There’s No Such Thing as a Bad Teacher: Reconfiguring Race and Talent in Post-Katrina Charter Schools

Based on 16 months of fieldwork in New Orleans charter schools and education non-profits from 2010–2015, this article examines contested ideologies of teacher quality in the city’s reform landscape. The article discusses how notions of good and bad teachers as well as talent and human capital come to be racialized. However, the article also considers how both pro and anti-charter school constituencies frame the question of teaching labor within an atomizing and individualistic lens and argues that we must attend to the teacher quality question as an ideological matter, not only one of practical efficacy.