With the increased focus on improving consistently low-performing schools and districts, public education in the United States (U.S.) is undergoing a tremendous transformation. Within the past decade, a handful of states including Louisiana, Tennessee and Michigan have transferred chronically low-performing schools from the jurisdiction of local school boards to special state-run districts. Whereas the mechanisms of accountability and their efficacy in raising the level and equity of student achievement have formed the majority of the extant literature, the role of interest groups and their impact on the policymaking process, particularly the processes of takeover of schools by states and the eventual return of those schools to local control, has been overlooked.

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the role of interest groups in education reforms in post-Katrina New Orleans.  The passage of Act 35 by the Louisiana legislature in November 2005 allowed the state-run Recovery School District to take control of the majority of public schools in New Orleans.  However, Act 35 did not specify the process for returning schools back to the control of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). We apply a political science framework, McDonnell’s (2009) Policy Feedback Model, to education policy and investigate the role of special interests in the policymaking process in post-Katrina New Orleans with a specific focus on education governance.  We examine the relationship among the creation of policies, subsequent interest groups behavior and education governance models.

Along with reviews of previous policy reports, we examine data on campaign contributions in state and local school board elections from the Louisiana Ethics Commission for the past three elections.  We conducted interviews with key stakeholders throughout the educational system ranging from state-, district- and school-level education policy leaders to teachers. An initial round of in-person interviews was conducted in New Orleans in early March 2013. Follow-up interviews with additional stakeholders were conducted by phone. All interviewees were promised confidentiality and interviews were 40-90 minutes in length and followed a semi-structured interview protocol. 

The preliminary findings from our interviews and analysis highlight six overarching trends over the post-Katrina period (2006-07 to 2012-13): non-profit organizations are major players; growing national and outside influences; differential mobilization of interests; evolution to a nearly complete charter school district dramatically transformed the stakes and interests in education; the OPSB still has substantial room for improvement; reformers becoming policymakers.

Overall, Act 35 seems to have empowered nonprofit organizations and others to become more politically active and involved in education policy making in Louisiana.  The reform-minded political actors that advocated and ensured the passage of Act 35 continue to influence the landscape of Louisiana and New Orleans educational policies. Interest groups influenced the return to local control policy as well as overall governance through unprecedented levels of contributions to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and OPSB elections.  The influence of interest groups has contributed to an emerging shift in political control from traditional school board candidates to an increase in pro-reform board members on the BESE and OPSB.