ABSTRACT
The struggle over public schools in New Orleans is not limited to where schools will be reconstructed or who will operate and govern them. It is likewise over who will teach in them. Three months after the storm, Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) announced the district's teachers and school employees would be fired en masse in early 2006. Prompted by takeover of nearly all the city's public schools by the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) and plans by local and state officials to charter the schools and recruit new teachers, this action involved 7,500 veteran educators and support staff, many of them tenured and most of them African American. In 2005, black veteran teachers constituted approximately 75 percent of New Orleans public school teachers and a substantial portion of the city's black middle class. Moreover, they were unionized and represented by United Teachers of New Orleans (Local 527 of the American Federation of Teachers) through a collective bargaining agreement with OPSB. The mass firing of black veteran teachers and their strategic displacement by inexperienced, transient white teachers from outside the community cannot be separated from these facts.
