Past Investments
Over the years, NSNO has developed a series of impactful programs that were instrumental in advancing our mission of providing an excellent education for every child in New Orleans. These programs supported schools in recruiting top educators, facilitated collaboration among the city’s principals, and helped cultivate leadership at both the school and system levels. These programs and investments played a vital role in strengthening our schools and shaping the foundation of our ongoing commitment to educational excellence in our city.
New Orleans Public Education Timeline
The New Orleans Public Education Timeline shows the milestones over the past few years in the evolution of the New Orleans public school system.
CEO Succession Planning Toolkit
NSNO developed a CEO Succession Planning Toolkit to support charter school boards in developing and executing a plan for successful CEO successions.The best practices included in the Toolkit are based on lessons learned from national CEO succession planning research and a series of interviews with local charter school CEOs and board members who have undergone CEO successions.
We created this toolkit knowing that all CEOs and Executive Directors eventually leave their organizations, so boards must be prepared for and anticipate these inevitable CEO departures. As organizations evolve and develop new ways to serve students, their boards must continually and thoughtfully plan for changes in leadership. To do so, they must implement best practices that promote organizational strength, stability, and effectiveness.
The toolkit was comprised for the following resources:
The NOLA Tutor Collaborative
The NOLA Tutor Collaborative is an evidence-based tutoring program for public schools that also helps prepare our city’s future educators. NSNO created the program in 2022 to meet key needs across our system. The pandemic had taken valuable learning time away from students citywide and nationally, and schools were looking for ways to help their students catch up. Schools were also eager to help find and prepare the next generation of teachers for their classrooms. We built the NOLA Tutor Collaborative to help them do both.
Portfolio and School Sustainability
More information to come. You can review all current and past School Sustainability Analysis resources here.
NSNO Instructional Quality Initiative
In 2018, NSNO launched the Instructional Quality Initiative (IQI) in partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE). We aimed to increase access to high-quality curriculum for New Orleans’ students and help them grow and achieve in core subjects. Louisiana’s academic standards had become more rigorous, and our schools needed curriculum that was aligned to that rigor.
To support schools in this, we funded new, high-quality curriculum as well as training for educators on how to implement it. We saw enormous growth in engagement over the course of our six years of IQI. When we began IQI, just 30 % of schools were using high quality curriculum in ELA and Math. Today, around 90% are. We evolved over time to meet schools where they were. We began offering professional development “hubs” with vendor partners, through which educators could connect, strengthen their practice, and more deeply engage with materials. We started our support with just English Language Arts and Math curricula, but in 2020, we offered Science support as well, and in 2023, we launched the New Orleans Social Studies Consortium. Our educators’ hard work made a difference. In 2022-23, 81% of our city’s public schools earned an “A” or “B” in academic progress.
Executive Education Experience (E3)
NSNO Launched the Executive Education Experience (E3) Fellowship to help prepare and develop high-performing and diverse school leaders with the key skills and competencies needed to lead strong teams as CEOs and chief-level executives of schools in our city. The program was such a success that it spun off into a national organization, Greenhouse E3.
E3 was a highly-selective, 2-year fellowship where fellows learned how to drive results across several schools and how to successfully manage the complexity of a large organization.
The Fellowship’s professional learning framework was based on leadership competencies drawn from the practices of effective local and national charter CEOs, with an emphasis on what works in New Orleans.