Entrepreneurial Networks and Charter School Reform in New Orleans: Researching the Ecology of Racial-Spatial Power

• In Event: Elite Policy Networks and the Politics of Education Reform: Researching the Social Geography of Power

Abstract

The second presenter develops a case study of charter school reform in New Orleans and illuminates the role of entrepreneurial networks at the local, state, and national levels since 2005. Over the past decade, in fact, New Orleans has become the premier site of urban education experimentation and privatization, with the city's charter school movement supported by human and financial resources of venture philanthropists—some of the same ones highlighted by the first presenter. Focusing on New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), a charter school and human capital incubator, lines of influence and power are charted throughout the social network in which NSNO is embedded. Drawing on critical race theory and critical theories of political economy, the accumulative interests of elite actors and organizations are revealed. Critical analysis of network relationships is based on methods discussed by Weaver-Hightower (2008) and Ball and Junemann (2012), including field notes, interviews, document analysis, and extensive internet searches of relevant actors and entities. Equally important, the efforts of grassroots educational groups in New Orleans—ones with roots in the city's black working-class communities—to challenge such reform are highlighted, including the work of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective; firsthand testimony and counter-stories are central here. Finally, this research illuminates how the so-called New Orleans model of school reform has been at the center of policy borrowing not only in urban centers throughout the United States, but in nations as diverse as England and Haiti.

Author

• Kristen L. Buras, Georgia State University