Post Katrina Educational Policy as Racialized Innovation: Replicating the Institutionalization of Black Dispossession

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

Abstract

The intimacy of power, epistemology, and reform often work to narrowly confine questions of educational policy to test outcomes. In particular, despite the mixed evidence of effectiveness on reforms such as charters and state takeovers (e.g., Epple et al., 2016; Schueler & Bleiberg, 2022), how do we make sense of the resilience of reforms? As scholarship demonstrates that state takeovers do not necessarily produce meaningful differences in outcomes (Schueler & Bleiberg, 2022) and are applied in Black districts more often and more punitively, when compared to similarly performing white districts (Morel, 2018), how reforms are interpreted is critical. This case study of Memphis, Tennessee, examines the sunsetting of a state takeover agency in a majority Black city following the post-Katrina educational model, and illuminates implications for public education broadly.

Scholars demonstrate parallels between the education reforms in New Orleans and Memphis in the reproduction of racialized power (Anderson & Dixson, 2016). This is important as Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) formalized its relationship with Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD) in a federal Investing in Innovation replication grant in 2010 (Mason & Reckhow, 2017). In this study, I examine how post-Katrina educational policies reshaped Black political power in another Black southern city where local racial representation existed. This study asks: How is Black political power reshaped by state-driven charter expansion? I focus on the critical moment of the state agency’s sunsetting, mandated by the state legislature in 2020, and deliberations on the contentious past and future of state-authorized charter schools.

Drawing from interviews, observations, and document analysis, this case study traces the evolution of state authority and private management in Memphis, investigating the stakes of post-Katrina policies when imported to other locales. Observations of public meetings traced the deliberation processes on plans for state approved charters in the aftermath of the sunsetting. I reviewed, coded, and analyzed governmental reports, policy documents, and charter applications to examine the composition of authorized charters and trace their post-sunset plans. Over 40 semi-structured interviews provide insight into how various actors navigated shifting governing arrangements between state, local, and private managers.

Findings show that in the wake of declining public legitimacy of state takeover agency, partly based on then-emergent empirical evidence on effectiveness in Memphis (e.g., Zimmer et al., 2017), the state agency was reconstituted as an appointed commission. This protracted “state of exception” (Wang, 2018) illuminates how the new commission institutionalized state intervention in the district through ongoing authorizing authority. This study maps the composition of the landscape of state authorized charters (founder background, board composition, school model), and highlights disparate patterns when compared to locally authorized charters (more national operators and less racial representation in founder and boards in state approvals). While Memphis did not evolve into a complete charter district like New Orleans, the path to institutionalizing state authority (and the resulting charter landscape) reflect a significant parallel in reshaping Black political power. This study demonstrates how post-Katrina reforms take shape in other contexts, and implications for Black people’s political power over education and democracy.

Author

• Rachel E. Williams, University of Wisconsin - Madison