A Burdensome Experiment

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In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the "backbone" of the city's Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children? The struggle over this question exposes the inherent antiblackness of charter school systems and the unequal burdens of school choice.
 

Christien Philmarc Tompkins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

"We are inundated with books extolling the virtues of charter schools or excoriating the neoliberal turn in public education without ever telling us what happens in these schools. A Burdensome Experiment is a rare and brilliant exception. Drawing on rich ethnographic research, Christien Philmarc Tompkins interrogates how charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans have reshaped educational labor in the context of neoliberalism, systemic racism shrouded by post-racial conceits, new pedagogical strategies, and the struggles of students, teachers, and parents over the purpose of schooling. Anyone committed to creating liberatory models of education must read this book, not because it has all the answers but because it asks the right questions, with care and humility. And isn't that what great teachers do?"—Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History, University of California, Los Angeles
 
"From the heartbreak of veteran Black teachers made strangers in their own city to the hubris of transplanted educators who see New Orleans as grist for their own good works, Tompkins's trenchant labor ethnography goes beyond 'what works' in urban schools to attend to a city still reeling from the institutional violence of post-Katrina school reform."—Savannah Shange, author of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco
 
"Theoretically precise and powerfully personal, this ethnographic analysis of the top-to-bottom transformation of the New Orleans school system post-Katrina tracks the dismantling of neighborhood schools as the outcome of neoliberal capitalism, design thinking, and the always-present workings of racial inequality. Tompkins's takedown of design thinking is spot-on and a uniquely important contribution to real-world understandings of the ways that the universalized, normative whiteness so prominent in design worlds continues to damage and destroy while claiming to solve problems."—Elizabeth Chin, Editor in Chief, American Anthropologist