Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space

Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance

Kristen L. Buras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135077501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Charter schools have been promoted as an equitable and innovative solution to the problems plaguing urban schools. Advocates claim that charter schools benefit working-class students of color by offering them access to a "portfolio" of school choices. In Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space, Kristen Buras presents a very different account. Her case study of New Orleans—where veteran teachers were fired en masse and the nation's first all-charter school district was developed—shows that such reform is less about the needs of racially oppressed communities and more about the production of an urban space economy in which white entrepreneurs capitalize on black children and neighborhoods.

In this revealing book, Buras draws on critical theories of race, political economy, and space, as well as a decade of research on the ground to expose the criminal dispossession of black teachers and students who have contributed to New Orleans' culture and history. Mapping federal, state, and local policy networks, she shows how the city's landscape has been reshaped by a strategic venture to privatize public education. She likewise chronicles grassroots efforts to defend historic schools and neighborhoods against this assault, revealing a commitment to equity and place and articulating a vision of change that is sure to inspire heated debate among communities nationwide.

1 Black Education in the South

Critical Race Reflections on the Historic Policy Landscape

DOI: 10.4324/9780203067000-1

Scholars’ inattention to the nexus of race and place, and their omission of the South, despite its centrality in African American people’s experiences, has led to a truncated understanding of Black academic achievement throughout the United States.

—Jerome Morris and Carla Monroe, writing on “Why Study the U.S. South?” in Educational Researcher (2009, p. 31)

You don’t know American history until you know Louisiana history.

—Keith Plessy, New Orleans resident and descendent of Homer Plessy, who challenged segregation in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (Reckdahl, 2009, para. 21)

Railroad tracks run along Press Street in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans. Where Press intersects with Royal Street, an old warehouse with graffiti sits on one side of the track. Overgrown patches of grass line the other side. To the everyday observer, it appears to be a street corner forgotten long ago. Yet this is the place where Homer Plessy, an Afro-Creole citizen of New Orleans, was arrested on June 7, 1892, for refusing to vacate his seat in a “whites only” railcar (Michna, 2009).

Plessy protested Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890 as part of a civil rights campaign by the Citizens’ Committee, a group organized by Afro-Creoles to challenge racial segregation. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark Supreme Court case that followed in 1896, “separate but equal” became legal doctrine (Medley, 2003). In reparation, one would expect local and state officials to memorialize the place where Plessy resisted white supremacy. Any attempt to do this, however, would be left to teachers, students, community members, and ancestors—a reminder of the unequal dynamics of race and how they define struggles over urban space.

On June 7, 2005, more than 100 years after Plessy’s courageous actions, members of the Frederick Douglass Community Coalition (named after Douglass High School just a few blocks away) gathered at Press and Royal for the third annual Homer Plessy Day. Catherine Michna (2009) explains: “The attendees at Plessy Day 2005 were mostly members of an alliance of educators, community organizers, artists, and students who had been working for the past seven years to empower Ninth Ward neighborhoods and schools through practices of collective storytelling” (p. 532). It was the Douglass Community Coalition that fought to have Plessy Day recognized as a state holiday The coalition also turned to two of its member organizations, the Crescent City Peace Alliance and Students at the Center, to develop plans for Plessy Park. Students at the Center, a writing and digital media program cofounded by veteran teachers and students and partly housed at Douglass High School, worked with a local artist to envision the park “as an interactive, changing memorial that would have paired students’ stories about their schools and neighborhoods with stories about historic local civil rights struggles” (p. 537). More specifically, they imagined a railroad track with stops along the way for turning points in New Orleans’ civil rights history, alongside student narratives that “provoked visitors to think critically about the way in which that historical moment continues to resonate” in the city (p. 538). Additionally, Plessy Park was envisioned as a space where students could perform, read poetry, and organize the community around racial and educational justice projects. Then Hurricane Katrina came.

New Orleans was struck on August 29, 2005. Waters had barely receded, but top-down plans were being made already for the city’s students, public schools, and neighborhoods without consulting grassroots constituencies, such as the Douglass Community Coalition. With black working-class communities displaced, policymakers acted with shocking speed and precision to remake the landscape of New Orleans. At the local, state, and national levels, policymakers and entrepreneurs determined New Orleans would be the nation’s first charter school district. To date, there is no other city with a higher proportion of privately managed charter schools or a more comprehensive program of human capital development, including alternative teacher recruitment. The collective bargaining agreement of the teacher union was nullified when the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) took control of the vast majority of public schools in New Orleans. Black veteran teachers were fired en masse while white recruits with Teach for America (TFA) were sought aggressively to replace them. Nearly a decade later, 85 percent of the city’s public school students attended charter schools. New Orleans quickly became the premier site for market-based urban education reform. It is due time to assess this experiment honestly and from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. This is the purpose of this book.

In Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space, I reveal a strategic and racially exclusive set of education policies centered on New Orleans. I draw on almost ten years of qualitative research and critical theories of race, political economy, and space to analyze the policy ecology and networks surrounding reforms. I show that New Orleans charter schools are less about the needs of racially oppressed communities and more about the Reconstruction of a newly governed South—one in which white entrepreneurs (and black allies) capitalize on black schools and neighborhoods by obtaining public monies to build and manage charter schools.¹ Equally important, I document grassroots resistance to this southern strategy, sending a powerful message to communities nationally that New Orleans is not a blueprint for democratic and equitable transformation of urban public schools.

Since 2005, a host of reports have been issued that present New Orleans as a model to be followed by cities across the nation:

• 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, 2012);
• 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.

The evidence does not support such exuberance. Just the opposite: New Orleans reveals how destructive the culture of the market is to children of color and the neighborhood public schools they traditionally have attended. It is important for me to state something upfront—loudly and clearly. The critique presented in this book of market-based school reform does not imply the preexisting system in New Orleans was ideal. This certainly was not the case due to white supremacy and state neglect of black public schools. I underscore this point because “reformers” have discursively positioned critics of market-based intervention as “defenders of the status quo.” This makes for good propaganda, but does little to illuminate the root causes of the problems faced by urban public schools and what is required to truly enable the teachers and students in them to thrive. Most alarmingly, “reformers” have co-opted the language of the civil rights movement to legitimize for-profit ventures in the public schools of racially oppressed communities (Buras, 2008; Scott, 2013). Neerav Kingsland, CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, a local charter school incubator bankrolled by the Broad, Gates, and Fisher Foundations and the federal government, proclaimed: “This transformation of the New Orleans educational system may turn out to be the most significant national development in education since desegregation” (Gabor, 2013, para. 4). Wendy Kopp, founder and president of Teach for America, an edu-business that provides temporary and uncertified teachers for impoverished urban and rural public schools, wrote a book entitled One Day, All Children (2001). TFA’s alumni magazine is likewise entitled One Day. This language invokes the words of Martin Luther King’s well-known “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he proclaimed at the 1963 March on Washington:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. …

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning. “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.”

(King cited in Washington, 1992, pp. 104–105)

The civil rights rhetoric of education CEOs should prompt us to ask: Are privately managed charter schools in New Orleans really an oasis of freedom and justice?

Education entrepreneurs, such as Kingsland and Kopp, would have us believe that charter school development in New Orleans represents third-wave civil rights activism or what may be called Brown III. Brown v. Board of Education, also known as Brown I, struck down Plessy in 1954, rendering “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional. Brown II sought to remediate the legacy of “separate but equal” through court-ordered desegregation; federal desegregation mandates were to be implemented “with all deliberate speed.” Brown II met massive resistance as white parents withdrew their children from public schools and state policymakers invented schemes to deter desegregation. Interestingly, while Brown II met massive white resistance, Brown III, school choice through charter schools, confronts growing black resistance. In New Orleans and other cities, increasing numbers of veteran teachers, students, and parents are coming to recognize that “freedom of choice” is not freedom at all. In the hands of mostly white entrepreneurs and philanthropists, charter school development has compounded the injustices perpetrated as a result of Brown II. Only this time, black veteran teachers are replaced by TFA recruits, most of them white and inexperienced, while public schools attended by black students are either closed or taken over by white charter school operators. There is a long history of white control over black education (Scott, 2009; Watkins, 2001); unfortunately, we have entered a new era of this. Black communities stand to lose a great deal once again. As I show in upcoming chapters, underfunded all-black public schools in New Orleans, despite their struggles, were sources of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2006) and heritage knowledge (King, 2009). Like many black schools throughout the South, these schools anchored and sustained neighborhoods (Horsford, 2011; Morris, 1999; Walker, 1996).

Let us get back to Plessy for a moment. In 2009—four years after the storm in New Orleans—Crescent City Peace Alliance and ancestors of Homer Plessy and Judge John Howard Ferguson (who ruled against Plessy in Orleans Parish Criminal Court, with his decision upheld by the Supreme Court) installed a plaque at the former site of Press Street Railroad Yards to honor Plessy’s legacy (Reckdahl, 2009). Keith Plessy, whose great-grandfather was Plessy’s first cousin, learned as a child about his relationship to the case from teachers at Valena C. Jones Elementary School. Phoebe Ferguson, whose great-great grandfather was Judge Ferguson, joined with Keith Plessy to establish the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation. Keith Weldon Medley, a local historian who wrote a groundbreaking book on Plessy (Medley, 2003), and Brenda Square, a local archivi...