Skip to main content

Kristen L. Buras

Georgia State University

Kristen Buras is an Associate Professor in Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She is the author of Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance. Additionally, Buras is coauthor of Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans, recognized for its outstanding contribution by the Curriculum Studies Division of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She has spent almost two decades studying the development of the nation’s first all-charter-school district in New Orleans. Buras has worked extensively with communities there and is regularly contacted by school board members, teachers, parent groups, education activists, and journalists from cities across the nation for her expertise on the “New Orleans model” of education reform and its effects on local communities. She is director of Urban South Grassroots Research Collective for Public Education and was granted the Distinguished Scholar-Activist Award by Critical Educators for Social Justice of AERA. Her research has been published in Harvard Educational Review, Peabody Journal of Education, Race Ethnicity and Education, and elsewhere. Likewise, Buras has spoken by invitation at universities such as Columbia, Dillard, Fordham, Loyola, Harvard, and Tulane, and as part of community-based forums in New Orleans, Nashville, Milwaukee, and elsewhere. Buras is past associate editor of the Journal of Education Policy. Her other books include Rightist Multiculturalism: Core Lessons on Neoconservative School Reform and The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles, co-edited with Michael Apple.

Email Kristen Buras at: kburas@gsu.edu

NEPC Publications

NEPC Review: The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, January 2012)

Nelson Smith
The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State

In The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticizes local urban governance structures and presents the decentralized, charter-school-driven Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans as a successful model for fiscal and academic performance. Absent from the review is any consideration of the chronic under-funding and racial history of New Orleans public schools before Hurricane Katrina, and no evidence is provided that a conversion to charter schools would remedy these problems. The report also misreads the achievement data to assert the success of the RSD, when the claimed gains may be simply a function of shifting test standards. The report also touts the replacement of senior teachers with new and non-traditionally prepared teachers, but provides no evidence of the efficacy of this practice. Additionally, the report claims public support for the reforms, but other indicators—never addressed in the report—reveal serious concerns over access, equity, performance, and accountability. Ultimately, the report is a polemic advocating the removal of public governance and the replacement of public schools with privately operated charter networks. It is thin on data and thick on claims, and should be read with great caution by policymakers in Ohio and elsewhere.