Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools &quot;Chapter One: Silver Linings and Golden Opportunities: The Corporate Plunder of Public Schooling in Post-Katrina New Orleans&quot;

Kenneth Saltman

This is the first chapter of Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Routledge 2007). It details the way that neoliberal educational restructuring was accomplished through the use of the natural disaster. Specifically , it focuses on the roll out of charters, vouchers, no-bid contracting in New Orleans and the gulf coast, and the firing of teachers and dismantling of the teachers union. The chapter illustrates how the disaster was used by the political right to accomplish a longstanding agenda.

Hurricane Katrina was a “disaster” both “natural” and “social.” The storm destroyed a major American city that, like most American cities, was already the site of great inequality and vulnerability. It also dramatically put to the test both the logistical capabilities and the political responsibilities of national, state, and local governmental institutions. The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans is an important collection of essays on the dynamics of “remaking New Orleans” and the limits of that effort. We have thus asked a diverse group of political scientists to review the book, and at the same time to treat it as an opportunity to reflect on two related questions: 1) What are the most important economic, cultural, and political dimensions of the crisis precipitated by Katrina, both for New Orleans and for US cities more generally? 2) What resources does political science as a discipline possess to help us understand these issue...

1 1 Silver Linings and Golden Opportunities: The Corporate Plunder of Public Schooling in Post-Katrina New Orleans Real estate breeds poetry. Of all creative language, real estate people especially like euphemisms. In the property business a dark and dingy “basement apartment” becomes a “garden apartment.” The neighborhood is “in transition” means poor people can no longer afford to pay raised rents. Professionals who move into “transitioning” neighborhoods to speculate on rising property values or to pay cheap rent are “urban pioneers.” When for years a slumlord charges top rents to tenants who are forced to step around holes in floors, endure broken fixtures, chronic water and gas leaks, and missing windows in winter, rats as roommates, and cockroaches as commonplace, such profitable buildings are said to have “deferred maintenance.” Deferred maintenance sounds hopeful. The structure may be crumbling but it can always be fixed, fumigated, painted. It is just a matter of time. The New Orleans public schools have long been considered some of the most neglected in the United States suffering not just crumbling dilapidated buildings and insufficient resources but all of the ills accompanying malignant poverty including the deferred maintenance of jobs, deferred maintenance of healthcare, and the deferred maintenance of public and private services. As in the case of most urban school districts, the longstanding linkage of the New Orleans public school funding to the unequal economic hierarchy of the broader economy, and particularly to unequal property ownership, resulted in chronic failure to support this crucial public institution. Corporate wealth in New Orleans produced shining towers of glass and steel while tourist dollars flowed through restaurants and hotels, bars and sports events but not 2 to schools. Per pupil spending in New Orleans as of 1997 was 26% below the national average and 16% lower than the average of badly under funded urban school systems nationally.1 “Public school students regularly had to bring their own supplies to school, from writing paper to toilet paper. The school system was on the brink of financial collapse and struggled to even meet its payroll.”2 As advertising and public relations companies pour billions of dollars a year into marketing junk food, clothing, cosmetics and other products to youth targeted by race, ethnicity, gender, and class and as they aim to infiltrate classrooms to hawk product, they and other industries make little effort to shoulder the costs of public services.3 The business sector has long failed to support public institutions from which it benefits. In fact, for decades the tax burden has been shifted off of business and onto individuals. Under George W. Bush these regressive tendencies have radically increased with the richest Americans who own the majority of corporate wealth receiving massive tax cuts while the middle class has suffered tax increases and social spending is being slashed. In 2003 taxpayers making more than $10 million saved $1 million in taxes. “As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, current and proposed tax cuts for households with incomes above $1 million would cost more than the combined cuts planned over the next five years for education, veterans health benefits, medical research, environmental protection and programs such as housing, energy, child care and nutrition assistance for families living in poverty.”4 The 2006 budget includes $70 billion in new tax cuts for the rich and $35 million in cuts to programs for the least fortunate.5 As in Iraq, Katrina has been seized upon by the right as a radical free market experiment in neoliberal privatization and deregulation – a way to undermine the public 3 sphere while strengthening the private sector. The Guardian (U.K.) describes Katrina as a “vast laboratory” for right-wing social policies (in addition to those in education detailed below) including attempts to suspend a series of regulations including local wage guarantees and affirmative action, and environmental regulations, while giving massive tax breaks to business.6 As this chapter details, disaster is being seized upon and even produced by the political right to exacerbate inequalities while creating lucrative opportunities for those most well off. ------------------- On August 29, 2005 three massive storm fronts converged, tearing into the gulf coast of Mexico with unprecedented destructive power. Hurricane Katrina splintered houses, flung vehicles, and burst the levees holding back the gulf from the low lying parts of New Orleans. Floodwaters trapped those who could not afford to evacuate, killing many and stranding without food and water countless others.7 The incompetence, deliberate or otherwise, of the FEMA agency, the White House, and the Department of Homeland Security to secure properly the levees, to provide evacuation means for residents, or to rescue those trapped has been the subject of a vast media spectacle.8 Briefly, mass media focused on the plight of the poor and the racialized nature of poverty in America yet also replicated a deep culture of racism by framing scrounging whites as resourceful heroes and foraging blacks as criminal looters who should be shot on sight. In one notorious instance an African American boy heroically took a school bus to collect residents and drive them to the Superdome. White officers arrested him as he delivered members of his community to safety. The storm destroyed sizeable sections of the low- 4 lying parts of the city inhabited by the poorest mostly African American residents. Countless images and narratives of the brutality of the storm and the brutality of the government response have been publicized: elderly residents of nursing homes and hospitals abandoned to drown; corpses left to rot on the front porches of homes; an unidentified corpse left for two weeks in a busy intersection of Bourbon Street. Numerous commentators have proclaimed Katrina the worst urban disaster in U.S. history.9 Months after the storm it became apparent that the scandals of Katrina were hardly limited to the kind of government incompetence and neglect typified by the inaction of Dan Brown, head of FEMA, and Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security. Despite presidential praise for FEMA and Homeland Security officials who failed to act (“You’re doing a heckuva job Brownie”), and statements after the storm that the tragedy could not have been predicted, video surfaced of President George W. Bush receiving warning of the magnitude of crisis about to unfold. Rather than acting he went on vacation as the hurricane moved in. Further information arose that in early 2001 FEMA ranked the state of New Orleans’ hurricane vulnerability as one of the three most likely disasters alongside the risk of a terrorist attack on New York.10 And yet funding to fix the levees had been cut by the Bush administration. The disaster was predicted and it was preventable. The storm hit hardest the poorest, predominantly African American residents who lacked the resources to flee its approach after Mayor Ray Nagin called a mandatory city- wide evacuation.11 The city, the state, and the private sector failed to provide transportation to citizens in the line of the storm. Instead the shelter of last resort was the 5 notorious Superdome that a study had predicted would not withstand the force of a scale three hurricane. The sweltering shelter had not been adequately prepared with provisions as overcrowded, hungry, thirsty people who had just lost all that they owned, their homes, their pets, had no place to sleep. Many died and others suffered without crucial medicine. Some of the bodies of loved ones were lost. For weeks, relatives desperately tried to recover the bodies of those who died in their arms on the floor of the Superdome. Survivors, though spared, felt their lives had been swept away. Hundreds of thousands of residents who had lived their entire lives in New Orleans were subsequently evacuated to other states. The richest, mostly White Orleanians were able to return to pricier elevated neighborhoods less impacted by the storm while the sections of the city worst hit such as the lower 9th ward remain devastated more than half a year later. Despite billions of dollars in emergency funding allocated by congress, the main players in reconstruction -- FEMA, the Louisiana Reconstruction Authority (LRA), and the business-oriented Bring New Orleans Back Committee (BNOBC) – have failed to rebuild large sections of the city inhabited by the poorest mostly black residents. Residents themselves have largely been excluded from the political process of decision- making about rebuilding. For residents to return to the city, housing and schools would need to be rebuilt. As Naomi Klein pointed out, a glut of rental housing sat on the market as residents were forced out of the city. Half of residents could have been housed had they been given housing vouchers by FEMA. These could have worked like HUD section eight vouchers, allowing landlords to receive fair market rent for their units. Instead, those residents who returned to the city were put up in expensive cruise ships and then temporary military barracks-style trailer parks devoid of crucial services and 6 patrolled by private security forces prohibiting basic rights like interviews by journalists. Like the war in Iraq such decisions seem to have followed from contracting connections rather than public interest. The project of keeping residents from returning to their communities appears in housing policy decisions and school policy as well. Silver Linings and Golden Opportunities Six months after the disaster, the destroyed New Orleans public schools sit slime- coated in mold, debris, and human feces, partially flooded and littered with such detritus as a two-ton air conditioner that had been on the roof and the carcasses of dead dogs. All 124 New Orleans Public Schools were damaged in some way and only 20 have reopened with more than 10,000 students registered. There were 62,227 students enrolled in NOPS before the storm.12 The devastation nearly defies description. … Katrina roared in, severely damaging about a quarter of the schools: Roofs caved in. Fierce winds blew out walls and hurled desks through windows. Floodwaters drowned about 300 buses. Computers, furniture and books were buried in mud. Dead dogs and rotting food littered hallways.13 Yet days after the disaster The Washington Times quoted longstanding advocate of school vouchers Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice. Bolick used the tragedy to propose wide scale privatization of the New Orleans public schools in the form of a massive voucher scheme. He said, “If there could be a silver lining to this tragedy, it would be that children who previously had few prospects for a high-quality education, 7 now would have expanded