A Decade Later: The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Racial Segregation in New Orleans Schools

• In Event: 42.059 - Policy, Politics, Choice, and Geography: How Place Matters Across the Pre-K–20 Spectrum

Abstract

Following Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans underwent major demographic and social changes as many families – especially poor and African-American—were displaced (Berube & Holmes, 2015) and as the public school system was transformed into the nation’s most saturated marketplace for charter schools. Currently, New Orleans Public Schools lead the nation in the percentage of public school students attending charter schools (over 90%). This study assesses the degree that these charter schools along with the few remaining traditional public schools offer a more racially integrated setting compared to pre-Katrina schools, which were highly segregated by race and poverty. Specifically, we utilize descriptive statistics including the racial isolation index (Massey & Denton, 1988) and spatial analyses to evaluate if some areas of New Orleans are more or less likely to have racially integrated schools.

The rationale for this study is guided by research indicating that racially integrated schools provide academic and social benefits for students of all races (Mickelson, 2008). Since charter schools theoretically decouple housing patterns from school enrollments, they could potentially lead to more integrated charter schools (Lubienski, Gulosino, & Weitzel, 2009). Nationally, charter schools have often enrolled populations that have tended to increase racial segregation (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley & Wang, 2011). However, given New Orleans’ long history of school segregation, it was almost impossible for the city public schools to become more racially and economically segregated. Thus our study examines if pre-Katrina levels of segregation by race and poverty have persisted despite an influx of white and Latino public school students or if this dramatic shift has disrupted this extreme segregation.

Using school-level data, we examine the enrollment patterns for three time increments: 2003-04, 2008-09, and 2013-14. We find that although there are some modest inroads in creating racially diverse schools in New Orleans, the typical minority student attends a school highly segregated by race and poverty. In terms of diversity, there were 14 schools in 2014 where no racial group had more than two-thirds of the students -- up from 8 in 2004. Yet, we find that the more racially diverse schools are mostly in affluent neighborhoods. Moreover, the typical minority student still attends a highly segregated school with over 95% of their classmates also being a minority. Moreover, the dual segregation of race and social class has intensified between 2004 and 2014. For instance, the correlation between the percent minority and the percent free/reduced lunch increased from 0.61 in 2004 to 0.82 in 2014 and two-thirds of students now attended a school that is both over 90% minority and 90% FRL.

Our presentation concludes with a discussion on the implications that these findings have for local educational leaders including transportation challenges as well as parent and community engagement. Although the increase in the number of diverse options potentially could attract more affluent students away from private and suburban schools, there still appears to be a system of winners of losers in the new New Orleans school marketplace.

Authors

• Stephen Kotok, St. John's University

• Steven Leonice Nelson, The University of Memphis

• Brian Robert Beabout, The University of New Orleans

• Luis Eduardo Rivera, University of Texas at El Paso