Draws on personal involvement in the New Orleans (LA) School District to examine the origins & development of the Recovery School District (RSD), wherein the state took responsibility for running the New Orleans schools tagged as failing at the end of the last testing period before Hurricane Katrina. Background to the crisis of New Orleans public education is provided, & the US government's Katrina response is compared to certain of its actions in Iraq, highlighting problems engendered by the ideological conviction that the private sector outperforms the public sector. How a market-based approach was applied to the New Orleans public education crisis is explained, identifying the problem with market-driven education as chiefly one of unequal market access. The arrival of the RSD in the wake of Katrina & the struggling market-based charter school experiment is then discussed, highlighting problems stemming from the lack of administrative leadership. The current state of the New Orleans education system is described, giving attention to the arrival of Paul Vallas from the Philadelphia, PA, school system to take over RSD. D. Edelman