options. Even with the children scattered to the winds, that prospect can now be a reality – if the parents are given power over their children’s education funds.”14 Bolick’s metaphor of the silver lining would be repeated over and over in the popular press immediately after the storm, calling for the privatization of the New Orleans public schools. Karla Dial in the Heartland News wrote, “emergency vouchers could be the silver lining in the storm clouds that brought Hurricane Katrina to the Gulf Coast on August 29.”15 Reuters quoted Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard as saying, “We think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I call it the silver lining in the storm cloud.”16 Jack Kemp, who served in the Reagan administration, a long time proponent of business approaches to urban poverty, took poetic license but stayed with the theme of precious metal, “…with the effort to rebuild after Katrina just getting underway, the Right sees, in the words of Jack Kemp, a “golden opportunity” to use a portion of the billions of federal reconstruction funds to implement a voucher experiment that, until now, it has been unable to get through Congress.”17 The governor of Louisiana saw gold too. Although before the storm the state legislature had rejected the governor’s attempt to seize control of the public schools from the city, “legislation proposed by Governor Blanco in November allows the state to take over any New Orleans school that falls below the statewide average on test scores and place it into the state’s Recovery School District. Under this low standard, management of 102 of the 115 Orleans Parish schools operating before Katrina would be transferred to the state. The governor sees it as an effort to grasp what she called a “golden opportunity for rebirth.”18 8 Brian Riedlinger, the director of the Algiers Charter Schools Association that would control all but one of the re-opened New Orleans schools six months after the tragedy, employed a creative variation on the theme, invoking the poetry of Coleridge and the discourse of hygiene, “I think the schools have been a real albatross. And so I think what we’re giving parents is the possibility of hope, a possibility of wiping the slate clean and starting over.”19 Longstanding advocates of public school privatization, Paul T. Hill and Jane Hannaway, carried the hygienic metaphor a step further writing, in their Urban Institute report “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans,” that “[e]ducation could be one of the bright spots in New Orleans’ recovery effort, which may even establish a new model for school districts nationally.”20 This “bright spot”, according to Hill and Hannaway, that should be a national model, calls for refusing to rebuild the New Orleans public schools, firing the teachers and by extension dissolving the teachers union, eradicating the central administration, and inviting for profit corporations with sordid histories such as The Edison Schools21 and other organizations to take over the running of schools.22 Sajan George is a director of Alvarez & Marsal, a Bush administration-connected business-consulting firm that is making millions in its role sub-contracting the rebuilding of schools. George, a “turnaround expert” contracted by the state, brought these metaphors together stating, “This is the silver lining in the dark cloud of Katrina. We would not have been able to start with an almost clean slate if Katrina had not happened. So it really does represent an incredible opportunity.”23 An incredible opportunity indeed. In what follows I discuss a number of ways that Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans typifies a new form of educational privatization. I focus on how the disaster has 9 been used to enrich a predominantly White tiny business and political elite while achieving educational privatization goals that the right has been unable to achieve before: 1) implement the largest ever experiment in school vouchers; 2) allow for enormous profits in education rebuilding by contracting firms with political connections; 3) allow the replacement of a system of universal public education with a charter school network designed to participate in the dispossession of poor and African American residents from their communities and to remake the city “cleansed” of former residents, designed to fire experienced teachers and destroy the teachers union, and destroy the city’s public school central office and democratically-representative institutions to replace them with authoritarian and business-controlled bodies and to implement the largest experiment with numerous business-oriented school reforms. In the sections that follow I address the economic, political, and cultural battles being waged in the wake of Hurricane Katrina through the fights over vouchers, contracting, and charter schools – fights that I argue are ultimately between, on the one hand, the expansion of capital accumulation by pillaging the public sector and dispossessing citizens of their wealth, political power, and cultures and, on the other hand, the possibilities of expanding democratic social relations in terms of politics, economics, and culture. The point in telling the story of how the right-wing is taking advantage of disaster to implement democratically-failed reforms is to alert readers to how educational privatization and the assault on public schools are taking a new insidious form and to encourage readers to work to defend public education as part of the broader struggle for the expansion of democratic social relations and the democratic redistribution of political, economic, and cultural power. I conclude by highlighting the resistance. 10 Vouchers Vouchers use public money to pay for private schools and thus stand as a potentially lucrative business opportunity. Right wing think tanks and advocates of educational privatization have been calling for wide scale voucher schemes for decades, alleging that the competition for consumers’ money will drive up quality and drive down costs. For example, the Heritage Foundation has been lobbying for vouchers for decades and published a report immediately after the hurricane calling for vouchers, as did the Urban Institute.24 Support for vouchers comes largely from the neoliberal ideological belief that applying business ideals to the necessary bureaucratic public sector guarantees efficiencies. Critics of vouchers have contended that 1) encouraging parents to “shop” for schools will take scarce federal resources away from those public schools most in need of them – schools that have historically been under funded by having resource allocations pegged to local property taxes25; 2) vouchers have traditionally been used to maintain or worsen racial segregation in the face of desegregation policies26 -- a particularly relevant legacy to the racial dispossession going on in New Orleans; 3) vouchers undermine universal public schooling by redefining a public good as a private commodity and stand to exacerbate already existing inequalities in funding; 4) vouchers undermine the public democratic purposes of public schooling by treating citizens as consumers; 5) vouchers undermine the constitutional separation of church and state. Not only was the voucher agenda being pushed unsuccessfully for years before the storm, but also until Katrina the only federally funded voucher scheme was implemented by the U.S. Congress in the District of Columbia. 11 One that has been “marked by a failure to achieve legislatively determined priorities, an inability to evaluate the program in the manner required by Congress, and efforts by administrators to obscure information that might reflect poorly on the program.”27 This voucher scheme was snuck through federal legislation by being rolled into a budget bill and it was aggressively supported by one of the richest people on the planet, Wal- Mart inheritor John Walton of the Walton Family Foundation, one of the largest spenders pushing privatization of public education.28 Not only did New Orleans not have a voucher scheme prior to Katrina, but a K-12 voucher bill had just been defeated in the Louisiana state legislature just before the hurricane.29 The bill would have allowed for public tax money to fund private or religious schooling. Despite public democratic deliberation on the issue concluding against vouchers, conservative privatization advocates moved quickly to take advantage of the disaster. Within two weeks after the hurricane struck, the Heritage Foundation released a “special report” refashioning their longstanding agenda as “principled solutions” for rebuilding. “Heritage has been pushing school vouchers since 1975 and so it is no surprise that the organization now strongly believes that a voucher proposal that would fund private schools constitutes a successful response to the crisis.”30 The Bush administration, so slow to provide federal emergency aid to residents, was nonetheless quick to respond to extensive media criticism by formulating help through the privatization proposals of such right-wing think tanks. The administration proposed $1.9 billion in aid to K-12 students with $488 million designated for school 12 vouchers. The editors of Rethinking Schools accurately wrote, “This smells like a back- door approach to get public funding for private schools and would essentially create the first national school voucher plan.”31 Privatization advocates were quite explicit in their desire to undermine local control over educational decision-making and to create a situation in which it would be very difficult to reverse the implementation of vouchers. For example, Carla Dial reporting in the right-wing Heartland Institute School Reform News quotes Chris Kinnan of Freedom Works, a D.C. organization fighting for “smaller government” and more “personal freedom.” “Having those vouchers for a couple of years would change the way parents and students and even educators think about them,” Kinnan said. “The impact would be so powerful that if you did it right, [school] systems would be competing to attract these [kids with vouchers]. It’s all about changing the incentive. Once you have that freedom it would be very difficult to go back to the community control system.”32 For Kinnan and his ilk “freedom” means privatizing public control over public resources so that fewer people with more wealth and power have more political control over said resources. The genius of framing the amassing of political and economic control over public resources as individual consumer choice is that it takes on the deceptive appearance of increasing individual control while it actually removes individuals from collective control. Privatizers aim to treat the use of public resources as “shopping” by “consumers,” thereby naturalizing the public sector as a market -- as a natural, politically- neutral entity ruled by the laws of supply and demand rather than as a matter of public 13 priority, political deliberation, and competing values and visions. Such metaphors of consumer culture not only conceal the ways that public goods and services are different from markets (public services aim to serve public interest and collective goals not the amassing of private profit) but such appeals also fail to admit that markets themselves are hardly neutral and natural but are, on the contrary, hierarchical, human-made political configurations unequally distributing power and control over material resources and cultural value. Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice was also scheming to get a foot in the door. Hopeful that the initial one year period for vouchers in the Bush proposal could be extended indefinitely he said, “I think that if emergency school vouchers are passed this time they will be a routine part of future emergency relief. I’m also hopeful that when the No Child Left Behind Act is modified that it will be easier for Congress to add vouchers to the remedies available under that law.”33 The Heritage Foundation, The Alliance for School Choice, and The Heartland Institute were hardly alone as a large number of right-wing groups committed to vouchers praised the President’s plan. Gary Bauer of the group American Values hailed the “rebuilding challenge as an opportunity to implement conservative ideas such as school vouchers and tax free zones.”34 The Bush plan was praised by the Family Research Council, Rich Lowry of the National Review, Gary McCaleb of the Alliance Defense Fund, Marvin Olasky of World Magazine, William Donohue of the Catholic League among others.35 The Yankee Institute took a full page color advertisement in Heartland’s School Reform News with a letter from Executive Director, Lewis Andrews who admonishes 14 readers that when the real estate bubble bursts and public education “cost soars relative to home values” in rich communities “savvy reformers will be prepared to make the case for school vouchers in all communities.”36 The ad begins with the expression, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” Implicit in Andrews’ statements is the fact that privatizers have already been taking advantage of the historical failure to properly fund education in poor and working class communities. Before Katrina, per pupil spending in New Orleans stood at about $5000 ($4,986 in 1998). To put this in perspective, per pupil spending in suburban public school districts in wealthy suburbs around the nation reach as high as roughly quadruple this amount despite the fact that they face far fewer obstacles. As the right clearly grasps, the question of privatization is inextricably linked to matters of public funding. Vouchers, charters, and EMOs cannot make headway with well-financed public schools in richer communities. Crisis and emergency benefit privatization advocates who can seize upon a situation with pre-formulated plans to commodify this public service. To put it differently, privatizers target those who have been denied adequate public investment in the first place. As the United Federation of Teachers Joe Derose insists, the policy emphasis in rebuilding should be on the chronic under funding plaguing the New Orleans public schools rather than on the schemes to privatize them.37 As the above quotes from Bolick, Kinnan, and Andrews illustrate, the right is eager to take advantage of crisis to subvert democratic oversight over policy matters of great public importance. The Bush administration has long aimed to expand vouchers. In 2002 vouchers were removed from the No Child Left Behind bill at the last moment as part of an effort to secure bipartisan support.38 Not only do the Katrina federal vouchers cover far beyond 15 the gulf coast region but they take advantage of the crisis to promote the idea of vouchers and privatization generally. For example, while select counties and parishes in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida are included in the Emergency Impact Aid, the entire state of Texas is included in the voucher scheme. While emergency funds do not permit public school rebuilding, they nonetheless give funding to schools in 49 states. What is more, the vouchers can be given to charter schools without charter schools meeting section 5210 (1) of ESEA No Child Left Behind that requires charter schools to be developed with public charter agencies. In other words, the vouchers allow public funding for charter schools that do not need to be held accountable to public oversight institutions that regulate charter schools. As a result the Aid favors not merely the public funding of private schools but even encourages the development of charter schools unregulated by the public sector by funding them when they would otherwise be ineligible to receive federal funding for having failed to meet basic requirements.39 The Emergency Aid is also being used to promote and publicize vouchers as a legitimate school reform. As part of the program the State Education Agency must provide notice to parents of students attending a nonpublic school informing them, “a. the parent or guardian has the option to enroll his or her child in a public school or a nonpublic school; and b. Emergency Impact Aid is a temporary program that will be available only for the 2005-2006 school year.”40 While at first glance this requirement appears to be about simple notification of policy, in the context of the administration’s longstanding push for vouchers, it appears to be designed to encourage parents to support vouchers for private schools in part by emphasizing the withdrawal of resources, albeit in voucher form. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made this goal of proselytizing 16 vouchers quite explicit in her speech of April 5, 2006 in a New York church, saying that, in addition to expanding charter schools and the voucher scheme in D.C., “most importantly, we’ve armed the parents of 48 million public school students nationwide with the information to be smart educational consumers and become real advocates for their children.”41 Spellings notably embraces the neoliberal description of education as a business with consumers rather than as a public good crucial for the making of citizens capable of developing skills and dispositions of self-governance. In this speech Spellings explains that No Child Left Behind’s provision allowing students to attend other schools and its designation of schools as “failed” are designed to expand “choice” which is how she describes both vouchers and the NCLB provision allowing students to go to any school – a measure implemented to set the stage for vouchers. And as Spellings explains, the voucher scheme in New Orleans is part of an aggressive broader attempt to use federal power to marketize public schooling, More than 1,700 schools around the country have failed to meet state standards for five or six years in a row. And many of these schools are in districts where public school choice isn’t a real option. We’re proposing a new $100 million Opportunity Scholarship Fund to help thousands of low- income students in these schools attend the private school of their choice or receive intensive one-on-one tutoring after school or during the summer.42 Immediately after Katrina Secretary Spellings even sought to waive a federal law that bans educational segregation for homeless children with the obvious purpose of using public funding for private schooling even if explicitly segregated schooling.43 What is 17 crucial to recognize here is that disasters are being taken advantage of and produced to set the stage for educational privatization. Whether public schools are being systematically under funded, as were the New Orleans Public Schools before Katrina and then declared “failed” (as NCLB is designed to do nationwide), or whether a storm blows them to smithereens does not matter to the privatizers – though the aftermath of Katrina indicates the right has found just what can be accomplished through sudden massive destruction. What goes undisclosed in the Department of Education’s mandated notification is a comparison of how much money a student received in their prior public school relative to the federal funding for the private school. In fact, the vouchers give significantly less money per pupil than New Orleans students received. New Orleans students received an already very low per pupil funding of roughly $5000 while Bush’s voucher scheme pays only $750 per pupil and then gives money to schools. Clint Bolick argues that a prime reason for vouchers is to save money. Cutting funding for education certainly saves money but it doesn’t explain how educational services are paid for. The numbers don’t appear to add up. Congress approved $645 million in the Hurricane Education Recovery Act that applies to 49 states and $496 million to the states most severely damaged to reopen schools under the Immediate Aid to Restart School Operations Program. In September of 2005 Spellings stated that there were 372,000 schoolchildren displaced from Louisiana and Mississippi. Yet in March 2006 she gave a figure of 157,743 students nationwide who are eligible for portion of the HERA money as of the first quarter of the year. That would mean HERA should pay about $4088 per pupil but schools will receive only $750 per pupil and $937.50 for students with 18 disabilities. Where is the money going? Instead of going to aggressively rebuild the destroyed schools in the regions hardest hit needing the full amount, the money is being dispersed throughout 49 states and D.C., States and the District of Columbia will receive funding under this emergency, one-time program. Funds may be used to hire teachers; provide books and other classroom supplies; offer in-school or outside supplemental services such as tutoring, mentoring and counseling; and cover transportation and health costs.44 It would be myopic to think that this funding is merely about paying for the new burden of educating hurricane evacuees. This shifting of educational resources around the nation under the guise of emergency needs to be understood in relation to the failure of the Bush administration to pay states’ federal funds as part of NCLB. As Monty Neil points out, Not only has the federal government failed to meet the social, economic, and health-related needs of many children, but NCLB itself does not authorize nearly enough funding to meet its new requirements. The Bush administration has sought almost no increase in ESEA expenditures for FY2005 and the coming year. The funds Congress has appropriated are about $8 billion per year less than Congress authorized. Meanwhile, states are still suffering from their worst budget crises since World War II, cutting education as well as social programs needed by low-income people.45 It appears that emergency is being used to cover failed promises that have nothing to do with emergency other than the emergencies created by an administration hostile to 19 supporting public education in the first place. But such coverage is taking the form of privatization. Such failures of a conservative executive and legislature to support public education need to be understood in relation to a conservative judicial branch that in 2002 ruled vouchers constitutional. The political right is waging war on public education while doing all it can to force through privatization initiatives that are unpopular and difficult to win politically. Neither the HERA nor the IARSOP funds allow money to rebuild the public schools themselves. Without the schools being rebuilt many residents are not returning to the city. But that seems to be part of the plan of the business-dominated Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state government, and FEMA.46 Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Governor-formed LRA made quite explicit state priorities saying, “Our goal is to try to identify the ways this money can be used to have the most leverage, in terms of providing private sector investment.”47 Part of why the voucher scheme appealed to business elites in New Orleans and beyond was that beyond fulfilling a longstanding conservative dream it participated in removing poor black residents from the city by offering them schooling throughout the gulf coast region. As Mike Davis writes, [real estate developer-gentrifier] Kabacoff’s 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public housing project River Garden, a largely market-rate faux Creole subdivision, has become the prototype for the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that Mayor Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro [Bush connected developer] as head of the crucial urban planning committee) proposes to build… BNOB grew out of a notorious 20 meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders (dubbed by some the “forty thieves”) that Reiss organized in Dallas twelve days after Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded most of New Orleans elected black representatives and, according to Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street Journal, focused on the opportunity to rebuild the city “with better services and fewer poor people.”48 When the BNOB faltered in the face of public resistance they employed the voice of corporate land developers, the Urban Land Institute (ULI). “In a nutshell, the ULI’s recommendations reframed the historic elite desire to shrink the city’s socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.”49 The translation of a land grab into the discourse of safety and security was used to undermine democratic governance over both housing and schooling. Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city’s finances. With control of New Orleans schools already usurped by the state, the ULI’s proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives.50 The voucher scheme participated in dispossessing residents of their land and schools to provide profits for investors and remake the city. Contracting initiatives worked in conjunction to achieve the same goals. 