Separate and Unequal: The Consumption of Public Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans

ARTICLES

Separate and Unequal:The Consumption of Public Educationin Post-Katrina New Orleans

JOSHUA M. AKERS

Abstractijur_1062 29..48

Before the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina had receded, New Orleans was inundatedby a wave of neoliberal prescriptions, foundation money and celebrity educators eagerto dismantle the city’s public education system. The opening of public education to themarket has left the residents of New Orleans with an education system that isincreasingly separate and unequal. At the center of this radical neoliberal experiment isa 40-year effort by local proponents of ‘school choice’ for a voucher program. Thisresearch examines the links between the system of forces — economic, social, politicaland (in the case of Katrina) natural — and the transformation of daily life within the cityand metropolitan area through policy and media discourse. This article argues that priorefforts to undermine public education at the state and municipal level were key to thevelocity and scope of the subsequent changes in New Orleans. Efforts to organize againstthese changes have focused on the role of think-tanks and foundations at the nationalscale. This focus severely limits the power of local organizations to challenge thosedriving these changes within their communities.

Although efforts to rebuild the city of New Orleans continue at a glacial rate, thedismantling of its public education system has continued apace in the years sinceHurricane Katrina. The education experiment currently underway in the city incorporatesmany of the core tenets of the school choice movement, such as expanding the privateeducation market and guaranteeing public subsidies for private or public–privateeducation ventures. The introduction of charter schools and education vouchershas radically altered public education in the city by introducing market-based systemsthat require parents to act as consumers while exposing their children’s future to thewhims of the marketplace. Government-funded charter schools are utilizing selectiveadmissions to take the top performers while excluding those with behavioral issues andspecial needs. Over 50% of the schools operating in New Orleans are now charterschools, run by non-profit organizations and private contractors. In addition to theexpansion of charter schools, the state introduced a modestly sized voucher programin the fall of 2008 that pays student tuition at private schools, thus further reducingthe amount of funding available to the remaining public schools (which serve adisproportionate number of the city’s poorest and special needs students).

The author would like to thank Matthew Farish, Jason Hackworth, Alan Walks and the three IJURRreviewers for their useful comments and feedback.

Volume 36.1 January 2012 29–48 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01062.x

© 2011 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2011 Urban Research PublicationsLimited. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden,MA 02148, USA

The rapid restructuring of New Orleans’ public education system following HurricaneKatrina offers insights into the workings of actually existing neoliberalisms, and thepath-dependent and contingent ways in which these changes take place. Many narrativeson the transition have focused on the efforts of actors at the national level and the workof think-tanks and foundations in implementing a radically different system of educationin the city. Although this work offers compelling evidence of political and economicopportunism and the continuing ideological restructuring of redistribution towardscapital, this focus obscures 40 years of struggle steeped in race and class antagonismswithin the state of Louisiana to either abandon or take over New Orleans’ school district.These efforts point to the complex entanglements of the social and cultural with theeconomic and political embedded within the process of scale, and how place matters inthe incessant privatization of public goods or accumulation through dispossession(Brenner, 2000; Harvey, 2005).

The argument presented here is in two parts. First, radical and sweeping changeis neither sudden nor unexpected, as neoliberalization requires local organizing thatoften links social and cultural antagonisms with political and economic concerns.Second, urban public education, a contested and essential site of social reproduction,is becoming a state-guaranteed site of accumulation characterized by systems oftax-backed dispossession.

If we are to take seriously the claims that urban change is path-dependent andhistorically contingent, it is necessary to interrogate the changes that emerge in theaftermath of a natural disaster and human catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina. It is inthese moments that the assumptions of the power of the state and/or the desires of globalcapital are both revealed and troubled by actualities on the ground. Propagandists andthink-tanks such as the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the HeritageFoundation issued hundreds of press releases following Katrina, arguing that governmentwas not responsible for disaster response, while at the same time declaring a flooded NewOrleans to be a blank slate for a laundry list of long-targeted national reforms, fromrepealing the Davis-Bacon Act (requiring the payment of market-rate wages) to theprivatization or chartering of the education system.

Although the Bush administration briefly suspended Davis-Bacon, a longstandingpriority for neoliberals and conservative politicians, the changes implemented in thecity’s education apparatus are part of an even longer-running story, which dates back atleast to the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and thesubsequent decade-long fight to desegregate public schools in the city. New Orleans haslong been the site of racial conflict and court challenges; it is where the actions resultingin the Plessy vs. Ferguson case occurred, culminating in the 1896 United States SupremeCourt decision codifying segregation in a ruling upholding the standard of ‘separate butequal’. The struggle over access and control of services is often contested throughracialized boundaries; this has certainly been the case in New Orleans (particularly in thecity’s history as part of the United States).

What follows is an exploration of the variegated tendency and unevenness ofneoliberalization in urban environments through an examination of both thesociohistorical development of an education crisis in New Orleans and the state takeoverand quasi-privatization in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The intent is to workwithin the overlap of state and urban theory and the arguments advanced in this journalon scale, as a process to examine the interlinking of the microdiversity of locallydeveloped conservative social and cultural movements with the macronecessity ofeconomic demand for increasing access to government-financed sites of accumulationthrough dispossession.

The neoliberalization of urban education has been well documented through examiningthe changes in curriculum and requirements for graduation, often guided by corporateinterests and local business elites as well as planning and policy processes in various citiesin North America (Lauria and Miron, 2005; Hankins and Martin, 2006; Basu, 2007). Thisproject has operated at both the local and national level, with proponents of corporatist

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.1© 2011 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2011 Urban Research PublicationsLimited.

educational values utilizing the implementation of such changes in one school district asjustification for utilizing the same process in another (Stone, 1998). More recently thisprocess has assumed a dual focus: one is the training of students for ‘new market realities’;the second is to turn schools into a means of generating profit. By siphoning off publicfunds for the private provision of education, charter schools and vouchers are gearedtowards pulling the top students into a system of both reproduction and accumulation,while pushing the education of higher-cost students (e.g. those with accessibility issuesand particular needs) onto local government to protect profits.

