Reorganization of School System Following Hurricane Katrina
NOPS was the New Orleans area's largest school district before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005, damaging or destroying more than 100 of the district's 128 school buildings. NOPS served approximately 65,000 students pre-Katrina. For decades prior to Hurricane Katrina's landfall, the New Orleans public school system was widely recognized as the lowest performing school district in Louisiana. According to researchers Carl L. Bankston and Stephen J. Caldas, only 12 of the 103 public schools then in operation within the city limits of New Orleans showed reasonably good performance at the beginning of the 21st century.
In Katrina's immediate aftermath, an overwhelmed Orleans Parish School Board asserted that the school system would remain closed indefinitely. The Louisiana Legislature took advantage of this abdication of local leadership and acted swiftly. As a result of legislation passed by the state in November 2005, 102 of the city's worst-performing public schools were transferred to the Recovery School District (RSD), which is operated by the Louisiana Department of Education and was headed for a key period (2008-2011) by noted education leader Paul Vallas. The Recovery School District had been created in 2003 to allow the state to take over failing schools, those that fell into a certain "worst-performing" metric. Five public schools in New Orleans were transferred to RSD control prior to Katrina. The current RSD superintendent is Patrick Dobard, while the OPSB is being led on an interim basis by Stan Smith.
The NOPS system is currently digesting reforms aimed at decentralizing power away from the pre-Katrina school board central bureaucracy to individual school principals and charter school boards, and at vesting choice in parents of public school students, allowing them to enroll their children in almost any school in the district. Charter school accountability is realized by the granting of renewable, five-year operating contracts permitting the closure of those not succeeding. In October 2009, the release of annual school performance scores demonstrated continued growth in the academic performance of New Orleans' public schools. If the scores of all public schools in New Orleans (OPSB-chartered, RSD-chartered, RSD-operated, etc.) are considered, a district performance score of 70.6 results. This score represents a 6% increase over an equivalent 2008 metric, and a 24% improvement when measured against an equivalent pre-Katrina (2004) metric, when a district score of 56.9 was posted. Notably a score of 70.6 approaches the score (78.4) posted in 2009 by the adjacent, suburban Jefferson Parish public school system, though that system's performance score is itself below the state average of 91.
Read more about this topic: New Orleans Public Schools
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