New Orleans Education Reform: A Guide for Cities or a Warning for Communities? (Grassroots Lessons Learned, 2005-2012)

Abstract

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, co-chair of the Senate Public Charter School Caucus in Washington, DC, hosted a forum for education policymakers. It centered on New Orleans-Style Education Reform: A Guide for Cities (Lessons Learned, 2004-2010), a report published by the charter school incubator New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO). Through human capital and charter school development, the report asserts, New Orleans has become a national leader in education reform. In this essay, members of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, including education scholars and those affiliated with longstanding educational and cultural organizations in New Orleans, reveal that such reform has been destructive to African American students, teachers, and neighborhoods. Inspired by critical race theory and the role of experiential knowledge in challenging dominant narratives, authors draw heavily on testimony from community-based education groups, which have typically been ignored, regarding the inequitable effects of New Orleans' school reform. While the Guide for Cities is used as a sounding board for concerns and critiques, this essay challenges claims that have circulated nationally since 2005ones that laud New Orleans as a model to be followed. This essay also charts the elite policy network that has shaped the city's reform, with NSNO playing a central part, in order to reveal the accumulative interests of education entrepreneurs. A postscript illustrating parent and student resistance to charter school reform in New Orleans reminds urban communities elsewhere that current reforms are not a guide but a threat to those struggling for racial and educational justice.

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Models of Success, Teacher Quality and Student Disciplinary Infraction: A Critical Analysis of Chicago’s Urban Preparatory Academies and Harlem Children’s Zone

“…Additionally, many charter schools have become privatized and they create systems for corporations to make profits (Buras, 2013). While this is indeed the case in cities like New Orleans and Los Angeles, charter schools are less than 4% of the nation's public schools.…”

“…Most of these criticisms center around enrollment, increased privatization through markets, in some cases lack of teacher quality, segregation, attrition, and mixed academic results (Buras, 2013;Golann, 2015;Hill & Lake, 2010;Vergari, 1999). Researchers argue that because of the high competitive selection process of urban charter schools, they are having an advantage over public schools because of their ability to hand pick students (Buras, Hill & Lake, 2010).…”

Winners and losers: School closures in post-earthquake Canterbury and the dissolution of community

“…Over time, all public schools in New Orleans Parish were systematically transformed into charter schools. Students were left feeling dislocated, disoriented and disengaged (Akers, 2012;Buras, 2011Buras, , 2013Gabor, 2013;Maxwell, 2007;Newton, 2013;Poon & Cohen, 2012). Giroux (2006) claims that Hurricane Katrina revealed how the global ideological agenda had dismantled the safety net that supported society's most vulnerable.…”