Students from George Washington Carver High School’s 2025 graduating class. Last year, the school earned an A for academic growth from the state. (G. W. Carver High School/Facebook)
Twenty years ago, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina inadvertently created the conditions for one of the most remarkable education experiments in American history. Today, that experiment has quietly produced results that should be making national headlines. Instead, it’s met with a curious indifference that reveals something broken about our politics and media.
To better understand that disconnect, I spent months in New Orleans interviewing more than 50 people about their experience over the past two decades. I heard from both critics and champions of the city’s Katrina recovery reforms: parents, students, teachers, principals, administrators, activists, academics, and common citizens. Their stories are important and illuminating. I even created a whole podcast about them, called Where the Schools Went.
But it’s easy to fall into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms. So let’s start with the data instead. Hard numbers are more useful than speculation. And the hard numbers from New Orleans are overwhelming.
There’s no one better at parsing the data than Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Harris has spent years analyzing these outcomes with the kind of methodological rigor that usually prevents education researchers from ever saying anything definitive about anything. His team of advisors includes both reform advocates and skeptics, yet when I spoke with him, Harris offered something virtually unheard of in education research: an unequivocal conclusion. “If you look at any of the typical things that we measure — test scores, high school graduation, college going, college persistence, ACT scores — all of those things are not just better, but quite a bit better than they were before.”
The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60% of New Orleans schools were labeled “failing” by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54% to 78%. 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.
The Battle of Carver High
To understand why this success story became politically radioactive, look no further than George Washington Carver High School. Originally built in the 1950s as one of the city’s first high schools for Black students, Carver embodied the flawed promise of separate-but-equal education. By the 1990s, it had become what historian Walter Stern called an “educational Soweto” — a struggling school in a neglected neighborhood with graduation rates hovering around 50% and repeated failing grades from the state.
Then Katrina destroyed both the school and its surrounding Ninth Ward community. Karl Washington, a Carver alumnus, remembered the aftermath: “That area received eight, nine feet of water. It wiped out everything: the community footprint, businesses, spirit.” But the alumni were determined to rebuild Carver.
The state agreed, but then came the question of who would run it. The alumni community had their vision: a return to the Carver they remembered, with its proud traditions of football, marching band, and community connection.
The state had different ideas. Instead of awarding the charter to community leaders, officials chose Collegiate Academies, an organization founded by Ben Marcovitz, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had achieved remarkable academic results at his Sci Academy charter school campus. Marcovitz’s schools were data-driven, disciplined, and relentlessly focused on college preparation. They were also run primarily by young, white outsiders through programs like Teach for America.
This staffing approach was particularly inflammatory given what had happened to New Orleans teachers after Katrina. When the district ran out of money, all 7,500 employees — including every teacher in the city — were laid off en masse. Most were never rehired. Many of these teachers were Black women who had been pillars of the city’s middle class for decades. They had deep roots in the communities they served. To see them replaced by young, college graduates, many of them white, with minimal teaching experience (and no union contract) felt like salt in an open wound. I explore this painful history in Episode 3 of Where the Schools Went.
The backlash to the state’s Carver plans was immediate and fierce. Chris Meyer, a state official tasked with explaining the decision, recalled arriving to find “a human chain in front of the building” and protesters blocking the entrance. After managing to get inside, “I get two words, maybe three outta my mouth, and the whole meeting just erupts in chaos.” When Meyer left the meeting, he found his car windows smashed, with glass scattered across his child’s car seat.
Jerel Bryant, the Yale-educated principal chosen to lead the new Carver, walked into this firestorm. His team quickly produced strong academic results, posting some of the best algebra scores in the city. But the achievement felt hollow amid growing community resistance.
The breaking point came in December 2013, when 60 students walked out in protest. They were frustrated by what they saw as excessive discipline: having to walk on taped lines in hallways, getting suspended for chewing gum or wearing the wrong shoes. One student told reporters: “You get suspended for coughing. You get suspended for sneezing out loud.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center criticized the school’s suspension rates. Three parents publicly withdrew their children, though the vast majority stuck with the program. Local newspapers published side-by-side graphics showing Carver’s academic gains alongside its suspension statistics, as if to ask: At what cost?
For critics of education reform, this was the perfect story: test scores rising through harsh discipline and cultural suppression. For supporters, it was proof that change inevitably faces resistance, even when it’s working. The battle lines were clear, the rhetoric heated, and the national media seized on the drama. The Atlantic ran not one but two major pieces on Carver’s discipline policies. The Hechinger Report called it “the painful backlash against ‘no-excuses’ school discipline.”
But then something unexpected happened.
