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This is part of a series covering the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, its effects, and the recovery of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here.

Five years ago, as his time as Louisiana’s superintendent of education was coming to an end, John White granted The 74 an exit interview. Including a stint heading the state agency that oversaw the reboot of New Orleans’ schools, White had had a hand on the tiller of education innovation in Louisiana for almost a decade. 

During that time, he made national headlines for changing the state’s school accountability system, for steering the conversion of virtually all New Orleans schools to charters and for defending Louisiana’s then-small voucher program from pushback by President Barack Obama’s administration. 

He also dug in in less sexy arenas, making changes to teacher training, improving — often amid vociferous opposition — standardized assessments and surviving demands from governors of both parties that he act more politically and less pragmatically. 

Less than a month after White’s far-ranging 2020 conversation with The 74, the world changed dramatically. As he was clearing out his desk, COVID-19 forced the shutdown of schools everywhere, throwing up hurdles unforeseen even in a state where school is regularly interrupted by disasters. 

Today, White is the CEO of Great Minds, which makes some of the curricula he championed as state superintendent, taking a carrot-and-stick approach to getting schools to adopt evidence-based classroom materials.  

On the 20^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, with seemingly everyone in education policy circles taking a fresh look back at the school reforms undertaken by White and his colleagues, we asked to revisit his exit interview. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When last you and I spoke, as you were wrapping a decade focused on improving schools throughout Louisiana, you talked about changes needed to enable students everywhere to flourish. One of the things you called for were stronger child and family policies. Update us. 

We’ve been working on those issues in New Orleans, and there’s evidence of some success. But on some of those issues, there hasn’t been a lot of progress — not just in New Orleans, but across the country. There are some obvious concerns posed in the new environment.

You could argue that that child and family policy is an issue of greater focal discussion today than it was 10 years ago, because there is a stronger and more prominent kind of division between the Republicans’ theories of family and community and the Democrats’ perspective on that than there was then. In that sense we can say, yes, there are promising signs of public attention.

On the other hand, I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that some of the essential momentum that was being achieved across the country — on access to child care, for example, the wages of child care workers and the quality of child care, Head Start and pre-kindergarten experiences —has taken quantum leaps forward.

There at least was an emerging consensus on the path toward public-private systems of regulated child care, Head Start and pre-kindergarten that has slowed. There have been moves to divest from some of those systems in recent years. And very serious conversations about divestment that are quite worrisome.

Those decisions would have had a serious impact on communities like New Orleans. I could point to plenty of positive indicators and a lot of progress in New Orleans and Louisiana. But there is some peril. There’s debate — which is good — but there’s some peril wrapped up in that debate these days in our country as well.

Can you point to a couple of successes? 

When you and I talked in 2020, we were just really getting off the ground the New Orleans Early Education Network, which had been started out of a local nonprofit, The Agenda for Children. It was an attempt to create a parish-level — county-level — model that provided financial support, professional learning support and a unified enrollment function across private pre-K, public pre-K, child care and Head Start centers. 

It’s a great example of a public-private partnership launched to exert a kind of soft governing power over a highly diverse sector of small businesses, non-governmental organizations and government-run centers, to the effect of providing more seats. It’s generated additional investment from the city taxpayers. It has really raised standards for care — especially for infants and toddlers, where very often the professional learning has been [missing from] the discussion.

There is something about a 20-year trajectory of going to a charter school system that’s very nimble and then discovering where there needs to be points of unification. This system allowed early childhood to move faster.

One of the extraordinary benefits of not having one single operator of all core education and care services from, let’s say ages 3 to 18, is that [in New Orleans] all operators of early childhood and K-12 services have to routinely justify their ability to continue to serve kids, because they’re on a contract.

Every child care center is rated and subject to an enrollment process, as is every school. That means parents might not choose it.

The school board isn’t operating every school and therefore can’t essentially assure that all schools, or all child cares and pre-kindergartens, remain in operation.

With that sometimes comes the [public] presentation of our struggles and frailties. That makes the system more open to critique because it’s doing more to lay bare its challenges. Every school has to come forward in front of a board and argue that it should continue its contract. That opens you to critique — a good thing in the public sector. 

