In rebuilding public schooling in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, education reformers have managed to hire energetic teachers, break ground on a few new school buildings, raise public confidence, and show progress on test scores. But fundamental questions remain as the 2007-08 academic year draws to a close, including how the city's still-evolving decentralized mix of regular public schools and charters will operate in the coming years. Nearly 60 percent of the city's 33,000 public school children attend 40 charter schools now, the highest percentage in any district. The number is likely to rise as several more charters open in the fall. Paul G. Vallas, the superintendent of the state-run Recovery School District (RSD), talks of giving the 33 schools he manages "charter-like" independence, with principals who will choose their own faculty members and manage their own budgets, and school-based committees that will help select principals. Only five schools still answer directly to the elected Orleans Parish school board that ran the district before the storm struck in August 2005. When the state took over the low-performing schools in New Orleans just after the hurricane, the takeover law dictated that, after five years, the RSD would dissolve and the schools would be returned to some form of local control. With just more than two years to go until the fall 2010 deadline, education leaders are just beginning to wrestle with the question of who or what will ultimately govern public schools in the city.