A PRIVATE SCHOOL SYSTEM FOR A DEMOCRACY...:

These ideas--choice, charter schools, vouchers--have all gained a foothold to one degree or another in struggling urban districts across the country, including in DeVos' own home turf of Detroit, where more than half of public school students now attend charter schools. But nowhere has the revolution achieved the kind of complete victory it has in the Crescent City in the years since Hurricane Katrina. The neighborhood attendance zones that define school options for families around the country have been abolished here. Soon, New Orleans may become the only big city in the country without a single traditional public school run by a central office; nearly all have been turned into charter schools--there are now more than 80 in all--and the five remaining holdouts may be converted in the next few months. A few thousand families take advantage of the state's voucher program, enrolling in local Catholic schools. And overall, test scores here have improved markedly.

But if the idea is to blow up traditional school systems around the country this way, there may be as much cautionary tale in New Orleans as success story. Just because one charter school system works, doesn't mean every charter school system works. Through more than a decade of policy changes and course corrections, New Orleans has discovered a lot of the ways that a system based on giving parents choice can go wrong. The solution, it has discovered, is not simply to retreat and allow market forces a free hand in delivering education. In contrast to some other states with big charter sectors--notably Michigan, where DeVos just helped kill a proposed state law that would have made it easier to close failing charter schools--Louisiana has been relatively aggressive in shaping the available options, repeatedly closing charters that underperform.

If there is a Betsy DeVos of New Orleans, it is Leslie Jacobs, a former insurance executive and school board member who has been one of the most tenacious advocates for the city's charters. She described the city's school system to me recently this way: In the ideological struggle over choice and charter schools "we're actually in the middle. Yeah, there are charters and there's autonomy, but charters don't get to pick their own enrollment and you're going to be held to a very high standards. There's nowhere else in the country that has this."

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