A look back in time at decades of fighting for education equity in New Orleans
22nd September 2015 · 0 Comments
By Kari Harden
Contributing Writer
Since the birth of public schools in New Orleans in 1841, the battle to ensure equity for all students has been waged on many different fronts, in different forms, and against different foes.
But the need to fight for a public school system that is just, adequately and equitably resourced, and accessible to students of all races and socio-economic backgrounds has always existed, and continues to exist today.
The momentum for civil rights and social justice has not always seen consistent forward movement.
Though not without resistance, in 1868 (following the Civil War), schools were required to integrate. In 1874, there were 19 mixed-race schools. Violence and resistance spiked that year, and schools were resegregated along racial lines when the Union troops pulled out in 1877. But the period of integration between 1871-1874 is referred to by historians as relatively successful.
After the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896, upholding the constitutionality of “separate but equal,” two schools systems grew that were separate but anything but equal.
According to a report from the Tulane University Cowen Institute for Public Education examining schools after Reconstruction, “While white schools were more numerous, better financed, and kept in better condition, Black schools languished with fewer resources and overcrowded classrooms.” Many white schools with extra capacity were located in close proximity to overcrowded Black school, according to the report.
The report substantiates the inequities with some numbers for the state of Louisiana: During the 1939-1940 school year, the average state expenditure per white child was $62.99, and $17.17 per Black child. In 1937-1938, the average annual salary paid to white teachers was $1,193, and $504 for Black teachers. That same school year, the average number of students enrolled per teacher at white schools was 27.5, and 41.8 at Black schools.
From 1917 to 1942, John McDonogh #35 was the first and only Black high school in the city.
The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 was aggressively fought against by the Louisiana Legislature, and the New Orleans School Board (OPSB).
When a judge ruled in 1960 that New Orleans schools would have to desegregate at a rate of one grade per year, the OSPB fought it. Eventually, they decided to accept applications for transfers, narrowing 137 from African-American students down to just four that were accepted.
Dr. Al Kennedy, a history professor at the University of New Orleans, described this integration effort as too slow, ineffectual, and inadequate: “Great effort to very little effect.” Kennedy noted that if the process begun in the 1870s had been allowed to continue, history might have taken a very different path.
Kennedy was honored in 2013 for his work collecting and restoring 170 years of OPSB records.
Pastor, historian, and preservationist Brenda Square said that looking at the history of public education in New Orleans “chronicles who we are as a people. It also tells the story of America, and how we grapple with issues of justice.”
While many of the buildings and the names documenting that history disappear, Square works to preserve and document them.
It is a fundamental story of “achievement amid struggle,” she said.
While the changing demographics and deterioration of the public schools in the 1970’s is generalized and accepted as driven by “white flight,” Walter C. Stern, a PhD student at Tulane University, recently published a dissertation that “challenges the popular concept of ‘white flight’ as an explanation for metropolitan change by demonstrating that school segregation, as well as reaction to desegregation, divided urban and suburban space along racial lines. It also inverts prevailing scholarly interpretations of this transformation, which emphasize that public and private manipulation of the housing market created the racially distinct communities that promoted and sustained segregated schools. Additionally, the dissertation’s examination of schools, race, and space, underscores the extent to which Jim Crow continued to evolve through a dynamic, oftentimes improvisational process during the twentieth century. Finally, it demonstrates that, even as public schools became the sites of courtroom and neighborhood battles over desegregation, they were actively tightening racial inequality in ways that contemporary activists and observers did not always recognize.”
Early on, the racism was overt – both in public policy and public sentiment.
1841’s Ordinance 159, the “birth certificate” of public schools in New Orleans, explicitly stated: “There shall be established for the time being, our Public School for the gratuitous education of children of either sex in each ward of this municipality, to which Public Schools all children of proper age, of white resident parents, shall be admitted . . .”
While accommodating nearly every other ethnicity, public education was outright denied to the free African Americans (numbering about 11,000 in 1960) and slaves living in New Orleans.
In a 1908 editorial in The Daily Picayune, the newspaper warned: “Just as soon as all the negroes in the State shall be able to read and write they will become qualified to vote, and it is not to be doubted that they will demand their rights in the premises with the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution to back them up. Then there will be negro majorities in a great number of the parishes and wards of the State with no legal means of neutralizing or defeating that most dangerous situation.”
Nicholas Bauer, who served as superintendent from 1923 to 1940, wrote the following in 1902 when he was the assistant superintendent: “I realize from my limited observation that to teach the negro is a different problem. His natural ability is of a low character and it is possible to bring him to a certain level beyond which it is impossible to carry him. That point is reached in the fifth grade of our schools.”
Today’s racism and remnants of white supremacy can be found in more subtle forms and policies, and under the guise of outsiders arriving with the viewpoint that the poverty stricken African-American public students of New Orleans are a problem to be fixed – a cause in need of saving and rescuing from their own cultures and communities.
It can be found in the lack of transparency in admission processes, a lack of transportation options, high fees for things like art, science, and extracurriculars, and discipline practices that allow schools to kick out, push out, or “counsel out” undesirable students arbitrarily and with little accountably.
Data shows that white students make up disproportionately populations of the highest performing schools. And despite a decade of unprecedented funding and autonomy, there are only a handful of public schools that middle and upper class families consider as options for their children.
While there are exceptions, and trends pointing towards more diverse public schools, the majority of the schools still look segregated.
After Katrina, the population of white students in public schools has doubled to seven percent. In the 2011-2012 school year, more than 86 percent of all public school students were African-American.
When post-Katrina reform was imposed on the traumatized community, using the stated goal of “turnaround” as a synonym for “privatize,” phrases like “blank slate” and “wiping the slate clean” were used frequently.
This narrative sold to the public served to dismiss and disrespect more than a century of struggle and tireless work for better educational opportunities for African-American children.
While no one wishes to return to the state of the public schools pre-Katrina (which most agree were in a state of crisis), the use of the term “blank slate” can be viewed as extremely offensive to the generations of teachers and administrators who put everything they could – against all odds and largely without the support of the public or the government—into providing their students with an education that also incorporated music, culture, heritage, and art.
While many those in positions of power in 2005 were incompetent and corrupt, there were genuine gains happening in classrooms despite being systemically starved of resources. Not only were documented academic improvements underway, but there were innovative, creative modes of teaching and vocational programs that were unique only to New Orleans, and a contributing factor in the fostering of some of the most brilliant artistic minds in the world.
For those intent on privatization, the villianization of teachers and unions was a necessary manipulation of history to sell their “gallant” new plan. The mass firing of all 7,500 public school employees was also a necessary step in rewriting history.
The underhanded tactic caused unimaginable pain to those teachers and other employees – both financial and emotional. It was a huge blow to the Black middle class. Replacing the teachers with inexperienced, uncertified, white teachers from out-of-state sent a powerful message about who was valued in the new system.
“But we should not under-estimate the ability, or the will, of teachers to overcome the problems created by those who oversee them,” said Douglas Harris, director of the Education Research Alliance of New Orleans in a speech in 2013. “At the very least, we should be careful to judge the quality of schools by the quality of their governing bodies.”
Over the decades, “There were so many African Americans doing heroic things to keep the schools going and to find resources wherever they could,” Kennedy said.
By pretending that the past 150 years of history never happened, Kennedy described the cruelty of the message to those generations of teachers who fought during that time, and their “loss of sense of self,” and “humiliation of being told by the community that ‘You were holding the schools down.’” The pain, along logistical burdens, and grief, trauma and depression, are “side effects of the wholesale disposal of 7,500 people,” Kennedy said.
Square described the mass-firing as “A violent assault – it took the heart out of the community.”
Now, New Orleans is home to the nation’s first urban all-charter network. But while the reformers and privateers scream success, there are many aspects of how reform was done to New Orleans that should be cause for great concern for any community looking to learn from the grand experiment.
There have been genuine improvements for many students, but there are more questions than answers at this time.
Research has shown that nationally, charter schools are exacerbating segregation, and without any strong evidence that academic performance is better than traditional non-charter schools.
Today, Square said, “Our kids have not gained the advantages other kids have gained during the post-Katrina reform.”
A new face of the continued struggle for civil rights has emerged in the current education landscape, which has been driven largely by corporate reformers and out-of-state charter operators who do not look like the kids they teach, and who would not put their own children in the schools they claim represent the right way of educating New Orleans’ children.
The data from the past decade is insufficient and questionable in its validity, and there are unanswered questions about how equitably and successfully the new system serves all children. And how efficiently the public/private model is using taxpayer dollars.
One question that Kennedy thinks is worth asking, is “What does white supremacy mean today?” There are attitudes lingering that resonate back to the 1908 newspaper editorial, Kennedy noted. Rounding the corner into the 20th century, white supremacy had “a tremendous amount of momentum behind it,” Kennedy said. And it was very much still there in the 1960’s.
Kristen Lynn Buras, author of “Charter School, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, described the city’s history of integration as follows: “The history of New Orleans Public Schools is characterized by two competing efforts: Black struggles for educational equity and mass resistance by whites to nearly any form of Black education. The very construction of the city’s Black public schools was met with white opposition. Later, white philanthropists who supported public education for Blacks sought to institutionalize an educational model that would keep African Americans in a subservient position. In light of this history, we should be asking some critical questions about white entrepreneurial control of Black education today, especially when it comes to charter school expansion in New Orleans.”
No one is advocating to go back to the pre-Katrina system, Kennedy said, but there are questions that need to be asked if looking to New Orleans as a model. And the debate has been overpowered by the wealthier, better connected pro-reform side that paints any criticism as being “anti-children learning.” It’s an effective strategy, Kennedy said, but not one that allows for healthy and honest debate.
“A major concern is the redefinition of the Civil Rights legacy by charter school operators,” said Buras. “While educational exclusion and racial inequities have worsened in New Orleans over the past decade, charter schools are touted as an answer to such problems.”
Looking forward, Kennedy said one change he would like to see is putting schools – good schools – back in the proximity of where people live. And he wants a more honest conversation about the school system’s history, and a genuine effort to avoid making the same mistakes.
“We have to be honest about history, and once we understand what happened, only then will we be able to make better decisions,” Square said.
“It’s an ugly history,” she said. “But also a history of a determined, consistent, persistent, and committed struggle for opportunities in education for kids. We need to preserve and respect that history before we can go forward together as a community.”
This article originally published in the September 21, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
