Education in New Orleans

Imagining Partial Reality

James Boyd White ends Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) with an eloquent remark about Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, and Nelson Mandela as writers:

None of these writers thought he lived in a just or perfect world.  Everyone saw evil , in himself and in others;  everyone saw defects of mind and language, in himself and in others.  Yet each found a way of living in an unjust world by imagining an ideal into a partial reality. (307)

Such neoliberal sentiment might encourage fresh thinking among voters in New Orleans, voters who will elect a mayor and seven city council members on October 14, 2017.  Each voter knows the city is neither just nor perfect.  Each witnesses major and minor evil on a daily basis.  Each is aware of defects of thought and language in the city's economic and political dialogue, in how priorities are triaged.  Whether each voter has an equal opportunity to imagine "an ideal into a partial reality" may be compromised by class, wealth, color, gender  or poverty, the dynamics of Realpolitik.  In the ambience of imagining, each voter is the maker of history's narratives (oral or written) as well as the subject of history's carnivalesque forms.

The materiality of politics can push moral and ethical issues from the center to the margins, and  voters in New Orleans know how politics as usual can be a Petri dish for corruption and inequities.  Many of the voters have mastered cognitive dissonance.  This defense mechanism, as Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger noted in ISIS: The State of Terror (New York: Ecco, 2015), kicks in when evidence indicates that beliefs are wrong; "instead of rejecting their beliefs, they will often hew to them more strongly still, rationalizing away the disconfirming evidence" (228).  The mechanism is paramount among cults and various terrorist groups, but upstanding and honest citizens can be affected by it.  This seems to happened among many voters in post-Katrina  New Orleans as they accommodate cognitive dissonance regarding public education.  Indeed, in the listing to date of major priorities in the forthcoming election (public safety, infrastructure, economic opportunity, city services, city finance, and the civil service system), education languishes on the margins.  No candidate, as far as I can determine, has positioned education as a central priority.

This is disturbing, because the minds and life opportunities for young people in New Orleans are at risk.  Have only a handful of voters heard the clarion call in the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change's 2005 document on "Structural Racism and Youth Development: Issues, Challenges, and Implications"?  [Visit https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs ] Are only a handful of voters troubled that charter schools "are managed by a private non-profit board," which is not exactly held to the same standards of community  accountability as the Orleans Parish School Board and the Recovery School District?  Is it acceptable to de-emphasize the intimate links between education and economic opportunity, to ignore the possibility that restoring vocational-technical education in some of the city's public schools might enable a larger number of young people to qualify for better-paying jobs than they can have in the service and tourism industries?

If voters in New Orleans want to find a way of transforming educational  inequity into something better during and after the celebration of the New Orleans Tricentennial  (2018), they must insist that all candidates present reasonable plans for reforming the configuration of education in our city.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            July 20, 2017