This article concludes with a case study examining local and statewide efforts toimplement school choice in Louisiana. The school choice movement promotes educationreforms that move tax revenues away from public schools and into private schools,or through public funding of non-profit and privately run charter schools, vouchers andtax credits. This is a nationwide movement that has made increasing advances inschool districts throughout the United States. The case extends the analysis of theneoliberalizing city and the role of crisis in reactionary and regressive change byexamining the microdiversity of and historical struggle over urban education in NewOrleans. The case follows multiple temporal trajectories with a broad examination of alonger history of contestation over ‘crisis’ in the city’s school system, and specificallyexamines a 5-year period around Hurricane Katrina. The conflicts over primary andsecondary education largely stem from historical exclusions formulated around race inthe state of Louisiana, and the production of the discourse of an ‘education crisis’ whichobscures the perpetuation of inequality at various levels of government and theentrenchment of inequality through private and non-profit promotion of educationreform. This crisis is compounded by the human catastrophe following HurricaneKatrina and the subsequent rapid expansion of exclusionary reforms. Under examinationhere are the links between the system of forces — economic, social, political and (in thecase of Katrina) natural — and the transformation of daily life within the city andmetropolitan area through policy and media discourse (Wacquant, 2008).

Neoliberalization and New OrleansThe outcomes of Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophe that followed have broadimplications for geography, neoliberalism and social movements generally. The growingliterature around the event by scholars of neoliberalism has focused on the Bushadministration’s attempts to exploit the catastrophe in order to extend neoliberalprograms, the use of non-profits as a disciplining force, and finally the failure of thefederal government to respond adequately — characterized either as benign neglect orinevitable given cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or as part of alarger pattern of shock programs exploiting disaster and catastrophe to implement‘market-friendly regimes’ and policies.1

Before the floodwaters had receded in New Orleans, the first critiques of the federalgovernment’s response to the disaster quickly emerged. Political economist Mike Davis(2005) issued a scathing and comprehensive polemic on the government’s inaction andits default position allowing conservative think-tanks to manage the response fromWashington, DC. Davis pointed to the suspension of regulations requiring privatecompanies to pay market-rate wages as a particularly egregious example of federalpriorities. Jamie Peck (2006) pushed this analysis further, tracking how the federalgovernment marshaled neoliberal think-tanks and foundations in the construction ofpolicy prescriptions for Louisiana while simultaneously attempting to neutralize anincreasingly dire example of the realities of neoliberal and conservative governance inthe press. Peck’s analysis reveals the intricate entanglement of the political and economic

1 For a more detailed discussion of scholarship on neoliberalization in New Orleans, see Hackworthand Akers (2011).

Segregation and education in post-Katrina New Orleans 31


at the national level, and the recognition of the disaster as an opportunity for theapplication of long-sought policy prescriptions for the rollback of government at variouslevels and the expansion of the practices of accumulation through dispossession. Thesepolicies not only targeted federal regulations, but were also used to eliminate theremnants of a shrinking welfare state in New Orleans, with dire consequences for publichousing and public education (Hackworth and Akers, 2011).

Implicit in the discussion around how aid would (or would not) be delivered in NewOrleans, and explicit in the ‘free market’ ideology behind the policies upon which thecity would be rebuilt, was the push for a whiter, more business-friendly, deregulated cityas noted by Gotham and Greenberg (2008: 1055):

This market-centered approach has been enforced ‘top down’ by a federal government averseto a strong public sector and direct outlay programs, and propagated by entrepreneurial city andstate governments and public-private partnerships seeking to use post-disaster rebuilding as anopportunity to enhance their cities’ competitiveness and business climate.

To this list should be added charter schools and voucher programs that seek to allowprivate companies, entrepreneurs, churches and non-profit NGOs to take over theadministration and delivery of deregulated education in the city.

As the scholars above focused on the political–economic assault from Washington,Cindi Katz began to pull apart the historical costs of long-term disinvestment throughexamining social reproduction in New Orleans. Highly critical of the paternalisticapproach of non-profits, she argued that the increasing professionalization of theseorganizations had left many of them ill-equipped to combat the dismantling of housingand education, and eviction of the racialized poor from the city. Katz (2008: 25–6) statesthat it is essential to connect activists in multiple places to create spaces of resistance:

In other work I have developed the notion of ‘countertopography’ to invoke ‘contour lines’ thatconnect disparate places similarly constituted or affected by certain problems. This sort ofpolitical imagination might be called upon here to make connections among US cities, forexample, around poor people’s evictions from the city, or the school–prison pipeline, or theprivatization of security and relief services.

This countertopography offers a framework in which activists may work and organizeacross territory by connecting the demands of global capital with the policies of national,state and local governments in seemingly disparate places. It is through focusing onsocial reproduction in the city that the terrain of the conjunctural may be identified (Katz,2008).

The argument that this type of organizing needs to expand on the left is made moreimmediate in the writing of George Lipsitz (2006: 454) shortly after the catastrophe inNew Orleans:

The most important social mobilization of our time was not the civil rights movement of themid 20th century but rather the counterrevolution that emerged against it through resistance toschool desegregation, fair housing, and progressive taxation and eventually coalesced into asocial warrant for competitive consumer citizenship.

According to Lipsitz, the current social warrant venerates private privilege and privateneed over public good. This focus on what is good for the individual or the householdresults in societal inequalities and disparities resulting in continuing crisis. In movingbeyond consumption, the social warrant becomes one of hostile privatism in whichgreater levels of force are introduced to privatize all manners of services, from thecontracting in the Iraq War to the current approach to rebuilding the city of New Orleans(Lipsitz, 2006). By turning attention to the mobilization against the advances of themid-twentieth century towards the continuing counterrevolution on the right, Lipsitz andKatz open up avenues to explore how radical neoliberal policy was implemented in the

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days and years following the storm. By recognizing these practices as historical andcontingent and uneven in application, we can gauge how longstanding local conservativesocial movements seeking to privatize public education connect with global and nationalpolitical and economic practices through events prior and subsequent to HurricaneKatrina.

Approaching the dismantling of the public education system in New Orleans as amoment in which the complex entanglements of social reproduction and social structureconverge with the economic and political opportunism following Katrina provides aricher understanding of the uneven and variegated process of neoliberalism, anddemonstrates how the terrain of the conjunctural is contested by numerous actorsdislodged in the formation of an ascendant social warrant. The contest over publiceducation is an integral site in urban struggles.

Urban educationThe public school district in the United States is a complex multi-scalar apparatus inwhich competing policies, funding mandates and hyper-local and glocal conflicts aremediated through a variety of representative bodies. Until the mid-nineteenth century,primary and secondary education in the US was overwhelmingly provided by religiousorganizations and private schools (Meyer et al., 1979, Morken and Formicola, 1999).The implementation of public high school education was both a nation-building exerciseand an attempt to aid the economic imperatives of changing modes of production. Thislegacy renders these schools both an institutional construction of discriminatorypractices, and sites of struggle for recognition and equal access to a service that hasbecome essential to accessing higher education in the United States and in mediatingemployment opportunities (Lauria and Miron, 2005).

Urban education has witnessed a multitude of struggles over the last century: effortsto combat and overcome race-based exclusion and segregation; immigrant battles foraccess; and the fight to end limited access and gendered course offerings for women. Butthe achievements in these struggles were undermined by the abandonment and isolationof public schools, particularly in the urban core as the enrollment in racially homogenoussuburban districts and private schools grew (Squires and Kubrin, 2005). Mostintegrationist interventions, whether by the state or (in the case of Louisiana) theCatholic Church, were met with claims of an impending crisis, falling standards andoccasionally violence (Devore and Logsdon, 1991; Fairclough, 1995).

New Orleans is a central site in the long struggle for equality and access to publicservices. In 1892 Homer Plessy was charged with violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Actwhen he boarded a train car designated for whites only in New Orleans. His arrest andcharges led to a challenge of the act decided in the United States Supreme Court in 1896.The case of Plessy vs. Ferguson established the legal basis that would rule infrastructureand commerce throughout the country for the next five decades. It held that ‘separate butequal’ was within the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Thisruling validated the Jim Crow laws that had emerged over the preceding 20 years, in thevery violent final episode of the Reconstruction period. Though separate accommodationwas provided, from hotels to schools, the equal portion of the clause was rarelyrecognized and challenges were largely ineffective until the Brown vs. Board ofEducation ruling of 1954.

The structure of publicly provided elementary and secondary education in the UnitedStates is marked by contradictory mandates and particular outcomes at each individualschool. An apparatus controlled loosely at the national level through policies anddirectives tied to additional funding is complicated by state legislatures reworking policyto both acquire additional federal funds and shape it to the particular needs of the stateand the districts represented. Finally, local school boards oversee the day-to-day



operations of each school district and are tasked with spending the majority of thedistricts’ funds acquired through local property taxes and sales tax, which have continuedto fall in the urban core and inner-city school districts across the United States (Squiresand Kubrin, 2005). The urban school district is a reflection of national and stateeducation and economic policies, and also an amalgam of the policies and practices ofthe city in which these schools are situated. The changes underway in urban educationoffer insight into how neoliberal regimes are reshaping and co-opting hyper-local actionsas part of a global–local strategy pointing towards the limits and the depth of the processat work.

In her examination of school closures in Ontario in this journal, geographer RanuBasu (2007) noted that interaction between levels of government and the public in thedecision-making process is complicated by conflicting demands and differing outcomesat the hyper-local and provincial or state level. She argues that the contradictions inherentin neoliberalization provoke counter-tendencies with varied outcomes. In order tounderstand these contradictions, Basu (ibid.: 110) states:

These mixed reactions and their implications for the policy process and sustainability ofneoliberal regimes require long-term, close and even tedious scrutiny — often at the mundaneand grassroots level — to ultimately unravel the spatial and institutionally entrenchedneoliberal doctrines promising progress and change.

It is the positioning of the mundane and the grassroots that is important to this argument.What has occurred (and is continuing) in New Orleans schools is the interlinking oflong-practiced social and cultural antagonisms centered on race and class with theeconomic demands and political ideologies of national interests in further integratingaccumulation through social reproduction. These processes unfold through incorporationof policies guaranteeing profit through tax-backed programs, that also allow for themediation of local antagonisms for those in power through the selective control overstudents and employees through measures such as entrance exams and contractualemployment policies.

Although seemingly sudden, the changes to the New Orleans education system hadbeen contemplated and fought for over a 40-year period. The local school choicemovement was at the forefront of this fight, working in local school districts and throughthe state legislature to dismantle the public education system in the city of New Orleans.By focusing on school choice we can begin to (in Basu’s words) ‘unravel the spatial andinstitutionally entrenched neoliberal doctrines promising progress and change’.

School choiceThe school choice movement in the United States began in the early 1950s. Many of itsaims were articulated by Milton Friedman (1955) in his essay The Role of Governmentin Education. He argued that government involvement in education could only bejustified in exceptional circumstances. He proposed a system of market-based schoolswhich would compete for students through price and product. A caveat was offered;government should intervene with vouchers only when parents were unable to pay thelowest market price. Though Friedman’s framework for market-based private educationgained little traction with policymakers and educators at the time, it was popular amongwealthy business owners and various philanthropic foundations across the United States(Morken and Formicola, 1999).

In the following decades the school choice movement slowly expanded at the localand state level throughout the United States, often utilizing the funding from corporatefoundations and the work on school choice by the Rose and Milton FriedmanFoundation. The movement grew to encompass a variety of strategies to change thestructure of public education. Many of these were a direct response to the success of the

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civil rights movement and court interventions to disassemble local practices ofsegregation and inequality in the public education system across the country. Thesechanges led to urban school systems structured around legally mandated tenets of equaleducation and equal access for all students. These legal interventions by the courtsundermined the structures of de facto segregation in which minorities and the poor wereexcluded from particular areas of the city or the suburbs, and spurred a reaction togovernment intervention among more affluent white families that both fuelled and grewalong with and as part of the school choice movement across the United States (Parkerand Margonis, 1996).

The introduction of busing and court attempts to integrate these districts challengedentrenched boundaries that privileged race and class within the social structure of citiesin the US (Lassiter, 2004). Many whose position was challenged by integration sought toshift the debate by adopting a language of freedom and choice rather than address thematerial reality of the largely racialized poor. The claim of government interference withpersonal freedom submerged the issue of race and seemingly absolved participatingindividuals of complicity in the structures of segregation. The efforts of the courts and thesubsequent organizing of parents against integration gave increasing currency to thearguments first advanced by Friedman which would allow for the circumvention ofstate-mandated changes. The declining conditions of urban schools, exacerbated by theflight of capital to suburban enclaves outside the taxing authority of urban districts, onlyincreased criticisms of the public education system. These perceived failures were usedto justify and bolster attacks on the role of government in the provision of education(Newmark and Rugy, 2006).

The school choice movement grew quietly during the 1970s and 1980s with the aid ofwealthy philanthropists who provided scholarships for children to attend private schoolsin places such as Indianapolis. The movement made significant advances in the late1980s and early 1990s, with the push for charter schools and vouchers on citizen-generated propositions in California funded by John Walton (an heir to the Wal-Martfortune) and the introduction of charter schools in Minneapolis. The largest gains camein the mid-1990s and early 2000s with a series of court victories by the MilwaukeeSchool District and a US Supreme Court ruling in favour of the Cleveland SchoolDistrict, allowing these districts to provide public money for private education. Thesesuccesses spurred local movements across the US to move education out of the realm ofcollective consumption and into private hands (Fusarelli, 2003).

In their book, The Politics of School Choice, Hubert Morken and Jo ReneeFormicola (1999) offer an analysis of how the school choice movement viewsparticular types of education. Figure 1 is adapted from this discussion. This linear map

Figure 1 The school choice continuum (source: based on the work of Morken andFormicola, 1999)



places public education at the far left of a continuum, and full private education at itsfar right. Along this line, incremental steps from public education to full privateeducation are laid out moving from left to right, with magnet schools and charterschools advancing to public–private scholarships, followed by public and privatevouchers leading to tax credits, and ending with free-market schools and homeschools. Education systems from charter schools to home schools are classed asentrepreneurial systems under this model (ibid). This continuum provides a frameworkin which to view the progression of the school choice movement in New Orleans. Allof the options laid out within this framework have been proposed and debated inLouisiana and New Orleans, with some (particularly magnet schools) having now beenin operation for years.

Charter schools

‘State officials don’t disagree that New Orleansis about to begin a form of educationDarwinism, where some schools will succeedand survive while others will fail and disappearin the years ahead.’

Ritea (2006a)

The move towards charter schools is a move towards market-based education provisionand the construction or reconstruction of social exclusions. For conservative think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise, Cato and Manhattaninstitutes, as well as national media conglomerates such as The New York Times andThe Wall Street Journal, this system came to dominate public education in NewOrleans after Katrina through the power of the free market to not only overcome majorcatastrophe but also to emancipate residents from the ‘tyranny’ of teachers’ unions,and to relegate the failed bureaucracies of collective consumption to footnotes in thestruggle for ‘freedom’ (Peterson, 2006). Hyperbole aside, the narrative of free-markettriumph is ever present in reports on the ‘new New Orleans’ at the national level(Nossiter, 2008). Within this national narrative Katrina was a catalyst that washedaway the crisis of a failed education system, leaving a blank slate on which to builda model system for the rest of the nation (Carns, 2006). This hyper-cynical metaphorof a blank slate was deployed in the push to reorganize the school district and the city,working to erase the presence of residents remaining in New Orleans and to limit thepossibility of return for those displaced by the storm. This narrative hands thepossibility of transforming and rebuilding the city to those ‘with the power and wealth’to do something immediately, while disempowering already existing communities anddismissing their ability to rebuild their neighborhoods and the city (Wagner, 2008).Media reports at the local level reveal more caution, cynicism and criticism in therollout of charter schools; perhaps this comes from the decades-long effort to improveand reform the school system, or perhaps it arises from the reality of living in a marketexperiment.

The dismantling of the public education system in New Orleans threatens theuniversal right of public education in the United States. In the aftermath of Katrina, thelong-running efforts of a variety of regressive local movements to take over or dismantlethe city’s public education system melded with neoliberal opportunists in the federalgovernment and in various policy agencies to privatize education and ensure that thepublic subsidized profits. The power and effect of macro-level policy institutions in therollout of neoliberal policies at the local level is dependent upon the interplay of actors

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at various scales working to reshape New Orleans over time. The materials reviewed inthis study help define these relationships by detailing the actions of both the state andlocal school boards in implementing a charter school program (both before and after thestorm), and explain how the current system emerged.

This case relies on both primary and secondary sources including interviews andarchival research. It utilizes media reports, think-tank publications, education journals,newsletters and reports from the United Teachers of New Orleans and other educationunions. At the core of this is a comprehensive review of over 200 articles directlyaddressing public education in the city over a 5-year period (between January 2003 andDecember 2008) published in the New Orleans newspaper The Times-Picayune.2 Thisperiod was selected in order to capture the discourse surrounding public schools in thecity in the two and a half years prior to the storm and the two and a half years afterKatrina. These reports are supplemented by both an analysis of historical documents andsecondary work produced in various journals and newsletters by those working ineducation or focusing on issues around education.

These materials offer a narrative of local agents preparing legal frameworks whilecultivating and promoting discontent, making possible the rapid implementation of theregressive ideas of think-tanks and foundations in times of upheaval and crisis. It isthese efforts prior to Katrina that made possible the rapid dismantling of the publicschool system in New Orleans. The focus here is on the school choice movement inthe years immediately preceding and following Hurricane Katrina. By tracking theefforts of the local school choice movement and its struggles for power in the yearsbefore Katrina, both the ongoing scalarization of neoliberal governance and thecomplex interplay between macronecessity and microdiversity of neoliberalizationemerge (Brenner, 2000; Peck et al., 2009; Brenner et al., 2010). Hurricane Katrina andthe flood that followed did not open the city to radically new approaches, but usheredin the possibility of expanding already existing regressions, particularly in theeducation sector.

In the aftermath of Katrina, the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisianastruggled to reopen the Orleans Parish School District, as state and local agenciescontinued to fight over plans and proposals, and over who had the power to controleducation in the city. The system had a battered reputation before the storm, which wasfurther compromised by heavy damage to its physical infrastructure. In addition to suchdamage, the school district was contending with limited revenues and in danger ofinsolvency (Ritea, 2005b). The mass exodus prior to and following the storm, and theextensive damage to the city, put the district’s main source of funding (a sales tax) injeopardy. With commerce at a virtual standstill, the district was facing a multi-milliondollar budget deficit. The drop in the number of students severely decreased the taxdistribution the district received from the state, dictated by a funding formula based onstudent enrolment (Anderson, 2005).

