Colonialism, Not Reform
New Orleans Schools Since Katrina
An Interview with community activist Karran Harper Royal
BY STAN KARP AND JODY SOKOLOWER
PURCHASE A PDF OF THIS ARTICLE
PURCHASE A PDF OF THIS ARTICLE
Karran Harper Royal
By next fall, New Orleans will have only five public schools—those operated by the Orleans Parish School Board. Everything else will be charters. The post-Katrina path to almost 100 percent charter education began with the post-storm shutdown of the city’s struggling public schools and the firing (recently declared illegal) of some 7,500 unionized teachers and other school employees, predominantly African American women. The assault was accelerated by a massive infusion of foundation and entrepreneurial investment in new charter schools, and years of state and federally supported deregulation and privatization.
Today the city has tens of thousands fewer children than before Katrina and significantly fewer African American residents, but the school-age population of 44,000 remains mostly poor and black. Parents and families must navigate a maze of selective charters, each operating as an independent district with little oversight. Special-needs students have particular problems finding appropriate placements. One 2010 study found 4,000 teens, about 10 percent of the city’s student population, not enrolled in school at all. New Orleans has also been a spawning ground for authoritarian “no excuses” pedagogy, inexperienced Teach For America corps members, and “zero tolerance” discipline policies.
Throughout this transformation, Karran Harper Royal has been a passionate voice for parents and an articulate witness, sounding the alarm to the rest of the nation about the on-the-ground realities behind the New Orleans “miracle.” Rethinking Schools editors Stan Karp and Jody Sokolower spoke with Harper Royal in several sessions over the past year.
Rethinking Schools: What was your experience as a parent in the New Orleans public schools before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005?
Karran Harper Royal: My start was 22 years ago, in 1992, when my son Khris was in kindergarten and he couldn’t sit still. I worked in the French Quarter, right at the corner of Royal and Toulouse. There was a little school down the street called McDonogh 15 Creative Arts Magnet School [now a KIPP school]. I wanted Khris to go to school near where I worked. So I just went down the street and asked, “Can I enroll my child here?” and they took him. He didn’t have to take a test or audition to get in, but it was a school of choice focused on the arts. It was such a special place, an amazing public school, very child-centered. The founder was Lucianne Carmichael. She’s retired now, but she has an artist retreat across the river called A Studio in the Woods.
RS: Khris was your oldest child?
KHR: My first child. And I was not who you see today. I was a very meek—if you can believe that—quiet mother who just wanted her son to be successful in school, because otherwise he was going to end up like my brother who at that time was in and out of jail. He was on drugs, he was a car thief—the best car thief in New Orleans, but a car thief. And, in my mind, there was a straight line from kindergarten to the prison cell. So I started visiting my son’s school. By the spring of his kindergarten year, I had quit my job and started going to school every day to find out why he was always in trouble. In trouble at that school was not the same as in trouble at a school today. In trouble meant he was asked to sit outside the classroom in the hallway or he was sent up to the librarian. Sometimes his teacher’s husband, a 70-year-Colonialism, Not Reform: New Orleans Schools Since Katrina • An Interview with Karran Harper Royal: