The first thing to be said about Kristen Buras’ new book is that the publisher overpriced the book ($125). As the author, she had nothing to do with that poor decision. This is a book that should be widely read, but at that price, it won’t be. There will eventually be a softcover edition, but probably not for a year. Urge your library to buy it, or get together a group of friends to pool the cost. Or contact the author directly, and she will send you a coupon that gives you a 20% discount (kburas@gsu.edu).
Although it has its share of academic jargon, it is a major contribution to the literature about post-Katrina New Orleans that directly challenges what you have seen on PBS or heard on NPR or read in the mainstream media. Buras has written her narrative from the grassroots, not from the top. She has spent countless hours interviewing students, parents, teachers, and reformers. She has read all the relevant documents. This is the other side of the story. It is important, and you should read it.
In 2010, I went to New Orleans at the invitation of my cyber-friend Lance Hill, who was running the Southern Institute for Education and Research. Lance arranged for me to speak at Dillard University, a historically black institution in New Orleans, and he invited some of the city’s leading (displaced) educators. There were advocates for the charter reforms in the audience, and they spoke up.
But most of the audience seemed to be angry teachers and administrators who had been fired, and angry parents whose neighborhood school had been taken over by a charter. What I remember most vividly from that evening, aside from meeting the direct descendants of Plessy and Ferguson, who now work together on behalf of racial and civic amity, was a woman in the audience who stood up and said, “After Katrina, first they stole our democracy, then they stole our schools.”
I understood that she was unhappy about the new regime, but I understood it even better after I read Kristen L. Buras’ Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space (Routledge). It is just published. As i said at the outset, the publisher priced it out of the reach of most people who want to read it. What a strange judgment at a time when so many cities are closing down their public schools and handing their children over to charter operators because they want to be “another New Orleans.” If there is one lesson in Buras’ book, it is this: Do not copy New Orleans.
Buras, now a professor of educational policy at Georgia State University, spent ten years researching this book. She describes fully the policy terrain: the Bush administration’s desire to turn Katrina-devastated New Orleans into a free enterprise zone. The support of New Orleans’ white-dominated business community and of the leadership of Tulane University, for privatization of the schools. Privatization also was encouraged by the Aspen Institute, whose chairman Walter Isaacson (former editor in chief of TIME) was simultaneously chairman of the board of Teach for America. A swarm of market-oriented “reformers” saw a chance to turn New Orleans into a model for the nation. They had no trouble getting tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, from the federal government and foundations to create the enterprise zone of independently operated charter schools they wanted.
Obstacles were quickly swept away. Some 7,500 veteran teachers, three-quarters of whom were African-American, the backbone of the African-American middle class in New Orleans, were abruptly fired without cause, making room for a new staff of inexperienced young TFA recruits. Public schools were soon eliminated, even those that were beloved in their communities, some with fabled histories and vibrant ties to the neighborhood.
Buras relates the troubled history of New Orleans, with its background of white supremacy and the disempowerment of African Americans, whether enslaved or free. She recoils at the accusation that black teachers were somehow responsible for the poor condition and poor academic results of the public schools of New Orleans before Katrina. She documents that those in power in the state systematically underfunded the schools until the charters came; then the money spigot opened.
Reviewing this history, and especially the years since the destruction caused by Katrina in 2005, Buras reaches some strong judgments about what happened to New Orleans that ties past to present.
When the new power elites were debating the best way to manage the schools, what became clear was that they distrusted local school boards as “politicized and ineffective,” and preferred either state control, mayoral control or appointed leadership. Behind their models was the Reconstruction-era assumption that “African Americans have no capacity for self-government.”
“Whether in terms of how [charter] boards are constituted or in terms of how student or familial challenges are addressed, the charter school movement in New Orleans is closely bound to the protection of whiteness as property, as the clearest beneficiaries are upper-class white (and a few black) entrepreneurs who seek to capitalize on public assets for their own advancement while dispossessing the very communities the schools are supposed to serve.”
Buras tells the counter-stories of community-supported public schools that resisted the charterization process. One chapter is devoted to Frrederick Douglass High School, the heart of the Bywater neighborhood in the city’s Upper 9th Ward. It opened in 1913 as an all-white school named for a Confederate general who was Reconstruction governor of Louisiana after the Civil War. With desegregation in the late 1960s, white flight commenced, and it eventually became an all-black school. Not until the 1990s was it renamed for abolitionist Frederick Douglass. As Buras shows, the local African American community tried to save the school, which was important to the neighborhood, but it was eventually handed over to KIPP.
Buras points out that most of the charter schools did not hire veteran teachers, and none has a union. They prefer to rely on the fresh recruits, “most of them white and from outside the community.” After Katrina, she writes, state officials and education entrepreneurs shifted the blame for poor academic results onto the city’s veteran teachers. She quotes Chas Roemer, currently the chair of the state education board, as saying “Charter schools are now a threat to the jobs program called public education.” (Roemer’s sister heads the state’s charter school association.) Buras concludes that his remark echoes the old racist view that African Americans are shiftless and lazy and dependent on state welfare. She counters that teachers in New Orleans before Katrina contended with “racism and a history of state neglect of black public schools.” Several teachers told her of the unfit conditions of the schools in which they taught. They did not have access to the bounty that arrived in the city for charter schools.
Beneath the chatter about a New Orleans “miracle,” Buras sees the unfolding of a narrative in which whites once again gain power to control the children of African American families and take possession of schools that once belonged to the black community and reflected their culture and their aspirations.
“Knowingly or unknowingly,” she writes, inexperienced white recruits with TFA undermine the best interests of black working-class students and veteran teachers to leverage a more financially stable and promising future for themselves.” Buras is especially scornful of TFA, which she holds culpable for treating its recruits as “human capital,” while helping to dismantle democratic institutions and take the place of unjustly fired black teachers.
In the end, she offers up her book as a warning to urban districts like Philadelphia, Newark, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, and others that New Orleans is not a model for anyone to follow. The entrepreneurs grow fat while families and children lose schools that once were the heart of their community. Schools are not just a place to produce test scores (and the evidence from the New Orleans-based “Research on Reforms” shows that New Orleans’ Recovery School District is one of the state’s lowest performing districts). Schools have civic functions as well. They are, or should be, democratic institutions, serving the needs of the local community and responsive to its goals. Schooling is not something done to children, but a process in which children learn about the world, develop their talents, and become independent, self-directed individuals and citizens.
I doubt if the author will ever have another reviewer with your skill in writing and historical perspective, although a teacher named Mercedes Schneider, who is still living this history Is a candidate.
You are doing a great service in spreading the word about this book, and in a form that serves as a red flag to the many metro districts in the path of these same forces of destruction.
I am also reminded that this is the year when all students are supposed to be 100% proficient by NCLB standards. Reports are in for Iowa schools: 66% are now eligible for the big “F” grade.
It’s even worse in Utah. It’s expected that about 85% or more of schools in Utah will now be labeled “failing” in this year’s school grades. Last spring was the first time the new CC tests were used in Utah.
But Becky’s going to put an iPad in every child’s hands and that’ll fix everything, right?
Then they can cram even more students into Utah classrooms, because the iPad will be “teaching” them. Or at least that was how I interpreted one asinine Utah legislator’s comments about kids basically having a second teacher in the class if they had an electronic device.
Yep. And it may cost as high as $437 million to do it. When Utah pays the least money per pupil and has the highest class sizes in the nation and teachers’ salaries have gone down every year for six years, what we need to do to fix it is give a tablet to every kid, right? (sarcasm)
Reblogged this on and commented:
this is an important analysis of what happened to schools in New Orleans after Katrina and the introduction of charter schools and TFA.
Are there any plans for a book tour or a speaking schedule? Is it possible to arrange a visit by the author. These are views that need to be heard here in Indianapolis, where the voices and publicity of national education reform groups fill the local news, but fail to disclose the extremely small number (15? 12?) of people they actually attract to their well publicized events, and most of those are paid staff.
Hi, Mary Ann. I am coming to Indianapolis on April 14, 2015, to speak at the annual meeting of the National Council on Educating Black Children. Seven urban school superintendents will be on a panel to respond to my talk. Please join us and spread the word.
In Indianapolis, the Mind Trust is pushing adoption of the “New Orleans model.” I agree, we really need to challenge this. Let me know if you want to organize something in advance of April.
Here is a link to the Mind Trust’s “Bold Plan to Transform Indianapolis Public Schools”:
http://www.themindtrust.org/creating-opportunity-schools
Thank you. I’m very familiar with the Mindtrust plan. It wasn’t well received when published/publicized, so they are now trying to elect their hand chosen pro education reform candidates to the elected IPS School Board in the Nov 4 election. If they succeed, the district will be theirs. I am contacting you privately.
Indianapolis: exposé their motives. They seek election to privatize public schools, not improve them. Write letters to the editor, blog, speak out. Do not be silent.
i do not know how it could be done but one way to spread the word on the Kristen Buras book would be to have her appear on BookTV. This is where I first became acquainted with Dr. Ravitch and her books. Serious readers watch this excellent program. Because they have to be non partisan they have some atrocious authors but there are fantastic scholars who spend years in research, again, such as Dr. Ravitch.
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
“First they stole our democracy, then they stole our schools.”
Thank you for extrapolating from this book, the “modus operandi” used to change a public school district into to a corporate one. It is both nice and essential for parents of school aged children to see the road-map in advance, and to effectively argue against beginning the journey, instead of being lead trustingly by the hand, only to be blindsided by staged events upcoming in each takeover-school-district’s future.
This is one of the major reasons that I wrote the book. Making communities aware of the road map of corporate education reform enables them to see the “signs” and “landmarks” in advance of arrival. Hopefully, this allows them to mobilize more effectively and learn from the insights of those who have struggled against this reform model for the past decade in New Orleans. In just the past week, Nashville, TN, and York City, PA have been fighting against what appears to be the impending imposition of these reforms.
Check out The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
Diane,
I noticed that amazon has no reader review or rating of the book. I wonder if you would consider posting your review there, or a condensed version of it?
I expect not many people have read the book. I have. I have underlining on almost every page.
Agreed – a review up there of this magnitude will help. I think I may just take the $125 plunge, though I’ll look on Powell’s site or have my local bookstore order it if possible rather than purchase it from Amazon. It’s an important topic, and I am very much interested in the research, especially since WA State (and Seattle in particular) is now facing charter schools amid hints of mayoral and corporate control of SPS.
Darn – Powell’s did not have the book, though they did have a previous one by the author that I just ordered at $35.
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780807750896-1
Reblogged this on Mansfeld225 and commented:
Re blogging this article as it is VERY important read. I have bought the book and am only into the third chapter. I hope every parent reads this book and request the public library get a copy at least.
I’ve wondered what the individual stories of the teachers who were laid off are. From your review it sounds like Kristen Buras gets up close and conveys the deep injustice done to so many dedicated people.
It’s amazing how many stories haven’t been told, or if they have been told, how their significance gets diminished or lost.
Real ideas and narratives bring clarity to an opaque world.
How important is the “New Orleans Miracle” to understanding the entire “education reform” movement and its business plan masquerading as an education model?
Naomi Klein, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE (2007), begins her lengthy and informative book with an “Introduction” entitled “BLANK IS BEAUTIFUL: THREE DECADES OF REMAKING THE WORLD” (pp. 3-25).
Those introductory remarks themselves start with New Orleans in 2005 and the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The focus?
From p. 7:
[start quote]
Friedman’s radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans’ existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state. it was crucial, Friedman wrote, that this fundament change not be a stopgap but rather “a permanent reform.”
[end quote]
Privatization details aside, the elimination of public schools and their replacement by the “factories of failures” of the self-proclaimed “education reform movement” needs to be told.
By their own standards, the New Orleans Recovery School District is a failure. But their response? Double down on failure.
Kristen Buras: thank you for speaking truth to power.
😎
Well said!
Another excellent account of this recent history is “Hope Against Hope” by Sarah Carr ((c) 2113, $27, Bloomsbury Press). Carr gives a very nuanced account that includes detailed, human-level accounts from perspectives of several characters, including a middle school student and her mother, two principals, and a teacher.
I have excellent news. The publisher has informed me that the book will be released in softcover next week! Please spread the word and thanks for your support and activism.
If you organize a group of community members to read it, I’m happy to arrange a conversation through Skype to discuss the spread of the “New Orleans model” and the concerns this raises.