First, here’s the story from the libertarians at Reason TV.
Before hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, New Orleans had one of the worst performing public school districts in the nation. Katrina forced nearly a million people to leave their homes and caused almost $100 billion in damages. To an already failing public school system, the storm seemed to provide the final deathblow. But then something amazing happened. In the wake of Katrina, education reformers decided to seize the opportunity and start fresh with a system based on choice.
Today, New Orleans has the most market-based school system in the US. 60% of New Orleans students currently attend charter schools, test scores are up, and talented and passionate educators from around the country are flocking to New Orleans to be a part of the education revolution. It’s too early to tell if the New Orleans experiment in school choice will succeed over the long term, but for the first time in decades people are optimistic about the future of New Orleans schools.
And then the videos.
Part 1:
Part 2:
School choice works – let’s hope they can keep the unions and bureaucrats away from the kids long enough so that they can get an education. I’m not a big fan of libertarians, because they are often lousy on social issues and foreign policy. But I agree with them on school choice.
Don’t miss the previous story about Governor Bobby Jindal’s pro-life reforms in Louisiana.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Anon left this comment in another thread:
I looked at their website and stumbled upon this article (they are trying to argue for school choice of course, but they quoted this from people who are against school choice)
http://www.pacificresearch.org/publications/school-choice-improves-public-schools
“In a recent op-ed, former New York Times education editor Edward Fiske and Duke University professor Helen Ladd claim, among other things, that school choice is bad public policy because it hurts poorly-performing public schools. Citing New Zealand’s quasi-school-choice program, Fiske and Ladd charge that when more advantaged students left New Zealand’s poorly-performing public schools, these “downwardly spiraling” public schools were left with disproportionate numbers of hard-to-educate students.”
So school choice is bad because better students then can choose to go to better schools and that would hurt poorly-performing public schools?
LOL
And then Richard Ball said this:
Presumably it hurts the public schools because they’re funding is reduced by every student who leaves.
Plus, their average scores, etc. would drop, causing pressure for them to reduce their academic standards even further, causing further erosion among parents who care about where their children are educated.
If we go back to a pre-Big Government era, parents would decide, and pay for, where their children were educated.
The State has an interest in ensuring that children are educated, and are educated well, and not by, e.g., Islamic wackos urging jihad.
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