Big Easy, Hot Mess
Why New Orleanians are turning against the city’s education reform experiment…
Here is all you need to know about the New Orleans schools before Hurricane Katrina hit, ten years ago this summer: they were awful. The schools were awful, the school board was awful, the central office was awful—all of them were awful. At a recent conference held to tout the progress made by the schools here since Katrina, Scott Cowen, an early proponent of the all-charter-school model that exists here now, described New Orleans’ pre-storm schools as mired in *unprecedented dysfunction.* In other words, they were awful.
The problem with a story like this isn’t just that it leaves out anything that doesn’t fit but that it can be hard to contain once it gets going. Before long, this *awfulizing narrative,* as it was described to me more than once during the ten days I recently spent in New Orleans, spread past the school yards and central offices, sweeping up in its wake parents, children, indeed the whole hot mess that is New Orleans. The awful story was at the root of the decision to fire 7,000 teachers after the storm, the majority of whom were Black New Orleanians and the backbone of the city’s middle class. It is the reason why so few locals can be found among the ranks of education reform groups here. And it is a rarely acknowledged justification for the long school day favored by charters here—ten, even 12 hours when you factor in the cross-city bus trips that a choice landscape necessitates.
*When you start from the point of view that the communities these kids come from are broken, then the goal becomes to keep kids away from them as much as possible,* says Deirdre Johnson Burel, the executive director of the Orleans Public Education Network or OPEN, which seeks to engage community members around school-related policy issues. *It’s a way of containing and insulating kids from their own families.*An advocate of school reform in New Orleans long before the cause was cool, not to mention lucrative, Burel doesn’t fit the pre/post Katrina schools narrative at all. A native New Orleanian, Burel is a proud graduate of McMain High School, then a magnet school, now part of the Orleans Parish School Board, still one of the city’s best. She was an early proponent of charter schools here, including the city’s first, NOLA Charter Middle School. *I worked in the district and saw the disfunction. I saw what a difference it made for children and families when schools had autonomy and a community could create something for its own children.*
But when Burel looks at the version of education reform that has taken root in New Big Easy, Hot Mess | EduShyster:
