Is New Orleans a Model for America?

By David Osborne

Since charter schools were invented in Minnesota two decades ago, they have grown into one of the more important public-policy innovations in many states. Last year, approximately 2 million children—roughly 4 percent of all public school students—attended 5,600 charter schools, in 40 states and the District of Columbia.

Yet in most places, charter schools remain a positive innovation around the edges of a struggling public school system. Some reformers have argued for years that charters should become the system , that we should treat every public school like a charter. With parental choice, freedom from most district rules and constraints, and accountability for performance, charters simply represent a better way to organize public education—or so the argument goes.

Over the past seven years, New Orleans has conducted the nation's first serious test of this proposition, and the results could well shake the...