








An excerpt from Reinventing America's Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System discusses the reinvention of the New Orleans public education system after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After Katrina, Louisiana handed all but seventeen of the city's public schools to the state's Recovery School District (RSD), created two years earlier to turn around failing schools. Over the next nine years, the RSD gradually turned them all into charter schools--a new form of public school that has emerged over the past quarter century. Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In 2019, New Orleans' last traditional schools converted to charter status, and 100 percent of its public school students now attend charters.
