But in an infant-toddler room just down the hall, dispositions are sunny. Three teachers and eight children are on the rug, engaged in the all-consuming business of using words to build developing brains.

“What’s this?” the lead teacher asks, touching a boy on the belly. “Your tummy!”

To either side, her co-teachers are helping other toddlers find their tummies. In a few minutes, the kids will be busy making pictures of themselves. If Educare can hang onto these children, they will enroll in kindergarten as ready to learn as their wealthy peers, longitudinal research done by the center’s parent organization shows.

All five preschool years — Educare’s program encompasses from birth to age 5 — is best, but even two has a measurable, long-term effect. And the earlier, the better developmentally, says Keith Liederman, CEO of the social service provider , one of the groups that joined forces to get an Educare in New Orleans.

“Those are the most pivotal years, we know from neuroscience,” he says. “By age 3, somewhere around 80 percent of brain development has occurred.”

Other research backs this assertion. found that the children of parents who lived in communities with Head Start preschool programs graduate from both high school and college in higher numbers, among other positive factors. And of Educare-like programs in the 1970s showed lasting benefits from very-high-caliber early care.

Educare is known as the gold standard as far as quality in early education, and ongoing studies of its results are expected to add to that suggests the socioeconomic achievement gap can be prevented from ever opening if a child gets the right care from birth to age 3.

It’s expensive — $18,000 a year per child at the New Orleans center — but research also shows the benefits remain as students advance through school. And economists have put the “return on investment” for every tax dollar spent on high quality care at 16 to 1.

The money that makes all of this possible is a complicated proposition, which boils down to what early childhood advocates refer to as “braided funding.” Different pots of local, state, and federal money are added up, with a community’s Head Start and Early Head Start funds laying a floor by funding 50 percent to 60 percent of operations. Parents sometimes make co-pays, and private philanthropy picks up the slack.

The tummy talk occupying Educare’s youngest children doesn’t look like brain science, but it is. During the first three years of life, a baby’s brain is by experience. Trauma — poverty, homelessness, parental addiction, or unmet mental health needs in the home — has a negative impact on this process.

And the impact is cumulative: Each adverse childhood experience, or ACE, as the development experts describe these toxic stresses, takes its own toll.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of reliable care and engaging stimuli strengthens the brain’s neural net. Exposure to language, in particular, has a dramatic, positive impact, bolstering synapses the way weight-lifting builds muscles. Some studies put the “word gap” that typically separates impoverished children and wealthy ones by kindergarten at 30 million.

With their animated faces and exaggerated reactions, the teachers here are deliberate in the way they talk to their tiny pupils. As the kids learn to talk, a teacher will follow a one- or two-word exchange with a question that invites an answer that uses more words. When a child turns away and shows interest in a different toy or activity, they may narrate the story of what the boy or girl is doing.

Through a combination of required volunteer hours and events, Educare parents are exposed to ways of promoting their children’s development at home. Family liaisons help the adults set goals of their own and also facilitate education on everything from financial literacy to wellness. There’s a concerted push to get adult men to events.

“You do see a lot of dads, uncles, and even brothers,” says Dwaynia Dunams, whose twin 4-year-olds, Travis and Trevor Sandifer, have been at Educare since August 2016. “Everybody knows them by name. It’s very family-oriented. I’ve met so many other moms there, and we get together outside of Educare.”

Both boys have autism, something many preschools struggle to accommodate. By contrast, Educare is able to provide the ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) therapy the boys require and has a family advocate dedicated to the needs of children with disabilities.

“My older twin is a little bit of an introvert, and they work really hard to find ways to help him come out of his shell,” says Dunams.

The center serves just 163 children, but a key part of its mission is to train caregivers and preschool teachers throughout the Gulf Coast. And to serve as a vivid proof point to its continual roster of visitors that quality is a path out of poverty.

Like the other 21 Educare sites throughout the country, the goal at the New Orleans facility is to enroll the children who live below the federal poverty line — less than $25,000 for a family of four in 2017 — who are most likely to have experienced the most stresses and to pour on developmental stimuli.

With the second decade of New Orleans’s unprecedented schools reboot well underway, educators and policymakers are taking stock of challenges they have yet to meet. Briefly sketched, in the 12 years since Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed 100 of the city’s schools, the school system has gone from the equivalent of an F grade on state report cards to a C.

In other words, it’s gone from being a nation-leading study in failure to one of the dozens of urban U.S. school systems where results are persistent and ultimately unacceptable. To get from a C to an A will take concerted efforts on a number of fronts, Orleans Parish School Board members and education policymakers say.

But if there were one thing that would make a profound and immediate impact tomorrow, those leaders say, it would be finding a way to make high-quality early childhood education available to every low-income family.

New Orleans is home to 23,000 children 4 and under. More than 42 percent live in poverty, and virtually all of them will continue on to the public school system, where impoverished children make up 85 percent of the student body.

There are 5,200 publicly subsidized preschool seats in the city, but they aren’t evenly distributed. Thanks in part to an Obama administration push to expand pre-K, many New Orleans schools are adding classrooms for 4-year-olds. This leaves just 335 4-year-olds without access to a publicly funded preschool, according to by Agenda for Children, a nonprofit leading the early ed push.

By contrast, nearly 11,000 of the 13,000 children ages 0-3 have no access to affordable or subsidized care — despite a well of evidence that those are the years when every dollar spent on quality early education makes the biggest difference.

“From that point on, it’s all about remediation, it’s all about plugging gaps and making up skills,” says Educare Center Director Angelique Shorty-Belisle, who taught at the public school that used to be down the street from the center before the storm.

As they look ahead, leaders of New Orleans’s K-12 education landscape have an intimate understanding of how hard it is to close achievement gaps for older students. When it comes from moving schools from C to A, having children show up for kindergarten as ready as their affluent peers would be huge.

Within months of its opening in October 2013, leaders at Educare’s New Orleans facility realized they were seeing signs of mental health issues at home in very young children. Given the recent history of the city, and in particular of the neighborhood where the center is located, they weren’t surprised.

In 2005, Katrina left the St. Bernard Housing Community under more than eight feet of water. More than half its 5,800 displaced residents were children.

