An Interview with Felipe Smith

An Interview with Felipe SmithAuthor(s): Felipe Smith and Charles Henry RowellSource: Callaloo, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring, 2008), pp. 564-580Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27654839 .

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AN INTERVIEW WITH FELIPE SMITH

by Charles Henry Rowell

This interview was conducted on December 1, 2007, in New Orleans, Louisiana, in Suite jazz on

the corner of Frenchmen and Decatur.

ROWELL: You have the privilege of serving as a professor at Tulane University, the premier institution of higher education in New Orleans. In what ways did Hurricane Katrina and

the flooding affect higher education in New Orleans?

SMITH: Well, the consequences in some ways depended on where the institutions were

located and from which populations they draw their student bodies. The reason this is

important is that the locations of the institutions within the city reflect something of the

social structure. You have in the Uptown area on the St. Charles corridor, near the river,

Tulane and Loyola University, side-by-side, but further away from the river and closer to

the lake, you have Xavier?also Uptown but in close proximity to the canal system con

nected to and much closer to the lake, and which therefore had much more substantial

structural damage than did Loyola and Tulane. The location of Tulane and Loyola near

the river meant that they were on higher ground than that of the rest of the city, because over a long period of time the river has built up a natural levee.

The areas that the other universities are located in, especially the public universities

like The University of New Orleans, Delgado, and Southern University at New Orleans, is on land that was previously reclaimed from marshy uninhabitable ground nearer the

lake as well, and therefore closer to the area that flooded more substantially. Since the

flooding was mostly caused by levee breaches in the canals that feed into and out of the

lake, the well-established private institutions closer to the river and the more historic part of the city had much less structural damage. And because Tulane's student population tends to be not as local as the other institutions, the core facilities of the University, the

surrounding infrastructure, and the University's specific challenges in reopening meant

a different manner of addressing post-Katrina issues from schools that drew from a more

local working-class population and suffered proportionally more infrastructure damage.

The public institutions have had a much more difficult path to restore sustainability, which involved many more stakeholders in the conversation because they have to go

through the state legislature and other bureaucratic hurdles that private institutions did

not have to do.

I'm more familiar with the Tulane situation, but I think with all of the institutions the

immediate response was a downsizing of faculty and of support employees, so that in the

midst of this larger catastrophe, we had the loss of jobs in all of these institutions which

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contributed to the larger displacement and unevenness of return of people into the city. At Tulane the number has been conservatively estimated in the hundreds in terms of staff

positions and also in the hundreds in terms of faculty positions especially in the medical

school and engineering programs. Tulane to my knowledge has been able to within two

years return almost to its former levels of student recruitment and in part that has been

done because its main campus was more or less intact, and it was able to present itself as

fully operational relatively soon after the flooding. Therefore Tulane was able to market the

university in terms of students coming here to be a part of the rebuilding effort. In other

words, they seized upon the national attention to the city in order to appeal to students

who might have a sense of public-spiritedness about the opportunity to contribute to the

rebuilding process. Other institutions I don't think have as yet had as great a success in terms of getting

back their student numbers, but all have returned to functioning. There were a lot of

post-Katrina concerns about safety,

concerns about the viability of the parts of the city

where the institutions were located, whether or not there would be enough housing, and

whether previous occupants would be returning. So I think Tulane has weathered the

storm, because we have had it a lot better than other institutions have and, as a result, the larger picture is very mixed. But Tulane and Loyola have substantially recovered and are by all appearances back to where they were before.

There are drastic changes, though. As I mentioned, many of the faculty who were let

go at Tulane were in the medical school, many of them were in the engineering schools.

There have been questions about that, because there was not much if any faculty input about those kinds of decisions. Precisely, because the administration felt that they would not be able to do the kind of things that they thought would be necessary if there were a

university-wide debate over how to proceed, because everyone would be trying to protect

their turf and no one would be interested in giving anything up. So the reinvention of

the university was done by a fairly small group of people working with input from only selected faculty members. Since that time, we've had a much more challenging job, because

the returning faculty have been tasked with making those changes work on a day-to-day basis. So that we have had to figure out how to reorganize ourselves to get things done in an effective manner and that's put

a lot of pressure on faculty members like me who are

running programs without a lot of resources, because we have to do extra work to make

up for the kind of financial support that is withdrawn.

ROWELL: Earlier you said that recruitment was successful the last year?as successful

as before, in fact. What is the effect of successful recruitment on classes while you have a

reduction in faculty? You said that Tulane reduced its faculties in medicine and engineer

ing. Did it reduce its arts and humanities faculties also?

