Education in New Orleans: Some Background

Education in New Orleans:

Some Background

Not much about New Orleans, or Louisiana as a whole, is ordinary. People down here take a particular pride in being distinctly different from everywhere else. This difference is evident not only in the culture, music and food but in the intricacies of local government. Truly understanding the post-storm landscape of education in New Orleans and the metro area requires a grasp of some of the pre-storm realities of New Orleans public schools. This piece will provide a brief overview of three arenas important to understanding the educational landscape of New Orleans – parish governance, desegregation and private schools.

Parish governance

Geography is crucial to understanding the patterns of migration out of New Orleans particularly after desegregation and during the era of middle-class flight out of urban centers that spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike most school systems in America that are governed at a city or town level, Louisiana public schools are collected in parish districts – the equivalent of counties in other states. This parish designation is a throwback to the state's Roman Catholic heritage and an era when civil government was intricately tied to ecclesiastical governance.

Each parish, there are 66 in the state, has an elected school board charged with overseeing all public schools. While most parishes include both rural and urban areas and frequently encompass several municipalities, the boundaries of the city of New Orleans and Orleans Parish (Figure 2) are congruent so that all Orleans Parish public schools are within the city's limits. Orleans Parish is bordered to the east and west by Jefferson Parish, to the southwest by St. Bernard Parish, and to the north by St. Tammany Parish (Figure 1).

Desegregation

The New Orleans white power structure did not move to desegregate the city's schools until 1960. In that year, the School Board subjected black students who applied to attend a white school to an admissions test and finally allowed a carefully selected group of black girls (boys were deemed too threatening) to attend William Frantz and McDonogh No. 19 elementary schools.

Although more than 137 African-American kindergarteners applied for admission and were tested, only five were ultimately allowed to proceed into the two elementary schools. They five young girls were subjected to harassment, threats and physical attacks and when they could not be scared away, white parents eventually pulled their students out of the two elementary schools. White parents boycotted McDonogh No. 19 and the four African-American girls who integrated that school attended school alone for the year. At Frantz, some white parents continued to send their children to school but the students who would have been classmates of the schools' sole African-American student, Ruby Bridges, did not come to school so she too completed the school year alone. McDonogh No. 19 never again had a majority white student population and Frantz quickly became a majority African-American school.

The dynamics at these two elementary schools played out across the system as the school board implemented its grade-per-year integration plan. By the late 1960s, African-American students outnumbered white students 2-to-1. By 2005, more than 80 percent of students attending public schools in New Orleans were African-American and many schools that had student populations that were 100 percent African-American. The city's demographics before the storm were about two-third African American and just under 30 percent white.

As New Orleans schools integrated, many white families moved out of New Orleans into one of the surrounding parishes, particularly to St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes. Other families transferred their students into non-public schools that have remained a significant...