Hope in New Orleans.

Kathryn Newmark and Veronique de Rugy's brief mention of the comparatively rapid rebound of Catholic schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ("Hope after Katrina," features, Fall 2006) casts the private school sector as "more nimble" than the public system. The superintendent of Catholic schools in New Orleans, Fr. William Maestri, offers an alternate explanation: "We believe that schools are magnets of hope in the midst of despair, and by reopening them, you ensure that people will come back."

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Forty-two days after Katrina devastated the city, 45 percent of the 107 Catholic elementary and high schools were back in operation, and 80 percent of the nearly 50,000 students were back in school classrooms either in the archdiocese, which embraces eight civil parishes (counties) in southeast Louisiana, or neighboring dioceses. By the end of January 2006, 75 percent of the schools had reopened and 86 percent of the total student population had returned. A greater contrast to the public schools' record could hardly be imagined. Making the archdiocese's recovery all the more remarkable is the fact that its schools suffered losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Catholic leaders said they never entertained doubts they could bring the school system back. The archdiocese pledged to accept any Catholic or public school students, whether or not they could pay the tuition. Some 300 public school students accepted the offer. The archdiocese has since applied for, and is hopeful of getting, displaced student tuition reimbursement from the federal government's hurricane relief fund. The Catholic school system also decided to return tuition money to the family of any student forced to relocate to another school. "This was a fundamental moral point for us," noted Fr. Maestri. "We couldn't keep tuition for services that weren't rendered, nor could we have parents whose children relocated to other schools pay tuition twice." The Catholic schools have proved an extraordinary beacon of hope for the future of New Orleans.

RANDY YOUNG

Freelance Writer

Kathryn Newmark and Veronique de Rugy have made the most positive case for school choice in New Orleans. They could be right; I hope so. But there are problems they didn't acknowledge.

First, the state of Louisiana's Recovery District, which wanted to charter all the schools under its control, couldn't find enough competent charter-school operators. Indeed, the National Association of Charter School Operators judged that only a small minority of applicants could be trusted to run a school, limiting the growth of choice in New Orleans.

Second, unable to charter all the schools, the Recovery District opened non-charter schools of its own. The people running those schools weren't required to write charter applications, and I suspect few of them could have done it well. Thus, the state now oversees charter schools, plus other schools that probably couldn't have met the standards charters were held to. The charter schools can be closed if they don't perform well, and their staffs have jobs only as long as the schools survive, but it is not clear whether the same is true of district-run schools. Preoccupied with the need to open schools any way it can, the state is in danger of reproducing what New Orleans had before--schools that didn't work and nobody wanted.

Third, national foundations really haven't contributed much to the effort. The school redevelopment process has been underresourced, in my view. It is not too late for some big foundations to help out.

Fourth, it isn't clear whether the Bring New Orleans Back model will ever be used. The state will eventually return all the schools to local control. If the new local authority looks like the one Tulane president Scott Cowen's group devised, and all the schools can be replaced if they don't work, then New Orleans could become a model school district.

Things could work out as well as Newmark and de Rugy predict, but I wouldn't count on it.

PAUL HILL 

Research Professor of Public Affairs 

University of Washington