Windows Into My Work:
A Visual Timescape
2005
Urban South Grassroots Research Collective (USGRC) is founded after Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of Black neighborhoods, state takeover of New Orleans public schools, and mass firing of Black teachers
2008
Kristen with USGRC member Amelie Prescott. Amelie founded the Mos Chukma Arts-as-Healing Institute and worked in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward schools, which the community fought to reopen and govern.
2010
Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance is published by Kristen with students and veteran teachers who are part of Students at the Center, a writing program in New Orleans.
This same year Kristen attends a public meeting on the takeover of New Orleans public schools by the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) and charter school operators. Many community members demanded the return of schools to local control.
2011
In recognition of her grassroots work with New Orleans communities, Kristen receives the Distinguished Scholar-Activist Award from the Critical Educators for Social Justice group of the American Educational Research Association.
2012
After publishing an article in Harvard Education Review that criticized the racial politics of the state takeover in New Orleans, which occurred without community input, Kristen debates the city’s leading charter school advocate at Harvard University Askwith Forum, “New Orleans Education Reform: PASS or FAIL?”
2014
Kristen speaks with New Orleans parent advocate Karran Harper Royal in Nashville, TN, at a community forum on the dangers of public school privatization.
With New Orleans youth from Students at the Center writing program, Kristen participates in President Joyce King’s Education Research-to-Performance Youth Apprenticeship Program for the American Educational Research Association. Stories focused on racism and incarceration were linked to broader critiques of charter schools, harsh discipline policy, and the criminalization of Black youth in New Orleans.
Kristen is interviewed on Majority Report, Sam Seder’s national podcast. She discusses the racial inequities of the charter school takeover in New Orleans.
2015
With Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, Kristen organizes a national convening for the ten-year memorial of Katrina and takeover of New Orleans public schools. Education activists from ten cities nationwide learn about the destruction of neighborhood schools, privatization, and community resistance to such reform. New Orleans students, veteran teachers, parents, and community members share firsthand knowledge of charter school inequities.
Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance is published. It chronicles the assault on African American communities by education entrepreneurs and the struggles against public school closures and charter schools.
Kristen also goes to Milwaukee with fellow activists to address community groups and legislators on the dangers of public school privatization.
2016
Reverend Willie Calhoun of the Lower 9th Ward School Development Group takes Kristen on a walk through the newly built Martin Luther King High School. The community struggled for a decade to secure funding from master planners to rebuild the school. Kristen chronicled this fight in The Progressive magazine.
2017
To document the legacy of George Washington Carver Senior High School, a historic all-Black school in New Orleans that was closed and replaced by charter schools, Kristen gathers oral histories from Carver students and teachers.
Kristen receives the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award for Graduate Teaching in the School of Education at Georgia State University, where she taught doctoral students in Educational Policy Studies
2018
Kristen publishes “History Rewritten: Masking the Failure of the Recovery School District” with public education activist Raynard Sanders in The New Orleans Tribune. They critique the anti-democratic state takeover of public schools and their equally anti-democratic return to the local school board. ACT 91 of the Louisiana state legislature largely stripped the local board of control over the city’s charter schools when they were returned.
2020
Kristen receives the competitive Dean’s Faculty Research Leave for Scholarly Excellence in the College of Education at Georgia State University. During this sabbatical, she works on writing her next book, What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.
2023
Kristen publishes “Education Research and Critical Race Praxis: Fieldnotes on ‘Making It Matter’ in New Orleans”. This article discusses her work with Urban South Grassroots Research Collective for two decades and details her commitment to community-based research and activism.
Kristen also joins the Plessy and Ferguson Initiative as a board member, historian, and writer.
After ceasing travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kristen visits in person with Dave Cash, president of United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO), the city’s teacher union.
2025
What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School is published by Beacon Press. It documents the legacy of Carver Senior High School in New Orleans, where teachers built a robust culture of self-determination before the school’s closure.
Kristen writes a series of articles with fellow activists for the twenty-year memorial of Hurricane Katrina and the charter school takeover in New Orleans. They are published in the New Orleans Tribune and elsewhere, and analyze two decades of failed education reform as well as community concerns over racial inequity.
