How the Large-Scale Privatization of New Orleans' Schools Upholds Inequality
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report
Cafeteria workers in New Orleans are working to organize a union in order to
negotiate for better wages and working conditions with Volunteers of
America, a wealthy Christian ministry contracting with local elementary
schools to provide meals to students. From left to right: Damita Hall,
Pamela Bourgois, Quintessa Dampeer and Debra Slaughter. (Photo: Julie
Dermansky)
Cafeteria workers in New Orleans are working to organize a union in order to
negotiate for better wages and working conditions with Volunteers of
America, a wealthy Christian ministry contracting with local elementary
schools to provide meals to students. From left to right: Damita Hall,
Pamela Bourgois, Quintessa Dampeer and Debra Slaughter. (Photo: Julie
Dermansky)
It's the steamy first week of August in New Orleans, and a number of charter
elementary schools are already welcoming students back from a brief summer
vacation. I've volunteered to help make lunch. At 8 a.m. I arrive at a
kitchen located in a revamped warehouse along the Mississippi River that
once housed a cotton press dating back to the 19th century. I sign my name
on a volunteer list, don a hair net and get to work. One of the women I'm
working with adds a dash of seasoning to a mound of green beans, and we
begin scooping servings into little trays already full of shepherd's pie.
The meals are then trucked to school cafeterias, heated and served.
The school lunch service is called Fresh Food Factor, and pictures of
children holding vegetables in a garden hang in its brightly lit office. The
brochure says school administrators are under "increasing pressure" to cut
costs, so the program provides a "viable alternative to the quick fix of
processed foods" offered by other vendors. Some lower-income neighborhoods
in New Orleans are considered food deserts due to a lack of affordable
grocers, so serving healthy food in schools can provide kids with options
that they may not always have at home.
Fresh Food Factor is run by the local chapter of Volunteers of America, a
multimillion-dollar Christian ministry that runs halfway houses, shelters,
food banks, drug treatment programs and housing projects nationwide, often
with government funding. For right-wing champions of charter schools, such
as Betsy DeVos, President Trump's controversial education secretary, Fresh
Food Factor would be a shining example for the rest of the country: a
religious group serving healthy meals at charter schools that chose to
partner with a civic-minded contractor. Democrats would be happy to know
that the food service helps schools comply with nutrition standards
established by Michelle Obama -- standards that the Trump administration
recently scaled back.
Despite its parent organization's name, most Fresh Food Factor workers are
not volunteers like me. Employees who cook in the warehouse kitchen or serve
students in schools receive wages that start at $9 per hour. Some work
full-time, but the food service relies on part-time workers and a smattering
of volunteers to fill the gaps. Besides managers and truck drivers, most
employees are women of color, the workers commonly called "lunch ladies" who
are inseparable from mealtime in public schools. As we wrap dozens of veggie
eggrolls in sheets of shiny foil, one part-time kitchen employee tells me
that she is not scheduled for enough hours to make ends meet and is looking
for additional work, a common story in a local economy built on tourism and
low-wage service industry jobs.
Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans' school cafeteria workers and janitors
were represented by the same union as teachers and enjoyed the same
benefits, including paid vacation and time off during the summers, according
to LaTanja Silvester, president of the local Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) office. After the storm devastated the city, the state took
over the school board and began an unprecedented experiment in school
privatization, dismantling the teachers union and firing 7,000 school
employees in the process, many of them Black women. Cafeteria workers now
work for competing contractors that offer varying pay scales and benefits.
Sometimes, benefits like paid sick days aren't offered at all.
"Volunteers of America advocates for alleviating poverty, when in fact the
jobs they are providing at the Fresh Food Factor are actually poverty-wage
jobs," Silvester told Truthout, adding that SEIU is currently working with
employees seeking union representation despite "pushback" from Volunteers of
America.
Pamela Bourgois and Damita Hall, Fresh Food Factor employees who serve lunch
at Encore Academy, a local charter elementary school, told Truthout they
were regularly expected to work off the clock for no additional pay until
they began organizing a union and standing up for their rights on the job.
