Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften The Coup D’état of the New Orleans Public Schools: Money, Power, and the Illegal Takeover of a Public School System: 14 (Education and Struggle: ... and the Political Production of Meaning)

The Coup D'état of the New Orleans Public Schools explores and criticizes the contemporary educational reforms of the New Orleans public school system. The New Orleans education reforms implemented after Hurricane Katrina, using the corporate model approach, have been an academic failure with charter operators making millions of dollars while reestablishing a segregated school system based on race and class-all in the name of school reform. Despite the claims of unprecedented academic success the educational reforms have been a dismal failure academically and operationally, and have resurrected equity and access issues. Equally as disturbing the reforms firmly have re-established a tiered public school system that segregates students by race and class. The Coup D'état of the New Orleans Public Schools puts the corporate education reform movement in its proper context, which is to create a new twenty-first century model for turning around urban public school districts in the United States. This book reveals what really happened pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina that contributed to the state takeover of public schools in New Orleans. This story is told through the eyes of parents, students, activists, political leaders, and Orleans Parish School Board members and employees who have been largely ignored. It also includes an analysis of the author's personal experience of almost forty years in New Orleans public schools as a teacher, principal, and college professor. Review "Illegal. Fraudulent. Criminal. Unconstitutional. These words merely understate the dehumanizing abuses the families, children and educators in New Orleans are continuing to fight back against. When I lived there and worked at the University of New Orleans, in close partnership with the public schools, I was inspired by the rich cultural heritage preserved and passed on in neighborhood institutions, including the city schools. What has been done to the schools and neighborhoods in this city is nothing short of war--not only against the Black community but also against freedom and democracy. It is my fervent hope that in the tradition of David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, Raynard Sanders's meticulously researched and courageous eye-witness testimony, The Coup D'état of the New Orleans Public Schools, will also serve as a radicalizing wake-up call to those of us who cherish liberation and believe in defending human freedom. Let us all say with the people of New Orleans: 'We won't bow down. We don't know how.'"--Joyce E. King, Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership, Georgia State University "Raynard Sanders provides a vivid account of how the educational 'Miracle in New Orleans' following Hurricane Katrina has created an educational marketplace that offers 'choice' to the most advantaged students and a revolving door of failing schools to the least advantaged, while re-segregating the city even more starkly than before. Sanders meticulously outlines the equity and access issues that have emerged in a marketplace that provides only the illusion of school choice to many families who have witnessed the destruction of neighborhood schools that were once the hub of their communities. The Coup D'état of the New Orleans Public Schools is critically important reading for those who care about the future of public education and the fight for equal rights in American society."--Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor Emeritus, Stanford University and President, Learning Policy Institute "The struggle over the fate and future of public education has played out with notable intensity in New Orleans, Louisiana, never more significantly than in recent years as NOLA has become--post-Hurricane Katrina--the laboratory for a thoroughgoing corporate takeover of public education. In this compelling account the educator/activist/scholar Raynard Sanders documents the treacherous al