Video of the Week: The New Orleans School Choice Experiment

Brandon Stewart / August 19, 2010

Our friends at ReasonTV have put out a great new video highlighting the strides that have been made towards school choice in New Orleans following the Hurricane Katrina disaster. As ReasonTV Editor Nick Gillespie says in the video, few people could have predicted the improvements in education that would result, but “sometimes things get so bad that radical change can happen.”

Before Katrina, the New Orleans school system was in terrible shape. As one mother explains, when they were displaced to Baton Rouge during the cleanup, she found much better schools compared to what they had known before. The thought of returning her children to the same terrible system upon their return to New Orleans weighed heavily on her mind. “I dreaded coming home,” she admits in the video, “I didn’t want to put my kids in public school here in New Orleans.” (more…)