Sarah Carr, a former Milwaukee education reporter who moved to New Orleans in 2009 to cover schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sees some similarities in both troubled public education systems.
“I think they both have their strengths and their weaknesses,” Carr said in a recent interview.
“I think both places have great and awful schools.”
In her new book , titled “Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children,” Carr writes about the New Orleans school system by focusing on the personal lives of various figures struggling to educate students in a city still suffering from the aftermath of Katrina.
Her book reports the progress of three different New Orleans schools in a city where charter reform movement has brought about drastic change for poor minority students , administrators and teachers. Carr took a personal approach to interviewing her subjects in order to tell the greater story of the challenges involved in a community where social conditions have a large impact on the education of students.