“Poking Holes in Your Program”: Educational Enclosures in the New Orleans Recovery School District

• In Event: New Orleans as Ground Zero for Remedy and Repair: Research Advances Interrogating the Post-Katrina Reform Model

Abstract

While researchers have found mixed results regarding school choice effectiveness (Jabbar et al., 2022; Larsen, 2020; McEachin et al., 2016), policymakers continue to experiment with free-market reforms, often in predominantly Black communities. Proponents and opponents of school choice have yet to consider enclosures, or how regional power blocs (i.e., the plantation bloc) implement physical, economic, political, social, and ideological barriers to extract assets and maximize profit (Woods, 1998). In this paper, I merge conversations about educational marketplaces with those about the plantation’s ongoing presence (Hartman, 1997; Summers, 2019; Woods, 1998) by investigating the country’s first all-charter structure in New Orleans. As such, this paper asks: How did various constituents in the Recovery School District’s (RSDs) “lowest-performing” high schools narrate their experiences with closure and charter restart?

This case study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) comes from two larger ethnographic studies that considered various constituents’ (alums, former parents, students, and educators) perspectives about the charter school takeover, restart, and closure of majority Black high schools. Data collection included open-ended and semi-structured interviews with 25 participants, including local, African American veteran educators (principals, guidance counselors, teachers) and novice white teachers. By working with a former veteran school principal and community groups, I identified participants to interview. Data collection also included over a hundred documents, including field notes and transcripts from local, state, and charter school board meetings, community meetings, and events. Analysis began with the more extensive studies’ research questions and continued throughout the research process. Using NVivo software, categories, themes, properties, and tentative hypotheses were developed through constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). In subsequent coding cycles, broader analytic codes were developed that included inductive and conceptual categories derived from the theoretical frames that informed the study (Saldaña & Omasta, 2016).

Findings illuminate how majority Black public schools function both symbolically and materially as the antithesis of choice. Enclosures provide insight into the notion of “poking holes,” an evolving technology that participants repeatedly referred to during interviews. Many participants explained that it was a larger unspoken process. Teachers who worked in multiple schools during charter restart processes narrated how “poking holes” adapted to different contexts, but more importantly, how they took steps both individually and collectively to undo its impact. Drawing from documents, photographs, and open-ended interviews, I examine multiple manifestations of its application, including (a) teacher and principal churn, (b) programmatic churn, and (c) resource extraction.
Departing from case studies about individual school-level reforms (such as closures) or turnaround districts this paper investigates how the “lowest performing” schools function as an essential component of structural reforms. It suggests that “poking holes” is part of a larger antiblack process where black public high schools are positioned in a larger representational system ( i.e., Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Wynter, 1992) that justifies marketplace reform. Finally, it asks: How has “poking holes” influenced the documentation, codification, and dissemination of the New Orleans model?

Author

• Elizabeth K. Jeffers, University of New Orleans