Education and Internally Displaced Persons

Christine Smith Ellison, Alan Smith, Colin Brock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441106131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation comparative

What are the barriers to education for internally displaced persons? How can these be overcome? Drawing on research from a diverse set of countries, including the the USA, Somalia, Colombia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the contributors consider the relationship between education and internally displaced persons. These case studies raise fundamental questions regarding the barriers to education and some unexpected benefits for displaced children. The dynamics that impact access and quality of education for internally displaced people are examined and the role education can play in rebuilding societies and strengthening peace building processes is considered.Each case study brings to light a different aspect of displacement including various causes: current legal protection and its implications for government action and practical responses; challenges arising from country contexts related to the scale and duration of displacement; and the role of education in meeting the needs of returnees.

The Education Sector Response to Hurricane Katrina in the USA Anne Westbrook Lauten

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Chapter Outline

Introduction

Evolution of Post-Disaster Assistance and Protection of Internally Displaced Persons

Child Protection and Education in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

Creating a Protective Environment for IDPs in the Aftermath of Katrina

Education Post-Katrina: A Series of Failures

Education and Child Development Outcomes

Conclusion

Abstract

Despite enormous resources, forewarning of the event and government systems that remained largely untouched by the disaster, the United States government proved lacking in its response to the humanitarian emergency created by Hurricane Katrina. Displaced Children, in particular, reaped the consequences of the government’s missteps, as political decision-making repeatedly ignored international standards and experience in humanitarian response. The following chapter examines the application of child protection principles in the Katrina response, both generally, regarding attention paid to the creation of a protective environment for displaced families, and specifically, highlighting opportunities lost in improving child protection through the education system. Ultimately, opportunities to rebuild a safer, better and more equitable city for New Orleans’ children were handicapped by political posturing and misplaced priorities, which ignored both the context in which the disaster occurred and the well-documented lessons of the humanitarian field.

Introduction

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina many of the individuals most affected by the disaster took offense to being called refugees¹ by the media. Ironically, the thousands of people who lost their homes, livelihoods and social support networks following Katrina’s landfall may have ultimately been more vulnerable due to the fact that they were not legally entitled to refugee status. Being internally displaced persons (IDPs) within the United States meant that the survivors of the hurricane were repeatedly subject to the missteps of the US government at best, and to the arrogance and ignorance of some of its members at worst. Social services in New Orleans were stretched prior to the hurricane. The public education system, in particular, was in crisis (Adamo, 2007) with 73.5% of New Orleans parish schools having been rated ‘academically unacceptable’ by the state during the 2003–4 school year and 35% of schools not making adequate progress in 2005 according to the No Child Left Behind Act (Hill and Hannaway, 2006: 2). Unfortunately, the ‘opportunity’ to recreate these services from the ground up after the hurricane was largely squandered as policy makers repeatedly ignored more than 15 years of lessons learned within the humanitarian sector on how to respond to complex emergencies.

While effective solutions to the destruction and displacement created by major catastrophic events depend on a confluence of factors, the immediate response to such events fundamentally lays the groundwork for success or failure of longer term recovery efforts. The government holds the greatest responsibility in defining and executing this first response. Addressing the rights of children following a natural disaster is particularly crucial to ensuring positive long-term outcomes for those children and their families. The following chapter specifically considers attention paid to child protection vis-à-vis children’s right to education in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Highlighting international standards in child protection generally, and in education specifically, the chapter considers how lack of planning coupled with policy decisions in the Gulf created and/or reinforced barriers that prevented children from fully realizing this right.

Evolution of Post-Disaster Assistance and Protection of Internally Displaced Persons

Responding to a large-scale natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina has historically proven complicated even for the most well-resourced nations. The assumptions that aid was fundamentally altruistic and positive were destroyed in the responses to complex emergencies of the 1980s and 90s, in which the politics intertwined in the aid efforts often gave rise to devastating impacts on social and institutional structures in affected countries. The Gulf States have been no exception to this trend. As noted by Kates et al.,

‘For three centuries, New Orleans has had the recurrent opportunities found in other disasters to rebuild the familiar in safer, better and more equitable ways. It essentially rebuilt the familiar, expanded between disasters, and provided marginal increases in safety but laid the groundwork for the next catastrophic failure with major burdens falling on the poor’.

(Kates et al., 2006: 14656)

As the failures in international humanitarian response became increasingly glaring in the late twentieth century, efforts to professionalize the field took hold. Studies had revealed that despite their complexity, disasters shared key characteristics. In 1994, the International Committee for the Red Cross led an effort by non-governmental organizations to identify and define their responsibilities to disaster-affected populations, ultimately articulating a ‘Code of Conduct’ adopted by the General Assembly of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in 1997. Soon after, the same group of organizations which had helped to create the ICRC Code of Conduct, worked with academics and peers to produce quantifiable minimum ‘Sphere Standards’ designed to translate the core humanitarian principles of protection and assistance into tangible practice – most notably in the fields of water and sanitation, food security and nutrition, shelter and non-food items and health. Finally, these organizations committed to a ‘Humanitarian Charter,’ signifying the recognition of the legal rights and responsibilities inherent in humanitarian response. While the Charter is designed to guide the actions of humanitarian agencies, the duties of states and/or warring parties remain primary; humanitarian agency duties are triggered only when state and/or non-state armed actors are either unable or unwilling to meet their humanitarian obligations under law (Sphere 2004: 18). Together, the three documents represent the ‘rights-based’ approach to humanitarianism. They focus on the rights of the affected population and the responsibilities of governments and, secondarily, humanitarian agencies to protect lives while promoting wellbeing.

While education has developed more recently as a priority in humanitarian response, child protection has long been viewed as an essential element of the initial response to a crisis. Two key principles have specifically emerged in child protection practice, complementing the core humanitarian commitment to providing protection and assistance to disaster-affected populations: (1) the principle of family unity and (2) the ‘continuity principle’ (Omer and Alon, 1994). The first principle requires actors involved in humanitarian response to consider children who have been separated from their families as ‘among the most vulnerable’ (International Committee of the Red Cross, 2004: 2), and to ensure that any humanitarian action makes every effort to respect the family as an inseparable unit. The ‘continuity principle’ goes one step further, focusing on the importance of maintaining the child’s existing individual, familial, organization and communal strengths and resources in order to counteract the disruptive effects of disaster (Klingman, 2002).

Although the right to education is codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man (1998), as well as a number of other key international and regional conventions and agreements, this right has often been classified as ‘secondary’ to life-saving priorities highlighted in the Sphere Standards. However, through the 1990s, the protective quality of education began to receive greater attention in child protection circles. The child protection framework aspires to reduce risks to a child’s social and psychological development, and to enhance the enabling external and environmental factors, which can foster and support a child’s wellbeing in the face of adversity (Dawes and Donald, 1994: 19). In recent years, the child protection community has increasingly looked to education institutions to support child resiliency to catastrophic events. In 2004, the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies published a companion to the Sphere Standards providing minimum standards for education in emergencies. The INEE Minimum Standards focus specifically on ensuring community participation, providing an education system that is grounded in rigorous analysis of needs and strategy for action, ensuring that access to schooling is safe and non-discriminatory, and that educators are qualified, and supported to provide learner-centered appropriate and relevant instruction. Finally, the INEE Minimum Standards address policies around education, requiring flexibility in emergencies to promote inclusion and quality education, but ensuring information sharing with relevant stakeholders, addressing the specific needs of the displaced population and providing quality education in line with national and international standards. Education, in particular, was seen to offer children a sense of self-worth that comes with being identified as a student, to support the growth and development of social networks, and to provide a structure and order to an otherwise often chaotic environment (Nicolai and Tripplehorn, 2003: 9). Recognizing these important benefits, guidance on the protection of IDPs has increasingly included specific instruction on ensuring the right to education in emergencies.

Child Protection and Education in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

The response to Hurricane Katrina effectively highlights the two key intersections of child protection and education in emergencies. On the one hand, strong education systems may have the capacity to respond to child protection concerns in the aftermath of a disaster. On the other hand, a lack of attention to the basic tenets of child protection throughout the response can seriously penalize efforts to ensure safe and equitable access to education. The response to Hurricane Katrina revealed extreme weakness on both fronts. The education system in the Gulf region was far from strong at the time the hurricane hit, after being crippled by years of mismanagement and poor performance. As of August 2005, the school district of New Orleans Parish alone was facing a more than $25 million deficit (Hill and Hannaway, 2006). The hurricane then added to the burden, rendering unusable 16 of the previous 126 public schools in New Orleans parish and more than 600 schools in the region (Harvard Educational Review, 2005). A patchwork of policies designed to ‘fix’ the education system generally left more than 370,000 displaced students with relatively few options, most of which did little to prioritize quality education or provide greater protection to students.

The response to Hurricane Katrina also failed to capitalize on more general global learning in child protection, resulting in children being repeatedly exposed to risks to their wellbeing throughout the recovery effort. Specifically, efforts by the government to secure the affected area took on an ‘us-against-them’ persona, creating a militarized environment in which many residents felt more threatened than secure. The temporary housing of displaced residents was poorly planned and poorly executed, forcing families to move multiple times and causing significant disruption to any efforts they made to resume their ‘normal’ lives. Finally, despite initial proclamations that the reconstruction of the gulf region presented great opportunities to create ‘better’ communities, those opportunities were rapidly subsumed by competing pressures to rebuild quickly regardless of quality, poor communication and collaboration between different levels of the government and a complete lack of consistent and reliable communication with the affected population. As poor decisions in the field of child protection immediately following the hurricane were compounded by ‘experiments’ to fix the education system in New Orleans, the few positive opportunities that Hurricane Katrina may have created were largely squandered.

Creating a Protective Environment for IDPs in the Aftermath of Katrina

While ‘protection’ describes actions that prevent and respond to a wide range of rights concerns, it is fundamentally grounded in creating an environment in which individuals are safe. In a typical response to disaster a number of security measures are taken to ensure such a protective environment: police or security monitors² are positioned in areas that are known to pose hazards to the civilian population; displacement and refugee camps are disarmed; and safe living environments for children are promoted by ensuring that living facilities and social organization arrangements consider needs for privacy, adequate space, sufficient lighting at night, etc. (UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 1994: 53–4). Reestablishing the rule of law is essential to creating the space for displaced populations to regain a sense of normality in their lives. Furthermore, the order that is inherent in widespread respect for the rule of law typically opens the space for government agencies to provide effectively essential social services to the population in support of the more general recovery of the affected region.

The areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina were known for significant violence long before Katrina struck. In 2003, murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft all occurred at levels greater than the US national average (Crime Rating, 2003). In a study carried out by Save the Children with 700 displaced students in two Baton Rouge schools immediately following Katrina, roughly 60% had witnessed a shooting or murder prior to the hurricane. Nearly half the children interviewed had seen a drug sale, one third had witnessed a shooting, and 42% had seen physical violence between a man and a woman³. Furthermore, nearly one-fifth of the children had witnessed all three forms of violence, and one third had been exposed to two of the three (Lauten and Lietz, 2008: 171). Such statistics are useful in highlighting the vulnerability of the hurricane-affected population, in that many affected individuals – including children – had been repeatedly exposed to traumatic events. Ultimately, such exposure makes coping with the effects of catastrophic events like Katrina significantly more difficult.

The extreme militarization in the security response to Katrina, with political leaders equating the ‘security threat’ in New Orleans with the War on Terror,⁴ only served to exacerbate this difficulty further. As noted by Binu et al., the common assumption that natural disasters trigger mass disruption, disorder and social breakdown is not only false but that ‘it is well documented that natural and man-made disasters are followed by increases in altruistic behavior and social solidarity’ (Binu et al., 2008: 558). Unfortunately, although the government did actively address security post-Katrina, it did so without significant understanding of or regard for the population it was meant to be protecting. The government’s approach to security focused on num...

Table of contents

• FC
• Also available in the Education as a Humanitarian Response Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction: A Global Overview of Education and IDPs
• 1 The Education Sector Response to Hurricane Katrina in the USA
• 2 Alternative Approaches to Education for Displaced Children in Puntland and Somaliland
• 3 The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education
• 4 Legislative Protection for IDPs and Education in Colombia
• 5 Educational Challenges of Conflict and Flood-related Displacement in Pakistan
• 6 The Challenges for Education of Protracted Displacement in Sri Lanka
• 7 Returnees and the Challenges for Education Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 8 Challenges for the International Aid System
• Index