The illusion of choice: Crescent City schools in the pure and perfect market

Public schools in New Orleans are changing our normative understandings of what it means to be a teacher, student, or administrator in our global society. The New Orleans public schools underwent a process of deregulation initiated by the State of Louisiana and the local school board in 2005. The process, truly the first of its kind, was expedited by Hurricane Katrina and magnified by a confluence of neglect and planned obsolescence. That historical event was used to usher in a new era of reform not just in the Orleans Parish school district, but in the field of education as a whole. A dedication to neoliberal reform and experimentation resulted in new ambitious models of educational governance and policy, and the first major school district composed entirely of charter schools. In a city with a storied history of racial projects, the politics of education came to be even more closely aligned with racialization processes post-Katrina. This project is a qualitative inquiry into the neoliberal or market approach to public education. Through a case study centered entirely on document analysis methodology, the study will show how the district has created an illusion of choice. The case is a single public school representing some of the best-laid plans for diversity and inclusion in elementary and secondary education through a charter school model. I find that what the market has essentially fostered is a process of re-regulation that recreates the same institutional racial project, reproducing similar results. This new model offers a new cast of beneficiaries and controls yet fails to adequately interrupt historically destructive processes of globalization, segregation, and racialization in the local public schools