Our Own Private Disaster
Terrible Schools Are Great for Business
Interior of Israel M. Augustine Middle School showing damage from Hurricane Katrina. Like many of New Orleans's former public schools, the building remains derelict and abandoned since the storm. Photo: shkizzle
The Inevitable City: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and 10 Principles of Crisis Leadership
Scott Cowen with Betsy Seifter
St. Martin's Press, $17 (paperback)
Scott Cowen with Betsy Seifter
St. Martin's Press, $17 (paperback)
In August 2015 Kristen McQueary published an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune wishing that a Hurricane Katrina would wash away Chicago’s teachers unions and public housing:
That’s what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans. . . . A new mayor slashed the city budget, forced unpaid furloughs, cut positions, detonated labor contracts. . . . An underperforming public school system saw a complete makeover. A new schools chief, Paul Vallas, designed a school system with the flexibility of an entrepreneur. No restrictive mandates from the city or the state. No demands from teacher unions to abide. Instead, he created the nation’s first free-market education system.
McQueary later apologized, but she was only repeating the beliefs of many of the country’s elite, who wish to do away with teachers unions and dispossess the long-term residents of American cities who trenchantly resist efforts to privatize social services. Former Tulane University president Scott Cowen’s new book, The Inevitable City, demonstrates how one member of the white New Orleans elite took it upon himself to subject his city to disaster capitalism post-Katrina, which he sees as model leadership to guide others seeking to do the same in their cities.
In Cowen’s thinking, Hurricane Katrina presented a golden opportunity to remake New Orleans as a privatized, corporatized playground for white tourists and tech companies—liberated from the troublesome teachers unions, housing projects, and neighborhood interests that he believes held the city back for decades. African Americans remain a part of this technocratic city, but they primarily appear as iconic touchstones—musicians, chefs, Mardi Gras Indians—whose purpose is to bring local color to new New Orleans. He states that Katrina “was the crisis that forced new ideas,” ideas he himself claims he led. He fails to provide a moral calculus for finding these opportunities on the backs of the city’s 1,800 dead.
In fact, in the past decade New Orleans has been quite utterly transformed by the displacement of the largely impoverished African American population and by the privatization of the city’s social services. Prison corporations took over the city’s jails while charter school evangelists wrested control of education, making it the nation’s first all-charter school system. The city tore down thousands of units of public housing. The New Orleans school system fired 7,500 unionized teachers—mostly African Americans—and replaced them with Teach for America workers, sending untrained and idealistic young volunteers into impoverished schools. The public housing projects of pre-Katrina New Orleans had more than their share of problems and probably needed to be torn down. But the new mixed-income projects have pushed poor residents who serve as the labor force for the French Quarter out into distant New Orleans East, where they have no access to public transportation. Sixteen thousand New Orleans residents are currently on a waitlist for subsidized housing. Wealthy whites have increasingly gentrified large swaths of the city, engineering a carnival of food, drink, and culture without the messiness of poverty and racial strife that has underpinned the city for two hundred years. Meanwhile, rapid gentrification led by politicians and corporations retains the city’s famed culture as amenities for the consumption of wealthy whites instead of as the culture of everyday people.
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Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine popularized the idea of disaster capitalism by focusing on how corporations, rich world governments, and international funding agencies take advantage of economic crises to “shock” the economic system by privatizing public resources, creating profit for corporations while generating inequality and despair for the purported beneficiaries of this “largesse.” New Orleans has become a prime example of what happens when disaster relief is privatized and allowed to reshape cities without input from—and often to the exclusion of—those most affected: the residents.
A free-market city is an exploitative city, one that displaces the poor and overpowers democratic structures.
In The Inevitable City, Cowen is proud to have taken advantage of the hurricane to implement Shock Doctrine ideology in New Orleans, starting with Tulane and moving on to the New Orleans public school system. His first post-Katrina priority was to get Tulane up and running because the city needed the jobs and the potent symbol of a functioning university. But in doing so, Cowen led two controversial initiatives. First, he pushed through the chartering of a nearby, predominantly African American school so that the children of his mostly white employees would have a place to send their children. Second, he unilaterally reorganized Tulane, firing tenured professors and consolidating programs without input from faculty. This led to his censure by the American Association of University Professors. He justifies both as examples of his leadership in tough times:
A first principle of leadership is “Do the right thing,” despite opposition. Leaders have the realism to face the facts, the wisdom to weigh the options, the will to make a decision, and the audacity to act. Which is another way of saying, Stand up and do what you think is best.
Cowen’s vision of leadership seems to be that one simply does what one wishes—that displaced black schoolchildren are in effect mere impediments to a kind of self-actualization that one achieves through proper “leadership.”
Unfortunately, that school was merely the beginning. Cowen went on to be a central player in the transformation of New Orleans into the first all-charter school district in the United States. While Cowen and others champion the results—including purportedly higher test Our Own Private Disaster | Boston Review: