Since reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (chapter 20, especially) I’ve been thinking about what happened to New Orleans after Katrina. Klein tells how the disaster was a business opportunity for contractors who bulldozed homes and privatized long-neglected public schools. This story, or rather the version of it that would be told by people who’ve been “displaced,” is not something that I’ve heard much about - maybe because I live so far away from there. Or maybe it’s because nobody’s talking about it anymore.

Dday’s post, It’s Time to Talk About Katrina, got me started looking around at stories about what happened, and what’s happening now. Dday announced the screening of a film called Trouble the Water that opens August 22, and after watching the trailer, I really want to see it. It’s not a perspective you’d find in the mainstream media, which pays more attention to what the power brokers have to say.

For instance, Paul Tough wrote a piece called A Teachable Moment published in the NYT Magazine a couple of days ago. Tough’s article tells about the major players in the New Orleans Public Schools, which now run a smorgasbord of publicly funded, privately managed charter schools including an entity called the Recovery School District, dedicated to catching the spillover from the more selective charters, and in effect offering “schools of last resort” to kids who don’t have the skills or the pull to find anything better. Tough acknowledges critics who claim this tiered system recreates the same inequalities that existed prior to the storm, but he brushes them off with the reassurances of Supt. Paul Vallas, who believes that “successful schools can be left alone to do their own thing, while failing schools are subject to increasingly active levels of, first, support and then control.” Not that control is a bad thing, but we should think about who is doing the controlling.

From the Cost of Doing Business Department: Just three months after Katrina, Milton Friedman published an article called The Promise of Vouchers in which he said:

Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.

Friedman believed, with religious conviction, that market forces would produce the greatest social good. He advocated vouchers as a way to stimulate competition between schools, and claimed they “would be a move to a bottom-up organization, which has proved so successful in the rest of our society.” But successful for who? I ask.

Ralph Adamo, a journalist and teacher living in New Orleans who was awarded an OSI Katrina Media Fellowship, calls the post-Katrina school reforms a Failed Education Experiment.

…one has to ask where on earth the proponents of a “market-driven” approach to public education got the idea that anything the public sector could do, the private sector could do better. Did they get it from the sterling job private hospital corporations and insurance companies have done to assure that all Americans have access to adequate medical care? Did they get it watching the delivery of privately contracted services in Iraq or in post-Katrina New Orleans — two places where any goods or services might cost a hundred times their actual value (sold by the private sector to government) and still not function correctly?

Adamo has another excellent article, Squeezing Public Education, in which he lays out the ideological foundation of the scheme to siphon tax dollars into the hands of charter operators in New Orleans.

The great experiment had begun. With seat-of-the-pants planning, with no community input, and against the objection of a smattering of political and social leaders, the state, Alvarez and Marsal, and the cast of the Greater New Orleans Education Foundation (working under new and different organizational names) brought us a new dawn of all charter schools all the time. Or that was the plan, abetted by the national charter school movement; right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation; and the libertarian or “market-liberal” Cato Institute, one of whose members crowed at a public forum in February, “We got rid of the school board! Anyone interested in market-driven education should be watching New Orleans.” Indeed. A flood of corporate foundation money poured in to help the representatives of the (market-driven) movement to get their schools chartered and staffed with a whole new kind of teacher (that is, young, inexperienced, and from somewhere else).

Is this what Friedman meant by a “bottom-up organization?” Whatever it was, it wasn’t ready for the return of thousands of students in the fall of 2006. What the Recovery School District lacked in supplies and teachers, they compensated by hiring extra security guards - as many as one for every 37 students.

And the story doesn’t stop with schools. Housing, as you may imagine, is a huge problem, or opportunity, depending on how you look at it. There’s a story about Karen Gadbois, a New Orleans blogger who uncovered discrepancies in the city’s records concerning contracted repair work that was paid for, but never done. In some cases, the “repaired” houses had been demolished at government expense!

Other stuff worth looking at:

Dismantling a Community - testimonies from students along with a chronology of events from Spring 2005 to Fall 2006.


Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster - a video about the long-term effects of Katrina across the Gulf.

Voices from the Gulf

Bill Quigley’s, “Reports on New Orleans’ Children Fighting for the Right to Learn” (Part I) and (Part II) - In Part II Quigley says that “A real positive outcome would be if the experiment could translate the advantages of the top half of the selective schools into success for the rest of the public school children as well. There is little evidence of that happening at this time.”

It’s a damn shame.

When the Levee Breaks