The city’s second-largest public housing project, St. Bernard was unfit to live in even before the storm. One-third of its 1,400 units were boarded up and the rest crumbling. In the four years before Katrina, 700 felony crimes were committed, including 42 murders.

Some of the brick walls inside Educare’s $9 million center are left over from St. Bernard’s row houses. The hallways they frame are airy and orderly. The building itself sits at the center of a mixed-income redevelopment where a number of units are reserved for families displaced by the storm.

A longtime Head Start provider, Kingsley House did extensive research to determine the type of early childhood program that should be part of the reconstruction and then worked to secure the multiple sources of funding necessary to meet the cost.

“You know how in real estate it’s location, location, location?” asks Kingsley House’s Liederman. ���n Louisiana, when it comes to 0–3, it’s all funding, funding, funding.”

The organization now spearheads the public-private partnership behind Educare New Orleans. Other partners include the Bayou District Foundation, Total Community Action, and the city’s housing authority.

The delicate financial structure could topple, Liederman warns, if the hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to federal preschool funding President Donald Trump has proposed make it through Congress. With the budget tussle stretching on for months, it’s hard to plan for long-term stability.

And even if federal funding is left intact, there are the nearly 11,000 impoverished children ages 3 and younger who lack quality subsidized care. Several organizations have teamed up to begin considering what a comprehensive public network would look like, says Deirdre Johnson Burel, program officer for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which funds a number of early education initiatives in New Orleans.

The New Orleans Early Education Network includes the foundation, advocacy organizations, childcare providers, and the Orleans Parish School Board, which by the end of next year will oversee all of the city’s public schools.

The questions on the table are many, says Johnson Burel. Parents love the addition of 4-year-old classrooms to their desired school, with its free transportation and guarantee of a kindergarten seat. But early ed and K-12 are very different things; are public schools best equipped to serve the younger kids developmentally?

Because child-to-caregiver ratios are higher for 4-year-olds than infants and toddlers, private childcare providers rely on a certain number of them to “calibrate” their budgets. If public pre-K takes those 4-year-olds out of the equation, that means a hit to their wallets. How can the system help the 0–3 centers maintain quality?

The network has launched a universal enrollment system not unlike OneApp, the centralized application hub that now encompasses most K-12 schools in New Orleans. Not only is the system expected to help match needy kids with open 0–3 seats, its documented wait list likely will serve as a potent talking point for advocates pushing for an institutional home for early education — and money to fund it.

Saja Farhood learned about Educare from OneApp. She was thrilled to learn there was a five-star-rated center about a block from her house and relieved when the oldest of her two children was admitted two years ago.

After two years in the program, she says her 4-year-old son, Fethi Judeh, already knows all of his sight words — a goal children are typically expected to meet by the end of kindergarten.

“It’s not just him,” says Farhood, “they have several others who are going to kindergarten reading.”

There is one more bit of magic that happens inside Educare New Orleans, says Shorty-Belisle, the director. Because chances are high that the next stages of their children’s education won’t be as exceptional, parents need to be taught what high standards look like.

“Our families are ready for their children to learn because they have had that support all along,” she says. “They know what the expectation in the classroom should look like. They’ve become staunch advocates for their children.”

And what better place for a parent to learn to both collaborate with their child’s teachers and hold them accountable?

“We work hard to make them our harshest critics,” says Shorty-Belisle. “That’s what they need to be.”

Located in New Orleans’s Tremé-Lafitte neighborhood, these are Sims’s halls. Fed up with bad management and a teacher corps that rotated faster than she could learn their names, Sims is one of the guardians who fought hard to get the former McDonogh 42 Charter School, rated an F on state report cards, turned over to a nonprofit network that runs A schools.

Sims has cared for Robbie since his father died when he was 4. He’s quick and has ADHD, a combination that can make him a handful in the classroom. Instead of entering a quiet retirement, she’s spent a lot of time at school, advocating for the boy and serving as an extra set of hands to keep him on task.

Last year, the school’s former leaders barred Sims from the premises, a move that tapped out her seemingly inexhaustible well of patience. Soon after she was shown the door, Sims learned that McDonogh 42 had chalked up another F on state report cards and was being taken away from its management — again.

In fact, 42 has the dubious distinction of enduring more management changes than possibly any other school in post-Katrina New Orleans. Three times its families have been promised that a new plan would ensure that their kids, born into a city that historically has had some of the lowest educational outcomes in the nation, would learn the skills they need for bright futures.

42 is the second underperforming school the fledgling InspireNOLA network has agreed to take on in as many years. Last year, Inspire took on a different F school, Andrew H. Wilson, which ended the last school year with a C. Wilson’s 2015–16 test scores revealed more growth than any other school in the city, with a 29-point jump on a 150-point scale.

Taking on an F school is a risky proposition. Leaders of the networks, or charter management organizations, that run almost all New Orleans schools live or die by those grades. Common wisdom holds that A operators wouldn’t take on the lead weight of an F school.

Last spring, when that one of the groups that applied to take over 42 had submitted a plagiarized charter application, it seemed entirely likely history was about to repeat itself.

Parents were invited to participate in the decision to give 42 to InspireNOLA, which boasts two of the city’s , Edna Karr High School and Alice Harte Charter School. Sims leapt at the opportunity.

She had no idea that soliciting parent input into this kind of decision is a departure from business as usual in New Orleans, where outside education administrators are engaged in the process of handing control over schools back to city residents. Parents at InspireNOLA’s first turnaround, Wilson, had to fight to have a say in their school’s fate.

Until recently, a state turnaround agency, the Recovery School District (RSD), oversaw almost all of the city’s schools and made decisions about which charter operators would be allowed to open new schools or turn around flagging ones. The agency got high marks from policy watchers for making tough decisions, but it typically made them from its Baton Rouge offices, out of the public view.

The four InspireNOLA schools are among the first to be returned to the oversight of an elected Orleans Parish School Board.

“We often did things to the community with school siting assignments, not with the community,” Patrick Dobard, then-superintendent of the Recovery School District, told The Louisiana Weekly two years ago, after the Wilson parents demanded — and got — a say.

In a closely watched experiment in radical school reform, after Hurricane Katrina almost every public school in the city got a reboot. Improvement in New Orleans’s schools, long some of the worst in the nation, was swift and dramatic.

