Dr Adrienne D Dixson was furious as she sat in the back of a Louisiana courtroom in 2008. It was more than two years after thousands of New Orleans public school teachers had been terminated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Some of those teachers had filed a lawsuit against the Orleans parish school board for wrongful termination and to be compensated for lost wages.
The scene in the room was emotional, Dixson recalled, as many teachers broke down into tears throughout the hearing. “It was clear the love and the care and the dedication that the teachers had,” Dixson said. An associate professor in education at Ohio State University at the time, Dixson was conducting research on Black educators and the effects of Hurricane Katrina. “They were just so profoundly hurt that they had been fired,” she said. “No one knew that the hurricane would also be a category 5 professional disruption.”
After Katrina, the Orleans parish school board terminated more than 4,000 teachers, most of whom were Black women with at least 15 years of experience, as the state-run Recovery School District assumed responsibility for most of New Orleans’s schools. Created in 2003 by the Louisiana legislature, the Recovery School District took over the operations of failing schools. The state and city education agencies eventually transferred all of the schools to charter management organizations that signed contracts with the state or the school district and received public funding. Some of the terminated teachers returned to the industry in the following years, but the hurricane ushered in a blow to the Black educator workforce, which has yet to fully recover.
In the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the northern Gulf coast in August 2005, New Orleans’s education system has gone through drastic changes as the schools transformed into a public charter school system. Black children, who make up the majority of the student population at more than 90% of the schools, have felt the negative impacts of the decrease in Black teachers most severely, say some researchers, such as a reduction in Black role models and a lost sense of community. Before Hurricane Katrina, 71% of public educators were Black. But by 2014, the number of Black teachers had dipped to 49%. In recent years, the Black teacher population has increased to 56%. The number of Black teachers has never returned to its pre-Katrina level in the decades following the storm.
Research shows that Black students who have at least one teacher of the same racial identity by third grade are 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to enroll in higher education than their Black peers without one. And Black students perform better in math and reading when taught by Black teachers. A recent study from Tulane University’s initiative Education Research Alliance for New Orleans showed that Black students reported less positive educational environments than white students a few years in a row.
But the study author and founding director of the university’s initiative, Douglas Harris, said that it’s difficult to measure the impact that the dip in Black teachers has had on Black students’ perceptions of their education environment since no such surveys were conducted prior to the storm. “The race of the teachers can’t be the only thing,” Harris said, adding that Black teachers have increased since the early to mid 2000s. “So it’s probably something more about other elements of the background of the teachers or about the accountability system.”
In recent years, Black-led charter systems and organizations have served as models for schools wanting to incorporate more Black empowerment into the education system. Started in 2017, the Black-governed non-profit Black Education for New Orleans (Be Nola) offers various professional development programs for teachers and a digital syllabus that uses the history of Black education as a guidepost to reimagine the current school system. The syllabus references the New Orleans writing program Students at the Center, where students were encouraged to read texts from the author bell hooks and to examine systemic injustices in the city. It also mentions laws that threaten the critical examination of systemic injustices, including a state act that removed teacher instruction on dating violence and training on cultural competence.
And at the Black-led charter school system InspireNola founded through community support in 2013, 83% of the teachers are Black or brown, and the majority-Black student population sees a 100% graduation rate. But efforts to increase Black educators in the city have hit a roadblock with the Trump administration’s recent cancellation of $23m in federal funding for teacher-training programs designed to increase diversity throughout the state.
Non-profit organizations and researchers say that the persisting 15% drop in Black educators since Hurricane Katrina has affected Black teachers’ and students’ sense of safety in the school environment. Black teachers are often unable to infuse Black empowerment into their lesson plans. New Orleans charter schools rely on standardized tests to evaluate school performance, which leaves less freedom for creative lesson plans. Teachers are at-will employees and can be fired at any time, “so people don’t feel as comfortable to be themselves when their job is on the line”, said Stevona Elem-Rogers, Be Nola’s chief of community programs and partnerships.
“When a Black student isn’t able to not just see a reflection of themselves, but see someone who is truly brilliant and helping them problem-solve through life, then they waywardly go through life,” Elem-Rogers said. “And when we as human beings waywardly go through life, we may see more crimes. We may see more disassociation from our lifestyle. We may see more riffs in our family.”
On the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s schools illustrate the complexities of rebuilding an education system following a disaster. It shows the power of community-led efforts to transform schools into safe environments for Black students where they feel empowered and excel in their studies.
When Adrinda Kelly, Be Nola’s executive director, tells educators and non-profit leaders in other cities with large Black populations that 96% of teachers in the organization’s fellowship program stay in the industry following the program, they are astonished. “People from Chicago, people from DC, people from Atlanta say: ‘We need this in our space,’” Kelly said. “And so Katrina and Black people in New Orleans saying that we deserve better for our Black children has charged the path to create spaces where we’re able to bridge generations of brilliant Black minds.”