21 These neoliberal public-private initiatives in schooling need to be understood in relation to those that have overtaken housing, military, security, parks, and other public institutions. One of the most relevant in this case is the way that Hope VI public private partnerships to develop “mixed income” housing have replaced prior public housing around the U.S. As with the privatization of schooling, the metaphor of business efficiency stands in for the real inefficiencies introduced through the privatization of public housing as multiple lucrative subsidies for real estate developers, massive fees for lawyers, come at taxpayer expense while public housing is gutted and poor residents are displaced. Not only do such schemes fail to replace public housing that is dismantled but they also bilk the public of money that could pay for these crucial services while funneling money to the rich. What goes up in place of public housing is gentrified neighborhoods populated by richer, whiter residents. This process is being coordinated with the closing of public schools in neighborhoods where public housing is being dismantled. New schools are being opened specifically tailored for the cleansed population and many of these are charters or other models that opt out of public school district oversight. Renaissance 2010 in Chicago, as I detail in Chapter Three, exemplifies this dispossesive trend but it can be found in Portland, Oregon, Boston and elsewhere. These projects are supported and promoted by business groups like the Metropolitan Planning Council, the Commercial Club, and the Business Roundtable. Proponents of such urban cleansing schemes reframe the dispossession of communities as “urban renewal” and trumpet the miraculous achievement of academic success in the newly opened schools (with their new students with more cultural capital) while carefully avoiding discussion of the decimation of public housing and public schools.51 22 Contracting and the Neoliberal Uses of Corruption In New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and around the U.S. following Katrina, the privatizers seized upon the tragedy by repeating a tired mantra of longstanding neoliberal arguments for vouchers, deregulation, anti-unionism, and charter schools. Shifting the question of the public schools onto market logic they invoked the language of “business failure”, “monopoly”, “efficiency”, “business turnaround” and wrapped it all in the language of compassion. For example, John Merrow, reporting on public television, describes a dubious program of putting principals in a 9 day training course and then sending them to fix “failing schools.” Merrow says, “The newest, hottest idea in education is happening in many states. Borrowing from business, they call these principals turn-around specialists.”52 The “silver lining” for privatizers was the destruction of a “failed” school system rather than recognizing the extent to which the historical linkage of the public schools to inequalities in wealth and income resulted in what Kozol has called “savage inequalities” long before the storm. Privatizers’ justifications for vouchers, charters, and contracting are based in market metaphors of market efficiency as superior to the allegedly corrupt public sector. In the media coverage of schooling following Katrina most journalists and school reformers emphasize a singular theme: the New Orleans Public Schools had “failed” because they were rife with corruption and the market will finally bring transparency to school policy and finance. For example, Sajan George and Bill Roberti of Alvarez & Marsal whose company was making millions of dollars of public school money as a “turnaround consultant” appeared to lose no opportunity to bash the New Orleans public schools in the press with the most extreme examples of accounting 23 irregularities meant to illustrate just how little public control could be trusted to run the schools. These claims appear particularly exaggerated in light of the fact that Alvarez & Marsal were brought in as “turnaround experts” to keep HealthSouth a viable company after a $2.7 billion accounting fraud. In this case the magnitude of corporate fraud makes the payroll accounting irregularities and unaccounted for federal funds of the New Orleans Public Schools look like loose change.53 While A & M was happy to work to restore the autonomy of such a profoundly corrupt corporation there would be no such second chances for the public schools in New Orleans. What is remarkable in this comparison is that one of the central arguments of educational privatizers is to let public schools “fail” just like businesses do when they are not run properly. As this example shows, (as do the examples of WorldCom, Martha Stewart, and most appropriately The Edison Schools) corporations are often given second chances and rather than being allowed to fail are allowed to offset losses onto shareholders and the government. (The Edison Schools was bailed out by Governor Jeb Bush using the Florida public school teachers’ retirement fund money to buy up Edison’s failing stock.) Corporate media framed Alvarez & Marsal’s work in New Orleans as heroism – fleet-footed corporate America rushed in to rescue Americans from the public itself. Yet, nearly every aspect of the Gulf Coast school rebuilding showcases how profit motivated actors have been willing to rip off the public sector and undermine the development of universal quality public schooling. This is evident in the cronyism and inflated billing by contractors with ties to the federal government. Shortly before Hurricane Katrina struck, the state of Louisiana had hired Alvarez & Marsal, a New York based business-consulting firm, with close ties to both Bush 24 administrations, to work as “turnaround specialists” with the New Orleans public schools. As the predominantly white state government was attempting to seize control from the predominantly African American city schools, they applied a business logic to public schools, treating them as if they were a business that was not profitable rather than as a public service dedicated to acting in the public interest. In a compromise with the state, following the state’s attempt to seize the schools, the city school board hired Alvarez & Marsal at a cost of $16.8 million. Rather than recognizing that the city’s public schools had been historically under funded resulting in a slew of problems such as crumbling infrastructure, low teacher pay, and a lack of adequate services, Alvarez & Marsal determined that the city schools were receiving too much money. Their plan was to cut nearly 10% of the system’s budget – a cut of $48 million for a school system with a $500 million budget. This was justified as combating corruption. Though the media coverage of the “turnaround” work by Alvarez & Marsal emphasized corruption in the New Orleans Schools it did not cover the fact that Alvarez & Marsal has itself been accused of corruption by inflating their contracting fees by 60% in work for Bradford Teaching Hospitals in the U.K.54 Nor did media coverage investigate the relationships of the firm to the Bush administrations and family including the relationship of director Bill Roberti to the administration of Bush, Sr. (he was appointed by Bush to oversee government contracting for military apparel) nor the relationship of corporate director David Javdan to George W. Bush (he was General Counsel of the Small Business Administration under G.W. Bush and was a legal advisor on Federal contracting and business development programs for all Cabinet Departments and Federal Agencies). Connections and 25 metaphors of business efficiency apparently stood in for experience and credentials with regard to education. Prior to being hired in New Orleans Roberti led a team to consult with the St. Louis Public Schools and admitted having no experience running public schools. Roberti freely admits he and his team have no experience or credentials that would qualify them to operate schools. Few, if any, of the ideas that Roberti proposes are new; almost all of them have been tried in piecemeal fashion in other major urban school districts to different degrees and in varying ways. Other districts have privatized departments and outsourced custodial, maintenance or food service. Some districts have closed schools and sold off real estate to save money. What is different in St. Louis is that a new school-board majority, dominated by members backed by Mayor Francis Slay, moved with great haste in ceding operational control to outside consultants.55 If what happened in St. Louis sounds familiar, it should. Roberti overstepped the bounds of Alvarez & Marsal’s contract, which stipulated non-involvement in personnel and curriculum decisions, by firing 1,400 teachers.56 In New Orleans Alvarez & Marsal’s role as “turnaround specialists” took a radical turn with the onset of the hurricane. The Newshour with John Merrow on PBS painted a picture of Sajan George and Bill Roberti heroically trudging through the floodwaters in the middle of the hurricane to rescue personnel files from the central office. Katrina not only flooded the schools, but also the central office, where the basic financial and management records -- now accurate for the first time 26 in years -- were stored on computer disks. Roberti and George had to rescue those files even though the city was locked down. BILL ROBERTI: We got through all of the checkpoints, and the first thing we did was we started looking for police. I wasn't going in the school until I knew police officers knew we were there, because I didn't want somebody shooting at us. And we did finally convince a tactical police unit, six officers, to come in with us. JOHN MERROW: Once they rescued the files, they arranged to pay the nearly 4,000 teachers for their time served before the hurricane. But that was it. Immediately after the storm, the school board put everyone on "disaster leave," and advised teachers to look for jobs elsewhere.57 Alvarez & Marsal’s heroic directors proceeded to save the documents and fire all of the New Orleans public school teachers. This resulted in the dissolution of the teacher’s union following a vote by the state legislature to sweep 87 percent of the schools into a state run recovery district. This annulled the collective bargaining agreement of the United Teachers of New Orleans, which had the exclusive right to negotiate teaching contracts. Already in place to slash the public school budget before the hurricane, following the hurricane Alvarez & Marsal were in position to take advantage of contracting. They began assessing damage at the public schools and assembling proposals for contractors to put bids in for the work. At the end of February 2006 Mike Thomson of Alvarez & Marsal estimated more than $800 million in physical damage to the schools. Although 27 Alvarez & Marsal in news reports repeatedly alleges to have made terrific progress in straightening out the NOPS financial situation prior to the hurricane, they do not take responsibility for failing to insure properly the district in the event of a storm such as Katrina. FEMA is consequently punishing the schools. Thompson estimates the district will be penalized $165 million for under- insuring the school building, and whatever FEMA matches will cost the Orleans Parish School system $55 million for short term emergency repairs. That doesn’t count long-term district costs – an estimated $272 million, Thompson said. A & M officials secured a $30 million community disaster loan for the district from the federal government, but NOPS is still looking at a $111 million budget deficit by June 30.58 So the school system suffering the most devastating destruction and in most need even before the storm is put in massive debt, under funding, and rebuilding uncertainty, while congress distributes nearly a billion dollars in education aid around the nation. Half a year after the storm the schools have not been rebuilt. To make matters worse FEMA emergency school contracting in the gulf coast appears to be mired in allegations of corruption and cronyism of which the saga of Alvarez & Marsal is but one part. Friends at FEMA: Akima’s No Bid Contract FEMA is under the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security’s first Secretary under George W. Bush was Tom Ridge. Tom Ridge, former Governor of Pennsylvania, has a history of working to have a mostly white state government seize a mostly black city school district in the case of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to then turn the schools over to be run for profit by a company with a dubious financial and performance 28 record, The Edison Schools.59 Ridge is a magnet for coincidence. While at Homeland Security Ridge