Description
Book SynopsisThe Coup D'état of the New Orleans Public Schools explores and criticizes the contemporary educational reforms of the New Orleans public school system. The New Orleans education reforms implemented after Hurricane Katrina, using the corporate model approach, have been an academic failure with charter operators making millions of dollars while reestablishing a segregated school system based on race and classall in the name of school reform. Despite the claims of unprecedented academic success the educational reforms have been a dismal failure academically and operationally, and have resurrected equity and access issues. Equally as disturbing the reforms firmly have re-established a tiered public school system that segregates students by race and class. The Coup D'état of the New Orleans Public Schools puts the corporate education reform movement in its proper context, which is to create a new twenty-first century model for turning around urban public school districts
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“Illegal. Fraudulent. Criminal. Unconstitutional. These words merely understate the dehumanizing abuses the families, children and educators in New Orleans are continuing to fight back against. When I lived there and worked at the University of New Orleans, in close partnership with the public schools, I was inspired by the rich cultural heritage preserved and passed on in neighborhood institutions, including the city schools. What has been done to the schools and neighborhoods in this city is nothing short of war—not only against the Black community but also against freedom and democracy. It is my fervent hope that in the tradition of David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, Raynard Sanders’s meticulously researched and courageous eye-witness testimony, The Coup D’état of the New Orleans Public Schools, will also serve as a radicalizing wake-up call to those of us who cherish liberation and believe in defending human freedom. Let us all say with the people of New Orleans: ‘We won’t bow down. We don’t know how.’”—Joyce E. King, Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership, Georgia State University
“Raynard Sanders provides a vivid account of how the educational ‘Miracle in New Orleans’ following Hurricane Katrina has created an educational marketplace that offers ‘choice’ to the most advantaged students and a revolving door of failing schools to the least advantaged, while re-segregating the city even more starkly than before. Sanders meticulously outlines the equity and access issues that have emerged in a marketplace that provides only the illusion of school choice to many families who have witnessed the destruction of neighborhood schools that were once the hub of their communities. The Coup D’état of the New Orleans Public Schools is critically important reading for those who care about the future of public education and the fight for equal rights in American society.”—Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor Emeritus, Stanford University and President, Learning Policy Institute
“The struggle over the fate and future of public education has played out with notable intensity in New Orleans, Louisiana, never more significantly than in recent years as NOLA has become—post-Hurricane Katrina—the laboratory for a thoroughgoing corporate takeover of public education. In this compelling account the educator/activist/scholar Raynard Sanders documents the treacherous alliance that formed between old-school white supremacists and modern-day corporate raiders eager to get their grasping hands on what they perversely perceive as the ‘public education market.’ The Coup D’état of the New Orleans Public Schools illustrates the case in compelling detail, and shows us precisely what’s at stake: education as a basic human right versus schooling as a product for sale in the marketplace; democracy as a vital force for human development or the veritable erasure of the public; a step forward in the abiding and courageous press of Black parents for a full and decent education for their children as a pathway to authentic equality versus a further continuance of the shameful American tradition of apartheid schooling. This is a necessary book.”—William Ayers, Author of several books on education including Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World, To Teach, and Teaching Toward Freedom
“Raynard Sanders follows the trail of money to show how a group of white community-and-political leaders snatched control of the public schools from the citizens of New Orleans. They turned the schools over to profit-driven ‘reformers’ who made it nearly impossible for parents to participate in any meaningful way in their children’s schools, and they discarded a largely African American work force—eerily reminiscent of what happened in New Orleans following Reconstruction. Sanders peers behind the curtain of the ‘New Orleans Miracle,’ and what he shows us is not pretty.”—Al Kennedy, Historian and Author of Chord Changes on the Chalkboard: How Public School Teachers Shaped Jazz and the Music of New Orleans
Table of Contents
Foreword – Acknowledgments – The Coup D’état – Privatizing Public Education: New Orleans the Perfect Place – Intended and Unintended Consequences: The Assault – School Communities Disenfranchised and Destroyed – The New Orleans Public School Gold Rush – Old Lessons Learned in New Orleans – Glossary – Appendix A: Picard Letter to the Department of Education – Appendix B: Act No. 35 – Appendix C: Charter School Grant Program Amounts Allocated to Charter Schools – Appendix D: Louisiana’s 7th Grade Cohort Graduation Rate – Appendix E: Reasons for Judgement, Eddy Oliver versus Orleans Parish School Board – Appendix F: Carver Civil Rights Complaint – Appendix G: Civil Rights Complaint on School – Appendix H: Data Sharing Agreement – Appendix I: Act No. 91 – Index.
