Two decades after Hurricane Katrina, the legacy of New Orleans’ radical education experiment is still contested. Was it a success? The final episode of Where the Schools Went grapples with this question head on.

Doug Harris, chair of Tulane University’s Department of Economics and founding director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, has led the team studying the city’s schools for years. Their findings show both real progress and persistent gaps: higher graduation rates, more students going to college, stronger test scores, but uneven results and questions about whether the momentum can last. 

We talk with Doug about how to make sense of this data and what lessons other cities might take from it:

But of course, data can only go so far. In the second half of this episode, we return to voices you’ve heard from throughout Where the Schools Went to test those findings. 

Chris Stewart reflects on how New Orleans became the center of a national fight over education policy, with critics and champions battling on social media and in statehouses over whether the “system of schools” model would spread. 

Former principal and school founder Alexina Medley, who led a school both before and after Katrina, describes her pride in how far the city has come, but also cautions that the impact of COVID means it now faces a new crossroads. 

Dana Peterson, CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, calls accountability the city’s greatest legacy while cautioning that progress should not be mistaken for success. 

And John White, the former state superintendent, argues that the deepest lesson is about the importance of coherence and its ability to empower educators, hold them to clear standards, and resource schools fairly.

Finally, I share some of my own reflections. As a veteran of the education wars who left school leadership burned out, I found that reporting for this series helped me to reconnect with the purpose of schools and the people who run them. This story, and the city of New Orleans more broadly, offers a lesson not only in how to build better schools, but also in how to practice a better kind of politics.

Listen to the final episode above. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans dismantled its public school system in a way no other American city had tried. Neighborhood zones disappeared. The elected school board was stripped of most authority. What emerged was a patchwork of independent charters with near-total autonomy. In the early years, there was energy and innovation, but also chaos. Families had to navigate dozens of separate enrollment processes. Students with disabilities could be turned away or underserved. Discipline practices meant that the city’s schools were ranked among the highest in the nation in suspensions and expulsion rates.

Over time, a new approach began to take shape. Leaders in the state-run Recovery School District started to ask which parts of a school system truly needed central oversight. Guided by principles of equity, accountability, and parent choice, they began to stitch together a more coherent structure. OneApp, a single citywide enrollment process, replaced the maze of school-by-school applications. A centralized expulsion system curbed abusive discipline practices.

Perhaps the most significant change came in special education. After a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the city overhauled how it identified and served students with disabilities. Funding was restructured so schools taking on the highest-need students received more resources. That shift made programs like Opportunities Academy possible, a groundbreaking school for young adults with intellectual disabilities that combines life skills classes with student-run businesses.

By the late 2010s, New Orleans had built a system that left most day-to-day decisions to schools but took a firm hand where fairness and access were at stake. Enrollment became more transparent. Suspension and expulsion rates dropped. Special education services improved dramatically.

In this episode of Where the Schools Went, we hear from the architects of these changes and the educators who made them work. Their story is not one of rebuilding the old district, but rather deciding which levers to pull, which to leave alone, and how to make the few things a system must do work uncommonly well.

Listen to episode four above, and watch for the final chapter debuting Sep. 9. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

The post-Katrina reinvigoration of public education in New Orleans is one of the great stories of that city’s recovery. State and city leaders rethought education one school at a time. The Center on Reinventing Public Education played a part, both by publishing a that city leaders for ideas about how to provide schools as kids returned, and by providing research in the first decade of the rebuilding process.  

Instead of defaulting to the pre-storm status quo, New Orleans used chartering to build new schools and let their leaders recruit the best combination of teachers and administrators for their students. Schools received based on enrollment, allowing them to prioritize instruction. Once most schools were open, returning families were able to choose among them. The State of Louisiana built a system of public oversight that allowed schools to differ but monitored student learning equally. It closed the lowest-performing schools and created new ones based on effective models. State education leaders aggressively pursued quality school operators and a more educated teaching force. 

As a result, . City public school students caught up and surpassed others in Louisiana. But problems remained, and test scores still lagged behind national averages. The new charter schools came under criticism for not offering appropriate services to students with . Some low-income families could not their kids to the schools they wanted to attend. Parents charged that charter schools challenging students without due process. These issues were addressed via new agreements and resource sharing among charter schools.

While parents the academic focus of the new schools and the new teachers hired from across the country (many from Teach For America), they missed the Big Easy feeling of pre-Katrina schools. Teachers who had worked in the public schools before the storm resented having to apply for jobs in the new schools, and grievances over continue to this day. 

Now, after having made rapid progress in the early post-Katrina years, academic gains in New Orleans schools have , as the “no excuses” approach that most of them adopted has proven effective but insufficient in preparing all students for college and solid careers. 

Leaders in other cities today, facing political, economic and demographic storms, can learn from New Orleans’ successes and struggles. 

First, the positive lessons.

State and local leadership can transform a district. In New Orleans, energy and commitment came not from the federal government, but from with influence in the state capital. Paul Pastorek and Leslie Jacobs, both New Orleans natives who served on the state Board of Education, persuaded lawmakers to create a new Recovery School District. The federal government and national foundations put their money behind local initiatives, but Louisianans called the shots. 

Cities can rebuild schools one at a time. New Orleans got results for students by fostering schools whose leaders and educators shared consistent ideas about learning. They built a system of diverse schools, not a centrally controlled bureaucracy.  

How money is distributed and controlled matters. When , schools are more effective and more equitably resourced. In most districts, an inefficient, opaque financial system hides the actual cost of schooling, hinders decision-making and protects outdated practices. 

New opportunities attract teachers and school leaders. A city that gives educators new opportunities can become a magnet for talent. The new charter schools in New Orleans drew a combination of educators from across the country and returning city teachers. As time went on, the majority came from the local community, but resentments against Louisiana’s summary firing of all teachers after Katrina remain unresolved.  

Performance accountability and replacing or restaffing low-performing schools can lead to continuous improvement. Tulane University research demonstrates how New Orleans test scores and high school graduation rates rose steadily over several years, both by starting strong new schools and by charter schools that did not work for students. But even though this process helped raise overall performance, it caused churn as families had to switch schools. New Orleans now focuses on restaffing troubled schools or assigning new operators, rather than on creating wholly new schools. 

There were, of course, failures and surprises that forced New Orleans leaders to adapt their plans or take unanticipated actions. These hard lessons include: 

A local K-12 education system needs organization above the level of the individual school. Local leaders must unfair practices, such as hand-picking the most promising students, expelling struggling kids to raise a school’s test scores and refusing to serve children with expensive special needs. Someone above the school level needs to identify demographic trends, compare schools’ results and rescue students in ineffective schools, stop inequitable practices and ensure students can get transportation to schools of their choice. 

After two decades, New Orleans still demonstrates that a central office can perform these functions without eroding school control or creating a compliance mentality. New Orleans also relied on a local independent organization, , to recruit teachers and promising school providers. 

A city shouldn’t put all its eggs in one basket. When New Orleans schools started to reopen, “” and “college for all” models were widely admired and had new evidence on their side. Results improved but were to what only one school model could deliver. To restart the continuous improvement process, New Orleans needs once again to recruit innovative new school providers, including some that offer artificial intelligence-based courses and online resources, use new definitions of the teacher role and teacher teaming, and emphasize both career and college readiness.

Families need good choices near home. After Katrina, New Orleans considered the entire city a single marketplace where students could choose a school without being constrained by location. This pulled some students away from their social and cultural roots in neighborhoods that meant a great deal to many families. Over time, schools paid greater attention to local cultural issues, music, art and student morale, and city leaders tried harder to make sure that all families could choose effective schools near their homes. 

Beware a new establishment. Chartering remains New Orleans’ secret sauce, open as it is to new ideas, school leaders and teacher roles. But it needs to be continually used for flexibility, not limited to a set group of schools.

New Orleans faces different challenges now, much like the ones plaguing other cities: stagnating academic performance, persistent post-pandemic learning losses, chronic , steadily declining enrollment and federal funding cuts. All cities so affected must speed up and deepen learning, motivate students and parents, and find ways to operate on less.

To meet these new challenges, there are new options that were not available in 2005. Charter school providers can open up multiple pathways into college, careers and credentials-focused training for high school students. Charters can operate as portfolio managers of student learning opportunities like internships, dual enrollment in college, community projects and online courses that brick-and-mortar schools can’t provide. They can also serve students with special needs via partnerships with community groups and health care institutions. At the elementary level, new school models can provide in-person adult guidance but let students pursue different learning experiences, depending on readiness and interest. Such schools can be more adaptable and motivating than traditional schools.

Most cities can also improve children’s access to the arts and specialized courses funded through new state voucher and supplemental education services programs. 

States can help by enacting laws that make districts ambidextrous — able to charter schools and buy learning experiences from the best sources, as well as operate schools directly. States that find themselves forced to take over collapsing school districts could also follow the New Orleans example by empowering local leaders to create new schools that fit current student needs. Weak state takeovers that put individuals in charge without new powers or strategies for transformation are useless.

There is much to learn from New Orleans’ public education recovery post-Katrina. The core lesson: Public education must always be nimble in response to new challenges and possibilities. 

Before Hurricane Katrina, teaching in New Orleans was more than a job. It was a pathway to the middle class; a profession led by veteran Black educators with deep roots in the city and protected by one of the South’s most powerful teachers’ unions. The United Teachers of New Orleans had fought for higher pay, stronger benefits, and job security. But those protections also made it hard to remove ineffective teachers and left principals with little control over who worked in their buildings.

After the storm, the entire teaching force was dismissed. More than 7,000 educators lost their jobs in a single stroke, many learning the news from the evening broadcast. 

The layoffs wiped out decades of experience and dealt a heavy blow to the city’s Black middle class. Some of those educators came back, determined to reopen their schools under extraordinary conditions. At Warren Easton Charter High School, staff taught on the second and third floors while the first floor remained under water. Still, the majority of dismissed educators never taught in the city again.

Into the gap came a wave of new recruits, many in their twenties, many white, and often from outside Louisiana. Programs like Teach For America promised energy and results. Principals could now hire quickly, replace teachers just as fast, and push for immediate improvement. 

Some schools thrived under the new flexibility. Others struggled with constant turnover and cultural gaps between teachers and the communities they served.

Today, the city’s teaching force is more diverse and more local than it was in the years after the storm. Yet a new challenge looms: how to attract and keep enough teachers willing to do the hard, often unglamorous work of helping students succeed. In the third episode of Where the Schools Went, you will hear from veteran educators, school leaders, and newcomers about how the city rebuilt its classrooms, what was gained, what was lost, and why the question of who teaches still shapes the future of its schools.

Listen to episode three above, and watch for the next chapter debuting Sep. 2. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

As the largest school improvement effort in U.S. history matured, so did the energetic transplants. Wanting kids of their own and more sustainable jobs, many moved back home, bringing their experiences to bear in classrooms in places where life is easier.

Patrick Dobard has been there the whole time. He was born in New Orleans, grew up in the city and cut his teeth there as a teacher. In the years before Hurricane Katrina, he worked for the Louisiana Department of Education, trying to figure out how to address the decay of New Orleans’ schools — beloved but crumbling, scandal-ridden and some of the lowest-performing in the country. 

In 2012, Dobard became head of the Recovery School District, the state agency that took control of most of the city’s public schools in the wake of the flood and steered their overhaul. There, he oversaw the district’s conversion to the nation’s first all-charter school system, as well as the return of the schools to the control of the local school board starting in 2016.

In 2017, he became CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the district’s nonprofit partner. Today, he is a partner at the City Fund, which helps districts engineer their own school turnarounds. 

What follows is a conversation in which Dobard reflects on the first two decades of the largest — and most controversial — school improvement effort in U.S. history, and outlines his hopes for the next 20 years. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Among education wonks, discussions about public education in New Orleans can feel like a Rorschach Test. Some people are laser-focused on academics, some on policy innovations that might transfer to other school systems and still others on privatization conspiracy theories. Locally, though, one of the most enduring conversations involves popular perceptions of a takeover of a Black-led school system by white outsiders who valued test scores more than the city’s culture. This is true — but also not the capital-T truth. Can we start there?             

I started as a classroom teacher in New Orleans in 1989 at Gregory High School, which was a junior high school, grades 7 through 9, located in what at the time was a pretty middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood, Gentilly. Most high schools then started at 10th grade. Junior highs were extremely important as athletic and band pipelines. 

The workforce for the most part at Gregory represented how the workforce across the city’s schools looked at that time: predominantly Black middle- to upper-middle-class individuals teaching kids. 

The schools that had really stringent enrollment criteria, like what was then named Lusher [now the Willow School] and Ben Franklin High School, more white students went to those schools. They had majority white staff.

By 1999, the state had created an accountability system under which a large number of the schools in the city — I believe about 60% — were identified as academically unacceptable. At that point, I was working at the state Department of Education. 

There was a lot of corruption in the air in New Orleans. There were conversations about the district being bankrupt. There was a Federal Bureau of Investigations [probe] going on. 

In 2003, the state created an agency called the Recovery School District. In the spring of 2005, the initial plan was for it to take over about three schools in New Orleans. We didn’t really know what that was going to look like. But then Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005, and all those plans were put on hold. 

We were getting phone calls weeks and months after Katrina from teachers trying to get a hold of their teaching certificates so they could work other places. There was just mass displacement of teachers.

And that’s where I think people’s knowledge of what happened gets told in different ways. The district was bankrupt. There wasn’t a way for it to pay teachers, so it was forced to lay them off. The state didn’t step in to try to offset that. So it was the district that had to fire the teachers and not the state. 

People were setting up the modular trailers and all the things people did after Katrina to get their lives back on track. There were schools — mostly the selective-enrollment schools that I mentioned earlier — where people were able to come back a little bit more quickly. Those schools were bringing teachers back and hiring.

The Recovery School District was trying to recruit back New Orleans teachers, but a lot of the Black middle class didn’t have the ability or the wherewithal to come back to New Orleans those first few years. 

Once the state decided that they were going to try the chartering model, the RSD started to recruit from Teach For America. A large number of TFA folks from all around the country wanted to come help. A number of those individuals were white. They didn’t look like the kids that ultimately were in front of them in schools.

I have no inside knowledge of this, but I don’t think TFA leadership at that time had lots of conversations strategically thinking about race. They were just functioning the way they normally functioned. 

Data shows having kids in front of teachers that are really strong and that look like them helps make for much better educational progress for young people. Once John White came in [as state superintendent in 2012], we were hearing a lot about the lack of diversity in the teaching force. 

John and I talked to TFA leadership about diversifying. While the number of Blacks and other minorities in TFA increased, it didn’t match the number of teachers of color that were there before the storm. 

Seven or eight years ago, I brought that awareness to the teacher work that we were doing at New Schools for New Orleans [where Dobard was then CEO]. We wanted to help schools build a corps of teachers that reflected the kids in the classrooms. Schools just took that on. They owned up to where they fell short, and then they actively recruited to make sure those numbers improved. 

I don’t think anyone had intentional ill will. It was a series of unfortunate circumstances that folks were reacting to after Katrina: the bankruptcy of the district and the uncertainty of people coming back to the city at different times, which was skewed to more white and affluent Blacks coming more quickly than others. 

And yet the narrative persists. 

Yeah, the narrative persists. I think what’s been missing is no one from the Orleans Parish School Board who was part of the decision to lay off the teachers to my knowledge has ever publicly acknowledged the firings. Or apologized for having to do that. Or for what transpired in the years before 2005, with the FBI having to be there and how bad it was. 

There’s no closure. There should be a moment of healing. The times that the district leadership over the years was approached, nobody really wanted to acknowledge it that way. Some felt like it was on the state for not stepping in. So maybe the state leadership at that time should apologize.

It feels like in terms of the school governance experiment, you’re at an inflection point. There’s continued improvement, but there are also tensions over whether an accountability-driven system is still something the community is lined up behind.

I think the governance contract is working well. Around 2016, I was leading the work on behalf of the Recovery School District. School leaders and advocates like the Urban League, New Schools for New Orleans and a number of other groups were working together on what the unification structure would look like. A number of legislators at the time helped to codify in law the governance construct that was created over the years as Act 91. 

It’s no longer an experiment. It’s really how schools function in New Orleans. The district has fully embraced it, maintained it and actually improved upon it. It’s a different role than any other school board in the country, but it’s also an extremely important one that’s proven to have spurred tremendous gains.

Yes, there are some people who would like to see the district go back to the way it functioned prior to Katrina. But I don’t think those individuals are but a small minority who are for the most part consistent and persistent in their viewpoint. 

When things are working well in New Orleans, you don’t hear from people. Nobody’s going to say, “Hey, the governance structure of this school that my kids have been at for the last 15 years and my grandchildren have gone through is great.” When I was state superintendent, I used to ask kids and parents, “Do you know if this school is run by the Recovery School District or by Orleans Parish?” And they’d just look at me, like, “No.” 

The average citizen, what they want to know is, is my child getting a good education? Do we have good extracurricular activities? Does the transportation work well? 

I’ll tell you one quick story. Dana Peterson, who now is the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, was involved in some sessions with parents. He had this parent who was just railing against charter schools. Like, “We need to go back to what was before.” 

Dana was like, “Do you realize your kid’s in a charter school?” The parent was at a loss. She was happy with where her child was, but she was indoctrinated that charter schools are bad. I think for some of the critics, that’s what it is. 

If you don’t really know what the governance construct is, at the end of the day it’s all about who’s working with the kids. There’s more proximity when it’s a charter network, with the urge to improve all the time so they can continue to have the privilege to teach kids. Versus a bureaucracy that’s expected to do it but that doesn’t have strong accountability to make sure it’s not year-after-year failure.

And that’s what it was before 2005. 

Reams have been written about the rapid academic improvements, the all-charter model and, more recently, the racial upheaval. What about the fact that you had to rebuild — as in, rebuild the buildings — 85% of the schools?   

Prior to Katrina, the buildings said to our kids and families, “We don’t care about you.” Those dilapidated buildings are no longer there. That’s something worth celebrating. 

Being a young boy that grew up in New Orleans, I’m extremely proud of the facilities. The price tag came to a little over $4 billion, if I’m remembering correctly. About a billion came from the disadvantaged business enterprise program that we started at the Recovery School District.

My first months as superintendent, there was an article in The Times-Picayune where they followed me as I rode the bus the first day of school with some kids to see what their experience was. I met the kids across the street from Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on Orleans Avenue. 

I was talking to the kids and a mom, and I pointed to Dooky Chase and right behind Dooky Chase there was a school. It was [what is now] Phyllis Wheatley Community School. There was a debate whether or not to rebuild it. 

I said, “We’re going to rebuild this school right here. And if we did, would you have your kid come here?” She’s like, “Absolutely I would.” We demolished the building and built new.

I’m extremely proud of that because my father was a part-time electrician and I could remember when I was a young boy, him getting work with one of his friends who was a subcontractor on large jobs. As I got older, I understood how important it was to be able to have subcontractors that were often minorities to work on large construction projects.

When I took over the RSD, New Orleans didn’t have a disadvantaged business program. And once I realized what that was, I felt it was important that we try to implement one. I was told that state agencies couldn’t have a DBE component. 

But we had legal take a look into it, and they advised me that the law was silent. It didn’t say whether you could or you couldn’t. I felt like it was important for us to at least try. And if we were challenged in court, we would see what a judge would say.

Once we launched it, I received maybe one or two emails from, like, the carpenters union saying we couldn’t do that. But they never followed up. We generated over $10 billion of revenue for local businesses and I’m extremely proud of that.

To this day, every now and then if I look at the placards on the front of a school I see my name and those of the folks on my team that helped make that happen. It brings me a great sense of pride and joy to know we played a small part in making sure that we have facilities where, when children and families walk in, they say to themselves, “This district really cares about me.” 

Do you have a wish for the next 20 years? 

I wish that we continue to build upon the foundation that’s been laid. I would love for us to eliminate all D-rated schools, to have a true system of good-to-excellent schools. 

That we would have a much more robust early childhood system where 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds are entering kindergarten and first grade on grade level. Today, we still have kids that enter all grades not reading on grade level, so schools have to keep almost starting over with kids. 

The last thing that I would hope for is that the school board in New Orleans more vocally embrace the structure that’s been created. To be unambiguous about its power in being a manager of a system of schools, versus being a traditional school district. That they fully understand and embrace that role and lead the way on that evolution. 

If you had a do-over, what would you change?

I would have intentionally built the next generation of leadership to think more about the system as a whole and to prepare for inevitable transitions — everything that we did 15 or so years ago. We had this rare confluence of strong leadership at almost every level: the schools, the state.

We leveraged everything in our power. For every metric evaluated by external entities, the growth was really powerful. We virtually eliminated F-rated schools. The on-time graduation rate is hovering close to about 80%. It was about 54% around 2005.

I wish we would have started to build that next cadre of leadership in real time. But it’s hard to be in the midst of something so unique and try to think 15, 20 years ahead. I was literally trying to think eight hours, one week, one month ahead. Things were just always coming at us, and we were constantly building and adjusting. 

We get these great leaders, and they do great work — almost like a meteorite or something that comes and then goes away just as quickly. People move on. 

The work is so hard. This is generational work.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

To better understand that disconnect, I spent months in New Orleans interviewing more than 50 people about their experience over the past two decades. I heard from both critics and champions of the city’s Katrina recovery reforms: parents, students, teachers, principals, administrators, activists, academics, and common citizens. Their stories are important and illuminating. I even created a whole podcast about them, called Where the Schools Went. 

But it’s easy to fall into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms. So let’s start with the data instead. Hard numbers are more useful than speculation. And the hard numbers from New Orleans are overwhelming.

There’s no one better at parsing the data than Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Harris has spent years analyzing these outcomes with the kind of methodological rigor that usually prevents education researchers from ever saying anything definitive about anything. His team of advisors includes both reform advocates and skeptics, yet when I spoke with him, Harris offered something virtually unheard of in education research: . “If you look at any of the typical things that we measure — test scores, high school graduation, college going, college persistence, ACT scores — all of those things are not just better, but quite a bit better than they were before.”

The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60% of New Orleans schools were by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54% to 78%. College enrollment has jumped by 28 percentage points. Students across all demographics — Black, white, low-income, students with disabilities — have that would be the envy of almost any school system in the country.

Harris’s team anticipated and tested the obvious objection: that the student population must have changed after such a massive displacement like Katrina. Perhaps the student body became more affluent? Less needy? They worked with the U.S. Census to track who actually returned, and deflates the skeptics’ favorite excuse: “The demographics of the district changed for families that had school-aged children… almost not at all.” Even more compelling, when they tracked individual students who attended school both before and after Katrina, those same children were learning at faster rates in the new system.

Yet if you scan the national education discourse today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any major elected leaders talking about New Orleans. This represents a dramatic shift. A decade ago, President Barack Obama himself the city’s progress, telling a New Orleans audience in 2009 that “a lot of your public schools opened themselves up to new ideas and innovative reforms,” and that “we’re actually seeing an improvement in overall achievement that is making the city a model for reform nationwide.” 

But that early attention has given way to virtual silence. This silence isn’t accidental — it’s the result of a success story so politically inconvenient that it threatens the foundational beliefs of both sides of America’s education debate.

The Battle of Carver High

To understand why this success story became politically radioactive, look no further than . Originally built in the 1950s as one of the city’s first high schools for Black students, Carver embodied the flawed promise of separate-but-equal education. By the 1990s, it had become what historian Walter Stern called an “educational Soweto” — a in a neglected neighborhood with graduation rates hovering around 50% and repeated failing grades from the state.

Then Katrina destroyed both the school and its surrounding Ninth Ward community. Karl Washington, a Carver alumnus, remembered the aftermath: “That area received eight, nine feet of water. It wiped out everything: the community footprint, businesses, spirit.” But the alumni were determined to rebuild Carver. 

The state agreed, but then came the question of who would run it. The alumni community had their vision: a return to the Carver they remembered, with its proud traditions of football, marching band, and community connection.

The state had different ideas. Instead of awarding the charter to community leaders, officials chose Collegiate Academies, an organization founded by Ben Marcovitz, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had achieved remarkable academic results at his Sci Academy charter school campus. Marcovitz’s schools were data-driven, disciplined, and relentlessly focused on college preparation. They were also run primarily by young, white outsiders through programs like Teach for America.

This staffing approach was particularly inflammatory given what had happened to New Orleans teachers after Katrina. When the district ran out of money, all 7,500 employees — including every teacher in the city — were . Most were never rehired. Many of these teachers were Black women who had been pillars of the city’s middle class for decades. They had deep roots in the communities they served. To see them replaced by young, college graduates, many of them white, with minimal teaching experience (and no union contract) felt like salt in an open wound. I explore this painful history in Episode 3 of .

The backlash to the state’s Carver plans was immediate and fierce. Chris Meyer, a state official tasked with explaining the decision, recalled arriving to find “a human chain in front of the building” and protesters blocking the entrance. After managing to get inside, “I get two words, maybe three outta my mouth, and the whole meeting just erupts in chaos.” When Meyer left the meeting, he found his car windows smashed, with glass scattered across his child’s car seat.

Jerel Bryant, the Yale-educated principal chosen to lead the new Carver, walked into this firestorm. His team quickly produced strong academic results, posting some of the best algebra scores in the city. But the achievement felt hollow amid growing community resistance.

The breaking point came in December 2013, when 60 students . They were frustrated by what they saw as excessive discipline: having to walk on taped lines in hallways, getting suspended for chewing gum or wearing the wrong shoes. One student : “You get suspended for coughing. You get suspended for sneezing out loud.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center the school’s suspension rates. Three parents publicly withdrew their children, though the vast majority stuck with the program. Local newspapers published side-by-side graphics showing Carver’s academic gains alongside its suspension statistics, as if to ask: At what cost?

For critics of education reform, this was the perfect story: test scores rising through harsh discipline and cultural suppression. For supporters, it was proof that change inevitably faces resistance, even when it’s working. The battle lines were clear, the rhetoric heated, and the national media seized on the drama. The Atlantic ran not one but on Carver’s discipline policies. called it “the painful backlash against ‘no-excuses’ school discipline.”

But then something unexpected happened.

The Quiet Revolution

Had I visited Carver 10 years ago and stopped my reporting there (as many national outlets have), this would be a very different story — one that fit neatly into our national education wars. But over the past decade, something remarkable happened. 

By 2014, Carver’s principal and his team began to listen more carefully to their critics. “Even when I didn’t agree with their tone or tactics or priorities,” Bryant reflected, “I didn’t doubt that they wanted the school to be great. And finding that common ground—that’s the challenge, and the opportunity.”

The school began implementing what educators call “restorative practices”—mediations and healing circles instead of suspensions. They trained staff differently, built new programs, funded the marching band, and hired more teachers from the community. Most importantly, they connected these changes to their core mission rather than treating them as distractions from it.

This version of “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus is so powerful! George Washington Carver Highschool Marching Band from New Orleans level up! : dright.the.king.of.oneself

“Strong sports teams help with suspension rates,” Bryant explained. “Engaging lessons help with suspension rates. Connecting before you correct, that helps too. A kid has to really believe: I want to be part of this. Otherwise, we lose a powerful lever to change behavior.”

The results were dramatic. Suspension rates by nearly two-thirds in a single year. But rather than hurting academic performance, the changes seemed to enhance it. Last year, Carver for academic growth from the state and ranked second among all open-enrollment high schools in New Orleans for students achieving mastery on state exams. The year before, they had the highest academic growth in the state. Oh, and their boys’ basketball team? They’ve been to three straight state championship games and won in 2022 and 2023. 

When I visited the school this spring, the transformation was evident everywhere. The trophy case displayed sports trophies and homecoming photos alongside college acceptance letters. The staff was older, more rooted in the community, and included several Carver alumni who had returned as teachers and coaches. Even Sandra, who works in the cafeteria, glowed when talking about the school: “The teachers? Marvelous. The principal? Excellent. Everybody here is loving and kind.”

Eric French, the band director and Carver alumnus, broke down crying when describing what it meant to return to his alma mater: “It was like a dream come true. When I walked into the interview, I almost broke down. I knew if I could just get my foot in the door, it would be up from there.”

Nell Lewis, the school’s director of culture, had lived through the entire transition: “The community didn’t believe at first. They saw white folks, outsiders, people who didn’t understand. But now they see the results. We didn’t used to have academic success here. We had championships, but not college. Not like now.”

Of course, cafeteria workers praising their workplace and band directors getting emotional about their alma mater don’t generate the same headlines as student walkouts and community protests. Collaboration doesn’t click like conflict. Which helps explain why the current New Orleans story — technocratic problem-solving, gradual improvement and former adversaries working together — has been largely ignored by those who thrive on drama and division.

The Systemwide Evolution

What happened at Carver was part of a broader evolution occurring across New Orleans. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the city had operated what could charitably be called an “anti-system” — dozens of autonomous charter schools with little coordination or oversight. This approach produced impressive academic gains but also created chaos for families trying to navigate wildly different enrollment processes, discipline policies and academic calendars.

By 2012, state leaders began implementing what they called “systems building.” They created , a centralized enrollment system that gave families one application for all schools citywide. They established common discipline policies and centralized expulsion hearings to prevent schools from pushing out challenging students. They developed a that sent more resources to schools serving students with greater needs.

Most importantly, they approached these changes collaboratively. Rather than mandating from above, the Recovery School District convened school operators to build consensus around shared systems. The result was something unprecedented in American education: a system that preserved school-level autonomy while creating citywide coherence around the functions that mattered most for equity and access. Schools could still choose their own curriculum, pedagogical approach, and staffing model. But they couldn’t cherry-pick students, ignore due process for discipline, or operate in isolation from families’ needs.

The Uncomfortable Truth

This evolution produced a model that should theoretically appeal to both sides of America’s education debates. It delivered the academic results that reformers promised while addressing the equity and community concerns that critics raised. It proved that choice and accountability could coexist with collaboration and local input.

Instead, it has been met with bipartisan silence.

For progressives, acknowledging New Orleans’s success would require confronting some uncomfortable truths. The Katrina recovery transformation was built on the elimination of teacher tenure, the dissolution of union contracts and the replacement of neighborhood school assignments with choice-based enrollment (subjects we cover at length in episodes 3 and 4 of Where the Schools Went). These are precisely the policies that national Democratic leaders now oppose.

President Joe Biden has called himself “.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren warns that charter expansion “strains the resources of school districts and leaves students behind.” The party has increasingly embraced a defensive posture that treats any deviation from the traditional district model or unequivocal support for teachers’ unions as an attack on public education itself.

But the old, pre-Katrina New Orleans had all the elements that progressives now champion as essential: a powerful teachers’ union, centralized administration, neighborhood school assignments and an elected school board. It also had some of the worst educational outcomes in the country.

For conservatives, the New Orleans model presents an equally uncomfortable problem. The city’s success came not through pure market forces but through a limited but aggressive government intervention. The state stepped in to close failing schools, coordinate enrollment, standardize discipline policies and redistribute resources based on student needs. They also relied heavily on government-mandated standardized testing to gauge school quality. This is hardly the small-government, laissez-faire approach that conservative education reformers typically champion.

Moreover, if more districts could become as responsive and effective as New Orleans, there would be less demand for the private school vouchers and education savings accounts that have become conservative orthodoxy. Why abandon public education if it can actually work?

The media, meanwhile, has moved on to more sensational stories. The current New Orleans narrative doesn’t generate clicks or cable news debates. It’s the educational equivalent of reporting on a well-functioning water treatment plant: critically important but insufficiently dramatic for our attention economy.

The Lessons We’re Ignoring

This silence comes at a significant cost. New Orleans offers genuine lessons for other cities struggling with educational inequity, not as a perfect model to replicate but as proof that dramatic improvement is possible when leaders are willing to experiment, listen and adapt.

The city’s approach suggests a middle path between the extremes that have dominated education debates: neither the rigid centralization that characterized many urban districts nor the unchecked autonomy that marked early charter experiments. Rather it demonstrates what former state superintendent John White called “coherence” — clear communication and a well-articulated philosophy around what government should control and what schools should decide for themselves. 

“You attracted some great people, many from within the system, many from without,” White explained. “You held them very accountable for doing their jobs. You resourced them proportionate to the challenges, and you set very clear boundaries around what you were gonna be involved with and what you weren’t gonna be involved with.”

This approach could work in districts with or without charter schools, with or without choice programs. It’s fundamentally about governance: being strategic about where to centralize and where to decentralize, building systems that support both equity and excellence, and creating space for both innovation and accountability.