presided over the regular issuance of scare warnings in the form of color- coded terror alerts that coincidentally escalated throughout Bush’s reelection campaign and ended when Bush won his second term. Tom Ridge left Homeland Security at the end of Bush’s first term to work as a lobbyist for Blank Rome Government Relations, a lobbying firm whose CEO is David Girard-diCarlo, coincidentally a fundraiser for Tom Ridge.60 On Ridge’s first day on the job at Homeland Security he flew out to Girard- diCarlo’s home in Scottsdale, Arizona. There is extensive investigative journalism on the relationships between Ridge and many companies that received Homeland Security contracts throughout Ridge’s leadership of DHS. No ethics rules in the newly formed department prohibited what would be conflict of interest in most government departments. Ridge disclosed investments he made with companies doing business with DHS ranging between $100,000 and $800,000 while he was still with Homeland Security. Shortly after resigning from Homeland Security in 2005 Ridge appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart and explained his decision to enter the private sector as being partly about the need to make money to pay for his children’s’ education. Immediately following Katrina the Department of Homeland Security gave an Alaska-based company called Akima a $40 million no-bid contract to build portable classrooms in Mississippi. Akima, which has a mix of 26 no-bid and competitive federal contracts, is majority owned by Nana Regional Corporation, “which coincidentally happens to be a client of Blank Rome Government Relations, a lobbying firm with close ties to the Bush Administration and former head of the Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.”61 Other Blank Rome employees include high ranking Homeland 29 Security officials under Ridge, Mark Holman and Ashley Davis (a Ridge staffer who worked on both Bush campaigns). Nana officials and employees donated thousands of dollars to Republican congress members from Alaska.62 Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.) wrote to the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general charging that the government is paying $88,000 for each mobile classroom when a local Mississippi company can provide them for a market rate of $42,000. This would mean that more than half of the $40 million emergency funds allocated by FEMA were being expropriated out of state through these connections while a local firm that could do it for less than half was dropped from consideration.63 The General Accounting Office, the investigative branch of Congress, investigated and concluded that the negotiated prices were indeed inflated. Thompson explained that the deal made no sense because FEMA could have hired the local business directly. Instead Akima subcontracted the work and took a massive cut. By mid November of 2005 Akima’s original bid of $40 million was up to $72 million, allegedly because of the need to do additional work. However, even the installation of the modular classrooms appeared to be done in a questionable cost-cutting fashion. Rather than following the Mississippi Board of Education code and pouring concrete foundations with steel posts to anchor the structures, Akima had the units tethered with straps to anchors that had been drilled into the ground. The president of Akima, John Wood, denied “gouging the government” but refused to divulge how much profit the company made on the deal.64 In the press much was made of the fact that Akima secured its no-bid contract by having a minority business status due to the fact that it has 20% native Alaskan ownership. However, the rules do not require the company to be managed by native peoples and 30 Akima is not. Cultural difference in the form of indigenousness in this case appears to have served the interests of securing profits for business people non-indigenous to the region in question while dispossessing of work those who live in the disaster area. Cultural difference was used as a tool to grab inflated contracting through inside connections to a federal government and Republican party riddled with corruption scandals from the lobbying scandals of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff (who also took advantage of minority status legislation) to the tangled web of lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq and discredit its critics. The subversion of local business in Mississippi was part of a larger pattern in New Orleans. As Mike Davis points out, the loss of local construction contracts by African Americans was systematic and planned from the top. Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA), which rejected a majority of loan applications by local businesses and homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure. As a result, the economic foundations of the city’s African-American middle class (public-sector jobs and small businesses) have been swept away by deliberate decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income blacks are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to more mobile outsiders.65 Accusations of a corrupt predominantly black school system by a predominantly White state and federal government that appears to be more corrupt and at a higher level 31 highlights a deep alignment of neoliberal ideology with white supremacy. The theme of corruption of the public sector and the efficiency of the private sector thrives on a legacy of racist and colonial thought that aligns Whiteness, economic power and the state with the historical discourses of civilization, technological mastery, rationality, planning, order, science, control, the mind, discipline, masculinity, universality. The other side of these discourses of power is their opposite or outside that are frequently ascribed to subaltern populations: savagery, primitivism, irrationalism, presentism, disorder, nature, the body, indiscipline, laziness, femininity, difference. Within an array of cultural meanings allegations of corruption can be selectively mobilized within representations such as the spectacle of Katrina to link up with a number of other assumptions attributed to particular populations. Hence, while Alvarez & Marsal have inside connections to the White House and a questionable past for inflated contracting and while Akima, FEMA, and Homeland Security have indulged in what is hard to call anything other than corruption, these businesses and state agencies working for the benefit of businesses are represented in corporate media as saving the New Orleans public schools from its corrupt past. Such inversions are intertwined with racial politics that represent non-whites as incapable of self-governance, that represent Whiteness as aligned with civilization, progress, efficiency, and discipline and that link up with representations of business as ideally managing the social scene and determining public priorities. In New Orleans these cultural politics played a large role along with neoliberal ideology and corruption to dispossess poor, working class, and non-white residents of public schools and homes. This was achieved by framing as common sense such remedies as refusing to rebuild the 32 New Orleans public schools and instead engaging in one of the most radical experiments in public schooling ever. Seizure The failure to rebuild the public schools was intimately linked to attempts to dispossess residents of their homes, work, and communities. Shortly after the hurricane the BNOBC came up with its notorious “four month plan” that prohibited residents from returning to their communities while requiring these prohibited residents to apply to a citywide planning body a recovery plan that would need to be approved to return to their homes.66 After four months the areas in question that hadn’t met the nearly impossible conditions would have their communities bulldozed and taken over by developers. Former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial who is president of the National Urban League described the plan as a “massive red-lining plan wrapped around a giant land grab.”67 Although the “four month plan” was beaten back, the schools were nonetheless successfully seized by the state. All but 15 of the 117 schools in the system were taken over and all but one are operating as charter schools. The storm also set the stage for political dispossession. As Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation put it gloating over the political implications of the storm, “The Democrats’ margin of victory is living in the Astrodome in Houston.”68 As Mike Davis argues, the implications extend far beyond the city, “Thanks to the Army Corp’s defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional seats and probably the governorship.”69 With regard to schools Sharon Cohen puts it mildly writing, “some see post-Katrina changes as a move to shift education policy to the right and further undermine its struggling schools.”70 33 Despite being a Democrat, Governor Blanco used the disaster to slash public spending by $500 million, give tax breaks to oil corporations on the basis of economic development, and take the schools. Supported by rural conservatives, she fended off a challenge by the Legislative Black Caucus to her actions that sidestepped lawmakers.71 The state clearly refused to rebuild more in accordance with the business visions of the BBNOC. “Before Katrina hit August 29, the New Orleans district served 56,000 students. Currently, it’s handling nearly 10,000 students with a capacity for 2,000 more, according to the state.”72 The United Teachers of New Orleans dispute the state’s claims about capacity and sued to force the city to open more schools. Joe DeRose of the UTNO said, “Not enough schools are being reopened and kids are being denied access” emphasizing that the charter schools are hiring unqualified teachers to save money and capping low salaries.73 The union’s charges that too few schools are being reopened was confirmed by the head of the Algiers Charter Schools Association who said, “There are not enough schools open in New Orleans and we’re trying to fix that problem.”74 “The union disputes the state’s capacity numbers, claiming there are more students than space. Union leaders also argue that by returning soon to a larger school district, the city will be able to lure more citizens with a sense of normalcy.”75 But that does not appear to be what the planners want. Instead they have forced a radical school model that deregulates the central administration, dismantles the union, and shift power away from public control to a small number of business-oriented leaders. As USA Today reported, reopening the New Orleans public schools would threaten the radical experiment. If state education leaders are allowed to lay out their plan deliberately, in years to come Los Angeles, Detroit, and other cities with troubled schools 34 will come to New Orleans to learn valuable lessons. Opening schools for the sake of opening schools however, would only compromise that dream.76 Charters Following the state seizure and dismantling of the New Orleans public school system, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission endorsed an education plan that breaks the New Orleans school district into “clusters” of 8 to 14 schools.77 The network clusters would have near total control of curriculum decisions, budgets, hiring and firing of teachers, length of school day, among other decisions that had been district-wide policy. Breaking up the system into semi-autonomous clusters will mean that housing quality and price will more closely correspond to school plans by shifting power over schooling in a radically localized way. Put differently, the plan assures the exacerbation of the most unequalizing effects of schools being tied to property values. In the last month of 2005 the stripped down school board would retain control of only eight schools in a system that had been comprised of 120. The state of Louisiana took control of roughly 90% of the schools --102 of 117 public schools -- on the grounds that they had failed to meet academic standards.78 The state-seized schools comprise the Louisiana Recovery School System and 15 schools were made into an independent network of charter schools run by the Algiers Charter School Association. The state seizure that was done in Louisiana (which was also done in Philadelphia and is being fought out in Baltimore as I write) needs to be understood as precisely what No Child Left Behind is designed to do around the U.S. which, as in Louisiana, stands