New Orleans schools were radically remade after Katrina. He wanted to know: Did it work?

Twenty years ago, it was the most radical experiment in American education. Today, it’s just the New Orleans school system.

That system, which state leaders and self-styled reformers engineered after Hurricane Katrina, remains unlike any other. Nearly every public school is run by a private charter school operator, families are unbound by attendance zones and low-performing schools are routinely shut down.

Perhaps no one has studied this system or analyzed its results more closely than Douglas Harris, an economist and the founding director of the Twenty years ago, it was the most radical experiment in American education. Today, it’s just the New Orleans school system.

That system, which state leaders and self-styled reformers engineered after Hurricane Katrina, remains unlike any other. Nearly every public school is run by a private charter school operator, families are unbound by attendance zones and low-performing schools are routinely shut down.

Perhaps no one has studied this system or analyzed its results more closely than Douglas Harris, an economist and the founding director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University.

Harris and his colleagues at the research center have produced more than 50 studies on the post-Katrina changes to New Orleans schools and their impact on students and families. He also wrote a definitive book on that research, “Charter School City: What the End of Public Schools in New Orleans Means for American Education.”

In terms of improving academic outcomes, Harris says, the evidence is undeniable: The overhaul worked. But other effects — a loss of veteran Black teachers, a deemphasis on arts education, a weakening of school-community bonds — were far less positive and remain painful to many.

In two recent interviews with The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, Harris described the impact of the changes, how New Orleans schools are faring today and where they go from here. His responses have been condensed and edited for clarity.

What are your main findings on how the New Orleans education overhaul affected students?

We tried to look at a lot of different outcomes over time. Test scores and high school graduation rates; college-going, persistence and graduation; ACT scores, SAT scores.

They all looked positive, really without exception. And not just in a good direction, but usually quite large improvements. I've been studying education policy for most of three decades and you just never see outcomes like that.

You rarely see effects on any outcome that are substantial. So to see large effects on essentially all the outcomes be sustained over 20 years — I can't think of another example like that.

Considering the overwhelmingly positive academic results, why do the post-Katrina changes — especially the move to all charter schools — remain controversial?

I think part of it is the disagreement about what schools are supposed to be doing. The system is set up to generate positive academic outcomes, and it does that. But if you're more interested in the arts, if you're more interested in critical thinking or really engaging students in their communities, these are things that I think the system is not designed to do.

I think part of it also goes back to the process of how the reforms were put in place. Most people couldn't participate. Even if the reform leaders had really wanted the community input, it would have been very difficult to do that under the circumstances with everybody spread out and disconnected.

That leads to a bit of a conundrum if you view (the changes) as a success and you also view the democratic process as being something we value. Because of all the power struggles and the differences of opinion, there's no way you would have ended up here. You would have ended up with something done by committee. You would get incremental change.

What do you hear from New Orleans families about the changes?

I hear a lot of contradictory answers. They'll say, “I wish we could have this system but have neighborhood attendance zones,” or “I wish we could have the system and not have to close schools for low performance.”

Also in the traditional public school system, everybody on the same block who’s the same age walks to school together and they go to sporting events together and things like that. You just don't have that (in the current system). That's another frustration.

But if you ask parents about the academics of the schools, they have generally positive things to say. We expect an awful lot of schools and they can't do it all. I think that's why you always end up with these tensions and conflicts.

How have New Orleans’ charter schools evolved?

They're a little bit more like traditional public schools than they were in the beginning.

The system has gotten a little bit more centralized. Also, I think there has been a little relaxation in regards to student discipline, (moving away from) the idea of aggressively suspending and expelling students.

Also, that's true on (school) offerings. If you go back and look at the marching bands in 2012 or so, a lot of schools didn't have them or they were really small. Every year it seems like they're getting stronger again.

Some charters also restored the names of the traditional schools they replaced, right?

The perspective of the charter schools at the beginning was that they were rejecting the past by adopting new names.

But that's not really what people want. They like having the legacy, the name of the school is something you've heard about and you know somebody who went there.

One of the things that's interesting about the charter school movement as a whole is that the original motivation was experimentation. But, for the most part, that's not what parents are looking for.

You've shown that New Orleans schools made dramatic gains in the decade after Katrina, then their performance leveled out. Can they keep improving?

Given how much performance improved in the first decade, the fact that they were able to maintain it is a huge success. It is harder to see how you get better from here, however.

You're probably going to need entirely different strategies to make further improvements. A prime example is early childhood education.

When kids first enter school, they're not ready to learn. And the early childhood system in Louisiana and New Orleans is a mess. If you can get students starting school in a better place, then that would substantially improve outcomes down the line, too.

In the past, charter schools enjoyed bipartisan support nationally. Now Republicans mainly talk about private school vouchers while few Democrats publicly promote charters. What happened?

If you ask the voucher folks nationally, they'll say part of what happened is that conservatives gave up on charter schools because they were “woke.” It was mostly Democrats leading the effort and they were focused on equity issues, which is all true.

(But when you ask charter school proponents,) their response is that if you look at legislation, the charter movement marches on.

Almost every state has a charter law, and the laws are getting more and more favorable to charter schools in terms of funding and regulation and accessibility of buildings. You don't see any legislation getting through that's anti-charter either.

They're winning the battle of the legislative pen, but not the public bully pulpit. 

After studying the New Orleans education changes for over a decade, do you have any unanswered questions?

We don’t know the effects on students' lives, how they do long term. All the improved academic outcomes predict better livelihoods, but we don't know for sure. We don't know the effects on communities, the effects on the arts and how that changes the culture of the city.

There are a lot of things that are unmeasurable about education, and we need to pay attention to those things too.