Where The Schools Went, Episode Two: The Battle for Carver

Hello everybody, this is Robbie Gupta, co-hosted Majority 54, which is here on the Midas network and airs every Wednesday.

I've been working with the brothers for years and this year we've been working together on a special project.

It's called Where the Schools Went.

It's a five-part podcast series all about New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina and how the schools have changed dramatically in that city and what that means for all of us all around the country.

It's all about the politics, the policy, government service, idealism, you know, insiders and outsiders.

It's got drama.

It's got inspiration.

And it's all about the most important functions of government, which is taking care of our kids, educating our kids.

And we spoke to over 50 people as part of the story.

And we're dropping here our second episode.

This one's all about a school called George Washington Carver, which was central to a lot of the debates and changes that were happening in New Orleans after the storm.

If you really like this episode, go to Where the Schools Went, wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe there and you'll get the rest of the episodes.

So that's where the schools went, wherever you get your podcasts.

Here we go.

What really makes a school great?

Impressive college admissions?

An obsession with literacy?

Strong test scores?

Or is it hallways that feel safe?

Educators who remember your name?

What about sports?

Marching bands?

The rituals that turn a building into a memory?

Most of us would probably say, all of the above.

But what happens when you don't have the luxury of all of the above?

When your city is in crisis, when the money is tight, the clock is ticking, and every decision feels like a trade-off?

What do you choose to build first when you can't build it all at once?

And maybe, Most importantly, who gets to decide?

In this episode, we'll explore those questions through the story of one school, a school with a famous name, a school that became a battleground over who has the right to shape the future of an entire neighborhood.

I'm Ravi Gupta, this is where the schools went.

The 1940s brought a wave of migration to New Orleans.

The black population alone surged by 20%.

But the infrastructure didn't follow.

Housing was scarce, and the overcrowding issues didn't stop at the front door.

The first high school for black students in New Orleans had opened in 1917.

By the end of the 1950s, the city had added just two more.

Classrooms were packed.

Federal money came in to build a sprawling new housing project, which would eventually include a locally funded high school.

Officials chose a patch of swampy land in the 9th ward, west of the Industrial Canal, far from the city center and the white neighborhoods they named the housing project desire after the street that cut across the land

all right so we're in a desire neighborhood it's called the desire neighborhood because it's the desire housing project

this is oscar brown 9th ward resident speaking from the thrive 9th ward community center He's walking me through Desire, where generations of black families have lived.

And I have friends, mentors, they talk about the beauty of Desire

when it first was built, about how fascinating it was finally for them to be in their own home.

They grew up family of 12 in a one and two bedroom because that's all that they was able to afford.

And now they had their own rooms and it was affordable.

Construction began on the complex in 1949.

And back in those early years, hopes were high and pride was deep.

The city picked the site in part because the land was cheap.

A former dump, the ground was so unstable that engineers had to drive 70-foot pilings into the ground just to keep the buildings and even the sidewalks from sinking.

Our new Desire Square building is one step closer to reality.

Six weeks before the first families were set to move in, the Tenants Association released a report calling the facilities, quote, unsafe for human habitation and a blight on public housing in New Orleans.

Soon after construction of Desire began, the city bought a 90-acre tract just north of the new housing project.

It would become a sprawling school campus.

They'd call it George Washington Carver.

Whether by design or neglect, the city had created a separate world, one built on the margins, physically and politically.

What historian Walter Stern called an educational Soweto, invoking the infamous segregated South African township, Carver became a promise kept and a promise broken all at once.

Over time, if you put so many people into one area, it was too many people, it was very little resources, you're going to start having problems.

And I think that's what happened to Desire.

Oscar grew up in the 80s and 90s, three decades after Desire first opened its doors.

By then, the neighborhood was struggling.

And while Oscar is a proud Carver alum and a current parent, he acknowledged that the school had also changed.

My experience with Carver, it was a fantastic school.

My friends that I met there, you know, it's lifelong, but it was some things that happened in that school that was just products of what was happening in the community.

In 1999, the state labeled Carver one of 50 unacceptable schools in Orleans Parish.

Roughly half its students were dropping out before a graduation.

There were widespread allegations of sexual assault, violence, and the use of narcotics at the school.

It was hard to imagine things could get any worse.

And then Hurricane Katrina hit.

The Desire neighborhood was devastated.

Built on swamp and bordering a levee, it was the worst possible terrain in the event of a hurricane.

