Don Brunell

Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast in 2005, flooding cities and towns in four states and killing more than 1,800 people.

The government response to Katrina, especially by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), became the poster child for an inept and incompetent bureaucracy.

But out of this disaster has come a story of success.

The hurricane gave New Orleans educators the opportunity to reinvent the city’s failing public schools. Two years before the storm struck, the state had created the Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD) to turn around a school system that was riddled wi...