SMITH: Yeah, those faculties were also reduced, with more retrenchment even after the

2005-2006 academic year, because we had a number of people, especially in the liberal arts and sciences, who left the University for other institutions even after they initially returned for the 2006 spring semester. A lot of what explains those departures has to do once again with concerns about the city as a whole as opposed to Tulane itself. Some people

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felt that the public school system was already in crisis before the disaster, others that it

had been radically undermined by the state takeover. There were lots of concerns about

public safety and so forth. A lot of people who were mobile in terms of their employment

options decided to go elsewhere. My department, the Department of English, lost about a third of its faculty of twenty-four. A number of people who were nearing or at retire

ment age decided that this was a good opportunity to leave. Others left because one of

the organizational changes that were made was to downsize the number of PhD granting programs at the university, and our department had its PhD program suspended. Some

faculty who wanted to work in a program with a very active graduate program felt that

they didn't have any assurance that the university would restore the PhD program?we still have a master's degree program, but there's no guarantee that the PhD program will

be restored. So a lot of people left the university on those grounds as well.

What has happened in the interim is that the university has recently begun hiring re

placements for some of the people who have left, especially those who have left recently. But the bigger picture is that they have gone in a different direction in reconstituting the

faculty by creating a number of nonpermanent positions which are called a variety of

things?"professors of practice," and "postdoctoral fellows"?but they are non-tenure track

positions. Generally, they are three year appointments renewable for another two or three

years, which raises a concern to a lot of tenure-track faculty that this is the beginning of a

process of eroding tenure for the institution's faculties. One of the things that currently is

being closely watched is whether or not the university, now that it has recovered financially somewhat and is looking towards having the books balanced in the next couple of years,

will phase out these types of positions. We have, to be clear, been hiring in tenure track

positions to replace our lost department faculty members. The question is whether we

will get back all the positions that we lost in a department that now has nearly as many non-tenure track as tenure track faculty.

ROWELL: There are a great number of educated people

across the country who can't

find jobs.

SMITH: People are finding jobs in non-tenure track arrangements more and more, because

Tulane is maybe an

example of what an institution under a certain degree of financial

pressure might do in order to dramatically change the nature of its workforce.

ROWELL: But what does that say about the future of the quality of education at the Uni

versity and its academic ranking nationally? I am talking about the form of hiring and the

creation of a new status of faculty at Tulane. The suspension of PhD programs is shocking. I would think that would have a very negative impact on the institution as a whole.

SMITH: Well, the fact that the PhD program in English was suspended has changed the nature of the department. Having a large PhD program allowed the department to have a significant number of courses being taught by graduate students. With postdoctoral

positions taking the place of graduate students teaching, the effect is not going be a drop off in quality in terms of the level of preparation of the people who are doing the teaching

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now. There's an argument that people who have their PhD's, but are not in tenure track

positions and who are competitively selected for these postdoctoral positions, are actually an upgrade in the predictability of the quality of the teaching that is being done in those courses. So I don't think the concern is one that has to do with quality, but it has to do with

the nature of the departmental life which has now radically changed by having nearly as many people who are short-term employment positions

as there are who are in long

term employment positions and that requires a certain amount of adjustment in terms of

departmental life and the kinds of coll?gial relationships that people establish, etc.

In the larger picture, I think that, like I said before, Tulane is a test case for what other

institutions are facing in the way of financial pressures, especially high tuition private in

stitutions, in terms of the quality of education that they deliver for the price that is charged. The liberal arts, in general,

seem to have been asked to subsist on a lower percentage of

the general budget than are the professional schools and the sciences. The professional schools typically draw a higher percentage of paying customers without discounted tu

ition and the sciences can be supplemented by grants from outside of the institution that

the liberal arts typically don't have access to. So, what it's done is it's more dramatically

shaped institutional priorities around those units which the administrators think will be

more revenue producing, however they

measure that.

ROWELL: Do you think anything positive will result from these drastic changes? To save money at an institution of higher education does not necessarily mean that you will

promote high quality education; saving money does not mean that you will get the best

quality of teacher or the highest quality of research.

SMITH: Well, the allocation of money has been a sore point with me. My program at Tulane

has always been rather peripheral to what the institution has established over its history as its mission. It's been for the most part, largely an institution that saw itself more in line

with Ivy League and other private Southern institutions, with a specific clientele who

for the most part came from out of state and since what I've been arguing for in the last

nineteen years since I've been there is a greater investment in New Orleans and especially the cultural resources of New Orleans that derived from its African and African Diaspora influences, that approach hasn't always been met with a lot of enthusiasm because there

was not really an audience for any kind of dramatic change

at that time.

What has happened positively then has been a reconsideration of the institutional mis

sion so that now it is officially on record as tilting in the direction of being a kind of engine for local reconstruction and a greater engagement in the future shaping of the city and

that will open doors for the kinds of conversations that I've been wanting to have since

I've been there. I haven't been able to get a really positive hearing from the University, but now that students are being recruited with rebuilding New Orleans in mind, with

engagement in the city in mind, I can make a better case that maybe they should be hiring in these areas that take more advantage of the kinds of opportunities that are presented in the city, as opposed to the old paradigm which was that Tulane was the bastion of the

western high culture in the frontiers of the Gulf South, a place which didn't want to give up the notion that the educational mission was to reform the local landscape rather than to orient to it. And so if there's anything positive, it's the fact that students who have been

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coming into the University recently are perhaps more politically and philosophically open to that kind of orientation than the students that they drew from in recent years. And also

that the institution now has put a certain priority on making its relationship to the city a

centerpiece of how it's going to function from now on.

ROWELL: You speak with much enthusiasm; however, I noticed that you do not even

have a staff for the work you do as director of African Diaspora Studies. You don't even

have an administrative assistant in spite of all the work you have to do.

SMITH: Well, the budget is embarrassingly small and the University's investment has

been, over the existence of this program, very, very minimal. We're ironically looked at as

a successful interdisciplinary program in terms of our resources because we have office

space, we have joint faculty, and we once had a part-time clerical position. Yet I've been

concerned that the program, despite lackluster support, has been used by the University in presenting itself as a forward thinking institution that has hired people in joint appoint

ments in the Diaspora Studies program and that it also has the Amistad Center for Research

in African American History and Culture, and these things give the University a certain

amount of credibility in an area where the resources have not always been provided to

actually make that impact felt. And so I've been fighting these battles for a long time.

On the other hand, we actually were in the process of putting together another in a

series of proposals for a center for African American African Diaspora studies at the uni

versity. We had gotten to the point where we'd finalized a draft of the proposal and we

were scheduled to meet with the then provost on September 6, 2005, so we were

exactly a week and a few days away from a meeting which could have changed all of that. But

before we could have that meeting, the flooding took place and after the cancellation of

that semester and with the loss of revenue, and of faculty and students, there was a great

deal of uncertainty. The center proposal was tabled and was not revived and we

really

did not expect it to be revived until a return to a kind of financial normalcy at the institu

tion. So we haven't given up on pressing that case and in fact fully intend to continue to

press that case.

One of the complications has been that it's not only faculty who've left but also people in the higher echelons of the university administration who've left because we've just

recently appointed a new

provost after two years with an interim appointment. So the

university simply was not

willing to make moves of that magnitude absent someone in

the position of provost. We also simultaneously lost our dean of liberal arts so that we're

in search mode now to find a permanent replacement. Having said that, I also note that

the university has publicly launched very prominent initiatives, including new centers on

race and poverty and on public education, that have been given the resources to operate

as start-up ventures, during this same

period of supposed austerity. It will be interesting to see what the university will invest in when it's time to move beyond just replacing the

lost faculty.

ROWELL: But does a three year appointment promote academic loyalty to the Univer

sity as a

concept and to students? Such an arrangement, it seems to me, only encourages

performances for money?literally a

paycheck.

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SMITH: Well, there are certain kinds of checks and balances on the performance of people in those non-tenure track positions. They, after all, are

looking for long-term positions and

as such, recommendations from regular faculty on their promise

as teachers who work

hard and have performed admirably under the circumstances go a long ways for them to be able to get future tenure track positions. The other part of it is that the alternatives

might be their teaching at institutions where they have a heavier teaching load than they do at Tulane, and so having less of a teaching load here means a greater opportunity for

them to put more time into building up their publications, which will also give them a

better shot at tenure track positions.

But then again it's not just Tulane. Lots of institutions of higher learning are going to

this model. The Ivy League schools have long had societies of fellows and other postdoc toral arrangements to keep their better graduates in a position where they can work on

their scholarly projects and get them published and make themselves more marketable.

These are things other institutions have done, so the change

was presented

as an actual

improvement in our instructional quality because the number of adjuncts has now been

reduced, so the university is advertising that an overwhelming percentage of classes are

taught by full-time faculty as opposed to part-time faculty. The administration has figured out the marketing aspect of it to make this seem like it was a positive direction.

Again, I am curious about whether or not this is an erosion of tenure track appointments.

We'll see how it looks when we are told that we are set at optimal staffing numbers and we

can see where we are in comparison to our previous faculty size. What has also complicated

the operation of the program was a decision that I made not to press for course releases

as a program director because my own department

was so severely depleted. We lost so

many people, especially at the senior level, that we could not provide a full schedule of

classes to the remaining graduate students, especially in my field, if I were not teaching. So I made that decision based on my commitment to the department of English. I accepted a

heavier workload as my contribution to the department, but now that the University has

declared the emergency to be over now we have to have another conversation.

ROWELL: Is the administration of Tulane University aware that, in its efforts to draw

upon the community and maybe educate its people in terms of the community, it also

makes a negative impact

on the community, especially in terms of its closure of the medi

cal school, when the city is in urgent and desperate need of medical and psychological care. Does the University

ever plan to help address issues of mental health, for example,

in New Orleans?

SMITH: I have no idea. You know my sense is that it came down to looking at things in

terms of dollars and cents. A lot of the medical school faculty have much higher salaries

than those of us in the liberal arts faculty. My assumption is that the University looked at the part of the budget which would yield the most savings in return for the number

of faculty that they determined they would have to let go. Maybe lots of that school's

faculty would have left anyway with the uncertainty over whom and how many of the

city's population would be returning. The fact that this contributes to the overall health care crisis in the city is a part of the short-sightedness of that decision-making process that

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was done in a vacuum, with a high degree of uncertainty, where everyone is asking, "Oh,

what are we going to do about the shortfall in revenue?" And as I said, what has made

my job and the job of my colleagues harder is having to manage the damage. In other words, people in a room can come up with all of the new designs that they

want to, but it's people like me who have to make it work. And that's where the real crunch

has been?trying to make these changes work. I don't understand the University's logic in getting rid of the mechanical engineering program, that's the last thing that you would

think would be done in an engineering crisis of this magnitude. We had on the faculty a

civil engineer who was the go-to person for many media outlets in terms of things like

hurricane preparedness and now that person is gone from the University because the

position was eliminated.

ROWELL: For any particular reason?

SMITH: Frankly, I don't know, but she was the person that was well known for expertise in civil engineering circles for evacuations and preparation for hurricanes. She now works

for another institution.

ROWELL: What is the city doing now?

SMITH: Well, like everybody else they call consultants when they have a crisis. Again, I

can't account for their decision-making process. They were

looking at numbers on paper.

They weren't really thinking through, I don't think, all of the ramifications. I mean, this is

where our conversation started. Were they thinking through the ramifications when they took the doctors out of the city?

ROWELL: Do you know if anybody has discussed the implications of these matters in a

public or university forum?that is, the consequences of the impact of this behavior upon, not only the University, but the city also? Has anyone even studied the ramifications for

the State of Louisiana?

SMITH: No, those kinds of conversations have been taking place to a certain extent in

the university setting in different faculty meetings, but not in the context of any kind of

modification or adjustment in the decisions that they made. For the most part, those things were taken off the table as a subject of the discussion and it had to do with the context

in which the decisions were made and the fact that there wasn't a lot of faculty input. So, what may have occurred to us within individual faculties as subjects worth discuss

ing, we have no idea whether they were even discussed. The administration has always used the explanation that it did what it had to do to save the institution. That those of us

complaining about the changes that were made have to understand that other than the

choices they made, we wouldn't have jobs.

ROWELL: Is that a threat?

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SMITH: Well, that could be an implied threat, but it also is true that other institutions did

more severely cut faculty.

ROWELL: But isn't this a moment where you could also make an appeal with the state

for support? There are instances of private institutions that receive state money to operate

programs which are very valuable to the state.

SMITH: Umm, I'm sure that they could have. I don't know of what kind of signals they were or weren't getting from the state as they made their decisions. We don't know if

they ever had conversations at that point. We do know that the state was suffering very extreme infrastructure losses in terms of the LSU Medical School facilities here. I don't

really have an answer to that, but if I'm just speculating?I think Tulane was concerned

about its own bottom line, their attitude was "we'll do what we have to do and the state can do what it has to do and we'll start out from there." I think people who were involved in this decision-making process would say okay, well, in hindsight, you know certain

things happen and we could not have predicted those things at that point and therefore we made a decision under duress in an effort to make the institution viable.

ROWELL: How would you compare Tulane's continuation to that of other institutions in

the city? And I'm thinking of Dillard, the University of New Orleans, Southern University,

Loyola University, and Delgado. I especially think of Loyola, Dillard, and Xavier. They, like Tulane, are

private institutions.

SMITH: Xavier and Dillard have slightly different profiles. I think Xavier has been more

locally situated in terms of where it draws its student population. Dillard actually doesn't seem to draw as high of a percentage of population locally as does Xavier. Xavier has a

presence within the city as the black Catholic institution and there are so many black

Catholics in the city. Because of its success of their science and pharmacy programs, they get a certain amount of support from federal funds, from funds outside of just tuition that I think they had an easier path toward reconstruction than Dillard did.

ROWELL: Reconstruction versus recovery. Which is the better or more appropriate term to use in this context? There is a difference between the two words in the context of Hur ricane Katrina.

SMITH: Yes, recovery suggests that you return to the status quo and none of the other institutions did that. All of them took the opportunity to fundamentally change the nature

of the services that they were delivering. A lot of them made decisions about where they would invest their resources and what their new priorities were. So I consider that to be a

rethinking of the institutional mission that everyone engaged in to some degree even when there were some who felt that their hand was forced to go in certain directions. But to get back to Dillard, Dillard is located near one of the canals that had one of the most severe

levee breaks. The flooding was catastrophic. It is also an institution which has a smaller student population and therefore a drop off in recruitment means that it suffers more in

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terms of every student who decides not to return. It relies more heavily

on tuition maybe

than probably is the case for a place like Xavier. So, I think their recovery or reconstruc

tion projects are slightly different, because of their different locations and how they define

themselves. Xavier is defined more in science and pre-med, and pharmaceutical training.

Dillard is a much more traditional liberal arts college environment and as such it has a

much more traditional tuition-based situation. All of them had drastic faculty cuts.

The University of New Orleans and Southern also, because their populations are more

local and they then were in position where the return of the population to the city was of a greater concern in terms of what they would have to do to become financially viable.

So, from what I know of Dillard, Xavier, and Loyola, Loyola, like Tulane suffered less

in the loss of infrastructure and therefore their recovery tasks were focused on getting insurance and FEMA settlements and then simply to convince their student population to return, that it was safe to return, that the institution was intact, the educational value

was not going to suffer, etc.?as opposed to finding money to repair buildings. Dillard, for example, had to go to unorthodox measures, like teaching

courses out of hotel rooms

or using cruise ships for housing their student population and their faculty. Tulane also

used cruise ships as temporary housing, but not to that degree.

ROWELL: I want to shift, for a moment, to public schools. You're not employed in the public school system, but you do have a working knowledge of what is going on in the public schools of New Orleans. I want to drag

over the words "recovery" and "reconstruction" to

that context. When the state took over public schools, the state government described what

it is doing as

"recovery," as

opposed to "reconstruction." What is the state recovering? Is

"reconstruction" too suggestive of recent Southern history? Does "reconstruction" frighten the white population? [Laughter] Isn't the state "reconstructing" the public schools?

SMITH: Well, it might have been more ironic if they used the word "redemption." Then

that would complete the historical cycle. Now, I don't know why they use the term "re

covery district." The term may have actually been in effect prior to the levee collapse. But it definitely has become a name to distinguish this newly constructed school district from

the schools that remain under the auspices of the Orleans Parish School Board, which is

the local body from whose control the schools were removed. The state testing program called LEAP, responding to the Bush "no child left behind" effort in the last six or seven

years, has changed the nature of the dialogue about education in the state. So that with

everyone theoretically on a

single standard of evaluation, it meant that you could com

pare apples to apples and say that some institutions are prospering and some are failing based on the scores.

New Orleans was the school district prior to Katrina that was considered to have a higher percentage of schools that were not meeting the expectations in terms of the standardized test performances. There was a lot of discussion about whether or not these

standards were measurements of actual student achievement, but no one was satisfied

with the performance of the Orleans Parish schools. So what was taking place in New Orleans prior to Katrina was that very influential group of citizens and corporate types,

good government types with access to the news media, were pushing institutional reforms

and exerting a lot of pressure on a school board that was elected by local districts. The

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elected board reflected the demographics of the city in terms of its racial composition, but

it also reflected a long tradition in the city of having public office holders who approached any elective office as a kind of career move, as a

position from which to operate in terms

of political patronage?in other words the reality was that in school board settings where

the issue you would expect to be uppermost, which is whether or not they are producing a viable educational product, in some ways was being undermined by the political culture

which was producing board members who did not necessarily have a background in or

a very strong personal investment in public education per se.

As a result, leadership of the school system was always the flashpoint for these kinds

of concerns in terms of what types of superintendents were chosen based on what criteria

and whose interests of the many different vested parties in the city they would represent. So there was a series of superintendents beginning with I would say Colonel Alfonse

Davis, who had no prior experience in education, whose career was in the military and

who was chosen largely because he was seen as an outsider who would come in and

transform the political culture of the school system. He was seen as someone who was

not beholden to the prevalent politics and therefore he would serve simultaneously as a

disciplinarian who. .. .

ROWELL: Who was to be disciplined?

SMITH: The student population. The assumption was that as a military person, he would

establish a certain kind of disciplinary mode throughout the system that in some way would

create, if not a more educated student, would create a more socially?[laughs]

I don't know

if this is the term I'd use, but?a socially controllable student. I say that from the context

of what the local business interests typically need as a labor force. Of course, they use all

of the correct language. They want better schools that would attract new industries and a more diversified economy, and of course, that happens to be true. But in the short term,

what they are trying to do is staff service positions in the tourism industry with a depend able but semi-skilled workforce. This is a part of the macro-political aspect of this.

There were powerful voices: the news media, the corporate (I want to use the word

"elite" but of course not all of these people are elite), but the people with power and money are saying that the terrible school system was an inhibition on the city's ability to grow a business culture, because people would not invest in a

city where the public education

levels were so low that they couldn't get people to relocate to this area, and was impeding their ability to move out of a

strictly tourism economy. So Colonel Davis' superintendence was perceived as being a sort of shock to the system, with somebody who could transform

the school system culture to the extent that you could then get a more business-friendly climate established in the city that would then lead to further transformations. This was

the official rhetoric, in any case, from those pushing his candidacy.

ROWELL: So far have you seen any signs of it? Are they significant?

SMITH: Well, Alfonse Davis had a fairly short tenure as superintendent and so did his

immediate successor. Then the board brought in Anthony Amato, the superintendent who

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came in from the Hartford, Connecticut school district and who was the person ultimately chosen to head up the system prior to Katrina, someone who was

promoted as a kind

of educational innovator. His tenure was very rocky, and he eventually was fired by the

same cabal on the school board that was behind his hiring.

ROWELL: Why?

SMITH: Well, because he was a person whose ability to work with other people construc

tively was very limited, and that eventually included his allies on the board as well. He was a person who saw himself as a true believer and other people who didn't agree with

his philosophy, he tended to shut them out and become suspicious of their motives for

disagreeing with him. The board majority, most of whom did not support him, and he were

at odds but, because he was initially the darling of the local corporate and media backers

of "school reform," he was able to circumvent his own board's ability to discipline him.

The board members who were supportive of him were able to get court injunctions from

friendly judges to prevent the majority of the school board from firing him.

So once again the school system became more or less a

staging area for these larger

community struggles. On the one hand, you had the people interested in local control

who were responsive to their neighborhoods and communities. On the other hand, you had these metro-vision types who were trying to impose a different model of school

leadership and they were able to circumvent the normal principle by which the majority on a board can fire its own employees, and then through allies in the legislature they had

laws that were passed that further impacted the school system. The law that was passed which applied only to Orleans Parish Schools, that if the majority of the schools in any school district were deemed to be underperforming then the state could come in and take over all of the underperforming schools from that district, was the state's response to his

lackluster performance and subsequent dismissal.

ROWELL: Is it legal in this country for a state government to select a certain school district

for particular treatment?

SMITH: Well, the way that the law was crafted, since it did not specifically mention Orleans

Parish, it said any local entity whose schools were considered to be mostly underperform

ing. And again you have to understand that there is an alliance here of legislators and

judges and people with influence in the media who were pushing this as the only hope for saving the school system. This is all in the wake of Katrina. So shortly after Katrina, the school board was reduced to having only about thirteen or fourteen schools that it

still controlled. This was out of more than a hundred schools in the system as a whole. So it was overwhelmingly the majority of the schools that were being taken over by this

legislative action.

ROWELL: Were all of those schools actually failing?

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SMITH: Well, with the standardized testing being the only measure for whether a school is

failing, a lot of schools that were actually improving were lumped in with the rest, because

they technically did not reach a certain threshold in terms of the number of students, the

percentage of students, who were meeting these benchmarks.

ROWELL: Did the government of the state of Louisiana ever consider that fact that the

social, cultural, economic, and political lives of the students and their families also play a part in what the state is now calling "failing schools"?

SMITH: In what sense do you mean?

ROWELL: The life of a child growing up in a home in the Lower Ninth Ward is vastly different from that of child in the Garden District, where one is expected and is prepared from birth to attend Tulane or Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or, if not a comparable institution, then LSU in Baton Rouge

or to take over "Daddy's

or Mama's business." On

the other hand, a child growing up in the poverty of the Lower Ninth Ward might, from

early childhood, have to address a culture of violence that infests his/her community. In

the midst of economic poverty, that child might not have books or the daily newspaper or adequate food to eat. That child, more often than not, grows up in a household where

education, especially higher education, is not a significant concern. Literally, basic survival

might very well be the central concern of such a household. In other words, to make sure

that "no child is left behind," we also need to address, assist, and educate the families of

the children who populate "failing schools."

SMITH: Well, first I should say that the Lower Ninth Ward was not a particularly dys functional neighborhood in the city pre-Katrina. There was a very high incidence of home

ownership there, however modest most of the homes were, but it was a relatively stable

community with some better than average schools.

But to get back to the schools, there's another dimension too, that they are institutions

that were drawing their population citywide from those students with the academic

qualifications to go there, that were high-performing schools on standardized tests and

ironically, these were the schools that the school board retained control over, many of

which have been allowed to become charter schools. These were largely schools that were

created by skimming off the top students in the district and clustering them in "magnet school" programs to which students had to apply, regardless of their residential district.

However, that same clustering contributed to the educational deterioration of the schools

in the neighborhoods where they lived. So, that system, which, by the way, most middle class parents try to access?my own kids went to magnet schools?exacerbated precisely that condition that you were talking about which is the erosion of a climate within neigh borhood schools citywide where education represents a kind of path, a predictable path, out of a certain socio-economic existence into another set of possibilities. So that there

were proportionately fewer successes coming out of these schools that could be pointed to as being something that would mobilize those student populations into thinking about

education differently.

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But the other part of it was that the whole process was hijacked by a larger kind of

politics. For example, within the New Orleans metropolitan area, Orleans Parish has been

losing population. The suburbs have been gaining population and the suburbs have a higher

percentage of white population. When things are looked at from the metropolitan area

perspective, the politics of race inflect very differently and make clearer the struggle for

control of the school system. Local control meant majority black students and black school

board members. But then when you get these other players from this larger metropolitan context, whose influence is going to come in other ways than solely through the board

politics, the conventional wisdom becomes that locals can't solve the schools' problems.

Only outsiders can change things for the better. When the state took over the majority of

the schools and put them under the jurisdiction of the State of Louisiana Department of

Education, it simply replicated that model of having people outside the school system be

the ones who were making the decisions.

So, this transfer of the schools to state control is taking place in the context of the Katrina

displacement and return. And it's the convergence of those two things that produced the

custodianship over local schools by the Recovery District. One of the problems with the

Recovery District was that the school district was under the financial control of an outside

management company which was brought in as a way of reforming the record keeping, the book keeping, and the management of the financial aspects of the system. And these

people were answerable not necessarily to the elected board but to other powers that be

within the political landscape who pressured the board into the arrangement. So that by 2005, the board was not entrusted with the management of its own finances.

This was part of the larger state and regional politics. The physical management of

the facilities of the school system was under control of this private outside company. This

financial crisis in the school system was also a factor in the state takeover?the way that

they were able to cite poor test performance and financial crisis as the determining issues

for which school systems would be subject to the law and how this then made it clear that

only Orleans Parish Schools satisfied these criteria. So after Katrina you've got two differ ent outside agencies with not necessarily compatible agendas who were

controlling the

material resources, in addition to which you have your original elected school board which now only controlled a handful of the schools that they previously were in charge of.

ROWELL: Only in Louisiana [Laughing].

SMITH: Well, it's only in Louisiana now, maybe, but it's also indicative of the macro politics of education which recently have seen the not-so-subtle push towards alternative ways of

using public funds for education than putting them directly under the purview of elected

school boards, creating all kinds of alternatives such as charter schools, pushing vouch

ers: those are the kinds of things that, in terms of circumventing the school board model, became the options encouraged by influential figures at the federal level, at the state level, and at the metropolitan level. The Bush administration's fingerprints are all over this trend of transforming public school systems. And so in New Orleans you now have all of these

players who control the financial resources of the school system, who have a much greater

say in the on-the-ground operation than in most localities in the United States.

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ROWELL: From where you stand, are you prepared to mount an

argument as to which

one is the appropriate model for education in the city of New Orleans? Or do we not

know yet?

SMITH: Well, we do know that the Recovery District as a concept is not working very well, in part because the original person put in charge of it was not well-suited to the task; and what also has to be understood is that she was appointed because of her political connections to the people in state educational circles who were all along angling for some

opportunity to gain control of the local school system.

ROWELL: Is she an educator?

SMITH: She was an educator. I think her prior experience administratively was a couple of years as an

elementary school principal. There was something very cynical about ap

pointing her a superintendent

or a master, or whatever you want to call her, of an entire

district when she has never had that kind of an institutional position, with regard to an

entire school system. But again, the philosophy was that anybody who wasn't there before

the takeover was a part of the problem, not a

part of the solution. So again, it was like,

"Oh, we can pick

someone whose only experience was

running an

elementary school

and they could do a better job." Well, New Orleans is much too complex a situation for someone from the outside with the assumption that everything here is wrong, to come in

and change. You have to have people who understand the complexity of neighborhoods, of cultural traditions, of the ways that individuals interact with each other to be able to

develop an educational strategy that doesn't come in with the assumption that the local culture is pathological?which has been the assumption.

ROWELL: Where is this person from?

SMITH: Well, she was an employee of the State Department of Education and she was

living in Baton Rouge and at no point did she ever change her place of residence. So while she was running the recovery school system of New Orleans, she was living in Baton

Rouge, for the most part. She was relieved of her responsibilities prior to the most recent

superintendent of the Recovery District who was just brought this past summer.

ROWELL: Who is this person and where is he from?

SMITH: He's the person who was previously the superintendent of schools in, I think,

Philadelphia. His name is Paul Vallas.

ROWELL: Is he still in the system?

SMITH: Yes. He just arrived this year. He's here for at least another year and his mandate is to bring in ideas from outside that will transform the educational situation and, obvi

ously, reform whatever was not working and help with the rebuilding of the schools.

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ROWELL: But what has he brought in that's non-New Orleans? I'm thinking of kinds of

ideas and practical plans.

SMITH: Well, he also hasn't moved his official residence to New Orleans, because he

doesn't have any long-term commitments to this area or to the city. Basically, he is being

brought in as a troubleshooter who will poke and prod and tinker with this, that, and

the other.

ROWELL: Why would he, or anyone, do anything serious, if he has no investment in the

community? Does the State understand that? It's the same thing that I am talking about

with these three appointments. Why would you do anything more than draw the salary? You have other experiences that you could use for these recommendations.

SMITH: Well, I could be totally cynical and say that people like that are brought in some

times for cosmetic purposes to convince certain constituencies that the powers that be are

trying to do something to solve the problem. People who don't really have an insight into

the nature of the challenge at the level of the individual school and individual neighbor hood, many of them are placated by the notion that it's going to take someone from the

outside to fix these problems, because these are chronic issues.

Again, this all leads to a kind of assumption that the city itself is a problem?that we

have a pathological culture that has to be reformed in ways that begin with an entirely dif

ferent starting point. It has to be said that the State Department of Education bureaucracy entrusted with saving the Orleans Parish school district is also responsible for the state's

overall forty-ninth or fiftieth position nationally in public education achievement. So the

only measure by which that they can been seen as problem solvers is that the degree to

which Orleans Parish has been blamed, because of its size, as the main contributor to the

low achievement scores of the state. The argument State Department of Education makes

is that if you subtract Orleans Parish from the state figures, we don't look as bad as we do

with Orleans Parish included. But that is not proof that you are doing a good job elsewhere and therefore should be given

more power.

ROWELL: I'm not going to ask you for all the ways which Louisiana may overcome its

crisis in education, but I am going to ask you what do you see as the future of public edu

cation in Louisiana? I'm talking about public school systems, K-12, and higher education.

What can Louisiana do to get itself out of this big education mess?

SMITH: Well, the question is, and this is the way people ask it, is New Orleans willing to

do what it takes to become Atlanta or Dallas? To be these other models in terms of Southern cities which first off develop a kind of corporate identity and then this corporate identity becomes the driving mechanism for what kind of an educational system you will have.

What I mean is when you talk about a place like Dallas or Atlanta, you have a southern location which, in contrast to the familiar post-industrial northern urban environments,

is a more corporate friendly environment with typically less unionization and lower pre

vailing wages. So Atlanta and Dallas over the last twenty-five or thirty years have grown

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as a result of an influx from the Rust Belt of a lot of corporations and a lot of workers that

have moved into the South specifically because they see this as a growth area.

Is this the direction we want to go in? Who wants to be simply a hub for these corpora tions which promote a kind of homogenized version of American life, dominated by these

suburbs with, you know, mass transportation systems to move

people to and from work?

There is a lot of local resistance on the grounds that the character of the city is contradic

tory to the importation of that Puritan work ethnic, "anything for a buck" mentality. But

then you do have the other question of should the future of the children of the city be

mortgaged to the tourism industry, with an educational system designed to train workers

for the minimal levels of literacy that are needed for the low wage jobs that the tourism

industry tends to create, or else to serve as a feeder for the criminal justice system? The

incarceration industry? Because there is resistance to accepting either approach as the best

that we can hope for out of the school system. We need to be able to have some kind of consensus for how the city can maintain its

character and not sell out its identity to this kind of homogenized American lifestyle that seems to be taking over other places in the South. What seems a better plan is to identify the city's cultural strengths, its history, and its diverse populations and develop educa

tional programs around maintaining that, while providing basic skills usable anywhere. I mean

historically, New Orleans was a center for education in the nineteenth century with

a critical mass of people of color in the city who had economic means and who were suf

ficiently well placed within the local economy to thrive. You no longer have much in the

way of a local economy such that when you do educate young people they can find com

mensurate employment opportunities. New Orleans exports most of its better-educated

population and that's because they are going to go where the high paying jobs are. So we have got to figure out a way that is going to produce educated members of the com

munity who are going to take root and spur a whole different attitude towards education

rather than exporting the educated elite of each generation and then starting again from

scratch; recreating a resident population for whom education does not materially impact

their life course.

I would argue that New Orleans can, in terms of its own history and its own culture,

develop distinctive educational programs that tap into those resources rather than seeing them as a liability. As something that complicates education, because it draws the energy and the attention of students away from the process of education. If you move this perspec tive into a more central position within the educational system such that you train people into ownership and entrepreneurship with respect to their cultural, social, and environ

mental resources then you can begin to build local infrastructure where the educational

process is not simply feeding into a tourism economy but is feeding into actual building of the community on its intrinsic strengths. It takes vision and an understanding of how

those local resources can be mobilized to do that sort of thing. But I think that the notion that only outsiders can save us is wrongheaded. I'm not saying that the situation can't be

helped by outsiders, but it has to be a particular kind of outsider who is willing to learn

and adapt to the local situation. You can't simply impose a school system organization that works in Topeka, Kansas, or

Anchorage, Alaska and say that.. . .

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ROWELL: Or what about Philadelphia?

SMITH: Or especially Philadelphia and say that one size fits all! This is the blind spot in

the "no child left behind" model from the beginning that one standardized test should

be the measure of any school achievement by students. You should be promoting basic

literacy, but that should not dominate the curriculum to the exclusion of other subject matters. You have to educate "whole" people; you can't simply reduce all education to

these measurements of reading and mathematics. So, I think that there are a few things that can be done to restore a kind of balance to the educational system that would have

greater community participation, something that gets parents more invested in seeing education as a

platform for future citizenship as

opposed to an irritant to their own par

ticular lifestyle. There has to be a way of presenting education as having positive social

outcomes in terms of individuals' life chances, as building

on local successes. Because there

are so many instances of whole families dropping out of the system and of circumventing the system, of gaming the system, lots of people here don't have any real faith that the

educational system is ultimately going to serve their interests.

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Documents

An Interview with Felipe Smith