Carl Washington, a lifelong desire resident who graduated from Carver in the 80s, remembers the damage well.

So that area received 8-9 feet of water.

It wiped out the lower nine, it wiped out the upper nine.

It took many lives, it took many of homes, it took many destruction.

It just

was devastating to that area.

Benzopyrene, a carcinogen, was detected in some areas at more than 50 times the allowable limits.

As one New Orlean wrote of the Ninth Ward at the time, it seemed that every inch of it was covered by a thick, mysterious sludge containing all manner of nasty chemicals.

That sludge covered cars, doorsteps, entire blocks, everything in its path.

Eventually, it reached Carver.

And for a while, the school, like much of the neighborhood, sat silent.

Almost like someone had turned back the clock to 1949.

Before a single brick had been laid.

Before the school or the neighborhood around it even existed.

With the neighborhood destroyed and its population displaced, some officials doubted the area would ever again need a high school.

The city had access to federal dollars to reconstruct a number of schools, and those schools that had suffered the worst damage would be costlier to reopen.

Carver alumni, parents, and longtime 9th Ward residents began to organize, sign petitions, and show up at meetings.

Carver was clearly a unifying institution, a source of pride, and a patch of stability at a time when the community needed one most.

Vibrant community,

sports, band.

It was an ecosystem for communities.

So it was a desire housing project.

It was Samson Park.

It was Carver.

Carver was

a thing when it came to sports, being in a band, being in a community.

It was a great experience for me at Carver.

NFL Hall of Famer Marshall Falk went to Carver.

He put it simply, a lot of life lessons were taught at that school and in that football program.

My coach got me off the street and taught me to believe in myself.

That's what football can do in a school where kids don't have a lot of other things.

These sentiments, they're what fueled Carl.

Knowing the importance of what Carver did and meant to the desired community area, ain't no way in the world.

We were going to allow someone from somewhere else to come dictate to the community, to the Ram Nation, that Carver was going to be closed for good.

This was about more than a building.

It was about legacy, dignity, and the right to reclaim what was theirs.

And eventually, the state agreed.

Carver would rise again.

It was a huge victory against difficult odds, but securing the building was just the beginning.

Who would run the new Carver?

The alumni community had their ideas.

The state had others.

And the gap between them was about to crack wide open.

In the years after Katrina, a new charter school opened four miles from Carver.

It was called Sai Academy.

And while I was leading schools in Nashville in 2011, I was invited to visit.

The campus, if we even want to call it that, was anything but glamorous.

A chain-link fence surrounded by a cluster of trailers that were donated by a local Catholic school.

It even had wooden boardwalks connecting the classrooms.

Despite its humble exterior, what I saw inside was impressive.

Classrooms buzzed with focus.

Teachers weren't just teaching lessons.

They were coaching, pushing, encouraging.

Here's a clip from an old video from Teach for All, where a school leader from Sai is describing her goals before she observes a classroom.

I note what I want the teacher to keep doing, slight changes I want them to make, and what they're changing should be related to their current instructional goal.

So I look up each teacher's instructional goal and I look to see are they like actually working toward meeting that goal.

Adults were constantly refining their craft.

They were expected to move fast, teach well, and never blame circumstances for low results.

Those results, the data, was their touchstone.

So much so that in the staff office, there was a frame photo of the word data with a heart drawn around it.

That culture also required structure.

Uniforms were checked down to the socks.

The school day was longer.

Students received weekly and sometimes daily progress reports tied to behavior, effort, and performance.

This was a no-excuse to school.

It prioritized discipline, rigor, and academic excellence.

The student body was more than 90% black, more than 90% low-income.

Students mainly came from the 9th ward, from the very same neighborhoods that Carver had long served.

There was no championship football team, no award-winning marching band, no alumni base, no history.

Because unlike Carver, which had deep roots in the community, Sy Academy was built by outsiders.

He was the brainchild of Ben Markovitz, who was 28 years old when he founded SCI, just six years after graduating from Harvard.

The Washington, D.C.

native had one mission.

What I would say is non-negotiable and never changes is our goal of getting all our students ready for college success.

He hired a staff of mostly overachieving recent college grads, enthusiastic, idealistic, bright-eyed.

Many had come through Teach for America, and they delivered.

The The average student had entered multiple grade levels behind.

Here's how one SCI teacher described her incoming ninth graders in an interview with Education Week.

They come in at about a 4.5 grade point level.