But the controversial effort was anything but grassroots, and as the 10th anniversary of the storm approached two and a half years ago, tensions over who got to make decisions about New Orleans’s schools came to a head. The community demanded a voice in the process. A meaningful one.

Nowhere was this more visible than at Andrew H. Wilson Charter School, a K-8 in Broadmoor, a wedge-shaped neighborhood north of New Orleans’s leafy and prosperous districts. Sometimes referred to as “the bottom of the bowl,” the neighborhood is so low-lying, city planners thought about turning it into a park after the storm. Residents wouldn’t hear of it.

Nearly 10 years after Katrina, with persistent financial and academic problems and a grade of F on state academic report cards, the state agency ultimately responsible for the school faced a decision: Close it or find a new organization to manage it.

Realizing they weren’t being included in meetings about the school’s future, a group of about a dozen Wilson parents met in the school’s library and decided to insert themselves into the process. Starting in late January 2015, the parents scheduled tours of schools run by all six charter management organizations — the nonprofit organizations that operate school networks — that could be in the running to take over Wilson.

And they made it clear they weren’t going away, sending emails to officials and news media and securing 250 parent signatures on a petition to be given a seat at the decision-making table. Wilson’s mascot is a wolf; the parents styled themselves the Protectors of the Pack.

“We split up into teams and visited schools,” says Dana Wade, the mother of three Wilson students. “We had two weeks to do it. We were taking off of work to do this. We were totally committed to the process.”

Within days, the RSD gave the group three seats on the committee vetting proposals from would-be Wilson operators. InspireNOLA was the panel’s unanimous choice.

For parent Lamont Douglas, the network’s local roots were key. InspireNOLA was the only homegrown operator under consideration, he says.

���t was almost like they were saying no one in New Orleans can make it work,” says Douglas, whose daughter started fourth grade at Wilson. “There are still a lot of teachers who were in the schools before the storm who are still here. You have people from New Orleans who know how to do this.”

InspireNOLA co-founder and CEO Jamar McKneely was one of them. After college he started work in nonprofit finance, but education tugged at him. ��� can remember sitting in my cubicle thinking, ‘I want to do something for kids,’ ” he says. “So I quit my job and moved here.”

McKneely started teaching in New Orleans schools 16 years ago and was one of the 7,500 teachers laid off when schools closed after Hurricane Katrina. When they opened again, he took over as principal of Edna Karr High School. During his watch, the school rose from a D to an A, a feat he repeated at Alice Harte.

Two years ago when InspireNOLA decided to take on more schools, engaged families was one of the things McKneely looked for. “We didn’t care where we expanded, we just wanted to work in a community with involved parents,” he says. “That’s when we met these parents.”

The network had a choice of two programs in need of new management. Turning around Wilson — a school already serving some 600 students, some of them years behind— was the harder job.

“A lot of people are fearful of turnaround work, but who are we to say these students don’t deserve a quality education,” says McKneely. ��� think it’s important as a charter management organization that we don’t consider our work done until every child has a quality school.”

The first thing McKneely did at Wilson was painful. After numerous conversations with staff about their vision for the school, InspireNOLA replaced 70 teachers — but in many instances with local veterans and not AmeriCorps volunteers or Teach for America corps members or any of the other youthful idealists who flocked to the city after the hurricane to help rebuild the schools.

McKneely’s bottom line was a belief set. Wilson’s new teacher corps had to believe better was possible. “You’re walking into a culture that is not as structured,” he says. “You’re walking in where the expectations have been very low for years.”

Parents, too, had demanded the school push their kids. “They really went to bat for us,” says McKneely. ���t takes away some of the outside pressure, so we can really take some risks, do some creative things.”

InspireNOLA instilled some practices common to high-performing schools. It instituted weekly professional development for teachers, formalized the collection of data pinpointing individual students’ challenges, and ensured consistency from one classroom to another in terms of routines.

Three administrators — each with a desk located, visibly and accessibly, in a hallway — are each responsible for a group of grade levels.

Douglas’s wife now teaches sixth-grade math at Wilson, and some of his own childhood teachers are there, too. The relationships between Wilson staff and neighborhood parents has been key, he says: “Sometimes with kids, you know if you act up, ‘I’m gonna see your mom at the grocery store.’ ”

Dana Wade’s three children returned to Wilson in August for the 2017–18 school year, enrolling in kindergarten, fifth, and sixth grades. Staff knew her youngest daughter before the girl started in its preschool classroom, says Wade.

“We tried to instill a model where kids can learn from their mistakes and really build on their strengths,” says McKneely.

The parents have stayed involved, they say, organizing to support not just traditional PTO projects like band and sports, but working to get “wraparound” social services into the building to address students’ unmet needs.

“Now we have people coming to see what we’re doing,” says Wade. “We’ve gone from being the black sheep to being someplace people want to come study.”

Can InspireNOLA pull off another successful turnaround at 42? McKneely doesn’t see a choice, given the violence, poverty, and other long-term challenges facing NOLA’s low-income kids of color.

“Even before the storm we had to do something different,” he says. “We had people who were working hard, but we needed something different.

���f we’re making academic gains, I’m ready for that to turn into a lower crime rate. We’re ready for that to translate into higher employment rates.”

For her part, grandmother Sims is convinced that this time leadership won’t let 42’s students down. She understands why families are slow to share her conviction, so she’s throwing the energy she used to put into advocating for Robbie into personal outreach to parents, asking them to consider getting involved one more time.

And Robbie? Sims is proud to busting as she says he’s done his own turnaround, earning InspireNOLA’s equivalent of a letter jacket, a gold sweater that signifies having reached the “mastery” level on his exams.

Reams of statistics outline the meteoric improvement in New Orleans public schools in the 12 years since Hurricane Katrina. So far as anyone knows, David Osborne asserts in his new book, Reinventing America’s Schools, it’s the most dramatic school improvement effort in U.S. history.

In 2005, the year the storm forced the temporary shuttering of all of the city’s public schools, 35 percent of students passed state math and reading exams. By 2014, the percentage had risen to 62.

Before, 62 percent of New Orleans students attended schools on the state’s failing list. Even though state standards rose in subsequent years, that number fell to 6 percent by 2016. The city’s public schools, measured collectively, rose from the equivalent of Es and Fs to a C on state report cards.