Proper safety supplies such as arm-length oven mitts are not provided,
leaving some workers to choose between paying for their own safety gear or
burning themselves on hot trays. Only full-time managers and lead workers
are offered health care benefits, and Bourgois says she has only received
one raise in three years. Spokespeople for the New Orleans chapter did not
provide a response to several inquiries from Truthout.
Encore Academy is the charter elementary school in New Orleans where Damita
Hall and Pamela Bourgois work in the cafeteria. Under the charter system,
students are not assigned to a school based on where they live. Instead,
parents submit applications with a list of schools ranked from their top
choice on down, aware that their child may not be admitted to the school
they like best. (Photo: Julie Dermansky)
New Orleans charter schools hire food service contractors like Volunteers of
America with money from state and federal school lunch programs because so
many students qualify for the subsidies. In 2016, Volunteers of America
Greater New Orleans received 59 percent of its $32 million in revenue from
state and federal grants and contracts, according to an annual report
released by the group. Nationally, Volunteers of America brought in nearly
$312 million in total revenue last year.
New Orleans cafeteria workers meet at the local union office. Some school
employees work multiple jobs to make ends meet and have children and
grandchildren attending charter schools. (Photo: Julie Dermanksy)
Hall says Volunteers of America has responded to their push for union
representation with SEIU by hiring a lawyer and deploying other
"intimidation tactics." She received a disciplinary write-up for "petty
stuff" on the first day of school this year. Still, the women see their jobs
as crucial for making sure students are able to learn in class -- something
that's hard to do if you're feeling hungry. After all, their own children
attended public schools in New Orleans, and now their grandchildren attend
charter elementary schools.
"In our position, we know that we are very instrumental in the kids' daily
process ... we should be treated better than this, more fairly and justly
than what we are," Bourgois says.
***
Betsy DeVos, the wealthy charter school advocate who survived a razor-thin
Senate confirmation vote to become US secretary of education earlier this
year, has reignited a fierce national debate over school privatization. Now,
all eyes are on New Orleans, where critics say the nation's most complete
charter experiment is steeped in structural racism.
After the floods of Katrina were finally cleared, a state board elected by
Louisiana's white majority took over the New Orleans school system from the
local board elected by the city's Black majority. In the decade since,
schools have closed, consolidated and been handed over to private companies
and nonprofits. Now, 92 percent of New Orleans students are enrolled in
schools run by charter boards, more than any other urban district in the
country.
Test scores and graduation rates have markedly improved over the past decade
in one of the nation's lowest-performing districts. However, rates of
student achievement had nowhere to go but up, and researchers are hesitant
to give school privatization full credit for improvements in performance.
They say other factors, such as strong incentives to "teach to the test," a
$1,000 increase in per pupil spending relative to other districts and the
fact that some lower-income students did not return after being displaced by
Katrina, must be considered before New Orleans schools are held up as a
model for other systems.
At the same time, a federal lawsuit and a list of civil rights complaints
have been filed on behalf of immigrant students, students of color and
students with disabilities who were denied access to public education
because schools have discriminatory enrollment and disciplinary policies, or
are simply inaccessible. Many students travel across town to attend class,
and schools buy ads on billboards and buses all over the city, while
neighborhood schools are often neglected or abandoned. Schools in
working-class Black areas are shuttered when students fail to perform on
high-stakes standardized tests, leaving empty buildings where neighborhood
institutions once stood.
"You label our schools as failing, when in fact it is the system that has
failed us, because we never addressed [Brown v. Board of Education], we
never made education equal," says Jitu Brown, national director of
Journey4Justice Alliance, a coalition of groups from Black and Brown
communities impacted by charter schools, including New Orleans.
Fencing blocks access to John McDonogh High School in New Orleans, which has
been closed since 2014. Charter schools are shuttered when students fail to
perform on high-stakes standardized tests, leaving empty buildings where
neighborhood institutions once stood. Many students commute across town to
attend class. (Photo: Mike Ludwig)
Brown says the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision may have ended the
"separate but equal" doctrine of school segregation, but equality has yet to
be realized. After convincing two Republican senators to flip and oppose
DeVos, who was only confirmed after Vice President Mike Pence cast a
tie-breaking vote, Brown and other organizers realized what was missing from
the progressive education movement: multiracial coalitions led by the people
of color who are impacted most. Activists are currently conducting an
"equity assessment" of public schools nationwide to prove just that. The
assessment is part of the #WeChoose campaign, a nationwide push for racial
justice and sustainable community schools that grew out of efforts to block
DeVos's nomination.