We have several that are emerging readers that cannot read or can read only basic words and can't decode words and have never been taught phonics and I'm sorry that makes me furious.

But by senior year, those students were posting some of the highest ACT gains and state test results in the city.

In 2010, 98% of Sai's first graduating class was accepted to college.

Almost all of them were first-generation college students.

There were plenty of critics who questioned SAI's success.

They pointed out how most of its teachers were young and white.

How SAI suspended more than three times as many students than the average school in Louisiana.

In one early cohort, only 52 of the 83 students who began as freshmen made it to senior year.

But even with those criticisms, Sai's success took the nation by storm.

Ben was even interviewed by Oprah.

So today, we're here with founders, with principals, and teachers for some of the most groundbreaking schools in the country.

These school leaders are doing whatever it takes, taking the hours and the sacrifice to make sure that.

And at the end of his live interview, he accepted a million-dollar check from Oprah's Angel Network.

So the Angel Network is giving each of your charter school networks $1 million.

A million dollars for Thai Academy.

A school that had started in trailers, surrounded by fences, run on urgency and belief, was now held up as a national model.

But with shallow roots in the community it served, did it belong in New Orleans?

At first, Sai brushed off its critics and focused on growth.

Sci Academy evolved into collegiate academies, a network built to replicate its model across the city.

The city of New Orleans had received a $2 billion FEMA settlement to rebuild school buildings.

Instead of completely new schools like Sci Academy, the city needed to use their new funds to reconstruct existing legacy institutions.

That's when Ben Markovich started eyeing Carver.

It also sort of captivated us in a great number of ways.

Specifically, it was in a part of the 9th ward where a lot of our students were coming from already.

Collegiate began to prepare an application for Carver's charter.

But unbeknownst to them, others were already doing the same.

The alumni.

Michael Stone, former CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, recalls the moment a group of Carver alums went to Paul Vallis to fight for the right to rebuild the school.

Vallas was the superintendent of the Recovery School District at the time.

The RSC was responsible for figuring out who would receive the charter to run the school.

Vallas

said to them, look, here's a little bit of money, write a charter, and you can have a chance to run the school.

So that's what they did.

The sequencing here is a bit hazy depending on who you ask.

But what's clear is this.

At some point, Paul Vallis encouraged members of the Carver community to submit a charter application, framing it as their best chance to reclaim the school.

The application got rejected and they got pissed.

So then they wrote another charter.

They submitted it to the state.

The application got rejected by the state board and they got more pissed.

According to reporting from NOLA.com and accounts from Reverend Willie Calhoun, the alumni group submitted applications to the Recovery School District several times.

Alumni Carl Washington told us not every group vying for a charter was up to the task.

Here you have all these people coming saying they want to be charter president.

They want to do this.

They want to be charter.

All of a sudden, everybody wants to be a charter operator.

have their own charter school and most of them wasn't astute or intelligent enough or academia enough to run the charter.

They all saw, oh, this is a new hustle.

This is a new thing.

There's new charter.

So they all was on a charter hustle.

Chris Meyer, who eventually landed at the RSD, was involved in those Carver discussions.

He agreed with Carl, sort of.

How do we pick the right operator for this school?

The community really wanted to run it themselves.

And while we loved that passion, they didn't have any particular kind of education background, right?

Collegiate was approved to take over the school.

Ben Markovitz was aware it wasn't a popular decision amongst the community.

I imagine there's quite a bit of justification for this feeling that they were empowered to run the school themselves and then rejected without given much reason as to why.

Now, collegiate academies are invited to apply by the same people who rejected them and then given approval without much justification as to why.

This is, of course, deeply upsetting.

Yeah, rightly so.

Many in the community felt betrayed.

Here's how Oscar Brown describes it.

Biggest thing is outsiders coming in, and there's always been this political dark cloud over the city of New Orleans where politics have been a little bit shady.

And I think immediately for those folks, that was the first thing that came up.

Oh, it's part of a regime.

We knew it wasn't going to happen and things like that.

There were two fundamentally different visions for the school's future.

Collegiate academies, led by Ivy League Outsiders, focused almost exclusively on academics and college preparation.

Then there was the segment of the community that felt shut out, the Carver Alumni Group.

They were fighting for tradition, ritual, and identity.

Ben knew he was an outsider.

He had a sense for how hard it would be to overcome skepticism.

I don't know what it means to have gone to that school.

But he didn't didn't think the primary community he needed to serve was the Carver alumni group.

Because the Carver Alumni Group is the Carver Alumni Group in all caps.

It's not the group of all Carver alumni.

It's not the group of parents who could send their kids to Carver right now.

It's a very distinct group.

And they're important, but they're not also necessarily the stakeholders closest to this project.

Of course, the kids and their families are.

The RST held a series of community meetings to explain their decision, and those didn't go well.

Chris Meyer can still remember them clearly.

We pull up and there's a human chain in front of the building.

Protesters before this meeting were all standing there, locking arms.

A co-worker approached him.

So she said, hey, just let them do their chant for a minute and we're going to let you through.

And I said, all right, cool.

Yeah, no, not a problem.

So they're demonstrating, doing their thing.

They let us in into the parking lot.

We pull up.

We go into the meeting.

And my job that night was to communicate that we had determined the right school for Carver, the right school partner and operator.

I get two words, maybe three, out of my mouth.

And the whole meeting just erupts in chaos.

There's yelling, there's screaming, there's, you know, we didn't even get to naming who it was.

It was just like, who are you to tell us this is the right school?

And Eddie leans over to me.

He's like, I think it's time for us to go so I walk outside to my car and I find that all my windows had been bashed in

there was even glass in his child's car seat

tensions became so high that education leaders across the city even those who had previously supported the original decision questioned if it was the right move a mediator stepped in to help broker a piece Collegiate Academies went ahead with plans to run Carver.

In 2012, the phase takeover of the school began.

The man leading Collegiate's effort was Jarrell Bryant.

I loved school.

I still tell kids to this day, I missed one day of school until senior skip day.

So I was just a lover of school.

Jarrell was a Yale graduate from New York City, a rock star dean of students at Psy Academy.

He'd stood on the stage next to Ben Markovitz when Oprah had handed them that million-dollar check.

And now, he was tasked with taking over one of the most iconic black high schools in New Orleans history.

Well, kind of taking over.

Initially, Carver split in two, or depending on how you categorize it, three separate programs.

Collegiate Academies ran its version of Carver from modular buildings, trailers set up behind the original Carver campus while construction on the new school building was underway.

One program was run by the RSD for a few years until its students graduated out.

There was one shared football team, shared extracurriculars, shared name, but an entirely separate leadership staff and school culture.

It's okay if you're confused.

Most people were.

The community was.

For students, parents, and alumni, it wasn't clear who actually was Carver anymore.

Drell got a call on the very first day of school.

The person's an alum and says, you know, I have some concerns that you're not running the school the way alums expected it to be run or wanted it to be run.

The way the school should be run.

The alum was talking about Carver's culture, but culture was only one of Jarrell's concerns.

At the top of his list were academics.

Now, hardcore school leaders will argue that academic excellence is culture, but for the purposes of this episode, when I use the term, I mean non-academic elements of the school, like co-curriculars and community ritual.

Drawl was working 80-hour weeks with his team, trying to make sure that collegiate's Carver would achieve gains in core subjects.

This focus led to an unforced error.

I never had in my life bingo card being able to discern so many shades of green, but I made the seismic mistake of thinking a blue polo was going to be okay out the gate.

He's referring to school colors, and for Carver alums like Oscar Brown, the green and orange were sacred.

Were the colors going to change?

You know, we've seen Kennedy get changed to Lake Area, and not only did the name change, the colors changed.

So, Kennedy's colors was blue and gold.

And then, when Lake Area took over, then the colors were real, white, and blue.

So, I think those things was happening across the city.

And I think it was people saying, Wait, hold up, hands off Carver.

Like, we want the green and orange.

It's very distinctive.

You know, when people see those colors, they tend to know that you're from Culver.

It was a learning moment for Jarrell.

That was really the first time I had a clear understanding of expectations here.

My relative success is not going to be just indexed to what the organization has said is good, right?

There are going to be some other arbiters here.

At the end of the year, Jarrell and his team celebrated their strong Algebra 1 scores, some of the best in the city.

They saw it as a sign that their model was working.

But the achievement didn't seem to make a difference in the broader community.

They wanted what Carver had always meant.

Rituals, pride, enrichment, sports, Friday night lights, a homecoming game, a marching band.

When I asked Jarrell if they even had a marching band in their first year, he paused.

We did,

but remember, you had this 10 through 12 recovery school district, and so the fact that I really can't even answer you conclusively about what did we have?

What were our kids doing in year one, right?

