Busts are painful.
Destruction is brutal.
Death is horrible.
However, it is out of all those things that the sprouts of future generations come. New Orleans’ is proving that this is just as true today as it’s always been:
Katrina also washed away much of New Orleans’s sorry public school district, where majorities of students consistently failed. Once again, citizens are improving on what they had. The city’s biggest education reform is that the majority of its 35,000 public school kids now attend charter schools overseen by a state-run school district. It’s too early to tell much from test-score results, but it’s clear that the success and optimism of charter school operators—from the national KIPP outfit to local nonprofits—at getting schools up and running has been a big factor in residents’ decisions to return home.
Often the way things are is simply a legacy of the way things have always been.
And if it took Katrina to save a city full of kids that haven’t had a chance in generations; well, so be it.
