Giving Compass' Take:

• Kevin Mahnken reports racial disparities in parent opinions of New Orleans schools: white parents view reforms much more favorably than black parents. 

• Do you agree with the conclusion that the removal of power from the community accounts for the differing opinions? How can reforms best serve all students? 

• Learn how New Orleans leaders built a segregated city. 

Ample evidence shows that New Orleans public schools are performing much better now than in 2005, when the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina led to a large-scale takeover of most public schools and the introduction of ambitious education reforms. Experts have found that students there are now more likely to finish high school, and learning gaps between black and white children have noticeably closed over the past decade.

But not everyone puts faith in those successes. According to a new paper looking at public opinion data during the period when the reforms were being implemented, New Orleans’s black majority has been more likely to perceive post-Katrina schools negatively compared with the status quo before the storm.

Public perceptions of the new school system have generally been seen as warm: According to regular polling conducted by the Cowen Institute — a research group formed in 2007 to monitor progress in local schools during the city’s recovery — most New Orleanians rate their schools as average or better, and majorities believe that the spread of charter schools has had a positive impact.

In the paper, however, Morel points to significant differences in the way the post-Katrina reforms have been received by whites and blacks. Examining Cowen Institute polls from 2011 and 2013, he finds that black respondents were vastly more likely than whites to say that New Orleans schools were better in the period before Katrina; a majority said that they had either gotten worse or stayed the same in recent years. At the same time, a majority of white New Orleanians said they believed the schools had improved.

Black respondents were also much more likely to say they supported an end to the Recovery School District — the state-created entity that administered most schools after the storm — and a return of the schools to local control.

The divergent attitudes are the result of the black community’s loss of control over schools, Morel argues: Whereas previously the public school system (the population of which is estimated to be 80 percent black) was governed by a majority-black school board and staffed by mostly black teachers, the education regime following Katrina was quite different: Louisiana state officials, authorities at the RSD and charter school boards, who were all disproportionately white. By one estimate, the number of black teachers as a percentage of the whole decreased from 75 percent to 50 percent.

Read the full article about parent opinions of New Orleans schools by Kevin Mahnken at The 74.