Because storm damage necessitated $1.8 billion in new infrastructure, some of the poorest children in the country now spend their days not in buildings crumbling from decades of decay and infestation, but in sun-drenched, pristine classrooms.

Policymakers and education scholars nationwide have tracked the unprecedented effort in the hope of finding a road map to the transformation of other crippled school systems. Lessons gleaned are on display in classrooms thousands of miles away.

And yet, astonishing as the turnaround New Orleans’s educators and policymakers have pulled off is, it’s not nearly good enough. A fourth of the city’s children — including a majority of white kids — attend private schools, the highest rate of any metro area in the country. Schools are as segregated as before, according to .

And a C is hardly a grade to crow about. Only a fourth of New Orleans students scored at the “mastery” level on . And just 14 schools beat the state average.

Only seven schools on state report cards, and three of the seven are “selective admissions” schools that currently don’t have to take struggling students. Six earned Fs and 15 Ds.

Growth, for years the fastest in the country, has flattened. Pending this year’s report card, the system has been stuck at C since the 2013–14 school year.

Ben Kleban is the founder of the New Orleans College Prep network of schools and a member of the Orleans Parish School Board, which is in the process of taking control of the city’s schools back from the state Recovery School District, which has run all but a handful since Katrina.

The elected school board oversees a district that 10 years ago was mired in corruption and ineptitude. Although many fear the board will not be as tough on underperforming schools as state overseers, Kleban has been an early and vocal proponent of reunification.

To move the needle further, he and other backers of the experiment say, New Orleans needs to see two huge changes. First and foremost, if equity is to be achieved, the public schools must attract all children, wealthy and poor, which means racial integration — an elusive goal anywhere, much less in the South.

Equally hard: To graduate students with the critical thinking skills, creativity, drive for innovation, and tenacity needed to ensure the city is not just rebuilt but revitalized, school needs to look radically different from the “command and control” model that lifted the system from failing to average.

“From a big-picture perspective, we have to recognize that student outcomes have plateaued and even declined,” says Kleban. “As a school board with authority over all these schools, we have to fundamentally revisit school improvement. We can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

The bottom line: Getting from C to A, the architects of the effort say, will be harder. Much harder.

The next decade is likely to be the real test. “What scares me the most is we won’t get it right,” says Kleban. “The stakes are so high.”

‘Ghosts in the classroom’

It’s Day 11 of the new school year at Bricolage Academy of New Orleans. In one of those sunny, freshly painted classrooms, fourth-graders are engaged in morning meeting, which on this day is a variation on show-and-tell.

One boy watches as a stuffed toy his grandmother gave him makes its way around the circle, no doubt anxious his classmates might handle his treasure too roughly.

His seatmate pulls out a CD of Prince’s 1999 and, in the impossibly earnest tone only a child can muster, speaks directly to it: ��� just really like listening to you.”

A third boy produces a bottle of Tabasco and describes his family’s summer trip to the bottling plant. Alarmed, his teacher jumps as the bottle starts around the room. “Let’s not open the hot sauce right now,” she interjects. “Let’s not.”

In its fourth year, Bricolage is something of a laboratory. The program’s founders believe that educational equity doesn’t just benefit when children of different backgrounds are educated together — it requires it. Accordingly, the school is intentionally diverse, with enrollment policies to ensure it remains so.

Educators here are working on strategies that could radically alter the city’s school landscape again. Teachers work to customize instruction, with an emphasis on student agency and creativity. Its test scores make it the highest-performing open-enrollment school in the city. For every open seat, there are five applicants..

And the exchange with the hot sauce? It may seem like the most trivial thing. But because of those moments when a class is in danger of losing its collective focus — and by extension the teacher’s ability to manage behavior — transitions are something of an obsession in high-performing schools.

Managing moments where things can teeter off course is just one element in creating a school culture where classrooms are orderly and calm — the characteristic parents frequently cite, above test scores, as their first priority in choosing a school.

Bricolage is attempting to forge such a culture not by controlling the sundry transitions that make up a school day but by teaching students to manage their own behavior. It’s an extension of the philosophy behind the personalized approach: Give students both autonomy and accountability, and they will achieve more than they would with strict adult guidance.

���’ve seen too many situations where it’s control, control, control, and supposedly gradual release, but that never happens,” says founder and CEO Josh Densen. “There are hidden low expectations when you control kids.”

“We from the beginning tried to take a very organic approach to kid culture,” adds Elementary School Principal Michele Murphey. “We try to build social-emotional skills in a way that trusts their ability to manage themselves and their tools and emotions.”

This is a high-wire act in any school, but all the more so in an integrated setting where “ghosts in the classroom,” as they’re known — unconscious beliefs stemming from teachers’ and parents’ own experience of parenting and school — factor into the million interactions that make up the day. Even if a teacher works to address his or her own implicit bias during, say, a morning meeting, how is the school day discussed at the dinner table?

As the school grew from an inaugural class of 76 kindergartners in the fall of 2013 to 445 in grades K-4 this fall, consistency from one classroom to another became harder and harder, says Murphey. Bricolage faculty met monthly last year to consider different strategies for ensuring that expectations about adult language and student behavior were the same throughout the school.

They needed a system all teachers could apply regardless of their own “ghosts,” and in place of demerits and rewards they wanted students to grapple with so-called natural consequences, the problematic issues raised by bad choices.

They settled on Responsive Classroom, an approach that associates social and emotional learning with academic achievement. Teachers foster a sense of belonging, in which children are comfortable taking risks. Adults use consistent language that reinforces good choices and recognizes students’ strengths.

Responsive Classroom isn’t new, and a solid body of research at raising achievement. But because teachers are modeling the self-regulation skills they expect students to acquire, the approach is most effective when teachers have bought all the way in. When a school’s entire staff is on board, results are even stronger.

One of the key tenets of the approach is to give students choices as to how they will meet a particular learning goal, which jibes perfectly with Bricolage’s goal of customizing instruction.

There are 45 staffers working with about 445 students, a low ratio that enables teachers to meet each pupil’s unique needs. While every classroom has extra teachers during morning meeting, when art and other co-curriculars aren’t being taught, kindergarten has a second teacher all day long. Typically new to Bricolage, the co-teacher not only helps customize lessons but has a full year to learn the school’s approach.

