Last Saturday, the Network for Public Education held a PUBLIC Education Nation at the
Brooklyn New School with a live feed at schoolhouselive.org that
is being archived. Four impressive panel discussions preceded a final
conversation between Diane Ravitch, whose blog has surpassed 15 million views since its inception two years ago, and Jitu Brown. A growing network of bloggers met prior to the event to strategize and
discuss next steps. Organizer Anthony Cody intentionally, in contrast to past versions
of NBC’s Education Nation, made prominent the voices of parents, teachers, and students accompanied by
scholars, writers, union and community activists. Although it was not easy to
sit in a hard auditorium chair for five hours, the enthusiastic audience
energized the proceedings with applause, questions and insightful comments.
Also providing a boost were the countless people on Twitter who kept
#PublicEdNation trending at the top all afternoon.
Superstar principal from Long Island, Carol Corbett Burris, led the
first panel discussion on high stakes testing and the Common Core. A parent of
a third grader from the Brooklyn New School, Takiema Bunche Smith, began with
the litany of problems for early childhood with barely a pause to ask, “Are you
sad yet? I’m sad.” She made the good point that our deeply flawed public
education system makes it vulnerable to “shiny, bright” ideas that are
potentially harmful to children. The current singular focus on the new
standards also obscures other important issues such as class size. In the elementary
schools I visit regularly in the Bronx I am seeing the lower grades with 28 or
more students, and in some cases, more than the legal number of children with
special needs. Victoria Frye recently wrote of similar overcrowding in
Washington Heights.
The next speaker was Rosa Rivera-McCutchen, a former Bronx high school humanities and history teacher and currently an
assistant professor at CUNY’s Lehman College, who prepares school leaders for
the considerable challenges they face in these times of high stakes
accountability. Drawing on the framework for facing troubling policies
eloquently laid out by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Rivera-McCutchen argued that school leaders have to not only examine the
intentions, outcomes, and impact on stakeholders of the flawed policies. In the
self-purification step described by King, they must also consider their own
complicity in perpetuating oppression through tacit continued support of the
flawed policies that contribute to the harm being done. She further argued that
those with more privilege and social capital have to question if their acts of
resistance will extend to other communities and provide the necessary advocacy
work in socio-political realms for all school communities, which
requires careful examination of the power dynamics at work. She said principals in the
Bronx are somewhat skeptical about joining the efforts of those in the opt-out
resistance movement for they fear the very real political and even economic
consequences that might result from resisting.
Her words struck a hard truth that resistance itself can
reproduce the same inequities it is arguing against. I was reminded of when Principal
Elizabeth Phillips wrote an elegant op-ed last spring in the New York Times
about problems with the new tests yet seemed on the defensive when bragging about her school’s performance and
enthusiastic support for the Common Core. “It truly was shocking to look at the exams in third,
fourth and fifth grade and to see that they were worse than ever. We felt as if
we’d been had.” You can’t embrace Common Core and oppose the tests, for the two
go hand-in-hand in terms of their destructive impact on low-income communities.
As Dr. McCutchen cautioned, we must all move beyond self-interest to consider all
communities and shield the most vulnerable from additional harm. Civil
rights activist Bayard Rustin described non-violent resistance by explaining, “The only weapon we have is our
bodies, and we have to tuck them in places so the wheels don’t turn.” Yet job
insecurity, contractual obligations, and fear of destructive consequences keep
most teachers quiet and compliant. I feel this conflict on a daily basis in my
work as a teacher educator. On the one hand, I have to prepare my students at
Mercy College for the certification exams, including the burdensome and
thoroughly problematic edTPA (see my previous posts), while on the other making
them aware of the harmful effects of these new policies. As I sat in the
auditorium listening I couldn’t help wondering: How do you stop the turning
wheels of a jumbo jet that has taken off?
Other
speakers offered messages of hope and possibility, calling for building
awareness in communities, speaking out, standing up for the values that fuel a
healthy democracy, while some provided harsh reminders of just how bad things
can get. Tanaisa Brown, a student activist from Newark, described a school
principal telling students to choose either breakfast or lunch, because there
wasn’t enough money for both, and while money goes to more metal detectors, the
schools take away dance, art, music to chain and constrain. Later Diane Ravitch
reminded us that you can’t live without music, it’s human instinct to sing and
dance. Edwin Mayorga of Swarthmore College tweeted in response to panelist
Professor Yohuru Williams,
Tanaisa
Brown has bravely protested in Newark against the powerful Governor Chris
Christie and Superintendent Cami Anderson by creating a human chain a month ago
to block Broad Street (see here for the story and photos). Nevertheless, Anderson said Tuesday that her heavily criticized One Newark plan
will move forward, and even expand, while parents, teachers, and students held
a town hall meeting to grow the protest and publicize the federal investigation through the U.S. Department of
Education’s Office of Civil Rights opened last spring. Tanaisa said the
Christie and Anderson rhetoric of believing in order to fix a flower you have
to uproot it is obviously not true: “You have to water it!”
Even
more ominous were the tales of woe in post-Katrina New Orleans described in
heartbreaking detail by parent activist Karran Harper Royal, who said that
nearly all schools in her city are charters: “We are like the canary in the
coalmine and the canary has died.” Phyllis Tashlik, the Director of the Center
for Inquiry for the New York Performance Standards Consortium, posed the question, “Why do we have to plea for social studies? We are at the
point of absurdity!” Jitu Brown spoke with passion and conviction that this is
not merely an intellectual fight, but a spiritual one where livelihoods and
promises are shattered, and children’s lives are lost due to negligence and
indifference. Diane Ravitch responded that the hypocrisy of the so-called
reformers to say they are civil rights leaders is what fuels her anger and
keeps her going. She wants to shout back at them, “No, you are not, you are
hurting people!” As a historian, she closed by pointing out that we are
currently living in unprecedented times, because public education in the past
has always been seen as a public responsibility. Now we see a movement funded
by foundations and billionaires to eliminate public education in our cities
with the political backing of the federal and state governments that are
enabling this privatization and profit-making scam.