Students at a fundraiser for Liberation Academy in New Orleans March 14, 2014. Some of the students who led protests over the district’s Collegiate Academy charter schools withdrew from those schools and enrolled in Liberation Academy, founded by parents and local activists.
By Jordan Flaherty| Originally Published at The Root. May 13 2014 3:00 AM
Every year hundreds of young, idealistic recent college graduates flood into New Orleans to teach at the city’s public schools. But in a school system where the vast majority of students are African American, the mostly white influx of new teachers has brought complaints of racism and cultural insensitivity, and helped birth a new student-led protest movement.
African Americans are about 60 percent of New Orleans’ population (down from 67 percent before Hurricane Katrina) but make up 88 percent of the city’s public school system. White students are clustered at a handful of high-performing schools, and other ethnicities make up only small portions of the system, so most schools are almost entirely African American. Before Hurricane Katrina, most teachers were black women, mostly from New Orleans and often from the neighborhoods of the schools in which they worked.
But in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the entire staff of the school system—about 7,000 teachers and other employees—was laid off, their contract was ignored and their union was powerless to help. Katrena Ndang, who worked for 17 years as a teacher in New Orleans, found out she’d been fired while watching the news after being evacuated. “Even though we had given them forwarding addresses, they never sent us empathyeducates – New Orleans Teachers and Students Wrestle With Racial Tension: