In the years following Hurricane Katrina, most of the decision-makers who converted the New Orleans public school system into a network of privately managed charter schools, closed schools and fired every single previous school employee, hired thousands of new teachers and educators from outside of the city, and excluded community input were white and subscribed to elitist and market-oriented theories of administration. However, it has now been nearly twenty years since these reforms began, and no regime remains stable. This article explores the ways that local and transplanted Black professionals in New Orleans have engaged with reform movements and organizations. The enduring presence and consolidation of charter schools are being constructed out of a compromise between white supremacy, neoliberalism, Black politics of self-determination, professional–middle class patronage, and entrepreneurialism. I argue that racial arbitrage represents the privileged epistemic vantage of Black participants in reform movements, which are reconfigured in the post-Katrina era but also representative of elements of neoliberalism that extend back to the Reconstruction era, despite received notions of late-twentieth-century origins.
Christien Tompkins (Tue,) studied this question.