Twenty years after Hurrican Katrina, some folks are celebrating by writing happy talk pieces about the after-effects to the school system. Jennifer Berkshire, writer and podcaster, suggests checking a different source.
Ten years ago, I wrote a piece about some of the many unintended consequences of New Orleans’ charter school experiment. Wildly at odds with the narrative of success and transformation being peddled by the education reform industry, the story was among my first real attempts to do ‘serious’ journalism, and I’m still really proud of it. (For those of you who don’t know, I got my start chronicling the excesses of education reform on a humorous blog.) I learned a lot working on that story, including that writers have no control over whatever terrible headline gets slapped on their masterpiece… But it was in New Orleans that I really began to understand something essential about education reform. If the vision of what’s on offer is narrower than what the community wants, these top-down efforts to “disrupt” public education are doomed from the start.
The twenty year mark since Hurricane Katrina has ushered in a predictable wave of celebratory accounts of the New Orleans miracle. I recommend giving them a miss and spending some time instead with an eye-opening new book by parent advocate Ashana Bigard. (Full disclosure: Ashana is one of my favorite people in the world, not to mention among the most amazing organizers I’ve ever met.) Called Beyond Resilience, Ashana’s book opens with a scene of a meeting held in the period after the hurricane erased whole neighborhoods, and claimed the lives of some 1,800 people. The purpose of these gatherings, Ashana writes, was to give local parents the opportunity to envision the sort of education future they wanted for their children.
What they dreamed of was so much more than their children had before, and more than they themselves had had before. Having seen what was offered to children in other places, they wanted that and more for New Orleans’ children.
Among their demands: fully equipped science labs, theater programs, curriculum rich in local history, career and technical education that prepared students for jobs in the trades. The list was long. It was also grounded in the harsh reality of New Orleans’ brutal poverty. Parents asked for kids to be able to bring food home when money was tight, for washers and dryers in every school because so many laundromats had never reopened. And they wanted swim lessons in order to give their kids a fighting chance against the next hurricane.
The enormous gulf between those wishlists, compiled on flip charts and dry erase boards, and what the parents ultimately got is the subject of Beyond Resilience. “What they gave us instead was almost a cartoonish representation of the opposite of everything we had asked for,” writes Ashana. “The charter school operators and organizations that supported charter school reform efforts would listen to parents, guardians and community members, and then create schools that looked more like juvenile jail facilities than schools.”