INTRODUCTION

BUILDING A NEW EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

– Mark R. Warren –

THIS BOOK FEATURES VOICES from the front lines of a new movement for educational justice that is growing across the United States. Each author tells the story of how black and brown parents, students, educators, and their allies are fighting back against profound and systemic inequities and mistreatment of children of color in low-income communities. These activists are advancing a vision for humane, high-quality, and culturally relevant education.

We desperately need a new way forward. Reforming traditional schools through high-stakes testing has hit a dead end. The charter school movement has been taken over by corporate-backed reformers who offer choice but no real improvement in educational opportunity. In fact, charter schools have some of the harshest discipline and highest suspension rates of all schools, while failing to educate children any better. We are stuck either defending public schools as they are or privatizing them.

The contributors to this book challenge both entrenched district officials in traditional public schools as well as school privatizers, because neither directly addresses the systemic nature of racism in our education system and in the broader society. The failures of public education are a profound racial and social justice issue. They must be addressed as such by building a broad social movement committed to educational justice. This book tells the stories of how parents, young people, educators, and their allies are building that movement today. It is a call to action for those who care deeply about the lives of all of America’s children and want this country to overturn its history of racial oppression to become a land of opportunity and an inclusive democracy for all.

SCHOLAR ACTIVISM AND MY JOURNEY TO EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS

I first met the nascent educational justice movement when I began to study community organizing efforts in education reform in the 1990s. I was in graduate school getting a PhD in sociology from Harvard University and researching the Alliance Schools Initiative, led by Ernesto Cortes and the Industrial Areas Foundation in Texas. Most sociologists at the time studied communities “from above” and treated people’s lives as so much fodder for sociological theorizing. While personally progressive, many of these sociologists were content to publish study after study showing the effects of racism, for example, but not do anything to address it. I was looking for a different approach. I believed we had a lot to learn from the people who were leading organizing efforts. I wanted to study the work of these people, lift up successful models, and also partner with them to contribute to racial justice and community power.

I had long believed in the importance of working people organizing to build power. I grew up in a white blue-collar family and neighborhood called Hungry Hill, in Springfield, Massachusetts. My mother was an ardent Catholic, daughter of Italian American immigrants. My father was a warehouseman, a New Deal Democrat, and an activist in the Teamsters Union who taught me the necessity for working people to fight for their rights. However, he was quite unusual for a white, working-class man at the time. He supported the civil rights movement and taught me that racism was wrong. His vision of working people uniting across racial lines for racial justice and a better life for all became my life commitment. I became radicalized in college and left to work as a labor and community organizer. I brought that experience and a commitment to building social justice movements with me to graduate school at Harvard.

I knew that working people and people of color had many issues to fight, but I cared about educational justice for personal reasons. I was the only boy in my neighborhood to go to college; public education opened up the world to me but not to my friends. They thought they were going to get well-paying factory jobs like their fathers, but just then factory after factory started to close in Springfield and across the country. My childhood friends have struggled ever since with unstable employment while I went to Harvard.

As I started to study organizing efforts, I learned that for African Americans and many Latinos, the struggle for education was not solely about economic well-being. It was bound up with the struggle for liberation, for political power and full citizenship, and for their very lives. This history goes back to slavery, when it was forbidden to teach black people to read, and runs through the citizenship schools of the civil rights era. When school failed black and brown children, they often ended up on the street and in jail, many even dead. Visiting Baltimore, I heard young black organizers in the Baltimore Algebra Project chant, “No education, no life.” I learned the profound truth in that declaration: getting an education was truly a life-or-death matter for them.

Meanwhile, my oldest daughter entered an urban middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the racist treatment of children of color became personal to me. I had married a black British woman—Roberta Udoh, an educator whose essay appears in this book—and we had two beautiful black, biracial daughters. I saw her middle school come down hard with zero-tolerance discipline toward black students, suspending them and alienating many from school. The school-to-prison pipeline was no longer something I read about or heard about from people I met in my research. It was happening right in front of my eyes.

By this time I had just finished writing a book called A Match on Dry Grass with a faculty colleague at Harvard, Karen Mapp, and fifteen doctoral students, documenting community organizing efforts in six localities across the country. These were very important efforts to build leadership of parents and students and to create real change in schools and education policy at the local level. We treated these cases separately, as independent local cases, and that made sense at the time.