Prior to the storm, the district was struggling financially and had depleted reserves.The financial situation led to a comprehensive investigation into graft and corruptionwhich began prior to the storm. This uncovered phantom employees receiving paychecks, and payments to contractors for services that were never received (Sanders,2005). The financial crisis faced by the district became a catastrophe following Katrina.In an attempt to provide some educational services to remaining students, the OrleansParish School Board contracted with non-profit firms to charter 21 schools in buildings

2 The Times-Picayune was chosen by circulation size, reach and status as the paper of record. Theauthor recognizes that a text, particularly a newspaper, is shaped by the political leanings andeconomic considerations of its owners, as well as the biases and abilities of the writers and editorsin its employ, and is of course partial. It is this perspective that is under analysis here. The choice ofother newspapers and periodicals published in the city of New Orleans or nationally would providevariations of perspectives on the same subject.



with minor damage. Charters were characterized as a way to open schools quickly, shiftcosts out of the district and gain time to develop a strategy to reopen all 117 schools inthe district. In addition to the district opening charter schools, a plan was proposed by theNew Orleans community of Algiers (along the west bank of the Mississippi) tosplit from the Orleans Parish School District and operate a charter-only districtof nine schools. This plan was promoted as an opportunity to break from the failingdistrict.

Five weeks after Katrina, Leslie Jacobs of the Louisiana Board of Elementaryand Secondary Education expressed her support for the Algiers charter plan to TheTimes-Picayune:

When you have a damaged home, at some point you have to sit back and assess whether itmakes more sense to build anew rather than renovate. If it’s two feet of water, you can renovate.If it’s eight feet of water you likely have to rebuild, and this district has been under water fora very long time (Ritea, 2005a).

Though Jacobs used the metaphor of a flood in discussing the possible dismantling of thepublic education systems in New Orleans, Algiers did not experience the massiveflooding prevalent in other portions of the city (thanks to its location on the west bank ofthe river and its higher elevation). Another issue driving the Algiers Charter SchoolsAssociation was the allocation of nearly US $20.9 million by the US Department ofEducation one month after the storm for the opening of charter schools in Louisiana inthe aftermath of Katrina. The hurricane and the federal money both played a role in theformation of the Algiers Charter School Association, but the will and the political toolsnecessary to secede from the Orleans Parish School District had fomented long beforethe storm. The formation of the Algiers Charter School Association illustrates thedevelopment of a movement generated out of race and class antagonisms into apolitically potent tool, used to weaken a local school board and consolidate power on thewestern side of the Mississippi. Approximately 99% of the association’s 3,900 studentsare classified as minorities, and 86% of those students qualify for the free or reducedprice lunch program (Louisiana Department of Education, 2010). This interlinking ofmacro-political and economic policies that eliminate worker protections and openeducation to private contracting demonstrates how local antagonisms are reconstructedand mobilized for other purposes, and how local movements clear paths that may be usedby various groups at multiple levels seeking to consolidate power or control in aparticular place.

The Orleans Parish School District’s implementation of charter schools after thestorm and the formation of the Algiers Charter School Association were not the firstinstances of charter schools in New Orleans. Prior to the storm, a small number ofcharter schools were already operating in the city. In May 2005, the state stripped thedistrict of three failing schools and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and SecondaryEducation (BESE) assumed responsibility for them. The board sought applicationsfrom non-profits and community organizations to run the schools under a charter(Ritea, 2005c). The introduction of charters in New Orleans was the result of acompromise in response to an intensifying push for school vouchers by a coalition ofelected Republicans, lobbyists for the Archdiocese of Louisiana, and various otherchurches and private schools.

BESE was granted the power to take over underperforming schools in the OrleansParish School District through a state constitutional amendment in 2003. Approved bythe legislature, the amendment was placed on a state-wide ballot. It passed with approvalfrom 60% of the voters. This amendment was a state-level solution to the worseningacademic performance of public schools in New Orleans and growing dissatisfactionamong New Orleans’ elected officials (particularly the mayor, business owners anduniversity presidents in the city) with their ability to influence the elected Orleans ParishSchool Board in respect of changes to the education system (Rasheed, 2003b). In

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addition to concerns over the ability of the local board, some legislators saw a statetakeover as a way to respond to growing political pressure for school vouchers, aproposal that would pay tuition for children in ‘failing schools’ to attend urban privateschools or public schools in suburban districts (Maggi, 2003). The takeover allowed thestate to pursue charter schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mechanismutilized not because of an ideological commitment to school choice (which the governorand key legislators had opposed for years or — in the case of some politicians — evendecades) but due in large part to budgetary constraints and the opportunity to score adecisive blow in a long-running political battle between the state legislature and theOrleans Parish School Board.

Less than 6 weeks after Katrina, Governor Kathleen Blanco announced plans to takeover all underperforming schools in New Orleans. Blanco said the move was necessitatedby the infighting of the Orleans Parish School Board over how to proceed in openingschools, and the magnitude of the financial crisis faced by the Orleans Parish SchoolDistrict (Maggi, 2005d). All of these factors were said to threaten the ability to provideeducation to the students remaining in New Orleans after the storm. What the aftermathof the storm provided was an urgency that limited debate and discussion, allowing for theexpansion of the school choice compromise that eliminated labor protections, promptedthe mass firing of the district’s teachers and other district employees, and guaranteed thatschools in the city of New Orleans would operate as tax-backed sites of accumulationthrough dispossession.

The takeover plan utilized results from the state’s standardized test in 2004, andplaced any school scoring below the state’s targeted score under BESE control. Underthis plan, which appeared as a minor change in the state’s position, taking control ofboth failing schools and underperforming schools would lead to a radicalreorganization of the entire district, severely limiting the power of the publicly electedschool board and gutting collective agreements protecting teachers (Maggi, 2005c).Blanco’s plan passed the state legislature within weeks. The majority of the debatecentered on an even more drastic counter-proposal to take over all public schools inNew Orleans. The legislature quickly approved a plan giving the state control of 102schools in the Orleans Parish School District. Opposition to the plan came fromlegislators concerned that it was a power grab by the state, taking advantage of the factthat the storm had displaced tens of thousands of residents, including most of themembers of the district’s teachers’ unions, who had opposed similar but more modestproposals in the past (Maggi, 2005b). In this case, the displacement of those directlyaffected by this legislation limited their power to act, and allowed state officials to takesweeping action that may have taken years (or may never have occurred) without theconfluence of physical destruction, fiscal constraint, structural neglect, and thepolitically potent language of crisis that had enveloped the district in the decadesbefore the storm.

