Good day, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share a Contributor Column by Jerel Bryant, CEO of Collegiate Academies in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
We provide a bio for Jerel below.
Prior to becoming CEO in 2022, Jerel led George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans’ historic Ninth Ward for more than a decade, helping transform it into one of the city’s highest-performing high schools and earning recognition as Louisiana High School Principal of the Year in 2021. As CEO, he has focused on cascading mindsets and choices that drive absolute results for all kids across the region. A graduate of Yale University, he loves the work he gets to do.
The Mindsets Behind School Transformations
When longtime New Orleans residents learn that I served as principal of George Washington Carver High School for more than a decade, the response is often something like this:
“If you’d told me 10 years ago that Carver would become one of the top high schools in New Orleans—with a state championship basketball team and graduates attending elite universities across the country—that would have been hard to believe.”
This has been a reoccurring experience in a great city that is wondering aloud, “Can we offer rigorous progress for all kids in this system?”
Today, I have the privilege of serving as CEO of Collegiate Academies. If our mission is truly generational change, then success can’t stop at our own schools. My goal isn’t simply to lead a network of charter schools that delivers on its promises to scholars and families. It is to help build a New Orleans where educational excellence is no longer the exception, but the expectation.
The encouraging part is that this isn’t just my goal. It’s the shared aspiration of our unique public school system in New Orleans, where charter school leaders have the freedom to innovate while sharing a collective responsibility to improve outcomes for every child in the city.
Transformational change in K-12 education isn’t built on a formula. It’s built on culture.
And culture begins with three mindsets.
The first mindset is collaboration.
Outside New Orleans, people often don’t believe me when I describe how charter schools operate here. Yes, we compete for scholars, talent, and philanthropy. But we also visit each other’s schools, borrow each other’s ideas, solve problems together, and celebrate each other’s victories. Around here, collaboration isn’t an initiative; it’s simply how we choose to do business.
Collegiate Academies developed me as a teacher, but it was an early visit to a local KIPP school that most reminded me how far I needed to travel in order to become the educator our amazing and powerful kids most needed. In 2009, I observed Freddy Kullman’s classroom, and it changed my career. I had never seen scholars learn that quickly or that deeply. I wanted that. To this day, that observation still impacts how I plan, practice, and execute.
From Jamar McKneely, CEO of InspireNOLA, I learned to elevate the scholar experience by constantly asking a simple question: What do the communities we serve deserve to experience beyond academic progress?
From FirstLine, Crescent City, and ReNEW, and other K-8 operators I’ve learned how to better engage eighth-grade families, create stronger transitions into high school, and build better supports for our most vulnerable scholars.
Just recently, when this year’s state test results became public, I did what I always do at this point. I looked for schools getting extraordinary results in a particular grade level or with a particular group of scholars. Then I texted the CEO one simple question: “How did you do it?”
The second mindset is radical openness to feedback.
Recently, I participated in a panel at the National Charter Schools Conference with New Orleans Superintendent Dr. Fateama Fulmore. She teased me about our obsession with feedback.
She told the audience that after attending one of our graduation ceremonies, I called her and asked what we could have done better.
“Jerel,” she laughed, “it’s graduation. There were caps, gowns, and excited scholars. You don’t need feedback on everything.”
Actually, I do.
If you visit one of our schools, don’t be surprised if we follow up to hear your honest impressions. We want to know what stood out to you and where we can improve. Those conversations often lead to tangible change.
Sometimes feedback is formal, like a charter renewal site visit. Sometimes it’s much less formal —like an encounter with an alumni inspired to share critical feedback. But I have learned to take it even when I don’t want to hear it.
Because organizations stop improving the moment they believe they have all the answers.
The third mindset is mission discipline.
The best teachers understand that when scholars become emotional, adults have to become calmer. I believe organizations work the same way.
When a crisis hits, human instinct is often to react quickly. But healthy organizations do the opposite. They slow down, step back, and focus relentlessly on what matters most.
Last year, New Orleans charter schools learned that an accounting error had created a surprise $41 million funding shortfall across the district. Months into the school year, we needed to act decisively to account for the multi-million dollar impact on Collegiate.
Many organizations respond by making broad cuts, protecting existing structures, and hoping variables eventually stabilize.
We chose a different path.
Scarcity drove clarity. We defined our non-negotiables. We eliminated mission drift. We aligned staffing, spending, and priorities around the work that mattered most. We optimized the amount of resources going into the classroom that directly improved teaching and learning.
Despite these painful cuts, we produced the strongest academic results in Collegiate’s history: Nearly 70% of our scholars now attend B-rated schools.
A crisis that could have been a disaster instead became an inflection point, forcing us to see our budget not as a mere spreadsheet but as an expression of our strategy and mission.
New Orleans has shown what’s possible when leaders choose collaboration over competition, curiosity over certainty, and mission discipline over drift. If our schools played even a small role in helping build that culture citywide, that would be more meaningful than what I have achieved as a leader at Collegiate. My hope is that one day, no one will be surprised that New Orleans has extraordinary public schools.
They’ll simply assume that’s who we are.