Education Reform in New Orleans: Voices from the Recovery School District

Abstract

In the post-Katrina education landscape in New Orleans, teachers in charter schools and district-run schools in the Recovery School District are uniquely situated to provide a direct eyewitness account of the successes and failures of the city's new direction in public education. This narrative presents the opinions of teachers in a critical assessment of recent reforms. This piece is a condensed overview of a qualitative study that took place during the 2010–11 academic year.

Heretical Discourses in Post-Katrina Charter School Applications

“…Although there was upward movement in student achievement the year prior to Katrina, nearly 80% of Orleans Parish public schools saw improvement on the School Performance Score matrix—the state’s measure used to index student achievement—the New Orleans public school system faced several challenges including systemic underfunding, growing deficits, protracted student poverty, and student underachievement on traditional accountability measures (Ciolino, Kirylo, Mirón, & Frazier, 2015; Jabbar, 2015). Conservative Louisiana legislators tried unsuccessfully to create a voucher program prior to the 2005 hurricane and in 2003 the Louisiana legislature passed Act 9.…”

Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans: Where are We Now and Where Might Imagination Take us?

“…Gone are the prerequisites of 'first hired, last fired' of collective bargaining. In its place, for better or worse (see Ciolino et al, 2014), are graduates of Teach for America (TFA) and the demographic groups TFA represents -largely private school educated from some of the academically elite and financially well-endowed schools such as Stanford, Penn and Harvard. At the school level, university-trained and state-licensed principals have disappeared.…”