A Model for Politics

Perhaps most importantly, New Orleans demonstrates something that feels almost impossible in our current political moment: the capacity for opposing sides to actually listen to each other and change course based on what they learn.

The reformers who dismissed community concerns about culture and representation gradually recognized that academic success without community buy-in was unsustainable and immoral. The community leaders who initially rejected any changes to traditional approaches came to appreciate that good intentions weren’t enough if children weren’t learning.

This wasn’t compromise for its own sake but genuine evolution based on evidence and experience. Today, many of the harshest critics of early reform efforts acknowledge the system’s improvements while continuing to push for better. Many reform leaders have become more sophisticated advocates for equity and community engagement.

As education advocate Chris Stewart, who grew up in New Orleans, put it: “We want to be transparent, but not loud. New Orleans should keep doing what they’re doing. They should keep winning and improving. But it doesn’t help to nationalize their story anymore.”

Perhaps Stewart is right that New Orleans benefits from flying under the national radar. But the rest of the country pays a price for ignoring what’s happened there. In an era when Americans seem incapable of finding common ground on any contentious issue, New Orleans offers a rare example of adversaries becoming collaborators, of ideology yielding to evidence, of a community choosing pragmatic progress over perfect ideological purity.

That’s a lesson worth learning, even if it makes everyone a little uncomfortable.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faced two urgent questions: Which schools would be rebuilt, and who would run them? In the Ninth Ward, few fights were as big as the one over George Washington Carver High School, a community anchor with deep history and proud traditions.

When the state chose Collegiate Academies, a high-performing charter network led mostly by people from outside of the city, the pushback was swift. Alumni rallied. Students staged a walkout during Collegiate Carver’s first year. The arguments weren’t primarily about academics, but about who gets to shape the future of a place like Carver, and whether a model built for results could ever feel like home to the people who had kept the school’s spirit alive. 

For many, the fight over Carver came to represent a larger fight over what kind of New Orleans would rise after the flood.

In time, the picture shifted. 

In this episode, you’ll hear from alumni, educators, and advocates about what can happen when people who once saw each other as opponents realize they’re fighting for the same thing. As Carver began pairing academic gains with a return to the traditions that had long defined the Green and Orange, something beautiful began to grow. “Episode Two: The Battle for Carver” traces that bumpy path and draws lessons that extend far beyond one school.

Listen to episode two above, and watch for the next chapter debuting on Aug. 26. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans in August 2005, it destroyed homes and flooded neighborhoods. Eighty percent of the city was submerged, 1,800 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. It also upended a public school system already collapsing under the weight of decades of failure. 

In the years that followed, the system was not just rebuilt; it was radically reimagined.

The debut installment of revisits the years leading up to the storm and the questions New Orleans was already grappling with. Crumbling buildings, failing academics, and deep corruption had eroded trust with the public — so much so that the FBI had even set up shop inside the school district’s central office. The below episode explores the question: What happens when a public institution fails the people it was built to serve? 

And what should come next?

We hear the story from the people who lived it, like former school district employee Ken Ducote, who used code names and classic cars to pass documents to the FBI. We learn about the students who had to leave school to use the bathroom at Taco Bell, because the ones in their building were constantly broken. And we meet the valedictorian who was barred from graduating after failing the math exit exam — for the fifth time.

In episode one, we talk about what loss really meant after the storm and the rituals and routines that helped bind communities together. We hear from a child who couldn’t find his mother for more than a month, a teacher who sheltered with her family in a room in a church basement and the students who, even in new classrooms in new cities, hid under desks every time it rained.

But this isn’t just a story about what was lost or broken. It’s about what people built in the aftermath. Just days after the storm, a team of New Orleans educators reunited with their students in Houston, many of them living in the Astrodome, and opened a school for them. This new campus quickly grew into a community for kids who had lost nearly everything in their lives.

The episode doesn’t settle the debate about what came next. But it begins to unpack the competing beliefs surrounding New Orleans’ post-Katrina school reforms. Some hail the transformation as miraculous, a turnaround that turned one of the nation’s worst-performing districts into a national model. Others view it as a betrayal: a dismantling of community control, the displacement of Black educators, and the erasure of local identity. This episode is the first of five chapters that will help you decide which, if any, of those narratives is correct.

Listen to episode one above, and watch for episode two debuting on Aug. 19. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

The 2005 hurricane and subsequent flood destroyed or severely damaged 110 of the 126 public school buildings operating at the time. Bringing them back was a linchpin of efforts to rebuild the city. Displaced families could not return until there were classrooms to welcome their kids. 

The logistical challenges of the $2 billion effort were unprecedented. No one had ever tried to rebuild an entire school system. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was mostly in the business of repairing or replacing houses and residential buildings, and was notorious for doing so excruciatingly slowly. 

Federal law specifically prohibited taking advantage of a disaster to build something better than what had been destroyed. Decades of official neglect, however, had left most New Orleans schools moldering long before the storm. Students sat in classrooms that didn’t meet fire and electrical codes, lacked window panes and were inaccessible to people with disabilities. 

Adding to the challenge were New Orleanians’s passionate attachments — some generations old — to the legacies of individual schools, as well as the city’s racialized education history. Strict historic preservation rules protected elements of devastated buildings that needed wholesale upgrades. Officials would have to decide how to handle dozens of buildings that were the sites of important firsts — the first school for Black children, the first named for a Black community leader, the first to be forcibly integrated. 

Officials quickly realized they would need to rebuild in three overlapping phases. First, on a ridiculously compressed timeline, they needed to construct or rehab a handful of schools so neighborhoods could start to revive. Then, they would have to determine which buildings should be torn down and which — and how many — replaced. Finally, they would have to figure out which could simply be refurbished and which historic — and often protected — landmarks merited a painstaking rebirth.    

It was a massive, hydra-headed puzzle — but also a milestone. “For years, people have commented on the unacceptable physical condition of our schools,” then-Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek said in 2007, as he announced the rebuilding plan. “We want these schools to stand as a symbol of the value we place on our children and their education — and as a symbol of what’s possible for the future of our city.”  

Here are the stories of seven buildings, each illustrating a different aspect of the 18-year effort.  

Click the arrows for details on each building.

McDonogh 35

New Orleans’s first public high school for Black students is still its crown jewel

For decades, New Orleans’s location made it an ideal slave-trading hub, allowing a particularly aggressive enslaver named John McDonogh to become very rich. When he died in 1850, he willed the fortune he had amassed buying and selling hundreds of people to the city, decreeing that it be used to do the unthinkable: finance the creation of public schools open to children “of both sexes of all Classes and Castes of Color.” 

The schools opened with his money all bore his name, distinguished from one another by sequential numbers. Opportunities for Black children came and went, though, until 1917 — when a group of African Americans persuaded school leaders to convert McDonogh 13, whose white students were being moved into a new facility, into the first public high school for Black students. McDonogh 35, as the building was rechristened, became — and remains — the city’s crown jewel, boasting generations of graduates who rose to prominence in politics, civic leadership and the arts. 

The basic bargain — moving Black children into a dilapidated facility when white children were given a new one — persisted for the better part of a century. During that time, McDonogh 35 occupied four buildings. Each bore the same name and number — an unusual and historically significant protocol that persisted until the racial upheaval that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020.  

The original McDonogh 35 building was destroyed by Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Classrooms were then set up in an old courthouse. In 1972, it got a new, squat cement block building erected using a Tulane University design for bunkers.

The third McDonogh 35 came through Katrina in decent shape — which made the building an essential part of the reconstruction campaign. It reopened within a few months. But as the Orleans Parish School Board and the state Recovery School District began making a master plan for rebuilding the entire school system, planners realized the best use of the windowless facility was as a swing space — temporary quarters for a succession of schools whose own buildings were being replaced or rehabbed. 

In 2015, McDonogh 35 got a gleaming, modern facility of its own. In 2020, the school board — which has the power to rename the buildings, though not the schools they house —  dubbed the new building 35 College Preparatory High School. But McDonogh 35’s historic name remains because of its importance to the community. Today, it is the only school left that bears the enslaver’s name.

Finally, the architects and engineers turned their attention to the fate of the school’s old, bunker-like building. As it happened, the onetime home of the first Black high school would be the site of the last of 89 reconstructions.

L.B. Landry High School

A gleaming, not entirely practical, palace — built around an old magnolia

Displaced families could not move back to New Orleans until there were classrooms for their children. Because the flood had decimated many neighborhoods, the first few schools needed to be reopened in different portions of the city, so that as many communities as possible could welcome residents back home. In 2007, local and state education officials announced a plan to reconstruct five schools — one in each of the city’s electoral wards — as quickly as possible. With classrooms to welcome children distributed throughout the city, refugees from Katrina could begin returning to New Orleans.  

L.B. Landry High School was not originally among the first five. Even before the storm, its neighborhood, Algiers, had more schools than it needed. Controversially, the “new” New Orleans was projected to be smaller. The building, which was moldering even before Katrina and dealt a death knell when FEMA used it as a staging ground, was unsalvageable. 

Enraged, Landry’s alumni fought fiercely to bring back the school — the city’s second high school for Black students, the first on the west bank of the Mississippi and named for a revered Black physician. They won. 

It took three years of pitched public battles, but a plan emerged, and it was clear the new Landry had to be a lot of things. It had to echo the layout of the old Landry. In contrast to the ugly, squat building it would replace, it had to be sleek and modern, a down payment on a different future. 

Its design had to be complete in five months. After that, construction had to start right away and could last no longer than 20 months. It had to be hurricane-proof, its electricals and other critical infrastructure housed on the third floor — far above any floodwaters — and protected by exterior cladding able to withstand 125 mph winds.

Finally, because the community was determined to salvage something from Landry’s old campus, it had to be built around the only thing spared by the wrecking ball: a magnolia tree. 

Completed in 2010 at a cost of $55 million, the new school is a soaring three-sided U built around an enormous magnolia. Inside is space for a health clinic, a community theater and classrooms that could be used by a local community college or university to hold classes in the somewhat isolated neighborhood. 

At the back of the courtyard, three stories of windows illuminate a soaring atrium. They reveal a sweeping staircase leading up to a broad hall painted with social justice quotes in yellow and orange. Catwalks cross overhead, connecting the wings of the schools. The space glows, signaling the importance of the school to the community. 

It’s beautiful, but dogged by design flaws, the school’s leaders say. It is impossible to get a mechanical lift onto the staircase’s landings, for example, so changing the bulbs that cast the golden light requires building a temporary two-story scaffolding, which can cost $12,000. 

As Landry was being reopened, officials still needed to address the neighborhood’s excess school capacity. In 2013, the state Recovery School District combined a rival high school, O. Perry Walker, located just a mile away, with Landry in the new building. The district renamed the building housing the consolidated schools Lord Beaconsfield Landry-Oliver Perry Walker College and Career Preparatory High School. 