Like all New Orleans schools participating in the unified enrollment system, Bricolage must accept new students when seats open up. Often, those transfer students are behind. A number of teacher “interventionists” work with individual students or small groups to help children acquire missing skills or catch up.

“We have some kids on tight behavior plans,” says Densen. “But that’s an intervention.”

Morning meeting and the other items on the daily schedule are similar in every classroom, from kindergarten through fourth grade, by design, says Densen. ���t’s community-making,” he says. “We think that’s connected to longer-term progress on the achievement gap.”

Indeed, as the Tabasco and the CD are being handed around the fourth-grade sharing circle, four kids are doing their own thing. Three are finishing projects or books they chose at the start of the morning to help transition to the school day.

The fourth is busy making a good choice about behavior. Seated next to a classmate bent on distracting him, a boy has gotten up and moved across the circle. Not long ago given to veering off-task himself, the boy has scored a victory in self-regulation.

Bricolage more diverse than NOLA proper

Like many other teachers and education leaders, Densen came to New Orleans to join the effort to rebuild its schools. He began his career as a Teach for America corps member in Oakland and taught in KIPP schools. In 2009, he moved to Louisiana to head the local office of the Achievement Network.

But as he and his wife started looking for a kindergarten for their daughter, he was forced to confront the fact that the school he wanted for his family didn’t exist: “There was no school that was socioeconomically diverse and academically excellent.”

Densen wasn’t the only New Orleans educator coming to the same realization. His neighbor, Matt Candler, moved to the city in 2006 to serve as the first CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, whose mission is to push for school quality.

But the alternatives were equally unpalatable to any white parent who didn’t want to enroll their child in a white enclave — a private school or one of a handful of traditionally run Orleans Parish School Board schools that had steep entrance requirements.

With the school system stable but overwhelmingly poor and black, he adds, lots of white education reformers began acknowledging the same thought: ���’m promising these families I’ve got this school that will do right by your kids, but then when I had my own kids …”

��� came to New Orleans to do school to New Orleans,” Candler says bluntly. “We have to start ridding ourselves of the mindset that solutions come from people who are outside of New Orleans. Part of going from C to A has to be more done by and with locals.”

In 2010, he started the education idea incubator 4.0 Schools with the aim of giving people support for testing even crazy-sounding ideas and fleshing out the ones that prove to have merit. Densen was one of 4.0’s first fellows, taking fun tools teachers call manipulatives to parks and festivals and engaging the parents who came trailing after curious children.

“We put out the Thinker Linkers and kids would come to us,” he recalls. “Out of those conversations, it became clear, people want a school that’s diverse and different from where they went to school.”

Two years later, Bricolage was born. The word bricolage has several meanings. Among them: the creation that results from a tinkerer, or “bricoleur,” combining an assortment of different elements. An apt name for a school trying to conjure possibility.

Like at other charters, enrollment is via lottery, but under a set of rules created to try to maintain racial and socioeconomic balance. Siblings of current students, children of employees, economically disadvantaged children, and residents of the school’s assigned zone under the enrollment system have preference.

In the 2015–16 school year, 54 percent of students were white, significantly higher than the 31 percent of the New Orleans population that is white. At 39 percent, black enrollment trailed the city’s population by about 28 points. Nearly half were impoverished, and 10 percent qualified for special education — a number that’s growing. Although the number fluctuates system-wide, some 11 percent of students in New Orleans public schools qualified for special education services in 2015–16.

To circle back to the intentional construction of a culture that sees children as capable agents of their own learning, Bricolage is succeeding. And already it’s clear that putting children from diverse backgrounds into the same building isn’t enough.

While too new to appear on Louisiana state report cards, the school appears poised to earn an A or a B this year. But it faces an internal achievement gap. Every demographic group of students in the school is far outpacing state averages on end-of-year exams, says Densen.

Overall, 61 percent of students in third and fourth grades, the earliest years for which the state requires an assessment, scored at “mastery” or above in reading on Louisiana’s LEAP tests. Sixty-nine percent of students scored “mastery” or above on math tests. Broken out, the school’s economically disadvantaged students and black children scored higher than their peers in 85 percent of New Orleans schools.

But there’s still a gap. While 75 percent of white children scored mastery or above on both tests (significantly higher than the 45 percent rate statewide), 30 percent of black students did, compared with a state rate of 19 percent. Thirty-eight percent of Bricolage’s economically disadvantaged students were proficient, compared with 25 percent statewide, while 69 percent of its students who are better off scored at mastery or above, compared with 52 percent of their socioeconomic peers statewide.

Teachers and administrators have a number of detailed classroom interventions planned to work toward a “near-term” goal of 75 percent proficiency throughout the school. Another step is committing to making sure 50 percent of staff, teachers, and board members are people of color. Another is to engage parents on issues of bias and culture.

In the meantime, they say, they have a lot more work to do to exorcise the ghosts from their classrooms. It’s clear that consistent culture notwithstanding, what happens in the classroom is perceived differently in different homes. To that end, the school recently hosted a two-day Racial Equity Institute.

“One of the next big steps is to develop empathy, with respect to bullying,” says Murphey. “We need to develop parent support around that — because it’s a limited goal if you can’t get parent buy-in.”

As schools succeed, so does New Orleans

Next year, when its inaugural cohort of kindergartners graduate from fourth grade, Bricolage will open a middle school, which will start with fifth grade. Both programs will be housed down the street in the former John McDonogh High School, which is undergoing a $40 million renovation.

It’s one of the city’s most prominent, storied school sites. Most recently, the building housed the Future Is Now public charter school, which turned in its charter in 2014, a year after posting the lowest performance in the state. The decision to give the campus to Bricolage was made after lengthy debate.

It’s a curious home for an intentionally integrated school. A slave owner who died in 1850, the eccentric McDonogh attempted to make restitution for owning Africans by paying for the education of freed blacks and by endowing school systems in New Orleans and Baltimore specifically for poor white and freed black children.

