After the Flood: The Impact of Katrina on Education in New Orleans

This issue of The High School Journal, "After the Flood: The Impact of Katrina on Education in New Orleans," marks a departure from previous issues. As a first step in our new direction, we have decided to devote this issue to trying to make sense of developments in New Orleans since the devastating hurricane and its aftermath. While we will maintain our commitment to publishing the most current and best research on high schools, we also aim to solicit articles from students, practitioners, and others to more accurately convey the experience of life in the high schools of today. We also want to play a role in the vital task of translating academic research for practitioners and policy makers, while posing relevant questions for future research.

At this point, given the confused state of post-Katrina education, the possibility of definitive research seems unlikely. Instead, we offer a number of snapshots from varying perspectives with the goal of detecting trends, exploring and questioning policy decisions, and suggesting research questions. As these articles all demonstrate, even as they sometimes disagree, a new education system is emerging in New Orleans and the lives of students and teachers are being transformed. It is not too soon to try to take some stock of this process and point toward possible research projects, projects which are urgently needed.

There is little consensus on the appropriateness or effectiveness of the changes in New Orleans schools. Instead of offering definitive conclusions, we have included multiple, but incomplete, perspectives. Our authors are alive to the uniqueness of New Orleans, and especially to its strong pull on its residents and former residents. Most of the articles are critical of changes in school policy, but often for different reasons.

We begin with a background piece from education journalist and activist, Aesha Rasheed. She provides important political and historical context by reminding us of the parish structure unique to Louisiana and then describes the impact of desegregation resulting in the large-scale abandonment of public schools. Then, like others in this issue, she communicates the complications and confusions of the remaking of New Orleans schools into a largely charter system. She does find some hope in the creation of some schools "with deep community involvement" and organizations committed to monitoring school progress.

The Center for Community Change's "Dismantling a Community" timeline provides an informative chronology of post-Katrina education developments. It laments the loss of the "slice of common ground" in the retreat from public schools and the promotion of charters. The timeline identifies the forces that saw the opportunity to start from scratch and seize unprecedented control over an urban school system. The article demonstrates the effectiveness of aggressive advocates with connections, in particular to the US Department of Education. The fears, expressed here, of the uncritical propagation of a market model of education surfaces in a number of other articles in the issue.

The perspective of teacher unions is represented in the next two pieces: an interview conducted by Dr. Theresa Perry and an excerpt of a recently released report from the United Federation of Teachers of New Orleans, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and the national American Federation of Teachers. The oldest teacher local in the South was uprooted when the Orleans Parish School Board summarily fired all teachers and staff and refused to renew the union contract. Collective bargaining is now a thing of the past. In some cases, teachers in the new charter schools have been forbidden to publicly reveal their salaries. The experience in New Orleans sharply raises the question of the future of teacher unions, especially in an era of school reform. These pieces also cast a somewhat more positive light on pre-Katrina schools than many of the other articles.

Next we bring in student and teacher perspectives. These heart-felt narratives, mostly from the Students At the Center (SAC) program in the high schools, provide on-the-ground points of view on positive efforts in New Orleans schools both before and after the storm. A fuller introduction immediately precedes these narratives.

Alethea Frazier Raynor...