But something was changing by the time the book came out: a new movement was rising. Local groups were beginning to join together in various kinds of formal and informal alliances. While in 2008 there were almost no national coalitions, by 2015 we had the Alliance for Educational Justice, the Dignity in Schools Campaign, the Journey for Justice Alliance, and the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, as well as a web of networks across local groups and in various alliances with unions, advocacy groups, and other organizations committed to educational justice. In the past, the hunger strikers discussed by Jitu Brown in his essay would have fought the closing of Walter Dyett High School in Chicago on their own, or perhaps just with local support. This time they mobilized support nationally through the Journey for Justice Alliance, tapped connections in the American Federation of Teachers, and used social media to reach out internationally. They “nationalized” their local struggle, as Jitu says, creating the additional pressure on the mayor that helped the strikers win their campaign. In the end the hunger strikers inspired organizing efforts against school closings across the country, helping to create a larger movement against the privatization of public education.

The movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline had also taken off by 2015. Consisting of multiple and overlapping local struggles, and organized into national coalitions like the Alliance for Educational Justice and the Dignity in Schools Campaign, the movement was driven by parents, youth, and community organizing. Young people of color had asserted themselves strongly in this movement, demanding a voice along with parents in creating justice for themselves. These grassroots organizations had managed to form large and interconnected alliances with civil rights and legal advocates, researchers, and educators to turn the tide of public discourse away from zero tolerance, win changes in school discipline policy at local and state levels, and help push the federal government to issue new guidance that warned against harsh and racially discriminatory practices and encouraged the adoption of restorative justice alternatives.

The title of this book, Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out!, and its accompanying graphic on the cover of the book, comes from the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline. The Dignity in Schools Campaign adopted the slogan and graphic for its Week of Action Against School Pushout, in 2016.

Increasingly, the various components of the movement began to connect. These connections were partly driven by the need to respond to the emergence of a corporate-led school reform movement intent on privatizing public education. These well-funded groups lobbied to get districts to close so-called failing public schools and open charter schools in their place. The closed schools were disproportionately located in low-income communities of color, which led the Journey for Justice network to file a civil rights complaint against them. While charter schools may originally have been a place for small-scale innovation and experimentation, often by nonprofit groups, by this time private management companies had come to dominate the charter movement, and they were not democratically accountable. Whole districts, such as New Orleans, had been converted to charter schools, and the threat loomed in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and elsewhere across the country. Local organizing efforts on their own did not have the resources to defeat these campaigns. They needed support from a national movement. The educational justice movement has emerged to meet that need.

SYSTEMIC RACISM AND THE NEED FOR AN EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

While studying the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline, I traveled to the Richmond, Virginia, area to visit Advocates for Equity in Schools and I Vote for Me, local organizing and advocacy groups fighting racially discriminatory school discipline policies, with a special focus on students with special needs. The morning after I arrived, I was scheduled to interview coleaders Kandise Lucas and Lorraine Wright. But I received a call from them at 11 p.m. They had to cancel the meeting because a distraught mother had just contacted them about a school security officer who had accosted her son outside his middle school that day. Kandise and Lorraine invited me to join them as they accompanied the mother to a meeting at the school the next morning.

I sat there in shock and anger as the mother recounted what had happened. Her African American son had an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) that specified he could take a break from class and get some fresh air out on the school grounds if he needed to. When he took a break that day, however, a security officer followed him outside, handcuffed him, and dragged him along the ground. The school sent him home, where he arrived with his clothes full of mud from the assault all the way down into his underwear. The vice principal called the parent and told her to keep him home for a few days. He wasn’t suspended, an action that would have created a paper trail, but his mother was told she should keep him home nonetheless.

The mom faced an array of impassive school and district officials at the meeting. They had just watched a video that was taken of the incident but refused to show it to the mother. Although they agreed that handcuffing was wrong, none of the staff seemed to care that a child had been abused. No one apologized or offered to do anything to help. At one point, the district administrator got up from her seat and said she had to leave because “some of us actually have to work.” The mother had, in fact, taken time off from her job to attend the meeting. In the end, the mother felt she had to accept the one hundred dollars the district offered to replace the young man’s damaged clothing in exchange for her agreement not to pursue any further claims.

I have witnessed or heard story after story like this as I traveled across the country. The movement for black lives has exposed police brutality and killings on the streets, but black and brown children are being brutalized in schools every day and their families disrespected and bullied. In Los Angeles, I learned that police used to stand outside of schools and give students arriving late hefty truancy tickets. The costs would mount up to hundreds of dollars. When families couldn’t pay, the students were arrested and many were sent to juvenile jail. I also learned that LA schools were so militarized that the district’s police department owned a military tank. In Chicago I saw metal detectors and armed security guards everywhere; many schools had police stations located in the building. Meanwhile, most schools in the city lack art, music, and physical education classes, and there was no recess for children for decades.

These examples represent the tip of the iceberg of deep-seated and systemic racism in our public school system and in our broader society.¹ Children of color are far more likely to grow up poor than their white counterparts. Fifty years after the end of the civil rights movement, we have constructed a society in which nearly half of all black children grow up poor, many desperately poor and even homeless. They often live in neighborhoods that suffer from environmental degradation, violence, and police brutality.

Rather than providing opportunities for a better future for these children, public education has become part of the same system perpetuating racial oppression. Black and brown children from low-income families typically attend schools that are systematically underfunded, lack necessary social and emotional supports, have less-qualified teachers, and teach a Eurocentric curriculum that ignores their culture and history. The school-to-prison pipeline is perhaps the clearest example of the interlocking systems of oppression facing black and brown children. Harsh and racially inequitable school discipline policies lead to high rates of suspension; indeed, black children are three times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. The problem is widespread: 75 percent of all black students in Texas have been suspended. Children who are suspended are more likely to fail to graduate from high school and then end up on the streets and in the criminal justice system. Two-thirds of all black men without a high school degree end up in prison at some point in their lives—two-thirds! And one-third are in prison at any one time. Convicted felons are denied access to public housing, can be legally discriminated against in job hiring, and lose the right to vote in many states.

Unfortunately, many Americans recognize racism only at the individual level, when a person intentionally says racist things. However, the racism at play in schools is systemic, involving not only racist ideas but also policies, practices, and institutional arrangements that keep black and brown young people poor, uneducated, and criminalized. Racial stereotypes play a role in this system too, as, for instance, when educators label black boys as “troublemakers” or their families as “bad parents.” An entire system based on white supremacy works to keep black and brown communities down and power and resources in the hands of affluent white Americans.

This is a profound issue of racial and social injustice. We know from history that entrenched systems of injustice can only be challenged through social movements, such as the civil rights movement. That movement overturned legal segregation, won voting rights and political power for African Americans, and vastly increased antipoverty and social programs that benefited millions of African Americans and many others across the board. As a result of the gains of the civil rights movement, the test score gap between black and white students closed substantially in the seventies and eighties, only to widen again as conservative forces regained power and began to cut social programs.

As you will see from these essays, the new movement that has been built over the past ten years explicitly names racism as the central problem in school failure and calls for strategies to directly address racial equity and justice. It has emerged as an educational and racial justice movement led by people of color.

THE STORY OF THIS BOOK: A TOOL FOR MOVEMENT BUILDING

Around the time that black parents in Chicago staged their hunger strike to save Walter Dyett High School, I published an article about the new movement called “Transforming Public Education: The Need for an Educational Justice Movement” in a free online journal. I received an immediate and overwhelming response, with the article quickly downloaded several thousand times.

As a next step, I decided to write a book on the subject that would include the voices of people building this movement in order to engage a broader audience on the need for addressing educational injustice and inspire others to act. I saw it also as an opportunity to bring these organizers and activists together, so the book project itself could be a way to help build the movement. Although many networks were forming across localities, organizers and activists often continued to operate mainly in their own sector. Collaborating on the book would be an opportunity to build relationships, lift up models of success, and tackle some tough issues. In the end, we would share stories, analyses, and lessons with one another across our sectors and then out to a broader audience in the education reform world and beyond.

I invited many of the organizers and educators I met in my research and activism to contribute to this book, people whose work I deeply respect and people from whom I have learned so much over the years. The response to my invitation was universally enthusiastic. The convening and book, like the article, struck a nerve and revealed the hunger to connect and build an alternative vision for racial and social justice in education.

THE PLAN OF THE BOOK: KEY COMPONENTS OF MOVEMENT BUILDING

I organized the book into four parts, which cover what I believe to be key aspects of successful social justice movements. Each section includes the voices of leading movement builders addressing these issues.

First, successful movements are led by people who are the most affected by injustice, in this case students and their parents or families from low-income communities of color. Participation and leadership by students and families of color anchor the movement in their experiences, ensuring that the movement stays accountable to their needs. Parents and students also bring urgency to the demand for change. The essays in the first part of the book highlight the disrespect and pain inflicted upon parents and children of color from low-income communities. Yet in these essays we also see how participation in organizing efforts transforms parents and young people into powerful leaders of their communities. The essays also show the power that can be generated when parents and youth leaders work together in intergenerational alliances, as in the campaigns to end zero-tolerance school discipline policies and create restorative justice alternatives. Building a movement with strong participation and leadership of families of color is hard work, but the essays lift up models of some of our most successful organizing efforts and show the radical potential for change through building power among those most affected.

Parents and students cannot build a movement on their own, working in isolation in local communities. The essays in the second part of the book show how alliances can be built to connect organizing efforts across localities and to a range of allies. We see how national movements and allies provide critical support for local organizing. They also help “nationalize” these fights, lifting them up to inspire action in other places. The expertise of professional advocates, financial support from philanthropy, and the legal strategies of civil rights lawyers represent critical resources that help create stronger campaigns. Meanwhile, we also learn about important changes occurring in teachers’ unions that have traditionally opposed demands for change by organized communities of color. Many are now joining the movement, with the Chicago Teachers Union leading the way to social justice unionism. Finally, we also learn in this section how a strong cross-sector alliance rooted in parent and youth organizing can achieve commitments from elected officials for large-scale systemic change in the form of community schools.

Parents, youth, and alliance builders can push for these kinds of changes from the outside, but creating new models of empowering education will require the work of educators on the inside as well. The third part of the book highlights the voices of educators who are leading change efforts in schools, school systems, and universities. We hear from teachers who are creating deep cultural changes in schools through restorative justice initiatives working in alliance with students and families. We also learn about the efforts by teachers to connect their community activism with classroom teaching and to create culturally relevant curricula that nurture the souls of black and brown children. We hear about how school board members can ally with community and labor organizations on the outside and work with district officials on the inside to create large-scale system change. Other voices address the transformations needed in higher education so that schools of education can prepare teachers for urban classrooms and become institutions that ally with communities in movement-building efforts. This requires a new model for scholars who reject the confines of the ivory tower and provide pathways for young people by connecting the classroom to the community.

The fourth section of the book includes essays from activists working to build a stronger and more effective movement by connecting educational justice to labor, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ movements. We are reminded that many workers are also parents who care deeply about their children’s education and are finding ways to use their unions as a venue for parent advocacy. Meanwhile, we learn how the immigrant rights struggle is fundamentally an educational justice struggle and see methods to bring them together to build a stronger movement with a shared agenda.

The final essay by the contributors challenges us to take not just a cross-movement approach but an intersectional one as well. LGBTQ students of color are in many ways our most marginalized young people, as they are impacted by multiple systems of oppression at the same time. As a result, they are often out front as leaders in both the educational justice and LGBTQ movements. If we place the lived experiences of people with multiple marginalized identities at the center of our analysis and strategizing, we can create a movement that is fully inclusive and a vision for educational justice that empowers all young people.

In the concluding essay of the book, I highlight important themes that appear across the essays and that speak to the challenges we face in building a stronger and more unified movement. These themes include confronting deep-seated racism, building alliances rooted in the leadership of communities of color, tackling the profound mistrust that often exists between educators and families of color, and creating a vision and program for a truly empowering form of education for black and brown children. I end by discussing the potential of the educational justice movement to connect issues and communities fighting for economic, racial, and social justice and serve as the catalyst for a new social movement.

I am a white college professor writing about the struggles of low-income communities of color. Although I come from a working-class background and have a multiracial family, I have had many privileges connected to my race, gender, and current middle-class status. It has been an honor and a different kind of privilege to work with the organizers and movement builders in this book and beyond, most of whom are people of color. I have been warmly welcomed into this movement, and I take that as a profound responsibility on my part. I try to use my privileges and the resources I have to support and contribute to building the educational justice movement. It is now time for the movement builders to speak for themselves and share their stories in the essays that follow.