His benevolence was not total, however. McDonogh offered his slaves the chance to buy their freedom but profited from their labor while they saved the money. He also used his considerable fortune to pay for freed slaves to move to Liberia, which he and other “colonizationists” thought preferable to assimilation.

McDonogh’s bequest funded the construction of more than 30 schools, most of them bearing his name and a number. Eight were still in operation at the time of the storm. Deciding whether to change the names of the schools that occupy the buildings is a fraught exercise: The legacy is shameful, but the schools beloved.

New Orleans’s racial history is also rich with social change driven by its black population, says Towana Pierre-Floyd, founder and school leader of KIPP Renaissance Early College Academy. Reconstruction after the Civil War, she notes, was a precursor to the civil rights movement.

“You had all the elements of fighting against streetcar segregation. You had element of fighting for voting rights,” she says. “You had one of the largest populations of black politicians come to this city and serve this city and the state after the Civil War in a way that really shifted a lot of policies. The city was the place that had the largest population of free people of color anywhere in this country.”

The success of the city’s schools is intimately tied to the overall health of the community, and because New Orleans struggles with crime, poverty, and homelessness, students born years after Katrina are showing up to school with the effects of trauma.

“Thirty percent of our students are living in poverty,” says longtime New Orleans educator Jamar McKneely, CEO of InspireNOLA, one of the city’s most successful school networks. “The median income for African-American [families] is $25,000. We’re still having a lot of violence in our communities when it comes to gun violence. But now, hopefully, what we’re doing, we’re transforming, giving those students true outcomes where they can be great citizens in our community.”

Getting from essentially a F system to a C system dispelled the notion that poverty is destiny, says Kleban. But the city can’t thrive with two systems, one of haves and one of have-nots.

“We have a high number of schools serving a high number of kids with challenges. Is that the best way to meet the needs of those kids, to isolate them in those schools?” says Kleban. “On a fundamental level, we have to address the segregation in our schools, the segregation of need, the segregation socioeconomically.”

Creating innovative, integrated schools isn’t just about bringing families of different races together, he adds. It’s about creating a school system all New Orleans residents are invested in, are willing to invest tax dollars and community resources in.

��� believe if we could find the way to engage the entire public in our schools it would create a whole other level of investment, and all our kids would benefit,” says Kleban. ���t would shift the mindset from ‘public schools are a charity cause’ to ‘public schools are where I see my kid and my grandkid.’ ”

Complacency, adds Louisiana state Superintendent of Education John White, is the strongest threat to continued progress.

��� think one of the big obstacles, I believe, is that again we have this silent majority,” he says. “New Orleans has done amazing things by being real and honest with its educational challenges. We have to keep that level of honesty.”

Which means taking risks, including challenging conventional notions not just of school governance — the experiment New Orleans is famous for — but of the definition of school itself.

���t comes back to this word, creativity,” says White. “ I think there is a willingness here to solve problems, to take problems upon oneself and to solve them … ‘I’m not gonna wait for central office to tell me what to do. I’m not gonna wait for a law to be passed to tell me what to do. I’m gonna do it.’

“And in my view, in a place of such dramatic homelessness, such dramatic transience, such dramatic unemployment, such dramatic violence — for all of its strengths, New Orleans has those issues,” White continues. “And we can sit around and wait for somebody in the central office or in Washington to start some program that might solve it, or we can just do it ourselves.”

Correction: While Bricolage Academy of New Orleans emphasizes customized instruction, it does not provide a personalized learning plan for every student. In addition, this year the school eliminated the second teacher for its first-grade classes.

At the same time, it’s also beyond dispute that parenting and interacting with other loving adults plays a crucial role in the development of a baby’s neural pathways between birth and age 3. The quality of the interaction between caregiver and infant literally shapes the growing brain.

When the blossoming brain doesn’t get enough nurturing and stimulation — more frequent in families struggling with trauma, addiction, or poverty — the effect shows up as a gap from the start of kindergarten. Ensure that gap never opens, and you greatly increase schools’ chances of succeeding with all kids.

These two truths bookend a dilemma: How does one help parents talk to, play with, and soothe their babies in ways that support their development without suggesting they are subpar as parents?

Melanie Richardson and Christine Neely have this one down cold.

“Melanie stands at bus stops,” says Neely, Richardson’s partner in , a startup that helps parents understand early childhood development. “And in the diaper aisle at Dollar General.”

Richardson busts out in an electric smile.

��� saw you have a little one,” she says, exuding warmth and pantomiming handing over a flyer bearing the address of , a drop-in center where the two women host playgroups. “This is a wonderful environment for your child to come play with other children and develop and be ready for kindergarten.”

“This takes it away from them and puts it on what’s here for your child,” says Neely. ���f you asked Melanie and I to make a list of top parenting things, those are the same issues that will come out during a play session.”

The two narrate — a style of describing what’s going on at any given moment that fills an infant’s environment with language. ���f an 18-month-old snatches a toy we announce, ‘Oh, look, he snatched a toy,’ ” says Richardson. “That’s so age-appropriate! He doesn’t have the words yet to say what he wants.”

We PLAY is intended to fill a vacuum in New Orleans’s early childhood education landscape. Thanks to a federal grant made to Louisiana for preschool for 4-year-olds, the city’s K-12 schools have been busily adding pre-K classrooms.

There is almost no funding and little opportunity for preschool for children ages 0–3 whose parents aren’t affluent enough to pay private providers, however. This leaves a void in which New Orleans’s youngest learners aren’t exposed to the rich language and other advantages of early ed and their parents don’t have pre-K providers to talk to about child development.

“Play is the work of a child,” says Neely. “They’re doing work. Seven hundred neurons a second are either developing or not developing, depending on their relationship with their caregiver.”

Parents are welcome at We PLAY during two free, two-hour windows a week from 9 to 11 a.m., a time when infants and toddlers are between naps and fresh. Both facilitators are on the floor the whole time, “modeling and redirecting and playing,” says Neely.

���t’s important for parents to see kids the same age as theirs but that aren’t theirs,” she adds. “There are certain indicators you can see when they are with other kids.”

