Doctoral Dissertation Research: Contested Geographies of Education: Neighborhood Schooling Struggles in Post-Katrina New Orleans

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Across the United States, cities have become testing grounds for policies designed to promote market-based solutions to problems in public education. These initiatives commonly rely on the institution of charter schools, which are publicly funded but often privately managed and only minimally accountable to locally elected entities. This research project examines place-based challenges to charter reform through analysis of the attempts of four New Orleans neighborhood-based groups to re-open schools in their communities. With 90 percent of its public school students currently enrolled in charter schools, New Orleans has been a major testing ground market-based reform, and of the ways such reforms might be contested. By focusing on the ability of neighborhood-based groups to address schooling concerns in the public sphere, this project will enrich understanding of place-based social movements, expand the range of concerns commonly addressed in discussions of public education policy, and support ongoing efforts to create more democratic urban spaces through collective inquiry and action. Because schools serve a variety of social, political, and economic purposes, the effects of school reform reach far beyond the school house walls. As they re-work essential aspects of daily life in cities, market-based school reform efforts have provoked intense struggles over the purpose and provision of schooling and the role of community members in influencing urban education policy and practice.The project will use multiple methods, including document analysis, participant observation, and interviews in order to examine how group members develop, understand, and pursue their schooling agendas under the post-Katrina charter school regime in New Orleans. The specific research questions include: How do neighborhood schooling groups frame their grievances with respect to the effects of neoliberal schooling policies and what counter discourses are advanced in support of neighborhood schooling? What strategies do neighborhood schooling groups use to insert those counter discourses into a larger public sphere and to what effect? How are race, class, and gender implicated in these struggles? What learning is taking place in these place-based efforts to realize particular schooling agendas and what are the democratic implications of both the processes and results of their activities? The proposed research provides (1) an empirical analysis of the possibilities for producing schooling alternatives to neoliberal policies through collective action initiated at the neighborhood level, (2) a socio-cultural counterpoint to existing political-economic arguments regarding how and why people become involved in such movements, and the ways that place and race inform strategy and the ability to achieve desired goals, and (3) an analysis of how people learn to do democratic work, including identifying and framing common problems, constructing space for social inquiry, negotiating difference, and navigating uneven power relations.