to 35 undermine democratically elected school boards, dismantle unions, dismantle schools, and shift power to centralized bodies heavily influenced by business. What is confusing yet crucial to grasp is that federal and state power is being used to radically localize control over schooling yet in ways that do not increase local democratic control. This shift is exemplified by taxpayer succession movements by rich neighborhoods in Los Angeles and New York that aim to segregate economically and racially the enclaves of privilege from urban areas, thereby allowing rich citizens to hoard public resources. This individualizing and anti-public trend is also exemplified by the Supreme Court’s landmark 2005 decision (Kelo v. City of New London) that allows locales to seize private property for the purposes of economic development. Previously, eminent domain had to be justified on the basis of public interest, but the new ruling redefines the public interest through economic development. For example, a residential neighborhood designated as suffering “blight” (and this is a hotly contested designation) can be bulldozed and the land can be seized by the city and rather than being put to public use (parks, schools, etc.) can be handed over to private developers, for example, to put up a shopping mall. In her dissent Justice Sandra Day O’Connor pointed out that such a redefinition of eminent domain would inevitably result in larger more powerful businesses using local political power to gobble up smaller ones. In this case the neoliberal redefinition of the public interest through business interests undermines not only the public interest but also the possibility for genuine market competition. In the case of the New Orleans public schools, the federal government and the state orchestrated the radical localizing of control. As Louisiana state superintendent of education Cecil 36 Picard admitted, replacing the public school system with charters was the most expedient approach because “federal dollars were immediately available for them.”79 Pumping massive federal funds into the charter school movement No Child Left Behind made the dismantling of public schools and the opening of charter schools an intelligible choice. In a sense then, the implications of New Orleans radical restructuring can be understood as No Child Left Behind on steroids. However, before conclusions are drawn about the results of the plan it must be recognized just how much the plan has involved in dispossessing residents of public services, political control, and the extent to which the seizure of the schools is inseparable from the dispossession of residents from their communities. In April of 2006 Betty DiMarco, a member of Community United to Reform Education (CURE), demanded the opening of schools at a public meeting stating, “There are a few schools open in uptown New Orleans. There are a few schools open in Algiers. Those families who have returned in the Treme and Central City area do not have schools to attend.”80 William Giles, a veteran teacher, reported hundreds of students wandering the city streets despite “at least 10 to 20 schools that can be open within three weeks that have only minor damage.”81 The press thinly veiled White middle class hopes to use the hurricane to “re- take control” of the schools. Before Katrina middle class mostly White parents abandoned the city schools for private schools resulting in segregation. They removed their political clout from the public schools, and then blamed the abandoned school system for what a legacy of racism and classism had bestowed upon it.82 Although charter schools comprise about 4% of public schools nationwide, the New Orleans plan gives them a much bigger role. This comes despite mixed to poor 37 reviews of charter performance conventionally determined. In 2004 The New York Times reported on the release of NAEP scores showing that charter schools are less likely to meet performance goals than comparable public schools. This ignited a firestorm of reaction by conservative charter school advocates, and the Department of Education subsequently altered such reporting to avoid damaging truths from getting out to the public. The Economic Policy Institute published one of the most comprehensive and careful analyses of charter to public comparisons and found “evidence that the average effect of charter schools is negative.”83 Although the implications are no small matter for a reform that is being forced into place without public oversight, my concern is less with the insufficient “delivery” of educational services than with the ways that the charter school movement is part of a broader privatization movement designed to undermine public goods and services in order to pillage and commodify them. Moreover, such undermining of the public sector in this way undermines the capacities for public institutions to be sites of democratic deliberation and transformation. According to the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, for-profit schools represent the fastest growing sector of charter schools, suggesting that charter schools should be understood as a central aspect of the privatization movement. What is more, once control has been wrested from school districts and districts are weakened it will be easier for charter schools to be taken over by for-profit companies, and the democratic possibilities for such schools will be further imperiled. 38 In what follows I focus on two aspects of the radical new model in New Orleans: 1) bad justifications for the plan based on the need for flexibility in a time of uncertainty, and 2) the extent to which an ideology of corporate culture drove the plan. In a strictly practical sense, unions, school boards, and district offices play crucial roles in maintaining public oversight, assuring a stable and reliable workforce with relatively low teacher turnover, protecting teacher salaries and benefits, providing certified teachers and educated and competent administrators capable of public management, and working to assure stable, reliable, and secure systems. As I have detailed in my book The Edison Schools, when Philadelphia was seized by the state and The Edison Schools took over a number of schools (about half of Edison schools are charters), this had dire implications for teacher turnover rates, financial accountability, public oversight, teacher experience and school culture. Charter schools are plagued by uncertainty and insecurity because they typically do not have many of the guaranteed features that regular public district schools have including physical sites, transportation, meals, and steady income. Charter schools are heavily reliant on philanthropic organization and grant writing, which means that funding support can dry up at any time. Much has been made by charter school proponents of the inventive new models that can be devised with the flexibility of the charter school ideal.84 The problem with this perspective is that while in theory charter schools could lend themselves to offering emancipatory alternatives to the public school system, the development of charters both weakens the struggle to make emancipatory public schools while also being constrained by the real limits charter schools have to work within including being subject to funding constraints and corporate philanthropy that push them 39 towards conservatizing choices regarding curriculum, school model, etc. like the embrace of standardized measures of achievement. The forms of the schools will tend to correspond to the predilections and constraints of funders and the trends of the moment. Especially the trend of privatization. As a leading researcher of charter schools, Amy Stuart Wells, writes, … it is clear that charter schools have gained a great deal of autonomy in terms of private fund raising, including and excluding children, and hiring and firing employees. In these ways, they look more like private than public schools, which is no doubt the intent of free-market reform advocates who see charter schools as one step down the path to full-blown voucher programs… we see from our study and many others that charter schools are not held any more accountable than other public schools for student achievement. And similar to the growth in income inequality in general over the past 20 years, the gap between the rich and the poor is only exacerbated under charter school reform.85 It is no coincidence that charter schools are being strongly promoted in cities by corporations and business groups such as the Commercial Club and Business Roundtable. A leading cheerleader for privatization, Paul T. Hill whose Urban Institute report reads like a blueprint for the New Orleans plan, emphasized that the city should not invest in rebuilding schools because of uncertainty about students’ neighborhoods. Hill and co- author Hannaway make the bad argument that the rebuilding model is justified on the basis that the future of New Orleans rebuilding is uncertain and so a “flexible” model is beneficial. In fact, the report and the “flexible” model, that keeps the public school 40 system from being rebuilt, participate in producing uncertainty and insecurity about the future by failing to provide a crucial feature of public infrastructure necessary for residents to return. As Sharon Cohen reports in the Associated Press, “The need for charter schools to take responsibility for services once provided by the school boards, such as food and transport, is an extra burden that some new schools could find “overwhelming”…”86 To deal with this potentially overwhelming extra burden, where did the charter schools turn? To businesspeople. The Rex organization established “Project Purple” to match member business skills with the administrative lacking of 11 new charter schools.87 In fact, press coverage about the charter school openings reveal how the new model is about closing public schools and opening schools like businesses. Many who embraced the assumption that schools are like business and the rhetoric and metaphors of market efficiencies had a rude awakening. “You don’t realize that you’re starting a business, and the business is public education, but there were all these services that were provided, not efficiently, by the school system,” she said. “I think that we got into this charter-school notion because the public schools weren’t doing well, but there’s no guarantee that because you’re a charter school, you’re going to do well.” McPhee’s epiphany has been common among people who are experiencing heavy doses of reality after their initial idealistic eagerness to form charter schools in the belief that they would do a better job of educating their children.88 41 The Project Purple volunteers who are mostly corporate employees speak of public schools entrepreneurially, describing the need to build business skills in a school staff that has been gutted of knowledgeable public administrators. In place of the central office Project Purple pushes business volunteerism. Of course, the communities that will benefit from this are those communities populated by residents with the time and knowledge to contribute to their schools. As a result, such deregulation inevitably results in exacerbated inequalities in resource distribution with regard to administration. The corporate model of the new school plan extends the authoritarian structure and tendencies of the corporation into the school format.89 This resulted in the most hierarchical form of school governance with the head of the Algiers Charter School Association handpicking principals who would handpick teachers and have total control and authority over every aspect of the school. The district policies and procedures were simply thrown out by the charter association. The power of the principal unilaterally to hire and fire staff and the defiance of unionization are central to the new model. John Merrow interviews one principal, John Hiser, who says, “I can hire and fire. In fact, I was telling the teachers yesterday that we are all accountable, that I will determine whether they stay or whether they go. They will determine whether I stay or whether I go.”90 In fact, while Hiser can determine whom to hire and fire, it will be test scores that will generally determine whether he will be retained by the person who runs the Charter Association. Consequently, Hiser will have an institutional incentive to do anything he can to effect that end whether it means threatening teacher’s job security, forcing teachers who are no longer protected by their union to work longer unpaid hours. Such a high pressure system can be profoundly counterproductive as it was with The Edison Schools, 42 resulting in high teacher turnover, walkouts or slowdowns, and cheating on tests to meet constantly rising expectations.91 Centralized authority has long been a call of conservative privatization advocates such as the Hoover Institution, which often blamed the failures of the Edison Schools to succeed on governance and accountability being shared.92 However, the case of New Orleans highlights some of the dire limitations of such narrow accountability. The new structure removes deliberation and dialogue from the process of administration. As one teacher complained, “once the [charter school association] hands down a decision, that’s the way it is.”93 Henry Shepard, a principal of Harte Elementary School, spoke out critically in Education Week of the concentration of control over the hiring process, ““I don’t like being the one that picks teachers,” he said. “I think it should be a committee, that I’m part of, [that picks].””94 Shepard’s perspective certainly makes more sense than the dubious method of hiring that Algiers Charter School Association used under the direction of its leader Brian Riedlinger. Six hundred people, who ranged from certified teachers to a baker, applied for the roughly 150 teaching positions in the Algiers system. After a 10- minute interview with each applicant, 250 were called back. The applicants were then asked to write a one-paragraph statement about teaching, which was graded by a college professor, and answer five 8th grade mathematics problems.95 The corporate model extends from concentrated governance resulting in shoddy hiring practices to the downward pressure on smaller units within the structure to do more with less. With the central office gone, “Administration would be pared to a minimum. 