Critical Studies in Education

ISSN: 1750-8487 (Print) 1750-8495 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcse20

‘Black crisis’ and the ‘likely’ privatization of public

education in New Orleans and Liberia

Mahasan Offutt-Chaney

To cite this article: Mahasan Offutt-Chaney (2019): ‘Black crisis’ and the ‘likely’ privatization
of public education in New Orleans and Liberia, Critical Studies in Education, DOI:
10.1080/17508487.2019.1662464

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2019.1662464

Published online: 08 Sep 2019.

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CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2019.1662464

‘Black crisis’ and the ‘likely’ privatization of public education

in New Orleans and Liberia
Mahasan Offutt-Chaney
Graduate School of Education, University of California Berkeley, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Neoliberal education reforms in schools serving sizeable Black Received 7 August 2018
populations throughout the United States have proliferated and Accepted 28 August 2019
are being transported to Black educational contexts abroad. KEYWORDS
Building on a framework of Coloniality, antiBlackness and a review Colonial education;
of Black colonial education this relational analysis argues that con- neoliberalism; education
temporary neoliberal education reforms not only resemble the early privatization; black crisis;
20th century movement to spread Black industrial education from philanthropy; relational
the American South to regions of the global South- including analysis; antiBlackness;
regions of West, South and East Africa but also reproduce logics coloniality
of antiBlack coloniality. This framework is applied to two cases: the
chartering of schools in New Orleans Louisiana following Hurricane
Katrina in 2005, and the 2016 decision to privatize the entire school
system in Liberia. Far from ‘unlikely’ this article argues that the
application of market-based reforms to schools in the Black
Souths (the ‘urban’ ghettos of the United States as well as the
‘underdeveloped’ global South) is a continuation of 20th century
colonial education interventions and the persistent claim of
Blackness as always in crisis.

Introduction
In 2016 Liberia’s then Minister of Education, George Kronnisanyon Werner publicly
announced a new initiative, the Partnership Schools for Liberia that would use govern-
ment funds to open up to 120 schools managed by non-state operators and provide free
education to all students (Werner, 2016). This ‘truly Liberian program,’ Werner
explained, drew inspiration ‘from an unlikely place,’ New Orleans, Louisiana. He sum-
marized post-Katrina education reform in New Orleans as follows:
After Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005, New Orleans’ education system lay in
tatters. The city government made the bold decision not to rebuild the monopoly of public
sector provision. Instead they partnered with nongovernment operators to create a diverse
ecosystem with a range of school operators, known as ‘charter schools.’ And it worked.
Despite huge economic and social challenges in New Orleans, charter schools have
delivered higher completion rates and better learning outcomes. Importantly, the poorest
children in New Orleans have benefited most (Werner, 2016).

CONTACT Mahasan Offutt-Chaney Mahasan@berkeley.edu Graduate School of Education, University of

California Berkeley, USA
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. OFFUTT-CHANEY

