In 2003, New Orleans public schools were among the worst in the country. Seventy percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in math, 74 percent weren’t proficient in English, and the graduation rate was barely over 50 percent. Moreover, the district was as corrupt as it was incompetent. FBI investigations led to the indictment of two dozen school officials; nearly $70 million in federal funding was missing.
New Orleans schools have since achieved a remarkable transformation. In 2023, the high school graduation rate was 79 percent, and 65 percent of graduates enrolled in college—nearly double what it was in 2004 and higher than the state average.
This success, one expert argues, was powered by the city’s commitment to charter schools. Publicly funded and but independently operated, charter schools enjoy more autonomy than traditional public schools in what they teach and how they teach it. Their charters, however, are dependent on their performance, which author and director David Osborne says is key.
In his new documentary, Turnaround, which premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival last fall, Osborne chronicles the rise of New Orleans public schools through its use of charters and argues for the expansion of this model. Osborne is the author of six books, including the 1992 bestseller, Reinventing Government.
This transcript has been condensed for length and edited for clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes.
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Anne Kim: Why did you decide to make this movie? What is going on with public education right now that compelled you to tell the story of New Orleans and its schools?
David Osborne: Our public school systems in the inner cities just flat out don’t work. They’re failing too many kids and it’s the big weak link in our K-12 system. But one city in particular has figured it out and is excelling and performing far above what would be expected given the poverty and the racial makeup of the city, and that’s New Orleans.
There are other cities that have done similar things, like Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis, but the New Orleans story is so important because it has huge lessons for other urban school systems.
I told the story in a book eight years ago called Reinventing America’s Schools, Creating a 21st Century Education System. We did a 24-city book tour and pushed the book as hard as we could, but you realize that in today’s world, if you want to actually change people’s minds, you have to get it on a television screen. I decided New Orleans was the most dramatic story and the most complete turnaround, and I found a producer of documentaries in New Orleans who had actually worked in a charter school and a charter network for over 10 years right through Hurricane Katrina. And so we decided to give it a try.
Anne Kim: The movie is titled Turnaround, so let’s start with what New Orleans public schools were like before the turnaround began.
David Osborne: This was often called the worst school system in the country. The dropout rate was 50 percent, and that included middle school and high school, because at the time you could drop out of seventh and eighth grade in Louisiana. Less than one in five went on to college. Test scores were abysmal. Sixty-two percent of students went to schools graded “F” by the state. Corruption was rampant, and a lot of people were stealing, including bus drivers selling gas out of their buses. The chairwoman of the school board went to prison for taking a $100,000 bribe to buy a particular educational software package. I think 22 people went to prison who were high up in the district.
The FBI had people stationed at the district headquarters investigating, and the federal Department of Education was threatening to take away all of Louisiana’s Title I money, which was a lot of money, because of the scandals in New Orleans. Both parties in the state legislature were completely fed up with the New Orleans school system.
Anne Kim: Wow. So that takes us to the turnaround. And one of the protagonists in your documentary is this really remarkable woman named Leslie Jacobs. And it seems she started pushing this idea of so-called charter schools back in the late 1990s. Can you tell us a little bit about Leslie, but also explain where this idea of charters comes from, how they work, and what makes them conducive to helping schools succeed in a way that New Orleans schools hadn’t been succeeding before?
David Osborne: I’ll start with that second part about charters. Charter schools are public schools, but they’re schools of choice. They don’t have a geography. They can’t choose their students, but parents can apply. They have to use a lottery if they have more students wanting to attend than they can serve.
They work better, particularly in the inner city, for several reasons. First, they have a lot of autonomy. They’re not part of a district. They don’t have to follow all the district rules and regulations. They can hire and fire their own staff, which most urban principals can’t do. Those teachers get assigned by the central office and once they get tenure, you can’t fire them unless they do something illegal.
[Second, charter schools] can also establish their own curriculum and their own schedule. Many of them, for example, go to a schedule with only a six-week summer and then two-week breaks throughout the school year because low-income kids lose so much ground over a three month summer.
In a city like New Orleans, there’s been centuries of racism—first slavery, then Jim Crow, and then, once the schools were integrated by the federal government, “white flight.” This was a system that had been abandoned by the white community in New Orleans, and the effects of racism are enormous. You can’t take a cookie-cutter middle class school and educate Black kids in the inner city the way you would middle class kids. You have to go way above and beyond.
If the kids are falling behind, you have Saturday school, and you have an extra week of school during vacation. Charter schools do all kinds of things that normal district schools don’t do because their kids have greater needs.
And then it’s paired with accountability for performance. If the kids aren’t learning, if they’re falling further behind grade level every year, that school will not get a second charter. It will be replaced by another operator who has shown the ability to educate kids.
Anne Kim: And did that happen in New Orleans? Did charters get shut down?
David Osborne: Since 2005, when the reforms began, they’ve closed between 35 and 40 schools for performance. And that’s in a district with about 80 schools. So yes, if you don’t perform, if those kids aren’t learning, everybody in the building knows that they might lose their job someday. And that makes everything different. That means when there’s a problem, the teachers and the administrators can’t just say, “well, sorry, our hands are tied.” We can’t do anything about that. They have to solve it. It creates so much more urgency.
