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From the Ground Up

With the future of New Orleans' schools at stake, Teach For America corps members and alumni step up to help remake the system

By Sam Winston and Ting Yu | Photographs by Jean-Christian Bourcart

On August 28, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit, Ronicka Harrison and her family made plans to leave their native city of New Orleans. However, Harrison's 72-year-old grandmother Joyce, affectionately known as Big Momma, refused to budge. So, Harrison, her sister, several of her cousins, and her grandmother hunkered down at their aunt Jocelyn's house in the West Bank area.

"At about 3 a.m.," says Harrison, "Katrina came. She took down the roof, and the windows, and everything else in the house. We just sat there crying." Later that morning, radio reports of looting and flooding convinced the family it was time to leave. Big Momma knew there was no other choice.

One year later, Harrison is back in New Orleans in her first year as a Teach For America corps member, teaching at the S.J. Green Charter School. She has become part of a sweeping education reform movement in New Orleans that is literally rebuilding the school system from the ground up. Harrison is joined by 57 other corps members and a close network of alumni, many of whom have endured extraordinary circumstances to keep education alive in the city over the past year.

It's no easy task, considering that even before the storm, public education in New Orleans was clinging to life support. In the fall of 2005, more than half of the 65,000 students in New Orleans Public Schools were failing math and English proficiency tests. By the end of the 2004-2005 school year, 68 out of 108 schools in NOPS had been branded "academically unacceptable" according to a six-level ranking system, with many at risk of being taken over by the state. Forty percent of Louisiana's academically unacceptable schools were in Orleans Parish, even though it held only 8 percent of all schools in the state. In an ironic way, the tremendous devastation wreaked by Katrina may prove to be New Orleans' best shot at educational reform. Since the storm, a deluge of federal money and a state takeover of the majority of schools have created an institutional vacuum and a unique opportunity to overhaul a broken school system. Today, 22,000 students have returned to New Orleans, and 53 schools have reopened in the district-approximately 60 percent of them charters. The remaining schools are controlled by the state-run Recovery School District and Orleans Parish School Board. As New Orleans struggles to rebuild its infrastructure and capitalize on the potential of this moment, those immersed in the revitalization efforts express no shortage of hope-or anxiety.

"We're not a region that's fixed," says Mary Garton (G.N.O. '91), executive director of Teach For America - Greater New Orleans. "We're an education community that's made pretty aggressive decisions, and we're plowing ahead with our plan. But until we've actually created equal education opportunities for every child, I hope people don't turn away from rebuilding efforts."

For Harrison, who grew up attending New Orleans public schools, the mission to reform the system is personal. Labeled throughout elementary school as a "gifted" student, Harrison was shocked when she was placed in remedial sixth grade classes after her family relocated to North Carolina. Apparently New Orleans standards came in far below those of other states. "It really felt terrible," she remembers. "Every day I begged my mom to come home."

Harrison channeled those feelings of embarrassment into a zeal for social justice. Last spring, she graduated from Xavier University in New Orleans and joined the 58-member Teach For America corps in her hometown. Now teaching fifth grade social studies and language arts, Harrison can't imagine being anywhere else. "This is my city," she says. "I love New Orleans with a passion. This is where my family is. There's a need here. There's not a need anywhere across the country like there is here."

Harrison's words could not ring truer after the storm decimated roughly 85 percent of the city's school buildings and turned teachers, students, and families into evacuees. Immediately after Katrina, Teach For America's Greater New Orleans team relocated temporarily to an office in Baton Rouge and worked around the clock to locate all 136 displaced corps members. Within two months, most corps members had been placed at rural southeastern Louisiana schools overwhelmed with evacuated students from the city, or they were working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the state's request. Corps members found themselves sleeping on the couches of alumni or, in some instances, in extra classrooms, as they started their new assignments. One large cohort volunteered to teach at NOW College Prep, a KIPP Transformation School in Houston that was created to serve evacuated New Orleans students (see "No Time to Lose").

Fourth grade teacher Stephanie Kissel (’05) recalls water pouring in through her school’s damaged roof, destroying all of her desks, supplies, and files. Despite this, her Jefferson Parish elementary school reopened in October, sharing facilities with a school nearby. At first, things were manageable, she says, but as families returned to the parish, “class sizes grew as large as 60 students in some of the grades.”

Yet through it all, Kissel recognized that living conditions for her students were even worse. “I was teaching students who were living in trailers or sharing crowded homes with other family members. I was teaching students whose parents were still living in Kentucky or Texas or Virginia because their jobs didn’t exist in Louisiana anymore. I was teaching students whose only piece of clothing was the one school uniform that the school gave to the students after the storm—if I gave up on them, who would be there for them?” she says. “So I didn’t give up on them.”

Margo London (’05) was charged with helping people apply for FEMA assistance but found herself redirecting the bulk of her efforts toward more immediate needs. “People would sleep in their cars to get in line in the mornings. People slept in our port-a-potties outside,” says London, who kept to a grueling schedule of seeing an average of 400 people a day, seven days a week. “Even though our said purpose was to go through applications and to help [people] with their long-term needs, it became much more about helping with their short-term needs and trying to find their relatives.”

Today, London is back in the classroom, teaching at the New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School. “There’s much more purpose in teaching now,” she says. “In this crazy place that is New Orleans right now, these kids are going to have to be the ones that make sure this thing keeps going.”

To make sure that it does, more than 100 Teach For America alumni have been at the forefront of change in New Orleans education, teaching, assuming leadership roles at new schools, advising government leaders on educational policy, and creating startup organizations. They are also leading efforts at successful nonprofits such as the Breakthrough Collaborative, The New Teacher Project, and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. The national nonprofit New Leaders for New Schools has conditionally agreed to partner with New Orleans to recruit, select, train, and license 40 new principals over the next four years—enough to lead the majority of the city’s schools. Currently, 44 Teach For America alumni serve as New Leaders nationwide.

“Anybody with a lot of talent and background in education can be part of something that is larger than what they could conceivably be a part of anywhere else in the country,” says Walter

Stern (Delta ’01), who works as The New Teacher Project’s site manager for teachNOLA, a program that recruits outstanding certified teachers for New Orleans’ public schools.

This past spring, Sarah Usdin (S. Louisiana ’92), former Teach For America executive director in Greater New Orleans, started New Schools for New Orleans, a nonprofit organization that assists charter schools with teacher recruitment, business operations support, and board governance training. The Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund recently awarded a $1 million grant to New Schools, which has already worked with more than half of the charters in the district. In New Orleans education right now, Usdin says, “whatever you want to do, there is a vehicle of opportunity for trying.”

But the stakes are high in this new charter-heavy landscape.

“Charters have so much more autonomy, but with that comes huge risk,” Usdin notes. “We have to provide the community with examples of phenomenal schools so that they have models to aspire to. In the past, we have had examples of excellence but not consistency.”

Another critical concern is the confusion surrounding the governing structures of the education system. Of the city’s 53 schools, 31 are charters, 5 are run by the Orleans Parish School Board, and 17 by the Recovery School District. Parents aren’t always clear on their options or where to register their kids.

“Right now, it’s totally open access across the city,” Usdin explains. “So how do we ensure that all schools are great, so that it’s not the case that ‘first come’ means best served and ‘last come’ means worst served? My hope is that we can get a coordinated effort to make it easier for parents and their kids to make informed decisions.”

Usdin’s biggest fear is a return to the status quo. “I don’t want us to re-create what we had before. The human tendency when you have a vacuum like this is to go back to what you’re familiar and comfortable with,” she says. “But that needs to change. We can’t tolerate failing schools. We have to do everything we can to not let those schools fail.”

People, she believes, will make the pivotal difference. “The greatest need down here right now is human capital,” she says. “We’re trying to do so much in such a short time frame because there’s so much potential and such an opportunity to get it right. And yet those of us who are here, we’re tired. We need reinforcements. We all know there’s no silver bullet. This is just really hard work, and it will require tenacity and intelligence. The real question is, how do we get enough hard workers in here doing it?”

One of the biggest challenges, says Dominique Duval-Diop (S. Louisiana ’93), the policy and reporting manager for the state’s Disaster Recovery Unit, is “attracting high-quality educators and administrators when we lack community resources such as housing, grocery stores, and recreation. There needs to be a holistic solution to the recruitment problem that aggressively seeks and provides housing and other resources.”

Helping to rebuild that infrastructure is where Ramsey Green comes in. Green (S. Louisiana ’01) is the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s education policy director, helping to oversee the distribution of more than $11 billion in federal funding. He is working with the LRA to provide teacher housing and to determine how to spend the $400 million allotted to construct environmentally safe new school buildings.

“We’re charged with making sure they rebuild safer and smarter schools. But that’s expensive, and a lot of people don’t want to take those cost-prohibitive measures,” Green says. “It takes some pain, and we recognize that.”

Still, Green is amazed at the resilience of the city’s residents and hopes this chance to rebuild will encourage openness to new ideas. “Teachers, principals, students, parents, government officials—they all need to recognize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime, hopefully, experience that must be viewed as an opportunity,” he says. “They just can’t say no to big things. Now is the time that big, visionary, hard goals can be accomplished.”

Despite the tough work, Green, who served his corps years teaching high school history in Franklin, a small Cajun town in the southern part of the state, is glad to be back. “An older teacher at Franklin told me that once you dip your toes in the bayou, you’ll always come back,” he says. “And here I am.”

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