Project Summary
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the US Gulf Coast in 2005, the state of Louisiana fired over 7,000 public school educators and transformed New Orleans’ public school system into a decentralized system of privately managed charter schools. At the time, charter schools were framed as a corrective for New Orleans’ severely underperforming public schools. In the post-Katrina school system, students are not districted based on neighborhood zoning or household zip code. Since 2011, parents can use an online application system called OneApp which allows them to apply to any charter school in Orleans Parish with open seats. Charter schools that can maintain increased performance on standardized tests remain open, and charter schools that cannot are closed by the Orleans Parish School Board. Every year, charter schools are issued grades based on academic performance. The logic of “school choice” presupposes that parents will seek to enroll their children in high performing schools, regardless of geographic proximity, and disenroll their children from low performing schools, thus applying competitive, market-based discipline to the city’s school system. This project examines school transportation as a key site to understand the social impact of applying large scale, market-driven policies to public goods and services.
