Customer choice, education division

New Orleans was so ravaged by Hurricane Katrina that apparently people were willing to try anything. The city became a one-of-a-kind petri dish for student choice, and (to the amazement of many) accomplished an incredible feat:

Before the storm, the city’s high school graduation rate was 54.4 percent. In 2013, the rate for the Recovery School District was 77.6 percent.  On average, 57 percent of students performed at grade level in math and reading in 2013, up from 23 percent in 2007, according to the state.

How did they do it?  By spending a boatload of money? Well, in part:

When Katrina struck in 2005, the public schools in New Orleans were considered among the worst in the country.  Just before the storm, the elected Orleans Parish School District was bankrupt and couldn’t account for about $71 million in federal money. . . .

The city is spending about $2 billion — much of it federal hurricane recovery money — to refurbish and build schools across the city, which are then leased to charter operators at no cost. . . .

After Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board fired more than 7,000 employees — nearly all of them African American — while the charter schools hired scores of young teachers, many of them white recruits from Teach for America.  The fired teachers sued for wrongful termination and won a judgment that could total more than $1 billion.

So some new money definitely has been injected into the city's education system.  On the other hand, a lot of that money was spent bribing teachers to go away so they could be replaced.  The comments to this WaPo story contain the predictable complaints that school reformers just want to make a buck.  Whether or not making a buck is a bad thing, though, the fact is that the New Orleans experiment isn't about profit vs. non-profit schools.  It's not even about private vs. public schools.  There is a small voucher program in Louisiana that permits some public-school students to attend private schools, some of which no doubt are for-profit institutions.   And in some parts of the country, there may be a lot of for-profit charter schools.  But what's happened in New Orleans is that the public schools are still public and still non-profit.  The difference is that parents can now leave a failing school and choose another. All that changed was customer choice:  the power of competition and consequences for failure to improve an institution's performance.