On the 20th anniversary of the Katrina disaster, a longtime NOLA reporter describes the challenges of covering a highly decentralized system — and the nuances outside NOLA coverage often miss.
Aug 27, 2025
Fifteen years ago, I moved to New Orleans as an Americorps volunteer. I was 22 years old.
Having spent my summers in Appalachia rebuilding houses, I was well poised to continue on that path.
However, my journalism career began a year later, when I responded to a Craigslist ad seeking a team of reporters to cover charter school boards for $50 per meeting.
I responded to a Craigslist ad seeking a team of reporters to cover charter school boards for $50 per meeting.
A small nonprofit outlet called The Lens had formed the Charter School Reporting Corps to monitor the nonprofit charter school operators’ adherence to sunshine laws.
By then, the rapid post-Katrina expansion of charter schools was well underway. Educators and community members were adjusting to the unprecedented structure. That meant newsrooms had to adapt as well, to cover an increasingly decentralized school system.
The new system was difficult for reporters to cover — and has watered down the voices of New Orleanians for 20 years.
With mixed success, reporters like me have worked to elevate those voices beyond the scattered schools.
My path to charter school board rooms
Twenty years ago this month, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. The Louisiana legislature immediately rewrote key education law, lowering the cut score for what was considered a failing school, and the state-run Recovery School District seized control of over 100 campuses.
Education decisions for the vast majority of the city’s students moved from New Orleans to Baton Rouge.
I was intrigued by the rebuilding school system. But I wasn’t initially involved. I had spent my college summers in rural Kentucky and West Virginia, shoring up bathroom floors in trailers and installing metal roofs on crumbling coal camp houses. Construction felt more meaningful.
Six years after the storm, I was living across from a boarded-up school, in the midst of rebuilding flood-ravaged homes. After a not-so-gentle “now or never” conversation with my parents’ neighbors, Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters Rose French and Brad Schrade, I secured an internship at a local outlet called Gambit Weekly.
In August of 2011, I joined the charter school reporting team. I had found the perfect marriage of my two interests in education reporting.
I had found the perfect marriage of my two interests in education reporting.
An overwhelming need for more education coverage
By 2011, the city had dozens of charter operators each with monthly school board meetings — tenfold the number of school boards a metro education reporter would typically cover. New Orleans was marching toward becoming the nation’s first all-charter school district.
The Times-Picayune long dominated education in city coverage. NPR’s local affiliate WWNO has long had an education reporter. TV stations largely follow press releases. The Baton Rouge Advocate came to town in 2012, adding another education reporter.
But as charter schools expanded the paper’s two or three education reporters couldn’t be in dozens of charter school board meetings. In 2011, newspapers across the country were already shrinking, including The Times-Picayune.
Founded in 2009, The Lens aims to fill gaps in city coverage on two ends of the spectrum — hyper-local straight news spots and in-depth, heavily-cited investigations.
Operating out of a few desks in the FOX 8 newsroom,The Lens was born of Karen Gadbois’ historic preservation blog. A textile artist turned watchdog, Gadbois would sometimes be the first to alert a homeowner the city planned to demolish their house. Her vision was to put a reporter in each charter board room.
I was grateful to be on The Lens’ ground-breaking team.
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Sunshine laws & meeting agendas
Charter school advocates tout bringing decisions closer to students. That is undeniable by way of a school leader hiring and firing teachers and choosing curriculum. But with unelected boards — taxpayers have no recourse for decisions they disagree with.
The routines instilled in elected boards had to be retaught. Charter schools must publicize budgets per state law and open board meetings to the public — many didn’t know. Some boards spent thousands of taxpayer dollars learning, by fighting, state public records law.
So Lens reporters had to explain to novice charter school board members that we were allowed to be in the room. Some of these were easily teachable moments — others were painful. We were the enforcers of public meetings law.
There were other items to sort out as well. Were charter schools entitled to free water as public schools were? The state attorney general decided the answer was yes — but some unaware charter schools still paid for water.
