Photograph Source: United States Environmental Protection Agency – Public Domain

To mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, numerous articles and opinion pieces have appeared in prominent media outlets touting the supposed improvement of the city’s public school system since the storm.

Katrina’s immediate aftermath saw the state of Louisiana disempower the democratically elected school board by taking over the management of 107 out of 128 schools. This led to the termination of 7,600—mainly Black and women—teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, clerical workers, principals, and other permanent employees, and the eventual conversion of all of the city’s public schools into privately managed charters.

A Washington Post column, “‘Never Seen Before:’ How Katrina Set off an Education Revolution,” by British journalist Ian Birrell, proclaimed the transformation a “miracle.” Another opinion piece in The 74, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools” by Ravi Gupta, the founder and former CEO of a charter school network, stated that the New Orleans school system shaped by Katrina was “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.”

As proof of their arguments, both authors pointed to a June 2025 report, “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons” by Douglas N. Harris and Jamie M. Carroll of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Pulling from the data presented in that study, Birrell said the case for declaring New Orleans-style education reform a “remarkable success” is “pretty definitive,” and Gupta called this supposed success an “unequivocal conclusion.” As a longtime youth advocate and community leader and an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, who was a public school teacher in the city, we invite you to consider whether this data alone proves that New Orleans public schools and the families they serve are better off after 20 years of “reform.”

Although Gupta warns against “[falling] into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms,” we’d like to tell you about Rio, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons. Rio attended 12 different schools in New Orleans, many of which were shut down suddenly, before he finally graduated from a school that is now also closed. Rio’s story is not atypical of the human costs of the New Orleans school system, where closures are a defining feature and evidence that the disaster Katrina wrought on the schools is still happening.

Forced to traverse the fragmented charter system that has replaced the public system of neighborhood schools, New Orleans students are often traumatized by multiple school closures. Decades of research attest to the academic, emotional, and economic harms that result from severing social connections that families, faculty, and staff have had with schools and with one another.

For instance, obtaining a job reference letter from a former teacher should be simple for students to do, but that task becomes an obstacle course for many young adults from New Orleans, like Rio.

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