The Children Hurricane Katrina Left Behind: Schooling Context, Professional Preparation, and Community Politics

Even before the 2005 «Disaster in the Delta» – as the devastation and loss wrought by the category-three hurricane known as Katrina came to be known – statistics emerged about the aggressive educational neglect of Louisiana’s African American schoolchildren. The harrowing data about the inadequacies being as racialized as the distribution of aid in the storm’s aftermath are chilling indeed. Yet, they have not dissuaded the more than thirty contributors to this volume from viewing Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity and a challenge to transform schools and society for the good of the entire United States. Divided into three sections («Education and School Contexts,» «Preparing Professionals for the Possible,» and «The Social Dynamics of Education Reform»), the seventeen chapters of The Children Hurricane Katrina Left Behind discuss what is essential for rebuilding urban schools in New Orleans as well as the nation, engaging the nuanced nexus of social events and educational policy (e.g., No Child Left Behind) as it relates to the preparation of professional educators and the future of America’s schools. As Linda Darling-Hammond notes in her Foreword, each chapter speaks «powerfully and poignantly to [centuries of educational neglect and failed social policies] and to what we can and must do about it.»