Separate and Unequal: The Consumption of Public Education in Post‐Katrina New Orleans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Before the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina had receded, New Orleans was inundated by a wave of neoliberal prescriptions, foundation money and celebrity educators eager to dismantle the city's public education system. The opening of public education to the market has left the residents of New Orleans with an education system that is increasingly separate and unequal. At the center of this radical neoliberal experiment is a 40‐year effort by local proponents of ‘school choice’ for a voucher program. This research examines the links between the system of forces — economic, social, political and (in the case of Katrina) natural — and the transformation of daily life within the city and metropolitan area through policy and media discourse. This article argues that prior efforts to undermine public education at the state and municipal level were key to the velocity and scope of the subsequent changes in New Orleans. Efforts to organize against these changes have focused on the role of think‐tanks and foundations at the national scale. This focus severely limits the power of local organizations to challenge those driving these changes within their communities. Résumé L'inondation causée par l'ouragan Katrina ne s'était pas résorbée que la Nouvelle‐Orléans croulait sous une vague de propositions néolibérales, de fonds caritatifs et d'éducateurs médiatiques impatients de démanteler l'enseignement public de la ville. À la suite de l'ouverture du marché, les habitants se sont retrouvés avec un système éducatif toujours plus séparé et inégal. Cette expérience néolibérale extrême est le fruit d'une entreprise menée sur quarante ans par des partisans locaux du ‘libre‐choix scolaire’ en faveur d'un régime de chèques‐études. Sont examinés ici les rapports entre le système des forces en présence —économiques, sociales, politiques et (dans le cas de Katrina) naturelles — et la transformation de la vie quotidienne, dans la ville et la zone métropolitaine, à travers l'action publique et le discours des médias. Les attaques précédentes contre l'éducation publique au niveau de l'État et de la municipalité ont franchement favorisé la rapidité et l'ampleur des changements qu'a connus ensuite la Nouvelle‐Orléans. Les tentatives d'organisation contre cette évolution se sont concentrées sur l'importance des groupes de réflexion et des fondations caritatives au niveau national. Cet intérêt restreint sérieusement le potentiel nécessaire aux associations ou organismes locaux pour contrer ceux qui mènent ces transformations au sein de leurs communautés.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".