From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE WESTERN FRONT
A Silver Lining?
New Orleans had a failing public school system. Its children deserve better.
As devastating as Hurricane Katrina has been, it now presents New Orleans officials with an opportunity. The city's 60,000 public school students have been trapped in a failing system for decades. There is no reason why the public education bureaucracy and other obstacles to real reform should now follow them as they move temporarily to Texas and elsewhere.
In many respects New Orleans was a failing city long before the levees gave way. Even while other major cities got a handle on crime in the 1990s--most notably New York under Rudy Giuliani--New Orleans remained somewhat lawless. It's worth noting that many of those who've been raping and pillaging over the past week might have been safely behind bars if the city had successfully cracked down on crime over the past decade. That's one lesson to be learned from New York's experience on Sept. 11, 2001 and during the 2003 blackout. New Orleans's poverty rate is also an astounding 24%.
Public schools are another area of government failure in New Orleans. Education is the only ticket into the middle class for most kids who grow up impoverished. Yet the city has some of the worst-performing schools in the state, and this year they suffered two embarrassments. New Orleans led the state in students cheating on the state's standardized tests; indeed, more than half of all of those caught in the state were enrolled in New Orleans public schools. And the school system's finances were in such disarray the state nearly took control. Instead financial control was handed off to Alvarez & Marsal, a New York firm, which recently cleaned up St. Louis's school system by shuttering schools, laying off staff and otherwise cutting waste. In New Orleans the waste wouldn't be hard to find. One problem was retired and even deceased teachers still on the payroll.
As in most districts around the nation, the obstacle to real reform in New Orleans has largely come from teachers unions. One measure of union strength has been the city's inability to fire teachers even as schools continue to fail. Booker T. Washington, a high school whose academic as well as athletic success was once legendary, became a shell of its former self. Student enrollment was down 60% from the 1950s and 1960s--when students had to wear ties to school. For a few years in the 1990s varsity football had to be suspended for lack of interest. This year there was a push to make it a vocational high school, a sharp departure from the past, when Booker T. was renowned for preparing students for college. While enrollment has plummeted, the number of teachers and administrative staff has remained relatively constant at 8,500.
None of this is to say there haven't been attempts to reform the schools. There were a handful of charter schools operating in the city. Summerbridge, a voluntary program active around the country that helps kids hone academic school skills not sharpened during the school year, also found plenty of willing and eager students in New Orleans. Meanwhile Tony Amato, who recently stepped down as schools superintendent, spent the past two years pushing through a batch of reforms, including a literacy program. This summer Lee Watson, Mr. Amato's successor, was threatening to upend the system with her own reforms. Katrina put the kibosh on that, but one way we know her reforms wouldn't have fared much better than her predecessor's is that as of Aug. 1 about 200 teachers had yet to be told which school to report to or even which grades they were to teach.
New Orleans's kids now have a better shot at getting a decent education. Many students displaced by the floods are likely to be absorbed into local schools from Texas to Tennessee and beyond, most will likely be a fair bit better than the New Orleans public schools. Other students could also find themselves in makeshift schools, such as outside Houston's Astrodome, or taught by teachers who lack proper certification but are willing to step into the breach.
This is a tough situation, but it's also no time to accept what President Bush calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Rather it's time to focus on the ball too often forgotten in education--student achievement. With New Orleans schools under water and a pressing need to get students back into school immediately, federal, state and city officials now have an opportunity to construct an educational system from the ground up. As schools expand to accommodate the influx in this emergency, union demands should be secondary. So should certification requirements that focus on education degrees instead of an ability to teach. Indeed, if tens of thousands of New Orleans students find themselves in what are essentially charter schools, they will be better off--education wise--than they were before the flood.
This is not an unrealistic outcome. And if it proves successful while the city is being pumped out, it could be used as a model for rebuilding New Orleans's school system once the city dries out. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has already signaled there will be some flexibility in restrictions imposed by No Child Left Behind for students affected by the storm, and with the national spotlight on New Orleans there will be plenty of money available for all the pens, pencils, paper and books and other supplies the city's students need, no matter which state they land in. Now free of the flood waters, the only question is whether New Orleans students will have also successfully escaped a failing education bureaucracy that had long trapped them.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