It also makes you humble about your limitations and hungry for solutions. You’re not as a system constantly trying to protect your singular role as the one operator. You are adaptive because you recognize where there is need.

Maybe you’re willing to admit that schools aren’t always in the best position to solve some of those concerns. Among those are schools as providers of pre-natal, postnatal and child care services, schools as excellent providers of nutritional solutions, schools as providers of health solutions, schools as providers of post-secondary and career-driven solutions.

While New Orleans is very far from figuring out all [these] issues, it is germinating unconventional and promising solutions at a systemic level. For example, schools have said, We’re not going to do all the career and post-secondary pathway planning. We’re not expert in that. We’re going to have one center that is responsive to the local economy’s needs, that is responsive to the latest in career training for what is now literally thousands of young people who come from high school to go [to the ] every day. 

That approach has generated lots of private-sector involvement, including $35 million in the restoration of the [old] McDonough 35 High School building in the 7th Ward. It’s an example of where an unconventional approach led by a nonprofit has created the possibility of scale because of a humble admission on the part of schools that they needed help. 

New Orleans still has myriad challenges: an increasing English learner population and a population of kids traumatized from years of poverty, violence, family disruptions and man-made disasters. These are not easy things to solve at scale. New Orleans is still wrestling with how you incubate solutions.

But it’s an easier district with which to have conversations about challenges, because the presentation of facts is in the DNA of the system. The transparency and the vulnerability that comes with acknowledging areas of struggle is part of the deal.

Another item we talked about was your work to create state programs to identify high-quality instructional materials and encourage schools to use them. 

I recognized early on that the same tools are not present in many places as they are in New Orleans. Therefore, we needed the ability to achieve some scale and coherence in teaching and learning quality in classrooms beyond the 7% of kids that are from Orleans Parish. And more than standards and more than tests, curriculum was the road map we found.

It was the road map to kids getting a rich education every day, to us being able to define what we meant by excellent teaching and what we meant by the daily skills and experience and knowledge that a child should gather, more than standards were. And so our reforms across the state were really curriculum-based reforms.

I don’t think that efficacy in the classroom should ever be thought of, though, as just a function of the curriculum. It is the behavior of the teacher using the curriculum and the way that kids are organized and focused on using the curriculum that very much determines the efficacy.

Therein is the great challenge for the education product industry. One, how do you make yourselves equally accountable for student learning as the schools are? And two, what role do you play beyond just dropping off books and software licenses to help principals and teachers embody the promise of the curriculum?

What is your wish for the next 20 years?

Since the first day that the schools integrated in New Orleans, its education system has been on a protracted march toward achieving a basic civil right. Which is the guarantee that, given reasonable effort, all children will learn to read, write, do math and make friends in the schools of our city.

By most measures, New Orleans is doing better at that today than it was 20 years ago. So, one way of answering your question is that New Orleans will be a lot closer to that basic promise in 20 years.

But New Orleans is trying to achieve that civil rights mission in the context of really challenging conditions. When I say its population is poor and historically disadvantaged, it goes well beyond what most American cities experience.

It’s experienced challenges of violence, of prejudice and of disaster that very few cities have experienced. There is a sensitivity to issues of difference and of fairness in New Orleans that go way beyond the school system. Really into the fabric of the city. 

In 20 years, I would also hope it would be true not just that many, many more kids are reading, writing, doing math and making friends, but also that students who bring to the classroom unique and extraordinary needs will find schools that have the tools to immediately recognize those needs and to serve them, irrespective of how exceptional the needs are. 

These two goals are completely linked to one another. They’re not different projects. New Orleans is talked about in the first category — you know, did the randomized controlled trial or the quasi-experimental study indicate that there’s some level of progress in reading, yes or no?

But in fact, I think if you ask most school leaders, they would say that they’re equally involved in the second project, which is figuring out how to achieve that in the context of high levels of need — and a great diversity of need.

In New Orleans, we are uniquely positioned to do that not just because of the level of need, but because of this idea that schools are laying bare their challenges. The public can see them. It’s not cloaked the way it is in so many other places.

Is every child given a set of supports needed for them to thrive and to be positioned to achieve the first civil rights mission? That’s just as much a part of our project.

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