This week marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. And while that storm certainly changed many facets of the state forever, the state is largely the same as it once was. Barry Erwin, the chief policy officer of Leaders for a Better Louisiana, says one effect of Katrina’s aftermath was the rise of charter schools throughout the state. Erwin says it all started in New Orleans, and the charter schools have produced tremendous results.
“You go back to 2005. Kids in New Orleans were the very bottom of the state. Today, that district is a C school district, but pushing a B school district,” Erwin said.
Erwin says Katrina also led to a consolidation of the levee boards in that part of the state.
“There’s only two Levee Boards in that area: One on the West Bank of the river, one on the East Bank. We took out the politics of the process, in terms of appointing people to the levy board,” Erwin explained.
Erwin says New Orleans used the occasion of the recovery from Katrina to try to reinvent itself economically, with limited success.
“There is a feeling about entrepreneurs coming in, people wanting to give back, diversifying the economy in ways that we hadn’t been able to do before. And we saw a little bit of that in the aftermath of Katrina. But it didn’t really stick,” Erwin said.
