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TEACHERS UNITE!
Organizing School Communities for Transformative Justice
– Sally Lee and Elana “E. M.” Eisen-Markowitz –
Teachers Unite, New York City
Sally Lee and Elana “E. M.” Eisen-Markowitz talk about the role of teachers as key participants in the fight for educational justice. Frustrated with the racist history of the local teachers’ union in New York City, Sally founded Teachers Unite to organize and support teachers as agents of democratic change in their union and allies for racial justice in schools and communities. E. M. shows how teachers can partner with students and their families to create restorative justice programs that transform relationships, culture, and practices in school communities. While winning changes in policy is necessary, Sally and E. M. highlight the essential role of school-site organizing that engages educators to create deep and sustainable transformative justice for young people.
We must do battle where we are standing.1
— AUDRE LORDE
SALLY’S STORY
Education is a big deal in my family. I’m a black multiracial woman from a middle-class, downtown Manhattan background. My father and his four siblings were first-generation college graduates who grew up poor and black in New England. My grandfather never attended college; he had been a talent scout, numbers runner, waiter, and bank security guard, among other professions. At night, after working as a guard, he studied my dad’s college economics textbooks and surpassed the white bankers in a professional advancement course. He went on to become the first black bank manager in western Massachusetts. In my family it was a given that each of us was smart and capable, and the fact that white people dominated institutions was simply proof of racism and oppression. We proved this through our academic achievement and by being a barrier-breaking family of “firsts.”
The emphasis on school in my upbringing cannot be overstated. We believed in the importance of quality, integrated schools in creating a just society, and I wanted to understand and improve how that happened. As a young adult, I knew that I wanted to work in education and make big systemic changes—and I knew I had to start that journey in the classroom.
I began teaching fifth and sixth grades in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, which is adjacent to my own childhood neighborhood and was always my favorite place in the world. (It has now been my home for eleven years.) My students looked like the neighborhood: mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican, but also black, white, Mexican, and Chinese. Increasing gentrification in the neighborhood, however, meant that younger grades were looking whiter and whiter. About half of my students’ parents needed Spanish-English translation to communicate with me, but the PTA leaders were virtually all white, native English speakers. The new parent leadership seemed to mark a shift away from the neighborhood’s long history of polyglot immigration, creativity, and guerilla-style land reclamation. Instead, diversity was talked about as one describes a box of crayons.
While I loved working with children, I was demoralized that my racially diverse colleagues, who were light-years ahead of me as pedagogues (I was a fumbling, bumbling new teacher), seemed unconcerned about the increasing marginalization of our students of color. The families of my students most in need of a village of advocates were not included in school leadership. I quickly became consumed both with my inability to be that village on my own and with the seeming absence of social justice teacher organizing in my city.
Founding Teachers Unite
Through my own research, I learned that in the 1930s the Teachers Union (TU) of New York City was known for its militant activism and worked with parents and community groups in Harlem to protest the brutal treatment of black students. When I quit teaching to start a teachers’ organization, I named it Teachers Unite (TU), partly in homage to the earlier TU.
We started TU in 2006 with a mission to organize democratic school chapters under the principles of equity, voice, diversity, and action, with an eye toward changing society and building a center for radical teacher organizing. The teachers’ union local, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), had an infamous history of conflict with communities of color dating back to its opposition to black community demands for local control of schools in the 1960s. We founded TU to try to build analysis and power among an intergenerational group of educators with a vision of democratically transforming the UFT into an ally in fights for racial and economic justice in schools and communities.
Teachers Talk
In pursuit of this mission, TU has launched a variety of projects and campaigns since its founding. Through building relationships with organizations fighting the school-to-prison pipeline, we copublished Teachers Talk: School Culture, Safety, and Human Rights with the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) in 2008. We surveyed more than 300 middle and high school teachers in more than 130 public schools across New York City and found that, contrary to what many people thought, many teachers had critical views of harsh discipline policies. Almost two-thirds of teachers felt that armed police officers in the school never or rarely made students feel safe. Half said that students should have “a lot” or “the most” influence over discipline and safety policies. Many teachers wanted support for students rather than punishment, like this Manhattan science teacher: “There should be a room with counselors or social workers where I could say to a kid, ‘Go now and talk to Mrs. So and So.’ . . . With certain kids, they need a chance to walk it off. . . . There are all these obstacles to getting them the help they need. And then I hear that, next period, the kid got suspended for yelling at a teacher, and I think, ‘Well, no wonder.’”2
The teachers we surveyed were not using terms like “restorative justice” as many do today, but they were thoughtful and concerned about the harmful effects of zero tolerance. As recently as November 2016, the American Federation of Teachers requested to review information from Teachers Talk—arguably because no one, including the union, has asked rank-and-file educators what they think about school safety. From Teachers Talk, TU recognized a need and a potential to build with students and families with the goal of interrupting the criminalization of people of color in NYC. Our partnership with NESRI introduced us to the Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC), a national coalition of grassroots and advocacy groups working to end the school-to-prison pipeline. TU joined DSC and got involved in its local New York chapter; we remain the only educator group member to this day.
Toolkits for Educators
After Teachers Talk, TU focused on building our network of educators growing restorative justice (RJ) at their schools. Meanwhile, our DSC partners and educators across the city were asking us if we could put them in touch with these schools or help duplicate their work. In 2013 TU campaign coordinator Anna Bean suggested a film project that would document strategies used by schools to try to meet students’ needs rather than just punishing them. We convened our member-leaders to plan Growing Fairness, a documentary and online toolkit focused on building the capacity of schools to resist the racist criminalization of students. Thousands of people viewed the film in its first year, and we continue to sell dozens of copies each year across the country. The project helped increase press coverage of RJ and launched TU as a go-to teachers’ organization on the topic. Meanwhile, we committed ourselves to support member-leaders to collaboratively build RJ strategies at their schools.
It took years for TU to arrive collectively at a theory of social change that centers school-site organizing and a functional plan for supporting it. It is much easier to be a supportive community of like-minded folks outside of schools than it is to organize those folks to do the hard work of building relationships with coworkers who may be exhausted, overwhelmed, unappreciated, ignorant, or oppositional. TU members’ roles as public school workers inform our relational approach to organizing: in a functioning democracy, we must slowly build consensus among diverse individuals around core values in order to transform culture. I have never heard a teacher say that students started thriving in a punitive school because of a few teacher allies, but I have heard multiple stories, like E. M.’s below, that describe years of collaborative hard work forging a new road map for a school community that empowers student leaders.
Redefining Worker Organizing and Teacher Unionism
The disgraceful legacy of undemocratic, racist teachers’ unions and the present-day reality of school-based oppression have meant that our organizational allies in DSC almost never think to reach out to rank-and-file teachers as potential allies. Instead, the strategy has been to confront districts around the country and fight for discipline policy changes and mandates without including teachers at all. While these policy changes are necessary, they will not meaningfully change the experiences of young people in schools if there is no buy-in or support from their teachers. Districts under fire are only too happy to offer multimillion-dollar contracts to nonprofit vendors who nominate themselves to train staff, usually without adequate plans or any educator input. The New York City mayor’s office and his appointed chancellor are claiming lowered suspension rates or successful implementation of RJ district-wide across the city, but our members often tell a different story. They speak about nonprofit consultants who come and go suddenly and/or waste educators’ time. They are hurt and angry that their black and brown students are once again being treated like guinea pigs in a rushed initiative created for political purposes. Our members end up frustrated by being stuck in the middle of a co-opted agenda that cares nothing about centering the voices or experiences of young people and their families, and that does nothing to build power or reflection among school staff.
The oppressive history of public schools requires a seismic shift in how we go about transforming school culture and education policy. By focusing on school-site organizing, TU is trying to redefine worker organizing and teacher unionism as well as the power relationships within each school’s community.
E.M.’S STORY
For better or worse, schools are often the places where people learn how to be in the world—they are reflections of the problems and the potential of our society. As a queer, white, Jewish kid, I was politicized by my experiences growing up middle class and navigating diverse, divided public schools in and around Washington, DC, in the 1980s and 1990s. I was prohibited from performing with a grade-school chorus because I did not wear a dress, and the following year I enlisted seven other girls to boycott dresses for the performance too. I wondered why so few of my classmates of color were in my middle or high school “honors” classes and watched friends of color get stopped constantly by school security when I could walk in and out of the building freely—and then cowrote a series of articles for the school newspaper about racial profiling and tracking in our high school. All my life, I have seen and felt how schools can be sites of trauma and oppression as well as sites of meaningful growth and change. I am a teacher because I believe in the power we have to change ourselves and the people closest to us.
Building the Foundations for Restorative Justice
On a rainy Wednesday afternoon in April, I sat in room 303 at the very end of the school day, recording and clarifying the notes from the day’s Restorative Justice Action Team (RJAT) meeting. Seven staff and five students had just shown up to a bimonthly after-school meeting about how to implement restorative justice practices in our alternative public school that serves sixteen- to twenty-one-year-olds in New York City. We were on the verge of proposing our comprehensive, multi-stakeholder plan to integrate restorative justice meaningfully at our school. Though I was cautiously hopeful, I had been feeling drained by the daily work of teaching that feels like harm reduction most days—important for individuals’ survival but not always toward transformative visioning or deep relationships; work that may be centered on feeding and caring for young people but is not really about shifting power.
Before that rainy Wednesday, RJAT spent a year and a half organizing our school community in order to lay a foundation for restorative justice (RJ). When they transfer to our school, students have faced problems that are seen across New York City’s high schools: harsh and racially discriminatory disciplinary policies that lead to excessive suspensions and expulsions, the less tangible effects of police presence and metal detectors, as well as many more informal practices that lead to school pushout. We were ready to explore RJ as a real alternative that could help us get at the root causes of the school-to-prison pipeline, help students and staff form healthy relationships, and learn to resolve conflicts in ways that transform power dynamics.