43 A “services group” would provide financial, transportation, and other key services. A “strategy group” – the CEO and a handful of other employees – would be in charge of academics, finances, accountability, and communications.”96 Though initially the plan would have ended the democratically elected school board, it was later amended to be constituted by a mix of elected and appointed members. Such de-democratizing of the school board to ensure state appointed representatives was engineered in part through the pushing of Scott Cowen, President of Tulane University, and head of the education committee of the BNOBC and by Mark Hoffman of Boston Consulting Group who coordinated the committee. In keeping with the conservative tradition of authoritarian governance models, Hoffman said, “one single, aligned governing body” was crucial to the success of the new model. Yet, as Catherine Gewirtz wrote, “Exactly how to ensure such governance in a district where most of the schools will answer to state-contracted groups, and a minority will answer to the local board, is unknown, Mr. Hoffman acknowledged.”97 The new structure appeals to privatization advocates like Hill and Hannaway because it sets the stage to contract out running schools to for profit companies. They make this agenda explicit. “To attract school providers with national reputations and track records for developing functioning schools quickly, the city might turn to the likes of KIPP, Edison, Aspire, and National Heritage Academies.”98 They advocate luring these companies, with at best questionable records of performance, by handing over publicly rented space and giving them “significant freedom in spending and teacher hiring.” In a footnote after praising Edison for “quality control and disclosure”, both of which, in fact, have extensive documented problems99, they state that Edison’s “results 44 are mixed” and direct readers to the Rand report that -- they fail to mention -- Edison itself commissioned and paid for. 100 This Rand report was delayed from release repeatedly only to be finally issued after Edison’s stock was bought up with public school teacher retirement funds. The ideology of corporate culture has been invoked to justify the refusal to rebuild the public schools. In the first month of 2006 State Superintendent Picard denies the interests and politics playing out in New Orleans and justifies the schools remaining unbuilt and under capacity by claiming, “This [rebuilding] is all driven by supply and demand.”101 “Turnaround Specialists” Sajan George and Bill Roberti also use the supply and demand metaphor in an interview with John Merrow. Sajan George: … The school system will have a major influence on whether this is a childless city. A lot of these kids are in good school systems in other cities. Why would you pull them out of that? But if you start building a school system that will make a difference and that is not only a good New Orleans system, good school system, but good system for the country, we won’t be childless. John Merrow: If you build it, they will come? Bill Roberti: We believe that’s right. Sajan George: That’s right. Of course, Merrow, George, and Roberti are referring to the Kevin Costner fantasy film Field of Dreams in which a man builds a baseball field in the middle of farmland resulting in the miraculous appearance of the ghosts of great dead ball players. Costner’s character hears a voice in his head saying, “If you build it, they 45 will come.” The film is a lamentation on the reduction of the dreams for the social world to the limits of economic reality of supply and demand. The film exhibits a fantasy of defying economic considerations in favor of unleashed desire. In the context of the interview, this reference is more than a little perverse, especially when the rebuilding of New Orleans is being dictated by the urban cleansing dreams of an economic and racial elite. On another level, the film is an apt neoliberal metaphor for those who want to capitalize on disaster: now that the storm has done the clear cutting, the dream of the field of economic competition can be built. At least that is the fantasy. Conclusion Public school privatization threatens the possibility for public schools to develop as places where knowledge, pedagogical authority, and experiences are taken up in relation to broader political, ethical, cultural, and material struggles informing competing claims to truth. Struggles against these ideologies and their concrete political manifestations must link matters of schooling to other domestic and foreign policies. It is incumbent upon progressive educators and cultural workers to imagine new forms of public educational projects and to organize to take back privatized educational resources for public control. Such struggles are ongoing in New Orleans. As the editors of Rethinking Schools write, “There is no silver lining to a disaster like Katrina, but where there is resistance there is hope.”102 They have taken the initiative to propose ways that educators can support groups that are fighting to rebuild public schools, stop the gentrification of communities, implement public oversight over rebuilding, and challenge the multiple 46 forms of anti-democratic apartheid, educational apartheid, but also the many forms apartheid takes, including racial, economic, employment, healthcare, housing and transportation. Organizations struggling in New Orleans include Community Labor United, Quality Education is a Civil Right, PURE, and ACORN. Readers can find crucial information from their websites as well as from groups that have gone to great lengths to highlight the social justice struggles central to Katrina: NYCORE (New York Collective of Radical Educators), rethinkingschool.org, zmag.org, commondreams.org, Teachers for Social Justice. In conjunction with activism, it is incumbent upon educators to theorize the democratic implications of schooling in disaster capitalism. As this chapter has demonstrated, the political right is aiming to subvert democratic control over public schooling in terms of policy, school structure, and model. Katrina itself can be the basis for critical lessons and a number of progressive educators are already developing such curriculum. New and more aggressive forms of taking back public institutions build on critical pedagogies. The next chapter attempts to expand the possibilities for theorizing the present political moment by detailing how the political right is using the language of “democracy promotion” to undermine democratic participation and democratic culture as part of the strategic aims of U.S. foreign policy that acts on behalf of an emergent transnational capitalist class. What emerges are startling overlaps in the ways that disaster capitalism is being used by the right for educational profiteering. 1 Orleans Parish School Board, “BGR Outlook on Orleans” available at <http://www.bgr.org>. 47 2 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <http://www.news.yahoo.com> 3 Businesses do of course exploit such underfunding of public services by promising cash in exchange for a captive market for products. See Alex Molnar, School Commercialism (New York: Routledge, 2005). 4 Holly Sklar, “Warning Tax Cuts for the Rich Harm the Nation’s Health” Znet Commentary, April 28, 2006. Available at <http://www.zmag.org> 5 Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney, Amanda Terkel, Payson Schwin and Christy Harvey, “Budget: After Katrina, More of the Same” ThinkProgress.Org, October 21, 2005. available at <http://www.americanprogressaction.org>. 6 Julian Borger, “Hurricane Aid Used ‘To Test Rightwing Social Policies’”, The Guardian/UK, September 22, 2005, available online at <http://www.commondreams.org> 7 The questions raised by Hurricane Katrina are numerous and much that is utterly central to serious inquiry is beyond the scope of this paper. But it is important to emphasize that such matters as militarized neoliberalism, systemic racism, and the disastrous results of global warming as an effect of global capitalism are as much the story of schooling in disaster as the matter of privatization of the public sector. 8 For a brilliant discussion of the spectacle of Katrina see Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006). 9 Gary Rivlin, “New Orleans Commission to Seek Overhaul of Schools and Transit” The New York Times, January 11, 2006, A1. 48 10 Sidney Blumenthal, “No One Can Say They Didn’t See it Coming”, Salon.com (August 31, 2005) available online at <http://www.salon.com>. See also, Paul Krugman, “A Can’t Do Government”, The New York Times, September, 2, 2005. 11 For two important discussions of the politics of race and hurricane Katrina see Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water (New York: Perseus, 2006) and Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006). 12 April Capochino, “More than 100 N.O. Schools Still Closed” New Orleans City Business, February, 27, 2006. Available online at <http://www.neworleanscitybusiness.com> 13 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <news.yahoo.com> 14 Clint Bolick, “Katrina’s Displaced Students” The Washington Times, September 15, 2005. Available online at http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050914-091903- 7385r.htm. 15 Karla Dial, “Emergency School Vouchers Likely for Katrina Victims” Heartland Institute School Reform News November 2005 available at <http://www.heartland.org> 16 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <http://www.news.yahoo.com> 17 People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education” November14, 2005, available at <http://www.pfaw.org> 49 18 Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans The Urban Institute, January 2006. 19 Online NewsHour, “Rebuilding New Orleans Schools” December 19, 2005 available at <www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education> 20 Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans The Urban Institute, January 2006. 21 See Kenneth J. Saltman The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). 22 Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans The Urban Institute, January 2006. 23 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <news.yahoo.com>. 24 People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education” November14, 2005 available at <http://www.pfaw.org> 25 Linda Baker makes this important point about the embedded funding implications of “choice” in the context of how No Child Left Behind allows students to choose any school, Linda Baker, “All for One, None for All” In These Times, October 24, 2005 available at <http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2336/>. 