Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Celeste Le.

She is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University

and author of the book Public Schools Private Governance, Education, Reform and democracy in New Orleans, available from Temple

University Press. Professor Lay, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs.

Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So your book is a discussion of the great experiment in education reform that occurred here in the city of New Orleans in the years after Hurricane Katrina.

And perhaps for listeners and readers who are totally unfamiliar with the great experimented education reform

that occurred in New Orleans over the last 16 years, you could give a sort of a broad

level overview of what happened to the school system and sort of why it's significant and worth studying?

Sure, absolutely. So the great experiment, and that's a good way to think about it. Others have

used that same language. Typically, people put the beginning of that experiment at the post-Katrina period.

So in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana had a special session.

The legislature had a special session not long after the hurricane in the fall of 2005.

And as a part of that special session, they passed a law that essentially transferred all

of the, all, the majority of, the vast majority of public schools in New Orleans to the

control of a state agency known as the Recovery School District,

the RSD. And so that sort of stripped most of the public schools all but about a dozen

public schools. So over 100 public schools. It sort of stripped the local authority, the elected school board,

and transferred that to this state authority. The sort of traditional way in which schools are

governed became very different in New Orleans after Katrina. Now, the argument in my book, one of the arguments in my book

is that I don't place the beginning of education reform

with Hurricane Katrina.

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