The post-Katrina implementation of charter schools was swift. Before the storm,four charter schools were in operation in New Orleans; most were struggling to remainopen due to budget problems stemming from poor management and ineffectiveimplementation (McFarley, 2003). In the years since the storm, charter schools havebecome the dominant model; over half the student population is now enrolled in a charterschool. Charter schools are in essence a public–private hybrid. They are funded throughtax dollars and required to meet state and local education standards, but that is whereoversight generally ends. Typically, the principal of each school is invested with thepower to hire and fire staff, set school hours, determine curriculum and manage thebudget (powers that more often reside with the local school administration and electedschool board). Charters are overseen by a board of directors, often composed of thosewho originally applied to charter the school, coming from a variety of backgroundsincluding business, education and the non-profit sector. Though these boards are oftennon-profit entities, many have contracted with for-profit companies to oversee theoperation of the schools (Carr, 2008a).



The balkanization of school management and control has led to major changes in thedelivery of education in New Orleans at various levels. Charter schools compete for thebest students in an effort to ensure that they achieve the standardized test scores neededto remain open and continue receiving state funds. Many efforts are made to attractyoung, inexperienced and inexpensive teachers to the city as replacements for those firedimmediately after Katrina. Teachers in the charter system have been stripped of unionprotections and are required to negotiate short-term contracts directly with charter schoolprincipals. In many cases, teacher contracts forbid them from disclosing pay levels,allowing charter schools greater leeway in individual negotiations (Perry, 2007). Parentsassume the role of consumer and are asked to ‘shop’ for educational services, but thevariation in each school’s services and curriculum, as well as locations and hours, has ledto confusion among many parents and the exclusion of particular students from thesystem (Nolan, 2006). A class action lawsuit has been filed in New Orleans on behalf ofstudents with disabilities, after it was revealed that some charter schools were turningaway children with particular needs despite having space available in the school. Statedata showed a disproportionate number of children with particular needs were enrolledin the few public schools in the city (Ritea, 2006c).

The introduction of market-style competition in the system has yet to achievesignificant academic results, but has resulted in a confusing dispersal of powerthroughout the local education system, and the removal of barriers that once protectedthose working in and accessing education from the whims of the market and the drivefor profit (Adamo, 2007; Simon, 2008). The move to charter schools in New Orleansis often portrayed by neoliberal think-tanks, policy groups and the national press as aradical departure from the city’s past, spurred in large part by Hurricane Katrina(Frank, 2005; Carns, 2006; Liu and Holmes, 2008; Mathews, 2008). Though thereorganization of the public education system in New Orleans has been aided by theinflux of foundation money, ‘hotshot’ consultants and media promotion, the processwas haphazard and driven largely by financial concerns, the settling of local politicalscores and attempts to overcome more radical calls for school vouchers (that wouldplace severe financial restrictions on an already struggling and underfunded educationsystem in the city).

Rather than a functional policy agenda guided by a neoliberal push to offload publiceducation, the outcomes of this process were largely determined by the political battlesfought by school choice proponents for the state to subsidize their demand to opt outof public education. The disaster provided a unique opportunity for the linking ofmovements, as local and social antagonisms harmonized with the larger political aims ofneoliberal and neoconservative officials in the Bush administration and the myriadcompanies and foundations seeking to capitalize on the profit possibilities ofdispossession. The push to wrench education from the public sector drew financing fromnumerous philanthropists and organizations such as the Bill and Melinda GatesFoundation. This investment and media attention on the experiment attracted celebrity-level talent in education reform to the city, accelerating and cementing advances. Butthese changes occurred with a scope and speed that would not have been possible withoutaction taken at local and state level in the years prior to Katrina (Nossiter, 2007; Riteaand Simon, 2007; Toppo, 2007).

Returning to the school choice continuum, the move towards charter schools in NewOrleans is rooted in the legislative battles over school vouchers. The growing schoolchoice movement in Louisiana (and New Orleans in particular) had invested years ofeffort into winning the state provision of school vouchers for parents of childrenattending failing schools in New Orleans. The growing political support for theseefforts in the years before Katrina led to changes in the Louisiana Constitution whichcreated a legal avenue for the city-wide implementation of charter schools. This battlefor vouchers did not end with charter schools. Proponents of school choice continuedtheir push for vouchers in legislative sessions following the storm, a battle they wouldeventually win.

40 Joshua M. Akers


School vouchers

‘This gave a clear signal that the winds of changeare blowing in the city of New Orleans and in thestate of Louisiana. We believe this change isinevitable.’

Rev. William Maestri, after the narrowdefeat of a school voucher bill in theLouisiana Senate, quoted in Ritea (2005d)

‘There are thousands of children in those schoolswho to me are being robbed of an education.’

Kirby Ducote, Catholic lobbyist andlongstanding advocate for vouchers,quoted in Maggi (2004)

In June 2005, school choice proponents celebrated a major victory. After nearly 40 yearsof rejecting vouchers, the House Education Committee approved a school voucher bill,clearing the way for a vote on the proposal. This was a significant victory for schoolchoice advocates, who had championed vouchers for years as an ‘issue of conscience’and a way to save children from failing schools in New Orleans (Ritea, 2005d). A keyproponent of the school choice initiative was the Archdiocese of New Orleans, whichruns a large parochial school system in Orleans Parish and had guaranteed spots tostudents in failing schools if vouchers were approved by the legislature. The bill gainedmomentum coming out of the education committee and passed the House, before fallingone vote short of passage in the Senate Education Committee.

This success of the voucher proposal was spurred by developments at the nationallevel. In 2002, the United States Supreme Court ruled five to four in favour of a schoolvoucher program in Ohio, allowing students in Cleveland’s inner-city public schools tochoose between private schools, charter schools and suburban public schools (whichrefused to participate in the program) and use vouchers (i.e. public funds) to pay fortuition. A lawsuit was subsequently filed after a majority of the vouchers were used atprivate religious schools. The court decision in the Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris case washailed as a landmark ruling by the Heritage Foundation and American EnterpriseInstitute as well as evangelical organizations such as Focus on the Family. The Institutefor Justice, a legal firm representing school choice proponents, declared the decision tobe as significant as the court’s 1954 ruling for school desegregation in Brown vs. Boardof Education (the point in history from which the school choice movement traces itsorigins). The group named six states which it would target for the implementation ofvouchers; Louisiana did not make the list (Schick, 2002). Despite the lack of nationalattention for Louisiana, the court ruling spurred the introduction of three bills targetingunderperforming schools in the Orleans Parish School District during the spring 2003legislative session. Opposed by teacher unions, the Orleans Parish School Board and theBESE, all three bills were defeated. In an attempt to slow down the political momentumbehind vouchers, BESE backed a proposed constitutional amendment that would allowthe state to take control of schools in the Orleans Parish School District if the schoolsfailed to meet state standards.

