Opportunity Lives visited New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina hit the city, and filmmaker Ben Howe sat down with students and teachers who have come back after the storm and how their lives have changed.
The short documentary examines the recovery of the city's school system thanks to school choice and charter schools.
The devastating storm hit in 2005 and New Orleans has made a remarkable comeback in the period since. Howe interviewed many people who lived through the storm who shared their stories about how they survived the storm, their life in its immediate aftermath and how they felt "bonded to the city" and felt a need to help it recover.
Since the storm, when many schools in the city were already failing, school choice has helped New Orleans lower its dropout rate and improve its ACT scores, graduation rates, college enrollment and eligilibility for merit scholarships. Parents have greater flexibility to choose the best school environment for their children instead of being forced to attend their local school based on geographic location.
As one teacher described it, charter schools give administrators an ability to deliver resources more quickly without an overbearing bureaucracy weighing them down.
"Charter schools give schools the autonomy to handle business and to set curriculum and outcomes for their students, whom they know," said chemistry teacher Kendall McManus-Thomas. "It's not centralized, so we have less bureaucracy, we have less issues that a normal, centralized school district would have, so resources are faster. We can make decisions based on our students and not as a district, not as a state, which makes sense, right? You're in your school, you know your community, you know your students, so why not have that opportunity to make sure that you have things in place for them to succeed since you know them."