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From the Ground Up

With the future of New Orleans' schools at stake, Teach For America corps members and alumni step up to help remake the system

By Sam Winston and Ting Yu | Photographs by Jean-Christian Bourcart

On August 28, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit, Ronicka Harrison and her family made plans to leave their native city of New Orleans. However, Harrison's 72-year-old grandmother Joyce, affectionately known as Big Momma, refused to budge. So, Harrison, her sister, several of her cousins, and her grandmother hunkered down at their aunt Jocelyn's house in the West Bank area.

"At about 3 a.m.," says Harrison, "Katrina came. She took down the roof, and the windows, and everything else in the house. We just sat there crying." Later that morning, radio reports of looting and flooding convinced the family it was time to leave. Big Momma knew there was no other choice.

One year later, Harrison is back in New Orleans in her first year as a Teach For America corps member, teaching at the S.J. Green Charter School. She has become part of a sweeping education reform movement in New Orleans that is literally rebuilding the school system from the ground up. Harrison is joined by 57 other corps members and a close network of alumni, many of whom have endured extraordinary circumstances to keep education alive in the city over the past year.

It's no easy task, considering that even before the storm, public education in New Orleans was clinging to life support. In the fall of 2005, more than half of the 65,000 students in New Orleans Public Schools were failing math and English proficiency tests. By the end of the 2004-2005 school year, 68 out of 108 schools in NOPS had been branded "academically unacceptable" according to a six-level ranking system, with many at risk of being taken over by the state. Forty percent of Louisiana's academically unacceptable schools were in Orleans Parish, even though it held only 8 percent of all schools in the state. In an ironic way, the tremendous devastation wreaked by Katrina may prove to be New Orleans' best shot at educational reform. Since the storm, a deluge of federal money and a state takeover of the majority of schools have created an institutional vacuum and a unique opportunity to overhaul a broken school system. Today, 22,000 students have returned to New Orleans, and 53 schools have reopened in the district-approximately 60 percent of them charters. The remaining schools are controlled by the state-run Recovery School District and Orleans Parish School Board. As New Orleans struggles to rebuild its infrastructure and capitalize on the potential of this moment, those immersed in the revitalization efforts express no shortage of hope-or anxiety.

"We're not a region that's fixed," says Mary Garton (G.N.O. '91), executive director of Teach For America - Greater New Orleans. "We're an education community that's made pretty aggressive decisions, and we're plowing ahead with our plan. But until we've actually created equal education opportunities for every child, I hope people don't turn away from rebuilding efforts."

For Harrison, who grew up attending New Orleans public schools, the mission to reform the system is personal. Labeled throughout elementary school as a "gifted" student, Harrison was shocked when she was placed in remedial sixth grade classes after her family relocated to North Carolina. Apparently New Orleans standards came in far below those of other states. "It really felt terrible," she remembers. "Every day I begged my mom to come home."

Harrison channeled those feelings of embarrassment into a zeal for social justice. Last spring, she graduated from Xavier University in New Orleans and joined the 58-member Teach For America corps in her hometown. Now teaching fifth grade social studies and language arts, Harrison can't imagine being anywhere else. "This is my city," she says. "I love New Orleans with a passion. This is where my family is. There's a need here. There's not a need anywhere across the country like there is here."

Harrison's words could not ring truer after the storm decimated roughly 85 percent of the city's school buildings and turned teachers, students, and families into evacuees. Immediately after Katrina, Teach For America's Greater New Orleans team relocated temporarily to an office in Baton Rouge and worked around the clock to locate all 136 displaced corps members. Within two months, most corps members had been placed at rural southeastern Louisiana schools overwhelmed with evacuated students from the city, or they were working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the state's request. Corps members found themselves sleeping on the couches of alumni or, in some instances, in extra classrooms, as they started their new assignments. One large cohort volunteered to teach at NOW College Prep, a KIPP Transformation School in Houston that was created to serve evacuated New Orleans students (see "No Time to Lose").