In the two decades since Hurricane Katrina drowned the city and its public school system, the story of K-12 education in New Orleans has gone something like this: nothing good happened until charter schools, and white reformers, showed up.
But Adrinda Kelly, a New Orleans native, former teacher and co-founder of Black Education for New Orleans (BE NOLA), knows that’s not the whole story. The public school teachers she had growing up — most of them Black women — helped prepare her for Harvard University.
“Frankly, our school system wasn’t perfect, but my experience pre-Katrina was a great one,” Kelly says. Her teachers, she says, weren’t just concerned with her grades; they cared for her well-being…