The third thing is choice of different learning models. [Charters] have the freedom to say, we’re going to be a Montessori school, or we’re going to be a STEM school, or we’re going to be a classical education school, or we’re going to be a military maritime academy, which they have in New Orleans, or we’re going to be a dual language immersion school, or we’re going to be hands-on learning school. There are many different models, and families can choose what they think will fit their child best. And if it doesn’t work out, they can choose a different school. Those are the elements that make charter schools work.
Now you asked about Leslie Jacobs, who really is the person responsible for the reforms in New Orleans. She is a remarkable woman. The state superintendent long ago described her to me as a force of nature multiplied by 10.
She got herself elected to the local school board in 1992 and spent four years banging her head against the wall. She couldn’t get the other school board members to make any meaningful changes. So then in 1996, she got herself appointed to the state board of education. And from there, she pushed through a new accountability system with a new test.
In 2003, a valedictorian at one of the high schools—let me repeat that—a valedictorian at one of the high schools could not pass the graduation exit exam, which was set at the time at a seventh grade level. And there was no protest, no fuss raised.
Leslie was a business person, and she realized that in business, when a company is failing, when it’s bankrupt, they go through Chapter 11 and the court makes decisions about how it should be restructured and its debts repaid so that it can reemerge as a viable business. She realized we need some version of that for public schools that are academically bankrupt. So she proposed and pushed through a constitutional amendment in 2003 that created something called the “recovery school district,” which was designed to take over the very worst schools in the state and hand them to charter operators to see if they could turn them around. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit two years later, they had taken over about five schools in New Orleans.
But Hurricane Katrina changed the game, because the school system was wiped out. Before Katrina, they had about 125 schools, and something like 100 or 105 were destroyed by the storm. Leslie basically said to the superintendent, “we cannot let that district reopen these schools.” So she proposed another law that would put any school performing below the state average into the recovery school district. As the schools began to reopen, and the state began to rebuild, they gradually handed them off to charter operators.
They were careful to make sure they were strong operators. So they really only did about five a year. The recovery school district had to operate some directly for a while, but they didn’t perform as well as the charters. So they eventually made a decision to charter them all.
For the first decade after Katrina, it was clearly the fastest improving district in the country. And since COVID, the data I’ve seen tell me that it’s the fastest improving district in the country.
Today, the graduation rate is 81 percent, and the percentage of graduates going to college is 65 percent, which is almost 10 points higher than the state average. Now, there is no other city in America, a high poverty city, that is sending kids to college at a higher rate than the state. It’s incredible.
Anne Kim: You profile some of the charter operators in the documentary, and I wonder if you could pick one of these operators and give us some concrete details about what is it that they do.
David Osborne: Well, they have high expectations of every student. For example, let’s talk about George Washington Carver High School, which is part of Collegiate Academies, a group of about five charter schools in New Orleans.
It was a totally failing school—an “F” school in 2005. It got flooded and has been totally rebuilt, so they have a nice new building. Like many charter high schools, they name their homeroom classes after the college that the teacher went to, and they’re talking to kids about going to college from day one. In freshman year, they’re taking kids to see colleges, so they’re building that expectation.
Often there are two or three leaders of a charter school. There’s the academic leader, the operational leader, and then sometimes they’ll have a leader for culture, which is about discipline and creating norms and expectations. So the academic leader will visit classrooms constantly and watch teachers teach and give them feedback. And then they will take their best teachers and make them deans, so they spend half their time coaching other teachers and leading teams of teachers who meet once a week to plan.
In the typical public school in this country, you get hired as a teacher, and they give you your classroom, they say good luck, they shut the door, and you’re on your own.
The successful charters don’t do it that way. They really invest heavily in making sure that their teachers are effective. And if they’re not effective, they let them go. And they’re very careful about who they hire. They have a lot of rigorous courses. They expect kids—no matter what their background, no matter how poverty-stricken their family is—they expect them to take rigorous classes, AP classes.
Anne Kim: I noticed you kept using the phrase “successful charters,” and there’s definitely been a lot of criticism that has come the way of charters, including some pretty high profile corruption scandals. For instance, a chain of Chicago-based charters called Concept Schools paid $4.5 million to settle a federal corruption investigation. You’ve also got national organizations like the National Center for Charter School Accountability that recently released a report not only criticizing charter schools for scandals like this one, but accusing them of underperformance. What’s your response to the critics?
David Osborne: Well, the first thing I want to mention is about corruption. There are plenty of corruption scandals in school districts. Witness New Orleans, where 22 people went to prison.
Corruption is something a small percentage of humans do, and in any activity, it’s going to be there. In terms of how we make sure that charters are high quality, there’s one huge factor, which is the authorizer.
Charter schools are given their charters by an authorizer, and it varies from state to state because every state has a different charter law. Michigan is a good example of a bad actor. Colleges can be authorizers in Michigan, and, unfortunately, some of them do a very poor job.
