After the cumulous storm clouds of Hurricane Katrina cleared to reveal masses of black people trapped in the Louisiana Superdome both by staggering poverty and government ineptitude, they were first seen as victims. Then they were refugees. Then evacuees.

Now, they’re guinea pigs.

After all his talk about dealing with the historic racism that exacerbated the misery of so many of the hurricane’s victims, it seems that George W. Bush believes that the way to rectify the effects of that history is through experimentation that ignores much of it. This week, the president’s GOP compatriots were crowing about a slew of provisions in the Gulf Coast reconstruction package -- things such as school vouchers and the like -- that couldn’t squeak through Congress unless a hurricane blew it through.

“The conditions that people were living in, I would argue, were the result of liberal policies,” Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, the Senate’s third-ranking Republican, told The Boston Globe.

He’s wrong. And so are all the ideologues salivating at the chance to exploit the misery of black New Orleans residents as a weapon to kill off what’s left of the Great Society programs. 

The disproportionate numbers of black New Orleans residents living in concentrated poverty weren’t trapped there by welfare dependency or by dependency on other subsistence-level aid made possible through the much-vilified War on Poverty. They were trapped there because over the years, the social and economic mechanisms all around them that were supposed to help them -- or for that matter, their parents -- climb out of poverty failed.

Since the 1970s, when desegregation began to take hold, whites fled urban cities such as New Orleans for the suburbs -- taking with them their fears and tax dollars that were necessary to sustain thriving school systems. Many blacks soon followed.

That state of affairs didn’t improve when the economy began to demand technologically-skilled and educated workers. Even then, most of those jobs were created in the suburbs -- and the low wage jobs left to the city denizens tended to be the kind that not only made it impossible for most of them to escape poverty, but kept them so isolated from the social and economic mainstream that cultures that they normally would revile -- like the prison culture glorified in much of rap music -- became celebrated.

But it seems that Bush and company don’t plan to use the Katrina tragedy as an opportunity to address the complexities that fuel the kind of desperation that the nation saw played out on the television during the Labor Day weekend. Instead, they plan to use it as an opportunity to experiment.

And I’m not surprised that they would start with vouchers.

In Bush’s aid package, he is asking for nearly $500 million for vouchers for Katrina’s schoolchildren. This he does even though it is dubious as to whether the nation’s credible private schools -- meaning those that weren’t set up in a basement overnight because of the promise of federal dollars -- would be able to handle the nearly 400,000 children displaced by Katrina.

What’s also bad about this is that while the GOP has touted vouchers as way to make public schools more accountable, it doesn’t require the private schools, once they get public dollars, to prove they're accountable through the testing measures it uses to discredit public schools. In fact, when it comes to voucher and charter schools, no accountability is usually required at all.

And a lot of children have suffered because of it.

In Milwaukee, where the voucher experiment was pioneered, a recent report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that 10 percent of the schools that were receiving vouchers raised serious concerns -- such as having seriously unqualified teachers and weak curriculum.

And while some would argue that 10 percent isn’t bad, I’d argue that unless the same rules are applied to them as they are applied to public schools, no one will know how well or bad the schools are until after a student has graduated. Meaning after it’s too late.

On top of that, the prospect for exploitation is ripe. I can just imagine some jackleg, would-be educator salivating over the prospect of some poor Katrina child and parent bringing him a $7,500 voucher.

That’s easy money there.

That’s why it’s sad, but not surprising, that the Bush administration would use tragedy to trot out ideology. It’s sad, because the money could be used in many other ways that would make more of a difference to the families displaced by Katrina.

That money, for example, could be used to step up enforcement of housing anti-discrimination laws. The Knight Ridder/Tribune wire service just published a study by the Urban Institute that showed that 20 percent of the time, black and Hispanic renters were less likely to receive complete information on advertised apartments than white renters. They also are still more likely to be told that apartments are unavailable when they are indeed vacant.

What that means is that even if a black Katrina evacuee is able to find a good private school for her child with the voucher money, or finds a good public school, it won’t help if she can’t find decent housing near the school because the landlord can lie to her when he sees her coming.

I had hoped that the Katrina tragedy would make its largely-poor, largely-black victims the subject of policy fixes. Instead, they’ve become the subjects of an experiment.

One that’s bound to end with more dashed hopes and dreams.