Leadership for change in the educational wild westof post-Katrina New Orleans

Brian R. Beabout

Published online: 18 May 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This study examines the perceptions of public school principals in New

Orleans, Louisiana during the period of extensive decentralization in the aftermath

of Hurricane Katrina. Using the frameworks of systems theory and chaos/com-

plexity theories, iterative interviews with 10 school principals form the core data

which examines leaders’ experiences in an increasingly market-oriented urban

school system. The following themes emerged during constant comparative anal-

ysis: (1) the omnipresence of storm recovery in principals’ lives, (2) the lingering

presence of the pre-Katrina school system, and (3) the emerging inequalities of the

post-Katrina system. The analysis also identifies several broader system change

concepts including: the strange attractor of inequality, differential perturbance,

requisite stability, and a need for system leadership to counteract inequality.

Keywords Chaos theory � Complexity theory � Qualitative methods �School choice � System leadership � Urban schools

Introduction

Tyack and Cuban (1995) plainly, but sufficiently, define school reform as ‘‘planned

efforts to change schools in order to correct perceived social and educational

problems’’ (p. 4). For more than half a century, much of the industrialized world has

tried ceaselessly to reform their public schools with uneven success (Olson 2003;

Ravitch 2000). Reforms have been both large and small in scope, centrally planned

or organically grown, and have addressed both the structural aspects of schools as

well as the more robust set of cultural attributes that have been remarkably constant

B. R. Beabout (&)

348-H Bicentennial Education Center, The University of New Orleans, 2000 Lakeshore Dr.,

New Orleans, LA 70148, USA

e-mail: bbeabout@uno.edu

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DOI 10.1007/s10833-010-9136-8

over time (Cuban 1993; Sarason 1982). It has been accepted as almost axiomatic

that educational policy alone cannot drive change (Berman and McLaughlin 1975;

McLaughlin 1990) and some have called for less bureaucratic and increasingly

entrepreneurial approaches (Chubb and Moe 1988; Schneider et al. 2000) which

have included school choice, charter schools, and educational vouchers (Levin

1999). While these arrangements have gained popularity nationally since the 1990s

(Barr et al. 2006), critics have discussed at length the inherent inequality of

unrestrained systems of choice (Hargreaves and Fink 2006; Lubienski 2003;

Lubienski et al. 2009). Further examination of this tension between the theory and

practice of school choice seems warranted. As Lubienski et al. (2009) note:

Incentivist logic presents a compelling critique of ‘‘government monopoly’’

school systems, and offers an intriguing prescription for competition to force

schools to become more effective in meeting the needs of underserved

communities. But the research on the underlying assumptions of competitive

incentives raises significant issues regarding how these incentives actually

play out in the real world of schooling. (p. 17)

This study acknowledges the gap between the persuasive theoretical case for

market-based reform and the messy realities of urban schooling. Presented below is

an analysis of the lived experience of school leaders working in a unique instance of

rapidly increasing market forces. The changes in the New Orleans Public Schools

after Hurricane Katrina included a state take-over of over 90% of public schools, the

creation of the nation’s first majority charter urban school district, and a little

noticed state-funded voucher program. This rapid transformation from traditional

school board control to a loosely connected un-system of schools brings into sharp

focus the national debate about marketization as a strategy for educational change.

This study attempts to answer the question: How do New Orleans principalsperceive the emerging market-driven school system brought on by HurricaneKatrina? I focus on the lived experiences of 10 school leaders in New Orleans

during the 2006–2007 school year, which was the first full academic year after the

storm. School principals (rather than teachers or students) were selected as

participants due to their optimal viewpoint at the boundary between the internal

processes of their schools and the external educational environment (Gallaher 1979;

Wolcott 1973). Their voices in this study, both hopes and concerns, might be the

canaries in our international coal mine; for what they have experienced, while

contextually bounded, is simply a distillation of approaches to educational change

that continue to gain support in the rest of the industrialized world.

The context of the study

After Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, the New Orleans Public Schools

temporarily lost 100% of its students while 50% of its buildings were moderately to

severely damaged (Anderson 2005). While the destruction was immense, many saw

a unique opportunity to rebuild the school system. In a radio interview shortly after

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the storm, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) member Leslie

Jacobs said:

The diaspora of New Orleans represents the opportunity to rebuild our public

school system. It was academically bankrupt, it was financially bankrupt, and

it was operationally bankrupt… the central office ability to support schools

was not there. So pre-Katrina, one could argue that Orleans public schools

could vie for being one of the worst districts in the nation. (Inskeep 2005)

The traditional power structure that controlled the New Orleans Public Schools

was rapidly dismantled as the state took control of most public schools in the city in

November 2005 and converted many of them to charters. Today, over 4 years later,

this series of structural changes has left the district as the nation’s most charter-

intensive urban district. When New Orleans students started school in fall 2009,

they had 54 charter schools to choose from, along with 33 non-charter schools

operated by the state and another 5 run by the locally elected school board (‘‘The

New Orleans Parents’ Guide to Public Schools,’’ 2009). Issues have been raised

about the ability of this decentralized choice-based system to deal with a range of

issues, including special education (Carr 2008; Ritea 2007a), equitable hiring of

teachers (Ritea 2007b), and student transportation (Ritea 2006). Within this

historically significant context of structural change and decentralization in an urban

district, the theoretical tensions between choice and equity become real and

tangible, if only for a brief moment while the system is still in flux. Educators and

policymakers are creating this new system as they go, and they are building it on a

foundation fraught with ideological potholes. Both supporters and critics of choice-

based reform have something to learn from these 10 educators as they work in New

Orleans schools.

Theoretical framework

Given the decline of the bureaucratic view of organizational change (Weber 1947),

scholars have sought alternative paradigms to explain how organizations operate

and change (Heckscher and Donnellon 1994). Systems theory and its descendents,

open systems theory, chaos theory, and complexity theory, are useful guides to

thinking about modern organizations. There is a fair amount of scholarship which

applies chaos and complexity theories (Carr-Chellman 2000; Davies 2004; Fullan

2001; Maxcy 1995; McQuillan 2008; Reigeluth 2004) and systems theory (Banathy

1996; Carr-Chellman 1998; Joseph and Reigeluth 2005; Peck and Carr 1997) to the

study of school reform. While much of what we associate with these theories

initially surfaced in the hard sciences (Briggs and Peat 1999; Prigogine and Stengers

1984), it has been increasingly applied to the social sciences (Kiel and Elliot 1996),

and this application to the social sciences will serve as the framework here. As a

whole, these theories view schools holistically, as entities which have boundaries,

internal functions, and some set of common purposes (Hutchins 1996). This stands

in contrast to theories of organization in which systems can be understood by

looking at constituent pieces, or theories which utilize fragmentation or

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reductionism (Morrison 2002). This lens is appropriate here because any semblance

of a top–down, hierarchical system was dismantled shortly after the storm, and

schools were faced with significant autonomy in the newly created educational

market of New Orleans. Complexity theory is useful for talking and thinking about

systems with little structural stability and in which change occurs through

decentralized networks (McQuillan 2008) rather than down the chain of command.

By all accounts, public schooling in New Orleans, even as we approach the fifth

anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, is a system very much in flux. Table 1 includes

some of the important theoretical concepts that inform this study.

These concepts served as important analytical guides as the transcripts, field

notes, and public documents were analyzed as part of this study. They proved

immensely useful in directing my attention as a researcher from the intimate,

Table 1 Concepts from systems theory and chaos/complexity theory useful to the study of educational

change

Nested systems Any system contains subsystems that contribute to the overall purpose of the system.

In the case of the reorganized New Orleans Public School system, subsystems

include groups of charter schools, the state-run RSD schools, school-board run

schools, and transportation systems. Each system is also part of a larger system

called the suprasystem. In this example, the citizenry of New Orleans, the state

accountability system, and the school financing system are examples of these larger

systems.

Systemic

feedback

Negative feedback (also called regulatory feedback) works like a thermostat. It senses

current conditions and suggests changes in order to keep the system on its present

course. Positive feedback (or amplifying feedback) is feedback which says that the

course which the system is on is not a good one and that changes in the system need

to be made to prevent organizational decline or death.

Dissipative

structures

These structures involve self-organizing phenomena in which the system, sensing

changes in its environment, reorganizes itself in a form better suited to the

environment. In this sense, fundamental change in a system occurs not when the

system is in a comfortable state of equilibrium, but when the system is pushed to the

edge of chaos. Given that the state of New Orleans schools exacerbated by Katrina

is far from equilibrium, this concept suggests that a fundamental restructuring might

occur now.

Morphic fields Wheatley (1999) has applied field theory to organizations and describes culture,

vision, and shared values as fields that shape the behaviors of members of

organizations. Fields can limit change as well as encourage it. For example, schools

that have a culture of not serving students with disabilities (as alleged in Ritea

2007a) will have a difficult time if leadership or external forces demand that the

school begin accepting such students. This demand would be incongruent with the

existing social field.

Strange attractors Strange attractors are pictures of a complex system whose behavior, while not exactly

predictable, is bounded by forces acting on the system. For example, a poor-

performing urban school system like New Orleans that is plagued by low teacher

quality and poor academics and seemingly unable to improve itself may appear to be

a chaotic system, but when viewed as a system designed to create compliant workers

and consumers, it is functioning quite predictably based on this alternative

perspective (Kozol 1975). This might be called the strange attractor of ghetto

schooling (Anyon 1997). This study examines principals’ experiences for the

presence of these strange attractors in the New Orleans Public Schools.

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context-specific words of the participants to the broader political, social, and system

level forces that are a part of the environment of any school system.

Review of literature

Scholars, especially anthropologists, have written at length about the lived

experiences of principals working in schools (Johnson 1998; Spindler 1979;

Wolcott 1973). None of these studies were completed in a market-based

environment like the one currently present in New Orleans, but they serve as an

important backdrop for this study. Particularly useful is the idea that school

principals are mediators between classrooms and the external environment

consisting of community expectations, reform pressures, and economic realities.

In the conclusion of his classic ethnographic study of an elementary school

principal, Wolcott (1973) suggests that principals are in ‘‘a position peculiarly

suited as a link between the educational bureaucracy and the individual human lives

of a large number of children and adults’’ (p. 320). In an essay written several years

later, Gallaher (1979) echoes Wolcott’s words:

If I had to summarize the school administrator’s role in one phrase, it would be

he is the man in the middle. He stands between the client group, technically

represented by the school board, and professional and other functionaries who

compromise the educational system. (p. 301)

One gets a sense that principals are important connectors between the system of

education and those communities, families, and students that both support and

utilize this system. Principals reside on the borders of the schools system and its

environment, and this is increasingly so in present day New Orleans. With the small

central office staffs common to both charter schools and state-run schools, there is

no longer a buffer layer of bureaucracy between principals and the public. The

participants in this study had job titles that included CEO, school leader, and

founding leader, with only a few principals. It is apparent that the market-based,

school choice environment has carried some of the verbage of the business world

with it.

In a review of literature examining the interconnections between educational

marketization and the well-being of principals (Oplatka et al. 2002), the authors

note the appearance of both positive and negative impacts. Positively, they cite

studies in which principals ‘‘feel a rebirth, a breaking of the routine, enthusiasm and

replenishing internal energy, and searching for new opportunities…’’ (p. 429). On

the negative side, they found perhaps more predictable evidence of marketization

leading to stress, burnout, and role ambiguity. They also call for further qualitative

examination of principals in market-intensive schooling environments. Oplatka

(2003) also identifies the coexistence of stress and rebirth that were present in the

life stories told by mid-career women principals. Change in post-Katrina New

Orleans has not yet run its course, and as such, the presence of significantly more

stress than rebirth in my data should be taken as a function of timing, and not

necessarily a conflict with Oplatka’s findings.

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Further insights emerge from studying urban principals working in strong

accountability systems. While not market-driven per se, the logic of test-based

accountability is inextricably related to that of school choice and educational

markets (Cuban and Usdan 2002). Urban principals in such systems have reported

that they feel like they are managing rapidly shifting environments and that just

keeping up is hard enough, let alone engaging in planned change efforts (Riley

2004). Evans (1996) notes the increased tension and decrease in satisfaction among

principals as accountability pressures have risen. He comments that ‘‘their

professional lives have grown more complicated and less satisfying. The aspects

of the job they most enjoy, such as working directly with teachers and students…have been steadily diminished…’’(p. 156).

In a recent study of urban school principals particularly relevant here (Orr et al.

2005), participants report being treated as incompetent because their schools had

low test scores and they resented the overreliance on superficial data (tests scores,

attendance) to evaluate leadership abilities. This concern with external opinions of a

school, often derived from test score data, has been exacerbated in present-day New

Orleans where not only are schools competing for resources and students in a

universal choice system, but where the vast majority of schools (all charters and

state-run schools) face a to-be-determined state review process in their 5th year

which decides the fate of their school. Undoubtedly, school leaders will face

significant pressure to guide performance to those indicators being assessed by the

state, rather than school-defined goals (Oplatka 2003).

Scholars have identified that principals feel their work is being deskilled as state

agencies become more prescriptive in the management of schools (Fink 2003;

Johnson 1998). A study of literacy reform in San Diego notes that school principals

felt that they we being rapidly forced into instructional leadership roles that they

neither wanted nor had the skills to perform (Stein et al. 2004). It should be clear

that principals’ perceptions of recent state-sponsored reforms are overwhelmingly

negative. Because of the newfound independence of many of the schools in New

Orleans, this study provides an interesting contrast to this extant literature. While

one of the philosophical anchors of market-based reform is that schools are freed to

create innovative and diverse educational approaches, there is reason to believe that

the pressures of state testing will contribute to the type of institutional isomorphism

described by Lubienski et al. (2009). Such a comprehensive analysis of New

Orleans schools is beyond the scope of this study, however.

The literature discussed above identifies a number of issues that have previously

been identified through qualitative inquiry with principals working in intensely

market or accountability driven urban school systems. These include role stress,

dissatisfaction with ineffective performance measures, opportunities for self-

renewal, the excitement of facing a challenge, and a lack of professional freedom.

It is sufficient to report that all of these issues were reported by more than one

participant in this study. The generally negative views of marketization reported by

principals in the literature were balanced somewhat here by the feeling that

principals were participating in a once-in-a-lifetime reform movement in New

Orleans. The findings reported below relate to the experiences of 10 principals

leading schools in this increasingly market oriented school system.

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Methods

As the review of the literature suggests, it is often the unintended effects of

externally derived change models (Fink 2003; McLaughlin and Mitra 2001) that

have hindered the process of successful change on a broad scale. The rationale for

the qualitative methods utilized here is based on an assumption that we can learn

much more about the process of educational change by tracing actual implemen-

tation rather than measuring experimentally or theoretically generated effects. This

inductive mode gives access to how principals actually experience the process of

educational change, apart from how theories and models predict reform to unfold

(van Manen 1997). Specifically, this study examines choice and marketization

through the perspectives of 10 men and women actually leading schools in a

market-driven educational system.

Three semi-structured interviews (Seidman 1998) were conducted with 10 school

leaders working in New Orleans public schools. Because a related study has

revealed something of a heirarchy of public schools in the new system (Beabout

et al. 2008) an effort was made to include principals from a range of school types.

This study includes 3 principals from the state-run Recovery School District (RSD),

1 principal from a school chartered by the RSD, 4 leaders from 3 charter schools

chartered by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), and 2 leaders from one

school chartered by the state school board (BESE). Because 2 participating schools

had co-principals that both agreed to participate in the study, there were a total of 8

unique schools involved. Of these 8 schools, 2 were high schools, 1 was a middle

school (grades 5–8), and 5 schools had a K-8th grade configuration.

Interview data was supplemented with local and national press documents as well

as documents released by state and local education officials. Additional data was

collected through half-day observations at six of the eight schools in the study. This

data was coded using codes developed from analysis of interview transcripts, and as

such, served a supporting role.

Results

In the analysis of the collected data, three major themes emerged: (1) the

omnipresence of storm recovery in principals’ lives, (2) the lingering presence of

the pre-Katrina school system, and (3) the emerging inequalities of the post-Katrina

system. A detailed reporting of these findings follows.

Storm recovery weighs heavily

While both educators and the public at large were talking about providing ‘‘world

class education’’ in the reconstituted New Orleans schools (Hickock and Andres

2005), many participants experienced a constant tension between the desire to create

excellent schools and the extreme physical and emotional tolls that Katrina had

taken on the city and its residents. Teachers were rebuilding their homes, students

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were dealing with the loss of family members, and school buildings were not

refurbished. The high public and personal expectations for reform brought these

challenges into stark contrast for many principals. At its essence, the rise of a

market-based school system in New Orleans should not be viewed as a replicable

case study of this already popular urban reform model. Rather, post-Katrina

educational change should be understood as the combination of disaster recovery

and educational marketization. The particularities of the post-disaster context

formed the basis for participants’ discussions about choice and competition. These

two forces were tightly linked for every principal represented here.

