How the Ruling Class Remade New Orleans and Its Schools
Much-touted education “reform” has proven unsuccessful
It’s one of those ironies that New Orleanians tend to especially appreciate. Today, on the tenth anniversary of the failure of the federally maintained levees, the keynote speaker at the annual Rising Tide Conference on the Future of New Orleans will beDeRay Mckesson [1].
Presumably, Mckesson’s invite was the result of his impressive work publicizing Black Lives Matters issues and protests across the country in the past year. But before McKesson became an activist in that movement, he was a standard-bearer for Teach For America and the New Teacher Project — education “reform” organizations that played a crucial role in aiding and abetting the destruction of New Orleans’ black middle class and propagating a pedagogical philosophy [2] that apes the worst of culture of poverty [3] rhetoric.
Such seeming incongruities are rampant this month in New Orleans, as they have been for the last ten years. Developers, urban planners, corporations, nonprofits, self-proclaimed activists, politicians, education “reformers,” hip consumers, middlebrow magazines, anarchists, urban farmers, bicycle enthusiasts, authenticity seekers, and “change agents” continually celebrate the city’s supposed rebirth, resilience, reform, rebuilding, re-whatever.
But it’s worth stepping back to consider whether such ironies are truly ironic, or rather just symptomatic of a larger condition that has plagued New Orleans — and the rest of the nation — over the past decade.
Since the levee failures, New Orleans has been ground zero for what on its face looks like a diverse cohort seeking to use the Katrina-produced “blank slate [4]” as a canvass [5] on which to enact their vision of twenty-first century reform. Black and white, gay and straight, wealthy and riddled with student debt, seventh-generation New Orleanian and recent Brooklyn-migrant, Republican and anarchist — little to nothing at the level of what the cultural studies aficionados might call positionality unites them.
Dig deeper though, and they share certain commonalities, commonalities integral to the only positionality that matters in the context of Katrina’s devastation and the resulting ten years of dislocation and upward redistribution of wealth: their political commitments and actions.
Indeed, what appears to be a motley group with every conceivable background and ascriptive subjectivity is, upon closer inspection, a class. It is a class well past the point of consolidation and one whose prerogatives have indelibly shaped the city’s rebuilding — dictating for whom New Orleans has and has not been rebuilt, all the while postulating and profiting from an ahistorical construction of authenticity, organic community, and ascriptive affinity as the basis for representation.
Mckesson is a particularly interesting case because he crystallizes these issues so well. One may ask how a dogged determination to end police violence against African Americans can be reconciled with a vision of education reform that cares nothing for questions of structural political economy, school funding, or the control of teachers over their classrooms, and instead supposes that the problem is that not enough teachers come from elite Northeastern colleges and universities; too many of them are old, lethargic, and evidently devoid of that pinnacle of neoclassical economics, “human capital”; and that poor students need to be cured of their Moynihan [6]-style tangle of pathologies.
The answer of course, is that they are not incompatible at all.
A deep and abiding commitment to dismantling a heavily militarized criminal-justice infrastructure does not necessitate that the committed individual oppose a national attack on democratic control over schools, the devaluation of teachers Choosing Democracy: How the Ruling Class Remade New Orleans and Its Schools:
