Overview:
In New Orleans, Black teachers once made up most of the workforce. Yet their numbers have sharply declined as the school system was rebuilt with reform in mind. Founded in 2017, BE NOLA works to reverse that trend, noting that Black students thrive with Black educators.
In the two decades since Hurricane Katrina drowned the city and its public school system, the story of K-12 education in New Orleans has gone something like this: nothing good happened until charter schools, and white reformers, showed up.
But Adrinda Kelly, a New Orleans native, knows that’s not the whole story. The public school teachers she had growing up — most of them Black women — helped prepare her for Harvard University.
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“Frankly, our school system wasn’t perfect, but my experience pre-Katrina was a great one,” Kelly says. Her teachers, she says, weren’t just concerned with her grades; they cared for her well-being.
Investing in Black Teachers and Schools
Now Kelly and her colleague, Stevona Elem-Rogers, are among those working to reclaim that legacy. They are co-leaders of Black Education for New Orleans (BE NOLA) a grassroots nonprofit that invests in Black teachers and promotes Black-led schools to increase the number of Black teachers in New Orleans classrooms.
The goal, Kelly says, is simple: ensure New Orleans’ Black students receive a culturally relevant, high-quality education, like she did. Since post-Katrina reforms, experts say, the city’s teaching workforce has gotten whiter and K-12 test scores have improved, but Black children are still being left behind.
“I think our education system is often pointed to as a model around the potential impact of charter-based reform,” Kelly said. But “there are a lot of people who don’t like what’s going down.”
Altered Dynamics
When Hurricane Katrina barreled through New Orleans on Aug. 23, 2005, it killed about 1,400 people, flooded blocks of the mostly Black Lower Ninth Ward, and swept entire houses off their foundations. The storm also altered the city’s dynamics: Tens of thousands of people fled or were displaced, but only about 60% have returned, and gentrification has taken hold. As it slowly recovered, New Orleans became smaller, with a larger percentage of white residents.
During the recovery, some civic leaders saw an opportunity to rebuild the city’s troubled school system. They gradually shifted K-12 education from a centralized, traditional public school system to a decentralized charter school system, with a focus on education reform. Part of that transition, however, involved revamping New Orleans’ teaching workforce — including firing more than 4,300 teachers, most of them Black.
The new teaching vanguard looked vastly different. Before Katrina, 71% of the city’s public educators were Black; by 2014, only 49% of teachers were. Meanwhile, as the overall gains in math and reading scores for city students improved, fewer than one-third of Black fourth graders were reading on grade level,
A Community-Rooted Solution
The BE NOLA founding collective — Dr. Howard Fuller, Elem-Rogers, Andre Perry, Bishop Tom Watson, Stacy Martin, Ashana Bigard, Bill Rouselle, and Jonathan Wilson — built BE NOLA in 2017. It was the brainchild of several community conversations they hosted about building up a thriving education system for Black educators and students.
While some thought the city’s school system was on the right track, “there were people in
