Governing in the Wake of Upheaval: Lasting Lessons From Katrina
A researcher finds applicable lessons for leading extraordinary renewal in schools today from the unprecedented disaster in New Orleans

Harvard professor Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell studied school governance in post-Katrina New Orleans. PHOTO COURTESY OF HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

In most years, this is the time when people start feeling settled into the new school year. Principals, teachers and students have the lay of the land as everyone works to reach benchmarks for staff and student learning needs and, in some cases, address the hurdles emerging to achieve those goals.

Of course, this year is unlike any previous year. Many of us now wonder whether it will be possible ever again to feel settled into school given the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond simply being settled in, will it be possible to achieve the best of results in our schools?

This is the same question every educator in New Orleans public schools likely was asking a few months into the 2005-06 school year after Hurricane Katrina struck with brutal force, killing 1,200 people, leaving thousands stranded and destroying core infrastructure and residences for hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians.

Even in the wake of such unprecedented disaster, less than 10 years later, student achievement on Louisiana state assessments had increased between 11 and 16 percentiles from pre-Katrina levels for students in New Orleans. College-entry rates had increased between 8 and 15 percentage points, and college graduation rates had improved between 4 and 7 percentage points.

Hurricane Katrina was far more localized than the widespread effects of COVID-19 across the country and globe. Still, the intensity of the devastation in New Orleans and the ability for schools to come back even better than before offers some clear lessons for schools now. Some observers have attributed revival to the New Orleans district’s “charterization.” However, as a co-author and I detailed in a recent case study, “Access, Autonomy and Accountability: School Governance Dilemmas in Post-Katrina New Orleans” for Harvard University’s Public Education Leadership Project, some of the most important lessons from the public school experience in New Orleans are about governance.

Often, people associate governance with school boards. However, governance is essential to leadership at every level of the system: in schools, central offices, state education agencies and boards of education.

Simply put, governance is the decision-making process for answering three big sets of questions: (1) what’s our goal, who decides and how; (2) what’s the plan and how will work get done; and (3) what resources, expertise, activities and labor are needed to succeed? Good governance ensures the answers to these questions hold to 10 key principles that every superintendent should have in mind.

Decisions About Goals: What Is the Goal, Who Decides and How?

»Set nested goals. Good governance means broad goals can be set by those at the top, but those closest to the work should be empowered to break down broad goals into more relevant, narrow goals. After Katrina, the broad goal of New Orleans’ Recovery School District was increasing educational access so new, mostly charter, schools were given wide-ranging autonomy to set site-based goals.

As student enrollment grew and goals evolved, the district centralized some functions. But doing so complicated day-to-day decision making for some principals, suggesting some goals in the more centralized system were not being set by those close enough to the work.

»Set legitimate goals. One challenge leaders at different levels face when it comes to setting goals is that diverse internal and external stakeholders must view the goals as legitimate. In New Orleans, a history of economic and social disparities meant conflicting views between Black versus White community members, the established middle class versus the wealthy and poor, long-time residents versus newcomers and rural versus urban.

Explicit procedures and agreed upon rules for involving all relevant stakeholders can help with the legitimacy of goals, as with models sometimes referred to as cooperative governance, consensus governance and community-engagement governance.

Set motivating and meaningful goals. Nested and legitimate goals may not be achievable unless they carry authentically important purposes and are emotionally motivating. For example, the equity goal set by the superintendent in New Orleans since 2015, Henderson Lewis, resonates with many educators’ deeply held values. Still, emotionally motivating and purpose-driven goals do not necessarily clarify the requirements of day-to-day work and decisions.

Goals also must fulfill a meaning-making, cognitive function. This includes goals being sufficiently clear, specific and coherently connected so people understand what to accomplish.

Decisions About Strategy and Structure: What’s the Plan and How Will the Work Get Done?

»Have a strategic plan. Today on the homepage of the New Orleans Public Schools, there is an easily accessible multipoint strategic plan. Having a strategy or step-by-step set of activities and timeline for improvement might seem obvious. However, strategic planning can be difficult when more energy goes into fighting fires than planning for the future. Good governance means making the time to plan, to put that plan into action and regularly check on progress.

Even so, a final plan, such as the one in New Orleans, rarely reveals the complexity of formulating and executing strategy, which has both external and internal components.

