Special Edition: Delta 📽️ Special Video Edition: Katrina, 20 Years Later

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 23, 2005. It was a devastating and defining event in Louisiana’s history, and in our lives as Louisianans. 

This week marks the 20th anniversary of that storm, and today, we thought it was worth a different kind of conversation than the written word alone could convey. 

I am from Louisiana, born and raised. I’ve lived lots of places, including other states, but Louisiana is my home. And I was a senior in college when Hurricane Katrina struck my beloved state. This is certainly a really memorable and, in many ways, traumatic period of time for everyone in New Orleans, including my friends, my family, and ultimately the students that I taught. 

Kunjan led the New Orleans Recovery School District in the long aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from 2011-2014. 

I’m eager to talk today about what happened during and after the storm, and the ways in which I think we have tried to better government on behalf of kids as it relates to education and the places we still have room for growth.

Jessica Baghian: Kunjan, do you want to introduce yourself?

Kunjan Narechania: Yeah, thanks, Jessica. I got to New Orleans in 2011, so about six years after Katrina. It has been my home for 14 years. And I’ve come to love the city and its people deeply, and had the honor of serving as the head of the recovery school district in New Orleans. I led the district for two and a half years before we returned the state-controlled recovery school district schools back to local governance. And that gave me a real unique vantage point on the school recovery effort.

I think that experience taught me a lot about the role of school systems in ensuring that all kids are able to achieve. How do you shape the policies of a school system so that you respect the autonomy and leadership of school leaders while at the same time ensuring that we protect the civil rights of all the kids inside the district?

It taught me a lot about what it means to work in collaborative partnership with a community of school leaders, but also advocates and families, in order to serve kids who are in some of the most challenging conditions I’ve seen. 

Jessica, can you talk to us about what it was like during Hurricane Katrina? As you said, you were a college senior here. And I’m curious what that experience was and the impact that it’s had on you.

Jessica Baghian: Yeah, so I was a senior at LSU (Go Tigers!), and it was wild. My dad worked in insurance growing up and dealt with a lot of disaster recovery stuff, so anytime — hurricanes are normal in Louisiana to some degree — and anytime a storm would be headed our way, I would do the check-in with dad and you know, he’d be like, “It’s fine, get some water,” whatever, you know, basic stuff. 

This one was different. In fact, he called me and he was like, “You need to leave.” 

And Baton Rouge is inland enough that that’s not normally what you do. So that was alarming. And so I went to North Louisiana to my grandparents and we watched on TV as the storm passed. And then the levees broke, and, candidly, all hell broke loose. 

So, it was me and a pack of college students in my grandmother’s living room. When the storm was over we immediately got back in cars and headed back to Baton Rouge. 

I was lucky enough to live on campus where there were generators, so I was one of few people in Baton Rouge that had power. Baton Rouge didn’t have power itself for weeks, but got back on campus and the briefest way to say what happened next is like, that’s the week I became an adult. 

I got a real eye-opening set of lessons about the reality of life and, honestly, the importance of government — its potential to help people and its potential to be unprepared and lead to great harm. 

You know, our field house and our basketball arena on campus became medical triage centers and most of us spent the vast majority of our time in those buildings. So you had an 18-year-old literally creating spreadsheets to track who was coming in and out because the Red Cross did not have that. You had myself and others like changing adult diapers, collecting socks. I mean it was really, chaos in a way that I have never seen since, thank God. It was the best of people and it was also like the hardest parts of humanity all at once. 

I was already planning to apply for Teach for America, and it reinforced the importance of public service and government to me and the importance of government working well. 

It also is the reason I ultimately advocated for being in New Orleans. Originally I was actually placed in Philly and I was essentially like, “Dear Teach for America, I have to stay in my home state. I need to be in New Orleans.” 

Usually the New Orleans corps had been something like 250 teachers. My year, it was 11. They weren’t even sure they were going to have it.

And the only people they brought in were people that had some other connection to the city because services and infrastructure was still so bad a year later, that, you know, it was necessary to have other connections and resources beyond just 250 other first year teachers to lean on because it was such a moment of just triage and recovery. 

And I was ultimately placed not in New Orleans proper, but in a rural parish outside of the city. In fact, I don’t know that anyone in my year was placed in the Recovery School District because it was still such a tenuous position. I learned a lot, and it ultimately led me to be in the New Orleans corps and teach the incredible kids that I taught. So I’m forever grateful for that. 

Kunjan, you came later, as you’ve noted, and I’m curious, as someone not from Louisiana, what it was like to move here. Like, what was your first experience of New Orleans post-Katrina? What struck you most about the recovery challenges as you were either visiting here or moving here?

Kunjan Narechania: The thing that struck me is the tenacity and heart of the educators that were working so hard for kids in spite of the fact that the system was not helping them necessarily. 

