In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a phoenix has risen from the ashes. Long plagued by incompetence, corruption, racial segregation and dysfunction, the New Orleans school district was essentially scrapped in the wake of the hurricane. In its place, education reformers have taken a “clean slate” attitude to the challenge, focusing on the needs of kids first and foremost. The human capital teaching in New Orleans schools has been a key change strategy, with Teach for America providing 250 corps members per year to begin teaching in New Orleans schools, and an entire Web site designed to recruit our nation’s best and brightest teachers called TeachNOLA.org. Meanwhile, the majority of New Orleans students attend public charter schools, operating outside the traditional district bureaucracy and without traditional collective bargaining union contracts. Most of these schools opened after the storm. The early results are tremendously promising, as profiled in last weekend’s New York Sunday Times article, “A Teachable Moment,” which profiles the reformers, families, and students who are turning the lemon that was Katrina into the lemonade of one of America’s premier education reform success stories. To quote from the article:
“For many years now, the central debate in American education has been over just how much schools can do to improve the low rate of achievement among poor children. While it is true that for decades the children of New Orleans toiled in a substandard school system, they have also continually faced countless other obstacles to success — inadequate health care, poorly educated parents, exposure to high rates of violent crime and a popular culture that often denigrates mainstream achievement. And though the hurricane washed away the school system, it didn’t wash away their other problems. In fact, for most children it compounded them with a whole new set of troubles: wrecked homes, frequent relocations, divided families, post-traumatic stress. Were public schools really the right vehicle to attack all of those problems? Were a blazer and a necktie and a lot of hard work enough to get Tony Petite to college?
For Hardrick and Sanders and the dozens of other education reformers I spoke to in New Orleans since my first trip there in March, the answer was a firm yes. They didn’t deny the daunting spectrum of problems facing the children they were trying to educate. But they said they believed they could overcome them in the classroom — and that the new educational terrain in New Orleans had significantly increased their chances of success.”
Continue reading the New York Sunday Times article on the rebirth of public education in New Orleans.
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