In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the devastated city of New Orleans entirely reinvented its system of public schools – by eliminating neighborhood schools and creating a city-wide system of competing, privately managed schools formally open to children regardless of where they live. State authorities spurred this transformation by rating most preexisting schools in the city as “failing” and using the state-run Recovery School District to take control of such schools away from the Orleans Parish School Board. All public school teachers were fired and their contracts nullified. In the weeks after Katrina, school reformers set up charter schools funded with public dollars but managed by private companies or nonprofit organizations. New Orleans became a nearly all-charter city, allowing for what many have called a “grand experiment” in school reform.

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