Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism: On the Spatial Politics of Whiteness as Property (and the Unconscionable Assault on Black New Orleans)

Abstract

In this article, Kristen L. Buras examines educational policy formation in New Orleans and the racial, economic, and spatial dynamics shaping the city's reconstruction since 2005. More specifically, Buras draws on the critical theories of whiteness as property, accumulation by dispossession, and urban space economy to describe the strategic assault on black communities by education entrepreneurs. Based on data collected from an array of stakeholders on the ground, she argues that policy actors at the federal, state, and local levels have contributed to a process of privatization and an inequitable racial-spatial redistribution of resources while acting under the banner of "conscious capitalism." She challenges the market-based reforms currently offered as a panacea for education in New Orleans, particularly charter schools, and instead offers principles of educational reform rooted in a more democratic and critically conscious tradition.New Orleans has become the premier experimental site for urban educational reform in the United States. There is no other city with a higher proportion of charter schools or a more comprehensive program of alternative teacher recruitment. Veteran teachers were fired en masse in 2006, and today the city's schools are headed toward complete charterization. Based on five years of qualitative research, including document analysis and interviews with a broad range of stakeholders and organizations, this article reveals a strategic and racially exclusive pattern of educational policy making at the fed-297 Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism kristen l. buras eral, state, and local levels. Drawing on critical theories of race, political economy, and space to analyze the policy ecology surrounding reforms, I argue that New Orleans charter schools are less about responding to the needs of racially oppressed communities and more about the Reconstruction of a newly governed South-one in which white entrepreneurs (and black allies) capitalize on black schools and neighborhoods by obtaining public monies to build and manage charter schools. 1 Although market-based educational reforms in New Orleans are presented by policy makers as innovative and democratic, they are nonetheless premised on the criminal dispossession of black workingclass communities and the teachers and students who have contributed to the city's culture and history. Lawmakers and entrepreneurs frame these reforms as a socially conscious effort to advance equity and improve public schools, rather than allowing the traditional profit motive to define their efforts-what has been referred to as conscious capitalism. In reality, however, the city's urban space economy is reshaped along racial lines, exacerbating inequity and deepening the confluence of capital accumulation, property rights, and whiteness. In this article, I critically examine the relationships among policy-making processes, spatial form, and power as they pertain to schooling and the racialeconomic reconstruction of urban space in New Orleans. To ...

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

“…Parents lost their social connections and sense of belonging, and thus their involvement in school life decreased. Where United States schools have been closed because of poor educational achievement, the literature shows those most affected are African-American, Latino and low-socioeconomic communities (Akers, 2012;Buras, 2011;Johnson, 2006;Lipman, 2011;Lipman & Hursh, 2007;Valencia, 1984). These are communities that are already marginalised, and students struggle to feel connected to the new schools when they have to travel out of their neighbourhoods to a new, often higher socio-economic location.…”

“…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.…”

Pedagogies of Resistance and Survivance: Learning as Marronage

“…In fact, a cursory grasp of the generational hold of vulnerable social status should cast a skeptical shadow on the rhetoric of opportunity and achievement. Societal, generational vulnerability is experienced through upheaval and threat of upheaval in housing (Delmont, 2016), incarceration (Alexander, 2012), school closure and overhaul (Buras, 2011), casualization of labor, and proliferation of privatization in myriad sectors of societies. All of these vectors exist in a racial capitalist global order (Da Silva, 2007;Du Bois & Edwards, 2008) that emphatically denies racial logics despite glaring realities.…”

Special Issue Race Ethnicity and Education: Initial teacher education: developments, dilemmas and challenges

“…The goal of CRT in education is to excavate how race operates in society and in education, at both the structural and local, everyday levels. This is accomplished through various strategies that include (1) counter-storytelling, an approach that calls attention to the voices of marginalized people of color by listening to how their own experiences, and the knowledge that emerges from them, illuminate and disrupt dominant narratives about race, racism and racial progress in society and schools (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001); (2) recognizing Whiteness as a form of property that offers to White persons and their interests various rights and privileges that include the right to disposition, the right to use and to enjoy, and the right to exclude (Buras, 2011; Harris, 1993;Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Vaught & Castagno, 2008); and (3) the nature, paradox and limitations of interest-convergence (Bell, 1995a; Donnor, 2005), or the strategy of addressing racial inequities in the context of remedies that serve and maintain dominant White interests. With its focus on centering race in the examination of societal relations, CRT in education offers a lens to understand the obvious, and more insidiously subtle ways that race operates in the context of teacher education.…”