This is the first installment in our two-part series looking at charter schools in New Orleans and Detroit. The juxtaposition is no accident — these two cities have the highest percentage of charters in the country.

In New Orleans, charters have almost entirely replaced traditional public schools; in Detroit, about half the schools are charters. Both cases show the perils of privatization and the way in which elites manipulate crises to transform social goods.

Similar themes are explored in Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook, a joint project of Jacobin and the Chicago Teachers Union’s CORE. The booklet can be downloaded for free and print copies are still available.

This fall, less than a decade after its post-Katrina, “grand experiment in urban education” began, New Orleans will become the first city in the country with an all-charter school district. The traditional school district has been effectively supplanted by the state-level Recovery School District, originally presented as a temporary solution to resuscitate lagging public schools before returning them to local control.

The state of education in New Orleans is often presented as a sort of grand bargain: on the one hand, the neoliberal transformation has been undemocratic and has marginalized community members, parents, and educational professionals; on the other hand, advocates of reform are quick to cite higher test and state school performance scores as evidence that the reforms have been successful. While the former is true, the claim that there has been substantial improvement in the educational experiences of young people is unfounded.