50 26 For an excellent discussion of the history of voucher debates see Jeffrey Henig, Rethinking School Choice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 27 People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education” November, 14, 2005 available at <http://www.pfaw.org> 28 See the eulogy for Walton who died in a private airplane crash in the right wing Hoover Institution published Fall 2005 issue of Education Next magazine, p. 5. It is important to mention that Walton’s multi-billion dollar inheritance was the result of Wal- marts’s spectacular growth that came not only from the entrepreneurial savvy of Sam Walton but also his commitment to union-busting, displacing the cost of healthcare onto public coffers by refusing to offer adequate health insurance to employees, the destruction of small business throughout the U.S. through monopolistic practices, and of course being a significant contributor to the vast loss of manufacturing sector work to China. See the excellent documentary film “Wal-mart: the high cost of low prices.” 29 Clint Bolick, “Katrina’s Displaced Students” The Washington Times, 9/15/05. 30 People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education” November 14, 2005. 31 The Editors, “Katrina’s Lessons”, Rethinking Schools, Fall 2005, 5. 32 Karla Dial, “Emergency School Vouchers Likely for Katrina Victims” Heartland Institute School Reform News November 2005 available at <http://www.heartland.org> 33 Karla Dial, “Emergency School Vouchers Likely for Katrina Victims” Heartland Institute School Reform News November 2005 available at <http://www.heartland.org> 51 34 People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education” 35 People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education” 36 Heartland Institute School Reform News November 2005, 9 available at <http://www.heartland.org> 37 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <news.yahoo.com> 38 George Wood, “Introduction” Many Children Left Behind edited by Deborah Meier and George Wood (Boston: Beacon, 2004), ix. 39 See U.S. Department of Education, Volume I, Frequently Asked Questions, Emergency Impact Aid for Displaced Students, January 12, 2006. 40 See U.S. Department of Education, Volume I, Frequently Asked Questions, Emergency Impact Aid for Displaced Students, January 12, 2006. 41 Press Release, “Secretary Spellings Delivers Remarks on School Choice”, For Release April 5, 2006, available at www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2006/04/04052006.html 42 Press Release, “Secretary Spellings Delivers Remarks on School Choice”, For Release April 5, 2006, available at www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2006/04/04052006.html 43 Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney, Amanda Terkel, Payson Schwin and Christy Harvey, “Katrina: Ideology over People”, ThinkProgress.Org, September 15, 2005, available online at <http://www.americanprogressaction.org> 44 Press Release, “Secretary Spellings, Gulf Coast Rebuilding Coordinator Powell Announce $1.1 Billion for Hurricane-Affected Students and Schools,” March 2, 2006. 52 45 Monty Neil, “Leaving No Child Behind: Overhauling NCLB” in Many Children Left Behind edited by Deborah Meier and George Wood (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 102-103. 46 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006. Available at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis 47 Adam Nossiter, “$29 Billion Package Buoys Hopes for Rebuilding Effort”, The New York Times, December 24, 2005, online edition. 48 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006, 14. 49 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006, 16. 50 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006, 16. 51 An exemplary case is the Metropolitan Planning Council that brings together corporations and business professionals with housing and school experts and officials nationwide to foster such plans. For detailed and scholarly study of this process see the work of Pauline Lipman such as High Stakes Education, (New York: Routledge, 2004). A number of liberal educational scholars including Richard Kahlenberg and Richard Rothstein fall prey to the logic of the urban cleansing trend by failing to situate school reform within the broader realities of neoliberal privatization and the dismantling of the public sector. Kahlenberg and Rothstein champion narrow school reform ideas such as the goal of expanding mixed income schooling. While the urban cleansing schemes I am describing might achieve some modicum of this as an incidental effect, on the whole, such projects result in the creation of new or expansion of already existing economically and racially segregated enclaves. For example, the replacement of the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago has hardly resulted in broad-based economic integration in housing and schools nor even the availability of high quality housing and schooling. It has 53 however resulted in residents moving to other poor neighborhoods to suffer the same kind of segregation that they were kicked out of. And it has resulted in the spectacular enrichment of real estate developers and lawyers. Serious wide-scale economic and racial integration projects can be achieved by the public sector directly without such initiatives wasting billions of dollars by further enriching investors. 52 Online NewsHour “Principals Challenges”, November 9, 2005. 53 While corruption in New Orleans public school system was a problem, not a single article I found discussed how chronic underfunding set within a web of broader conditions of poverty and social problems would inevitably inform administrative practices. One reason that the corruption at a business such as HealthSouth or Enron was so incomparably vaster than the public schools of New Orleans might have to do with the values institutionalized in each site. When profit becomes the prime motivator from which all other consideration follow, corruption is likely to be endemic. In my study of The Edison Schools I found the ceaseless push for high test scores to get investor capital resulted in pervasive testing corruption and misreporting of accounting and misreporting of numbers of school contracts and the use of paid public relations to create the appearance of popular support for the beleaguered company, etc. 54 <http://www.sourcewatch.org> 55 D.J. Wilson, “Demolition Man” The Riverfront Times, July 9, 2003. 56 D.J. Wilson, “Demolition Man” The Riverfront Times, July 9, 2003. 57 Online NewsHour “New Orleans Schools Before and After Katrina” November 1, 2005 available at <http://www.pbs.org> 54 58 April Capochino, “More than 100 N.O. Schools Still Closed” New Orleans City Business, February 27, 2006. 59 See Kenneth J. Saltman, The Edison Schools (New York: Routledge, 2005). 60 Kevin McCoy, “Alaska Firm Gets Gulf Rebuilding Job” USA Today, November 14, 2005. 61 The Editors, “Accountability at All Levels” The Louisiana Weekly, November 14, 2005. 62 Kevin McCoy, “Alaska Firm Gets Gulf Rebuilding Job” USA Today, November 14, 2005 available at <http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2005-09-29- katrina-contract-usat_x.htm.> 63 Eric Lipton, “No-Bid Contract to Replace Schools After Katrina Is Faulted” The New York Times, November 11, 2005, A1. 64 Eric Lipton, “No-Bid Contract to Replace Schools After Katrina Is Faulted” The New York Times, November 11, 2005, A1. 65 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006,12 66 Gary Rivlin, “Anger Meets New Orleans Renewal Plan” The New York Times, January 12, 2006, A18. 67 Gary Rivlin, “Anger Meets New Orleans Renewal Plan” The New York Times, January 12, 2006, A18. 68 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006, p.18 69 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006, p.18 70 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <news.yahoo.com>. 55 71 Mike Davis, “Who is Killing New Orleans?” The Nation April 10, 2006, 18 72 “Crisis Drives Reinvention of New Orleans’ Troubled Schools”, USA Today, March 6, 2006, 12a. 73 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews http://www.news.yahoo.com. 74 Brian Riedlinger quoted in Charter Schools News Connection March 14,2006 available at http://www.uscharterschools.org. 75 “Crisis Drives Reinvention of New Orleans’ Troubled Schools”, USA Today, March, 6, 2006, 12a. 76 “Crisis Drives Reinvention of New Orleans’ Troubled Schools”, USA Today, March, 6, 2006 , 12a. 77 Gary Rivlin, “New Orleans Commission to Seek Overhaul of Schools and Transit”, The New York Times, January 11, 2006, A1. 78 Online NewsHour, “Rebuilding New Orleans Schools” December 19, 2005 available at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education. 79 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <news.yahoo.com> 80 Democracy Now!, “New Orleans Residents and Evacuees Blast State of Schools, Housing, Jobs at Mayoral Forum” Monday, April 10, 2006 available at <http://www.democracynow.org>. 81 Democracy Now!, “New Orleans Residents and Evacuees Blast State of Schools, Housing, Jobs at Mayoral Forum” Monday, April 10, 2006 available at <http://www.democracynow.org>. 56 82 See for example Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews <news.yahoo.com> . Cohen participates in the bashing of the public schools while denying White supremacy writing, “But for many New Orleans residents almost anything is better than the corruption-ridden, underperforming public school system that had long ago pushed middle-class, mostly white parents into paying for private education, deepening the city’s racial divide.” What is important here is the inversion of agency. Cohen mistakenly attributes the power and decisionmaking over public school priorities to those with the least power and denies the systemic racism that drives white flight from schools. 83 Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (New York: Economic Policy Institute Teachers College Press, 2005). 84 See for example, Eric Rofes and Lisa Stulberg (editors) The Emancipatory Promise of Charter Schools (New York: SUNY Press, 2004). 85 Amy Stuart Wells, Where Charter School Policy Fails: the Problems of Accountability and Equity (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), 178. 86 Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews 87 John Pope, “Charter Schools Get Royal Treatment from Krewe”, The Times-Picayune, February 27, 2006. Online edition. 88 John Pope, “Charter Schools Get Royal Treatment from Krewe”, The Times-Picayune, February 27, 2006. Online edition. 57 89 For an excellent discussion of the political tendencies of the corporation see Joel Bakan, The Corporation (New York: Free Press, 2004), in particular chapter 4 “Democracy, Ltd.”. 90 Online NewsHour, “Rebuilding New Orleans Schools” December 19, 2005 available at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education. 91 Kenneth J. Saltman The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). 92 It is important to note here that the Hoover Institution is somewhat of a dubious source on the topic of The Edison Schools as it counts as a fellow John Chubb who heads the company. At the American Eduational Research Association annual meeting in 2006, Chubb served on a Hoover panel with Eric Hanuschek among others. I asked Chubb if he thought there was “an accountability problem” with him claiming to be a neutral and objective educational researcher and yet getting paid by Edison. He replied that who pays him has nothing to do with his research and that his research “stands on its own.” 93 Jessica L. Tonn, “New Orleans Charter Network Gets Underway” Education Week, January, 18, 2006, Vol.25, issue 19, p.1-16, 2p,2c. 94 Jessica L. Tonn, “New Orleans Charter Network Gets Underway” Education Week, January, 18, 2006, Vol.25, issue 19, p.1-16, 2p,2c. 95 Jessica L. Tonn, “New Orleans Charter Network Gets Underway” Education Week, January, 18, 2006, Vol.25, issue 19, p.1-16, 2p,2c. 96 Catherine Gewertz, “New Orleans Panel Rethinks School System” Education Week January, 11, 2006, V25i18, 5-12. 58 97 Catherine Gewertz, “New Orleans Panel Rethinks School System” Education Week January, 11, 2006, V25i18, 5-12. 98 Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans The Urban Institute, January 2006. 99 Kenneth J. Saltman The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). 100 Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans The Urban Institute, January 2006, 12. 101 Steve Ritea, “La. Won’t Run N.O. Schools by Itself” The Times-Picayune, January 3, 2006. 102 The Editors, “Katrina’s Lessons”, Rethinking Schools, Fall 2005, 5.