A striking statement on school reform by U.S. Education Secretary, Arne Duncan. Duncan called the 2005 Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”
Duncan continued: “That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better.’ And the progress that they’ve made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district. Long way to go, but that — that city was not serious about its education. Those children were being desperately underserved prior, and the amount of progress and the amount of reform we’ve seen in a short amount of time has been absolutely amazing.”
So a question: Without hoping for more natural disasters, what can we do to emulate New Orleans’s progress in other dysfunctional school districts? The hurricane shocked the system: Katrina (1) made everyone to focus on essentials, (2) disempowered the entrenched advocates for continued dysfunction, and (3) galvanized everyone else to positive action. In my judgment, we are good at (1) and (3), but we are weak at solving (2) through peaceful methods.
Another question: What else has Katrina taught us about disaster preparedness and how to recover? The Mercatus Center has a excellent ongoing project devoted to Entrepreneurship and Disaster Recovery. The project has published a useful series of articles and working papers by scholars studying the aftermath of the hurricane.
Two of Mercatus’s scholars, Professor Emily Chamlee-Wright and Professor Steven Horwitz, spoke last year at Rockford College on post-Katrina disaster response in the private sector. Their talks were sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and my ten-minute video interviews with them following their talks are available at CEE’s site: Chamlee-Wright on social entrepreneurial activity, and Horwitz on for-profit organizations’ response.
I think the biggest lesson that we can learn from Katrina concerning disaster preparedness is that if you expect the government to help you, you’re screwed. We have massive wildfires here in San Diego county every few years; the last big one forced thousands of people out of their homes. The city govt here in SD opened up the parking lots of Qualcomm Stadium (home of the NFL SD Chargers) as an evacuation site. That’s all they did. People showed up to stay there in tents and then people and NGOs (Red Cross) showed up en masse to provide all kinds of support/donations. Yes, the city did provide law enforcement protection, but that’s all they really did.
Contrast that with the people who lived in New Orleans who were expecting the government to save them (they were pre-conditioned to this mindset, I suspect) and you wind up with the mess you had.