Landry boosters howled again, but this time to no avail. That changed in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd racial reckoning, when the district redesignated 27 schools that had been named for Confederate leaders and enslavers. Noting that Walker had been a district superintendent who reinforced segregation, the school’s operator changed its name back to L.B. Landry High School. 

Andrew Wilson Elementary

Seamless wasn’t the goal in joining old with new

One of the first five schools rebuilt, Andrew Wilson Elementary originally consisted of five structures located in the Broadmoor neighborhood, a designated National Register Historic District. The main building was the only part of the school not too damaged during Katrina to rehab. 

Deemed to have architectural significance, the facility was beautiful — but without its outbuildings, nowhere near large enough to meet the demand from returning families. Officials decided to restore the original building and to add onto it. 

Opened in 1922, the original L-shaped building is a mashup of styles, drawing on Spanish Colonial, Classic Revival and Italian Renaissance designs that incorporate copper gutters, ornate rafter tails and high ceilings atop transom windows.  

As was typical of New Orleans schools designed at that time, the main entrance was in the middle of the front façade, on the second floor. (The first floor is often referred to as the basement.) To reach the double doors, students walked up two staircases that fan across the front of the building in an inverted V shape. At its top, the front door opened onto a wide hallway leading to the office, located behind an expanse of mullioned windows. 

Today, visitors walk past the façade, lovingly restored, and around the corner to a new, modern main entrance that sits at the place where the old building meets the new one. To the left of the new entry, an interior staircase climbs up what had been the old building’s end wall. From the landing at the top, two hallways branch off at right angles. 

The old one, a wide path of polished wood, leads to the main office and sun-drenched classrooms beyond. The other is a long terrazzo hall that passes through a new L-shaped building, past a library, gym and lunchroom, among other modern spaces. The joined structures — one with a red tile roof and one corrugated steel — form a rectangle that surrounds a courtyard.

Both wings are beautiful and functional, but the places where Andrew Wilson is most visually interesting are the seams. At the top of the new stairs that lead to the office, where the addition meets the original structure, the ornate, curved wooden eaves of the old building extend out into the new space, covered by the roof of the newer wing.

The space covered by the old and new roofs is bridged by three stories of windows that look out onto the new courtyard. On the second floor, it houses a cozy, sun-drenched reading nook. Opposite is the door to a spacious, modern library. 

The windows that previously let light into the rooms at the end of the old building now frame an illustrated timeline of the surrounding community dating to the 1500s, tracing Louisiana’s admission to the Union, America’s 1815 defeat of the British in the Battle of New Orleans and Broadmoor’s slow evolution from a lake to a diverse, middle-class neighborhood that prizes its education legacy.

McDonogh 19 Elementary

In the shadow of a breached levee, a civil rights icon turned her school into a museum

Six years after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, a frustrated federal judge gave a recalcitrant Orleans Parish School Board a deadline for taking a first step toward integration: Nov. 14, 1960.

That morning, federal marshals escorted four Black first graders — born the year Brown was decided — into two all-white elementary schools. Most famously, Ruby Bridges was led into William Frantz Elementary School, in the Upper Ninth Ward. 

Simultaneously, in the Lower Ninth, 6-year-olds Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost were walked past a mob hurling epithets and rotting fruit, up 18 steps and through the front door of McDonogh 19. As the , their white classmates left, never to return. 

The McDonogh 3, as they would come to be known, attended school alone for a year and a half — joined only by the U.S. marshals protecting them and the protesters who showed up every day. For their safety, the windows were papered over and recess was held in the auditorium. 

Desegregation orders notwithstanding, in 1962 the school board declared McDonogh 19 “for the exclusive use of Negro children.” The girls went on to integrate another elementary school, and then different middle and high schools. For 50 years, whites continued to leave for suburbs and private schools. 

Katrina’s floodwaters first breached levees perilously close to McDonogh 19, which had just closed to students because of changing demographics. The storm devastated the neighborhood, which has yet to recover. Eventually, it became clear there was no real possibility McDonogh 19 would reopen as a school. It did, however, have tremendous value as a historic landmark. 

After the storm, Tate, set out to buy the building, name it after herself and her classmates and turn it into a civil rights memorial. However, the Orleans Parish School Board was prohibited from selling it. Undaunted, Tate formed a foundation and spent nine years .

The district eventually transferred ownership to the city housing agency, which was able to sell it to Tate and a community development group that specializes in the “adaptive reuse” of historic sites. The agreement called for creating 25 affordable senior apartments on the second and third floors. 

To generate the $16 million needed to buy and renovate the building, Tate pulled together 60 funding sources, ranging from corporate donors to affordable housing tax credits. The TEP Center — TEP for Tate, Etienne and Prevost — opened in May 2022. 

Visitors now enter not via the iconic staircase the girls and their marshals used, but through a door at its base. One flight up, the original main entrance is ringed with artists’ renderings of what the hallway will look like once Tate has raised the $5 million needed to complete the museum portion of the property. The intent, she says, is for visitors to feel what it was like for a first-grader to walk into the school. 

The halls branching off from the school’s office are behind glass walls. Everything in front of the dividers is protected by the landmark’s 2016 inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. Behind the walls are classroom doors, which actually open onto apartments. A mural on the back of the building depicts the McDonogh 3 as both girls and women.

Downstairs, the classroom where the girls spent their days contains a single, child-sized wooden desk. It’s not original — the flood spared nothing inside the building. It’s placed there as a stark visual suggestion of what it felt like to be one of the three first graders, day after day.

Booker T. Washington High School

A new school built around an auditorium where history was made

In the early 1900s, with just a handful of Black public schools in existence, New Orleans’s African-American residents began a decades-long push for a vocational school. Fearing job competition, whites objected. Despite securing a $125,000 grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund — a philanthropy backing construction of Black schools throughout the South — the district stalled. For decades. 

Thanks to the federal Works Progress Administration, Booker T. Washington Senior High School finally opened in 1942, built on a toxic dump. It quickly became a crucial venue where groups pushing for a better education for Black children could meet.

For years, its 2,000-seat auditorium — designed by the architect who drafted the eclectic plans for Andrew Wilson Elementary — was the largest space in the city for Blacks to congregate, making it an epicenter of the community’s artistic and political lives. Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Dizzy Gillespie were among the artists who performed at the school. Martin Luther King Jr. preached there. 

A history of the school compiled by the African American High Schools in Louisiana Before 1970 blog catalogues numerous in the auditorium, including the 1945 annual assembly of the NAACP’s local chapter. 

“With nationally known figures in attendance, the organization delivered a powerful message to the community in which it outlined its goals for the Blacks in America,” the history notes, quoting the Times-Picayune newspaper. 

“Specifically, at this meeting the NAACP called for ‘the right of franchise, better housing conditions, equal education and economic advantages, and opportunities to serve community police and fire departments’ for all New Orleans’ African-American residents.” 

Despite having fallen into disrepair, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. Within two years, however,  enrollment had dwindled from 1,600 to fewer than 400 students, and Booker T. posted the lowest test scores in the state.

After Katrina, the building sat vacant and decaying for seven more years before everything but the historic performance space was torn down. In 2015, alumni backed by the KIPP charter school network lobbied to have a new high school built around the auditorium. 

Figuring out how to construct a state-of-the art facility without running afoul of historic preservation rules took years. The school’s alums, who refer to themselves as Washingtonians, had to work with multiple bureaucracies, including the National Park Service, to iron out everything from cleaning up the old dump to installing modern technology in the auditorium without disturbing its protected features. Completed in 2020, the new Booker T. Washington cost $55 million. 

The renovated theater includes a sweeping, two-tier balcony covered by a gently curved ceiling punctuated by ornate tile. The tile reappears in the lobby — which doubles as a student health and dental clinic during the school day — and in the original entry vestibule, where Art Deco scrollwork has been preserved.

Because of quirks in how the rules are written, the auditorium by itself no longer qualifies for historic status. Even the smallest details were faithfully restored, in accordance with preservation guidelines. But the loss of the surrounding building meant the school no longer met the National Register’s requirement that the site’s “context” also survive. 

Boosters still say the decision to replace everything but the auditorium was the right one. At the end of the process, the alumni association, state Recovery School District and KIPP produced a documentary detailing the school’s history. 

Martin Behrman Charter School

Bringing a school into the 21st century when nearly every detail is untouchable

The restoration of what is now called Martin Behrman Charter School Academy of Creative Arts and Sciences was one of the hardest of the rebuilding campaign. Individual elements of the structure ranging from huge, multi-paned windows to teacher mailboxes are specifically protected. 

Because of this, the renovation was expensive — at $40 million, it cost more than many of the district’s completely new schools — and painstaking. The complexity is one reason that the restoration was the second-to-last completed, with the school reopening to students in January 2023. 

Located a stone’s throw from Landry, Behrman’s Spanish Colonial Revival building might be the most beautiful of the renovations. Built in 1931, it was heralded as one of the city’s finest facilities, with then-cutting edge spaces such as laboratories and equipment for home economics courses. Now, it serves students from preschool through eighth grade. 

By the time Katrina hit, its modern sheen had faded. The building was too small to house everything needed by a contemporary school. 

The renovation challenges are visible from the street. To one side of an ornate, three-story entrance is a bell tower. Though no one seems to remember why, the clock was dismantled during World War II, rebuilt in 1997 and in disrepair when the renovation began. To restore it, the renovators called on White’s Clock and Carillon, a company that specializes in restoring clock towers. 

To get inside, visitors pass through a security gate in a tiny vestibule — a sub-optimal design decision forced by the original floor tile inches beyond it, which can’t be touched. Nor can the detailed plasterwork in the lobby — or, for that matter, the plain plaster on the walls. 

Also protected: huge wooden windows, tile mosaic floors on the second and third stories and ornamental molding in an auditorium that rivals Booker T. Washington’s. A balcony adjoins a spacious room that teachers use for breaks and prep, but it’s uncomfortably hot most of the year and there is no allowable way to put up an awning or pergola for shade. 

There was no way to create the spaces needed by the school’s early childhood education program, such as a tiny restroom in each classroom, in the protected building. So designers built an annex across the street that houses a gym, cafeteria and eight kindergarten and preschool classrooms. While the work took place, classes were held in one of the school system’s swing spaces, a school that was minimally functional but slated for permanent closure.

Martin Behrman’s leaders were ready to move in the second the last coat of paint was dry. Students went home for the 2022 holiday break from the school’s temporary home, the old Oliver Perry Walker facility that was merged with nearby Landry. When they came back a couple of weeks later, it was to two completely outfitted buildings.     

In 2023, the reconstruction project was recognized with the Louisiana Landmarks Society’s . 

Dr. Alice Geoffray High School/New Orleans Career Center

New Orleans’s last school rehab capitalized on a charmless bunker’s good bones

In total, between 2005 and 2023, the Orleans Parish School Board and the state Recovery School District constructed or rehabbed 89 buildings, 32 of them wholly new. Apart from the unprecedented engineering, architectural and equity challenges, officials had to figure out where schools would hold classes while their permanent homes were being rebuilt.

