As far as most people are concerned, the debate about how the federal government initially responded to Hurricane Katrina was over as soon as TV cameras rolled into Orleans Parish. The argument about how the recovery is being handled, however, is still active. Everyone agrees on one thing: New Orleans schools were in crisis even before the levees broke.

Soon after Brown v. Board of Education was decided — long before Katrina — white parents had started pulling their children out of public schools, taking their tax dollars with them. The overall test scores of Louisiana students ranked 49th in the nation when the storm hit. The state had seen 11 school superintendents in nine years and more than its share of graft and corruption. After standardized testing, 75 percent of the schools were deemed “academically unacceptable,” and five schools had already been taken over by the newly established Recovery School District. Before Katrina, Recovery meant academic recovery. After August 2005, the word meant something completely different and more dire.

New Orleans residents disagree on the course that recovery has taken; seen by all as a great opportunity to rebuild, the politics of rebuilding has had the population at odds. Rebuilding has also caused a battle between the city of New Orleans and the more conservative state of Louisiana. The conservatives in power have enthusiastically embraced the idea of using New Orleans as a test case for the privatization of public schools. This has meant establishing charter schools, which run on public funds but are managed independently from the state-run school district.

Nine days after Katrina hit, the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) made the following recommendation: “In general, tools such as tax credits and voucher programs, which allow individuals and families to direct funds, should be utilized to encourage private-sector innovation and sensitivity to individual needs and preferences…. The critical need now is to encourage investors and entrepreneurs to seek new opportunities within these cities.”

Opponents of this view argue that rebuilding has been driven by the education industry (major corporations that market goods or operate school systems) rather than educators. Provisions were passed in the state legislature to modify the state's regulation of charter schools in order to make the conversion to the charter system easier.

As a result, three different systems of schools have emerged: recovery schools, charter schools (each allowed to set its own rules), and what's left of New Orleans's public schools, with no central oversight and no shared infrastructure or enforcement. Because there is no centralized supervisory system in place and each school knows it will be evaluated based on its performance, many have complained that the charter schools practice unfair selection, weeding out underachievers or those with expensive special needs. Some schools have established selection criteria based on academic performance or behavior, while others have open-enrollment policies.

Within a month after the storm, all 7,500 school employees were placed on “disaster leave” without pay. Eventually, all teachers were fired. To get their jobs back, they were asked to reapply, pass competency tests, and agree to sign a nonunion year-to-year contract. In the meantime, the new schools — charter schools for the most part — are scrambling to hire younger, less experienced (and therefore less well paid) teachers. As of last year, New Orleans was short by 170 teachers, and will be more shorthanded this upcoming year when even more students are expected to return to the area.

New Orleans faces a unique challenge of accommodating an overwhelming migration of students to one city. Before the storm, 128 schools were running; only 6 were operational after the storm. Currently, about 56 schools are open. Private schools saw 90 percent of their students return within a year after Katrina, but only 20 percent of public school students had returned.

Some people complain that because the wealthier families returned to New Orleans first, all services and rebuilding efforts were directed at more affluent neighborhoods. The poorest families have just begun to return to New Orleans. Michael Patrick Welch, one teacher from the Young Audiences program featured in this article, says, “The thing about New Orleans is that it was possible to live here really cheaply, and so those without a lot of money could actually survive in New Orleans.” But now things have changed, and one of the most difficult problems people have in the area today is finding good and reasonably priced contractors and workers to complete the rebuilding.

Forced to evacuate, many families vacated to neighboring states and are now returning in greater numbers each year. Parents must educate themselves on the new educational systems, find a school that will take their child, and figure out how that child will get to a school outside of their neighborhood — if they are accepted at all. It is likely that those kids, who have lived through the kind of trauma that most of us could never comprehend, will also have to attend a different school with different kids, and be bused to an unfamiliar part of town. Some students don't return to school at all, and those numbers are impossible to track.

One powerful force for rebuilding the music programs in New Orleans's schools is called Young Audiences, the largest arts-in-education organization operating in New Orleans today. YA's home office is in New York, with chapters throughout the United States. The 52-year-old organization offers after-school and summer arts programs to schools that are financially challenged.

FIG. 1: The New York–based Young Audiences is the largest arts-in-education organization operating in New Orleans and offers after-school and summer arts programs. Its Arts for Learning Web site is a good professional-development resource for teachers and artists.

YA began as a way to introduce schoolchildren to classical music and opera, but it has broadened its approach over the years to include all the fine arts. That exposes kids to a variety of visual, performance, and fine arts. In 1996, YA introduced Arts for Learning (see Fig. 1), an online, media-based professional-development resource for teachers and artists. The national organization serves to feed the smaller franchises. They helped the New Orleans branch raise funds for the first nine months after the storm.

The program hires professional artists (not credentialed music teachers) to teach classes in their area of specialty. Professional dancers, fine artists, actors, and musicians come into the schools to share their talent with the kids (one woman teaches a stand-up comedy class!). The artists are paid and aren't responsible for discipline or any other such problems that a classroom teacher has to manage. Still, YA must conform to the same standards-based accountability as public schools.

The students attend whatever arts programs are offered by their schools on different days. According to Richard Bates, a former audio engineer and director of the New Orleans chapter of the Young Audiences program, a large number of those programs — which include short- and long-term residencies, workshops, and performances for school assemblies — are music related. “That's one area where we are as strong as our sister chapters,” he declares.

Before “The Storm,” as the locals call Katrina today, New Orleans YA had been downsized from operating 33 programs to 15. Two years after the storm, Bates says they are back up to about 60 percent of where they were, and the focus has shifted. “It used to be that we gave 1,300 community performances and fewer programs,” he says. “Today, we have close to 600 performances scheduled for this year, but we're running many more programs.”

New Orleans's public-school band programs were already unlike any others in the United States. For instance, they were developed from the French military style, long before John Phillip Sousa's influence, and are therefore more improvisationally based than are other marching bands in the country. Modern-day New Orleans school bands mix in contemporary rock, blues, and R&B and are such a part of New Orleans culture that being in the band is cooler than playing sports.

FIG. 2: The Tipitina’s Foundation has been extremely active in helping the New Orleans music scene recover from Katrina. Its support has helped schools obtain replacement band instruments, but electronic musical instruments are still in short supply.

“Part of that is because there is money in it,” explains Desmian Barnes, band director at Berhman Middle School, a Young Audiences participant. “There is great competition between bands for who gets to play conventions, or funerals, or parades. So these kids practice real hard and it's a great motivator for me, because I get to choose who gets the gig.”

“It's just part of our culture,” adds Curtis Pierre, instructor with the Young Audiences program at Laurel Elementary. “I have this old video of a group of kids coming up my street. They were banging on buckets and anything they found — I think one of them had a real drum with a drumhead on it — and they were marching. One of those kids came up through my program. He's 29 now, with a wife and kids.”

After Katrina, one of the first things New Orleans school administrators said was, “We have to get the marching bands back up and running.” Many of the bands had lost instruments. When so many of the impoverished schools were destroyed, their band instruments were either distributed to the schools that were intact or they were damaged and discarded. Many schools' instruments were destroyed for fear of mold, rust, and other contaminants. Even more schools lost their music libraries. It took a while, but music organizations such as Tipitina's Foundation (see Fig. 2), MusiCares, and VH1 Save the Music have done their best to aid these programs, which still struggle to return to prestorm levels.