Drawing from market reforms in New Orleans, proponents of the public private partner-
ship in Liberia claimed that a multi-faceted and ‘innovative’ approach was needed to
deliver good quality, inclusive education to Liberia’s school children. In 2016, Liberia’s
Ministry of Education partnered with eight education providers to manage 93 public
schools (Romero, Sandefur, & Sandholtz, 2017). The for-profit Boston based school chain
Bridge International Academies was chosen as the first partner for the pilot program.
Partners like Bridge international have other low fee private schools in countries like
Kenya and Uganda and receive funding from a range of foundations, venture philan-
thropists, and commercial capital investors (Junemann, Ball, & Santori, 2016). In the
first year of the pilot program Bridge operated a total of 25 schools and expanded to
a total of 68 schools in the second year (Bridge International Academies, 2017). In 2018
with the election of a new President and the appointment of a new Minister of Education,
Partnership Schools was renamed the Liberian Education Advancement Program (the
program is henceforth referred to as the Partnership program).
This article contends that far from being an ‘unlikely’ place, New Orleans serves as
a conspicuous source of inspiration for school reform in Liberia and elsewhere for at least
two reasons. First, after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005, New Orleans became
a laboratory of market-based charter reform (Henry & Dixson, 2016; Jabbar, 2015). New
Orleans is the model of neoliberal education reform par excellence in the United States and
as the Liberia case demonstrates, across international contexts as well.
Second, as this article interrogates, the decision of Liberian reformers to model their
Partnership program after market-based projects in New Orleans is reflective of
a longer historic partnership among governments, philanthropies, and business elite
to develop education programs deemed appropriate for Black children. In the early 20th
century groups like the Rockefeller sponsored General Education Board and its inter-
national division were key players in leading Black educational reforms across interna-
tional contexts (Franklin, 2011). Similarly, today’s philanthropic networks transport
reforms across the broad base of school systems for the ‘underserved,’ ’urban,’ and
‘undeveloped.’ While market-based reforms such as charter schools are not targeted
solely toward Black students, they nonetheless are often promoted as programs that will
bring about racial civil rights in largely Black districts (Scott, 2012).
Advocates of market-based reforms claim that schools will be more efficient, more
innovative and provide students with better educational opportunities by restructuring public
education through deregulation, competitive markets, and parental choice (Chub & Moe,
1990). Yet hidden behind these claims of efficiency are concerns about power as corporate and
venture philanthropists reshape public education through funding educational advocacy,
market initiatives, and teaching pipeline programs (Lipman, 2015; Scott, 2009).
This relational analysis (Goldberg, 2009) draws interconnections between the contem-
porary proliferation of market-based reforms in schools across the Black Souths. and the 20th
century models of industrial – or colonial education (Watkins, 2001). Black Souths refers
broadly to the racialized construction of ‘urban’ ghettos of the United States and the
‘underdeveloped’ global South. Unlike a comparative analysis that might ‘contrast racially
conceived or ordered relations of production in one place and another’, David Goldberg
argues that a relational analytic stresses how relational ties are reproduced and reinforced . . .
While A comparativist account contrasts and compares. A relational account connects’
(Goldberg, 2009, p. 1275). Using this relational analytic this paper explores how
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION 3

philanthropic and business elites often rely on discursive claims of ‘Black Crisis’ in order to
take control over majority Black school systems and transport education projects a broad –
a process that relies on and perpetuates a global anti-Black Coloniality.
This article begins with a review of neoliberal education reforms within the United
States and international contexts then, informed by theories of colonialism and
antiBlackness, argues that the notion of antiBlack coloniality offers a broader historical
and socio-political context that illuminates both the depth and breadth of contempor-
ary market reforms and the deeply racialized, historical and global reach these reforms
take. Next, I provide a brief background on the colonial links between Liberia and the
United States. I then use the case of 20th century philanthropic attempts to spread
industrial education throughout the Black Souths to demonstrate how school reforms
were informed by an antiBlack coloniality aimed at reproducing Black subjectivity
within a shifting race based political economy. I argue in the fourth section that
contemporary market-based reforms in New Orleans and Liberia reproduce similar
patterns of philanthropic control over Black schools. I conclude by relating neoliberal
school reforms to larger colonial structures and anti-Black coloniality.
This article does not attempt to enter debates about how or whether or not choice
models improve educational outcomes. Rather, it explores how marketized education
projects reinforce and reproduce dichotomous colonial relationships premised upon
profit and exploitation between Black and white, South and non-South, private and
public, underdeveloped and developed. In doing so this paper contributes to an
ongoing conversation about the role of race, the global reach of anti-Blackness and
moves beyond neoliberalism to explain the proliferation of market-based reforms.

Market reforms and moving beyond a neoliberal education critique

Neoliberalism is an economic theory, a political project, and a particular rationality that
emphasizes privatization, deregulation, and free-market oriented regulatory reforms.
As a political project neoliberalism re-establishes the conditions for capital accumulation
and restores power to economic elites (Harvey, 2005). Although public schools are sup-
posed to be publicly controlled, the neoliberal turn has been dominated by philanthropists,
educational entrepreneurs and business elite who have become the most influential educa-
tional leaders and policy makers in state and urban school systems (Au & Ferrare, 2014;
Lipman, 2015; Reckhow, Henig, Jacobsen, & Litt, 2016; Scott, 2009; Tompkins-Stange,
2016). Moreover, these new school leaders are predominantly white men who operate
within an expanding entrepreneurial reform network to generate support for market
reforms (Scott, 2008, 2009). Such leaders have accumulated power over schools and
districts previously administered by Black educators (Buras, 2011). While market reforms
have become increasingly popular amongst districts serving students of all demographics,
market-based reforms like charter schools have become particularly prominent in high
poverty districts populated by students of colour. In 2017–18, six of the seven school
districts with at least 40% of their students in charter schools were largely Black districts
(National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2019). New Orleans topped the list with
95 percent of their students enrolled in charters (National Alliance for Public Charter
Schools, 2019). Similarly, Outside of the U.S., global policy networks comprised of think
tanks, consultants, multilateral agencies, donors, education businesses, and philanthropies
4 M. OFFUTT-CHANEY

have increasingly globalized market based reforms by contracting out educational services,
and promoting international charter schools and voucher programs (Ball & Youdell, 2009;
Junemann et al., 2016; Robertson, & Verger, (2012); Srivastava, 2016).
Imposing neoliberal policy also requires the creation, management and manipulation
of crisis (Harvey, 2005). As Neoliberal theorist Milton Friedman explained ‘only a crisis
actual or perceived produces real change’ (Friedman, 2002, p. xiv). Not only do market
reformers and venture philanthropists exploit different economic, state and municipal
‘crises’ to pursue market-based education agendas (Lipman, 2015), education leaders
also evoke a particular form of race-based crisis by relying on narratives of damage and
struggle whereby Black youth in low-income settings are framed as ‘broken’ and in need
of ‘fixing’ (Baldridge, 2017, p. 281). As Michael Dumas argues, ‘the neoliberal project,
far from eschewing race, recruits familiar racial imaginations for its ideological and
policy agendas’ (Dumas, 2016a, p. 97).
These critiques inform how we understand the proliferation of market reforms in
both urban districts and in global contexts. Still, as geographer Jamie Peck observes,
‘neoliberalism is never the entire story, never the only causal presence; it never acts
alone’ (Peck, 2013, p.150). Relatedly, Tuck and Gorlewski (2016) argue that
education policy analyses which culminate in a critique of neoliberalism can easily skip
over the material effects of ongoing settler colonialism, how different bodies are differently
racialized, and how those made other in race-based stratifications might otherwise relate to
one another (p213).

Thus, answering their call for educational policy analysis to move beyond neoliberalism
as social explanation, this paper builds on colonial theories, anti-Blackness and coloni-
ality to frame how an anti-Black coloniality frames the current marketization of schools
across the Black Souths.

Anti-black coloniality: race, colonialism, and the afterlife of slavery

Scholars have long linked Black oppression with colonial conditions. In the 1960s
scholars and Black activists argued that Black economic and racial oppression could
be defined as an internal colony (Allen, 1970; Blauner, 1969; Carmichael, Hamilton, &
Ture, 1967; Clark, 1965). Psychologist Kenneth Clark (1965) for example postulated
that the Black ghettos of the U.S. could be understood as ‘social, political, educational –
and above all – economic colonies’ (p.11). Black ghettos were ‘erected by the white
society, by those with power to confine those who have no power and to perpetuate
their powerlessness’ (Clark, 1965, p. 11).
Scholars have since situated Black economic and social oppression to broader
structures of settler colonialism (Byrd, 2011; Glenn, 2015) and the enduring legacy of
slavery and antiBlackness (Day, 2015; Dumas, 2016b; Hartman, 2007; Leonardo &
Singh, 2017; Sexton, 2010). As Rinaldo Walcott argues, contemporary social relations
are framed by the ‘system of rule founded on indigenous genocide, and on the
making . . . of Black people as the ultimate anti-Human.’ (Walcott, 2014, p. 96). For
Saidiya Hartman (2007) Black Americans are ‘still imperiled’ in what she refers to as the
‘afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education,
premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment’ (p.6). Thus, antiBlackness
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION 5

contends with how Black people continue to be denied humanity (Dumas, 2016b;
Walcott, 2014). Furthermore, as Michael Dumas (2016b) argues, antiBlackness con-
tinues to explain how Black is ‘constructed as problem – for white people, for the public
(good), for the nation-state’ (Dumas, 2016b p12).
Lastly, scholars have looked at how the racism produced in the Americas spread during
colonial expansion and has continued to mark the power relations between Europe and
colonized populations (Grosfoguel, 2004; Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Quijano & Ennis, 2000).
Left in the wake of this race-based colonial expansion is an ongoing logic of domination –
a persisting coloniality whereby power relations and racial hierarchies continue to be orga-
nized and constituted by western colonial expansion (Grosfoguel, 2004). Race codified non-
Europeans from Europeans into new categories: East-West, primitive-civilized, irrational-
rational, traditional-modern – Europe and not Europe. (Quijano & Ennis, 2000, p. 542). As
Ramon Grosfoguel argues, ‘coloniality’ helps to address how ‘colonial situations’ – the
cultural, political, and economic oppression of subordinate racialized ethnic groups by
dominant racial/ethnic groups, persists with or without the existence of colonial administra-
tions (Grosfoguel, 2004, p. 320). Furthermore, as Renaldo Walcott’s (2014) argues, a wider
reach of coloniality centers the logic and practice of anti-Blackness (Walcott, 2014, p. 100).
Putting these theories together, the following sections examine how education projects
reinforce ongoing logics of colonial domination based on antiBlackness – or, an anti-Black
coloniality. Just as American race relations came to define the rest of the colonial world,
I explore how education projects transport across the Black ghettos of the U.S. – to the
global south and reinforce a global – anti-Black coloniality. This case is best demonstrated
by the spread of 20th century industrial education, what William Watkins refers to as a form
of colonial education (2001). Before turning to the spread of industrial education, the next
section provides a brief background on Liberia and its colonial ties with the United States.

Background: slavery, colonization and settling Liberia

The educational links that tie Liberia and New Orleans can first be historicized within the
context of U.S. slavery and the impending crisis that slavery cast on 19th century social
reformers and politicians. The American Colonization Society (ACS) founded Liberia in 1822
as a settlement for free Black Americans and those manumitted from slavery. Abolitionists
concerned about the morality of slavery, proslavery politicians and southern slaveholders
supported the colonization movement to send free Blacks to Africa as a means of protecting
slavery from the free Black community they felt threatened its existence (Clegg, 2004).
Between 1820 and 1860 the ACS sponsored the emigration of over 11,000 African
Americans to Liberia (Schiller, 2011; Tyler-McGraw, 2007). As members of the ACS planned,
Black Americans or Americo-Liberians would work to spread white evangelical, educational,
and domestic values to natives in Liberia (Franklin, 1974, p.101; Tyler-McGraw, 2007, p. 5).
Settlement in Liberia followed the American model – expanding their territory on the coast
through conquest, purchasing land not subject to sale, and converting treaties of friendship
into deeds of ownership (Konneh, 2002, p. 74). These very real effects of settlement too must
be tied to the legacies of slavery that the colonization movement sought to protect. As Peter
Clegg (2004) argues, the ever-changing identities of African American immigrants to Liberia
should be understood within the constantly evolving and entangled ‘meanings of slavery,
freedom, colonialism, race, citizenship, and migratory patterns that characterized the
6 M. OFFUTT-CHANEY

development of nineteenth-century Atlantic cultures’ (Clegg p6). Alongside the Black

American settlement, the United States has maintained an imperial and neo-colonial rela-
tionship with Liberia by exploiting Liberia’s natural resources and providing loans that
cemented forms of dependency, (Kieh, 2012; Konneh, 2002; Whyte, 2015).

Modelling 20th century colonial education: manual education and the

‘Negro problem’
Racial control over education has played a key instrument of colonial governmentality (Davis,
1976; Watkins, 2001; Spivey, 1978; Zimmerman, 2010). Once slavery was abolished – educa-
tional, philanthropic and business elite adopted new educational policies that would continue
to reproduce social and labor market control over Blacks. As others have demonstrated, this
colonial education is best exemplified by the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial educa-
tion (Watkins, 2001; Zimmerman, 2010). Under the leadership of General Samuel Armstrong,
Hampton Institute emphasized a curriculum focused on character building, industry, and
morality (Anderson, 1988; Watkins, 2001). Later, this curriculum model would be adopted at
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute led by Armstrong’s former student Booker
T. Washington. Hampton’s colonial tradition of manual education can actually be traced to
Samuel Armstrong’s father, Richard Armstrong, a missionary in charge of education in
Hawaii – and this colonial legacy continued as education leaders spread manual education
during imperial expansion in Africa (Zimmerman, 2012).
Philanthropic and educational elites such as the Phelps Stokes family, the Rockefeller
family, and sociologist and Hampton educator Thomas Jesse Jones built on the indus-
trial education model as they campaigned to build normal schools and high schools
throughout the New South characterized by the economic shift from an agrarian society
to one that embraced industrial capitalism (Anderson, 1988). Educational leaders hoped
to use manual education to solve the ‘Negro crisis’ – the problem of incorporating Black
Americans into a post-slavery Southern political economy while simultaneously guar-
anteeing their subordination within the new system (Anderson, 1988; Watkins, 2001).
This education model however was the ideological antithesis of the educational and
social movement begun by ex-slaves who linked education to social uplift, and physical,
social and political liberation (Anderson, 1988; Watkins, 2005). By supporting indus-
trial education and manual training schools as the preferred institutions for Black
students, these philanthropies reinforced the racially segmented labour force that
would in turn protect the political and economic order of the South (Watkins, 2001).

Transporting industrial education throughout the Black souths

Although movements for Black high schools were already spreading throughout the South,
agents of white philanthropy, including those from the General Education Board and the
Rosenwald Fund, the Jeans Fund, the Slater Fund, the Phelps Stokes fund organized cam-
paigns to build Black schools focused on industrial education meant to ‘fit the needs of the
Negro’ (Anderson, 1988). Philanthropists working with curriculum experts of industrial
education concluded that secondary education in New Orleans, like that in other schools
throughout the South, ‘should prepare boys and girls for vocations which are open to Negroes
in New Orleans’ (Anderson, 1988, p. 208). For example, the Rosenwald Fund sought to
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION 7

develop secondary industrial education that reproduced the existing structure of ‘Negro jobs’
(Anderson, 1988). The high school campaign in New Orleans and across the South advocated
for secondary industrial education that could produce scientifically trained and more efficient
Black workers in already largely Black occupations including caterers, laundry women,
dressmakers, maids, gardeners, chefs and cooks, tailors, chauffeurs, auto mechanics
(Anderson, 1988, p. 216).
Just as industrial education programs spread throughout the New South during the
early 1900s, European and American colonial powers, missionaries, industrial capitalists
and philanthropists began implementing similar programs in European colonies in
Southern, East and West Africa including Liberia (Franklin, 1974, 2011, p.44; Givens,
2016; Spivey, 1978a; Watkins, 2001; Zimmerman, 2010). In doing so educational leaders
globalized the charge to confer the colonial status of Black students, vis-à-vis industrial
education, from the U.S. South to the Global South. Moreover, as one historian
suggested, the education commissions led by the Phelps-Stokes Fund in Africa which
promoted Tuskegee-based models in Africa did so deliberately to counterbalance
movements for African independence and self-sufficiency such as the Africa programs
of Dubois’s pan-Africanism and Garveyism (King, 1971, p. 129).
Familiar actors prominent in establishing Black colonial education projects in the New
South maintained their prominence as they expanded colonial education to Liberia. For
example, in 1920, the Rockefeller-sponsored General Education Board, the dominant force
in the distribution of Northern economic support to Southern Black industrial education,
formed the International Education Board to initiate their programs abroad. This
International Board alongside the Phelps-Stokes Fund, Thomas Jesse Jones, and the
New York Colonization Society took on a new force as they opened up the Booker
T. Washington Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Kakata, Liberia in 1929 (Franklin,
2011; Spivey, 1978). More than 100 years after the American Colonization Society founded
Liberia, the New York Colonization Society took charge in sponsoring the commission
responsible for finding the institute’s location Kakata which proved to be an ideal location
for the new industrial school because of its close vicinity to the Firestone rubber plantations
(Franklin, 2011). The first three principals of the school, all southern white men, fully adhered
to the colonial ideas that Africans should be ‘educated for work’ (Franklin, 2011, p. 50).
Meanwhile, Firestone benefited by having ‘more efficient’ native laborers to plant and harvest
rubber (Franklin, 2011; Spivey, 1978). The efficiency manager of Firestone plantations for
instance asserted that one person ‘well educated could attend four acres,’ and ‘one hundred
acres planted in rubber trees would yield . . . a net profit of five thousand dollars per year’
(Spivey, 1978, p. 10). Students from Booker T Washington Institute would thus provide
Firestone with efficient workers.
The history of early 20th century industrial education demonstrates how Black
colonial education in the U.S. was relationally connected to educational models in
Black spaces like Liberia. Educational and philanthropic elite worked across the Atlantic
to solve the crisis of the ‘Negro problem’ – how to incorporate Black people across the
global South into a colonial and post-slavery political economy – by guaranteeing their
subordination within the new system. Through its international subdivision, The
General Education Board, alongside the Phelps Stokes Fund, brought the Hampton-
Tuskegee model to Liberia just as similar models spread through European colonies in
the rest of West, Southern and East Africa.
8 M. OFFUTT-CHANEY

Through the Hampton-Tuskegee model, educational elites reproduced and rein-

forced a global anti-Black coloniality. As Historian Andrew Zimmerman suggests, the
Tuskegee expeditions to European colonies in West Africa ‘helped transform the
political economy of race and agricultural labour characteristic of the New South into
a colonial political economy of the global South separated by the core capitalist
countries by what WEB Du Bois called the colour line’ (Zimmerman, 2010, p.1).
Such education programs reproduced notions of Black backwardness, cultural deficit,
and mental ineptitude (Givens, 2016).

Neoliberalization and the persisting philanthropic control over black

education
As reviewed earlier, claims of crises provide the necessary rationale for the articulation
of neoliberal governance (Friedman, 2002; Harvey, 2005). In New Orleans, the onset of
market-based reforms was made politically viable after Hurricane Katrina hit the city in
2005. As former Governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana declared, ‘it took the storm of
a lifetime to create the opportunity of a lifetime . . . that the state take control and
recreate the New Orleans public schools’ Garda, 2010, p.10). After the storm, oversight
over most of New Orleans’ schools was transferred away from the locally elected
Orleans Parish School Board (OPSD) to the state-controlled Recovery School District
(RSD) – which by 2015 operated a completely chartered district (Jabbar, 2015). As of
2019, New Orleans will become the first U.S. city with virtually all its public schools run
by charter organizations (Hasselle, 2018).
After the storm, power and jobs also shifted away from what had been a majority
Black teaching force as OPSD fired nearly all of its Black, unionized and veteran teaching
force (Buras, 2011; Buras, 2016; Cook, 2016). State officials cast veteran teachers and their
union as the ‘problem’ in New Orleans public education (Buras, 2016). The mass firing of
New Orleans’ Black teaching force and the simultaneous contracting with Teach for
America, the New Teachers Project and other alternative teaching programs diverted
Black jobs to novice white teachers from outside the community (Buras, 2016). Venture
philanthropists such as The Broad, Fisch and New Schools Venture Fund provided
private support for these alternative teaching programs in New Orleans and in other
racially and socioeconomically segregated districts across the US (Scott, 2009).
In addition, the rise of charter schools and charter management organizations
(CMOs) also redistributed power in the city from the public to the private sector.
There are many large CMOs in New Orleans including the Algiers Charter Schools
Association (ACSA), Firstline Schools, ReNEW schools, and KIPP New Orleans
Schools, (Cowen Institute, 2015; Jabbar, 2015). Between 2006 and 2015 the percentage
of charter schools belonging to a CMO grew from 45% to 60% (Cowen Institute, 2015).
While many of these large CMOs are local charter operators, what charter researchers
refer to as ‘homegrown,’ leaders and founders of these CMOs come largely from outside
New Orleans (Jabbar, 2015, p. 759). Furthermore, the charter authorization process may
serve as an additional barrier locking Black educators out of school governance. For
example, some Black educators seeking to get their own charters reported that they felt
they had been denied a charter contract because they were perceived to represent ‘a
failed, bloated Black bureaucracy’ (Henry & Dixson, 2016, p. 233).
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION 9

While the crisis of Hurricane Katrina made the massive reform efforts possible, the
triumph of neoliberalism as both ideology and policy regime, is again seamlessly
compatible with the discourse of racial politics (Reed, 2006), and reinforces and
buttresses long-stemming racialized power relations and a broader system of anti-
Blackness (Sondel, Kretchmar, & Hadley Dunn, 2019).
These reforms, which redistributed power from local Black teachers and district
officials in New Orleans to state and private white interests, reproduced similar racia-
lized shifts of power at the turn of the century. After Reconstruction ‘As [B]lack
southerners lost political and economic power, they lost substantial control over their
educational institutions, especially in the public sector and the shape and character took
a different turn’ (Anderson, 1988 p. 3). Similarly, after Katrina, the shape and character
of public education took a different turn. This is demarcated by the shift of power from
Black teachers to alternative teaching programs, from elected school board members to
charter management organization and from communities to venture philanthropies
who are shaping the reform movement in the city (Jabbar, 2015). Furthermore,
although the state has returned schools to the local control of school boards, there is
evidence that school board elections may be steered by candidates who support market
reforms and whose campaigns are sponsored by wealthy donors who serve on boards of
venture philanthropies (Reckhow et al., 2016).

Transferring a ‘Truly Liberian program,’ from ‘An unlikely place’

Absent from Liberia’s former Minister of Education, George Kronnisanyon Werner’s
claim that the inspiration for Liberia’s Partnership Schools came from ‘an unlikely
place: New Orleans, Louisiana,’ is a more nuanced relational analysis of how an
enduring anti-Black coloniality shaped the contemporary, cemented its structural
arrangements, and made ‘likely,’ the transference of neoliberal education models.
As with the market-based reforms in New Orleans, Liberia’s Partnership program is
backed by a range of venture philanthropies. When Liberia’s Partnership Schools was
initiated, the biggest contract went to Bridge International Academies which runs
a chain of low-fee, for-profit private schools that are funded by a number of venture
philanthropists including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the World Bank
International Finance Corporation (Riep, 2017). The Bridge International Academies
use a scripted curriculum model that includes step-by-step instructions directing what
teachers should do and say during class sessions and relies on a large team of ‘Master
Teachers’ based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Nairobi, Kenya to plan every lesson
taught at every class, transmitted wirelessly and recited word-for-word using tablet
e-readers (Riep, 2017). As one news report quoted, Bridge boasted that;
because of our highly efficient delivery mechanism (marrying talented individuals from
each community with technology, scripted instruction, rigorous training, and data-driven
oversight), Bridge is able to bring some of the world’s greatest instruction and pedagogical
thinking into every classroom in every village and slum in the world. (Sieh, 2016b).

Across the world’s villages and slums, Bridge estimates that by 2022 it will educate
4.1 million students and generate $470 million in revenue (Tyre, 2017). Philanthropic
elite have funded an educational program that has transformed the structure of
10 M. OFFUTT-CHANEY

educational governance from Liberia’s Ministry of Education to private for-profit and

non-profit education providers and have even outsourced and transformed the delivery
of pedagogical practice to ‘master teachers’ outside of Liberia. Similar to New Orleans,
this transformation has led teachers in Liberia to make claims that the Partnership
program stripped teachers of jobs, curricular control, and political power. After the
Partnership program was announced in 2016, such practices led The National Teachers
Association of Liberia (NTAL) to threaten a nationwide strike against the implementa-
tion of the partnership program (Butty, 2016; Front Page Africa, 2016).
Furthermore, while promoted as an altruistic project to help the villages and slums of the
global South, education companies like Bridge International profit off of the backs of Black
crisis. The memorandum of understanding between Bridge International, and the Ministry of
Education for example began by reciting that ‘After more than a decade of civil war, post
conflict stress, and the Ebola health crisis in 2014–2015, Liberia’s children remain with a right
to quality education that is unrealized’ (Bridge International Academies, 2016, p. 1).
In addition, the Commissioner of Education made familiar claims that widespread
educational failure including low-test scores, unqualified teachers, and inefficiently
managed public-school system justified the turn toward the public private partnership.
As George Kronnisanyon Werner detailed;
The statistics are grim for us; we do not have sufficient trained and qualified teachers; our
teacher attendance is poor, and the learning outcome for every student is dismal. So, what
we are trying to do is to leverage the best of the private sector in terms of management
systems and accountability and governance to improve all of these elements and accelerate
learning outcomes for our children wherever they are (Butty, 2016).

The case of Bridge and the Partnership program more broadly demonstrates how interna-
tional actors use contexts of vulnerability as ripe moments to promote preferred policy reform
approaches and to experiment with innovative policy solutions that would otherwise be
difficult to implement in more stable situations (Verger, Zancajo, & Fontdevila,). As others
have argued, Liberia’s Partnership schools seems to have been initiated more for ideological
reasons than for their potential educational effectiveness (Klees, 2018).
Just as turn of the century educational and philanthropic leaders used schools to resolve the
‘Negro problem,’ marketized reforms, like the ones taking shape in Liberia and New Orleans
have been made politically palpable in the Black, urban and underdeveloped areas character-
ized by interrelated claims of crisis. While Katrina was used to rationalize the shifts in power in
New Orleans, similar crises including civil wars, and Ebola have been used to justify the
current project to privatize Liberia’s education system. Thus, government and private actors
employed familiar discursive claims that market-based reforms would improve the multitude
of crises destructing areas of the Black Souths.

Conclusion
The proliferation of market reforms throughout the Black Souths, and across regions
with varying colonial histories is part of a longer, darker history – one that continues to
rely on constructions of Black crisis to control and reproduce white philanthropic
control over Black school systems. By engaging with anti-Black coloniality and tracing
the reproduction of Black colonial education- its movement, its reproduction and how
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION 11

it was transported from one place to the next – this article responds to recent calls for
educational policy analysis to explain beyond Neoliberalism (Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016)
Moving beyond neoliberalism means revisioning neoliberalism – not as an event –
but part of broader settler-colonial structure (Glenn, 2015) a structure that perpetuates
anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasures (Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016).
Examining market movements as part of a colonial structure – an enduring coloni-
ality that reproduces colonial relations allows researchers to ask different sets of
questions – ones divorced from evaluating the ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ of school
choice or innovations that derive from the ‘unlikely.’ Instead neoliberalism-as-structure,
forces researchers to explore how – and in which ways – market reforms have been
erected ‘by those with power’ to ‘confine those who have no power and to perpetuate
their powerlessness’ (Clark, 1965, p. 11).
Neoliberalism as part of a broader colonial structure invites researchers to look
relationally, beyond local contexts – and examine ‘how state formations or histories,
logics of oppression and exploitation are linked, whether causally or symbolically,
ideationally or semantically’ (Goldberg’s (2009), p. 1275). As this article has sought to
demonstrate, the proliferation of education reforms in the Black Souths are part of
a system of exploitation and profiteering vis-à-vis creations of Black educational crises.
Like 20th century colonial education projects, contemporary market-based reforms
in Black educational contexts are being shaped by a familiar cast of actors: business and
philanthropic elite who rehearse a recognizable script: that education will solve the
Negro problem, or in today’s terms, bureaucratic school failure, and the multitude of
crises used to characterize the urban, the underserved, the undeveloped. As others have
concluded ‘this, then, is the essence of antiBlackness in education policy: the Black is
constructed as always already problem’ (Dumas, 2016b, p. 16).
Arturo Escobar’s (1995) points to the discursive power of naming groups as problem
in his critique of mainstream development literature. He contends that within the
development literature

there exists a veritable underdeveloped subjectivity endowed with features such as power-
lessness, passivity, poverty, and ignorance, usually dark and lacking in historical agency, as
if waiting for the (white) Western hand to help subjects along and not infrequently hungry,
illiterate, needy, and oppressed by its own stubbornness, lack of initiative, and traditions.
This image also universalizes and homogenizes Third World cultures . . . that it exists at all
is more a sign of power over the Third World than a truth about it (pp8-9).

A similar critique could be applied to market-based educational projects that discursively

frame Black students and their school systems as failing. No excuse schools for instance are
predicated on perceptions of students and their communities as, violent, chaotic, vengeful,
and dangerous (Sondel, 2016; Sondel et al., 2019 see also White, 2015). Moreover the elite
network of entrepreneurial organizations that have gained power over schools such as Teach
For America, Charter Management organizations, and international development organiza-
tions offer that the market- can successfully teach Black students and that they are at the
forefront of a Civil Rights or humanitarian movement (Junemann et al., 2016; Scott, 2012;
Sondel et al., 2019). In other words, the persistent image of Black crisis and Black educational
failure perpetuated by educational philanthropies and international for-profit chains, is
perhaps ‘more a sign of power over the “Black Souths” than a truth about it.’
12 M. OFFUTT-CHANEY

This paper has focused on temporal and spatial dominance of institutional elite and how
they have structured Black education reforms. In doing so, Black leaders of colonial education
and even Black leaders of market based reforms have intentionally remained shadowy figures
in this account, still future research might do more to unpack the role of Black managerials
and how they are entangled within the structure of settler colonial history (Tuck & Yang,
2012), or how they too reproduce logics of coloniality.
Ultimately, there is nothing ‘unlikely’ about the transference of educational inter-
ventions deemed appropriate for resolving Black education. Not engaging with theories
of colonialism and the enduring effects ‘obscures the continuities between the colonial
past and current global colonial/racial hierarchies and contributes to the invisibility of
‘coloniality’ today (Grosfoguel, 2004). Thus, engaging with the logics of anti-Black
coloniality makes more visible, more ‘likely’ – both the transference of market-based
reforms across the Black Souths and the redistribution of power to educational elite.
Contemporary neoliberal reforms rely on and continue to reproduce an anti-Black coloni-
ality – designed by outside interest groups, imposed on Black people, and imported across
Black school systems. As literary scholar Sharpe (2016) offers, ‘The means and modes of Black
subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection remain’ (P.12). Just
as educational and philanthropic elites at the turn of the century framed industrial education
in terms of its civilizing and humanitarian goals, education reformers today re-invoke
a familiar missionary zeal. These efforts destabilize predominantly Black-run public school
systems. Once conducted on Black children in the United States, these programs are trans-
ported to other Black colonies abroad.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Mahasan Offutt-Chaney is a Ph.D Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the
Graduate School of Education. Her research sits at the intersections of the political economy of
urban education, critical policy studies and the history of Black education.

ORCID
Mahasan Offutt-Chaney http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8104-4862

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