Are new Orleans' schools beyond repair?

POST-KATRINA, New Orleans has become a battleground in the national struggle over how to fix public school systems. As contentious debates about charter schools and teacher unions rage across the country, families and educators who want to privatize education are hoping that New Orleans will set a model. Those who want real institutional reform are worried and ready to fight for a better vision.

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"The framework has been exploded since the storm," said New Orleans-based education reform advocate Aesha Rasheed. "It's almost a blank slate for whatever agenda people want to bring."

Before the storm and displacement, New Orleans had 125 public schools, 4,000 teachers and 60,000 students. The system was widely regarded as broken. Three quarters of eighth graders failed to score at the basic level on state English assessments. In many schools, JROTC (the high school military recruiting program) was a mandatory class, mostly because funding wasn't available for other programs. In the last decade, 10 school superintendents were fired or had quit. Many parents, especially white parents, had pulled their kids out of the system. Almost half of the city's students were enrolled in private or parochial schools.

The state seized control of New Orleans's schools after Hurricane Katrina struck. This past spring, five schools were run as public schools, but both the city and the state are chartering schools nonstop--that is, they give permission to corporations and school-based organizations to run schools. This September, it's expected that there will be 30 charter schools in New Orleans. Once the charter schools are running, the state and city governments have little input. Meanwhile, most former public school students remain displaced. While the city's private schools saw almost 90 percent of their students return, only 20 percent of public students came back to school last spring.

"In the old New Orleans, charters were an island in a sea of city schools," Rasheed said. "That's no longer the case. There's currently a big group of kids who don't have a school. Some think it's 1,000 or 2,000. That's a lot considering only 12,000 total have returned."

"The problems in New Orleans' education system are so wide-spread and long-standing, they defy simple solutions," said Mtangulizi Sanyika, project manager of the African American Leadership Project in New Orleans.

To change the system, the city will need much more funding and resources than it's received. If not, New Orleans risks losing a generation to a school system that has functioned as little more than a warehousing program for Black youth.