“Reform” makes broken New Orleans schools worse: Race, charters, testing and the real story of education after Katrina
An all-charter-school system was heralded as the future for urban schools. The future is filled with flaws
Here is all you need to know about the New Orleans schools before Hurricane Katrina hit, 10 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 Cowan, 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 10 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—10, 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 dysfunction. 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 Orleans since Katrina, she barely recognizes what she sees. “What we have now isn’t my vision. Reform here has diagnosed children and families as a liability.”
The Urban Education Future?
When Tulane’s Education Research Alliance gathered policymakers, education reform advocates and academics for a conference in late June, marking the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the beginning of New Orleans remaking of its public education system, organizers posed a question. Does New Orleans’ all-charter-school district represent “the urban education future”? The answer seemed predetermined. There is, after all, an aggressive effort already underway to sell the New Orleans model—”relinquishment” to true believers—with its mix of decentralization, school choice and extreme accountability, to urban districts across the country.
But again and again, the official theme of “measurable progress” was undercut by reminders of the real cost of what ERA director Doug Harris describes as “the largest overhaul of a public school system that the country has ever seen”: the 7,000 “Reform” makes broken New Orleans schools worse: Race, charters, testing and the real story of education after Katrina - Salon.com:
