section_path: Education/Primary and secondary schools
section_name: Primary and secondary schools
paragraph_text: Primary and secondary schools
  
  Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), also known as New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS), is the public school district for the entire city. Katrina was a watershed moment for the school system. Pre-Katrina, NOPS was one of the area's largest systems (along with the Jefferson Parish public school system). It was also the lowest-performing school district in Louisiana. According to researchers Carl L. Bankston and Stephen J. Caldas, only 12 of the 103 public schools within the city limits showed reasonably good performance.
  
  Following Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana took over most of the schools within the system (all schools that matched a nominal "worst-performing" metric). Many of these schools (and others) were subsequently granted operating charters giving them administrative independence from the Orleans Parish School Board, the Recovery School District or the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). At the start of the 2014 school year, all public school students in the NOPS system attended these independent public charter schools, the nation's first to do so.
  
  The charter schools made significant and sustained gains in student achievement, led by outside operators such as KIPP, the Algiers Charter School Network, and the Capital One–University of New Orleans Charter School Network. An October 2009 assessment demonstrated continued growth in the academic performance of public schools. Considering the scores of all public schools in New Orleans gives an overall school district performance score of 70.6. This score represents a 24% improvement over an equivalent pre-Katrina (2004) metric, when a district score of 56.9 was posted. Notably, this score of 70.6 approaches the score (78.4) posted in 2009 by the adjacent, suburban Jefferson Parish public school system, though that system's performance score is itself below the state average of 91.
  
  One particular change was that parents could choose which school to enroll their children in, rather than attending the school nearest them.