Black Teachers, the Culture They Created in New Orleans, and the Threat of School Closures

• In Event: “Slum Life Is Squalid”: Challenging Urban Renewal Through Critical Race Place-Based Research in Historic Schools/Communities

Abstract

This presenter spotlights the tireless work of Black teachers and the meaningful culture they built in a historic New Orleans school, one of countless public schools now part of a school closing crisis in cities nationwide. Time and again, teachers of color have been blamed for every conceivable wrong in urban schools, a tactic that ignores the history of racism and bolsters the expansion of charter schools that lack community roots. In this rare history of a neighborhood school ultimately closed and replaced by charter schools, the author challenges the vacuous narrative of “failure” with real evidence. Critical race theories and methods that prioritize history and counter-storytelling, challenge majoritarian notions of Black cultural deficiency, and center racial-spatial analysis guided the research.

Through more than thirty oral histories with students and teachers that span a half century (1958-2005), and related archival material, the author chronicles the rich legacy of George Washington Carver Senior High School, opened in 1958 as white policymakers funded new Black schools to curtail racial integration. Located near the Desire Housing Project on the city’s geographic margin and poorly resourced over subsequent decades, Carver was nonetheless a place where teachers fostered a culture of self-determination, high achievement, and critical consciousness of racism. Select aspects of this culture are examined through firsthand stories, demonstrating Black teachers’ invaluable and often unrecognized contributions.

This paper does more than chronicle the cultural legacy of the historic Carver, however. It is likewise a devastating account of Carver’s fate under school reforms that promised to assist Black communities in New Orleans with “recovery” and “renewal.” Carver’s reopening under state authority, its subsequent phase-out and closure, and the takeover of Carver’s namesake and campus by a charter school network with novice teachers and a harsh disciplinary culture are thus briefly explored based on fieldnotes, documents, and interviews with thirty charter school students and families. The culture of the historic Carver and the charter schools that followed are strikingly different and complicate dominant narratives that current school reforms advance the interests of Black communities.

Remembering Carver’s legacy is critical. This place-based history challenges charter advocates’ decontextualized rhetoric that public schools like Carver are “failing” and devoid of educational worth, while spotlighting the value of Black educational traditions—and the teachers who created and sustained them. In compelling detail, the stakes of school closings are made crystal clear and illuminate why the assault on veteran teachers, and the school communities they have fostered, is the civil rights issue of our era.

Author

• Kristen L. Buras, Urban South Grassroots Research Collective