A parent recently expressed concern that their child wasn’t talking as much as the others. “We said, ‘That’s OK, because we all develop at different paces,’ ” Neely recalls. “ ‘But if you want to stimulate language development at home, here are some things you can do.’ ”

Right now, We PLAY has operating funding through the end of 2017. If they are able to secure grants, Neely and Richardson would like to offer four drop-in sessions a week. They estimate they can serve a family for $150–$200 a year. If they could double the time the center is open, they believe they can increase the number of families served from 100 to 300.

If they won the lottery? There would be a We PLAY in every New Orleans neighborhood.

The two met several years ago while working at the Louisiana Children’s Museum. Through their nonprofit, TrainingGrounds, they also offer a number of parent workshops, training for early childhood educators, and support for childcare centers’ parent groups.

Unlike most 4.0 Schools fellows, Richardson and Neely didn’t hold any “pop-up” events. Based on the need they saw in their museum jobs, they were confident parents would come. So instead of staging pilots, they collected and analyzed data during two time periods.

During their 12-week fellowship earlier this year, 90 families visited We PLAY, totaling 385 contacts with parents, grandparents, and young children. Seventy families returned, and 69 percent of them said they were interested in more information on positive parenting strategies.

Richardson and Neely called the other 20, who gave reasons for not coming back, ranging from new jobs to needing to tend to older kids out of school and transportation problems.

One mother answered the phone and told Richardson she couldn’t talk because she was frantically trying to gather her kids’ things because a domestic violence shelter was sending a taxi to get them. A social worker by trade, Richardson told her to forget the clothes and toys and concentrate on documents and other essentials they would need to get re-established.

And yes, when We PLAY turns out to be more friendly than judgmental, larger questions sometimes get posed.

“One couple was there 45 minutes and then the mother said, ‘Ma’am, you know what, we’re homeless,’ ” recalls Neely. “ ‘Is there anything you know that would help?’ ”

Although the two do, in fact, increasingly walk right up to parents in public spaces and ask if they’re interested in opportunities for fun for their children, their visitors arrive thanks to word of mouth.

The results will be on display in New Orleans schools in a few years when the first We PLAY veterans show up for kindergarten. The TrainingGrounds founders believe the difference will be discernable.

Says Richardson: “We think it is a financially feasible way to change the trajectory.”

He served as the first CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, which does exactly what its name implies, and as chair of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools. Schools opened and the quality of the education in their classrooms improved at a pace that was astonishingly quick.

Candler’s an idea guy, though. In 2010, he left his job and started an education idea incubator, 4.0 Schools.

���t was based on the idea we’ve stabilized NOLA but there’s a long way to go,” he says. “Let’s create a dedicated school launch engine for New Orleans.”

There are national and regional programs for educators who dream of opening innovative public charter schools, but Candler wanted to try something different. School-creation programs typically support their fellows for three years — a year learning about leadership, a year coming up with a school concept and securing permission to operate, and a planning year.

Three costly years. Which is great if the new school attracts families and delivers for their kids.

But what if it doesn’t? What if it can’t attract enough parents willing to risk throwing their lot in with a startup before it even opens? Or if it opens and then strands dozens of families by foundering out of the gate?

Around him New Orleans was bustling with new cultural icons, many of them chefs eager to be part of the New South food movement. In particular, the mastermind behind Stein’s Market & Deli, a Lower Garden District institution, was generous with his equipment and his space.

If you had an idea, you could try it there. Just like on Top Chef, you could stage a pop-up restaurant and try out your concept and its execution on a hungry public. If you acquired a buzz, great. If food came back uneaten, you had some more noodling to do.

As Candler indulged on the fruits of all of this creative genius, he realized he envied the chefs. With the exception of an hour here and there, teachers work alone.

“As a teacher, I was very much fascinated,” he says. ��� was so isolated.”

The pop-up concept would translate to his own work, he imagined: “Every charter school application in the land is predicated on the idea you can convey your school on a stack of paper. But you’ve never actually tested whether people would like it.”

Et voilà, 4.0 Schools was born with the goal of supporting people who wanted to build not even necessarily a school, but something for parents or students. And not necessarily in New Orleans.

Fleshed out, some of the ideas would become new school models. Others would support educational attainment by addressing unmet learning needs outside of the school day, providing extracurricular activities in short supply in schools, or creating something that solves a problem.

4.0’s Essentials Fellowship includes a weekend of design-thinking with other fellows, a $300 grant, and help deciding whether an initial pop-up is promising. Would-be innovators can go on to the Tiny Fellowship, which comes with $10,000 to test an idea more extensively — as an after-school program, perhaps, or a recurring community pop-up.

“We try to give really loving feedback about taking the idea out of their heads and getting it in front of families and kids,” Candler says. “You can be here as long as you want to be here, until you’re ready to say, ‘OK, here’s what’s not working.’ ”

By the end of the calendar year, 4.0 will have worked with 1,000 education entrepreneurs who are connected in a network that ensures the intel gleaned from every pop-up and pilot informs new fellows.

Bricolage Academy of New Orleans is the incubator’s most visible brick-and-mortar success story, but there are others. Here are the stories of four fellows who brought three out-of-the-box projects to life:

A creative writing club where kids heal from trauma.

A high school where every student will graduate with both a college acceptance letter and the skills to snare a high-paying job in New Orleans’s “Silicon Bayou.”

A drop-in space where parents learn from their toddlers’ play.

New Orleans is in the midst of a great experiment.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana leaders famously turned the district into a nearly all-charter operation under the supervision of the state-run Recovery School District. More than a decade later, the state legislature passed a new law to return control of those schools to the locally elected Orleans Parish School Board. All schools in the city, which will remain charters with the attendant autonomy, will come under the elected Orleans Parish School Board by July 1, 2018.

(����Ӱ��: Louisiana Turns the Page: 11 Years After Katrina, New Orleans Schools Set to Return to Local Control)

The man in charge of that transition is Henderson Lewis Jr., who was chosen to lead the Orleans Parish district in 2015. He had previously served as superintendent in Louisiana’s East Feliciana Parish and as a charter school leader in New Orleans.

Lewis said his vision for the district is that “every single student from every single neighborhood, that they would have access to great public education in a great public school,” whether that’s in their neighborhood or an option across the city.

New Orleans is, of course, an all-choice district, with charters and a few district-run schools accessible through a common application, but Lewis is skeptical of large, unregulated school choice programs like the type Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has advocated.

