What is Community in NOLA Schools? by Mikayla Sanford

Day 5, NOLA

Community in NOLA schools is a term with a thousand and one different meanings. Community is the locals that live and breathe the culture here and the ones who just arrived. They were here before the storm and they remain after the storm. It is the Veteran teachers and the first year TFA teachers. Parents of kids in private schools and coaches who act as mentors, therapists, fathers, sex ed. teachers and counselors.

Community is passion that pumps the blood through the school system and out again. It is the business CEO's at chase bank that filter the money in and out of Andre Perry's pin striped pockets. It is the principals and board members and regional directors who sit in board rooms and enact five year plans. Community is the flood waters that took the place of children in school hallways. The water that washed away textbooks, desks, pencils, and the people that came back to pick up the pieces. It is anyone and everyone that ever thought about what rebuilding means for such a rich and diverse and left behind area.

Community is the land and the culture and the people and the history of is and all that will ever be NOLA. It is the Children. The children who study and take tests and take care of their brothers and sisters and cook meals and work three jobs and spend four hours on the bus each day getting to and from school. It is the hope and fear and passion that comes from sitting in the classroom connecting with others to discover what it means to rebuild this thing we call education.

Where is Community in NOLA Schools? by Max Schuner

Day 5, NOLA

Since returning to New Orleans this week, I’ve been struck again and again by the role of geography in the psychological and political life of this city. Neighborhood location and physical structures (roads, bridges, and canals) are huge determinants in threat of flooding, access to resources (including educational), and one’s self-defined culture. This is perhaps the “traditional” notion of community— a group of people bounded both by geography and social ties that has found some level of internal cohesion. In New Orleans, this “traditional” notion of geography is still extremely important in social and political life. The Upper Ninth Ward, the Seventh Ward, the West Bank and the Garden District are all important social sites and nodes of identity for their residents. After Katrina, I could see the significance of geographic-social community and networks of ground-level personal relationships in basic survival and maintenance of dignity of New Orleans residents. As a relief worker (and now as a visiting researcher), I struggled with this idea of community and had trouble defining and reconciling my own role as a white person not born in New Orleans as someone working in the Upper Ninth, a community largely defined by race, geography, and a deep common history.

Of course, “com- munity” is a floating signifier. Over the past week, I’ve heard “com- munity” used to describe an educational community of practice, the city of New Orleans in general, and the city’s political and business elites in particular. It’s been this last meaning that has been the most difficult for me to reconcile. I can see the thought behind it- in the view of some, political and business “leaders” are natural spokespeople for the rest of the socio-geographic community that is New Orleans. However, it’s also hard to deal with the fact that many people working in education see the businesses and politicians that have benefited from social and racial segmentation as being able to make decisions for the people (young, poor, largely black students) who have suffered from the city’s prevailing race and class structures.

These different ideas of community seem to be heavily mobilized in dis- cussions of charter schools and school choice. Again and again this week, people across the spectrum have iden- tified the dissolution of neighborhood schools and the institution of cross-town travel to schools as one of the most important aspects of the post-Katrina educational landscape. This seems like a major shift from geographically bounded ideas of community. In some ways the shift might be positive. While idealized concepts of community are nice, it does seem like youth culture in New Orleans was plagued by a deep territorialism that made it difficult to make connections between neighborhoods. Students attending schools across town might help lessen that dynamic. However, the change also weakens the potential for schools to be hubs of positive development and safe spaces in local geographic communities. The new New Orleans schools have unpinned geographic notions of community for students in a way that mirrors the deterrorialization process that has long been identified as a factor of globalization. This compounds the loss of rootedness that affected many of the city’s residents who were displaced by the storm.

This is a city with a deep history of strong geographic communities. Although it’s important not to idealize this history, as rooted in segregation as it is, it should also be recognized as a great source of resilience. Those of us interested in education in New Orleans should ask how schools can be spaces that strengthen and reinforce strong neighborhoods.

Is Public Education in New Orleans Being Rebuilt? by Ruthie Dreyer

Day 5, NOLA

To say the public education system in New Orleans is being rebuilt is mis- leading. The public education system in New Orleans is being dismantled. Pre-Katrina existed a centralized public school system that was run by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). Katrina was the catalyst for the beginning of the privatization of public education. Hurricane Katrina wiped out the previous system of public education and the State of Louisiana employed the Recovery School District to begin the take-over of public schools. This new experiment, the charter school movement, is an ugly, double-sided coin. Instead of being controlled by the OPSB and schools running on only state-given money, charter schools run under individual charter school boards that in addition to receiving public money get private money from private investors.

The pro-charter argument is that charter schools can offer autonomy for schools, choice for parents and then the most alluring benefit: better resources and space. I was shocked at the abundance of promethium boards and computers and the luxuriousness of some of the spaces we saw like the Medard Nelson School, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and Benjamin Franklin. Of course, books are a critical part of learning and children deserve to learn in pleasant environment with functioning bathrooms and plentiful libraries. But the resources were but a symptom of the larger sickness of the school system. The lack of resources in the previous pubic school system was a symptom of racism and neglect. Unfortunately racism and neglect still exist but our schools are looking much better three-dimensionally.


The most disturbing part of the privati- zation of the public school system is that the only two people who are actually in classrooms, teachers and students, have had absolutely no agency in this charter school movement. There are many engaging, intelligent, optimistic conversations happening about the future of public schools but none of them have included the people who actually give and receive education. The people are running schools and making decisions have little understanding about the practice of learning. It will be interesting to see how the theory of no-excuses, data-driven education fares in practice and if this five year experiment will result in whole citizens or very confused, neglected children.