Jarrell couldn't even remember if they had a band.

It tells you that in those early years of the new Carver, academics weren't just the top priority, they were almost the only priority.

While the community was hungry for extracurriculars, it doesn't mean everyone ignored the academic growth.

Carl Washington noticed.

I would say, Jarrell, I was impressed with his ability to

manage a school from an academia perspective, engaging in the students.

And I told him I was with him for that.

When I'm with him, I'm with him.

He just didn't understand why collegiates seemed to care so little about the importance of co-curriculars.

If you didn't understand, Carver rammed the mighty ram nation with basketball, football, and band in the community,

you shouldn't have even took that job.

You shouldn't have even took that job because that's big, that's big, big, big, not just in the area, in the whole city of New Orleans, in probably in other areas.

The year ended much like it started, with strong academics but a growing chorus of outside critics calling their very legitimacy into question.

Before long, those questions started coming from inside the building too.

By the winter of 2013, the pressure finally boiled over.

On November 20th, close to 100 students walked out of Carver in protest.

That year, over half of Carver's students had been suspended at least once, and they were frustrated by what they saw as an excessive discipline and an overly strict school culture.

They were made to walk on tape lines in the hallways.

A student said he'd been sent home for wearing the wrong shoes.

Another for chewing gum.

One student told a reporter, I'm tired of school rules and walking on lines.

You get suspended for coughing.

You get suspended for sneezing out loud.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote a letter to the school, criticizing the suspension rates and warning that the discipline policies may be discriminatory.

Three parents held a press conference announcing they were withdrawing their children from Carver.

Enough is enough.

Standing at the gate of Si Academy and George Washington Carver School on Reed Boulevard in New Orleans East, parents, teens, and activists speak out against what they call oppressive conditions.

Students issued a list of demands.

They wanted more lenient disciplinary rules and better lunches.

Carver's leaders sat down with parents, community members, and elected officials.

Here's how Jarrell Bryant remembers that time.

It was, I mean, confluence of events, some national backlash against no excuses broadly, some forces here locally.

Carver was always going to be a hotbed because of what it meant to the ninth ward, what it meant to the city.

It was one of the historically black high schools.

I have no sense of the depth of expectations,

real or perceived, or intended or unintended promises made to stakeholders about what they would control.

He says there wasn't a single spark, but rather a slow build of frustration, emotional, cultural, political.

I am laser focused on trying to keep my staff together, trying to make sure kids are safe.

You have some kids who maybe their mom or someone at church or someone else is telling them, These people don't treat you right.

You don't need to go in here.

I'm telling you that, right?

You have some kids saying, Mr.

Brian, I don't know these people.

I'm absolutely coming into my building.

In June 2014, the advocate published a graphic that laid it all out.

Suspension rates, test scores, side by side.

For readers, it confirmed a troubling trade-off.

Academic results at the expense of student dignity.

Among those speaking out was Reverend Willie Calhoun, Carver alum and one of the community leaders who had applied unsuccessfully for a charter to run the school.

He told the advocate, quote, I think some of these acts are criminal, and some of these things need to be litigated.

News of the controversy at Carver spread far and wide, making headlines across the country.

I even heard about it back in Nashville.

One of the most persistent critiques hanging over that period had nothing to do with discipline policies or test scores.

It had to do with representation.

Elizabeth Robeson was an outside organizer who questioned the legitimacy of the staff.

All these white people are coming into the city through Teach for America.

They have no experience teaching whatsoever, and they start these ridiculous salaries, 50,000 a year, whereas you had NOPS teachers work a whole career and never see that kind of money.

I mean, it was just a taking, a mass taking of public money.

For what it's worth, Elizabeth herself is white and not from the Ninth Ward.

But it doesn't change the fact that Ben Markovitz and the majority of the collegiate staff were also white.

and from either outside of the neighborhood or the city.

Elizabeth also seemed to believe that collegiate was deeply unpopular in the Ninth Ward.

I never met a parent who was on board with the program.

Never.

Of course, I didn't meet every single parent.

I can just speak from my experience that I never met a parent who was enthralled or in favor of what their children were forced to experience every day.

It's hard to imagine she didn't find a single parent on board with the program.

According to reporting at the time, out of the more than 800 students enrolled in collegiate-run schools, only three parents actually withdrew their children in the wake of the protests.

Drell was trying to keep those parents front of mind, but he couldn't help but feel the sting of the outside criticism.

He wasn't just defending a school, he was defending his own identity.

