Dive Brief:

• On the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s disastrous arrival, Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who both had a hand in New Orleans’ recovery, visited the city to discuss the post-storm overhaul of the city’s schools.
• Obama praised the education system’s progress, saying schools before the storm were “largely broken,” and Bush struck a similar chord by calling the city a “beacon for school reform.”
• Some families aren't as impressed, as illustrated by an International Business Times investigation that found a number of special needs students potentially pushed out of the system and a drastic reduction in black teachers.

Dive Insight:

It seems every observer has an opinion on how New Orleans’ schools have fared in the wake of Katrina. On one hand, politicians on both sides of the aisle have pointed to rising test scores and an increased set of choices for parents in the city, since the schools were largely turned over to charter operators. Before the storm, Huffington Post reports, the city school district was the second-lowest-ranking district in Louisiana — itself the second-lowest-ranking state in the country.

Today, nearly three-quarters of high-schoolers graduate and just 6% of students are failing.

But based on stories like the one published by the International Business Times, the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. As previously stated, IBT found that numerous special needs students may have been pushed out of the New Orleans school system due to the difficulty of the choice process and the lack of adequate services at the new charter schools. And controversy remains over the wholesale layoffs that led to a significant reducation of the city’s largely black teaching force, who were replaced by an increasingly white, non-local corps provided by programs like Teach For America.