Astral Codex Ten

Hurricane Katrina

7 min read

Hurricane Katrina

Article

Hurricane Katrina is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 18, 2021 and August 26, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of their schools”; “aftermath of Hurricane Katrina”; “After Hurricane Katrina, many New Orleans students had missed a year or two of school”. It most often appears alongside American, Britain, COVID.

Metadata

  • Category: Events
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: February 18, 2021
  • Last seen: August 26, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: The Cult Of Smart
February 18, 2021 · Original source
DeBoer's second tough example is New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of their schools, forcing the city to redesign their education system from the ground up. They decided to go a 100% charter school route, and it seemed to be very successful. Unlike Success Academy, this can't be selection bias (it was every student in the city), and you can't argue it doesn't scale (it scaled to an entire city!). But DeBoer writes:
After Hurricane Katrina, the neoliberal powers that be took advantage of a crisis (as they always do) to enforce their agenda. The schools in New Orleans were transformed into a 100% charter system, and reformers were quick to crow about improved test scores, the only metric for success they recognize. Whether these gains stand up to scrutiny is debatable. But even if these results hold, the notion of using New Orleans as a model for other school districts is absurd on its face. When we make policy decisions, we want to isolate variables and compare like with like, to whatever degree possible. The story of New Orleans makes this impossible. Katrina changed everything in the city, where 100,000 of the city's poorest residents were permanently displaced. The civic architecture of the city was entirely rebuilt. Billions of dollars of public and private money poured in. An army of do-gooders arrived to try to save the city, willing to work for lower wages than they would ordinarily accept. How could these massive overall social changes possibly be replicated elsewhere? And how could we have any faith that adopting the New Orleans schooling system - without the massive civic overhaul - would replicate the supposed advantages?
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
This turned out not to be true. So spectacularly untrue that we still talk about the Blitz Spirit. With our trademark humility, the British concluded that this was due to our exceptional moral fibre and, with help from the Americans, set about bombing German civilians to hell and back. Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort. Literally no one thinks this was due to their exceptional moral fibre. Instead, it seemed that crisis led to teamwork. Bregman is able to quote similar behaviour on the Titanic, on September 11th and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot Of School
August 17, 2021 · Original source
After Hurricane Katrina, many New Orleans students had missed a year or two of school (because their school had been destroyed, or they’d had to evacuate the city and live with relatives, etc). After the hurricane, New Orleans switched to a charter-school-based system and test scores went up, with New Orleans students generally outperforming their peers. There’s a lot of discussion about whether this does or doesn’t mean that charter schools are great, but either way doesn’t seem like missing a year or two of school hurt the New Orleanians very much.
Another strain of literature focuses on big Third World disasters, like an earthquake in Pakistan. These disasters usually destroy schools and give students a few years’ gap in learning, and studies do find that the students do worse just after the disaster. But importantly, they are doing more worse than the schooling gap can account for - eg if they miss school for a year, they’re two or three years below grade level. Most studies I read attribute this to some combination of malnutrition and PTSD. The grade losses worsen even after the students are back in school (ie they might start two years behind, and after two more years of schooling they’re four years behind). The commentators attribute this to “being promoted too quickly”, but I interpret this as further evidence that something beyond just missing school is affecting this. Given that the Hurricane Katrina study didn’t find this, I suspect that in a First World environment where malnutrition is less of a risk, there’s less need to worry about this.
Inline links: an earthquake in Pakistan
Source. New Orleans’ ACT scores improved from pre-Katrina to post-Katrina, even though the post-Katrina kids missed a year or two of school. I don’t want to trivialize the hard work that educators and school reformers probably put in to catch them up - but given that hard work, they caught up. I think educators will also put a lot of work into catching up kids who have to miss school because of COVID. Some parents "unschool" their children. That is, they object to schooling as traditionally understood, so they register themselves as home schooling but don't formally teach much, limiting themselves to answering kids' questions as they come up. When adjusted for confounders (ie usually these parents are rich and well-educated), their young children lag one grade level behind public school students on average - but only one (though these students were pretty young and they might have lagged further behind with time). By the time these unschooled kids are applying for college, they seem to know a decent amount, get into college at relatively high rates, and do well in their college courses. I think there’s some evidence that not getting any school at all harms these children’s performance on some traditional measures. But it doesn’t harm them very much. Given how little effect there is from absolutely zero school ever, I think missing a year or two of school isn’t going to matter a lot.
Inline links: Source, lag one grade level behind, they seem to know a decent amount
Highlights From The Comments On Missing School
August 26, 2021 · Original source
This article cites a number of studies about various incidents that disrupted education, including Hurricane Katrina, the bombing of German cities during WWII, the Blitz, and the closing of the public school system in Prince Edward County, Virginia after Brown v. Board, that claim to have found long-lasting effects though I’m sure some of them suffer from the problems you mentioned.
Inline links: This article
NOLA lost about 1/2 its population after Katrina. Also, Case studies of neighborhood recovery show that more-advantaged neighborhoods before Katrina have higher rates of return, and even gain new residents, while disadvantaged neighborhoods remain sparsely populated (Elliott et al. 2009).”
…this being a rebuttal of my point that New Orleans kids seemed to do well (compared to their previous baseline) after missing a lot of school post-Katrina.