The State of Public Education in New Orleans (SPENO) 2023

February 2023

The Cowen Institute last published our flagship report, The State of Public Education in New Orleans, in March 2020, right as the first tremors of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic were being felt in New Orleans and in communities around the world. Since then, schools, educators, parents, and students, here in New Orleans, as well as across the nation, have navigated and adapted to an unprecedented landscape of school closures and reopenings, masking, virtual learning, and other measures, while also trying to continue their educational journeys.

Since 2007, the Cowen Institute has published this report on an annual basis. We made a decision to not publish for the last two years due to a number of factors. First, in almost all cases, both here in Louisiana and nationally, school assessment measures were paused over the past two years. This meant that while students often still took end-of-year tests to assess their academic progress, schools were not evaluated or graded on student performance as they had been in the past. Furthermore, the ever-shifting nature of public education during the pandemic meant that a report would likely be outdated soon after publication.

We are excited to now release this report that works to capture some of the changes, accomplishments, setbacks, and gains that have occurred in public education in New Orleans since the start of the pandemic.