and others, have published meaningful book-length challenges to post-Katrina education in New Orleans. Orleans Parish School Board officials, along with Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services, their hired guns, were complicit in the takeover by summarily firing forty-three hundred veteran teachers, costing New Orleans an average fifteen years of teaching experience per person. In 1961, a plumber without classroom or administrative educational experience was given “complete authority to act on all school matters” (p. 66) in the Ninth Ward Cooperative School, an all-White alternative to integrated public schools in New Orleans. In 1999, the appointment of a temporary superintendent and a full-time superintendent, both without Louisiana teaching credentials, reflected “a community sentiment that had percolated for some time: that the school district needed outsiders, people with no K-12 educational experience, to address the vast problems in the city's public schools” (p. 162).