April 19, 2016

Last weekend, seeking a boost from like-minded education friends and writers, I attended the third annual Network for Public Education (NPE) conference in Raleigh, North Carolina–ground zero for this country’s insistence on clinging to a “Leave it to Beaver” fantasy of what it means to be an American. (NPE put out a pre-conference statement about North Carolina’s recent discriminatory legislation, making it clear that the organization stands in opposition to it.)

The conference started with a bang, thanks to North Carolina’s rising orator, Reverend William Barber. He gave the opening keynote address on Saturday morning, and roused the crowd with the kind of clarity he is famous for–mostly as it pertains to calling out “white, Southern Strategy politics” and other pernicious paths to power.

Barber’s framework for education justice sidesteps the market-based reform movement’s narrow adherence to “standards, accountability, and choice,” and instead insists on staring racism, inequality and historic educational injustice right in the eyes. (This reminds me of Bill Moyers’ great interview with Maurice Sendak about his book, Where the Wild Things Are, and its main character, Max, who “tamed the wild things by staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once.”)

Barber told the crowd of around 400 conference goers about his first-hand experience with racist, segregated schools in North Carolina, and he reflected on the “current political climate in far too many places, where people are downright hostile to public education.” Yes, Barber acknowledged, public education is dysfunctional and troubled in some places, but he insisted there is more to today’s anti-public education climate than ground-level failures.

If we are going to deal with public education, Barber said, we have to be “willing to be quite frank about how racism always gets in the way of us meeting the noble goals of education.” Access to a public education is guaranteed by North Carolina’s constitution, Barber told the crowd, but this guarantee has been historically undermined by racist, fear-based “extremist attacks on public education.”

Sometimes, Barber said, he gets confused when describing past actions against tax increases from people who were directly opposed to supporting public education for all, because it reminds him so much of contemporary protests against paying taxes to support “failing” public schools.”The first cries to cut taxes in this country came in direct relationship to opening up public education to all people, regardless of their race,” Barber expounded, his voice rising with passion and emphasis. “We have to learn this history, and understand this history,” he insisted, calling it the “challenge of our democracy.” 

We have to learn our “ugly history,” Barber told the crowd, if we are going to go forward. 

Barber’s call to conscience provided the perfect backdrop to the NPE conference, where sessions about such things as the demise of the African-American teacher, the rise of student-led protests, and the need to get involved in local elections offered both hope and heartache. I learned the most from listening to parents like Ashana Bigard and Karran Harper Royal, from New Orleans, describe the profound impact the top down reform movement is having on their city.

I cannot shake, for example, Bigard’s stories of New Orleans parents with multiple kids, who all have to attend different schools–thanks to a “unified” enrollment system that, supposedly, throws kids’ names into a computer algorithm, and then spits out a match for each kid. This is sold as a better, more equitable system for assigning schools (there are virtually no neighborhood schools left in New Orleans; only a scattershot landscape of charters), but Bigard questioned why all of the city’s white, middle class kids seem to be concentrated in a handful of “good” schools.

Both Bigard and Harper Royal also talked about this reality: there are thousands of New Orleans kids are on the streets, without a job or a diploma to give them hope. Perhaps we should just think of them as collateral damage in our war on “failing” public schools.

There were signs of success at the NPE conference, too. A panel on community schools included perspectives from Austin, Texas middle school principal, Raul Sanchez, and John Jackson of the Boston-based Schott Foundation. Sanchez has embraced a wrap-around model for his school, which serves a high number of homeless and immigrant kids. More than this, Sanchez described and seems to embody the kind of servant leadership that can bring a community together. Jackson, too, has stayed true to a model of school reform that seeks to embrace and support students and teachers–and not pit them against one another in a battle for resources and test scores.

On the flip side, I also spent time listening to a “spirited conversation” between Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) and Peter Cunningham, a former federal department of education employee now paid to run billionaire reformer Eli Broad’s $12 million “Education Post” website. I admire Berkshire for being willing to dance with the devil, so to speak, and both she and NPE were right to leave the door open to people with differing points of view.

But Cunningham disappointed. I imagine he was uncomfortable at NPE, especially when positioned in a room full of deeply invested teachers, parents, and activists; this perhaps explains some of the oddly one-dimensional angles he clung to. Example: a rumpled-looking father from Seattle poured his heart out to Cunningham during a question and answer session, asking for Cunningham’s thoughts on Bill Gates’ (and others’) repeated, money-dripping attempts to bring charters to Washington state. Eh, that’s just democracy, Cunningham shrugged. People with more money can make things go their way.

I’d say this response was just Cunningham playing coy before an unfriendly audience. But then there is his website, Education Post. There, he clearly has the platform and the paycheck to bring about a “better conversation” about education, as Education Post promises. Instead, the website seems to have done little but spawn a hate brigade of social media activists, whose talent for mean-tweeting and harassing behavior is as copious as it is offensive. I won’t name names, but I will suggest that Cunningham use some of Education Post’s munificent resources on an in-house bullying workshop.

In the end, no false front of school choice or obsession with every kid’s test score will allow us to avoid the historic and current exploitation of our most marginalized populations. And nothing–no silver bullet or forward-thinking strategy–will, alone, be able to overcome the deep disinvestment in public education, social services, and working people that has been going on for decades now, filling our prisons, privatizing our schools and parks, and throwing more and more children into poverty and crisis. Or, in the words of Chicago teacher Monique Redeaux-Smith:

“This idea of accountability with no resources is a setup.”

As Reverend Barber said, too, “You cannot say you love children and then fight investment in their lives, and investment in their teachers, and investment in their schools. That is hypocrisy.”

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