A New Orleans Film Festival entry revisits the post-Katrina changes to the city’s schools
By Marie Fazio
Source: The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com
October 24, 2025
A documentary film featuring key players behind New Orleans’ shift to a system of charter schools after Hurricane Katrina will premiere this week at the New Orleans Film Festival.
The film, “Turnaround: The Reinvention of New Orleans’ Public Education System,” was directed by David Osborne, an author and consultant who has focused on public government and education reform. It covers similar ground to Osborne’s 2017 book “Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System,” but Osborne said he hopes it will reach a broader audience.
“If you really want to affect the culture you’ve got to get it on television screens,” he said. “And the New Orleans story is so dramatic and so important I thought would make a natural movie.”
Two New Orleans-based filmmakers, Darcy McKinnon and Abe Felix, produced the film. McKinnon, who recently produced the award-winning film “Natchez,” worked as a teacher at FirstLine Schools before and after Katrina.
The documentary portrays New Orleans’ school system before the storm as broke, corrupt and academically poor-performing and chronicles the events that led to the state’s takeover of most of the city’s schools and eventual shift to an all-charter school system. Today, all but one of the city’s public schools is a charter school independently run by a nonprofit board.
The film features Leslie Jacobs, a former member of the state board of education and education advocate, Jay Altman, founder of FirstLine Schools, former Orleans Parish School Board Superintendent Henderson Lewis and longtime school district official Ken Ducote, among others.
While touching on some of the controversies surrounding the sweeping reforms, it largely praises the current system where schools get greater autonomy over aspects of day-to-day operations like curriculum and hiring but risk closure if they do not meet academic standards.
“The conversion of most New Orleans public schools to charter schools produced the best and fastest improvement in the country,” Osborne said in a recent interview, “and it is the way we ought to organize public school systems.”
Despite improved graduation rates and state test scores over the last 20 years, some community members remain vocal critics of the system. Some have said the overhaul was done with little public input. Others have said the removal of neighborhood schools with attendance zones has led to issues with transportation as students cross the city for school.
Local schools featured
Osborne is no stranger to New Orleans. In 2010 then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu hired him as a consultant when he took office and Osborne recommended a slew of policy overhauls to remedy what he in 2010 called the “least competent city government I’d ever seen in this country and the most corrupt.”
At the Bureau of Governmental Research’s annual luncheon last year, Osborne said the Orleans Parish School Board’s decision to open the Leah Chase School, the first permanent district-run school in nearly two decades and the only non-charter public school in the city, was “a mistake.”
The documentary features several current schools, including The NET, an alternative school network, Rooted School, whose mission revolves around setting kids up for financial success, and George Washington Carver High School, a legacy school run by Collegiate Academies.
It touches on the controversy of the reform movement, including the mass firing of public school teachers after Katrina and contentious protests as reforms were being implemented. A hearing about the future of the Living School which the Orleans Parish School Board voted to close in 2023 is prominently featured.
The documentary premieres in person at the New Orleans Film Festival on Oct. 27 at 7:45 p.m. It is available online through the festival after Oct. 23. It will be available through Kinema, an online streaming platform, in mid-November.
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