Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space

Kristen Buras is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She is the author of Rightist Multiculturalism and coeditor of The Subaltern Speak. She is also cofounder and director of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective for Public Education.

Buras does an excellent job of explaining the realities of the privatization of public schools in New Orleans. Her recounting of the history of public education in New Orleans connects the dots on today's corporate reforms, which have made the disenfranchisement of poor and minority children "politically correct" in the 21st century. --Raynard Sanders, Educational consultant and radio host of The New Orleans ImperativeAs Buras shows in this decade-long tour de force of theoretically grounded investigative research, rather than a national reform model advancing new democratic possibilities, the New Orleans market-based charter school experiment threatens to exacerbate racial and economic injustice. What is happening in New Orleans is nothing short of an unconscionable colonial project that we cannot ignore, and it will affect black education nationally for decades to come. --Joyce E. King, Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning & Leadership, Georgia State University, USA and President-elect, The American Educational Research AssociationBuras provides an essential look at how communities are engaging in, resisting, and making sense of a slate of educational reforms they had little say in designing. With incisive analysis, Buras helps to direct much-needed attention to the experiences of students, parents, and community members as local public schools are reformed into quasi-private entities. By examining the elite networks shaping schooling in New Orleans and cities around the country, this book calls us to consider the relationship between educational privatization and the ongoing racial and social inequalities that continue to characterize schooling in the United States. --Janelle Scott, Graduate School of Education & African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley, USA

• Chapter 1Black Education in the South:Critical Race Reflections on the Historic Policy Landscape Chapter 2The Assault on Black Children by Education Entrepreneurs: Charter Schools, Whiteness, and Accumulation by DispossessionChapter 3Keeping King Elementary School on the Map:Racial Resistance and the Politics of Place in the Lower 9th WardChapter 4The Closing of Douglass High School:Counterstories on the Master's Plan for ReconstructionChapter 5The Culture of the Education Market:Teach for America, Union Busting, and the Displacement of Black Veteran TeachersChapter 6New Orleans—A Guide for Cities or a Warning for Communities?Lessons Learned from the Bottom-Up(with Urban South Grassroots Research Collective)