(����Ӱ��: DeVos Hints at ESSA as Means for Feds to Push School Choice but Downplays Federal Oversight)

The oversight of schools in New Orleans has “made all the difference for the progress we’ve made so far,” Lewis said.

Lewis spoke with ����Ӱ�� earlier this year at the Council of Great City Schools legislative and policy conference in Washington, D.C., where DeVos touted new ESSA flexibility and her long-standing belief in private school choice.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: New Orleans is in the middle of the process of transitioning its schools from the Recovery School District to the Orleans Parish School Board. How’s that going?

Lewis: It’s going well. We have a great partnership with the Recovery School District. It’s a joint effort between the two agencies to make sure that when all schools are under Orleans Parish School Board, or OPSB, once again, that’s a very smooth transition.

What’s your long-term vision for schools in New Orleans?

We’re working on our long-term vision, but where I am, as I look at the school system and where it’s been and where it’s headed, [my vision is] that every single student from every single neighborhood, that they would have access to great public education in a great public school, whether it’s in their neighborhood or if they decide they want to attend a school in another area of the city. [My goal is] that we have created a very diverse school system that meets the needs of all of our students that we’re serving.

There has been a big change in the racial makeup of New Orleans’s teaching force in the years since Katrina, and there are now far fewer black teachers, and teachers who grew up in the city, than there were before the reforms. Is that a concern, and if so, what are you doing to remedy it?

My greatest concern is to make sure that in every single classroom, that the students are being taught by a highly qualified individual who is working to meet the needs of the students they’ve been hired to serve. That’s the most important thing for me.

[Lewis followed up later to note that he knows it’s important that students have teachers who look like them. The district has partnered with Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically black institution, to help recruit new teachers to the district and provide an alternative certification program for city residents who have college degrees in other fields but want to become teachers.]

The Trump administration is, of course, a big advocate of private school choice. What’s your opinion on vouchers or private school choice programs?

I graduated from public school. I’m a public school guy. That’s who I am. I believe that we have great public schools and that in every school there’s room for improvement, so how do you find ways to continue to have schools improve?

I believe empowering teachers, those who are closest to the students, is very, very important, and [so is] being able to have students have access to great public schools, so [we should create] a system to allow families to select those schools.

As far as vouchers are concerned, if vouchers are going to be given to students, it should be to the neediest students who are attending schools in areas where there’s not a great public school. But again, for me, first and foremost it’s that public education works.

Louisiana’s system allows poorly performing private schools to lose eligibility to participate in the program. Is that a qualification you think is important for a national program?

My first response is, ���’m about public schools,” but if vouchers are going to be, No. 1, like I said before, look at the students who would need the vouchers, but No. 2, hold those schools to the same standard that a public school is being held to. If that particular private school is not meeting the standards, then the dollars should be pulled away from that particular school.

The biggest story in education right now is implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. How’s it going in Louisiana?

We have had a lot of work happening around our state. Actually later this month our state school board superintendent is going to be presenting the recommendation for approval. As superintendent, we participated in various committees and had conversations, so I believe what’s being presented in Louisiana at this time is a compromise to all the various stakeholders and their views…

[After between Gov. John Bel Edwards and Superintendent of Education John White, Louisiana submitted its ESSA plan in April, and it was . The state will continue to require local school districts to offer public school choice to students in schools given an F in the school rating system. Louisiana schools seeking an A grade must have a 90 percent graduation rate, as well as students with “full proficiency of literacy and math skills.”]

I know there’s a lot that’s happening on the national level in reference to pulling back [on accountability] and all those things. That concerns me. It concerns me for several reasons.

One is that, from the federal level, will they have the broad oversight over schools? Also I have to think about, if it’s being pulled back and whatever the alternative is going to be, will it affect the federal grants that we have and the funding? And third, as we look at ensuring equity, looking at children of color, students from low-income homes, and our special needs students, looking at those groups of students to see if there is going to be something different presented, what’s going to be the impact on those students?

I do believe, I would hope that — of course, there’s some uncertainty here now — but I would hope if more flexibility is given to the states that everyone remember who we’re serving and making sure that accountability is in place in states so that our most vulnerable students can continue to receive the services that are necessary for them to get and have the best possible education.

What are you looking to hear from Secretary DeVos later this afternoon?

More of her thoughts on school choice … In New Orleans, in my district, we pretty much have a district of choice for families, and so I just want to be able to see where she is going in that direction and how it compares to where we are in Louisiana and specifically New Orleans.

I feel that our model is probably different from the model of the administration, and it’s not the same model of, if you would, a traditional school district. We’re somewhere in the middle, which I see as a third way. It’s having choice but also with a strict level of oversight. I believe that has made all the difference for the progress we’ve made so far in New Orleans.

(����Ӱ��: DeVos Pitches New ESSA Flexibility to Big-City Schools Leaders, Gets Tepid Response)

What advice would you give other districts who are looking to expand choice options?

… First of all, no district is the same, and there are different needs, but I believe what should be the same is, one, you empower those who are closest to the students to do what they feel is best.

You make sure that there is a strict level of oversight so that … whether it’s the superintendent or the school board, the commitment that you have to your community, you have something in place that is ensuring that students are progressing, and if they’re not, that you’re able through your oversight to address it.

And then finally, being able to have a method of allowing families to access various schools within the district. I believe those components have been very, very helpful and have contributed to our success in New Orleans. But if you look at those three, it doesn’t necessarily say you have to be a charter school to do that.

Finally, what has surprised you the most since taking this job?

(Watch ����Ӱ�� Documentary: Big Gains in New Orleans’s Schools After Katrina, Big Goals for Next Decade)

When I first started having conversations about unification and those schools in the Recovery School District coming back, [there were varying opinions, including] “Yes, that should happen,” “The time is not right,” “Not sure if we ever want to do that,” “[Look at] what happened in the past,” and the list goes on and on.

But before I finished my first year, we were working hand in hand with the Recovery School District, various stakeholders, to actually go to state legislators to say it’s time. Schools need to return back to the local school board, and within my first year, to have a bill passed to unify the school district. I think that has surprised me the most, but what has encouraged me about it is those who are on the front line with the students, they continue to do great things, and I believe, through unification, as a system we are only going to get stronger.