There’s No Such Thing as a Bad Teacher: Reconfiguring Race and Talent in Post-Katrina Charter Schools

Abstract

Based on 16 months of fieldwork in New Orleans charter schools and education non-profits from 2010–2015, this article examines contested ideologies of teacher quality in the city’s reform landscape. The article discusses how notions of good and bad teachers as well as talent and human capital come to be racialized. However, the article also considers how both pro and anti-charter school constituencies frame the question of teaching labor within an atomizing and individualistic lens and argues that we must attend to the teacher quality question as an ideological matter, not only one of practical efficacy.

Keywords::

• New Orleans
• charter schools
• labor
• race
• ideology

About the Author

Christien Tompkins is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His dissertation Reconstructing Race: New Orleans Education Reform as Experimental Labor examines the forms of racial expertise that have emerged from Post-Katrina New Orleans education reform.

Notes

Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Now They’re Wet: Hurricane Katrina as Metaphor for Social and Educational Neglect,” Voices in Urban Education, 10 (2006): 5–10.

According to a state measured School Performance Score, 63 percent of public schools in New Orleans were deemed Academically Unacceptable (AUS) at the end of the 2004–05 school year. SPS is a composite score based on student academic performance, attendance, dropout rates, and the graduation index. Additionally, the “The OPSB (Orleans Parish School Board) and the district central office continued to be considered ineffective and corrupt, so much so that in 2004 a special FBI task force was assigned to investigate the school system and eleven district employees were indicted” (Debra Vaughn, Laura Mogg, Jill Zimmerman, and Tara O’Neill, Transforming Public Education in New Orleans: The Recovery School District 2003–11, Rep. [New Orleans: Scott S. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, 2012]). However, we must remember that such metrics and narratives are contingent and ideological to make meaning of them.

Kristen L. Buras, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space (New York: Routledge, 2015), and Adrienne Dixson, “Whose Choice?: A Critical Race Perspective on Charter Schools,” in The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 130–51, demonstrate how the metrics and definitions of failure were politically contentious and under continuous negotiation in the process of enacting Act 35.

United Teachers of New Orleans, “No Experience Necessary: How the New Orleans School Takeover Experiment Devalues Experienced Teachers,” report (New Orleans: United Teachers of New Orleans, 2007).

The veteran teachers that remain in the system are disproportionately clustered in the few charters that are run by local veteran administrators who have tended to opt into the retirement system.

Vaughn et al., “Transforming Public Education in New Orleans.”

Patrick Sims and Vincent Rossmeier, The State of Public Education in New Orleans: 10 Years after Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans: Scott S. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, 2015).

Kristen Buras, Adrienne Dixson, and Elizabeth Jeffers, “The Color of Reform: Race, Education Reform, and Charter Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Qualitative Inquiry 21, no. 3 (2015): 288–99.

Andre Perry, “Teach for America Shows It’s Learned a Lesson about Diversity: Now, What’s Next?,” The Hechinger Report, August 11, 2014 (accessed August 21, 2015).

Buras et al., “The Color of Reform.”

Buras, Charter Schools; Sims and Rossmeier, The State of Public Education in New Orleans; Dixson, “Whose Choice?”.

Torin Monahan, Globalization, Technological Change, and Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005).

Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–1979 (New York: Picador, 2010).

Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Brooklyn: Verso, 2012).

John Arena, “Black and White, Unite and Fight?: Identity Politics and New Orleans’s Post-Katrina Public Housing Movement,” in The Neoliberal Deluge, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Donald Devore and Joseph Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans 1841–1991 (New Orleans: University of Louisiana Press, 1991).

Buras, Charter Schools; Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

Walter Stern, The Negro’s Place: Schools, Race, and the Making of Modern New Orleans, 1900–1960 (dissertation,Tulane University, 2014).

Kent B. Germany, New Orleans after the Promises Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Arena, “Black and White, Unite and Fight?”.

Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Cedric Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007).

Nandini Gunewardena, Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008).

Sims and Rossmeier, The State of Public Education in New Orleans; Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Knopf, 2013); Buras, Charter Schools.

Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Adolph Reed and Stephen Steinberg, “Liberal Bad Faith in New Orleans: In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina,” The Black Commentator, May 4, 2006, http://www.blackcommentator.com/182/182_cover_liberals_katrina.html (accessed August 21, 2015).This is not to say that CMOs never engage parents in other modes. However, these efforts could be characterized as uneven and haphazard “participatory technologies” (Michael Mcquarrie, “No Contest: Participatory Technologies and the Transformation of Urban Authority,” Public Culture 25, no. 1 (2013): 143–75) as opposed to systematic democratic participation in school governance.

All ethnographic interlocutors are identified by pseudonyms. Public figures and statements are identified with real names.

“Lessons from New Orleans,” Editorial, New York Times, October 15, 2011, SR10, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/lessons-from-new-orleans.html (accessed August 21, 2015).

Which turns out to be a bit of an exaggeration. I was able to find news stories from that year about a valedictorian at one high school who flunked the math portion of the high school exit exam five times. These accounts clearly have a certain expansiveness to them. Terry, an organizer familiar with the student in the narrative, expressed frustration to me with the way their story was being used.

Despite being a relatively poor city, New Orleans has the second highest proportion of students in private school (to San Francisco). At the time of Act 35, the public schools were 94 percent Black, despite the city population being only about 68 percent Black (Vaughan et al., “Transforming Public Education in New Orleans”).

The actual status that demarcated a school as failing was called “Academically in Crisis.”

Stern, The Negro’s Place; Lipman, The New Political Economy.

Sarah Carr, “In New Orleans and Nationally, a Growing Number of Charter Schools Aspire to Be ‘diverse by Design,‘” The Hechinger Report, November 5, 2013, http://hechingerreport.org/in-new-orleans-and-nationally-a-growing-number-of-charter-schools-aspire-to-be-diverse-by-design/ (accessed August 21, 2015).

Arena, “Black and White, Unite and Fight?”.

"The Privatization of Education: How New Orleans Went from a Public School System to a Charter School City,” Democracy Now! August 30, 2007, http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/30/the_privatization_of_education_how_new (accessed April 12, 2012).

According to the Cowen Institute, in 2007, half of the prospective teaching pool failed a newly implemented basic skills exam (Vaughan et al., “Transforming Public Education in New Orleans”).

Echoing these concerns, Holly Sywers in Succeed Anyway (doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 2003), in a dissertation focused on notions of success in a Chicago public high school, has argued that schools and teachers succeed at broader social functions which are devalued by a narrow focus on test scores and narratives of school failure.

Marilyn Strathern, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000).

A line told to me on many occasions by multiple informants.

The New Orleans Imperative, WBOK AM 1230, New Orleans, LA, June 27, 2011. Radio.

“my/our kids” is a particularly frequent phrase among TFA corps members.

The New Orleans Imperative.

Ibid.

Charles M. Payne, So Much Reform, So Little Change (Cambridge: Harvard Education, 2008).

Unsatisfactory rating on teacher evaluation.

Vaughan et al., “Transforming Public Education in New Orleans.”

Adolph L. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999).

Adolph Reed, “Three Tremés,” July 4, 2011, Nonsite.org (accessed August 21, 2015).

Waiting for Superman. Dir. Davis Guggenheim, Perf. Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee, Paramount Vantage, 2010, Blu-Ray.

Payne, So Much Reform.

Paul Krugman (“Slavery’s Long Shadow,” The New York Times, June 21, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/opinion/paul-krugman-slaverys-long-shadow.html?_r=0 [accessed August 21, 2015]) has pointed to research that shows how Americans identify the welfare state with African Americans.

Doug Harris, “The Post-Katrina New Orleans School Reforms: Implications for National School Reform and the Role of Government,” New Orleans Education Research Alliance, October 4, 2013, http://educationresearchalliancenola.org/publications/the-post-katrina-new-orleans-school-reforms-implications-for-national-school-reform-and-the-role-of-government (accessed August 21, 2015).

Andre M. Perry, The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City (New Orleans, LA: UNO, 2010).

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000).

Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006).

“In the end, underclass assumptions serve to take the focus away from (costly) demands for responsible government policies, blaming poor people, not societal choices, for another pat phrase, ‘persistent poverty’” (Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, 179).

Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no.1 (2004): 27–45.

Buras, Charter Schools.

Bonnie Urciuoli, “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 2 (2008): 211–28.

Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Further attention to the ways that local educators of color compromise with reform would give us great insight into the complexity of the racialization of education work.

John Hartigan, Odd Tribes toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 231–56.

”The Privatization of Education.”

Karen Zouwen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) examines these conditions of labor as human capital among Wall St. financial workers. One way that the “market model” is an apt metaphor for charter school reforms is the similarity in labor subjectivities between teachers as talent and Wall St. workers as human capital.

Perry, The Garden Path.

Paul E. Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

Adams, Markets of Sorrow.

Reed, Stirrings in the Jug.