Voices crying out from the wilderness: the stories of black educators on school reform in post Katrina New Orleans

Using the epistemological lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study recounts the stories of African American educators in regards to how they understand the sweeping school reforms in post-Katrina New Orleans. As an analytic tool, it will expose and hopefully undermine the ways in which race, racism, and power affect the structural conditions of schooling in post-Katrina New Orleans. As a methodology, I explore and expand the use of composite counterstories in education research. Using the tool of composite counterstorytelling, this dissertation research seeks to answer and explore what Black educators say about what is happening in the New Orleans Public Schools after Katrina. The data reveals a conflict between the stories of key education elites and the Black educators regarding reform in New Orleans after Katrina. While education elites articulate the reforms occurring after Katrina using a language of opportunity, the composite counterstory articulates the feelings of loss, anger and isolation in regards to the reforms in schools. Using Adkin’s (1997) concept of reform as colonization and CRT’s notion of whiteness as property to frame my analysis, I concentrate on the educators’ understandings of reform in schools post Katrina. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the contradictions between the composite counterstory and majoritarian story and the implications for urban school reform