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‘An intentional plan to eradicate a Black teaching force’
Even before the storm, the state of Louisiana took steps to exert more control over New Orleans’s school system. While positive facets of the pre-Katrina schools included the promotion of Black empowerment, another side of the education system ushered in its downfall. A long history of racial segregation, financial disinvestment in the predominantly Black schools, and school district instability led to underperforming schools. Sixty percent of the student population attended schools that the Louisiana department of education rated as failing prior to Hurricane Katrina. Only 6% of the student population performed at a mastery level on state exams.
As a result, the state legislature created the state-run Recovery School District two years prior to the storm to oversee low-performing schools. Intervention from the district included transferring schools to charter operators, partnering with universities or education management organizations to help run them, or shutting down the schools altogether. According to state test scores, the intervention worked: the student population that scored at a mastery level in state exams increased to 30% a decade after the storm.
But for much of the New Orleans Black population, the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina provided ample opportunity for education reformers, some of whom were from out of state, to overhaul the school system. “Like colonial regimes of prior,” wrote scholar Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr in an American Educational Research Journal paper, “the habitability of New Orleans was made manifest in the destinies of new settlers, the erasure of locals, and understanding this Black space, as blank space for redevelopment.”
After longtime educators were laid off following the storm, just a third of pre-Katrina teachers returned to work in the school system. Many of the educators who filled their spots came from the non-profit Teach for America, which places recent college graduates into under-resourced schools; sixty per cent were white and more than half received educations outside New Orleans. The termination of Black teachers also decimated the United Teachers of New Orleans, an educators union that consisted mostly of Black women who were veteran educators. It was the first teachers’ union in the deep south to win a collective bargaining agreement.
“To summarily fire and get rid of Black teachers allowed a complete takeover. And I would argue a destruction, but some would probably say a remaking, of public education in New Orleans,” said Dixson, who is now Penn State University’s education policy studies department head. “The teachers had to be moved out in order for these things to happen, because the teachers’ union was very strong.”
Prior to Katrina, the teachers were rooted in the community, said Dixson. Many of them lived in the same neighborhoods as the students, knew several generations of the children’s families or had attended the same schools as youth. The firing of teachers and education reform is “hard not to see as a concerted effort and an intentional plan to eradicate a Black teaching force”, she said. “It was a powerful political block, not only in New Orleans, but in the state.”
Test scores are only one piece of a well-rounded education, she said. For Dixson, what is missing are role models who look like the students and can help instill strong cultural values in them.
Be Nola was born out of a community-led response to the anger around the firing of teachers and that “education reform had been done to them and not with them”, said Elem-Rogers. The organization started with a coalition of Black New Orleanians who wanted to see more Black influence in the education system. Now the non-profit hosts a professional learning community for Black-led schools to learn from one another, and to receive coaching from Black institutions. From 2 to 5 October, the group will host its fifth annual Black Is Brilliant summit, where Black teachers from throughout the nation will discuss policy and how to help Black children thrive in the classroom. Last year, 1,000 people registered for the event.
Be Nola’s paid fellowship program, the Black Is Brilliant Institute, has also led to higher retention of Black teachers – 96% of the 60 teachers who have enrolled in the program since its inception in 2023 have remained in the industry. Every weekend for six months, Black teachers commune with each other with the aim of taking what they’ve learned about creating safe and joyful educational spaces back to their classrooms. They engage in wellness activities such as deep breathing and yoga, and they learn about the history of Black education in the city through lectures by historians. They also visit the Amistad Research Center, the oldest African American independent archive in the country, and St Mary’s Academy, one of the nation’s oldest Black Catholic schools. The organization is interested in the “broader questions that get to the heart of the education ideologies undergirding our space”, said Kelly, including: “What do we mean by the role of legacy in how we formulate school quality? What does success mean?”
For Kelly, the Black leaders behind the charter school system InspireNola, which operates seven public charter schools in the city, understand the role of community and legacy. It’s helped the charter management organization, which serves more than 5,400 students from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade, become one of the highest-performing charter networks in the city.
Jamar McKneely, InspireNola’s CEO and co-founder, said that Black governing has set a powerful example of what success looks like for the predominantly Black student body: McKneely is a Black man, the board is predominantly Black and brown, and they mostly have educators of color. He began the operation more than a decade ago after seeing a need for more Black leadership in a post-Katrina charter school landscape that was predominantly white-led. The organization helps inspire students by hosting Black speakers including Bernice King, a lawyer and Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter, and Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother. They also host back-to-school drives and giveaways to meet the needs of the students and the local community. Leaders of other charter school networks in the city sometimes visit InspireNola schools to observe their governing and practices.
“We see other charter networks following our lead to get more inclusive and more responsive to the community needs, especially around Black and brown students,” said McKneely. “We serve as a model for what can happen in a community where you embrace the community, you’re part of the community.”