Photo Credit: Photo by Ismael F. Armendariz Jr.
On a wet Thursday morning at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland, Calif., mother and father dropping off their youngsters on the final day of Barack Obama’s presidency have been greeted by an uncommon sight.
An energized mixture of academics, Glen View neighborhood residents and an Oakland Unified School Board member, Roseann Torres, who co-sponsored a decision final month making OUSD one of many state’s first “sanctuary” districts, have been holding protest indicators praising public faculties and rejecting Donald Trump’s marketing campaign pledge to deport tens of millions, goal Muslim-Americans and strip LGBT and reproductive rights.
“We’re passing out flyers, telling parents we are out here because we believe in public schools,” Ismael F. Armendariz Jr., a particular schooling instructor and “walk-in” protest organizer stated. “We believe in fully funding public schools and we also want to remind parents that our school is a safe school for students.”
Despite the moist day, a small crowd grew amid what’s usually a rush to lockers and lecture rooms. The Oakland protest was amongst 1,000 actions in 200 cities throughout the nation Thursday led by the three million-member National Education Association, with NEA president Lily GarcÃa showcasing faculties in Los Angeles and Las Cruces, New Mexico.
In Oakland, Rich Johnson, 72, stood amid pink, white and blue posters from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and NEA saying, “The schools all our children deserve,” and a handmade one saying, “Todos Pueden Estudiar Aqui”—all can research right here.
“I’m just a neighbor, not a PTA member. I think the schools are important,” he stated, saying he was impressed by what he noticed—a core group of 100-to-200 mother and father in an 800-pupil faculty that actively supported their youngsters and the neighborhood center faculty. He appreciated their values and what he noticed its academics doing.
“When I saw a leaflet with a walk-in, I said I’m going,” Johnson stated, including he shortly emailed others. “Walk-in day, not walkout day, where you go on strike. This is a very positive response that bunches of kids or their friend might be picked up by ICE [federal immigration police] because their paperwork is not in order. I like the name of that, walk-in… We don’t want ICE picking up parents either.”
The National Walk In marked the beginning of a brand new NEA push to interact and stand with communities by showcasing the successes and values of conventional public faculties as they’ve come beneath escalating assaults. The threats started with ongoing efforts by tremendous-rich entrepreneurs to denationalise faculty operations, slender curriculum to emphasise check preparation and retain academics based mostly on check scores. That was all earlier than Trump’s assaults on minorities, which might attain into public faculties and snare college students.
While conventional public faculty advocates in Washington, D.C., spent this week displaying how astoundingly unprepared Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education designate, is for that cupboard publish, actions like Edna Brewer’s stroll-in have been a deliberate counterpoint, stated Trish Gorham, Oakland Education Association president.
“In Oakland, our theme is SAFE: public schools are for everyone,” she stated. “It is coming off of the sanctuary resolution that certainly is uppermost in our minds, but immigration is not only where our students need to be protected. They need to be protected with immigration status, gender status, religion, ethnicity. All of these are possibly being targeted and that’s where we are going to protect our students in all of those areas.”
Standing with college students and their households was the precedence on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, Gorham stated, not bashing DeVos, a billionaire who by no means attended public faculties or despatched her youngsters to any, nor served on a regionally elected faculty board, and whose household basis has given multi-hundreds of thousands to Okay-12 privatization entrepreneurs.
“We decided that we would not create this external target, but we would try and strengthen our community,” Gorham said. “Because it is in strengthening our community and bringing our community together around our schools that ultimately will save our public school system.”
The strengths of conventional public faculties, together with what number of are deepening ties with different native public businesses to assist tackle well being, housing and providers that help poor households and their college students, is the “untold story” in Okay-12 schooling, stated NEA president Lily GarcÃa.
“It’s not uncommon. It’s the untold story,” GarcÃa stated. “Privateers need a narrative that public schools are bad schools and privatized schools are good schools. Research belies that. Some of the best public schools in the world are American public schools. Those are usually the ones that are well resourced and that have programs and staff built to develop the whole student’s diversity, talents and interests and needs. Our best public schools should serve as our model of where to go. They’re our North Star.”
The ‘Anti-Privatized School’
GarcÃa, who many years in the past started her profession in eduction as a faculty lunch woman after which a grade faculty instructor in Utah, was en route Thursday to Las Cruces, New Mexico, for a day ribbon-slicing ceremony and scholar-led dialogue in a district that the NEA sees as modeling one of the best of conventional public faculties. The district was increasing packages at a “community school” in coordination with native companies and social businesses, and it has a brand new superintendent who informed academics to show youngsters the place they’re and cease worrying about check prep and their profession prospects based mostly on check scores.
