‘We're not going nowhere’: race, urban space, and the struggle for King Elementary School in New Orleans

Abstract

New Orleans has become the blueprint for urban education reform in the United States, with federal, state, and local policymakers advocating its development as the nation's first all-charter school district. The destruction of the Lower 9th Ward following Hurricane Katrina provided education entrepreneurs and state allies with an ‘unprecedented opportunity’ to rewrite the geography of New Orleans. Targeted state disinvestment in black communities prepared the ground for white entrepreneurs to capitalize on public schools and create an urban space economy that serves their accumulative interests through dispossession of working-class communities of color. Based on oral history interviews with veteran teachers, administrators, and community members affiliated with Martin Luther King Elementary School in the Lower 9th Ward, this case study traverses time and space, documenting the community's history of racial resistance and more recent struggles for educational equity. I examine these struggles in the context of neoliberal attempts to undermine the reconstruction of long-standing schools and neighborhoods and instead secure space for privately managed charter schools. Notably, efforts to rebuild King Elementary in this reformed landscape reveal a distinct commitment to equity, culture, and a shared sense of place – the antithesis of the vacuous market-based policies that have guided reform in New Orleans. I argue that such commitments have enabled and energized grassroots educational resistance to dispossession despite the power of venture capital and exclusionary master plans.

Keywords:

• charter schools
• educational reform
• entrepreneurs
• grassroots resistance
• neoliberalism
• New Orleans
• race
• space
• urban education