Here's an article in the Washington Post about "The Big Easy's school revolution":

So sure are New Orleans officials of the work being done to turn around schools that they think they can become a model for urban education reform, proof that students of any color, income level or social background can achieve if schools do their job. Indeed, Kingsland — who came here as an undergraduate at Tulane and entered education reform through a (failed, he admits) stint mentoring impoverished students — argues that the transformation in this city may turn out to be the most significant national development in education since desegregation.

Most of the buzz about the city's reforms focuses on the banishment of organized labor and the proliferation of charter schools, which enroll nearly 80 percent of public school students, up from 1.5 percent pre-Katrina. But what really distinguishes New Orleans is how government has redefined its role in education: stepping back from directly running schools and empowering educators to make the decisions about hours, curriculum and school culture that best drive student learning. Now, state and school-district officials mostly regulate and monitor — setting standards, ensuring equity and closing failing schools. Instead of a traditional school system, there is a system of schools in what officials liken to a fenced-in free market. Families have more choice about where their children can best succeed, they say, and educators have more opportunity to choose a school that best aligns with their approach.

One teacher I spoke with during a recent trip talked about the luxury of being pursued by different charter networks willing to pay for her talents. After 11 years of teaching, she said, it was the first time she felt she was being treated as a professional.

…To those who argue that the overarching effects of poverty prevent children from learning, Principal Mary H.L. Laurie has a terse answer: "Then don't come to work here."

Leslie Jacobs, a businesswoman who has been a part of New Orleans education reform for two decades, concluded while serving on the local school board that she could stop bad things from happening but couldn't start anything good. She was appointed in 1996 to the Louisiana board of education, where she is credited with helping to craft accountability and teacher quality reforms as well as the mechanism that allowed the takeover of New Orleans's failing schools. Her journey taught her that top-down efforts to reform a district don't work; only by starting over school by school — like businesses emerging from bankruptcy — could real improvement occur. Anything short of that, she said, amounts to chipping away at a status quo that is bound to prevail.

It's a sobering determination for places, such as the District, where money and time are being spent to overhaul the traditional school system.

In fact, officials in New Orleans have come to believe that the traditional notions of school reform — switching to mayoral control, bringing in a star superintendent, enacting tougher laws, allocating more money — ultimately will founder and fail. Kingsland, blogging this year on the Education Week Web site, sparked controversy by challenging superintendents of struggling school districts to relinquish their systems instead of trying endless reforms: "Rid yourself of the notion that your current opinions on curriculum, teacher evaluation, technology, or anything else will be the foundation for dramatic gains in student achievement. If history tells us anything, they will not be." Move away, he wrote, from a centralized bureaucracy and improve the quality and number of charter schools.

The horrors of Katrina created a blank sheet that is (thankfully) absent in other cities. But the successes in New Orleans raise a question for officials in places where schools are horribly failing their students: Why should it take a natural disaster to return power to parents and educators?

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