Charter Schools flood New Orleans: the disaster ten years later.

• Author: Buras, Kristen
• Position: Essay

Within days of Hurricane Katrina, the conservative Heritage Foundation advocated the creation of a "Gulf Opportunity Zone," including federal funds for charter schools and entrepreneurs. Slowly but surely, the narrative of disaster turned to one of opportunity, even triumph. We were told that families abandoned in the storm were finding new hope in transformation of the city's public schools by charter school operators.

Report after report praised New Orleans as a model for urban school districts across the nation. Charter school operators, most of them white, declared "school choice" to be the new civil rights movement.

Now, almost a decade later, New Orleans is the nation's first all-charter school district. Charter advocates describe the district's achievements as nothing short of a miracle.

The truth is quite different: Flooding New Orleans with charter schools has been disastrous.

I was born and raised in New Orleans and have been studying education reform there for the last decade. One black veteran teacher told me what transpired in the wake of the storm. Policymakers declared, "You no longer have jobs. The local district no longer exists. We're going to split it up, make some charters. The state's going to take control of everything."

During an exchange with one state legislator, this teacher asked how the legislature could take such drastic action without public input. The legislator's response was brutally candid: "We called up a few people that we knew were back in town and invited them over to my house, and we sat down and began to dismantle the district." Justifiably angered, the teacher responded, "These are the kinds of underhanded tactics that were going on while our schoolchildren were still floating in the waters of Katrina."

In November 2005, barely two months after Katrina, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco called a special legislative session. This was the occasion for passing Act 35, which changed the definition of a "failing" school from a performance score of 60 (on a scale of 200) to 87.4, just below the state average. This allowed the state-run Recovery School District to assume control of 107 of 128 public schools in Orleans Parish, enabling charter expansion on a scale never before attempted in Louisiana or elsewhere. It was the ultimate public-private partnership-state officials serving the interests of private businesses rather than local communities, especially communities of color.

Although a state law, Act 35 specifically targeted the majority-black Orleans Parish. Before its passage, state officials crunched numbers in Baton Rouge to determine the school performance score cut-point and district size that would enable mass takeover only in New Orleans. Act 35 stipulated the Recovery School District could...