The efforts of school choice proponents in Louisiana were aided by a perceived andreal lack of progress in the Orleans Parish School District. Despite increases in funding,more programs and superstar superintendents, the test scores in the majority ofthe district schools continued to decline and the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) announced an investigation into the system’s use of government funds.But investigations into fraud and graft were not the only issue pushing the narrativeof a district in crisis. A power struggle erupted between board members and the



superintendent when he pushed for greater control in implementing changes; the boardpromptly fired him (The Times-Picayune, 2004). The state was granted a restrainingorder preventing the superintendent’s removal, and BESE began working with thesuperintendent to implement changes in the district (Grace, 2004). These developmentsprompted legislators from districts outside New Orleans to threaten a reconsideration ofvoucher proposals, as vouchers would reduce the school board’s authority (Maggi,2005a).

This narrative of crisis and failure surrounding the Orleans Parish School Districtwas amplified by allegations of fraud and political infighting. Business and politicalleaders had lost faith in the ability of an elected local board, and in their ability toinfluence the representative body, repair the district and shape it to the needs ofbusiness as had been the case previously (Lauria and Miron, 2005). Rather thanaddress the underlying structural issues of a system of exclusion organized around raceand class, and exacerbated by decades of economic decline and population loss, theblame for falling test scores and poor performance was directed at unionized labourand the elected board (Rasheed, 2003c; Thevenot and Rasheed, 2004). This narrativeworked to the advantage of school choice proponents, who pushed their solutions as away to ‘save the children’ from the failed public system. But this narrative of choice,of the superiority of private provision, also obscured the complicity of private schoolsin the city’s history of segregation and the equality struggle in the public educationsystem.

The continuum of school choice encompasses a variety of education systems, but thedefinition of choice within this movement is more narrowly defined. The choice is theability to opt out of public education, open to all, and select from private offerings, closedto many by a wide array of variables. Though proponents offer a continuum in whichpublic education options such as magnet schools and charter schools are part of choice,these are merely incremental steps towards a fully privatized system that in most casesis publicly subsidized through vouchers and tax credits. In the Orleans Public SchoolDistrict prior to Katrina, choice was quite prevalent. By 2003, parents had the option ofenrolling their child in any school in the district, with priority given to children in schoolsclassified as failing by the state (Russell, 2003). In addition, the district operated magnetschools with competitive entrance requirements. Magnet schools (which focus onparticular academic areas) were consistently among the top-performing schools in thestate of Louisiana, but they were marked by higher than usual racial segregation in bothfaculty and students (Adamo, 2007). These schools were often seen as a continuation ofa history of legislated segregation, and a stark reminder of the existing racial inequalitiesin New Orleans. The selective admissions process and testing regime required to entermagnet schools in New Orleans were often compared to the testing African Americanchildren underwent before admission to previously all-white schools under segregation(Rasheed, 2007).

Magnet schools were not the only remnants of institutionalized racism; privateschools also played a role as sanctuary institutions for white families opposing racialintegration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the South. When the first schools in NewOrleans were desegregated in 1960, only five African American students (all female)were allowed to attend previously white-only schools. Four of the girls were sent toMcDonogh #19 Elementary School. These girls were subjected to intimidation andphysical attacks; when those failed to drive them away, the entire white studentpopulation of the school was kept away by boycotting parents. The four girls attendedschool alone that year. One girl attended William Frantz Elementary School and none ofher white classmates showed up for the entire year (Fairclough, 1995).

By the time Katrina struck in 2005, over 80% of students in the Orleans Parish SchoolDistrict were African American (Rasheed, 2007). The extreme racial segregation of NewOrleans and the efforts of white families to opt out of the school district were illustratedin a 2003 lawsuit, brought by the parents of a white-Hispanic student on the verge offailing at one of the city’s magnet schools. The parents sued the district, claiming that the

42 Joshua M. Akers


public school near their home was underperforming and that their child would not fit inat a school with a 99% African American population. They demanded the school districtpay for the cost of sending their child to a private school (Rasheed, 2003a). The lawsuitwas dismissed in late 2003 (Thevenot, 2003). At the local and national level, schoolchoice advocates argue that the privatization of education extends to parents the right todecide between public and private education, but the historical language of choice inNew Orleans revolved around the privilege of white parents to opt out of an integratedpublic system, a system hamstrung by neglect and capital flight, spiralling towardsincapacity in the years prior to Katrina.

As the floodwaters receded in New Orleans, the state legislature convened in BatonRouge to address the immediate crisis of the hurricane-ravaged coast. One majorinitiative was the takeover of the majority of the Orleans Parish School District, whichwould lead to the formation of the Recovery School District to oversee charters andreopen public schools (Ritea, 2006b). These initiatives dominated much of the legislativework around education in the year after Katrina, but the push for vouchers continued withthe Archdiocese of New Orleans, Republican legislators and President George W. Bushrecommending vouchers as a way to deal with the shortage of buildings, teachers andslots for students in New Orleans (Kinnan, 2005; Alpert, 2007).

But the push for vouchers after the storm remained unsuccessful, as a majority oflegislators preferred to work with the new state system and the charter experiment. In2007, school choice advocates changed tactics, introducing both voucher legislation anda state tax credit for parents sending their children to private schools. This tax credit wascriticized as a backdoor voucher plan by weakened but active teacher unions and manyin the education system. Despite this opposition, the tax credit bill advanced further thanprevious voucher efforts, passing both the House and the Senate only to be vetoed by theexiting Governor Kathleen Blanco (a Democrat). She claimed that the state could notafford the tax credit while recovery efforts continued (Barrow, 2007). Similar to thevoucher program, the tax credit was an effort to redirect public funds into private hands(particularly those who could afford to pay private tuition fees upfront) while reducingfunding for a public education system already struggling to serve the most marginalizedwithin the population, people without the means to make such a choice or access a taxcredit for private education.

