Laying the Groundwork for a Takeover: Pre-Katrina Education Politics in Louisiana

• In Event: Policy in US States and Localities

Abstract

When Hurricane Katrina led to widespread, significant flooding in New Orleans in 2005, charter school and school choice advocates salivated at the “opportunity” afforded by a clean slate. The city’s schools had suffered for years from neglected maintenance, underfunding, corruption, and poor performance on state standardized tests. Louisiana acted quickly to dramatically restructure the New Orleans public education system. With the passage of one law in a special session, the state took control of nearly all New Orleans’s public schools, eliminated neighborhood schools and began a system of mandatory school choice. This paper examines how, even though these actions were made possible by a natural disaster (and its manmade effects), legislators in Louisiana had been setting the stage for a decade to make this possible. With the lens of policy feedback theory, we demonstrate that with a slow series of reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s, a new coalition emerged in education politics in Louisiana. We follow every piece of legislation introduced related to K-12 education between 1997 and 2005 to show the players in the coalition and the changing direction of education policy. They had laid the groundwork both in terms of policy and politics to seize the moment afforded by Hurricane Katrina.

Authors

• J. Celeste Lay, Tulane University

• Bethany Allison Carter, Tulane University