Following up on Amy Waldman’s excellent look at New Orleans schools (School Reform Hurricane), here are two contrasting views of how things are shaping up this fall:
The Greatest Education Lab - TIME
Hurricane Katrina washed away what was one of the nation’s worst school systems and opened the path for energetic reformers who want to make New Orleans a laboratory of new ideas for urban schools .
History and Ideology Gang Up in New Orleans Dissent
New Orleans now has three “systems”: NOPS, with a handful of previously pretty good schools still functioning reasonably well; RSD, with approximately twenty schools, mostly in distress, educating about a third of the city’s public school students (and planning to open another six to ten campuses next year using modular buildings supplied by the private sector); and thirty-one charter schools.