A lot of the folks who were most vocal at the time were folks of my parents' generation.

So that was a little bit strange for me too, to hear and feel like, whoa, some of your greatest critics are people that you grew up with as

your elders, your mentors.

You're taking me to a dark time, Robbie.

This is probably part of my leadership journey that I don't share often anymore.

It was a collision of values, academic performance versus cultural continuity, outsider urgency versus local tradition.

The promise of future results versus memory of the past.

Fights along these battle lines were playing out all across New Orleans, and Carver just happened to be the most vivid and the most volatile.

In some ways, Carver became a proxy for the city's larger identity crisis.

For opposing camps, the stakes weren't just the lives of the city's children, though they were that too.

The fight was about what kind of New Orleans would emerge from the floodwaters.

It had been nearly a decade since I stepped foot in a collegiate school, but one morning this past spring, I drove over to the 9th ward to see for myself how things had changed.

I arrived just before the staff's morning circle, and almost immediately, I could tell I was walking into something different.

The first thing I passed was a trophy case.

Inside, a recent state championship basketball trophy, photos from the last year's homecoming, team pictures, student celebrations.

In prior versions of Carver, the same hallway space would have been reserved for something else.

Quotes about grit, posters about college, charts tracking academic data.

Now, pride in culture lives right alongside pride in academics.

And to be clear, they still had visuals celebrating academic achievement too.

On that recent visit, I pulled Darrell aside and asked him to chronicle for me how this all changed.

We sat in his office and he walked me through his transformation as a leader, starting with those walkouts and headlines years ago.

The protests and criticism helped Jarrell realize that many of the people who had been the loudest critics of Collegiate weren't trying to tear the school down.

They just had a different vision of what greatness looked like.

And so, he was going to collaborate with them.

Whether I agreed with their tactics, whether I agreed with their tone, whether I agreed with their conclusions, I didn't doubt that they wanted the school to be great.

In October 2014, NOLA.com reported that Carver and its sister school, SCI Academy, were moving toward a zero suspension goal.

One year earlier, Bennett talked with PBS about why SAI had decided to shift its discipline model.

We found ourselves sort of tragically stuck with nothing more than stuff like suspension, stuff that got kids out of school.

We took a look at that this summer and said, that's just not what we want to do.

It's not what we want to be.

So what used to be a demerit is now a ton of praise in the opposite direction.

So the actual path to something like suspension or expulsion is much, much longer.

And that's something we thought we had in place.

We thought we had a long path to those things, but we really didn't.

Said actually reached zero suspensions before that 2014 article, and Carver was close behind.

Here's Jarrell again.

I often think that discipline and conversations around discipline are,

they're really lazy,

right?

Like there's so much about discipline that's rooted in history and culture.

And I think most importantly, intention and identity.

But

on paper, we were sending a lot lot of kids home.

Or let's say a high percentage of kids who attended our school had been suspended at some point in time.

That was a matter of concern.

Jarrell remembered seeing kids standing at the bus stop midday holding suspension slips.

I'd rather have you here physical learning than at home out there or out in the street.

The school began to build out a variation of restorative practices.

They created new systems, new training, and even physical spaces designed to help students resolve conflict without being pushed out of school.

They trained staff to lead mediations and healing circles.

They started to connect student discipline to other programmatic decisions.

They built programs, funded the band, revived the spirit gear, and leaned into rituals.

Engaging lessons helped with suspension rates.

Strong sports teams help with suspension rates.

Connecting before you correct help with suspension rates.

A kid has to really believe, I want to be a part of that community.

Otherwise, we lose a really powerful lever to changed behavior.

Suspension rates dropped nearly threefold in a single year.

This was a wildly different Carver.

During my visit this spring, I also wandered into the cafeteria where the staff had gathered for their morning circle.

On previous trips to Sy and Carver, the staff had been overwhelmingly white and young, energetic, committed, but also clearly outsiders to the community they served.

This group was different, still energetic, still mission-driven, but older, more grounded, mostly black, more men.

Here's Jarrell.

It is a team that is far more generationally inclined.

I'll say.

We have far more people who see their charge, yes, in the goals that are ambitious that we're setting right now, but also in the, I'm going to be a part of this community for years, years, and and years.

And people I care about are going to be a part of this community for generations.

When you look at our leadership ranks, a high volume of TFA alums, but these are also folks who have been here at this school in many cases for seven, eight, nine, 10 plus years.