The way you make sure that charters are high quality is to close the ones that are low quality. That’s the secret. That’s why this works. In fact, there’s a research group at Tulane University led by Doug Harris, who’s spent the last 10 to 15 years studying the reforms in New Orleans. If you talk to Doug Harris, he’ll tell you that the single most important factor in the rapid rate of improvement is the fact that they close the low-performing schools and replace them with high-performing operators.
There are places where authorizers don’t do that. Michigan, as I said, has too many authorizers, and too many of them don’t hold their schools accountable. So they let lousy charter schools go year after year after year. In California, the school districts authorize most of the charter schools, and frankly, they’re too busy operating schools. They don’t invest enough time in authorizing, and they don’t do a good job of it. So in California, the charters are above the district performance, but not wildly above it because too many low-performing charters are allowed to continue year after year.
Anne Kim: I want to switch gears a little bit and ask about something else going on in the public schools right now, and that is the burgeoning school voucher movement. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” that was passed by Republicans earlier this summer has a major provision to encourage the use of vouchers. Can you differentiate the voucher movement from the charter movement? I think there probably is a lot of confusion about these two alternatives to traditional public schools, and probably competition going forward between these models.
David Osborne: Yes, absolutely. So there are three big differences. With vouchers, parents take them to private schools. And a private school can admit whoever they want and reject whoever they want. So if they want all white kids, they have all white kids. A public school can’t do that. A charter school is not allowed to choose its students, and if it’s oversubscribed, it has to have a lottery. So there’s more equal access to charter schools.
The second big difference with charter schools is that if the authorizers are doing their job, they’re held accountable for their performance. If the kids aren’t learning, if they’re falling further behind grade level every year, that school’s going to have to close.
That’s not true of most voucher systems. I think there are one or two states that have some performance accountability in its voucher system. But in most states, there’s no accountability. When I wrote Reinventing Government in 1992, I thought that accountability to parents would be enough—that if the school was lousy, the parents would leave, the school would have less money, and it would have to close. It turns out, as we learned in the charter sector, that’s not true. There are a lot of parents who really don’t have a good sense of how well their children are learning and what they’re learning. You can’t just rely on parents to hold schools accountable. You also need the government or the school district to do it, whoever the authorizer is, and that just doesn’t exist in most voucher systems.
The third thing is that with a charter system, we can pretty much guarantee equal opportunity. But if a voucher is worth $10,000, and the best school in the city costs $30,000 a year, some people are going to spend the extra $20,000 for their child. So we’re going to stratify the education system by income even more than it already is. And equal opportunity, which is a founding principle of public education, just goes out the window. And this at a time when, for the last 40 years, the divide between affluent and poor people in this country has just been widening.
Working people’s standard of living has been going down for 40 years, and college-educated people’s standard of living has been going up for 40 years. We are coming apart as a society, and now we’re going to magnify that with vouchers? I think that’s a tragedy. And unfortunately, there are 15 or 16 states that have passed universal voucher systems where every kid in the state will eventually be able to get a voucher.
I always supported voucher programs for poor kids. That’s how they started in Milwaukee and Cleveland and other places. If a kid’s trapped in a lousy public school, yes, we want their parents to be able to get a better school for them. But when they’re universal, when everybody can get them, and there’s no limit on adding money to the voucher, then I think we’re making a big mistake.
I think the real motivation is just from people who are affluent, and they want their private school subsidized. Arizona has the most vouchers in the country by far, and studies have shown that something like 75 percent of the money is going to kids who were already in private school. I think it’s just the self-interest of parents who can afford private school and want some more money.
Anne Kim: How optimistic are you about the state of public education in America today? I mean, it seems to be under threat from so many quarters right now. Where do you see charters fitting in whatever large push needs to take place sometime in the future to save public education?
David Osborne: Well, let me just say first that until 2016, I was optimistic. Things were moving in the right direction. Charters were growing rapidly. School districts were beginning to learn from charters and to give their own schools a lot more autonomy. We had all these models popping up called “innovation schools” and “Renaissance schools” and “partnership schools.”
Two things happened in 2016 in November. First, pro-charter initiatives were defeated handsomely in Massachusetts and Georgia because the teachers unions did a good job of organizing and spending against them. Second, Donald Trump got elected and said he was in support of charters and appointed Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, who said she was in support of charters, although her real enthusiasm is vouchers.
Well, Democrats had been split because Bill Clinton was very pro-charter and Barack Obama was very pro-charter. But the teachers unions hate charters because they’re a threat to the unions. Ninety percent of charters don’t unionize.
So now you’ve got Trump being pro-charter, and 90 percent of Democrats just decided, OK, I’m against this. If he’s for it, I’m against it. We’re not going to support charters. So the politics changed dramatically after that election. Since then, I’m not very optimistic. I’m really not. The one area where I think there’s some hope is that school districts in voucher states are now going to have to compete. They’re going to have to up their game. And I’m hoping that they look at the charter models and realize this is the way to compete. That would be one good outcome in an otherwise bad picture.
