New Orleans: Appeals Court Affirms that Teachers from Mass Firing Deserve Damages
“Before and After. New Orleans has a new timeline. A new zero point. However, a natural event is by no means the sole cause for our new era. To understand post-Katrina, you have to understand pre-Katrina. Many folks in post-Katrina New Orleans, particularly in terms of public education, don’t follow this simple pre- and post-postulate. They are salivating to start from scratch, to establish a new day and a new order, with nothing but disdain for the prezero… In New Orleans we do have a new moment. But it is not a moment out of time. And it is not a story that only those in power will tell… The before and the after. The respect for elders and ancestors and cultural traditions. Without this full picture, our public education, our culture, our souls cannot continue to grow. Without imparting the knowledge of and action in history and struggle, we cannot teach our children well.” —Jim Randels and Kalamu ya Salaam, teachers at Students at the Center, a student writing program at New Orleans’ Frederick Douglass High School and Eleanor McMain Secondary School. (Kristen Buras, Jim Randels, Kalamu Ya Salaam and Students at the Center, Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans,[New York: Teachers College Press, 2010], p. 15)
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in early September of 2005. The story of what happened to public education in that city after the hurricane remains highly contested.
The Scott Cowen Institute at Tulane continues to publish data said to prove the schools—now well over 80 percent privately managed charters—have been transformed.
Mercedes Schneider, a Louisiana public school teacher and statistician, blogs regularly about