The New Orleans public school system faced great turbulence as it began to

reopen. These school leaders faced the paradox identified by Mulford (2005) that

schools need a certain amount of internal stability in order to take on meaningful

change. Participants cited numerous recovery activities that took energy and

attention away from classroom instruction. One area of concern was the school

buildings themselves. What had been superficial signs of neglect pre-Katrina

(mismatched paint, leaky windows, insufficient bathrooms, etc.) became mainte-

nance disasters after the hurricane as looters and ensuing months of vacancy took

their toll. One RSD principal describes the state of his school in the weeks before

school opened in fall 2006:

the kitchen was not fully restored… stalls were not up in restrooms, there was

no running water, the kitchen was not in service. No public address system…no phone system, no fire alarm system…

In the previous case, a combination of deferred maintenance and floodwaters did

most of the damage. In another RSD school, vandals entered a school building in the

aftermath of the storm and damaged a building that had survived the storm

relatively unscathed:

They tore out every piece of copper in that building. All the wires…everything. Copper around the roof and the trim around the roof… copper

flashing and all that stuff, took it all. Well when they did that, the next

rainstorm that came in, it all went inside the building. So that building had a

lot of problems after that.

And while the school buildings were the most visible damage, there were other

less visible consequences. The psychological trauma inflicted by Katrina on many

students exceeded public schools’ abilities to attend to student social and emotional

needs (Weems et al. 2009). An RSD high school principal talks about the harsh

conditions his high school students faced upon returning to the city:

We had 30 to 40% of our population without any adult supervision that was

back in the city… Unfortunately, you had a lot of young girls compromising

theirselves [sic] just for survival… extreme tardiness, high absenteeism, and at

the end of the day, ya know, poor performance on the state mandated tests…No consistency in home life, won’t be no consistency in school life either.

This problem of high school students returning to the city alone while parents

sought temporary employment elsewhere grabbed some media attention (Dunn

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2006), but was perceived as beyond the control of school principals to address. At

the elementary level, students were living with adults, but there were still no

guarantees that parents and guardians were equipped to help students make sense of

the trauma they had endured:

One of the 5th grade teachers…was having a problem with a child who was…never on task. So she called his mom and… the mom said, ‘I know, I’m

having some problems with him too, I’m wondering if it has something to do

with the fact that he saw his little brother drown in the storm.’ Duuuh, of

course it does! There’s no way… I would [like to] have a team of highly

qualified, highly trained therapists working with students in groups and

individually for an extended period of time. I think until we deal with those

issues, we can forget about textbooks. We have to help these kids know what’s

happening in their lives. (RSD Principal)

Despite this principal’s concerns, a lack of qualified counselors and other

resources left much of the psychological trauma he saw untreated.

It should be clear here that post-Katrina New Orleans was not a district where a

pure form of school choice was implemented that can serve as a test case whose

lessons can be replicated elsewhere. The deep impact of storm recovery on the

professional and personal lives of New Orleans principals diverted time and

resources away from improving the classroom experiences of their students. Choice

is based on an assumption that schools will alter their instructional practice to

compete for students. While the disruption (or perturbance) of everyday practice has

been a popular approach to initiating organizational change (Brown and Eisenhardt

1997; Goldenberg 2004), the disruption here was likely too great for meaningful

classroom improvement to occur. The storm’s fallout appears to have exceeded a

level of requisite stability that educators needed to focus their efforts on improving

teaching and learning. The words of my participants invoke the image of world

turned upside down, not the attention focusing disruption that might have been

caused by declining enrollments and funding. Borrowing from van Manen (1997), it

is also possible to talk about differences in the lifeworld of a school principal in

New Orleans and that of a state policymaker in Baton Rouge. This discussion of

differential turbulence is revisited in the conclusion.

Old system not washed away completely

While participants spoke proudly of the chance to be a part of New Orleans’ unique

experiment in urban educational change, they also acknowledged the persistence of

some of the old urban schooling challenges. Factors such as under-prepared

students, teacher quality and retention, and a lack of community support are

problems that plagued the pre-Katrina system and continue to present problems for

participants in this study. In essence, the rise of market forces and competition were

not described as creating solutions (or even conditions under which solutions might

emerge) to some of the more vexing problems of public schooling in New Orleans.

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Students attending the public schools in New Orleans are still overwhelmingly

poor with the majority of students being African-American (‘‘The State of Public

Education in New Orleans,’’ 2010). Problems of low academic skills (Louisiana

Department of Education 2006), little preventative mental or physical healthcare

(Viadero 2007; Weems et al. 2009), and early entry into the criminal justice system

(Tuzzolo and Hewitt 2007) are all issues faced by New Orleans teachers. As one

charter school principal said, ‘‘We are still an urban school. And sometimes… there

are issues… that you probably would not [see] in another place.’’ Principals felt that

universal student choice, which mixed students across neighborhoods, may have

contributed to an increase in tensions at some of the schools: ‘‘And you had the

violence, the neighborhood territorial stuff that was, you know, unfortunately a part

of our existence throughout the district’’ (RSD Principal).

Another result of the movement of population after Katrina was the arrival of an

increased number of Spanish-speaking students in schools that had not traditionally

served this population. In one classroom observation, I noted:

I spent a lot of time with Jose, one of four Spanish speakers. He was the least

proficient in English and was just sitting there, quietly doing nothing [while

the rest of the class worked independently]. The teacher said he usually has an

aide- but he had been absent for the last 2 days. [The teacher] didn’t seem to

do much for him. (Beabout 2008, p. 75)

Principals also noted the challenges of educating students who had, for whatever

reason, not received adequate education in the early grades and struggled to keep up

with their peers. One principal saw this problem among some of his post-Katrina 5th

graders:

Lawrence and Mario1 are both 2 years too old for the grade that they are in…both still coming in at a third-grade level, even though… they should’ve been

seventh graders. Phillip was a year behind in terms of age—he had been held

back once before, he probably came in at about a first grade level.

These students, while over-age, were still legally required to remain in school for

several years, and the schools will have to make accommodations for the thousands

of New Orleans students in their situation. As these over-age students move into

high school, they reach the age when dropping out becomes a legal option, forcing

one RSD high school principal to take a different approach:

I even brought some of my older kids… out to Avondale [a major shipyard]

last year. ‘Cause I said, you know—the chance of them finishing high school

in the regular way- it’s probably not going to work out. Because you are acting

a fool around here now and you’re 18 years old and you’re not—I mean comeon, some kind of way we’ve got to make this connection because you are not

getting any younger… I can’t look at you the same way I look at a 14-year-old

freshman. When you are now a 16, 17-year-old freshman.… your instinctual

maturation won’t keep you trapped in my high school another 4 years. You

1 All student names are pseudonyms.

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just gonna quit. So, and that’s not going to help me, in building the city… So

looking at a 16, 17-year-old freshman, scares me in the sense that- what are wedoing to meet that person’s needs?

The lack of resources for academically struggling students and for those who are

at-risk for dropping out was a concern for several principals in the study. Since this

data was collected, it has become clear that the adoption of market-based reforms in

New Orleans has led to a significant increase in federal and private dollars into the

schools. The Broad, Walton, and Gates foundations all have invested significantly in

New Orleans charter schools. Some charters are utilizing these resources and are

improving test scores for their students, but it is relatively early to make a definitive

assessment about the effectiveness of outside resources in improving the quality of

public education citywide.

A final area in which leaders perceived pre-Katrina problems impacting post-

Katrina education is the area of teacher quality. The two highest performing schools

in my sample were able to bring back pre-Katrina staff. These principals spoke very

highly of the quality of their teaching staffs. The other six schools in the study had

to create new staffs during a time when many experienced teachers had left the city.

One RSD Principal describes the frustration when a new hire began performing

poorly in the classroom: ‘‘I said, ‘OK, let’s hire her.’ Man, the day she set her foot in

that classroom, was… the first and last day I saw any kind of learning or teaching

happening.’’ Another principal stated having 26 uncertified teachers on his staff that

he needed to ‘‘get rid of,’’ while another predicted that 25% of her staff would not be

asked back for the 2007–2008 school year. These comments are backed up by some

of the classroom observations that were conducted as part of this study. The field

note excerpts shown below (taken from an RSD school) show a low level of student

engagement:

This 7th grade social studies class was doing a ‘‘book tour’’ activity answering

10 questions that made them familiarize themselves with the table of contents,

index, maps, glossary, etc. They had started it the day before and it should

have taken about 15 min—but she let them work on it almost the whole

60 min period. Some kids were done in 5 min. (Beabout 2008, p. 83)

In the preceding case, I had asked the principal to take me to an ‘‘average’’

classroom, and he took me to this one in which there was no egregious student

misbehavior, but clearly low expectations for student achievement. Another teacher

in this same RSD school had assigned a research report to his computer literacy

class:

He paid lip-service to using their own words [not plagiarizing], but didn’t

cover citing sources or any sort of process writing. He kept walking out of the

room to get a drink, talk to the custodian, etc. Mostly kids looking at pictures

and copying and pasting text. (Beabout 2008, p. 83)

In foreign language immersion classrooms in two higher performing charter

schools, my field notes read that the students ‘‘were busy copying sentences in their

notebooks’’ and ‘‘the teacher did a lot of snapping her fingers for attention and

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picking kids heads up off of their desks… I got bored’’ (Beabout 2008, p. 83).

Taking into account both the words of principals and my limited number of

classroom observations, it appears that a teacher quality problem still exists in the

post-Katrina system on some level.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that while marketization has shaken up the

structure of the system and allowed for an explosion of charter schools, the old

problems of urban education continue to exist. They are unlikely to be challenges

that can be legislated away (Fullan 1993) but are long-term undertakings that

require purposeful, steady work by educators. Even the most ardent choice believer

would not expect drastic one-year test score improvements. In line with other

charter school research (Lubienski 2003), while some principals spoke of enjoying

the freedom from centralized curriculum, nobody spoke of new approaches that had

been invented or shared as a result of the choice environment. There seems to be

little collaboration among schools that might allow for organizational learning

above the school level. Indeed, the competitive nature of such a radical choice

scheme is a disincentive for sharing new knowledge. New knowledge is best kept

close to the vest for competitive advantage, which improves one school’s position at

the expense of system level equity. In the 2 years since this interview data was

collected, there is evidence that while test scores have continued to rise, the gap

between high performing and low-performing schools has not decreased (Simon

2007).

Rebuilding inequality

While the theoretical case for the market-based reform of urban education is

certainly compelling, the central argument opposing it has always been that

unrestrained choice leads to inequality (Hargreaves and Fink 2006). Both the pro-

and anti-choice arguments suffer from a lack of empirical support however. Post-

Katrina New Orleans provides a unique case of rapid and total conversion from a

traditional public school system dominated by geographically-based student

assignment, to a system officially declared ‘‘universal choice.’’ With the exception

of a handful of selective admissions schools, any student in New Orleans is eligible

to apply for a seat in any public school in New Orleans regardless of where in the

city they live. The perspectives of principals working in this system are important

initial records of the validity of the hypothesized connection between choice and

inequality. After this analysis, this connection seems disappointingly strong.

In acknowledging the inequalities of the New Orleans public schools pre-Katrina,

one RSD principal in the study commented on the trouble he used to have getting

talented students to attend his open enrollment high school:

The biggest problem is that the best kids… try to go to a magnet school. My

job… is to make this place so attractive for this community that regardless of

whether they tag a magnet title on me or just a regular old community

school… they want to come here.

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There is a clear sense that this principal sees choice (even the meager choice

options of pre-Katrina) as contributing to a ‘‘creaming’’ process whereby talented

students are consolidated at magnet schools.

Listening to the reports of principals on the post-Katrina system, it is clear that

the New Orleans schools can be seen as part of an ordered hierarchy with low

performing schools available for everyone and high performing schools available

only for some. The spring 2007 testing results for 5th graders show that the highest

performing public elementary school in the parish had 92% of their students scoring

at or above the basic level in math and 94% scoring at the same level in language

arts (Louisiana Department of Education 2007). On the opposite end of the

spectrum, the lowest performing public school had 5% of its 5th graders score at or

above basic and zero students reaching the basic level on the math exam. That is a

90% difference which was common. Other grade-levels had differences between the

highest scoring and lowest scoring schools of 85, 90, and 95%.

Participants immediately acknowledged that the RSD, consisting of the failing

schools that were taken over by the state, would become ‘‘the district of last resort’’

for students returning to the city. They were unanimous in their condemnation of the

RSD. One of their own principals said plainly that, ‘‘We’re the lowest layer of

schools’’ in the city. Another charter school principal described the growing gaps in

quality between the various types of schools:

I think the system is… screwed up. You got a three tier structure. You’ve got

the charter schools, you got your Orleans Parish schools, and you got your

Recovery schools…Recovery schools were the dumping ground—for every-

body. OK. And I didn’t want a dumping ground in the public schools…

Principals held various explanations for the reemerging inequality of the post-

Katrina system. Some of them had to do with subtle, but legal, ways in which the

now prevalent charters might screen out certain students. Charter school principals

themselves talked about discipline policies that were meant to improve the quality

of their school, but also have the effect of selecting only stronger students for their

schools. For example, one charter school principal discussed a policy for not

readmitting students who had been suspended three times over the previous school

year:

I’ll tell you, there were a handful of children who had that third suspension,

which disqualified them from reregistering, that we documented and parents

informed, and had their signature saying they understand that, and that has

made an incredible difference… the three children who aren’t here because of

that. The silent ring leaders.

While couched in a discussion on effective discipline at the school, the principal

offered little about the fate of these three students with behavior problems. Most

likely they were enrolled at one of the categorically inferior Recovery School

District schools for the 2007–2008 school year. If all of New Orleans’ charter

schools did this, over 150 expelled students would transfer into the RSD every year.

Another advantage that charter schools had was that they were able to limit class

sizes to ratios that they had written into their charters. RSD schools were forced to

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continuously enroll students returning from their Katrina evacuations, causing

overcrowded classrooms and teacher shortages. An examination of enrollment

figures published by the Times Picayune (‘‘School by School Enrollments,’’ 2006;

‘‘Schooling the Poor,’’ 2006) shows that while the student population in the charter

schools increased 6.5% between September and November 2006, the Recovery

School District population increased a whopping 68.3% over the same period. One

RSD high school principal recounted this population surge in the fall of 2006:

In the beginning we had 50–60 people [per] class… we started registering

40–50 kids a day. For like the whole month of October. We got to 450 kids…in a 2 week period of time. But the problem, I was only allowed to staff for

two to three hundred. So, everyday [a prospective teacher] came through the

door with a warm body, you got a job.

This reality left RSD schools in a constant state of staffing and resource crisis,

made it clear to the public that the RSD was the school system of last resort, and

contributed to the exodus of students into charter schools. With no single source of

system leadership, the RSD continues to operate as the system of last resort which

threatens its long term viability.

Another practice that ostensibly provided choice for parents in the district but

also served to sort students was the use of language immersion programs. Three of

the high-performing charter schools in my sample had at least part of their school

run in such a manner, where all subjects (history, science, math, etc.) were taught in

a foreign language (French or Spanish). While providing an excellent opportunity

for students to begin mastering a foreign language at an early age, this approach also

serves unwittingly to keep out some students. One charter principal noted that,

‘‘You can’t start French [immersion] in 4th grade; you gotta start in kindergarten.’’

Outside of kindergarten and first grade, these schools would not accept new students

without the requisite French or Spanish background to learn in an immersion

classroom. While this is certainly a sensible student placement policy, it also has the

effect of putting up barriers to families, most often the poorest, who were late in

returning to the city, didn’t have the required language skills, and found rosters at

these high performing schools already filled by students with more socially

connected parents. Again, this is a situation where schools acting in their own self-

interest leads to systemic inequality.

Special education is the most glaring area of inequalities in the post-Katrina

system. Based on a report showing extreme discrepancies in special education

populations between many charters and RSD schools, the charters were accused of

passing special needs students onto the Recovery District, claiming that their school

didn’t offer the types of supports to which such students are legally entitled (Ritea

2007a). The report showed that charter schools in the East Bank section of the city

reported that 4.5% of their student body was classified with special needs, while the

RSD schools reported 7.3% of their students with special needs. A more recent

report shows that 12.6% of students in the RSD are special needs students, while the

various charter groups ranged from 3.8 to 7.8% special needs (‘‘The State of Public

Education in New Orleans,’’ 2010). Speaking with the principals shed some light on

the matter. A charter principal was quoted by the Times Picayune as saying:

416 J Educ Change (2010) 11:403–424

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We did have a parent who came in and she has a child with autism, and I did

speak personally with this lady and I told her we did not have an autistic class

on the site and we did not have a teacher for autism, and I told her to please fill

out an application for next year. I directed her to the [Recovery District].

When you don’t have that teacher and that class set up and we’re in February

or March, I believe it would be a disservice to the child to bring them in a

classroom and then not have a teacher who could serve the needs of that child.

(Ritea 2007a)

While most of the charter schools in this study employed special education

teachers, the majority of them used an inclusion model. While this is certainly an

appropriate placement for many students, those whose disabilities make spending a

full day in a regular classroom difficult would certainly feel pressured to enroll

elsewhere. Again the costs would be passed onto the RSD schools.

The reestablishment of unequal schooling in post-Katrina New Orleans, in spite of

the legal progress of the 1950s, the Great Society movement of the 1960s, and the

race-cognizant accountability practices of today, may be the most thought-provoking

aspect of this study. Most charter schools do not use selective admissions, the

Recovery School District actually gave large relocation and retention bonuses to

teachers who came to teach after the storm, and the RSD schools have the highest per

pupil spending of any group of schools in the city. Yet, still inequality persists. As

evidence mounts, it seems appropriate to call such a tendency towards inequality a

strange attractor of urban school systems. Recognizing, naming, and confronting this

natural tendency of urban schools may be an important first step to designing systems

that can foster equality. Since equality is a property of a system, not an individual

component of a system, fighting the strange attractor of inequality requires a systemic

approach, not a fragmented one in which schools seek their own self-interest with

little concern for the improvement of the system.

Discussion

The above analysis explores three themes emerging from 28 conversations with 10

school principals over the course of 6 months in the rebuilding New Orleans Public

Schools (the impact of recovery on principals’ lives, their observation of remnants

of the pre-Katrina system, and the emerging inequalities of the new system). Chaos

and complexity theories informed the study in several ways. First, this theoretical

framework implores the use of qualitative data collection methods. The work here is

based on an assumption that schools are complex systems in which no discrete

number of organizational variables can effectively capture a system. Clearly such

‘‘systems must be understood from the inside out’’ (Peat 2008, p. 61) and the social

world of actors is as significant as their professional roles. Second, this theoretical

base provides a collection of systems-related concepts that are used to structure the

systems-level analysis below. This discussion includes the strange attractor ofinequality, the concept of differential perturbance, and the concept of requisitestability as they operate at the level of the school system.

J Educ Change (2010) 11:403–424 417

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The strange attractor of inequality

It is not much of an accomplishment to recognize inequality as an essential

characteristic of schooling in America (Katz 1975; Kozol 1991; Tye 2000). What

this study contributes to this dialogue, however, is evidence that it is not merely

remnants of a racist or elitist system that foster inequality in our schools today.

While historical housing patterns and attendance zones certainly contribute to the

concentration of poor students in many schools (Orfield 2002), New Orleans is a

system whose structure was almost entirely rebuilt post-Katrina. Yet even within

this entirely new structure, inequality is readily observable (see section above). The

conclusion to draw is that school systems tend to organize themselves in ways that

allow inequality to grow. The more uncomfortable corollary to this idea is that on

some level, residents want racially segregated and class-based schooling for

children in New Orleans. Our system, even reborn, fosters these divisions and

separation. While many individuals actively oppose such inequity (I have been

working to open a diverse public school in my neighborhood with a talented group

of neighbors), those advocating for integration have so far been ineffective in

creating a system built on inclusion and quality.

As discussed above, the separation of the district into charter schools and state-run

RSD schools did not foster equity within the district. A handful of New Orleans post-

Katrina charter conversions were allowed to keep their selective admissions criteria

in a move that displeased some in the national charter school movement (Carr 2009).

Additionally, special Montessori and language immersion schools were open-

enrollment schools in their lowest grades, but did not allow students to enroll in older

grades, or gave admissions preferences to students with certain types of preschool

backgrounds (Carr 2010b). In a city where schools were inundated with returning

residents, this served as a filter that kept many students out. Special education is

perhaps the biggest area where inequality has been reconstructed. In a system

composed predominantly of charter schools, the self-interest of even the most equity

focused charters, clearly compels them to seek students who can perform well on

state tests while utilizing a minimum of resources. While most schools and school

leaders are ethical enough not to proceed down this path of turning away students

with special needs, the system we have set up encourages such behavior, and it will

eventually cause a crisis unless leadership at the system level emerges. In a city that

was quick to appoint a ‘‘Recovery Czar’’ to streamline rebuilding, the need for a state

entity (besides the courts) to monitor educational equity is required. A system based

(at least structurally) on self-interest, will always overcome the good intentions of

educators, and individual gain will trump public good.

Differential perturbance

Scholars of change have often noted the importance of disrupting everyday practice

in order to create the cognitive, cultural, and structural spaces for change to proceed

(Drucker 1980; Milstein 1980; Morrison 2002). It is important to remember that

schools are nested systems (Carr 1997; Hutchins 1996), and educational change

operates across many levels of systems (individual students and teachers, whole

418 J Educ Change (2010) 11:403–424

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schools, districts, entire communities, states, etc.). The simple useful insight of this

concept is the structural fact that schools contain systems and are contained in other

systems, each with their own purposes and actors. Schools contain departments,

classrooms, and committees, while they are at the same time contained within

neighborhoods, districts, and cities. Examining a reform’s interactions with only one

level of the system is unlikely to give a clear picture of what is changing or not

changing and why (Muncey and McQuillan 1996). Thus, a basic conclusion is that

market-based reform in post-Katrina New Orleans is so heavily influenced by

contextual factors that making inferences about marketization elsewhere based on

the post-Katrina experience must be done with caution.

Another conclusion gained by looking at the district level and the individual

school level is that Katrina had very different impacts on different levels of the

educational system. From one frame (that of the state), Katrina can be seen, quite

reasonably, as an ideal perturbance to alter the practice of schooling in New

Orleans. The state, after years of inaction, was pushed to take over the troubled New

Orleans Public Schools. The state legislature clearly considered the goals of its

education policies and individuals reconsidered their practices and goals in the wake

of the storm. Perturbance clearly happened in the state capital of Baton Rouge.

From the perspective of school principals, Katrina hindered change much more

than it acted as a catalyst. What was a big bump at the state level was often a

catastrophe at the school level, or what Gross (1998) might call severe turbulence.

This idea of differential perturbance in nested systems buttresses the idea that

schools are complex human systems that cannot be understood linearly. It is

reasonable to support the idea that disruptions to a school’s day-to-day operations

can indeed lead to change, but the data here suggest that disruptions large enough to

cause an entire system to reorganize are often devastating for the much smaller

schools and classrooms where our children learn. These excessively large

disruptions in the personal and professional lives of New Orleans school leaders

point to the importance of requisite stability for educational change.

Requisite stability

While trying circumstances definitely existed for leaders in the district, pre-Katrina,

circumstances have become more challenging for many schools, and implementing

change has certainly not gotten any easier. The general consensus of principals

sampled here was that the first year back from Hurricane Katrina was a year to ‘‘get

open’’ and deal with the multitude of distractions inherent in creating a school in

such an unsettled environment. The omnipresence of storm recovery in principals’

lives illuminates an important concept about school change. While complexity

theorists often describe the need to perturb a system in order to facilitate change

(Reigeluth 2004; Wheatley 1999), change is also dependent on that system having

enough stability for members to safely experiment with new ways of doing things

while remaining grounded in the safety of a recognizable system. Without this

requisite stability, purposeful change becomes impossible to undertake without

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overtaxing the people involved. Recent concerns about teacher burnout in New

Orleans charter schools illustrate this idea (Carr 2010a).

This perception of ‘‘just-enough’’ instability is crucial in the complexity

paradigm of organizations and change. As Doll (2008) notes, ‘‘the steadiness of

an open system is a dynamic or unstable steadiness… the system maintains an

‘imbalance,’ neither too great or too small, but of ‘just the right amount’ for the

system to be continually active’’ (p. 197). Substantive changes cannot be mandated,

and silver bullet solutions sold by fast-talking reformers are bound to fail unless

teachers and administrators engage in meaningful thought, dialogue, and action

around improving education for their students (Ravitch 2000). Change happens

when individuals and groups learn better ways of doing things and start

implementing these better ways. Ideas can come from the outside. Pressure and

support can come from the outside. But meaningful, lasting change, change with a

moral purpose (Fullan 1993) can only occur at the level of individuals or learning

communities operating in a sufficiently stable context. Mulford (2005) discusses this

paradox of stability-for-change and calls upon leaders to establish communication

and trust within schools as a prerequisite to sustainable change. Given that the

faculties of many post-Katrina schools were assembled from scratch in many cases,

this trust and communication will require some time to evolve.

The 2006–2007 school year in post-Katrina New Orleans is a case where too

much instability inhibited meaningful change efforts in classrooms. As student

enrollments, funding, staffing, and perhaps leadership become more stable in years

to come, some sustainable attempts at improvement may become more possible. Of

course, the combination of market pressures and test-based accountability policies

could potentially create more instability as schools with low test scores fall under

sanction and become susceptible to takeover. Louisiana’s inside track to Arne

Duncan’s Race to the Top funds makes this scenario increasingly likely. The

turnaround model, complete with teachers interviewing for their old jobs, a single

appointed leader with wide authority over curriculum and staffing, and an ‘‘out-

with-the-old’’ philosophy may fail because it ignores the lesson of requisite stability.

Conclusion

These experiences of principals leading schools in the turbulent and increasingly

market-like post-Katrina environment show a variety of themes related to change.

While the need for requisite stability certainly made a focus on instructional

improvement challenging during the 2006–2007 school year, the city and the

schools are becoming more stable as time passes. Focusing on the problems of ill-

prepared students, community apathy, and teacher quality will become easier as the

post-Katrina rebuilding process slows down. A challenge not likely to diminish with

time is the strange attractor of inequality that seems to be reasserting itself in

several new ways in the reconfigured school system. The prospect of some new

schools succeeding at the expense of others seems very real. Testing data from 2009

have shown a clear separation as open-access charter schools have far outperformed

state-run RSD schools on NCLB tests. Market-based approaches and the underlying

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Darwinian philosophy will not solve this problem of growing inequality between

schools. Solving this issue will require the work of ‘‘system leaders’’ (Hargreaves

and Fink 2006; Hopkins 2007) that work for the benefit of the system as a whole.

Such individual leaders certainly exist in New Orleans today, but there is currently

an insufficient role for them in the public sphere.

As the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, there is some general

agreement about the successes and challenges in the post-storm public schools

(‘‘The State of Public Education in New Orleans,’’ 2010). New and renovated

school buildings have come into service, test scores have gone up citywide, and

students now have more choice when selecting schools than ever before. These

successes have been accompanied by (and in some cases have caused) a number of

challenges ranging from an unequal distribution of students with special needs to

public confusion about school enrollment and wasteful spending on student

transportation.

I offer two suggestions that might help sustain current improvements and

mitigate the negative consequences of the post-Katrina reforms. First, a mechanism

for returning schools to local control must be established by the state. While keeping

continuously failing schools in the hands of the RSD or charter operators is

reasonable in the short term, there must be a transparent process for how schools

will eventually return to some form of local control. There may be performance

requirements for this transfer to happen, but these requirements should be

established, publicized, and acted upon as soon as schools meet them.

The second recommendation is to appoint a person or group with the authority to

investigate allegations of discrimination in terms of student admissions, student

discipline policies, and other potential unethical practices. In the current patchwork

system, no entity has this authority, and it is quite clear that individual schools

acting in their own best interests are not always acting in the best interests of the

city. This authority is essential to prevent individuals critical of market reforms

from giving up on the system altogether. Marketization has done some good things

for New Orleans schools, and the needed task is not selecting a governance model

based on ideology, but selecting one that maximizes the benefits of a choice system

while addressing the inherent flaws. In the end, despite all of the accoutrements of

privatization, this is still a public school system, and it is the public, albeit a

fractured one, that must take responsibility for its success.

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