So you have people still who were there for those trailer days, right?

Who were there for some of those crucible moments with community and outcomes and results and

who can speak to that, which is important.

More than once in our conversation, Jarrell made clear that this wasn't just about finding people in the community.

There can be a narrative that's lazy there.

And as a black educator, I don't think it's a benefit to land with,

well, culture improved when there were more black folks there.

All right, culture improved when you had more people from the community there.

Now, culture improved when we had great people

who declare on the targets and our development improved and our alignment improved and we became better at the craft of teaching and learning.

And we have benefited from Black excellence and folks who are of the community who can tell a story about what we're doing and how we're growing and can speak a language.

that maybe we weren't always speaking before, that

now

all of us speak with far more fluidity than we used to.

As the morning circle began in the cafeteria, the assistant principal kicked things off.

One by one, staff members, about 100 in total, stepped forward to share announcements, shout-outs, and intentions for the day.

I've seen these morning circles on past visits, and I've always found them impressive.

They require real discipline, training, consistency, and trust among colleagues.

They're more than a ritual.

They're a sign of strong staff culture, culture that values communication, that starts the day with intention.

Once we're in there, we can end up collectibles, we can encourage kids, but get into more classes.

Attend kids, get into classes, 90 seconds around the circle, go!

Carver had changed.

The staff looked different.

The building looked different.

There was pride in sports and spirit and tradition.

But Carver had also stayed the same.

That morning circle, that was collegiate to the core.

And as I listened, I heard the familiar reform DNA, talk of assessments, data cycles, progress monitoring.

But it didn't sound cold or mechanical.

It sounded focused, grounded, like a team that knew exactly what they were there to do.

After the staff circle, I talked with school principal Victor Jones as he observed morning student arrival.

Victor recently took over as school leader for Jarrell, who now runs the entire collegiate network.

That's a beautiful thing.

One of my favorite things about Carzana things, but it is the fact that, like, to work at a school where teachers who work at that school will bring their kids to learn at that school, that is rare.

The fact that like so many of our teammates actually bring their kids to go to school here and that I've got to teach them.

That they wanted me to teach their kid how you don't suppose you're good.

See you.

It's like an amazing, like,

we're doing something right.

Later, I sat in on one of Victor's classes and what I saw felt familiar.

One in 10, write it down, don't cheat.

Victor was using teaching techniques I remembered from the old reform days.

One in particular, no opt-out.

The idea that students can't simply choose not to participate.

Another, right is right, meaning the teacher doesn't round up or settle for a partially correct answer.

Victor called on a student who didn't know the answer.

And then Victor turned to another student and asked a related question, something that could help unlock it for the first student.

Finally, he came back to the first student, patiently prompting, supporting, guiding, until the student arrived at the correct answer.

It was the kind of moment that's easy to overlook, but it captured something essential about what Carver has become.

A school shaped by the DNA of reform, structure, rigor, clarity, but deepened, adapted by time, experience, and care.

Victor Jones is the principal, so one might expect him to say glowing things about the school.

But what struck me most during my visit wasn't just Victor's passion, it was how consistent it was.

Conversation after conversation, custodians, coaches, teacher, culture leads, many of them from the neighborhood, many of them alumni, parents, or longtime community members, sometimes all of the above.

All of them mission-driven.

Take Nell Lewis, Carver's director of culture.

I grew up in this community right across the tracks.

I've been working at Carver for a total of 18 years.

My son graduated from Carver in 2022.

He was Mr.

Carver.

She had lived through the transitions, seen the protests, heard the skepticism.

The community didn't believe who are these people?

They're coming from out of town.

They're white.

They don't care.

And I mean, this school never had the data it's had now.

Yes, we had sports championships, but the number of scholars that are enrolling in college and actually finishing

is

really amazing.

Let me put some numbers to the academic success Nell mentioned.

Last year, Carver earned an A for academic growth from the state and a B for overall academic performance.

For the more wonky education stats folks, Carver ranked second in the city for open enrollment high schools, all non-magnet schools, for students receiving mastery or advanced performance on the state exams.

The year before, they had the highest student academic growth in the city.

They've been able to keep growing academically, even as they continued to expand their extracurriculars.

Ronald Evans Jr.

graduated in 2017.

He came back to work at Carver in 2022, got his master's, and now teaches English and coaches football.

The enthusiasm and everything that was going on, like I walked into a teaching meeting, it was like 50 teachers in a circle, and all of them was like enthusiasm.

