Privatizing Education in New Orleans and Liberia: The Case of Two Colonies

• In Event: 41.030 - The Politics of Neoliberal Educational Policies and Equal Educational Opportunity: Empirical and Conceptual Examinations

Abstract

A number of researchers have examined the prominence and effects of neoliberal education reforms on schools and communities serving sizeable Black populations throughout the United States. Such reforms are based on claims that market rationality and privatization will make public schooling more effective and responsive to the needs of black students and their families. These educational reforms, like the investment in ideas which spread black vocational education from the American South to regions of West Africa in the early 20th century also have broader ideological, political, and economic implications (Anderson, 1988; Givens, 2015 Watkins, 2001; Zimmerman, 2012). Despite the controversy surrounding large-scale privatization efforts of districts across the United States (Scott, 2009), these models are being adopted and transported to Black educational contexts abroad. This comparative, conceptual analysis draws on a black colonial educational framework (Watkins, 2001; Zimmerman, 2012) to explore how the global reach of neoliberal reforms are reflective of long-lasting legacies of Black educational and colonial education.

Drawing from primary documents and a review of the empirical and theoretical literature, we apply this framework to the examination of two cases: 1) The privatization of schools in New Orleans Louisiana through charter management organizations following Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and, 2) Liberia’s newly announced “Partnership Schools in Liberia” plan to outsource the country’s entire educational system to a private for-profit American company (Mungai, 2016). The total privatization of the Liberia’s education, which is currently in its pilot stage, emerges from the shadows of a cataclysmic 14 year-long civil war, and more recently, a catastrophic Ebola outbreak from which the country is still reeling. The authors suggest that destruction provides the conduit for the possibility of this “ethno-class” conception of education (Wynter, 2005) to materialize and conclude that New Orleans and Liberia present the opportunity to examine how privatizing Black public education, in the United States and abroad, are constitutive of a global neoliberal agenda, which continues the persistence of the long standing colonial political economy (Zimmerman, 2012).

Authors

• Mahasan Violet Chaney, University of California - Berkeley

• Michael Myers, University of California - Berkeley