The Canadian Geographer Le Gographe canadien

Reforming the city: Neoliberal school reform and democratic contestation in New Orleans

Alice Hu
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles

Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became a testing ground for a series of neoliberal school reforms, including the eradication of neighbourhood attendance boundaries and the extensive charterization of public schools in the parish. Ostensibly designed to improve schooling options, these eorts are not directed solely at securing positive educational outcomes. Instead, neoliberal school reforms utilize spatial strategies to reshape the city itself in ways that often benet white elites while displacing and disempowering many of the citys poor people of colour. These reform strategies tend to undermine democratic life but, as illustrated by the work of the non-prot group OPEN (Orleans Public Education Network), they do not foreclose the possibility of it. Rather than taking a particular stand toward the current reforms, OPEN attempts to build civic capacity around educational issues. The deliberative process they use creates a time and a place for a type of educative experience that is actively discouraged by neoliberal reform and yet vitally important to democratic struggles. Keywords: neoliberal school reform, New Orleans, critical geographies of education, charter schools, democracy R eformer la ville : La r eforme scolaire n eolib erale et la contestation d emocratique ` a la Nouvelle-Orl eans ` une s Au lendemain de louragan Katrina, la Nouvelle-Orl eans a servi de terrain dessai a erie de r eformes scolaires n eolib erales, y compris l elimination des fronti` eres dinscription par quartier et la cr eation dun vaste ` charte dans la paroisse. Manifestement conc nombre d ecoles publiques a ues pour am eliorer les options de ` favoriser lobtention de r scolarisation, ces mesures ne visent pas uniquement a esultats scolaires positifs. Les ` des strat r eformes scolaires n eolib erales renvoient plut ot a egies spatiales de r eam enagement urbain qui protent souvent aux elites blanches aux d epens des minorit es visibles et marginalis ees qui, dans bien des cas, ` appauvrir la sont evinc ees et deviennent encore plus d emunies. Bien que ces strat egies de r eforme contribuent a ` but non lucratif OPEN (Orleans Public vie d emocratique, des travaux comme ceux r ealis es par lorganisme a ` Education Network) montrent au contraire quelles nen excluent pas la possibilit e. Au lieu de se borner a d efendre une position en ce qui concerne les r eformes en cours, OPEN met laccent sur le renforcement de la ` l capacit e dagir des citoyens sur les questions relatives a education. Le processus d elib eratif sur lequel on se ` lencontre de la base permet de situer une exp erience p edagogique dans un moment et un lieu qui vont a r eforme n eolib erale et qui contribuent grandement aux luttes d emocratiques. Mots cl es : r eforme scolaire n eolib erale, la Nouvelle-Orl eans, g eographies critiques de l education, ecoles ` a charte, d emocratie

Introduction
Since Hurricane Katrina, residents of New Orleans have been thrust into one of the most

Correspondence to/Adresse de correspondance: Alice Hu, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951524, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Email/ Courriel: alicehu@ucla.edu

speculative urban education experiments in recent US history. By converting all but a fraction of the citys traditional public schools into charter schools and eradicating geographic attendance boundaries, reformers have instituted an educational market in which chartering organizations compete for public funds attached to enrolment numbers and school service contracts, while remaining exempt from collective

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bargaining agreements and regulations mandated by the locally elected government. Without the safety net of neighbourhood schools, parents are forced to navigate a fractured landscape of limited educational options, competing against other parents in order to secure schooling opportunities for their children. The reforms described above support the basic tenets of neoliberalism. They position education as a commodity rather than a public good, rely on a shift from government to governance, and promote competitive self-interest over social responsibility. The focus is on removing regulations that hinder competition and prot making, rather than on promoting equity and collective investment. While touted as a remedy for failing schools, these reforms are more accurately viewed as a powerful mechanism for reshaping the city itself in ways that concentrate power in the hands of the few and obscure the democratic crisis that they help to create. In this article, I examine the spatial and pedagogical dimensions of neoliberal school reform in New Orleans. I argue that although the current reforms present a signicant challenge to democratic learning as a means of contestation, pedagogical strategies are nevertheless a crucial mode of resistance. The work of OPEN (Orleans Public Education Network [2011a]), a non-prot organization in New Orleans dedicated to developing civic capacity around education-based issues, is described in relation to this kind of struggle.

Neoliberal school reform as a spatial project

Neoliberalism is always hybridized by its interaction with local contexts and pre-existing formations (Brenner and Theodore 2002). Outside forces and elite actors werent the only drivers of post-Katrina school reforms in New Orleans, and their eorts have not entirely washed away channels of power and public expectations shaped by the citys complicated political and social history. As in other cities, decades of disinvestment and neglect led many residents to embrace charterization (Pedroni 2007; Lipman 2011). Much of the impetus and funding for the rapid post-crisis roll-out of neoliberal reforms in New Orleans,

however, came from a determined group of freemarket advocates who saw an opportunity to gain control of previously unavailable markets, land, and governance structures in a city softened by the crisis of Katrina (Peck 2006; Klein 2007; Saltman 2007; Buras 2011). The intervention of these advocates was swift and sweeping. Only 14 days after the hurricane struck, while most of New Orleans was still under water, the conservative Heritage Foundation developed 32 policies for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices, including the suspension of prevailing wage-laws in disaster areas, the creation of a at-tax free-enterprise zone, and the implementation of a voucher system for use in charter schools (Klein 2007, 410). As residents struggled with the destruction of their life-worlds, these strategists were recasting the city as an opportunity zone where new approaches to public policy issues such as enhanced choice in public education should be the norm (Meese et al. 2005, 1). In these highly racialized scenarios, black neighbourhoods and schools were depicted as unsalvageable, in need of being wiped clean by neoliberal reforms. Local planning commissions such as Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB), which included prominent developers, business leaders, and venture philanthropists, formed committees specically dedicated to reforming schools in ways that dovetailed with their plans for redeveloping certain (wealthier, whiter) sections of New Orleans, while other (poorer, blacker) neighbourhoods were destined to become greenspace (Puckett and Gilyard 2006). As the Wall Street Journal reported, The power elite of New Orleans . . . insist the remade city wont simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the ood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate . . . . The new city must be very dierent . . . with better services and fewer poor people (Cooper 2005, A1). Marketizing the public school system required a new system of governance; the chaos surrounding the hurricane provided both a justication and a distraction as the changes were pushed through. First, a series of state-level executive and legislative acts resulted in 114 of the citys 121 public schools declared failing and therefore eligible for takeover by the state

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of Louisiana (Dingerson 2006; Saltman 2007).1 Over 100 schools were eventually removed from the elected Orleans Parish School Boards (OPSB) control (Cowen Institute 2011) and placed under the auspices of the state-run Recovery School District (RSD).2 This manoeuvre decentralized school governance and diminished the inuence of locally elected government. In the wake of the state takeover, the OPSB red all of their 7,500 teachers and sta members which eectively broke the United Teachers of New Orleans union, destroyed a longstanding stronghold of the black middle class, and cleared the last hurdle to city-wide charter schooling (Buras 2011). Guided by the principles of governmentality, deregulation, competition, and privatization, the centrepiece of school reform in New Orleans is the use of charter schools as a replacement for, rather than an alternative to, direct-run schools. In 20112012, 78% of New Orleans 42,000 public school students attended charter schools, the highest percentage in the nation.3 Charter schools are publicly funded based on attendance numbers, but not accountable to locally elected governing bodies or collective bargaining agreements in the same ways that direct-run schools are. Instead, they are primarily non-unionized and run by appointed boards on a site-to-site basis. Thus there is no longer a centralized local governing body for New Orleans schools.4
1

