New Orleans schools were radically remade after Katrina. He wanted to know: Did it work?

Twenty years ago, it was the most radical experiment in American education. Today, it’s just the New Orleans school system.

That system, which state leaders and self-styled reformers engineered after Hurricane Katrina, remains unlike any other. Nearly every public school is run by a private charter school operator, families are unbound by attendance zones and low-performing schools are routinely shut down.

Perhaps no one has studied this system or analyzed its results more closely than Douglas Harris, an economist and the founding director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University.

Harris and his colleagues at the research center have produced more than 50 studies on the post-Katrina changes to New Orleans schools and their impact on students and fami