Guest Essay from Former CEO of FirstLine Schools, Jay Altman

What will the schools in New Orleans look like 20 years from now? Just as we might never have imagined the progress our system has made since Hurricane Katrina, it can be hard to picture in detail a future that accounts for the historic societal and technological transformation we are living through. What we can see clearly is that every dimension of schooling will be affected: how students learn, how we support their well-being, how we prepare them for college and for meaningful, well-paying jobs in a fast-changing world, and how we provide them with opportunities to develop as the leaders we will need in the future. 

I believe our history of innovation and our decentralized system of schools position us well to adaptively meet the new waves of change that are already crashing against our lives. While our schools still have much room for improvement, they have already demonstrated great progress, yielding significant gains in student achievement, high school graduation rates, post-secondary enrollment, and a dramatic decline in the number of failing schools over the past two decades, even as standards and accountability thresholds have risen. 

The adaptability and innovations that drove this success are still present today. Our system of schools, the district, and partnering organizations across the city worked have collaboratively to better support our city’s students, parents, and educators: implementing a differentiated funding formula to ensure resources better follow students’ needs; passing a facilities fund millage to help maintain our school buildings as inspiring places to learn; and launching the New Orleans Career Center to better prepare students for well-paying career pathways, to name just a few.

While much progress has been made, New Orleans schools still face significant shared challenges that transcend any single school or network and that often go well beyond the schools themselves. Coordinated action across schools, the district, city government, community-based organizations, and other local institutions is crucial to address citywide issues like students’ mental health, family food security, public safety, access to technology, and work-based learning experiences. Our success in tackling these shared challenges will undoubtedly depend in part on the depth of collaborative relationships across the schools, the district, parents, and the many institutions supporting young people and educators in our city. 

These relationships are a form of civic infrastructure. This infrastructure can be built and reinforced by working together on shared challenges, listening to different perspectives, and understanding the unrelenting pressures and resource constraints of parents, teachers, and school leaders as they focus on meeting the needs of our city’s young people, too many of whom are carrying a weight of poverty that schools seek to help lift.  

Perhaps the most important piece of civic infrastructure to strengthen is the relationship between schools and the district – New Orleans Public Schools. A collaborative relationship that helps the city’s schools better meet the needs of students will require the district to continue to evolve beyond its role of an authorizer, accountability, and compliance. It must become a better, closer partner in helping create the conditions for our decentralized schools to thrive and adapt: streamlining reporting and compliance processes so schools can focus on students, providing accurate and timely revenue forecasts, listening and being responsive to the ongoing needs of schools, and championing the remarkable work of educators citywide. 

Twenty years from now the world will be very different. If we can build the civic infrastructure of strong collaborative relationships across schools, the district, and supporting institutions, we will be much more likely to create conditions that effectively support those doing the critically important, future-facing work of ensuring every young person in our city has the opportunity to thrive.