Adapted Excerpt from Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and America's Struggle to Educate its Children

In this amended excerpt from Hope Against Hope, educational reform in post-Katrina New Orleans is considered from a journalistic perspective in presenting the story of Geraldlynn Stewart as she and her family navigate the new school system. In providing voices of lived experiences of Stewart as well as other individuals within this new system, the author seeks to complicate theory- and data-driven analyses of the city's controversial changes in schooling as well as stereotypes that exist about the predominantly low-income families attending the city's public schools.