(Im)Possibilities for democracy in an all-charter school district : the case of New Orleans

This dissertation examines sociopolitical phenomenon in the New Orleans all-charter school system to make broader claims about how decentralization (the dispersal of state power into smaller entities) and privatization (the involvement of private actors in providing public services) alter the state that structures the society in which we live. Every "public school" in New Orleans is a charter school. Charter schools receive a mix of public and private funding, are privately managed and governed, and have operational autonomy. As an extreme of decentralization and privatization, New Orleans' school system allows us to assess the social and political consequences of pursuing these types of reforms in how we provide public services to citizens in a democratic society. While other research may interrogate charter schools in the contexts of markets, opportunities for innovations, or equity-oriented policy interventions, I instead focus on the ways that charter schools reconfigure the American state apparatus vis-à-vis the destabilization of long-standing public institutions, the involvement of private contractors, decentralized governance, and the introduction of market-based logics. The New Orleans system was built on actions from the state that disproportionately harmed Black people and institutions, destabilized Black communities, and limited Black political power. Previous research on the New Orleans system and market-based school reforms allows me to conceptualize the school system as an event of mass disenfranchisement: Dispossession: Historically Black schools were disproportionately closed in the state takeover process dispossessing Black people of important social, cultural, and political institutions. (Buras, 2011; Buras, 2015; Ewing, 2018; Dixson et al, 2015; Duncan-Shippey, 2019) Exclusion: Black people were systematically excluded from the founding and management of new charter schools opening in the post-Katrina system. (Dixson & Henry, 2016; Henry, 2019; Henry, 2021, Lay & Bauman, 2019; Lay, 2022) Replacement: Black teachers were fired en masse and replaced by a less experienced Whiter teacher labor force. Choice policies and school closures have potentially facilitated the gentrification of Black neighborhoods. (Lincove et al, 2017; Pearman & Swain, 2017; Pearman & Greene, 2022; Tompkins, 2015) Restructuring: Black political power has been diminished as the powers of the elected school board have been delegated to charter school boards with non-elected board members that are not demographically representative of New Orleans. (Kipman, 2011; DeBray et al, 2014; Harris, 2020; Bulkley et al, 2021; Scott; 2015) As one of my informants, Pastor Brenda Square described to me: I think in New Orleans, we're back in 1900, when the early activists had to fight to get schools. Everything we've built has been taken from us and now here we are in 2022. Just as the Supreme Court decision is taking away the rights of women, we have experienced our rights being taken away in terms of public education and government. My research question in this dissertation is a result of thinking through the existing literature, Pastor Square's reflections, and an acknowledgement of people's agency to resist. I ask the broader question: What democratic possibilities exist in highly decentralized and privatized state arrangements? In my first paper, I examine political mobilization around school renamings in New Orleans. I make a theoretical contribution to field theory by examining what motivates certain actors to mobilize around school names. Strategic action fields (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012) model arenas of sociopolitical action. They are dynamic in nature but can also shift. I conceptualize the transition to an all-charter school system as a field shift. Currently, field theory lacks concepts linking successive fields and knowledge about how permanent structures of inequality, such as race, gender, and class, persist through fields. I contribute the idea of a field remnant to help link successive fields and provide a mechanism in which racial inequality between fields in maintained. In my second paper, I interrogate the extremes of institutional power that charter autonomy can afford certain organizations through the case of Lusher Charter School. After becoming a charter school in 2006, Lusher has developed exclusive admission and financial practices that have allowed it to provide a highly-resourced educational experience for a White and wealthy subset of the New Orleans public school population. The school's leadership and governing board also suppress uses of voice by the Lusher community when these practices or the authority of school leaders are questioned. I find that charter autonomy allows Exit, Loyalty, and Voice (Hirschman, 1970) to be manipulated within the institution. My findings on charter autonomy contribute to an ongoing and prescient policy conversation about the status of charter schools as publicly accountable institution. In my final paper, I take a systems-level view of democratic participation in the many spaces of education governance that exist in New Orleans' decentralized school system. Decentralization has been conceived as a potential avenue for localizing decision-making and reinvigorating democratic spaces that a growing public bureaucracy has complicated. However, decentralization is often pursued in tandem with privatization. I use the concept of Deweyan publics as a way to identify groups with similar policy interests. I find that generally publics are absent in decision making around issues of public education in New Orleans, especially in charter board meetings. Though I observe publics can still be consequential, they have new constraints and challenges. Additionally, the reform community in New Orleans can act as a powerful public committed to preserving aspects of the all-charter system that limit the potential for democratic voice. I urge for a conceptualization of localism that accounts for the democratic consequences of privatization. Through this dissertation, I contribute work that urges us to consider the democratic consequences of reforms that reconstruct the American state without preserving democratic institutions. The progress of past generations is at stake, and we can no longer think through narrow policy lenses that do not prioritize our society's democratic values and commitments. It will always be generational work to strive for a better world, but we can ensure that our future generations are given educational systems to improve and not to rebuild

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Stevens Mitchell L.
McAdam Doug
Scott Janelle T.
Pearman Francis A.