Call it charter school city.

The New Orleans Recovery School District has with the end of this school year shuttered its last five remaining traditional public schools, creating the country’s first all-charter school district.

This transformation has delighted corporate education reformers.

But the story of how New Orleans arrived at this point is one not of triumph, but of pain and tragedy, in which the city’s devastation from Hurricane Katrina was exploited to enact a radical program of school privatization.

Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, 10 days after the opening of school. The struggling school district — notorious for its corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and poor academic performance — had just begun a process of reform. The storm brought that process to a halt.

The city’s system of public education was effectively destroyed, both physically and organizationally. Only 16 of its 128 schools came out of the storm relatively unscathed. Some others were submerged beneath five feet of water or had their roofs torn off; many had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

The human toll was also tremendous. The storm displaced hundreds of thousands, including many families with school-age children. Many people who fled the city at the time of the storm never returned. Prior to Katrina, New Orleans’ public schools enrolled 60,000 students; today that number is 33,000.

Corporate reformers saw in the devastation an opportunity. Noted education historian and policy expert Diane Ravitch described their formula: eliminate public schools, replace with privately managed charters, fire the teachers, replace with Teach for America recruits, eliminate the union.

Shortly after the storm, the Orleans Parish School Board, which was in charge of city schools, fired more than 7,000 unionized school employees, including the entire teaching force. The teachers union lost its collective-bargaining rights. And, the state seized control of the vast majority of the city’s schools and placed them in the state-run Recovery School District, which quickly began to replace existing schools with charters.

Before the storm, there had been just seven charter schools in the city. By the 2007–08 school year, there were 40. In September, all 58 of the schools in New Orleans will be privately run but publicly funded charters whose teachers work without union protections.

The teachers who had been fired had to reapply for teaching jobs, and although some veteran teachers were hired back, primarily at the higher-performing schools, the overwhelming number of hires at most schools were young teachers from programs such as Teach for America who had no or little experience and no history of union affiliation.

Larry Carter, the president of the United Teachers of New Orleans, said the decimation of the teachers union was critical for privatization to proceed.

“The model used in New Orleans was to decentralize public education as well as to get rid of the union and get rid of its influence in education and politics,” he said.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan celebrated the system’s transformation in a notorious 2010 gaffe: “The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.”

The new system has been accused of discrimination on various fronts. A 2010 lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center charging that the new schools fail to meet the needs of disabled students, including in some cases refusing to enroll them, has led to settlement talks between the plaintiffs and schools. And this May, a group of community activists filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging that the closure of the city’s traditional public schools and the expansion of its charter sector have disproportionately affected African-American and other minority students.

On top of the charges of discrimination is evidence that the new, privatized schools perform no better than the public school system before the storm.

Student scores on state tests this spring put New Orleans schools in the 17th percentile among all Louisiana public school districts, just about where they ranked pre-Katrina, said Louisiana educator and researcher Michael Deshotels in an analysis of test results.

The purported success of the transformed system is a “great big fraud,” Deshotels wrote. “After more than eight years of state takeover and conversion of public schools in Louisiana into privately run charter schools, even the most ardent promoters of this radical privatization experiment can no longer hide its spectacular failure.”