Beyond the Parameters of “Choice”: An Obliterated Vision for Traditional Public Schooling and the Contamination of the New Orleans Charter Restart Model

Abstract

Departing from mainstream accounts of the post-Katrina New Orleans state takeover and the more recent “unification” of schools under local governance, this case study utilizes the plantation (Hartman, 1997; Woods, 1998, McKittrick, 2011) as a theoretical device and the silenced archive (Trouillot, 2015) as a method of inquiry to better understand why and how a Black public high school was obliterated. Data analysis indicates that despite the takeover and the damning of John McDonogh Senior High, this school was a lynchpin of struggle for democratic public schooling. Additionally, findings suggest that the charter school movement deployed community engagement, an evolving technology, to obliterate a collective vision that fell beyond the parameters of “choice.” In closing, the article points to an absence of empirical evidence on the all-charter structure, the ever-present use of the city as a laboratory for restructuring efforts elsewhere, and a pressing need for building and sustaining researchers who are accountable to African American communities in New Orleans.