“Las Cruces looks more and more like America—suburban with a mix of rural kids bused in, a large immigrant population, income disparity,” GarcÃa stated. “What makes this school unique is that they’re not waiting for some politician to give them permission to innovate. They don’t want privatized charters. They want to hold these kids in the arms of the whole community.”
Earlier this week on Tuesday night time, the board assembly of Las Cruces Public Schools started within the humdrum means most regionally elected faculty boards do throughout America, gaveling the assembly to order, amending the agenda and getting ready the night’s enterprise. But then board chairwoman Maria Flores turned the rostrum over to a number of members of the viewers who privately sponsored and ran an ongoing scholar essay and poetry contest, who in flip, launched their newest winners to learn what they wrote.
First was Andrew Angel, a Centennial High School junior who stated in his essay that his grandparents had been crushed by whites for talking Spanish once they attended Las Cruces faculties, but his grandmother turned the varsity district’s first Hispanic nurse. He stated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in solidarity with Cesar Chavez, impressed a imaginative and prescient of racial justice and nonviolent protest that has helped his household and impressed him.
“We were allowed to come to something from nothing, as equals to any other Americans,” Angel learn. “Dr. King helped me not only as a Hispanic but a member of a more tolerant generation, both on acceptance and non-violent expression… I intend to live my life this way and give my country in my thoughts and my actions the only thing that was ever needed: love. Love drives us all toward progress and love is the only truth that transcends race, religion and gender.”
Then got here Mireya Sanchez-Maes, a freshman at Mayfield High School. Her essay described what the Mahatma Gandhi quote—“Be the change that you wish to see in the world”—meant to her, which was discovering her voice, together with difficult “overtesting” and urging extra music and know-how courses.
“So what’s my voice?” she learn. “It is knowledge in the face of ignorance. Light in the face of darkness. My voice is standing up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves… My voice is fighting for what’s right, even when the battle is one fought uphill. Martin Luther King Jr. said our lives begin to end when we become silent about the things that matter. I have never felt more alive.”
Gregory Ewing, the brand new superintendent, beamed and responded, echoing what most of the stroll-in protesters at Oakland’s Edna Brewer Middle School have been telling the scholars and group—that he would use all of his legal authority to guard college students from the worst threats posed by the incoming Trump’ administration.
“I would just like to say how proud I am to see these students come up and speak,” Ewing stated, noting he was a member of ALAS, Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents and MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “As the superintendent, I say to the scholars within the faculty system, so long as I’m your el hefe, I pledge to you you’ll all the time be protected, not solely beneath my management however the management of my whole staff. We are right here for you. We consider in you.”
This small however stirring scene wasn’t the one dramatic pronouncement from Ewing on Tuesday. He addressed the considerations of scholars and academics that current state and federal legal guidelines are excessively and harmfully targeted on standardized exams, to the detriment of serving to college students extra holistically and giving academics leeway to deal with particular person scholar difficulties.
“I am in the first 90 days of the look, listen and learn tour. And here’s what I am hearing,” he stated. “There’s a lot of anxiety with students about all the testing that’s taking place in schools and in classrooms. There’s also anxiety with teachers. So I would like to say to you as your superintendent, with the powers invested in me by the state, I say to all teachers in the district, you have my permission to take charge of your classrooms… I want you to stop worrying about all these national and standardized tests. I want to say to our teachers and I want to say to our students, return to teaching, return to learning.”
The strains drawn by Ewing and heartily endorsed by his superiors, Las Cruces’ elected faculty board, are indicative of the fault strains dealing with conventional public faculties throughout America. The struggle towards privatization just isn’t new however takes totally different types. In Las Cruces, it’s seen in testing regimes imposed by appointees of a former Republican governor with deep ties to a nationwide testing regime that was underwritten by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Like many rich social entrepreneurs, he needs Okay-12 faculties to be extra like metric-pushed company America. In Oakland, many rich entrepreneurs—and never simply in tech—have been underwriting constitution faculties, which has led to multimillions in funds diverted from conventional faculties, and to more and more segregated faculties in a proud, combined-race group.
“I began the morning in one of America’s largest public school systems and will end it in a small one,” NEA’s GarcÃa stated Thursday. “It doesn’t matter—urban, suburban or rural. American public schools have the answers. We’re not waiting for permission. We will proceed until apprehended to design the schools our children deserve… We’re creative about pulling communities together to make sure kids have what they need, whether that’s a meal or an Advanced Placement math class.”
Emphasizing these options was why GarcÃa went to Las Cruces and why the NEA organized nationwide stroll-in protests at 1,000 faculties throughout the nation in 200 cities, she stated.
“They are cutting a ribbon at the Lynn Community Middle School [in Las Cruces]. The superintendent is calling for a moratorium on testing! The parents want this and are part of designing this,” she stated. “It’s the anti-privatized school. It’s the community standing up and saying our school belongs to all of us and is not a commodity on the market. It’s a public trust—and we’re the public.”
‘People Were Crying on November 9’
Meanwhile in Oakland, the place dozens of neighbors turned out for the Thursday stroll-in, particular ed instructor Ismael Armendariz pointed to a faculty board member, Roseanne Torres, who confirmed up with a hand-lettered signal, “Todos Pueden Estudiar Aqui”—all can research right here.
Torres, a lawyer who works with many Latino households, not solely drafted and co-sponsored the sanctuary district decision handed by the OUSD in December, however gained re-election in November regardless of greater than $160,000 in adverse advertisements from a number of the nation’s richest and greatest-recognized professional-constitution faculty advocates. That record consists of former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, California’s constitution commerce affiliation and a brand new group, Go Public Schools, underwritten by the household that when owned Dreyer’s Ice Cream, an area chain that’s now a subsidiary of Nestlé.
The battle over preserving, funding and enhancing Oakland’s conventional Okay-12 faculties was already very heated, Armendariz stated, and that was earlier than Trump campaigned on pledges to focus on undocumented immigrants, which strikes deep fears on this group.
“We’ve done a few walk-ins at our schools and it’s been mostly centered around public school funding and supporting public schools,” he stated, recounting the current activism. “In Oakland this school year, what’s happening is a lot of people are more on edge or more hyper-aware because during the school board elections, late in the election there was a lot of investigation into the funding of our school board candidates… And then Trump got elected, and he ran on the same message that the Go Public Schools people run on, ‘We need options.’ ‘We need school choice.’ That’s where it all ties together.”
“It all translates. People were crying on November 9th,” Torres stated, saying she shortly drew on language beneath evaluate on the Latino School Board Association to create OUSD’s sanctuary district decision. “By law, our children have every right to be in school. We had to act fast. I know how immigrant communities think. They don’t know the law. They don’t know the language.”
But whereas Trump’s threats could also be a tipping level that may ignite activism and resistance in contrast to something seen in America in many years, Torres stated there was a wider set of challenges from privatizers that have been ongoing and accelerating—particularly with the Trump administration’s professional-privatization crusaders.
“That kind of [campaign attack ad] money doesn’t get spent” for no purpose, she stated. “That is all connected to the Trump-type people. DeVos, Bloomberg, the billionaires… Go [Public Schools] is DeVos and DeVos is Go. For people to think anything else is because they are being misled by their very slick marketing.”
“It’s not that all charters are bad,” Torres continued, “but they disrupt district programs, lead to cuts in music, arts, teacher layoffs, and are especially disruptive with special education. The biggest challenge there is rising costs. You need classes with six-to-one student-teacher ratios, or 12-to-one classes, and nurses. Charters don’t offer support at that level… We need to talk about what is really happening in public education.”
“It is a direct attack on public schools,” stated Trish Gorham, Oakland Education Association president. “Some have misaligned or misdirected priorities. Some are purely out for plunder. That’s kind of the problem. There are people calling for school reform out of a deep concern and out of good intentions. But their solutions are wrong. And they’ve been proven to be wrong. And have they been proven to divide our cities and segregate and schools more than in the last 40 years… Creating these unique boutiques does a disservice to what our schools are about, which is the foundation of a democracy.”
And that’s the divide the NEA is looking for to underscore on the native and nationwide degree, the place on their aspect are native communities, regionally elected boards and conventional public faculties that embody democratic values and resist commercialization and a damaged—and probably worsening—federal justice system.
“While so much changes… with the change of administration, nothing changes for educators and parents and advocates for public education,” GarcÃa stated. “Our students will need us more than ever before to protect them and fight for them. Today, we put on the battle gear. We will not permit billionaires and profiteers to hurt our students. We will stand in the gap. To hurt them, you’ll have to go through us first. And there are millions of us.”
Steven Rosenfeld covers nationwide political points for AlterNet, together with America’s democracy and voting rights, campaigns and elections, and lots of social justice points. He is the writer of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).