The decades-long efforts of school choice advocates in New Orleans culminated in thestate’s first voucher program in July 2008. Governor Bobby Jindal (a Republican)approved the state’s first school voucher program, which he called a ‘scholarship’program in an effort to avoid the baggage of the debate around vouchers (Carr, 2008b).Purportedly aimed at low-income families, the program created a lottery system in whichqualifying families could apply for up to US $6,300 of private tuition cost (paid directlyto the school by the state). The 4-year program is available only to students inkindergarten through to third grade in the Recovery School District. The low-incomequalification of 250% of the federal poverty level means a family of four with an incomeof US $53,000 a year may qualify for the voucher (Carr, 2008c). This income levelgreatly increases the pool of eligible applicants, and raises questions about whom theprogram is intended to serve. The federal poverty level for a family of four in the US in2008 was US $21,200; in New Orleans over a third of the population lives below thatincome level (Department of Health and Human Services, 2008).

While school choice advocates claim this is an equitable program designed to helpthose most in need, the qualifying income level contradicts those claims. Though not afull voucher system, this move is an incremental step towards a privatized system inwhich those on the margins are forced to compete for the commodity of educationoffered at varying quality depending on price. This move towards market-basedcompetition hinders efforts to provide education equality or to develop a just andsustainable system. The allocation of resources to private providers increases thevulnerability of marginalized classes to the whims of the market. Such measures exposethe poorest in the city to greater disadvantage, by forcing them into a market tilted in



favour of those with the economic and political capital to structure the system to theiradvantage. This marginalization is codified by extending tax credits to those who canafford it, diluting the voucher pool with those who do not need assistance, and divertingfunds away from the public education system which is the only option for many.

The school choice movement in Louisiana has been successful in pushing through itslegislative priorities in the years since Hurricane Katrina, but that success is not a directresult of the catastrophe following the storm. The political struggles and incrementalvictories won in the years before Katrina laid the groundwork for the major victories thatfollowed it. In the years after the hurricane, political support continued to increasegradually with proponents gathering more allies as limited progress in the Orleans Parishschools frustrated opponents of vouchers. The ongoing struggles in the district were usedto argue that a more radical approach, the defunding and depopulating of public schools,was a viable solution to the issues in the district.

The crisis following Katrina brought the work of school choice proponents inLouisiana to the attention of national organizations and foundations with a predilectionfor market solutions, and resulted in financial backing and media attention for schoolchoice advocates. But given the pre-Katrina success of the local movement and theincremental progress made after the storm, it is problematic to wholly credit thesemacro-level organizations with the successful efforts of school choice advocates in NewOrleans. The hurricane and flood opened a desperate city and state to outside money andexpertise that accelerated the transition to a market-based education system, but the rapiddeconstruction of the district was made possible by the long-term efforts of local schoolchoice proponents in New Orleans and Louisiana.

ConclusionCities have long served as sites of multi-scalar resistance, but the city is also the targetand site of multi-scalar regressive policies and reactionary movements. As Lipsitz hasstated, it is conservative reactionary movements and their long march across the last halfof the twentieth century that represent the most successful social movement of our time.In the case of public education in New Orleans, it was a multi-decade march of violence,withdrawal, disinvestment and eventually a dismantling. The radical and sweepingchanges to New Orleans’ public school system after Hurricane Katrina were steeped inrace and class antagonisms and a revanchist approach to the city. In mainstreampublications such as The Times-Picayune, The New York Times and The Wall StreetJournal, the destructive aftermath of Katrina was characterized as an opportunity.Opportunists in neoliberal and neoconservative think-tanks offered up the metaphor of ablank slate and a wish list of policy repeals and privatization initiatives. The federalgovernment — so reticent to provide disaster relief — was quick to provide privatizationincentives, with the president as pitch man in his post-vacation visit to the Gulf Coast.

But the real opportunity for school choice proponents following the hurricane was theabsence of opposition. As much of the city’s population was displaced by the storm, thestate quickly decimated the teachers’ union through mass firings, and severely hobbledthe Orleans Parish School District by stripping it of responsibility for the majority of thecity’s schools. But these efforts did not constitute a new strategy; many of themechanisms were in place well before the storm, and support for these initiatives hadbeen building in the state legislature for years. The dispersal of opposition around thecountry allowed for the restructuring of one of the largest school districts in the countryas a site of government-financed accumulation.

The dismantling of public education in New Orleans is representative of ongoingstruggles, as urban centers are increasingly the target of, and incubator for, neoliberalprograms that are more about realigning redistribution through government than aboutthe privatization of service. The exclusions built into these changes through the language

44 Joshua M. Akers


of choice or markets represent additional barriers impeding access to sites of socialreproduction such as public education, public housing and a variety of other needs. Thiscase offers insight into how seemingly divergent and isolated local movements that arereactionary and regressive coalesce with an increasing trend towards accumulationthrough dispossession, apparent in the global push towards the privatization of publicservices. This confluence is essential to understanding the multi-scalar processes atwork in urban neoliberalization. But it also points to the possibilities of Katz’scountertopographies and multi-scalar organizing for alternatives that are radical andrevolutionary, rather than a reaction to an urban environment in which access to themeans of social reproduction is becoming increasingly tenuous.

Joshua M. Akers ([email protected]), Department of Geography, University ofToronto, Room 5047, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3,Canada.

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RésuméL’inondation causée par l’ouragan Katrina ne s’était pas résorbée que la Nouvelle-Orléans croulait sous une vague de propositions néolibérales, de fonds caritatifs etd’éducateurs médiatiques impatients de démanteler l’enseignement public de la ville. Àla suite de l’ouverture du marché, les habitants se sont retrouvés avec un systèmeéducatif toujours plus séparé et inégal. Cette expérience néolibérale extrême est le fruitd’une entreprise menée sur quarante ans par des partisans locaux du ‘libre-choixscolaire’ en faveur d’un régime de chèques-études. Sont examinés ici les rapports entrele système des forces en présence — économiques, sociales, politiques et (dans le cas deKatrina) naturelles — et la transformation de la vie quotidienne, dans la ville et la zonemétropolitaine, à travers l’action publique et le discours des médias. Les attaquesprécédentes contre l’éducation publique au niveau de l’État et de la municipalité ontfranchement favorisé la rapidité et l’ampleur des changements qu’a connus ensuite laNouvelle-Orléans. Les tentatives d’organisation contre cette évolution se sontconcentrées sur l’importance des groupes de réflexion et des fondations caritatives auniveau national. Cet intérêt restreint sérieusement le potentiel nécessaire auxassociations ou organismes locaux pour contrer ceux qui mènent ces transformations ausein de leurs communautés.

48 Joshua M. Akers


Documents

Separate and Unequal: The Consumption of Public Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans