‘Black crisis’ and the ‘likely’ privatization of public education in New Orleans and Liberia

ABSTRACT

Neoliberal education reforms in schools serving sizeable Black populations throughout the United States have proliferated and are being transported to Black educational contexts abroad. Building on a framework of Coloniality, antiBlackness and a review of Black colonial education this relational analysis argues that contemporary neoliberal education reforms not only resemble the early 20th century movement to spread Black industrial education from the American South to regions of the global South- including regions of West, South and East Africa but also reproduce logics of antiBlack coloniality. This framework is applied to two cases: the chartering of schools in New Orleans Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2016 decision to privatize the entire school system in Liberia. Far from ‘unlikely’ this article argues that the application of market-based reforms to schools in the Black Souths (the ‘urban’ ghettos of the United States as well as the ‘underdeveloped’ global South) is a continuation of 20^th century colonial education interventions and the persistent claim of Blackness as always in crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonial education
• neoliberalism
• education privatization
• black crisis
• philanthropy
• relational analysis
• antiBlackness
• coloniality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Mahasan Offutt-Chaney

Mahasan Offutt-Chaney is a Ph.D Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education. Her research sits at the intersections of the political economy of urban education, critical policy studies and the history of Black education.