Listen: New Podcast Explores the Evolution of New Orleans’ School System in the 20 Years Since Hurricane Katrina

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The 74 is partnering with The Branch in promoting Where the Schools Went, a limited-run podcast series that revisits the sweeping changes to New Orleans’ public schools after Hurricane Katrina came ashore 20 years ago this month. Listen to the first episode below.

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans in August 2005, it destroyed homes and flooded neighborhoods. Eighty percent of the city was submerged, 1,800 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. It also upended a public school system already collapsing under the weight of decades of failure. 

In the years that followed, the system was not just rebuilt; it was radically reimagined.

The debut installment of Where the Schools Went revisits the years leading up to the storm and the questions New Orleans was already grappling with. Crumbling buildings, failing academics, and deep corruption had eroded trust with the public — so much so that the FBI had even set up shop inside the school district’s central office. The below episode explores the question: What happens when a public institution fails the people it was built to serve? 

And what should come next?

We hear the story from the people who lived it, like former school district employee Ken Ducote, who used code names and classic cars to pass documents to the FBI. We learn about the students who had to leave school to use the bathroom at Taco Bell, because the ones in their building were constantly broken. And we meet the valedictorian who was barred from graduating after failing the math exit exam — for the fifth time.

In episode one, we talk about what loss really meant after the storm and the rituals and routines that helped bind communities together. We hear from a child who couldn’t find his mother for more than a month, a teacher who sheltered with her family in a room in a church basement and the students who, even in new classrooms in new cities, hid under desks every time it rained.

But this isn’t just a story about what was lost or broken. It’s about what people built in the aftermath. Just days after the storm, a team of New Orleans educators reunited with their students in Houston, many of them living in the Astrodome, and opened a school for them. This new campus quickly grew into a community for kids who had lost nearly everything in their lives.

The episode doesn’t settle the debate about what came next. But it begins to unpack the competing beliefs surrounding New Orleans’ post-Katrina school reforms. Some hail the transformation as miraculous, a turnaround that turned one of the nation’s worst-performing districts into a national model. Others view it as a betrayal: a dismantling of community control, the displacement of Black educators, and the erasure of local identity. This episode is the first of five chapters that will help you decide which, if any, of those narratives is correct.

Listen to episode one above, and watch for episode two debuting on Aug. 19. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with The 74 and MeidasTouch. Listen at Apple podcasts or stream on Spotify.

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