Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans
reviewed by Assaf Meshulam — August 23, 2010
Title: Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans
Author(s): Kristen L. Buras, Jim Randels, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Students at the Center
Publisher: Teachers College Press, New York
ISBN: 0807750905, Pages: 208, Year: 2010
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Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City is an exceptional work of collaboration between urban high-school students, their teachers, and leading scholars and social activists. The book compellingly illuminates Freirian liberatory pedagogy at work, on the one hand, and the destructive forces of neoliberalism in urban (un)development and educational policies, on the other. An expansion on Kristen Buras’ previous work with Michael Apple in The Subaltern Speak (2006), this powerful book shows not only that the subaltern can and do speak, but also what has been done to silence their cogent voices and how they can resist this. At its heart are the evocative and provocative essays of students and teachers in a critical writing program called “Students at the Center” (SAC), launched in 1996 in New Orleans high schools. The intimate and revealing narratives offer insight into the writers’ lives, schools, neighborhoods, and city, while vividly exposing how New Orleans became a neoliberal “experimental arena” after Hurricane Katrina on the foundation of the appalling racism and poverty that has long plagued the city. Building on Harvey’s (2006) conceptualization of “accumulation by dispossession” and Harris’ (1995) “whiteness as property,” the book explores class and racial dimensions of the transformation and restructuring of the public education system in New Orleans and the on-going struggles for justice and liberation of marginalized groups. Neoliberal reforms accelerated the attack on everything “public” following Katrina, particularly education, with policies decentralizing the public system, pushing to transform all public schools into selective admission charter schools, and ousting almost all unionized teachers, replaced largely by uncertified, inexperienced Teach For America teachers. The tremendous power of this book is the unique historical and spatial context of New Orleans, both as a site of racial and economic oppression and neglect, which intensified after Katrina, and as the site of a long tradition of social resistance to this.
Buras begins with a deep description of SAC, based on her research in two schools offering the program. She analyzes SAC’s work as exemplary of Freirian pedagogy in the context of the struggles over education in New Orleans, with its student participants “engag[ing] in historically informed writing initiatives aimed at transforming their schools and communities” (p. 8). Chapters 2, 3, and 4 then each present a set of personal accounts written by SAC students and teachers, each chapter centered around a different theme. The essays are followed by commentary and analysis from critical educators and activists, who reflect on the writers’ experiences and contextualize them in relation to pedagogy and policy-making.
Chapter 2 explores SAC’s beginnings and development as a liberatory education program. In her commentary, Adrienne Dixson frames the five accounts presented here in Critical Race Theory terms, depicting them as counterstorytelling, an important tool for uncovering and understanding social injustice and inequality. As Buras notes, SAC has developed “neo-griots,” “young storytellers of color” who narrate the racialized struggles in the city. Maisha Fisher, the second commentator, sets SAC’s work in the context of black activism, emphasizing the potency of activism and writing as an act of reclamation.
The gripping essays chosen for Chapter 3 raise the racial dimensions of the neoliberal reform in New Orleans, which has perpetuated the long history of disinvestment in communities of color in the city. These testimonials shed light on the long-term aftermath of Katrina for New Orleans’ residents. In the striking words of student writer Maria Hernandez, “I’ve lost my home, my friends, and my school. … But the worst part of it all is that the public officials—both elected and hired—who are supposed to be looking out for my education have failed me even worse than the ones who abandoned me in the Superdome. … [W]e’re still being abandoned by local, state, and federal officials” (p. 86). Commenting on this account and two others, Michael Apple describes how language has been used to mask dominant groups’ responsibility for the social disaster that exploded with Katrina, in its labeling as a “natural disaster” and the market’s presentation as the ultimate solution for the transparent and dehumanized victims. Apple relates to the part played in the “whitening” of New Orleans by the neoliberal ideology of the free market and consumer choice—the “desocializing sensibility” that has eliminated collective responsibility for social justice, replaced by an individualistic consumer identity. Pauline Lipman, in her commentary, shows how the processes underway in New Orleans are happening in other urban settings, extending the discussion of “accumulation by dispossession” to the case of Chicago.
Chapter 4 focuses on resistance to the educational reforms in New Orleans. The voices that “speak out” in this chapter offer a vision of change, where the curriculum is reconstructed to not only reflect all students’ experiences, but also challenge the structural transformation of public schools under neoliberalism and its destructive effect on social communities. Commentator Wayne Au describes the paradox of public schooling: reproducing inequalities while creating space to resist them. Au points to SAC as a concrete example of the possibility of successful critical consciousness and social-justice-oriented programs in schools, of “critical praxis.” Such programs, he urges, should replace tracking and testing, which lead to class- and race-based stratification in public schooling.
Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City not only provides a platform for counterstorytelling, but, mirroring the SAC program, also facilitates what Robin Kelley describes as “careful listening” to the stories (p. xii). Seeking an understanding of the complex social processes at work, the book creates a safe space in which the subjective account transcends the individual and the local, and the array of unjust power relations are exposed. So successfully accomplished by SAC, this enables the storyteller to liberate him/herself from the destructive effects of these power relations, to “reclaim [the] sense of self” (p. 53), to partake in liberating education. Only two issues particularly stood out as warranting further elaboration, both arising in the context of one of the schools researched for this book. Prior to Katrina, Eleanor McMain Secondary School had been a selective admissions school; but unlike the predominant trend in New Orleans public schools, it thereafter became an open-access school. Jim Randels, a SAC founder and teacher and co-author of the book, describes this change as “a major identity shift” (p. 27). A more developed discussion of this unique and intriguing transformation could have been significantly informative with regard to many of the themes and processes analyzed in the book. The second aspect of the school that might have benefitted from deeper discussion is the Asian-American (mostly Vietnamese-American) component of the school’s student body, which, along with African-American students, comprises the majority of the student population. Little attention is given in the book to the former group in the consideration of racialization processes and racial identity. Exploring the experiences of students from this community could have broadened, and nuanced, the intricate understanding of racial formation and counter-majoritarian resistance in the book.
In Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City, the story of the relentless neoliberal siege on public education in New Orleans eloquently unfolds to show how this has become “the most significant episode of racial marginalization, removal, and state disinvestment in recent U.S. history” (p. 14). The book provokes and advances consideration of a socially just reconstruction of public schooling. It shows our deafness to the subaltern’s voice to be the systematic, intended consequence (and objective) of neoliberal agendas and, hence, the importance of understanding the macroeconomics and sociopolitical contexts that generate these policies (Anyon, 2005).
This important book is invaluable and imperative reading not only for educators, but for anyone interested in real democratic, social-justice-oriented change, the interface of race and school, and the destructive forces of neoliberalism. Rarely do those engaged in educational policy and reform listen—or have the opportunity to listen—to the voices of racially and economically marginalized groups. As Buras notes, it is in this context of lack of voice and cultural recognition that the counter-storytelling in Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City is so vital: the stories of the experiences of the oppressed in New Orleans force educators, policymakers, and activists alike to critically reconsider neoliberal educational policies and urban development projects in general and their racial and social implications. In the words of co-authors Jim Randels and Kalamu ya Salaam, the story of New Orleans told in this book “is not a story that only those in power will tell. … Without this full picture, our public education, our culture, our souls cannot continue to grow” (p. 16).
References
Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement. New York: Routledge.
Apple, M. W., & Buras, K. L. (Eds). (2006). The subaltern speak: Curriculum, power and educational struggles. New York: Routledge.
Harris, C. I. (1995). Whiteness as property. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller & K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 276-291). New York: New Press.
Harvey, D. (2006). Spaces of global capitalism: Towards a theory of uneven geographical development. New York: Verso.
