Right Place, Right Time: The Democratic Challenges of Highly Privatized and Decentralized Education Governance

• In Event: Complex Contestation: Understanding the Structures and Actors that Manage Dissent in the U.S. K-12 Political Landscape

Abstract

Scholars have re-emerged divided on whether school boards are a fundamentally flawed form of democratic governance (Kogan, 2022) or institutions to be refined and improved (White et al, 2023). The proposed replacements to school boards are often a mix of governance structures that introduce more market-oriented, privatized, and decentralized state configurations into our democratic society. The modern New Orleans school system, which is composed entirely of charter schools, is a system that has implemented many of these ideas. There is no residential assignment of schools; parents instead must choose charter schools for their children through a centralized enrollment system. A private entity operates every publicly-funded school in New Orleans under contract with the school district or state board of education. Though New Orleans has a democratically elected school board, charter school boards in the city do the vast majority of decision-making about school operations and the allocation of public funds towards education.
To understand the civic and democratic consequences of this restructuring, this paper examines the potential for the formation of publics in the New Orleans all-charter school district, an extreme both in both privatization and decentralization in the American context. I frame instances of organized uses of public voice in school governance spaces around a particular issue as a public (Dewey & Rogers, 2012).
Leveraging over 200 hours of ethnographic observations of education governance meetings across 67 meetings, 20 qualitative interviews, and a corpus of over 500 education governance documents, I examine the practical realities of decentralization and privatization in relation to the democratic potential of publics. I ask: What facilitates or inhibits the formation of publics in highly privatized and decentralized state arrangements? Within my analysis, I also pay special attention to issues of race and political power. The New Orleans charter reforms are built on a foundation of racialized events, including mass school closures within Black neighborhoods (Buras, 2011; Dixson et al., 2015), the firing and replacement of Black teachers (Lincove et al., 2017; Tompkins, 2019), and the dispersal of power from a elected school board into non-publicly accountable charter school boards (Lay & Bauman, 2019; Lay, 2022).
I find that there are logistical challenges for publics to be in the right place at the right time to influence policy decisions. This is particularly salient for counter publics who are often figuring out how to insert themselves from the political periphery. Transparency practices are often in full compliance with public meeting laws, but they do not provide adequate structures for publics to form and weigh in on relevant policy decisions. Publics can still be consequential in this all-charter system if they draw from social ties developed from the previous centralized school system or if they demand more transparency from public bodies. However, the most powerful and organized public I observe is the “status quo” public that organizes in response to threats to the current structure of the all-charter system. Members of this public are charter system leaders who undermine the formation of other publics who might challenge their power.

Author

• Amanda Lu, Georgetown Public Policy Institute