New Orleans Schools 3 Years Later

Last week, I traveled to New Orleans to visit with community organizing groups, teachers and students, and to speak to a segment of the city’s blogging community. This wasn’t my first trip to New Orleans after Katrina’s flood waters streamed through broken levees and swept away people, pets, houses and schools. But what remains painfully clear is that three years after the waters receded, New Orleans is still struggling to get a foothold. The widespread failure of the local, state and federal governments to create structures and processes through which the people of New Orleans could participate—deeply and meaningfully—in their city’s recovery is particularly evident in the current state of the New Orleans school system.

The New Orleans Public Schools served 63,000 students before the levees broke on August 29th, 2005.  About 24,000 students are beginning classes there this fall.  No one—no one—believes that the pre-Katrina New Orleans schools were good enough. They were dreadful. The city’s White middle class had long-since fled to the suburbs, or put their children in private schools, leaving the public schools neglected and under-resourced for decades.

Katrina wiped out that deeply flawed system.  And while thousands of students and teachers fled the city, a well-organized network of conservative activists from around the country swung into action and orchestrated the most dramatic private takeover of a public-sector institution that the nation has ever seen (for this story, see Dismantling a Community). 

Within weeks, the State of Louisiana had taken control of over 100 public schools, and the infrastructure had been put in place to hand millions of taxpayer dollars to private entities to run them.

The takeover began with the gifting of public school buildings to private charter school operators.  The next target were the teachers. All 4,500 public school teachers in New Orleans were fired, even before the floodwaters receded.  The city’s powerful teachers union—one of the strongest Black-led labor unions in the south—was decimated.  Then the infrastructure of the New Orleans Public Schools was dismantled.

Today, the New Orleans Public Schools is a fragmented network including charter schools, state-run traditional schools, and locally-run schools.  There are over 30 governing bodies controlling New Orleans schools.  Only one of them—the Orleans Parish School Board, which remains in control of just five schools—is locally elected. 

This transformation of a school system was orchestrated largely outside of New Orleans.  In fact, state law was changed to eliminate requirements that parents and teachers in New Orleans have a voice in the restructuring.  After the storm, then-Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an Executive Order that waived, among others, a provision requiring two thirds of teachers, and a majority of parents to agree to the conversion of a public school to a charter school.  That Executive Order remains in effect today, though the “emergency” it proclaimed has clearly passed.

The families that survived Katrina have had to amass immense internal reserves to bring themselves back to their beloved city and to rebuild their lives.  The lack of an organized way for them to have a voice in the rebuilding of their city has left them feeling frustrated and ignored.  Even today, “disrespected” is one word you hear a lot in Black New Orleans when you ask about the process that created the new school systems.  Every step of the way, from the early weeks after the storm to this very day, many African American teachers, parents and students have been shut out, not just of the process, but of the new schools themselves. 
 
Imagine the spirit that might have emerged if a truly organic process of community planning and input had been established.  Imagine New Orleanians coming together as they returned to their city, working neighbor with neighbor, community by community to forge a new city out of the ruins of Katrina.  Imagine parents, students and teachers given real power to create the blueprints of a new school system that would be community based and owned.

That didn’t happen.  But the people of New Orleans refuse to let the reshaping of their schools continue without their voices. Over the past several weeks, five of the seven elected members of the Orleans Parish School Board announced that they wouldn’t seek reelection this year.  Many community members feared that Board might be dissolved—that the era of any elected board with jurisdiction over the city’s public schools would be over.  But in recent weeks, twenty candidates have stepped up to run for the open seats. 
  
Perhaps we’re beginning to see new energy rising from the hot, muddy streets of New Orleans this fall.  A vibrantly contested election for school board has the opportunity to bring the debate over the future of the New Orleans schools out into the open, and back to the people of New Orleans.

Leigh Dingerson is the Education Team Leader of the Center for Community Change.