New Orleans Education Reform: A Guide for Cities or a Warning for Communities?

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, co-chair of the Senate Public Charter School Caucus in Washington, DC, hosted a forum for education policymakers. It centered on New Orleans- Style Education Reform: A Guide for Cities (Lessons Learned, 2004-2010), a report published by the charter school incubator New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO). Through human capital and charter school development, the report asserts, New Orleans has become a national leader in education reform. In this essay, members of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, including education scholars and those affiliated with longstanding educational and cultural organizations in New Orleans, reveal that such reform has been destructive to African American students, teachers, and neighborhoods. Inspired by critical race theory and the role of experiential knowledge in challenging dominant narratives, authors draw heavily on testimony from community-based education groups, which have typically been ignored, regarding the inequitable effects of New Orleans’ school reform. While the Guide for Cities is used as a sounding board for concerns and critiques, this essay challenges claims that have circulated nationally since 2005—ones that laud New Orleans as a model to be followed.

This essay also charts the elite policy network that has shaped the city’s reform, with NSNO playing a central part, in order to reveal the accumulative interests of education entrepreneurs. A postscript illustrating parent and student resistance to charter school reform in New Orleans reminds urban communities elsewhere that current reforms are not a guide but a threat to those struggling for racial and educational justice.

Supporting material:
Figure 1: Policy Ecology of New Schools for New Orleans

Copyright Information
Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre
1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Kristen L. Buras, Educational Policy Studies, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 3977, Atlanta, Georgia 30302. Email: kburas@gsu.edu.

Berkeley Review of Education Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 123-160

(Grassroots Lessons Learned, 2005-2012
Kristen L. Buras a1
In conjunction with members of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective a Georgia State University

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, co-chair of the Senate Public Charter School Caucus in Washington, DC, hosted a forum for education policymakers. It centered on New Orleans-Style Education Reform: A Guide for Cities (Lessons Learned, 2004-2010), a report published by the charter school incubator New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO). Through human capital and charter school development, the report asserts, New Orleans has become a national leader in education reform. In this essay, members of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, including education scholars and those affiliated with longstanding educational and cultural organizations in New Orleans, reveal that such reform has been destructive to African American students, teachers, and neighborhoods. Inspired by critical race theory and the role of experiential knowledge in challenging dominant narratives, authors draw heavily on testimony from community-based education groups, which have typically been ignored, regarding the inequitable effects of New Orleans’ school reform.

While the Guide for Cities is used as a sounding board for concerns and critiques, this essay challenges claims that have circulated nationally since 2005— ones that laud New Orleans as a model to be followed. This essay also charts the elite policy network that has shaped the city’s reform, with NSNO playing a central part, in order to reveal the accumulative interests of education entrepreneurs. A postscript illustrating parent and student resistance to charter school reform in New Orleans reminds urban communities elsewhere that current reforms are not a guide but a threat to those struggling for racial and educational justice.

Keywords: urban education reform, educational policy, charter schools, alternative teacher recruitment, black education, New Orleans, Guide for Cities, New Schools for New Orleans, Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, grassroots resistance

Is education reform in New Orleans a model for urban school districts across the United States? Senator Mary Landrieu (Democrat–Louisiana) believes so. On March 1, 2012, Landrieu, co-chair of the Senate Public Charter School Caucus with Senator Lamar Alexander (Republican–Tennessee), hosted a forum for education policymakers in Washington, DC. The forum centered on a report entitled New Orleans-Style Education Reform: A Guide for Cities (Lessons Learned, 2004-2010), published by the charter school incubator New Schools for New Orleans (Brinson, Boast, Hassel, & Kingsland, 2012). Landrieu proclaimed:

With its Guide for Cities, New Schools for New Orleans is doing the important work of sharing lessons learned throughout the transformation of New Orleans’ public schools. Through relentless focus on accountability, human capital, and charter school development, New Orleans has become a national leader in education reform…I hope that this story and the Guide for Cities will inspire and equip other cities to follow New Orleans’ lead. (Landrieu, 2012, para. 2)

Participating in the discussion with Landrieu was Neerav Kingsland, chief strategy officer for New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) at the time. Kingsland is now chief executive officer (CEO) of NSNO because the organization’s founder and former CEO, Sarah Usdin, ran for a seat on Orleans Parish School Board—a point taken up later. At the forum, Kingsland echoed Landrieu’s remarks and added: “The New Orleans story is really one of transferring power back to educators and parents—to date, this had led to incredible gains in student learning” (Landrieu, 2012, para. 4).

In this scholarly essay, members of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, including education researchers and those affiliated with longstanding educational and cultural organizations in New Orleans, articulate their disagreement. Based on our experiential knowledge and qualitative research over nearly a decade, we do not believe that New Orleans school reform represents a guide for cities. Instead we assert that current reforms, including human capital and charter school development, have been immensely destructive to African American students, veteran teachers, and historically black neighborhoods in New Orleans. Ours is a warning for communities nationally. These “reforms” are not a guide for cities; they are a stark threat to the education, cultural integrity, and political-economic power of communities struggling for a semblance of justice.

To make our case, we draw on testimony from community-based education groups and scholarly research on the inequitable effects of New Orleans school reform for students, teachers, and schools targeted by organizations such as NSNO. Our focus will be on human capital and charter school development, and we will use the Guide for Cities as a sounding board for our concerns and critiques. However, we want to make clear that in responding to NSNO’s Guide, we also are speaking back to a larger set of reports that have been written since 2005 about education reform in New Orleans and distributed nationally. The reports noted below, which are examples, follow lines of argument that are similar to the Guide for Cities:

• Born on the Bayou: A New Model for American Education by Third Way (Osborne, 2012);
• The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (Smith, 2012; for a critique, see Buras, 2012c);
• Creating Opportunity Schools: A Bold Plan to Transform Indianapolis Public Schools by the Mind Trust (2011);
• Portfolio School Districts for Big Cities: An Interim Report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (Hill et al., 2009);
• After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans by the Urban Institute (Hill & Hannaway, 2006); and
• From Tragedy to Triumph: Principled Solutions for Rebuilding Lives and Communities by the Heritage Foundation (Meese, Butler, & Holmes, 2005).

Additionally, there has been much discussion in the media about the “success” of the New Orleans model. Illustrations are too numerous to compile here; major news outlets, from Time Magazine (Isaacson, 2007) and the New York Times (Tough, 2008) to the Wall Street Journal (Kaminski, 2011) and the Washington Post (Armao, 2012), have highlighted New Orleans as a site of innovation, a source of inspiration, and a model for replication. We firmly disagree, and our disagreement is based on an evidentiary record rooted in community experience and almost a decade of research rather than the ungrounded assertions that characterize many of the aforementioned accounts.

Before directly addressing the Guide and analyzing its claims, we first describe the critical race methodology that we employed as well as the work of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective. Next, we provide some background on NSNO and education reform in New Orleans since 2005. Following this, the Guide’s policy recommendations on human capital and charter school development are examined, and the concerns of longstanding community groups about these policies are considered through testimonies and primary source documents. Finally, we position NSNO within a wider policy network that includes elite actors at the local, state, and national levels, revealing NSNO’s pivotal role in a circuit of education entrepreneurs who seek to transform urban public schools through market-based reforms. We ultimately argue these reforms serve the interests of entrepreneurs rather than the communities at the center of their efforts.