Sometimes that meant FEMA trailers. Other times, a school community would use a swing space — a building in good enough shape to be habitable but not a gem. The windowless cement box built in 1972 for the school system’s pride and joy, McDonogh 35, was one such space. As the end of the reconstruction campaign approached, planners turned their attention to its long-term fate. 

At the time of the building’s design, Hurricane Betsy’s devastation was still fresh. Accordingly, the structure was constructed using Tulane University plans for creating fallout shelters, which gave it a feature most people would not stop to consider: the sturdiest foundation in the district. That made it uniquely suited to house not a school per se, but a center that could provide career and technical education to students throughout the district. 

In addition to its literal strength, the school had a huge concrete courtyard, spaces big enough to accommodate heavy equipment and a decent electrical grid. With some work, it would make a perfect high-tech career training facility.

And so the old McDonogh 35 building became Dr. Alice Geoffray High School, home to the independent, nonprofit New Orleans Career Center. Louisiana has a high need for workers who have strong skills but not necessarily a four-year degree. Training programs for welding, robotics, health care and similar jobs are in great demand but too expensive for individual high schools to offer.

A wing dedicated to health careers has functional hospital beds, nursing stations and exam rooms. Welding bays have been built in a cavernous space on the ground floor. A spacious, second-floor commercial kitchen for culinary arts trainees is located near a service elevator so food can be delivered to a bank of walk-in coolers. 

Throughout the building, the mechanicals are exposed. Trainees, as students are called, can work on exposed water pipes, electrical panels, heating and cooling equipment and IT infrastructure. The central courtyard is still open, but it has a roof and a fan so would-be carpenters and other tradespeople-in-training get early exposure to working in Louisiana’s climate. 

Lastly, the bunker-like building got windows. Lots of windows. 

Layout by Eamonn Fitzmaurice and Meghan Gallagher

In August, New Orleans Public Schools will open a district-operated school named for Leah Chase, a late civil rights activist and revered matriarch of a culinary dynasty. The school will eventually serve 320 students from pre-K through eighth grade, with an emphasis on the city’s culture and history. Located in a historic building, it will replace the failing Lafayette Academy Charter School. 

As they hire Leah Chase’s teachers, pick its uniforms and curricula and arrange for transportation and lunches, district leaders are also creating the administrative jobs other school systems rely on to oversee individual buildings. These central office departments will make it easier for NOLA Public Schools to open more “direct-run” schools, Superintendent Avis Williams says.

You read that right: New Orleans’ love-it-or-hate-it, seven-year experiment as the nation’s first all-charter school system is coming to a close. Going forward, it will act both as a charter school authorizer and an old-fashioned school district.

In principle, the city’s charter school advocates are not opposed. 

“I am personally governance-agnostic,” says Sabrina Pence, CEO of FirstLine Schools, which runs five schools in the city. “We wish the district every success in direct-running its first school in a while.” 

Head of the Louisiana Public Charter School Association, Caroline Roemer says she is confident Leah Chase will be well run.

Tulane University professor Doug Harris, who produced numerous school improvement studies that helped shape the unique system, says the decision to create the infrastructure to direct-run schools will give the district flexibility to respond to unanticipated challenges.

NOLA Public Schools’ decision to return to running schools could be a game-changing inflection point in one of the most closely watched school-improvement efforts in history. After Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005, the state of Louisiana seized control of most of the schools in what was then one of the lowest-performing districts in the country. 

In the years that followed, the state Recovery School District created a totally new kind of system in which every school lived or died according to its performance contract. Schools that don’t meet those standards lose the charters that allow them to operate — an autonomy-for-accountability bargain that remains controversial even as it has led to . The state returned New Orleans public schools to local control in 2016.

Two years ago, the Orleans Parish School Board appointed a new superintendent with a track record of success and no experience with charter schools. The board handed Avis Williams a formidable to-do list that included a dramatic downsizing to address enrollment losses and other sweeping decisions that would shape the next chapter of the school governance experiment. Progress has been halting.

In December, tensions surrounding the district’s future came to a head when Williams — under conflicting pressures from board members and seemingly without understanding the nuances of the system — decided not to renew Lafayette’s charter. What might in another moment have been missteps in timing and communications instead forced Williams’ hand on a number of consequential decisions.

Declaring charter schools a failed “experiment with children’s lives,” one school board member who had been pushing the district to return to a more traditional model demanded that Williams begin opening direct-run schools, starting with Leah Chase. 

The architects of the grand experiment may not be opposed — but they are eager for answers to some big questions. 

How will the prospect of opening new schools impact a lagging, three-year effort to address declining enrollment by closing others?

New Orleans faces a singular variation on a common problem. School systems throughout the country are facing the one-two punch of dramatic enrollment losses and the end of federal COVID recovery aid, forcing painful and overdue decisions about shuttering buildings and laying off staff. The politics of deciding how to meet the moment — playing out on steroids nationwide — is a frequent career-ender for superintendents and board members.

Locally elected school boards are easily overwhelmed by community ire and often either prolong the pain by taking piecemeal steps — such as closing two or three schools when there are 10 too many — or kick the can down the road by leaving the decisions for their successors. As resources dwindle in the remaining schools, student achievement typically falls, fueling further dips in enrollment. 

By contrast, in New Orleans, an eight-year-old law — Act 91 — spells out the process of replacing poorly performing schools with better ones. Under the law, the district authorizes individual charter schools, which may be operated by networks or standalone education groups. 

When a school has underperformed for a certain period of time or has run afoul of financial or regulatory requirements, the district board must revoke its charter. The district can give the charter to another operator or simply close the school. The only way to deviate from the process is by vote of a supermajority of the Orleans Parish board. 

But there is no provision for the board or superintendent to unilaterally decide to reduce the number of schools. Citywide, there are an estimated 4,000 empty seats.

In 2022, the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans, which serves as a research and innovation hub for the system, that schools citywide were nearing a tipping point in terms of enrolling enough students to pay for a full array of academics and services. Post-Katrina, enrollment peaked in 2019 at 49,000, and by some 4,000 students, the organization’s analyses have shown. Birth rates are also in sharp decline, so the number of students will continue to drop in coming years.

Because almost all state and federal per-pupil funding in New Orleans is distributed according to enrollment, each school sets its own budget according to its ability to attract and retain students. Too many empty seats in any school, New Schools warned, directly impacts its ability to pay for the staff and programs needed to serve kids well. 

On average, last year, New Orleans’ K-8 schools had space for 550 students but enrolled 484, which equals a funding gap of $625,000. In its reports, New Schools has provided examples of the number of educators and programs that would have to be cut to make up that amount.

“You can’t drain resources out of schools five or 10 students at a time,” says Pence. “Lose 10 kids, that’s a teacher, maybe an art teacher — that’s always soul-crushing.” 

After New Schools’s , Pence’s FirstLine was one of four charter networks that teamed up to consolidate six underenrolled schools into three buildings, eliminating 1,500 empty seats. The required the charter school organizations to work together to figure out which schools were most accessible to families and which three networks would run the remaining schools.

Charter operator InspireNOLA merged two of its K-8 schools into one building, while ARISE Schools and Crescent City Schools combined a school from each network into a single building to be run by Crescent City. The Collegiate Academies network merged two high schools, Rosenwald Collegiate Academy and Walter L. Cohen Prep, in Cohen’s brand-new building.

The district can reduce some excess capacity by closing underperforming schools instead of giving their charters to better-performing networks. But that alone would be unlikely to address the oversupply. Even if it could, the district needs a master plan to locate high-quality options in modernized buildings in every quadrant of the city. This means establishing how many schools should exist going forward, and how to make closure decisions that are not driven by school performance. 

“There are questions of fairness,” says Harris. “Some neighborhoods don’t have good options.” 

For example, a large swath of the city known as New Orleans East has lots of students but not many schools. “Performance is a good and important thing to start with, but you don’t want kids traveling 10 miles to school,” he notes. “You want high performers spread out around the city.”

What is to stop underperforming schools slated to lose their charters from lobbying to become direct-run schools?

New Orleans’s system was designed to insulate high-stakes closure decisions from political pressure. In 2015, Louisiana enacted a law spelling out limits on the Orleans Parish School Board’s power over charter schools and requiring it to step in when they underperform for long periods of time. 

Legal parameters in place, the state returned the schools to the district. In 2017, NOLA Public Schools found charter operators for its . 

Since then, a small but vocal number of residents have demanded an end to charter schools in the district. A group called Erase the Board has routinely protested closures and backed school board candidates who agree that the state constitution requires the Orleans Parish School Board to operate like a conventional district. 

They have an ally in state Sen. Joseph Bouie Jr., who has campaigned to overturn Act 91, the law codifying the district’s obligations to charter schools. For almost a decade, they had gotten little traction — not even after he equated the system to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment— with the exception of a change to state law to allow a board supermajority to overrule the superintendent’s recommendations.

Events of the last few months may, however, have allowed charter opponents to breach the firewall. When state report cards were , several New Orleans schools earned failing grades. In December, Williams recommended closing one and revoking the charters of two others, to be given to other operators. 

By the board’s January meeting, though, no network had stepped up to run one of the schools losing its charter, the 500-student Lafayette Academy Charter School, so Williams . The board approved her request, but angrily. 

In the past, to present an announcement about a closure or change in management with some certainty about families’ options, superintendents and charter network leaders would have talked beforehand about who should take over the charter and its building. Lafayette’s building was freshly renovated and in a desirable location, so normally the superintendent’s final recommendation to the board would have specified which of the district’s 67 schools should occupy it going forward.

Earlier, at that same board meeting, Williams had explaining why the central office was to run traditional schools. To do so, districts typically need departments focused on things like curriculum and instruction, human resources, food service and other tasks performed independently by charter schools.

To pay for its responsibilities as a charter authorizer, NOLA Public Schools receives 2% of each school’s per-pupil funding, which is not enough to pay for the staff needed to oversee conventional schools. How this will be resolved is unclear, though most local leaders say there is no way the operation of a single school justifies the expense of creating the centralized infrastructure.

Unconvinced that the district could not simply open and run schools, the board’s new vice president, Leila Jacobs Eames, chastised the superintendent, saying she had asked repeatedly for the district to do so.

“It makes my blood boil to hear these excuses,” Jacobs Eames said. “As a superintendent, you really should have come with a plan to direct-run in your back pocket.”

Jacobs Eames also said it was time to end the all-charter district. “I am asking from you for a plan on future direct [run] schools” she railed. “This experiment with children’s lives has failed.”

Williams clapped back. She often gets requests from individual members, the superintendent said, but she needs clear marching orders from the board as a whole. Consequently, her highest priority has been creating the portfolio plan the board requested at the start of her tenure, outlining what the district should look like in the coming years. 

“I do feel somewhat attacked by the suggestion I should have had [a plan to direct-run Lafayette] in my back pocket,” Williams replied. “Because at the end of the day, what I have had in my back pocket has been marching orders from the board that were very specific.” 

Board President Katie Baudouin agreed, in part. “We have not, as a board, asked you for a plan for when, how and why you might direct-run a school,” she said. “We have been clear about the goals for district optimization.”

Finally, there was broad unhappiness with the district’s communications with families and board members about Lafayette’s future. Jacobs Eames was angry that she had learned about the closure several nights before, on the evening news. 

A few days after the January meeting, the superintendent reversed herself, saying she would shutter Lafayette and ask the board in February to approve the opening of Leah Chase. By then, however, the deadline for the next year’s enrollment lottery was just days away, and neither the prospective new school nor Lafayette was an option.

Confusing communications about the transition, as well as its unfortunate timing, have reverberated , but the concern the charter community is left with is whether schools’ performance contracts can remain a chief driver of accountability.

“I’m afraid that what happened with [the Lafayette decision process] is it opens the door to the politics of closure,” says Roemer. “I get concerned that from now on, if a charter school is not operating at the level we want it to, the Orleans Parish School Board can step in and direct-run it.”

What happens now? How does the superintendent reshape a district still made up primarily of schools she doesn’t control — and hold the one she does to high standards?

In May, Williams previewed her for the board, which is scheduled to see the comprehensive version in August. To date, it does not detail an optimal number of schools or map where they should be located. 

Right now, half of New Orleans students attend a school that has an A or B rating on state report cards. Under the plan, the goal is for 80% to be enrolled in a high-performing school by 2028 — a rate that must be reflected in every part of the community. At the same time, segregation and racial and economic disparities must be reduced. 

Other factors, the superintendent said in an interview with ����Ӱ��, include the need to offer a variety of curricular themes and models, such as Montessori and arts-focused programs, as well as contend with shifting demographics. The number of English learners in the city is increasing quickly, as is demand for offerings like language-immersion schools and programs focused on the arts. 

“We do know that some of those models lend themselves to smaller classrooms or to schools being a certain size,” she said. “When we think of district optimization, it’s not a linear thing where all we consider is the number of seats.”

Any proposal for future direct-run schools will be considered against the same criteria and priorities outlined in the portfolio plan, Williams said. District-operated programs are subject to the state quality standards that govern all traditional Louisiana schools. 

“I do see where people might be concerned, maybe even confused, about what this looks like for a district-run school in terms of accountability compared to charters,” she said. “But the accountability measures and standards will certainly be there. This includes financial audits and compliance monitoring for special education and for English learner services.”

Williams also acknowledged the concerns raised by creating a new direct-run school to replace a chronically underperforming charter. “It’s very similar to what’s happening now with the Leah Chase school,” she said. “It’s not the goal. I want us to be intentional and use data points to make those decisions and not as a workaround.”

Her goal is not to weaken accountability, Williams continued. “I also don’t expect this to be our answer to schools not on track to be renewed or schools that are not meeting the mark in terms of academic outcomes,” she said. “We’re dealing with children and families, and they deserve high-quality schools.”

Like other system leaders, Pence says she has no doubt this is the goal — and one shared by the city’s charter operators. “If the district wants to run schools, great, but we’re going to have to take some offline,” she says. “Closing schools, no matter what, is really hard. Everyone loves their school.” 

Correction: The combined ARISE and Crescent City school will be run by Crescent City.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to Collegiate Academies, New Schools for New Orleans and .

Kamenetz had spent years covering the heaviest stories on the education beat as an award-winning reporter at NPR, from the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans classrooms to the potential risks of excessive screen time. And according to her sources, the coming pandemic wasn’t just going to drive down math scores or disrupt the teaching profession: Prolonged school closures would leave a mark on child safety, mental health and social development. 

The months that followed, shaped by academic stagnation and political division, frame Kamenetz’s new book, The Stolen Year. Released Tuesday by PublicAffairs, the volume reads like a reckoning with the predictions made by the experts she consulted more than two years ago. Each chapter examines a facet of social policy in America that was fundamentally challenged by the emergence of COVID-19, from the courts system to K-12 schools, and the effects that were felt by tens of millions of children.

And how much of her sources’ collective warning was validated?

“All of it,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Much of the social toll, measured in deaths or distance or deterioration of services, was unavoidable. But Kamenetz argues that the failure of online learning, and of in-person schools to reopen faster in thousands of districts, was also highly contingent — on leaders’ failure to adjust during the fateful summer of 2020, but also on experts and members of the media, whose message to the public was too often muddled. Though every Western country had to scramble to come to grips with a once-in-a-lifetime public health emergency, few kept children out of school longer than the United States. And virtually none were as divided in their political and policy responses.

Kamenetz observed those responses as a veteran journalist, but also as a mother of young children and a parent in New York City, where the official response to COVID was often scattershot. That experience “complicated” her view of public schooling in this country, she confided.

“I very much understand the perspective of people who feel betrayed by public schools, wherever they’re coming from politically,” she said. “There’s been such a fraying of the consensus around what is really our major piece of social infrastructure for families.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What’s it been like reporting on the pandemic for over two years, including writing this book, as both a veteran education reporter and a mother of young kids?

Anya Kamenetz: Over that weekend after March 13, the day that schools started to close, I was trying to confirm a coronavirus case in my child’s school, which I was then going to report to WNYC [New York City’s public radio station] and NPR. It’s not regular for reporters to report on their own kids’ schools, but this was obviously of import.

For a couple of weeks, I’d been covering the college shutdowns in Asia and then in the U.S., which were a precursor to the K-12 shutdowns here. But when de Blasio made the call to shut down schools — which he did, with his characteristic leadership, very late on a Sunday night after saying he wouldn’t do it — that was really the beginning of it for me. And I knew it was going to be a very big deal because I had not only been at NPR for six years at that point, but I’d covered [Hurricane] Katrina, which I believed would be a decent parallel: You have this society-wide catastrophe, and within that, kids are pulled out of school amid all this instability and trauma. The impacts of that were devastating, and the empirically measured effects on young people in New Orleans were still there 10 years later. 

So my job was to document what was happening, and it was a very special position to be in with my skills and prior research. I also had an interest in refugee education and what is called “education in emergencies.” So my contacts in international development circles were some of the first people I called up to ask, “How’s this gonna go? What should I be looking out for?” And everything they told me panned out.

You’re originally from New Orleans, right?

Yes.

Your instinctive Katrina comparisons have unfortunately proven accurate — test score data from NWEA shows that learning loss during the pandemic is pretty comparable to the damage suffered by students in New Orleans after the hurricane.

From what I can tell, it’s actually worse. The latest NWEA data indicates that the average elementary student is on track to recover in three years; for Katrina, it was two years. And after Katrina, those kids went back to “better schools” — better funded schools, certainly, and schools that achieve higher test scores.

That’s not what we’re seeing here. In the July 2022 NWEA study, it found that middle schoolers weren’t making any gains. We don’t even have a trajectory for them. 

The predictions in the research pointed me to the conclusion that high school students were the ones to worry about because they were on a course to separate from school. It’s not a question of catching up, it’s a question of whether they were going to stay in school. That is something we should worry about, especially with college-going .

Getting back to the early guidance offered by your international sources: How many of their predictions panned out?

All of it panned out.

The idea that young people would go into paid work and that young girls would become caregivers; that the impact of school closures would match underlying inequalities in society, and that children who were privileged enough would see no difference; that continuity efforts to keep learning on-track — this stuff goes back to World War II, for instance, when the BBC had its own children’s service that carried school broadcasts — don’t reach everyone, and in fact multiply inequality because the kids who can benefit from those efforts are already advantaged. All of that was exactly what we saw.

Those insights were remarkably prescient. In my own reporting, there were also some dogs that didn’t bark, most notably some early coverage on the possibility of a Great Recession-type crunch on school finances. 

That’s right. There was a short-term spike in child hunger — it could have been two or three months — and we have to remember that even one month of increased hunger is very bad. But kids actually finished the end of the year with money in their pockets, so the economic picture is a little complicated. And there wasn’t the kind of housing crisis that left huge percentages of kids homeless, which is something that can happen after natural disasters. 

In fact, if you get into , you can see that between unemployment and CARES Act money, families spent more time at home with their kids. There’s obviously a segment of society that doesn’t have paid leave. Patricia [one of several parents profiled in The Stolen Year], who’s a mom in D.C. with two kids, worked in D.C. Public Schools; she had her child prematurely in July and then went back to work in August. So during the pandemic, it was the only time she was able to be home with her children. As hard as it was, she saw the advantage in it.

What comes through in the book is that there was a lot of contingency, particularly in those first pandemic months. Do you think there was a way that the initial COVID wave could have been handled better by education authorities, either at the local, state, or federal levels. Could things have gone significantly better than they did?

School closures were sort of handled in the spirit of President Trump when he said, “We’ve got to shut this whole thing down until we figure out what the hell’s going on.” They were not controversial in that early wave because it was happening all over the world, and people really needed a handle on what was happening. The first big mistake was not making a plan, as soon as we shut them down, of how we were going to open them back up. 

We had this false idea about a two-week turnaround, and people really froze and didn’t plan for the future. If you’re on this beat, you know that schools start planning for staffing and scheduling in the next academic year by April. And that was when schools in parts of Europe started reopening, in April and May. They were like, “This is truly an emergency measure, and we’re going to treat it as such. We’re not going to let it continue through inertia because if districts don’t have clear leadership and messaging, they’re not going to respond.” And that’s what we saw here.

It’s unclear to me what the academic effects were of not reopening schools to finish out the 2019-2020 school year, as opposed to the extended virtual learning that took place the following year. I suspect the bigger impact was the precedent of closing through the end of the year, which seemed to set us on a course toward virtual learning being the accepted way to deal with this.

I agree completely. The effect of reopening in May 2020 would have been to put the training wheels on and get everyone onboard with the fact that this was going to happen. It was described to me by a teacher in Florida who went back into the classroom in 2020. She was like, “I know colleagues who stayed home with medical exemptions, and when they came back, they were terrified. So I said, ‘Listen, it’s not that big a deal, we’re doing this.” 

What was absent was the comfort of everyday routine, and the sense of control that teachers can have when they have protocols. By not opening in the spring of 2020, we made it that much harder. And there was a slice of schools in blue states that didn’t open up until February, March, April 2021, and it got harder and harder the longer they waited.

It seems like what set the U.S. apart was the diversity of local responses we saw in the summer and fall of 2020. Of course, there wasn’t a ton of clear federal guidance, and God knows if blue states and districts would have taken that from the Trump administration, but it yielded this fractured approach to reopening and public health measures that carries on to this day.

Writing the book, I felt compelled to do this deep dive into the history of our public school system. Because it’s very different from our peer countries, which have a national system and a national curriculum and a minister of education who actually runs the schools. Instead of that, we have all these different districts.

All of which is to say that there was an absence of guidance from the top, but also an absence of data collection. I covered a study from Spain in September 2020, which tracked case rates by region. Every region had all the same protocols. After schools reopened, cases went up in one region, down in another region, and stayed flat in some others. So they released this paper and said, “We don’t think what you’re doing in schools is making a big difference, please carry on.” The CDC didn’t release an equivalent paper until, like, January [2021]!

Where was the information? — this mom-and-pop data company that was started for totally different reasons — became the nation’s go-to source for what schools are doing because the federal government just wasn’t tracking and releasing enough information. 

You mentioned Bill de Blasio’s sort of tortured initial move to close schools in New York City, which attracted a lot of criticism. But from the distance of two-plus years, I suspect that many observers wish that districts had been more deliberate in shuttering schools and keeping them shuttered, even if that’s clearly a case of Monday morning quarterbacking.

That’s right. More forward-thinking, more innovative leadership could have gone a long way. And as frustrating as it often was to live in de Blasio’s city, it’s worth remembering that of the big blue cities, they opened schools up first. Though they had really bad uptake of hybrid [learning] because it was untenable from a child care perspective, and also because they delayed reopening twice. 

People don’t understand that there’s a dynamic between parent trust and how you communicate the decisions you’re making. The more you hem and haw and quibble over things, the harder it is for parents to actually trust that you’re going to do the things you say you’re going to do. One lesson from this period is that being a bad communicator is a problem in and of itself.

The consequences of that miscommunication and opacity in decision-making are already being felt politically, with school board members enduring a wave of recall attempts and Democrats losing ground on the issue of K-12 education. I’m wondering if your own levels of trust in political leaders and education authorities have diminished.

The process of reporting this book has complicated my view of public schooling. 

That’s a pretty broad thing to say, but basically: I thought of public schooling as a public good and something that needed to be freely available to all people, and I still think that. But I also very much understand the perspective of people who feel betrayed by public schools, wherever they’re coming from politically — whether they think public schools are racist, or that they’re not representing their family’s point of view, or whatever. There’s been such a fraying of the consensus around what is really our major piece of social infrastructure for families. In terms of the , a lot of parents feel like they were forced to exit. 

Of course, time will tell. There’s a powerful pull back to normal, and some families are changing what they’re doing. You see a lot of expressions of relief about coming back [to school]. But from what I understand of , both politically red districts and districts that reopened sooner — those are often one and the same — are reporting a rebound in enrollment. Politically blue districts, and those that opened up later or kept mask mandates in place, are continuing to lose students, which is what we’re seeing in New York City. That’s more important than what people say in polls, I think.

I take your point that school closures were mostly uncontroversial when they were first enacted. From my recollection, the point where some of this dissatisfaction began to set in was in fall 2020. According to Burbio data you cite in the book, 42 percent of students returned to all-remote schools that September. 

I actually think it’s more. The federal government released a report in February 2021 breaking things down schools by what they offered: in-person, fully remote, or hybrid. But we know that within the in-person and hybrid categories, there were also families that chose remote instruction. In that study, around half of all students were still fully remote that February, so it’s pretty safe to say that a majority of kids were in remote-only schools in fall of 2020; probably only about one-third had an in-person option.

In New York City, to my knowledge, about one-third of kids were actually showing up to school at that time. And that was an “open district.”

Okay, that’s an important caveat. Whatever the exact figure was, massive numbers of kids didn’t have the option of attending school in-person, even months after some comparable countries had fully switched back. Why?

They had not planned to come back in-person. There was a statement by Gov. Gavin Newsom in summer of 2020 about potentially opening up for summer schools; as we know, California schools didn’t reopen until spring 2021. So they just didn’t do the planning necessary. We might also say that states didn’t have the necessary resources in terms of public health tracking and contact tracing. I spoke to a woman employed as a contract tracer in New Jersey, and her experience in that job was why she didn’t send her kid to school. She was like, “This isn’t working.”

The testing also wasn’t in place in 2020, and obviously, there was opposition from people who didn’t believe their workplace was going to be safe. Some of the opposition came in the form of bringing cardboard coffins to marches and saying that children were going to die. That was not supported by the evidence, but it was scary.

The messaging was very heated on both sides of the reopening debate. What I don’t really remember was a more dispassionate accounting that weighed the legitimate public health concerns of both families and school employees against the legitimate educational and social needs of kids. 

Absolutely. That was not done. And we can see that from the fact that there was no real attempt to triage the situation. 

San Francisco tried to do this. They said, “We have lists of kids who are in foster care, kids who are in substandard housing, kids who are recent immigrants, and kids who are disabled, and we’re going to prioritize them for inclusion in learning hubs.” Okay, great. But they only created half of the hub spaces they said they would. The failure is in not balancing what you’ve articulated as important needs, and instead allowing chaos in the market to take place instead of those things.

You mentioned child care, which was a troubled industry even before the pandemic. In the book, you memorably refer to a “laser maze” of obstacles to access care. What did the pandemic teach us about how the United States provides services in this area?

The pandemic made it really obvious that we have no infrastructure for care in this country, and in fact, it would be exaggerating to call it a system. There’s been research showing that a certain percentage of child care providers use their own food stamps to feed kids in their care because our subsidy system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. 

We also learned that it’s essential infrastructure, and people can’t go to work without child care. What we rely on for young kids is a gradient of unpaid and underpaid care. COVID made a certain amount of people recognize that, and I was very happy to see some of these ideas [for child care and pre-K subsidies] in Congress. But seeing them yanked away in this version of is really disheartening and makes you ask what it’s going to take for politicians to change this. 

Among the big priorities the Biden administration wanted to address in January 2021 — and even including some that weren’t big priorities then, like inflation — most have been acted upon. Not child care or pre-K.

Yeah. Political theorists would probably say that the climate movement pushed their issue to the top of the agenda. Health care for seniors has always been a win for politicians, and there’s a clear constituency of people who vote a lot on that issue. But when do moms have time to march? When can they crowd into Nancy Pelosi’s office and make it unavoidable for this to change? I’d love dads to do this too, but my point is that it takes organizing.

We both cover education research. How do you grade the performance of education experts and policy specialists, many of whom gained big microphones over the last few years? You brought up Burbio, which I definitely hadn’t heard of before 2020, but I was thinking of figures like Brown University economist Emily Oster: people who were not affiliated with government but took it upon themselves to gather what information was available and communicate it to the public.

That question is going to be the subject of a lot of research and reflection going forward: How does this ability to speak directly to the public affect how research is conducted, how it’s publicized and how it shapes public opinion?

We talked about the vacuum of guidance from the federal government in the early stages of COVID, which kind of distorted the whole information ecosystem. And then the virus kept changing in really uncertain ways such that Omicron acted differently than Delta, which acted differently from the first wave. People really wanted certainty, and there wasn’t certainty to be found, so it was a foregone conclusion that people peddling reassurance were going to get a lot of attention. 

Do you have anyone specific in mind?

My previous book was about screen time, which is a hotly contested area without as much data as you’d like. It’s also a situation that’s always changing because new forms of media emerge. Something I found very useful during the pandemic was just being able to fairly convey that truth to parents that just want information to navigate their day. You have to be very clear about what you don’t know and how to make a decision depending on what your specific concerns are.

I think that was why someone like Emily Oster got so popular. Her wasn’t telling people what to do, it was a framework for making decisions.

For me, the urgent need for information made the pandemic a unique period of connection between reporters and readers. I imagine you were getting a ton of feedback, both positive and negative, from parents on Twitter as the various COVID debates raged on.

The uncertainty was so excruciating that it led people to retreat to their corners and take refuge in what their tribe was doing. That’s why there was this subset of people who were like, “I’m a liberal mom who thinks my toddler shouldn’t have to wear a mask anymore. But people hate me for that and think that I’m a Trump supporter.” 

Because it was so polarized, it was very hard to deal with these gaps. Or sometimes there weren’t even gaps! It was more like, “You have a child with a speech impediment, but we have a grandparent at home, so our concerns are different.” There was a need to give people a little more grace.

I’d add that we’re education reporters, not science reporters, and when we had to call up epidemiologists to get your story, there was a lot of caution around that. It was hard for a lot of reporters, and that led to gaps in coverage: We were comfortable talking about what was happening academically but not as comfortable talking about public health. For that, we really listened to the health experts, and the priority of the health experts was preventing even one case of COVID. With a little more confidence, we could have taken a broader view and said, “We might be reducing COVID spread by x amount, but what’s happening to these kids at home?”

This wasn’t even a phenomenon restricted to the education press. In spring 2020, you could get the feeling that the only relevant expertise was in health. It almost would have been strange if reporters didn’t become deferential around experts in that field. 

“Deferential” is the exact right word. And the solution for it was for education reporters to stay in our lane and report on what was happening to kids. I realized early on that NPR didn’t have a child care beat; we didn’t have a child welfare reporter, so we didn’t really know what was happening as far as kids getting abused and not being flagged by a mandatory reporter. 

We just had a schools desk with three reporters for the whole country, and one was doing higher ed. That wasn’t enough to cover what was happening to kids, particularly when schools were closed.

It takes so long to pitch, write, and edit a book like this. I’m curious how much changed after you submitted your first draft to the publisher, and if you had to rewrite a lot of this as conditions on the ground evolved.

I would say that trend lines basically continued, but the closures of the Omicron winter really impacted learning in 2021-22 — so much so that I don’t think it’s really fair to call it a recovery year. The amount of closures and quarantining and chronic absenteeism were too grave to say there was a huge amount of recovery, as opposed to just creeping back to normal. 

The school leaders I know are just beginning to contemplate what a full, normal year might look like, and is being framed accordingly. They’re very clear now — now — in saying that kids should be in school at all costs. In that way, Ifeel like public opinion and people’s experiences have evolved to the point that they’re ready to have this conversation. And I hope we do have it; I hope we don’t rush to saying, “Why aren’t you over that yet?” or, “There’s a huge achievement gap, why haven’t these kids caught up yet?” Like, let’s not forget what happened here.

So is it possible for 2022-23 to be the first post-COVID year? And what’s it going to take to make that happen?

I do think it’s possible. But in order for that to happen, we need to be clear-eyed about what has already happened. It’s a little frustrating to see schools lurching from crisis to crisis, and there’s a crisis rhetoric around schools that doesn’t always match reality. We’re hearing about a teacher shortage, for instance, but there were teacher shortages before the pandemic. And also, schools are listing a lot more vacancies; it’s not so much a shortage as schools trying to hire more people.

So there is a chance for recovery. In order for there to be recovery, schools need to do what they say they’re going to do in their [American Rescue Plan] plans and not lose sight of their responsibility to help the most vulnerable and the kids who lost out the most in this pandemic.

The premise of your book was that a year of learning was stolen; what needs to be done to restore what was lost?

You have to hear, without interrupting, what harm was suffered. You hear what kids went through. And then you try to give them back what they lost. That’s going to take time, but it can be done. A wonderful thing about children is that they have time, and the investment you make today will pay off many times in the future. We just need to give them that chance.

See previous 74 Interviews: Harvard economist Thomas Kane on reversing COVID learning loss, Seattle superintendent Susan Enfield on 700 days of learning disruptions, and Arizona assistant principal Beth Lehr on the pandemic’s effect on teachers. The full archive is here.