In fact, the system hadn’t been built around them. So people were making do with what they had, hustling to figure out how best to support kids and families, figuring out where to get resources to support the kids that were showing up at their door and dealing with really unthinkable challenges, dealing with an immense amount of transience among their population, kids moving constantly — and an unpredictability about their own buildings. The buildings were dilapidated and falling apart. So many schools are in trailers. It was hard to know if the electricity and the plumbing and whatnot were going to be consistent to make it through the school year. 

There was no technology infrastructure, no way to know, like, who’s on your roll? Who’s going to show up? Who’s not going to show up? There were so many things that individual schools were having to do to fend for themselves, and it speaks to the resilience of educators and the tenacity of educators. And it speaks to the need for the government to also play a role. 

And government wasn’t fulfilling its role to kids and to the community when I first got here.

I say that with a lot of humility — I’m not blaming or pointing fingers. I’m saying that the scale of the problem is such that it was just very, very hard to get your arms around how to build the system around the needs of people.

Jessica Baghian: That really resonates, even just like from the immediate after what felt true. There was a lot of finger-pointing, people were very angry, which I think is such a natural human reaction in that moment. And it’s not as clean as one person’s failing here or there. The scale then and after remained just so immense. 

I think a lot of people know this, but the schools of New Orleans after Katrina were transitioned over time to an all-charter school model, which is exceedingly unique. 

In most districts, the superintendent has a lot of direct control over how schools operate. But as the head of a recovery school district, your role was really different. And I just felt like I learned so much about this when you were in that position. Can you just talk a little bit about how you thought about your role, given the governance structure of the city?

Kunjan Narechania: Yeah, look, like I got there, as I said, in 2011. And when we arrived, a large portion of schools in the recovery school district were already charter schools. And there was also a number of schools that we ran as they were traditional district schools. And over time, as you say, all of the schools became charter schools.

That’s the piece of puzzle that gets headlines — “New Orleans becomes an all-charter district” — but in fact, there’s a reason. There’s a design of the system that’s behind that. And when we got to New Orleans, we realized that the community valued a handful of things. And we put out something called the 12 Commitments, that I think you can still find somewhere online, that describe what we set out to do in partnership with the community. 

The design of the system came from those initial conversations that we had with people, which are: One, people valued autonomy of individual schools. Two, they valued accountability for those schools in delivering results. Three, they valued parent choice. And four, they valued equity in ensuring that the most marginalized kids had access to resources that most supported them. 

So those are the four pillars around which we designed the system, which led us to say it makes more sense for the schools to be chartered because it allows for that balance of autonomy and accountability to be the central tenet of the system. And in doing that, we really redefined what the role of the central office was vis-a-vis the role of the school. 

We said, in order to live up to the sort of pillars of autonomy and accountability, what we’re saying is that those who are closest to kids are the best decision makers for kids. 

So whereas in most traditional systems, the school district sets the bell schedule, the school district decides the specific curriculum, the school district decides when and how teachers will be trained, we said all of those decisions should live locally at the school level. And the central office should play a different role. 

The central office should make sure that we are protecting the civil rights of all kids, that we are holding schools accountable to ensuring that actually the kids in their building are educated, that they’re growing and learning, to ensuring that all families have access to a seat in a school, which in fact wasn’t the case when we got there. 

Jessica Baghian: It’s worth talking about specifically some of the roles you did hold onto because I think that was an interesting learning for me to watch either what you guys kept or what y’all built. I think there are instructive examples of how you thought about the function of the central agency. Can you say a little more about that?

Kunjan Narechania: When we arrived in 2011, there was no guaranteed way that a family could get a seat in a school in New Orleans, meaning they had to go to every separate school building and apply separately to get into the school. And there were stories of families — particularly families who had students or children with special needs — not gaining access to any seat in the system. Now that is a tragedy and a crime in America. 

And so even in a system of decentralized schools where the school has more autonomy than they would in a traditional district, we said at the center level, we control enrollment because we need to guarantee every family a seat and we need to create a fair and equitable process by which families can apply to schools in the city and be guaranteed that they will get a seat. 

Similarly, on expulsion, it cannot be that every school decides on its own which kids are not meeting policies and then are excluded from school. There’s too much potential for kids’ rights to be infringed upon in that kind of scenario. So we said, we will control expulsion. And in doing that, we significantly reduced the number of expulsions happening inside of the city by creating a common standard that protected the rights of kids. 

So those are the kinds of things that we chose to keep because they were good for kids and they were good for the overall health of the system.

Jessica Baghian: Yeah, and there was a real management of the portfolio on that point. I mean, you did close schools and that’s a very contentious thing. I’m curious, being years out from that, what you think back on that process at this point, what you learned from it, and what, if anything, you’d change about it. You know, that’s a thing a lot of people say they’re going to do and then they don’t actually manage the portfolio and make the hard calls that need to be made and I’m just curious what you would say about that.

Kunjan Narechania: Yeah, look, closing schools is really, really hard. And I think there were things that we did that were good and there are things that we could have done better. And one really important thing that we learned was that we needed to involve more community in deciding how to transform schools. And we did not do that at the outset. But you know, midway through our tenure, we started convening community groups to help make decisions about school closures and who would take over schools when schools were being closed. 

So often we would say, you, you as an operator, you as a charter operator can’t run this school anymore because kids aren’t improving. We need to give it to somebody else. And those decisions we started to make alongside community members who participated in interviews of new school leader operators who walked through buildings that were already run by these operators, who made recommendations to us. 

And more often than not, we went with their recommendations. And I think learning how to do this kind of work in partnership with the community was just a really, really big lesson for me. But you’re right, we did manage the portfolio. I mean, we made hard calls about, if you’re not serving kids, you can’t keep running schools. And we tried to ensure that kids in closing schools were protected. So at the same time we were making the very hard decision for the system, we were saying to families in closing schools, you get first right in the enrollment system to the schools that would be best for your kids now.

So we tried to give them a leg up in the choice of their next school.

Jessica Baghian: As a person who works and engages in, you know, ed reform or ed-reform-adjacent circles, more often than I would think, I hear from folks outside of New Orleans that the post-Katrina ed reform stuff in New Orleans was a failure. That is certainly not my experience of it, but I’d be curious to hear you react to that. Why do you think that perception persists, and what is the reality on the ground?

Kunjan Narechania: Prior to the storm, one in two kids was graduating high school in New Orleans. Less than half of kids. And again, that’s criminal in America. And of the kids that were graduating high school, one in three was going on to college. That’s such a small number. 

The most recent statistics show that we are graduating four out of five kids in New Orleans and two out of three of them are going to college. And there’s lots of questions about college persistence and jobs after college. But those statistics help illuminate the drastic change in the system over the course of the past 20 years. And I think that progress is situated within a really complicated set of factors, inclusive of the kind of things you mentioned, Jessica, which are closing schools in communities is really, really hard. 

The decision by the school board to fire all the teachers post-Katrina really impacted the Black community in this city. I think the question of state governance versus local control, which one is better? All those sort of complicating cultural and environmental factors in which this reform story exists makes this story complicated. And I recognize that, I understand that the impact on the community has been greater than just the numbers that I named. 

I think about what is true for children as a result of this system. From my perspective, there is no question that the system today is serving kids dramatically better than the system did 20 years ago.

Jessica, I’m curious for you, looking back now, where do you think we’ve made the most progress since Katrina? And where do you see more work to be done?

Jessica Baghian: So, I do not live in New Orleans and my kids don’t go to school in New Orleans as of now, so I say all those caveats.

I think the idea of an all-charter district is certainly a concept that was enticing to reformers or reformers adjacent in a whole bunch of settings. And I’ve learned a lot about what it means to pursue the parts of that that are compelling on behalf of kids, which is like having more choices, keeping open the good, best, most effective actors, and managing down the ones that are not getting it done for kids. Like those principles I think are pretty hard to argue with.  

And that doesn’t mean just like, shirk responsibility and like it’s a free for all. Somebody has to hold center on making sure everyone’s sort of behaving for lack of a better phrase within the system. 

And by the way, one other thing you all pulled off [in New Orleans] that was incredible and has such a lasting impact on the city is the buildings. The buildings were horrendous before the storm. The schools in New Orleans at this point are some of the most state-of-the-art, beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen. 

And that could just be, you know, window dressing, but I think it matters for schools and educators and kids. That took a long time to do, but it’s certainly a lasting mark that I think changes the day-to-day experiences of kids and educators and is supportive of the academic gains that you were talking about earlier. 

You know, when I was teaching, everybody was just trying to get buildings back open in New Orleans and figure out where kids even were and how many schools they were even running. It was so triage-y and my district had its own many complications and my kids all had their own sort of lived experience of the storm, but you know, many of my kids live in very rural Louisiana, and even though it’s only 40 minutes from the city, some of them had never been to New Orleans. 

So the academic experience was, I think, less impacted. I think Hurricane Katrina is certainly unique to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I should mention, by the way, Mississippi has their own whole version of this. 

There’s a lot about disaster recovery that, given the world these days, is increasingly relevant for lots of places. And I’m curious, what, if any, lessons you learned about leading in crisis that stand out to you today as you think about state leaders or district leaders dealing with their own versions of environmental disasters or otherwise?

