PREFACE

– Mark R. Warren and David Goodman –

MARK’S STORY

In February 2015, I was sitting in a room with a dear friend, Lori Bezahler of the Edward T. Hazen Foundation, talking about the tremendous response I had gotten to an article I published on the need for an educational justice movement. I said I had to find a way to build on this article—why don’t I write a book about how organizers and education activists are building this movement today? Lori countered with a different approach; she suggested I work with them to tell their own stories of movement building.

I immediately saw this as a great idea. I would get to invite all of my favorite people—organizers and educators who I thought were doing exciting and groundbreaking work. And wouldn’t it be more compelling and inspiring for readers to hear directly from movement builders themselves? I could bring these organizers and activists together to discuss their essays as part of this process. They could build new and stronger relationships in these meetings, and that itself would be a direct contribution to movement building. Our collective sharing and learning process would then be reflected in the book.

The plan struck a chord, and I received an overwhelmingly positive response from organizers and activists to participate in the project. People were hungry for a chance to share their stories, deepen their analyses of systemic injustice, discuss the lessons of movement building, and develop new strategies for organizing across sectors and movements.

Around that same time, I helped found the Urban Research-Based Action Network, a group of activist scholars trying to reimagine the relationship between the academy and community. We were looking for new ways of producing knowledge that did not always situate the professor at the top of a hierarchy. We wanted instead to lift up community knowledge and work in partnership with community and education activists. I saw the book as a way to reimagine scholarship as a collaborative process that directly seeks to advance social justice movements.

Sanjiv Rao from the Ford Foundation embraced this idea right away and helped shape and support it. Joined by another thirty or so movement builders, the contributors to this book gathered in December 2016 at the offices of the Ford Foundation. We met just after the presidential election, and that brought a new urgency to our convening as well as a stronger recognition of the need for organizers and activists to support one another across movements. Contributors shared ideas for their essays, and we engaged in deep reflection on both what we learned together and the challenges we face to build a larger, stronger, and more unified movement.

We made sure to create a space where movement builders could bring their whole selves. We shared art, poetry, and song. We wanted to be smart and strategic but also to express the care and love for young people and for each other that animates the movement and sustains our participation.

It was such a powerful meeting that participants wanted to meet again. We met six months later and decided to form a People’s Think Tank as a learning community and an idea space for movement building. The network would use the book as a first step to promote intersectional movement-building strategies and engage new people in the struggle for educational justice.

During this time, I met David Goodman, a professional writer with a deep commitment to social justice. David became an invaluable partner in crafting this book. He gave me terrific advice about all aspects of writing and publishing. At times he pushed me to get out of my academic head and better orient myself to a larger audience. Along with me, David worked with most of the contributors on their essays.

Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out! represents the culmination of over twenty-five years of my engagement with community, parent, and youth organizing and with the broader educational justice movement. I have strongly shaped the contours and content of this anthology. Nevertheless, movement builders speak for themselves in their essays. They tell their stories and offer their analyses in their own voices. Together, I believe, we have produced a summary of the best of the last fifteen years of movement organizing and have highlighted models for organizing and educational justice that point the way forward.

DAVID’S STORY

In 2008, I met Chelsea Fraser, then a thirteen-year-old eighth grader from Brooklyn. She told me how police officers had come to her school to arrest her and four eighth-grade boys, handcuffing them and marching them out of the building in front of all their classmates.

Chelsea’s crime? Doodling. She wrote “okay” on her desk in block letters.

At the precinct, Chelsea was handcuffed to a pole over her head for three hours. “Hard Time Out,” my article about this incident, featured in Mother Jones, was one of the early published accounts of what has come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline. That story and my conversation with Chelsea and her mom have always stayed with me.

White people are often shocked when I describe how police handle routine discipline in many schools serving communities of color. This reaction underscores the apartheid nature of education in the US, where white students have a vastly different experience of school than students of color. I saw a similar dynamic in schools in apartheid South Africa, where I reported from for many years.

I was excited when Mark invited me to work on this book. This book, and the educational justice movement that it lifts up, constitute an important effort to bring these two worlds together. I am moved and inspired by the ordinary citizens and activists who contributed their powerful voices and shared their stories with us for this book. They are our hope for the future.