TU uses both “restorative justice” and “transformative justice” as terms for our work, although “transformative justice” perhaps more accurately acknowledges the role and history of institutional oppression and emphasizes that we must move forward rather than attempt simply to “restore” what was there before. Both restorative and transformative justice are concerned with the process of growing justice as well as its results. As the school-to-prison pipeline becomes a catchphrase, many districts are mandating RJ as a “classroom management” strategy when it really needs to be a philosophical paradigm shift. If we want RJ to shift school culture and policies, we need to create a sustained organizing process at the school site that includes staff, families, and students.
In room 303 we laid this foundation by building the RJAT from a study group of about eight staff members, four students, and two parents who met to explore theories and practices of restorative and transformative justice in schools. Members of the group met over the summer to design professional development for staff and brainstorm ways to grow familiarity with restorative practices at our school. We designed courses that would establish critical foundational knowledge, and two students committed to co-facilitating a course with me about the school-to-prison pipeline. We attended trainings offered by the NYC Department of Education and shared what we learned with our colleagues. We facilitated staff meetings based on role plays, surveys, and community-building circles to communicate to staff the deep philosophical shift RJ would require. I met with staff who wanted to try restorative interventions with young people who were having conflict and needed support. We pushed back against our well-meaning administration and colleagues who wanted to move too quickly toward “restorative” protocols for students without the structure or culture of self-reflection from school staff.
Allying with Students, Families, and Communities
And now we’re here—a committed, intergenerational group of teachers, counselors, school staff, and young people—visioning for the collaborative, justice-oriented future of our school. We could not have gotten here without my organizing with TU and our partners in DSC over the last eight years. My training, learning, and deeply relational organizing with TU has shaped what I believe is possible in schools. Moreover, it has introduced us to the language and strategies of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, to models of transformational healing and safety without police, and to the expertise of many people who have been doing this work for much longer than we have. Because of our connections to TU and DSC, we know when the Department of Education revises the discipline code and how to leverage new changes with our principal to invest in more counselors for our students. We know how to help our school leadership team rewrite our Comprehensive Education Plan to focus on evaluating racial disparities and increasing parent involvement.
Now it’s noon on a Thursday in mid-June, and room 303 is packed. About thirty-five out of fifty educators are waiting to cast a vote that would create a new, full-time “RJ coordinator” staff position as a key part of our plan for a set of whole-school shifts: in- and out-of-school credit-bearing internships for student RJ leaders, RJ-focused parent orientations, and schedule changes that would free students and teachers up for community building. Union rules require that at least 51 percent of the staff must vote to create a full-time out-of-classroom position like an RJ coordinator. As a result, very few schools have RJ coordinators; skillful, time-intensive, school-site organizing is necessary in order to make it happen. In room 303 on this day, the vote was unanimous: all staff members who showed up agreed to commit resources for an RJ coordinator at our school.
Schools as Sites for Liberation
School-site organizing, like true transformation and healing, is slow and neither linear nor hierarchical. It looks different in different places. It’s based on a decentralized cycle of leadership development that requires many different invested leaders who learn from and challenge one another. It wasn’t until May of this school year—when I realized that eight members of my school community, ages sixteen to sixty-five, had written pieces of our school-wide proposal—that I believed my school would be ready to meaningfully shift toward transformative justice. So I agreed to become the RJ coordinator. I wouldn’t do it without a core of people who understand how hard the work will be to chip away at our own biases and the school system’s entrenched racism.
This is the second NYC public school I’ve worked at in eleven years where I have organized with staff, teachers, parents, and students not just to demand a change in our policies but also to build the knowledge, skills, and engagement to make those changes real. I don’t know if it’s possible to transform US public schools as an institution, but I do think it is possible to organize and shift power at the school site to change things materially for young people and their families and for staff. Why wouldn’t we want to try that? Young people are required by law to be at school. Does this mean that school will never be a site of liberation or that we must make it a site for liberation? If our fights begin where we are standing, we can’t afford not to call one another to transform ourselves and our schools.
SALLY AND E. M.’S REFLECTION: TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE
All fights begin where you are. . . . We have to be careful not to underestimate the power we have in our neighborhoods, in our places of worship, in our schools.
—EVE L. EWING3
When we dream of how to make systemic change, we envision working with young people, families, neighborhoods, and communities at our schools. The school itself, however, is its own community, village, and workplace. We need to recognize the harm committed by our colleagues and act to transform relationships while we create processes and structures for those harmed to imagine new solutions. Deep and sustainable transformative justice needs to be built school by school. An educational justice movement guided by principles of democracy and equity needs to support members of school communities to lead the way.