“The decade mark was crystallizing,” Ms. Kalifey-Aluise said. “It was like, ‘Yikes, this wave is coming to an end.’ ”

The election of a Democratic governor with strong teachers’ union support last year raised the pressure for return. “We thought, let’s get on top of this and make it work the way we want,” she said.

It is hard to understate the presence of the state in the city’s schools. As Mr. White scooted out of his state-owned Prius to return a football that had been tossed from a schoolyard last week, an elementary school student recognized him, seizing the chance to suggest that dictionaries be allowed during state tests. (“I think I did O.K.,” the student said.)

Doubters worry that the timeline is too fast to create the same kind of robust power in the central office, where staff has been depleted since Katrina. School board elections are this fall, and the legislation calls for schools to be returned within two years.

An even bigger question is whether the elected board will have the nerve to close failing schools and resist the city’s tradition of crony politics and malfeasance.

Even those who have in the past resisted a return to local control say they now believe the changes here cannot be sustained without greater involvement from people who actually live here.

“It would be a shame,” said Ben Kleban, the founder of New Orleans College Prep, a charter network, “if our message to the rest of the country was that the only way to reform a school system is to seize control from local people.”