The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60 percent of New Orleans schools were labeled “failing” by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54 percent to 78 percent. College enrollment has jumped by 28 percentage points. Students across all demographics—Black, White, low-income, students with disabilities—have posted dramatic gains that would be the envy of almost any school system in the country.
Harris’s team anticipated and tested the obvious objection: that the student population must have changed after such a massive displacement like Katrina. Perhaps the student body became more affluent? Less needy? They worked with the U.S. Census to track who actually returned, and their finding deflates the skeptics’ favorite excuse: “The demographics of the district changed for families that had school-aged children… almost not at all.” Even more compelling, when they tracked individual students who attended school both before and after Katrina, those same children were learning at faster rates in the new system.
Yet if you scan the national education discourse today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any major elected leaders talking about New Orleans. This represents a dramatic shift. A decade ago, President Barack Obama himself celebrated the city’s progress, telling a New Orleans audience in 2009 that “a lot of your public schools opened themselves up to new ideas and innovative reforms,” and that “we’re actually seeing an improvement in overall achievement that is making the city a model for reform nationwide.”
But that early attention has given way to virtual silence. This silence isn’t accidental—it’s the result of a success story so politically inconvenient that it threatens the foundational beliefs of both sides of America’s education debate.
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