The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took

hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it

also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school

system–an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance….The floodwaters, so the talk went, had washed this befouled slate

clean–had offered, in a state official’s words, a “once-in-a-lifetime

opportunity to reinvent public education.” In due course, that

opportunity was taken:…Stripped of

most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired

all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the

teachers’ union. And the Bush administration stepped in with millions

of dollars for the expansion of charter schools–publicly financed but

independently run schools that answer to their own boards. The result

was the fastest makeover of an urban school system in American history.