Louisiana Illuminator

More than a decade of federal oversight of special education in New Orleans charter schools has ended, following a March 31 decision by U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey to terminate a sweeping consent judgment, which went into effect in early 2015. That consent judgment resulted from a class-action lawsuit filed by parents of charter school students against the Louisiana Department of Education. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, the state took over the majority of the city’s schools, converting them from traditional, district-run schools to quasi-autonomous charters, whose day-to-day operations are managed by private, nonprofit groups. The Orleans Parish School Board, which has since taken over the regulation of nearly all of the city’s schools, was later added as a co-defendant.

After years of good marks from a court-appointed independent monitor, the Orleans Parish School Board and the Department of Education formally requested release from federal monitoring. But parents of students with disabilities and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represents the plaintiffs, had asked the court to continue the consent judgment, saying the city’s schools were not ready to come out from under federal oversight. 

During an informal hearing before Zainey in November, called to hear parents’ concerns about the potential termination of the consent decree, dozens of people alleged that their children had been subjected to violations of federal special education law, despite federal monitoring. Plaintiffs said that the school district and state still lacked robust internal monitoring and oversight of New Orleans charters for the consent decree to end. But Zainey disagreed. Though problems with special education persist at some schools, the consent decree was primarily intended to address systemic issues — and whether the state and district are catching problems and implementing plans to correct them — rather than individual students’ experiences. “Most if not all of the individual problems raised could not plausibly be traced to a systemic failure, and some problems, while causing palpable frustration to class members, did not necessarily constitute a violation of federal law,” Zainey wrote in his ruling terminating the consent judgment this week.