A Legacy That Can’t Be Chartered: What We Stand to Lose in Closing Historic Schools

• In Event: Education Policies, Market-Based Discourses, and the Black Radical Imagination: Why Envisioning Matters for Race, Place, and Justice

Abstract

The third paper, “A Legacy That Can’t Be Chartered: What We Stand to Lose in Closing Historic Schools,” centers on changes wrought by market-based school reform in New Orleans over the past two decades. In cities nationwide, closure of historic public schools and subsequent charter school expansion have been accompanied by the mass firing of veteran teachers of color (Author, 2015; Sanders, Stovall, & White, 2018). In New Orleans, 7,500 veteran teachers and support staff were terminated en masse after Hurricane Katrina in 2005—most of them African American. This had devastating consequences for students, school culture, and Black education (Author, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2024; Author et al., 2010; Dixson et al., 2013).

This researcher draws on oral histories with past students and teachers at George Washington Carver Senior High School in New Orleans, a historic Black public school in the city's 9th Ward, to illuminate a robust school culture shaped by dynamics race, place, and the struggle for equity. In addition to oral history testimony, material from the Orleans Parish School Board archive and the personal collections of Carver community members inform the analysis. To reveal changes over time, qualitative interviews with students at the “No Excuses” charter school network that replaced historic Carver, and associated documents, are comparatively analyzed in relation to school culture. The differences are striking and shared through the critical race method of counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2009).

Opening in 1958 near the Desire Housing Project, Carver educated generations of youth, fostering a remarkably strong sense of identity among community members; to be a "Carver Ram" meant lifelong access to an enriching school culture. Veteran teachers worked intimately with students, building a culture of achievement and community of care. Notably, despite a long history of inequitable treatment of Black public schools by white policymakers (DeVore & Logsdon, 1991; Medley, 2003), Carver developed an extensive array of curricular and extracurricular offerings, and community-building traditions, that promoted student success. Further, teachers exhibited a dual commitment to academic content as well as the development of civic character in the context of racism. Ultimately, Carver is revealed as an intergenerational tradition of educational excellence rooted in New Orleans' culture and history, particularly the Afro-Creole-inflected struggle for Black self-determination (Blassingame, 1973; Desdunes, 1973). Community members attest to culturally and geographically situated, anti-racist pedagogies (see also Author 2013, 2015; Author et al., 2010; McKittrick & Woods, 2007).

After Katrina, Carver was reopened under the Recovery School District and ultimately closed (Author, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015). Schools in the Collegiate Academies charter network, operated by white entrepreneurs, adopted Carver's name, but not the elements of liberation education embodied in its culture. Collegiate instead embraced a disciplinary "No Excuses" model, which the paper compares to historic Carver. The glaring betrayal of the legacy nurtured by Black teachers and students of the historic Carver, and other longstanding public schools, must be challenged (Author, 2024). Carver’s educational traditions are thus invoked as indigenous, place-based alternatives to white supremacist, market-based approaches to education reform now.

Author

• Kristen L. Buras, Urban South Grassroots Research Collective