Act 9 (2003) allowed for state control of failing schools. Act 35 (2005) lowered the takeover threshold for schools in districts designated as Academically in Crisis. 2 The RSD is not an elected board, but is instead run by a state-appointed superintendent and overseen by Louisianas Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). BESE itself is comprised of eight elected members (one from each of the eight state-wide districts) and three governor-appointed members-at-large in addition to the governor-appointed State Superintendent. BESE meets in Baton Rouge, 80 miles from New Orleans. 3 Of the 88 schools in operation in 20112012, 22 were directrun and 66 were charters. The number of direct-run schools is slated to be reduced by a third, however, as the RSD continues to charter or close down its direct-run options. For more information see The State of Public Education in New Orleans report (Cowen Institute 2012). 4 Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) controlled public schools in New Orleans. OPSB is a locally elected board consisting of seven members. Now governance is decentralized. Schools are managed not only by the OPSB, but also by other entities including the RSD

In Louisiana, charter schools must meet statemandated performance goals, but each schools board has autonomy regarding hiring, ring, salaries, working conditions, enrolment procedures, entrance requirements, class size, instruction, and discipline. While most charter-holding entities are not-for-prot, many use private educational management organizations to oversee site-based operations, only one of the many ways that private contractors prot from the privatization of New Orleans schools. The result of widespread charterization is an urban public school system that is no longer a system and arguably no longer public in the sense that the vast majority of New Orleans public school students attend schools run by nonelected boards that are highly inuenced by a small set of non-prot organizations and venture philanthropists.5 The eects of neoliberal reform in New Orleans are compounded by the coupling of charterization and city-wide open enrolment. Open enrolment refers to the eradication of the neighbourhood attendance boundaries that in the United States have historically tied schools to particular geographic areas. In most US cities, parents may choose to send their children to charter schools as an alternative to their neighbourhood school, yet attendance zones remain in place, guaranteeing children a seat in a nearby school. This is no longer the case in New Orleans, where many residents returned home after Katrina to nd that their childrens schools had either reopened as charter schools and were therefore not required to admit students based on neighbourhood residency, or were not slated to reopen at all.
and BESE. The patchwork of school governance is made even more complicated by extensive charterization which places operational control of many New Orleans schools in the hands of private managers, even when the school in question is nominally overseen by a particular entity such as the OPSB, RSD, or BESE. While Louisiana law sets out broad guidelines for the selection of charter board members, the composition of charter school boards is determined by charter applicants themselves. 5 These include the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Fisher Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, which have given a combined total of $17.5 million in support of neoliberal reform eorts such as charterization, the development of alternative school administrator preparation programs, and the expansion of Teach for America (Saltman 2010).

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The relative scarcity of attractive schooling options places the power of choice primarily in the hands of charter operators and serves to cement class and race-based privilege (Lubienski et al. 2009). While schools receive funding for each student who lls a seat, from the point of view of a charter school board with contractors to pay and benchmarks to meet, all students are not equally desirable. Schools compete, therefore, not just for students in general, but for those who cost the least to educate and are the most likely to perform well on the standardized tests that determine whether or not a charter will be renewed. This creates incentives for schools to shape their student population through application procedures, mandatory parental commitments, enrolment caps, and discipline practices, as well as through spatial strategies such as limiting transportation options, locating school sites in low-poverty vs. high-need neighbourhoods, and deploying marketing strategies targeted to particular areas of the city (Henig and MacDonald 2002; Fenwick 2009; Ferguson and Royal 2009; Lubienski et al. 2009; Institute on Race and Poverty [IRP] 2010). This cherrypicking eectively concentrates families with the most need in already over-burdened direct-run public schools and in neighbourhoods already segregated by race and class (Lubienski 2005; IRP 2010). In addition, by allowing education providers to locate schools anywhere in the city, the current reforms have left large areas without any schools, contributing to the gentrication of some neighbourhoods and the abandonment of others (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009). Without the safety net traditionally provided by neighbourhood schools, many parents are forced to vie for limited spaces in distant schools that often face challenges similar to their direct-run predecessors. The rhetoric of school choice masks the fact that not all parents are equally capable of securing the widest range of options for their children and leveraging them in equally successful ways (Ball 1993; Bartlett et al. 2002). Removing attendance boundaries provides new options for some children whose parents are in a better position to compete, but it also results in an increasingly uneven geography of opportunity as the responsibility for providing children with adequate schooling shifts from the state to individuals.

OPEN: Democratic learning as contestation

The mechanisms that have been set in motion in New Orleans are both familiar in their method and devastating in their scope. And yet we live in a world that is complicated by the interplay of competing paradigms and practices, always in some sense open and in the making. It is imperative for those interested in alternative urban futures not to let the pervasiveness of neoliberal patterns overwhelm the capacity to recognize, build, and support spaces of contestation (Leitner et al 2007; Purcell 2008). Precisely because democracy, like neoliberalism, cannot simply be imposed from outside but must be imagined and enacted in the contexts of daily life, the matter of how and where people actually learn democratic habits cannot be ignored (Giroux 2004; Pappas 2008). In this spirit, I analyze the recent activities of OPEN in order to argue for the democratic potential of pedagogical contestations. OPEN has positioned itself as being neither in support of, nor in opposition to, the current reforms. Instead, the organization attempts to engage New Orleanians in deliberation on education-related issues and to amplify the outcomes of this process via public policy advocacy. Refusing to take a stand on issues before there has been sucient time and opportunity for deliberation on the part of the most aected is a dicult task in the charged atmosphere of New Orleans education debates. It is a tactic that has allowed the organization to maintain ties with a diverse group of policy makers and community leaders, but it also leaves the group vulnerable to partisan attacks and charges of political impotency. Despite the drawbacks associated with maintaining a space for inquiry before turning to advocacy, however, an important feature of OPENs process is that it brings together individual participants and organizations with radically dierent ideas about the purpose of education in general, and about reform in New Orleans more specically. From its inception in 2007, OPENs discussions have included those who advocate for, or identify with, business interests and the public sector; particular geographic and identitybased communities; as well as those who support

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and oppose market-based reforms.6 Rather than requiring formal membership, OPENs topical working groups and convenings bring together racially, geographically, and socio-economically diverse collectives including members of faithbased organizations, activists, students, parents, teachers, school administrators, academics, and union members. While members positionalities have sometimes strained the very fabric of the organization, the group remains dedicated to the value of dierence in the deliberative process. Although many of their commitments continue to be irreconcilable, the founding members were able to agree that a central task of the organization should be to help build civic capacity around public education issues. To date, this agenda has been manifested most signicantly in the One Step Campaign that began in 2010 with a listening project in which over 600 community members shared ideas regarding the most pressing educational issues facing the city. From these contributions, organizers identied nine topics of community concern,7 and developed a framework for inviting people from around the city to form small working groups made up of neighbours, friends, colleagues, and parishioners. These working groups attended (or watched recordings of) monthly panels that provided a variety of viewpoints and research on each topic. The groups deliberated on the issue and returned a summary of their recommendations, thoughts, and conicts to OPEN. There were then two city-wide convenings to deliberate more widely and develop policy recommendations. The resulting recommendations have become the basis for new rounds of inquiry/advocacy using a similar working-group model. I chose OPEN as an illustrative case not because the group endorses the characterization of school reform presented in the previous section
6

OPEN was formed when several non-prot groups came together to discuss the state of public education in the city. These groups included the Committee for a Better New Orleans, Greater New Orleans Education Foundation, Urban League of Greater New Orleans, Childrens Defense Fund, and Louisiana Justice Institute (OPEN 2011b, n.p.). 7 The nine One Step topics were: Crisis of the Black Male, Early Childhood Education, Educator Workforce, English as a Second Language, High School Reform, Kindergarten through Eighth Grade Reform, Neighborhood Schools versus Choice, School & Community Partnerships, [and] Special Education (OPEN 2012, 4).

(it does not), but because their process embodies the kind of democracy and the kind of learning that might trouble the neoliberal ideology currently at work in New Orleans. In arguing for pedagogical strategies of contestation, I point to the connection that Dewey (1976 [1939]) describes between democracy and educative experience. In this view, democracy is an ongoing project, not an achievable goal. It is dened not once and for all as a collection of political mechanisms or precepts, but is continually and cooperatively enacted as people inquire and experiment with new and better ways to live together. Democratic pedagogy does not seek to instruct people in a particular way of life or to reveal truths that would provoke advocacy for a particular position. Instead, it is the practice of attempting to live democratically. Democratic learning comes from dealing with the challenges that arise as a result (Pappas 2008). The implication is that our contestations must be attentive to power relations, but about more than merely mobilizing power around a given set of ideas (Rogers and Oakes 2005). Because the ends and means of democracy are the same, contestation must allow us to collectively practice recognizing problematic situations in our everyday lives and use the means at hand to transform and enrich experience. Neoliberal school reforms reward residents for acting as competitive consumers (Lipsitz 2006). They teach us to ignore the larger context of our interdependence, and they limit the spaces where we might practice this interconnectedness socially and politically. In so doing, they stunt moral imagination, shut down collective inquiry, and erode our willingness to engage with dierence and uncertainty, ultimately cutting away at the habits we need for democratic life. By focusing its organizing eorts on engaging neighbourhood-based groups in deliberation, OPEN explicitly taps into the wisdom and will that animates the very places that neoliberal school reform characterizes as void of promise or value. The process asks participants to use their life experiences in particular places as a starting point for inquiry. By repositioning inhabitants with diverse commitments as active participants in collective inquiry, the deliberative process challenges the construction of those most aected by neoliberal school reform as either

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passive victims of neoliberalism or reconstituted neoliberal subjects (Pedroni 2011). The deliberative process creates a place for a type of collective moral endeavour that is actively discouraged by the frenetic competitive landscape created by neoliberal school reform. OPENs model requires, and provides support for, long-term engagement with dierent others and dicult issues. An important component of this activity involves imagining the possible outcomes of various actions from various viewpoints. This sort of imagining is a creative act, but it is also a moral one in that it expands the scope of individual experience and requires an acknowledgement of social interconnectedness. Such engagement carries the potential for biased, exclusionary, and coercive interactions, but is ultimately necessary. Collective inquiry does not protect participants from risk of failure or subjugation; the very nature of the process may put it at risk for cooptation (Purcell 2008). It does, however, potentially provide a place where people can learn habits and skills that may allow them not only to contest neoliberalization, but to live more democratically.

Conclusion
As a spatial strategy, neoliberal school reform in New Orleans largely protects and expands class and race advantage. It creates fertile ground for the inuence of venture philanthropy on city planning; it undermines democratic mechanisms of governance; and it systematically erodes civic capacity as a basis for the kind of collective action that might challenge the aforementioned developments. New Orleans is a less just city because of these reforms. The task of democratizing the city and its schools is daunting. In advocating for spaces of democratic learning, I do not mean to imply that pedagogical strategies are sucient to counter the spatial tactics described in the earlier sections of this article. It remains to be seen what eects OPENs work, for instance, will have on these structural concerns. If, however, democracy is not something that can be achieved once and for all through political or economic means but is instead an ongoing task that requires constant learning, pedagogical

spaces such as those fostered by OPEN are necessary. We need these spaces not only because they may produce desired outcomes but because they provide a context for people to collectively ask better questions about why things are as they are, and to work towards something more democratic. If we are to eectively counter neoliberal school reforms and the city they produce, if we are to move towards more just alternatives, we must learn from these activities how to create democracy, not once and for allas in the traditional education model where accepted truths are transferred and receivedbut over and over again, as we have new experiences that cause us to reect upon our commitments to particular ideas and ways of being in the world. This is not an easy task under the best of circumstances, and it is made innitely more dicult in the spaces of the neoliberal city. The task of scholars interested in the spatial aspects of school reform is not only to better understand the relationship between school policy and neoliberal urbanization, but also to examine the practices that challenge, evade, and rework these processes. Even in a city that is powerfully shaped by neoliberal reforms, these practices exist. Alternative urban futures depend upon our ability to identify and support such eorts.

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