The core tenets of sunshine law — public records and public meetings law — were a key tool for reporters. As the media learned how to apply them to charter schools, the volunteer boards learned how to comply.
The learning curve was steep on both sides.
Reporting on delayed or obscure meeting agendas was another way The Lens was able to improve agenda clarity over time.
I try to patrol agendas as best I can, but there is still no centralized place for parents and taxpayers to find meeting schedules, and one outlet alone cannot track and publish all the agendas.
A slow rebirth of public meetings
Lens reporters’ presence at board meetings sped up charter school boards’ compliance — or at least good-faith effort towards it.
Our presence also taught parents their rights to participate in and question board members. I’ve covered Lycée Français de la Nouvelle-Orléans intensely over the last 14 years. It ran afoul of public meetings law many times in its early years. Lycée parents have been intensely involved in the charter’s public meetings and regularly use public records law.
Public participation has crept back in other ways, too. After reunification — a three-year process that brought all schools back under control of the Orleans Parish School Board by 2018 — charter school renewals were solely the decision of New Orleans’ superintendent.
Similarly, during a decade of state control, the Recovery School District’s board had only met in New Orleans once a quarter — the meetings were rarely of substance and gave the public little opportunity to weigh in.
Now, the Orleans Parish School Board has come full circle — it votes to affirm the superintendent’s recommendation so the public can weigh in on those votes.
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Test scores eclipse student well-being
In August of 2015, the national press descended on New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina’s 10th anniversary. The tension that summer was palpable. How had the city fared after a decade of rebuilding? Had the charter experiment worked?
Academic research largely focused on school ratings. How many children were still attending F rated schools?
That number had improved. But coverage generally overlooked children’s wellbeing. How did moving from F schools to D schools affect students’ mental health? We’ll never know. Student wellbeing on the whole was under-analyzed.
By the 10-year mark, there had already been many fantastic examples of work focused on individual students and families.
Sarah Carr’s 2013 book Hope Against Hope chronicled KIPP’s efforts to recruit students and the struggles of early days in a rebuilding city. For NPR, Anya Kamenetz captured the disappearance of neighborhood schools. TV stations like Fox 8 Live TV had produced compelling results when they honed in on education.
Locally, The Advocate and TV stations struggled to realize single charter school stories were often emblematic of systemwide issues. The engrained need for “district” oriented stories was weighted too heavily, many editors clung to that past standard of coverage.
The engrained need for “district” oriented stories was weighted too heavily, many editors clung to that past standard of coverage.
Other journalists — especially opinion writers — completely missed the point, retraumatizing citizens.
National outlets parroted former President George W. Bush’s praising of education reform in the city. Same with Arne Duncan’s line about Hurricane Katrina having been “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”
Even now, national outlets often fail to realize that as test scores have improved (and they have) the state’s rating system has changed nearly every year — including years of rating schools on a curve. This reporting requires a lot of context.
Many internal features of a school district, such as academic record-keeping, were not closely scrutinized at the 10-year mark. I was particularly proud of my coverage of John F. Kennedy High School in 2019, which found administrators had changed Fs to Ds to promote students on top of failing to track classes required to graduate.
After our reporting, they had to spend the summer making up credits — an outcome I hated. But students had long suffered from problems with transferring academic records and this reporting led to systemic reform.
I only wish we’d uncovered the problem sooner.
I often used anonymized district complaints to highlight problems. Even lacking a family’s story, I find many people will contact me with similar problems and a story can build from there.
That fear of stories being too small initially held back charter school coverage. Individual schools and students’ stories are often indicative of larger trends.
Reporters are often the centralizing force in covering agencies — and in New Orleans we must work even harder.
I hope we’ve risen to the challenge.
Marta Jewson has covered New Orleans schools for 14 years for The Lens. You can follow her at @martajewson and @martajewson.bsky.social. Her previous contribution to The Grade was The heartbreaking but necessary work of covering school closures.
Previously from The Grade
