New Orleans School Reformers at S.J. Green Charter School in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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The reform movement is allowing neighborhoods to take matters into their own hands and run their own schools. Broadmoor, where I grew up and my brother still lives, is a mixed neighborhood, racially and economically, right in the heart of New Orleans. It has long had an active biracial improvement association, which the storm kicked up a couple of notches. It formed a partnership with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, which has sent more than 90 students and faculty to help plan and rebuild, and aid from the philanthropist Walter Shorenstein and Bill Clinton's foundation soon followed. Thus fortified, LaToya Cantrell, president of the association, and Hal Roark, executive director of the Broadmoor Development Corp., helped the community take control of the neighborhood school. They formed a school board and selected Edison Schools, the education company founded by entrepreneur Chris Whittle, to operate a charter school.
Their main problem is finding a home for it. Broadmoor's old school building is still boarded up, like many across New Orleans, a testament to FEMA's intransigence and its culture of coming up with bureaucratic justifications for inaction rather than finding ways to help rebuild the city. Lately, however, Vallas and Pastorek have been working with President Bush's Gulf Coast relief coordinator, Donald Powell, and FEMA to find ways to get schools rebuilt or replaced. When that happens, Cantrell and Roark believe the new school will be an anchor for an education corridor planned in the neighborhood that would include a repaired library and a community learning center funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been deeply engaged, both with funding and through the no-nonsense leadership of its program director, Jim Shelton. Other philanthropic supporters of the school-reform movement, most notably Eli Broad and Don Fisher, are poised to become much more involved now that it has become clear, with the surge of school entrepreneurs and the appointment of Vallas, that New Orleans will be the nation's most visible test of the charter-school movement. Tulane University, a driving force in the renewal of New Orleans, has created an Institute for Public Education Initiatives to serve as a think tank for the process, and fans of the university's president, Scott Cowen, donated money to name the institution after him.
I assumed there would be a lot of partisan bickering over the new approaches being taken. But that hasn't happened. Democrat George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, came down and worked out ways to provide incentives for the teachers and educators willing to move there. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, a former Education Secretary, have also become deeply involved in finding practical solutions to the myriad federal bureaucratic challenges that come with building a new type of system from scratch.
So how is it all working? Next month as many as 84 public schools will be open, about 60% of them as public charter schools. Parents can apply directly to any of them or apply through the central school district and list their preferences. Oversubscribed schools will use a lottery, and undersubscribed ones will be either closed or turned over to different operators.
Vallas is lining up partners such as Lockheed-Martin, Shell Oil, the National Guard, various universities and perhaps even the Catholic-school network Christo Rey. With their sponsorship, he is creating an array of specialized high schools, such as a military academy, a maritime school and others focused on the arts and science. There is already a high-tech school, and Vallas is trying to persuade Microsoft to help build another. Some of the schools include paid work-study programs, which would connect the students to specific jobs when they graduate.
There will be problems in this entrepreneurial free-for-all. Even though the charter operators are carefully vetted and many of them have national track records, some will inevitably produce poor schools. There's also the danger that the best students with the most committed parents will be skimmed off by the best schools. That's why it's important to have clear standards, accountability and testing, so that all parents can make informed choices. The tuition money must follow the pupils, so that schools that fail will wither away and, unless politicians or old-line bureaucrats get involved, have to shut down.
There are those who argue that some parents will not have the ability or inclination to find the right school for their kids. But I'm convinced that all parents--rich and poor--benefit when they get to make their own choices rather than be subjected to a monopoly provider. So I am optimistic. If the experiment succeeds, even in part, it has the chance to transform urban education nationwide. That's why I'm excited that so many smart and spirited activists--innovative and imaginative and dedicated to the cause of ensuring that every kid in America gets a decent shot--are surging to New Orleans to be part of a mission of a lifetime that they, and their nation, will study for decades to come.
Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president of the Aspen Institute and chairman of the board of Teach for America