Integrationists vs. Choice Advocates in New Orleans

First, thanks to Scott for noting my article attempting to connect the post-Katrina reconfiguration of New Orleans schools to the post-Brown efforts in New Orleans 40 years prior.  Scott humbly failed to mention his own article that was part of the same presentation in New Orleans in January – I am told it will be posted in the near future, so stay tuned. 

Part of what my article attempts to do is place post-Katrina New Orleans in the broader narrative of efforts to deliver more equitable quality educational opportunities for African American students.  If one starts at Brown, that narrative begins with efforts at integration and is currently being dominated by efforts at increasing school choice, particularly through charter schools.  Where integration was about ensuring better educational opportunities for African American students by dismantling racially-identifiable schools, then choice is about ensuring better opportunities for African American students by dismantling failing schools.  

New Orleans represents an opportunity for choicers (I know it sounds a bit too much like “birthers” but it rolls so much more smoothly than “choice advocates”) to seize the flag of equal educational opportunity by implementing widespread choice (currently, more than 60% of students are in charter schools; nearly all schools in the district have district-wide open enrollment) in a largely African American district.  The recognition of this reality is apparent in the vehemence with which integrationists are fighting the post-Katrina New Orleans model. 

This summer, the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota and the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane engaged in a colorful, almost incendiary back-and-forth about the ability of the post-Katrina model to deliver for African American students.  Both seek to solve the same problem, but they could hardly disagree more about how to do so. 

[Links to the IRP Report - The State of Public Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans: The Challenge of Creating Equal Opportunity and the Cowen Institute’s Response] 

In a nutshell, IRP criticizes the post-Katrina model as creating a separate and unequal tiered (and segregated) system of schools.  Specifically, the report criticizes the growing charter school sector for skimming the best students through a variety of practices.  IRP advocates for regionalizing the school system (i.e., erasing district lines among city and suburban districts) and increasing regional magnet options in order to provide more potential racial integration and broader choices for all.  Using IRP’s own words, “When charter schools are the exclusive instrument of school choice in segregated urban districts such as New Orleans, school choice produces substantial inequalities among public school students.” 

The Cowen Institute’s response is harsh, critiquing the IRP analysis as “often incorrect, selective, and misleading.”  It notes that racial segregation in New Orleans schools predates Katrina, that charter schools were proposed to replace a model that had been failing educationally prior to the storm, and that the IRP’s proposed solutions, though not objectionable, are politically unfeasible or unlikely to achieve the desired results. 

Although I certainly have my own opinions on this, what I find most fascinating is the vigor with which two institutions, both arguing on behalf of the same basic endgoal, are fighting this fight.  Reading the documents, the animosity among these two is palpable.  This turf war over the future of reform creating equal educational opportunities is unfolding right before our eyes within a single district.