What about they do?

I'm like, it don't even matter what school,

I want these teachers like i don't want these teachers they like they take pride in what they have and i think that's the really all you can ask for teachers like to give their all and have pride in what they have and then there's nathaniel rocher the network's athletic director and longtime carver staffer Going through the orientation that Carver was giving me, the vision that the school had for the kids and the values, choices that we choose to make daily that directly impacts the culture of the building and the culture of the kids and also, you know, serves the community, I found myself like super aligned with that.

And finally, Sandra, the custodian.

The teachers are marvelous.

You see her very beautiful in and out.

The principal is excellent.

The whole, actually everybody in here is loving and kind.

And they're trying their best.

I hear him talking to the kids.

They're trying their best to make the kids learn.

When I asked Victor, what's the difference now compared to 10 years ago?

He didn't hesitate.

If you're going to work harder than you ever work, and then you choose to stay with us, well, you're obviously choosing to grow in those moments.

That's what they're also choosing.

When people come to Carver, they tend to stay with us

and they tend to grow.

I remember kids could only wear all black shoes.

And how much time we were spending on kids trying to correct kids for their I had the same policy.

We used to have the black magic marker, black tape.

Yeah, yeah, we used to do all that.

And that was wild to me.

That was crazy to me.

Of all the people we met at Carver, The one who stood out the most was Eric French, the school's band director.

He's also an alum from the pre-collegiate days.

After graduating, Eric returned years later to lead the very program that had once shaped him.

Under his direction, the Carver band has become one of the school's most visible sources of pride, performing across the city, drawing in students, and helping to reroot the new Carver in its old community.

It was like a dream come true to even going this interview.

When I was in the interview, man,

I almost broke down, you know what I'm saying?

Because it was like a reality.

Like, wow, I'm about to get this opportunity.

And I know once I get my foot in the store, it's going to be up from here.

So now I'm going into year eight here and just how I imagined it.

A new generation of Carver staff, many of them alumni, have stepped into the story, not just to teach, but to mentor, coach, and inspire.

The building may be different.

But the legacy, it lives on in the hands of those who once walked these halls and now lead them.

The Carver fights inspired many leaders across the city to take a different approach in their collaboration with the surrounding communities.

They watched Carver's early stumbles and worked hard to avoid them.

Rhonda Khalifi-Alouiz is the CEO of KIPP New Orleans, the city's largest charter organization.

She says it took time for them to find their footing.

There was a much broader political context that had not wrapped our heads and hearts around in terms of, you don't know everything you should connect with the people who actually have been here for many many years that learning changed how they reopened booker t washington one of new orleans' most storied high schools this time the new operators didn't just announce their presence they co-planned the school with its alumni association from uniforms and colors to governance and staffing there wasn't a lot that we actually didn't agree on.

What we learned is there's a Venn diagram and in the center is students and things like the color, crimson, like it has to be the right shade, and the name, and things like that that preserve their legacy.

Citywide organizations like New Schools for New Orleans and even the RSD eventually began providing more support to leaders.

That included an effort to more effectively matchmake between prospective charter organizations and community groups.

That process has led to much more positive partnerships than what we saw at Carver in its early days.

Today, the legacy high schools of New Orleans are led in many cases by people from the neighborhoods or people who've earned their place through years of service.

They've embraced academic rigor and band culture, college prep, and Friday night football.

Carver showed the city what happens when you try to rebuild a neighborhood without its traditions.

And then they showed us what's possible when you bring those traditions back and build on them rather than around them.

Next time, on where the schools went:

Every teacher in New Orleans is fired.

You lost your house, you've lost everything, you don't have a job, but it was just nothing to come back to.

When you think about the loss of health insurance that accompanied that, as people are literally trying to rebuild their lives.

That's next time on Where the Schools Went.

Where the Schools Went is an original podcast from the branch in partnership with Midas Touch.

I'm your host, Ravi Gupta.

This show is executive produced by me, Ravi Gupta.

Our senior senior producers are Kate Malakoff and Pallavi Katamasu.

Research and fact-checking by Ethan Macy Cushman and Katie Nelligan.

Additional support by Liz Smith and Leah Sutherland.

Post sound and music by Chapter 4.

Sound design and mix by Sarah Gibelaska and sound editing by Natalie Escadero.

Original music by Kareem Dueten, with Kevin Maringer on trombone and trouba and Eric Biondo on trumpet.

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