"Equity is not just funding," Brown tells Truthout. "It's about
expectations, it's about curriculums and how discipline is administered, and
we will demonstrate through this assessment that the issue is inequity. It's
not bad teachers, it's not bad students from the inner city, it's not
disinterested ghetto parents."
Brown says the movement is not railing against individual charter schools,
unless they have discriminatory enrollment and disciplinary policies. Some
charter schools do embrace progressive policies; for example, one New
Orleans elementary school is committed to enrolling a student body that
reflects the neighborhood around it, a working-class area with a mix of
Black, white and Latino families. However, this diversity policy does not
come without controversy and has made the school highly coveted among
parents jostling for enrollment spots in a system based on market
competition, making it difficult to get into.
"We don't have a problem with charter schools, we have a problem with the
charter movement and charter market, which is concentrated in our
communities," Brown says. "If charters were so great, white folks would have
them, but they don't get charters. They get magnet schools and well-funded
neighborhood schools."
Before Katrina, New Orleans schools were heavily segregated by wealth and
income, and a recent Tulane University study found that the demographic
breakdown of the city's elementary schools has not changed. There have been
some changes in high schools, with segregation increasing for low-income
students but decreasing for those with special needs. In New Orleans,
students are not assigned to a school based on where they live. Instead,
parents submit applications with a list of schools ranked from their top
choice on down, aware that their child may not be admitted to the school
they like best. Black students and activists criticize some charters for
enrollment schemes and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies that favor
white, abled and wealthier students while keeping -- or kicking -- others
out. They say the idea of "school choice" promoted by DeVos is a myth.
Researchers have found that zero-tolerance discipline disproportionately
impacts students on the margins, particularly children of color and children
with "non-apparent" psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. Charters in
cities like New Orleans are incentivized to enroll students who will improve
the school's overall performance. Lower-performing students can become
targets for punishments that ultimately do not correct behavior, but
"reinforce toxic interactions and reproduce cycles of perceived
misbehavior," according to the Ruderman Family Foundation. As punishment
escalates, students are pushed out of school, where they are more likely to
fall into the juvenile legal system and the school-to-prison pipeline.
The New Orleans system is now working toward "reunification" under one local
board and says it is addressing concerns about admissions, suspensions and
expulsions by centralizing procedures for some schools, but emotions remain
raw. In June, the NAACP held a listening session in New Orleans that became
increasingly heated as Black students and parents aired their frustrations
about living in the petri dish of an unprecedented charter experiment. They
lamented the inconsistent stream of teachers from other parts of the country
brought in by Teach for America, the organization that has long been
criticized for replacing local teachers with lightly trained outsiders who
are disconnected from local culture. They questioned how working parents are
supposed to stay involved in education when the schools their kids are
admitted to are miles from home.
In an especially powerful moment, a group of young students took the
microphone despite protests from moderators, declaring themselves experts in
the subject of charter schools because they attend them day in and day out.
"You don't attend the school, you're not there every day," one student said.
"The Teach for America teachers don't care about us, charter schools don't
care about us, and our futures are at stake."
The students were members of Rethink, a local group that empowers young
people to have a voice in changing schools and other institutions. Rethink
member Big Sister Love Rush, who recently graduated from a New Orleans high
school at the top of her class, got involved after learning that her alma
mater would be shutting down this year. After attending public meetings on
charter controversies, Love Rush penned a blog post explaining how
pro-charter forces take education "out of the hands of parents, like my
mother" and give power to outsiders who "act like [students] have no
expertise":
Through all these meetings I keep thinking, who is profiting? Who wins when
my school is closed? Who succeeds when conversations about education don't
include and aren't centered around students, families and teachers? Who
benefits when groups are examining the damage of privatized schools on
students without any plan on how to stop that damage? Who is aided when
discussions become pep rallies? Who makes the money when schools become
sites to make a profit?
The disconnect between students and school administrators can be traced back
to the firing of 7,000 school employees after Katrina, a move that ripped
members of the local community out of their educational institutions at a
time when thousands of families had been displaced by a natural disaster.
LaTanja Silvester at SEIU says that many food service workers and janitors
eventually returned to their jobs, but wages and benefits now vary widely
depending on where they work. Many teachers, however, were replaced by a
younger, whiter set brought in from out of town through programs such as
Teach for America.
Of the roughly 4,300 teachers dismissed after Katrina, 78 percent were woman
and 71 percent were Black, according to the Education Research Alliance for
New Orleans at Tulane University. About half of this workforce returned to
education in the years following the storm, with 37 percent finding jobs in
New Orleans and 18 percent working in surrounding areas. These numbers had
dropped dramatically by 2013, when only 22 percent of pre-Katrina teachers
were still employed in the city's public schools.
"It's the colonizing of our communities, where we have people running the
quality-of-life institutions in our communities through the way they see us,
through their lens," Brown says.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005, the state dismissed
thousands of New Orleans school employees and consolidated schools as it
launched an unprecedented experiment in privatization. This school in New
Orleans' Mid-City neighborhood has sat empty since the storm. (Photo: Julie
Dermansky)
New Orleans is at the forefront of a troubling national trend. Brown points
to the Albert Shanker Institute, which recently studied nine cities with
charter schools in their systems and found that the share of Black teachers
in the workforce had declined in every single one over the past decade.
Rates varied widely, with Boston and Cleveland losing 1 percent of their
Black teachers, while New Orleans and Washington, DC, lost 24 and 28
percent, respectively. Losses in the total numbers of Black teachers in the
population were even greater, ranging from 15 percent in New York City to an
alarming 62 percent in New Orleans. Seniority-based layoffs had little to do
with these declines. Nationally, minority teachers are hired at higher rates
than others, but they exit the profession at much higher rates as well.
"The lesson that is being taught all over the United States is that we are
not fit to lead, and that is a result of policy," Brown says.
Black and Brown teachers are more motivated to work with disadvantaged
students and hold higher academic expectations for them, which results in
better grades and social growth among students, according to the Albert
Shanker Institute's study. Students benefit from teachers of their own race
or ethnicity, who can serve as role models and share knowledge about their
heritage and culture, the study says.
Love Rush adds that the curriculum itself should also reflect the schools'
populations. She writes that many students want curriculums that "represent
us and people like us," and "that teaches us our true history and the role
that it plays in our current lives." Rethink youth activists are currently
campaigning to lower the voting age in New Orleans to 14 so students can
have a voice in shaping local politics and the schools they attend.
"We can and will do it," Love Rush writes. "We will take our education in
our own hands because we are the experts of our experience."
***
The mass teacher dismissal in New Orleans was reflective of a trend that
reached far beyond the classroom. Thousands of jobs that supported Black
middle-class people vanished at a time when residents were recovering from
an unprecedented natural disaster. Some displaced families have still not
returned. In the years since, property values in New Orleans have
skyrocketed and working-class neighborhoods have become hipster hotspots,
putting increasing pressure on lower-income renters in a gentrifying city.
Brown says the gutting of the Black middle class -- and the deliberate
minimizing of its political power -- is not germane to New Orleans, and many
of the same cities that have seen a decline in Black teachers have also seen
declines in the general Black population. When authorities divest from Black
neighborhoods by shutting down their schools and busing children somewhere
else, it could be a sign that property in the area may soon become a hot
commodity. At a time when the nation is facing a resurgence of overt white
supremacy, Brown points out the importance of simultaneously confronting
more subtle manifestations of white supremacy.
"I'm a lot more concerned about the white supremacists that are sabotaging
our children's education, that's white supremacy too," Brown says. "I'm
concerned about the white supremacists that are sabotaging our housing so
that we can't live in our neighborhoods, that's white supremacy too."
Back at the Fresh Food Factor kitchen, Volunteers of America's local
"neighborhood development" corporation has established another project in a
historic building adjacent to the warehouse where school lunches are
prepared: 52 furnished loft apartments complete with a rooftop patio
offering a view of the Mississippi River. With help from state and federal
tax credits and community block grants, Volunteers of America built these
lofts to serve "working households" by creating housing in "emerging
neighborhoods" near employers and public transportation, according to the
project's website.
A number of businesses and shops have sprung up in old warehouses and around
a nearby Wal-Mart, and public transportation can deliver residents to the
downtown business district within minutes. Volunteers of America offers half
of the units at lower prices for residents making under $35,000 a year, but
rent still ranges from $886 to $950 a month for those who qualify for the
discount. With wages ranging from $9 to $14 an hour, kitchen staff would
have to spend about 40 to 60 percent of their income to live in their
employer's lofts next door to where they work. Even workers making as much
as $34,000 would spend about 30 percent for a single-bedroom apartment, the
threshold at which federal authorities consider a household "overburdened."
Volunteers of America has long been in the "affordable housing" business,
using federal housing grants to construct residential buildings for
lower-income, disabled and elderly people. The group's neighborhood
development subsidiary in New Orleans, which was created specifically to
replace housing post-Katrina, is a nonprofit that has its own for-profit
subsidiary for building residences to rent out. Robert Silverman, a
professor of urban planning at the University at Buffalo who focuses on the
nonprofit sector, said for-profit spinoffs of nonprofit housing initiatives
are becoming more common, but profit incentives also raise concerns about
"mission drift."
Volunteers of America is considered a church, so it does not have to file
federal tax returns, and it remains unclear how top administrators and
property developers are paid for their work.
"It's kind of a new trend that has been bubbling up over the past six or
seven years, where a nonprofit will have a for-profit subsidiary connected
to it," Silverman told Truthout. "Different rules and tax laws apply to
each, but they use it as another way to generate revenue [for the parent
organization]."
In 2016, Silverman co-authored a study on affordable housing in several US
cities with shrinking populations, including New Orleans. In general,
affordable housing is not cited near "opportunity areas" as much as
observers would like. Single workers and senior citizens tended to have an
advantage, while single mothers with children were less likely to find
housing near employers or top-performing schools. Volunteers of America and
its subsidiaries run housing projects across New Orleans and southern
Louisiana, and Silverman said it appears the group is trying to "hit"
different income levels. The riverside lofts next to Fresh Food Factor are
probably meant for teachers, police, government workers and others with
moderate incomes, rather than the low-wage food service workers employed
next door.
"The other side of it is, when the nonprofit starts dabbling in these
for-profit ventures, it opens up arguments that can be made for why the
people working for the nonprofit themselves should be given living wages,"
Silverman said.
Pamela Bourgois and Damita Hall just laugh when I tell them how much it
would cost to rent a loft apartment next to the kitchen where their
coworkers make the lunches they serve. That's what their employer considers
"affordable housing?" LaTanja Silvester at SEIU, on the other hand, is
frustrated. She's sick of seeing workers employed by one school contractor
receiving a living wage under a union contract, while workers doing the
exact same job for another school must take on additional work just to feed
their kids. School privatization in New Orleans may have created a brutal
race to the academic top for students, but Silvester says it also created "a
race to the bottom."
"We have to be the city that revamped education and lifted kids out of
poverty and provided a pathway for them to be gainfully employed in this
country," Silvester said. "And we must take into account who is providing
those services, and they are the mothers of the kids who attend those
charter schools."
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Mike Ludwig
Mike Ludwig is a staff reporter at Truthout and a contributor to the
Truthout anthology, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? In 2014 and 2017,
Project Censored featured Ludwig's reporting on its annual list of the top
25 independent news stories that the corporate media ignored. Follow him on
Twitter: @ludwig_mike.
Related Stories
Schools Can't Do It Alone: Why "Doubly Disadvantaged" Kids Continue to
Struggle Academically
By Paul Thomas, AlterNet | News Analysis
Charter Industry Strong-Arms Public Officials; $3.3 Billion Spent
By Jonas Persson, PR Watch | Report
New Orleans Reconstruction Workers Fight to Remain
By Jasmine Lopez, Making Contact | Audio Segment