Kunjan Narechania: One of the most important lessons I learned is the power of collaborative work with school leaders, with community members, with families. Everything that we got done, we did with all of those people. 

Another example of something we did was create a differentiated funding formula that gave schools more money for kids who had more significant needs. You got more money if you had students with more severe special needs, students who were English learners, students who were over age. And we created that formula, which created winners and losers in the system in partnership with school leaders themselves, and school leaders who didn’t have as many students with special needs, didn’t have as many overage kids, had to sit at the table and agree. 

They agreed that it made sense for there to be redistribution of dollars because that was the right thing for kids and families. And that’s the kind of collaborative decision-making that led us to create the reforms that I’m describing. Every one of those things, centralized expulsion, centralized enrollment, differentiated funding. Even the buildings that you mentioned — we did so many collaborative meetings where we had to decide where the FEMA dollars were going to go. 

And that was a decade-long process, longer actually, in partnership with community members. And so I think that is my biggest lesson learned coming out of New Orleans, that we did it together with a lot of people. 

As I see more communities that are impacted by environmental disaster, I don’t see any way for a community to recover after those kinds of disasters if they’re not doing it in partnership with all the people in their community.

Jessica Baghian: I love that answer. You’ve said a little bit about this, but if you had to choose, what’s the standout grand achievement, and what’s the thing that most bothers you that it’s not still done?

Kunjan Narechania: We have seen a significant improvement in the quality of school. We’ve seen better outcomes for kids. And yet we need to continue to focus on that. We need to ensure that we are not taking our foot off the gas. I don’t suggest that the city isn’t focused on this. I think people are.

But we need to sort of remember that the progress we’ve made is just insufficient. It’s really good, and it’s insufficient — and it’s okay to recognize that and continue to press for better for our kids. That’s one. 

I think two, we all need to start thinking about kids who graduate, and what is their path to long-term success?

We launched a career center to help create opportunities for kids to get hands-on experience with skilled trades. And that’s just one step in ensuring that all kids in New Orleans have a funded next step. And that’s something I think we need to pay attention to. 

The system is uniquely positioned to respond to the current moment, the changes in technology, sort of focus on the individual needs of kids, ensuring that we’re paying attention to the needs of our immigrant students. The system is uniquely positioned to do that because individual schools can adapt and have the nimbleness, have the ability to be nimble to adapt to the needs of their kids. But we need to figure out how to continually do that in an ever-changing society and political climate.

Jessica, you’re so good at thinking about policy, and the work that you did at the state had a tremendous impact on the work in New Orleans. I’m curious if you could just send one message to policymakers in other states about Katrina, what would that be?

Jessica Baghian: I would say government matters. 

Anybody who wants to argue otherwise need only have lived in the state of Louisiana when the storm hit to understand that on a cellular level.

This is a somewhat selfish answer because of how I spend my time in the policy sphere, but I would say I think that Katrina is, and the post-Katrina reforms are, a reminder about how much expectations and accountability in the system really matter. 

We’re at a moment right now nationally where there’s shakiness on tests, and they’re certainly not perfect, but do I think they matter? Yes. 

And there’s shakiness on accountability in a lot of ways. 

What a convenient reaction for adults in a system that right now post post-pandemic, is like underserving kids as much as it maybe ever has, especially our kids of greatest need. And I think that Katrina and Louisiana in general provide an example of what it means to set a high bar. And I think that looks like a few things that are different than my experience of those types of systems in other places.

First, we did not just focus on defining failure, we focused on defining excellence. So Louisiana has a letter grade system. That meant that we were thinking about what is an A as much or more than we were thinking about what is an F, though we had a definition of both. That makes that system immediately relevant to everyone, not just the 5% of worst schools in a city or a state, which is I think an insufficient population to be pushed on outcomes in a system where huge portions of kids can’t pass a basic reading test in America.

 Second, we built a system that was calculable down to the individual kid level and that can sound very like surface, but what I mean by that is sometimes these formulas are like standard deviations of whatever, they’re like a black box. People don’t understand them. We really erred on the side of a simple system and we did that on purpose because you’re building a system not for a statistical perfection, but in order to signal and motivate the adults in the system to make the moves you want them to make on behalf of kids. 

And third, we were serious about financial and academic support when schools weren’t getting it done. I think that was true in the city of New Orleans, even in a decentralized system. And it was certainly true when we were at the state. And so all of that to say if you find yourself sort of cynical about how much these systems have even mattered, I’m telling you we need these systems. 

To the people of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, you are a resilient and special people, and I’m so grateful to be a resident of this state and to have been able to educate kids in and around the city for as many years as we’ve been able to.

And to all the educators who have like been behind all of the parts, Kunjan, of what you’ve talked about, literally none of this is possible without you. So thank you.