By decimating the school system and scattering the student body, Katrina gave New Orleans an educational clean slate. With Louisiana strapped for funds, and congressional Republicans looking to hand out money for privatized schools, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the Legislature hatched the new charter plan. The legislation gives the state jurisdiction over school districts with poor performance records. (The state took over 102 of New Orleans' 117 public schools.) In turn, the state can farm them out to charters operated by nonprofit groups, foundations or universities. Indeed, the feds have come through in the wake of Katrina, awarding $21 million to Louisiana for charter schools. Today, all but three of the 20 open schools in New Orleans are charters.
In general, charter schools are semiautonomous public schools run by private groups that contract with the city. They have the authority to hire and fire their own faculty -- who needn't meet state certification standards -- and design their own rules and curriculum, reducing the power of teachers unions and school boards.
Charter schools have been around in many cities since the early 1990s, but they've never dominated an entire public school system. Before Katrina, Washington, D.C., led the nation in charter schools, with about a quarter of its public schools run as charters.
All things being equal, there is no evidence that charter schools work better than traditional public education. Just last month, the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College, released a study showing that, when adjusted to take account of the differences in income and geography among various groups of students, kids in charter schools perform worse than those in public schools. Yet advocates still champion them as a way to slice through the educational bureaucracy.
Even Cowan -- who didn't know about the kids who can't get into school -- is worried about the massive transformation in New Orleans. "There has never been an experiment on this scale with charter schools in an urban school district," he says. "We have to do everything we can to support and resource these schools and get this right. It's a big challenge."
Under the new regime, all of the city's public school teachers -- more than 5,000 -- have been let go, and those who want to continue teaching in the city have to reapply for their jobs, often for less money. Rather than be assigned a neighborhood school, the charter system gives parents the power to choose where their children will be educated. The problem is that, without a guaranteed neighborhood school, some parents can't find any schools at all. Compounding the difficulty, New Orleans isn't yet offering school bus service, so parents without cars have a hard time if they can't get their kids into classrooms nearby.
"This just shouldn't be," says Washington, the civil rights lawyer. "If you ask people to return, there need to be schools."
In late January, Washington filed a class action suit against the Orleans Parish School Board, the state of Louisiana and all of New Orleans' charter schools. "Even more frightening," she says, than the 200 parents who have been denied access to New Orleans schools, "is that kids with special needs are being told that there is absolutely no space for them. They're being wait-listed and told they may not get into school until next year."
Washington is a pretty, broad-shouldered black woman who wears a tangle of pearls around her neck and has the "Sex and the City" theme song as her cellphone ring tone. Since Katrina, she's worked almost entirely pro bono, representing evacuees facing eviction from their hotel rooms and advising migrant workers being housed in filthy conditions by contractors. Her father is living in her office for the moment, so she works out of donated space at Hope House, the ramshackle headquarters for several progressive organizations, located on a rundown block of St. Andrews Street.
To Washington, the current problems in school enrollment are inherent to charters, which foster competition for places in preferred schools. She also fears the remaining public schools in the Orleans Parish School System will fall into further neglect in the new hierarchy of charter schools. "You cannot have a city where you decide you're going to have a caste system and allow the schools run by the Orleans Parish School System to be the dumping grounds for students that nobody else will take," she says.
The week before she filed her lawsuit, she says, she was standing across the street from Hope House, being interviewed by an out-of-town reporter, when four kids rode by on their bicycles. It was 1:30 in the afternoon. She says she stopped the interview to grab one of the kids, a little boy, and ask him why he wasn't in school.
"I don't go to school," he told her.
"What do you mean, you don't go to school?"
"I don't go to school," he repeated. "My mama tried to put us in school and nobody would take us, so we don't go to school. We might go back to Dallas. They like us in Dallas."
After that, Washington started asking around to find out whether local activists knew kids were being turned away from schools. She called New Orleans school superintendent Ora Watson and learned that there was a waiting list of people who'd called the Orleans Parish School Board office looking for a place for their kids. Washington got a copy of the list, which was over 200 names long, and started calling the people on it. One family had eight kids, only one of whom was in school. Another, Nicole Manning, was supposed to restart her old job as a cashier at Harrah's casino, but she was worried that she wouldn't be able to because no schools would take her learning-disabled 9-year-old son, Nicholas. Washington sued on behalf of the parents.
Meg Casper, director of communications for the Louisiana Department of Education, refuses to discuss the lawsuit directly. However, she insists that her office spent the weekend calling the names on the waiting list and that only 14 of them had been unable to find school placement. Since then, she said, "We've placed those 14 students."
Yet at the time Casper spoke, Manning, who was on the list, still hadn't found a school for her son. Someone from the Department of Education had called her, but only to say that they were working on her case. "I'm supposed to be getting a call again, so it's just a waiting process," she said. This week she finally heard back from officials. They'd found a place for her son to start school on Feb. 20.
Meanwhile, other parents are still waiting. A week after Washington filed her suit, United Teachers of New Orleans, the city's teachers union, filed a similar one, asking for a court order to reopen schools and provide free transportation for students. At a press conference in front of Joseph Craig Elementary, a shuttered school in the city's Treme neighborhood, Levene joined union officials and unemployed teachers. As they spoke, a woman driving a red truck noticed the TV cameras and pulled up.
"Please open some more Orleans Parish schools!" she shouted. Her name was Angela Ratliff, and when she pulled over, she explained that her two daughters, Raven and Letika -- both in the truck -- had been in middle school at the well-regarded Capdau, which was a charter school even before Katrina. She returned to New Orleans on Dec. 29, but when she tried to re-enroll her daughters, the school was full and they were turned away.
Ratliff said she was on her way to put her daughters on a waiting list for two public schools that were supposed to be opening later in the month. Until she enrolls them, she said, "I can't work. It's not like my family's here to help me baby-sit. Now I'm riding around with two girls because they have nowhere to go to school."
About the writer
Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon. Her book "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" will be published in May by W.W. Norton.
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