"Slave Market-Based Education Reform" in NOLA

“Slave Market-Based Education Reform” in NOLA

Kalob Scott, Jherell Johnson and Russell Robinson, Jr. stand along the school fence following a protest in December 2013 where parents withdrew them from the Carver Collegiate and Carver Prep charters complaining of harsh discipline, prison-like conditions. (Photo: Ted Jackson/Times-Picayune)

 Last August 4-5, a conference of education researchers was held in New Orleans on the theme, “The ‘New Orleans Model’ of Urban School Reform: A Guide or Warning for Cities Across the Nation.” Workshops were attended as well by local educators, community spokesmen, parents and students. The conference included a bus tour of the devastated school system and vivid testimony about what the corporate education “reform” means on the ground.

The tour underlined the way in which educational opportunity has been systematically cut off for black residents, and how the schools that have been reopened in black areas, often in temporary structures, have prison-like conditions. A participant, Julian Vazquez Heilig, who wrote an extensive blog post on the conference, from which these excerpts are taken, commented about one photo: “Guess: Is this a NOLA school or minimum security prison?”

They saw the well-appointed Charles Hynes charter school in the mostly white Lakeview area which was rebuilt while the John F. Kennedy HS (which served African American students) just across City Park has been demolished and slated for “landbanking,” even though it was a modern (1960s construction) school in what former students called an “idyllic” setting. Calls by JFK alumni to rebuild the school were dismissed.

In the City Park area, the largely white Edward Hynes charter school
(top) was rebuilt, while John F. Kennedy HS (with its overwhelmingly
African American student body) was torn down.

Many neighborhoods don’t have operational elementary schools even though there are shuttered facilities in the area. In the Lower Ninth Ward, ten years after Katrina, only one neighborhood school was functioning of the five that used to be there. Conference participants asked: “Where did the $1.8 billion given to rebuild schools go?” A 2013 article by Kirsten Buras, a professor at Georgia State University and primary organizer of the conference, in the Berkeley Review of Education gave the answer:

“Meanwhile, the RSD has received millions from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for damage to these schools. This money was not allocated to rebuild schools in the Lower 9th Ward, but instead was put in a general fund to support school construction in largely white neighborhoods uptown – all of this despite the fact that the vast majority of students in the city’s public schools are African American and live downtown. Most of the renovated and newly built spaces would be given to privately managed charter schools.”

Karran Harper Royal, a New Orleans native and parent, noted: “Students in Lower 9th Ward [were] not allowed in nearby St. Bernard Parish. They are bused to schools across town.” She noted that school buses bringing kids home often arrive as late as 8 p.m.

Dr. Raynard Sanders, a prominent New Orleans educational researcher and educator at the secondary, university and graduate levels, kicked off the conference. Here are some tweets from participants:

“What was a disaster became an opportunity.” Schools taken over “when bodies were still floating.” -Raynard Sanders

You’ll hear wonderful stories about the privatization of NOL.A’s schools. They’re hallucinations. -Raynard Sanders

Then came a session with parents. What they had to say was chilling:

“Mom do you want to check me for weapons when I come home from school” NOLA parent of 7yr old child

NOLA parent advocate: 7 year old “patted down” every day. “I cry daily for my children.”

NOLA parent advocate: What’s happening to our children is criminal. Our children have been sold to charters for profit.

NOLA parent advocate: “I live in fear for my children.” They are being trained to be subservient- prepared for jail.

NOLA parent advocate: Children forced into “silent lunch” from kindergarten on… 

Schools in NOLA look like prisons. We are training children to go to prison. -Parent advocates.”

Another theme was how highly paid charter school managers brought in Teach for America (TFA) to replace the public school teachers. “Between 2005 and 2006, NOLA fired 7500 teachers/school employees. Then claimed teacher shortage and brought in TFA.” TFA has been central to the drive for charterization, by providing non-union “teachers” without pedagogical training. But a number of former TFA recruits had become critical of their role. A former TFA administrator reported:

Discipline should not beget self-hate. When we met w/struggle, we punished & retraumatized kids. -Former charter admin.

No excuses charters: Students punished for speaking their native lang., hairstyles. Suspended when can’t afford uniforms.

A panelist said that “no excuses charter schools” cultivate a “culture of silence.” An educational researcher specializing in TFA and “market-based” school reform described “constant surveillance of kids at NOLA charters she observed, justified by ‘cultural deficit.’” An attorney reported: “Kids kicked out of no-excuses school for chewing gum, not walking in line. Many complaints re: dehumanizing treatment.”

Students present demands against harsh discipline in New Orleans charter schools on 10 October 2015, as part of National Week of Action Against School Pushout.
(Photo from video by Times-Picayune)

An item in a slide show reported that at Carver Prep, teachers corrected students “who sit incorrectly, speak incorrectly, wear their uniforms incorrectly, show their work incorrectly, and transition in the hallways incorrectly.” “We get detentions or suspensions for not walking on the taped lines in the hallway.” In short, “‘Control them, silence them, punish them.’ Life of high schoolers” in “no excuses” charters.

Behind it all is rampant racism. A panelist, Ramon Griffin, wrote an article, “Colonizing the Black Natives: Reflections from a Former NOLA Charter School Dean of Students,” wrote of his experience that “everything at the school was done in a militaristic/prison fashion.”

“My daily routine consisted of running around chasing young Black ladies to see if their nails were polished, or if they added a different color streak to their hair, or following young men to make sure that their hair wasn’t styled naturally as students were not able to wear their hair in uncombed afro styles. None of which had anything to do with teaching and learning, but administration was keen on making sure that before Black students entered the classroom that they looked ‘appropriate’ for learning.”

Summing up, Joyce King, a professor at Georgia State and recent past president of the American Education Research Association, concluded: “What’s happening in NOLA is ‘slave’ market-based reform. African Americans are controlled & used for profit” (from the blog posting by Julian Vasquez). Class Struggle Education Workers has stressed repeatedly that in NYC and elsewhere, school closures have resulted in a pattern of “educational apartheid.” At the New Orleans meeting an illustration prepared by the Schott Foundation showed how in city after city, over 90% of closed schools were in black and Latino communities.

New Orleans is what educational colonialism, corporate-sponsored apartheid and “slave market-based” ed reform looks like. This is the “new Jim Crow,” a 21st century Code Noir. The abolition of slavery required the Civil War, the second American Revolution. To defeat the racist, capitalist attack on public education will take nothing less than a socialist revolution that will make possible for the first time a truly liberating education in the interests of working people and all the oppressed.

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. See the CSEW program here.