»Develop an external strategy for partnerships. Leveraging external resources is key to accomplishing goals and was essential to New Or-leans Public Schools getting back on its feet. This is one reason Paul Vallas, an early superintendent of the Recovery School District, partnered with Teach for America, The New Teacher Project and the Broad Foundation to address the district’s teacher shortage.

Relationships forged with charter management organizations to initially run schools is another example of how the district lever-aged external resources to accomplish its early goals. While the partnerships New Orleans forged are not right for every district, the kind of resourceful thinking about which partnerships are possible is.

»Have an internal strategy for organization structure. Good governance means not falling back on conventional roles, positions and departments but instead asking, “What is the best way to divide and coordinate work, even if it is not the way things have always been done?”

By 2012, New Orleans was answering this question by allowing for differentiated, autonomous work among its 60-plus schools. However, differentiation can limit collaboration and sometimes lead to inequities and lack of accountability. This explains why it is important to facilitate communication and relationship building among those who most need to be connected. This might include flexible, mutually agreed upon work guidelines, knowledge-sharing technologies, liaisons between offices or ad-hoc cross functional teams.

Decisions About the Work: What Resources, Expertise, Activities and Labor Are Needed?

»Know what resources are required. There are four essential elements for accomplishing work in any organization. The first is resources or all the materials, supplies, equipment, funding and physical space needed to accomplish goals. After Katrina, additional federal funding played an important role in recovery.

The importance of physical space is partly why Vallas, as the superintendent, prioritized a facilities management and improvement plan. Of course, in schools, it is not simply the total amount of resources that matters but also that resources are allocated to the right activities most closely aligned with goals.

»Know which expertise is needed. One reason for excitement about starting up New Orleans schools after Katrina was the possibility of selecting staff with the best expertise to serve the relatively small number of returning students. Putting the right person in the right role can be difficult because it is not always easy to know which expertise is needed and because those with needed expertise may be in short supply.

Hence, good governance focuses not only on recruitment, training and retention but also on encouraging staff to learn, innovate and solve problems together so they can develop new expertise to address emergent needs.

»Identify appropriate activities. Being overly prescriptive about work activities can undermine motivation, innovation and problem-solving capacity. Good governance instead involves identifying major activity areas, articulating the theory of action for why activities would result in desired outcomes and providing guideposts and guardrails as activities are executed. Then, expert staff should be relied on to further delineate their key activities and encouraged to take risks to innovate as needed.

Doing the latter might have quelled dissatisfaction among some New Orleans principals when in 2012 then-superintendent Patrick Dobard revoked some principal autonomies to be more prescriptive about their work.

»Invest in sufficient labor. Labor is shorthand for time and effort. Some industries regularly conduct studies to determine how long it takes a qualified person to effectively perform their work. In schools, sheer effort too often is expected to make up for a lack of time. This plays a role in low teacher retention and school leader burnout, both of which became issues in some New Orleans schools after Katrina.

Good governance not only makes realistic and fair estimates about how much labor is required to complete work but also supports and develops staff, so they feel a sense of efficacy and commitment over the long run.

Governing to Greatness

Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the COVID-19 public health crisis cause devastation and despair for so many. Their impact touches every area of our lives and all sectors of society, notably schools. Still, nature’s dependable, if indiscriminate, pattern is that destruction also is a source of renewal and a clean slate on which to write a new story.

Schools are no exception to this either. Thus, restarting schools in the wake of COVID-19 is an opportunity to rebuild school systems anew with taken-for-granted assumptions about how things have to be done already cast asunder.

Now that the school year is underway, have the big goals not only been prioritized but has everyone involved in accomplishing them had a chance to visualize and articulate what the narrower version of broad goals means for their own work? Do office heads and school principals have a strategy — internal and external — for accomplishing their goals?

In a time of shrinking resources, how much attention has been paid not only to how existing resources might be reallocated but also to promoting staff’s shared expertise, sense of efficacy and mutual investment in a theory of action for the work.

As Mary Herrmann explained in her article “The Contradictions of Learning Together” (School Administrator, April 2020), superintendents need to help staff think creatively about all facets of work — from partnerships to internal structure to making the best use of resources. Paying attention to the 10 good governance principles can help with this. They also can help ensure our schools not only get through the COVID-19 crisis but perhaps even thrive in much the same way schools in New Orleans did after Katrina.

EBONY BRIDWELL-MITCHELL is associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass.