William Frantz Public School is an important yet troubling historical narrative that recounts the pain of desegregation, foreshadowing the troubling times of 2020. The story begins with William Frantz Public School, which “entered into the . . . collective psyche of millions of Americans” (p. 13) in 1960 when it became the epicenter of school desegregation. Then the authors place the small New Orleans neighborhood school within a local, state, and national context. Schaffer et al. examine racism and White supremacy in public education across the decades, a crisis, the authors contend, that “roils yet today” (p. 14). The accumulation of evidence surrounding William Frantz School's inept and incomplete desegregation foreshadows the post-Katrina schools that are hamstrung today by racism's lingering effects.
Furthermore, the historical parallels with the Trump administration and the state of education in 2020 are inescapable. The events at William Frantz School would reappear across time. Recounting the violence and trauma of long-delayed desegregation in New Orleans when six-year-old Ruby Bridges, surrounded by federal marshals, first entered William Frantz Elementary School, the book notes the public displays of “sickeningly familiar” (p. 52) racial hatred. The yelling, jeering, Confederate flags, and burning crosses of 1960 remain sickeningly familiar in 2020.
In 1991, to mark the sesquicentennial of public schools in New Orleans, Donald DeVore and Joseph Logsdon published Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans, 1841–1991, chronicling the first 150 years of public education in the city. It was the first comprehensive historical examination of New Orleans public education covering such a long period of time, but the narrative stopped in 1991. Decades passed, and in the intervening years, there were dissertations, theses, articles, and even occasional books on specific topics related to the schools—and then there was Katrina.
Thereafter, researchers such as Kristen L. Buras (Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance); Raynard Sanders, David Stovall, and Terrenda White (Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education); and others, have published meaningful book-length challenges to post-Katrina education in New Orleans. However, Schaffer et al.'s superintendent-by-superintendent analysis adds much-needed context to better appreciate the critiques mentioned above.
Opportunism is the term the authors use to describe one of the forces behind post-Katrina reforms: “Opportunism in the midst of chaos changed the very definition of public education in New Orleans” (p. 221). The floods following Katrina's landfall on August 29, 2005, inundated 80 percent of the city of New Orleans. Opportunists deemed the post-Katrina landscape of New Orleans a “greenfield opportunity,” (p. 211), meaning they viewed New Orleans as a vacant lot, an empty expanse of land ripe for their version of education development. The post-Katrina reforms meant that the new overseers made “an opportunistic ‘land grab’ in which private groups appropriated pieces of a valued social institution—public education” (p. 223). Those who were politically and economically helpless to intervene watched as their history and culture were discarded.
The authors document the machinations of reformers who attempted to sever the past from the present while imposing a system of new schools on what they perceived as empty space without any history. Possessing neither expertise in education nor familiarity with New Orleans, well-positioned outsiders were deemed qualified to implement their limited version of reform while excluding “‘the African American community’ . . . from the decision-making process” (p. 222). They were supported by officials, legislators, and reformers who played fast and loose with the Performance Score benchmarks, raising and lowering them to ensure gobbling up as many New Orleans schools as possible. Schaffer et al. show that the reformers used legislative emergency measures following the massive destruction caused by the post-Katrina floods to leapfrog over existing state regulations and lobby state officials to throw their support behind what essentially would become private schools. It became a fact of life for the already-struggling schools that, as had been done in the 1960s, “existing revenue needed to be shifted from public education” (p. 70).
Orleans Parish School Board officials, along with Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services, their hired guns, were complicit in the takeover by summarily firing forty-three hundred veteran teachers, costing New Orleans an average fifteen years of teaching experience per person.
The book makes it clear that little planning took place for what should happen after the takeover. Reformers and their legislative allies, intent on demolishing the old system, built—on the fly—a system that was untested on such a scale. They assured all who would listen that education would improve, and astute observers realized the new system could also generate financial profit for investors.
It is interesting that one of the first post-Katrina reforms served to remove the Black students from Alcée Fortier High School, scattering them without a second thought. The Uptown school was converted into a charter to attract the children of local university faculty members. The intent and purpose of the reforms became evident: that's how you build on a greenfield. In addition, with little or no oversight, some charters jettisoned the old school names “and replaced them with corporate names and charter management logos disconnected from the history and culture of New Orleans” (p. 257).
William Frantz Public School is exhaustively documented, and the authors carefully construct their narrative with abundant sources from university and private archives, historical and contemporary literature, newspapers, official reports, field reports, conversations, and correspondence. Their research allows the reader to see the failings of a pre-Katrina system of schools and peer behind the charter schools’ remarkably effective public relations creation: the “New Orleans charter school miracle.” Across the nation, this so-called miracle intoxicated school districts wanting to dump teachers’ unions and spread accountability so thin as to be almost meaningless.
With a careful accumulation of evidence, Schaffer et al. attempt to strike a balance between the realities the schools faced and the charges against them. For example, pre-Katrina per-pupil expenditures in New Orleans were the third lowest in the nation. In the post-Katrina era, however, Recovery District officials suddenly had immediate access to disaster funding, allowing them to spend almost twice the amount per student than pre-Katrina. This can make a big difference when creating the perception of improvement.
The authors present the many claims of success generated by the charter schools and various agencies—even FEMA—with the assistance of a noncritical press. But they also include the grassroots observations, studies, and reports that counter these claims. It is evident that both pre- and post-Katrina educators struggled with the persistence of the “resegregation of public schools … as well as its correlates of poverty, poor funding, [and] low test scores” (p. 110). That has not changed.
The authors detail examples of corruption in the pre-Katrina system, reporting that “corruption extended beyond the administrative ranks of the Orleans Parish School District, reaching all the way to the desks of school secretaries” (p. 160). Here, the book falters somewhat in that the descriptions of pre-Katrina corruption are not sufficiently balanced by post-Katrina examples of charter directors, operations managers, and other charter staff siphoning money, spending money with little accountability, making illegal payments to staff, and other crimes.
Another major issue deals with who is qualified to teach children. From early in the 1900s, credentials and certificates in subject areas were required; later, the state required undergraduate degrees, and then, in some areas, advanced degrees. However, when it came to fighting desegregation, educational credentials and expertise were quickly ignored. In 1961, a plumber without classroom or administrative educational experience was given “complete authority to act on all school matters” (p. 66) in the Ninth Ward Cooperative School, an all-White alternative to integrated public schools in New Orleans.
In 1999, the appointment of a temporary superintendent and a full-time superintendent, both without Louisiana teaching credentials, reflected “a community sentiment that had percolated for some time: that the school district needed outsiders, people with no K-12 educational experience, to address the vast problems in the city's public schools” (p. 162).
The post-Katrina floodwaters made it possible to discard the teacher qualification requirements from an earlier era. Following Katrina, charter leaders, no longer bound by old rules and able to promise signing bonuses and housing assistance, recruited well-intentioned and energetic young people without certification and experience to come to New Orleans. Prepared with five weeks of training, the young teachers were dropped into New Orleans schools with “limited contextual knowledge of their new teaching environment” (p. 245). With their zero years of experience, they replaced the forty-three hundred teachers who had been fired to make room for the youthful energy of the newcomers, who knew nothing about teaching the children of New Orleans. The young teachers’ turnover rate would prove to be exceptionally high. The authors point out that Teach For America and teachNOLA, businesses charged with filling empty teaching slots with warm bodies in New Orleans, “enjoyed the support of influential people and foundations with deep coffers” (p. 246). Money talks.
During the 2020 political climate, scientific, educational, economic, and historical expertise were mocked and devalued. In the same way in post-Katrina schools, credentials, expertise, and training were used against “professional educators” who were thought to be “no more equipped to teach and lead in public schools than those without traditional professional preparation” (p. 165).
Today's schools still face the reality that has bedeviled school administrators for generations: “[A]cademic struggles [represent] only a portion of the challenges faced by public schools” (p. 133), and the schools and school leaders continue to be overwhelmed by “systemic social issues” (p. 133).
The authors show how educators succumbed to the temptations of testing, believing in the miracle cure that testing promised, with the additional benefit that test results would shift the focus to the quality of teachers. In the post-Katrina era, teachers’ careers and livelihoods are based on test scores.
Lobbying pressure had already made private and parochial schools exempt from some aspects of state testing. Many White students do not face the same testing accountability that falls heavily upon Black students in public schools. Facing the consequences of testing, charter principals found ways to screen student admissions and even to place obstacles in the way of students who might negatively affect test scores.
In the pre-Katrina era, educators’ lack of knowledge of discipline techniques sometimes “resulted in the increased criminalization of student behaviors” (p. 157). Years later, in dealing with students who had suffered the trauma of Katrina, “school officials responded by replacing an atmosphere of education with an atmosphere of incarceration” (p. 242).
In the midst of the authors’ numerous mentions of poverty, desolation, and crime in the housing developments, it was heartening to read their acknowledgment of the residents’ “generational connections to the people in the area” (p. 151). In addition to private home ownership around the housing developments—a fact that has disappeared in much post-Katrina literature—those “who lived in the public housing also maintained ties to the area in spite of appalling living conditions” (p. 151). Reformers seemed to miss this appreciation of community, family, and home in housing developments, an aspect of public housing highlighted in Leonard Smith's 2020 film, A Place Called Desire.
The book is framed by Ruby Bridges's entrance into William Frantz Elementary School as a child, walking the gauntlet of protesters into the school building, and then, years later, seeing her dreams for the Ruby Bridges Museum and Development Center at the site of Frantz Elementary delayed, changed, and then pushed aside. Later, her planned Ruby Bridges School of Community Service and Social Justice, which was to be devoted to “history, civil rights, civic engagement, leadership development, and service learning” (p. 256), was killed when the Recovery School District rejected the plan (c. 2014). The history of the building would be buried under the name of Akili Academy. The William Frantz School site earned the protective recognition of the US National Park Service on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005; so, at least that much history is protected.
“Dysfunction reigned within New Orleans Public Schools” (p. 248) is a statement reformers could never have imagined being said of their work just a few years after the takeover, but that is how the authors describe it. Reformers’ efforts to uncouple what came before from what is occurring in the present shows that their greenfield perception is nothing more than an illusion.
Several years ago, I was invited to meet with the faculty of one charter school to talk about the history of public education in New Orleans. Having heard only that pre-Katrina schools were inundated by failure before they were flooded, the teachers new to New Orleans had been told in many ways there was nothing to learn from 1841 to the moment the levee walls collapsed in 2005. They were stunned at the recitation of persistence, innovation, struggle, and courage in the schools. Despite all they had been told, they were part of an important tradition of caring in the public schools. They were walking in the footsteps of teaching legends. At that moment, in that room, the roots of the past were growing back into the greenfield.
The authors conclude with a statement about the importance of knowing the history of what came before. Noting that reformers attempted to sever the history of pre-Katrina public education from the post-Katrina era, they put the loss into words: “The new vision of public schools marginalizes the vast contributions of public education and its role in confronting some of the most important past challenges faced by the people of the United States” (p. 268). It is regrettable that the “McDonogh Three” (Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne)—the New Orleans schoolchildren who endured the same racist treatment at McDonogh No. 19 at the same time as Ruby Bridges at William Frantz Elementary—could not fit within this already tightly packed narrative.
The authors of William Frantz Public School are to be commended for attempting to set the record straight. To their credit, Schaffer et al. make it clear that the shift in history caused by Katrina did not demarcate good from bad, honest from corrupt, effective from failing. William Frantz Public School offers a bridge to the present, crossing the chasm of a pre-Katrina and post-Katrina consciousness and reuniting a school system with its history. Schaffer et al. show that the tale of public schools in New Orleans remains a complex and frustrating story of a community's frequent neglect and sporadic support of the children in its public schools.
