Public Input, Private Decisions: How Community Stakeholders Resist Privatized Governance in New Orleans's All-Charter School District

• In Event: Community-Based Research as Consequential Research

Abstract

The first paper, proposed by Amanda Lu, is titled Public Input, Private Decisions - How Community Stakeholders Resist Privatized Governance in New Orleans’ All-Charter School District, focuses on the the current state of the New Orleans Public School System since Hurricane Katrina. The school district has been fully privatized into an all-charter school district through the creation of the Recovery School District, a state-takeover district containing any schools performing below the state-average, and the shrinking of the governing capacity of the traditional public school district. Though there is still a democratically elected school board in New Orleans, much of the consequential decisions involving school operations, human capital, and curriculum are given to private, self-appointed governing boards of charter operators. Charter board members are racially unrepresentative of the public school population of New Orleans schools, which is overwhelmingly Black and economically disadvantaged, and come from professional backgrounds in business and law (Henry, 2019; Lay, 2022). In practice, this representational mismatch has limited Black political spaces of consequence for public education in New Orleans (Lay, 2022; Morel 2018).
Students are assigned to schools through a centralized enrollment system in which families rank their preferences and a market algorithm efficiently allocates children to schools. More specifically to OPSB, the decoupling of urban geography and schools has left Orleans Parish School Board members less democratically accountable to the families who send their children to schools in a particular member’s district. For instance, if a family lives in New Orleans East and sends their children to a school on the West Bank, they cannot vote in the election that decides the board member which represents their child’s school.
By asking when and how community input can be of consequence in decisions made by decision makers who are not able to be held democratically accountable by a ballot box, this paper develops a theory of how community members can affect the decisions made by organizational bodies that govern public education in highly privatized and decentralized educational contexts. Drawing from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana and over 100 hours of observations of public meetings which include charter board meetings in New Orleans, OPSB Meetings, and Louisiana state senate education committee meetings, this paper examines the political dynamics of public comment in these various governance spaces. The author gives specific analytic attention to how public comment is structured, received, and responded to in each of these spaces, and explain how these structures may allow for public comment to be consequential in decisions made by each governing body. This study contributes to a budding literature on the promising democratic possibilities (Collins, 2019) and growing democratic impossibilities in education governance spaces for communities of color that are increasingly privatized and decentralized (Sparks, 2022).

Author

• Amanda Lu, Stanford University
  Presenting Author