What will you do to save the lives of the children of the city of Chicago?

Today, the Chicago Board of Education announced their plans to proceed with major school actions against 71 schools. These are not the least utilized schools, nor the lowest performing by CPS’ own flawed metrics.

This is the ultimate insult to nearly twenty thousand parents, students, educators and community members who came to community hearings to protest the closings nearly unanimously. They came to demand that CPS not compromise their children’s potential and now they have been utterly ignored. Anyone who came to any of the hearings knows that the parents both know far more about the district than the board employees responsible for the decisions and deeply oppose these actions. CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett neither attended the hearings nor listened to the community voices responding with the proclamation that “everyone understands that we need to close some schools.”

The board has made a political decision to help their deep pocketed allies that will hurt tens of thousands of Chicago students.

And what of that hurt? Let’s put it directly—real talk—if we, the people of Chicago; the ones who the schools belong to; the ones who attend, work at and send our own kids to CPS neighborhood schools allow the board to follow through on this decision, we will lose children; victims of an absurd system in which an unelected school board plays Hunger Games (much respect to Joel Rodriguez who coined the comparison and whose children’s school is slated for closure) with the lives of poor children of color even as they and many of the decision makers at central office give their own children and grandchildren highly resourced, stable educations.

Can you imagine parents from Winnetka having to come to Chicago and beg poor people of color to “allow” New Trier to stay open? Can you imagine the Lab School being labeled “underutilized” and closed?

Close your eyes for a moment and envision your own child, or grandchild. Now add their classmates and other students who go to a school. Now imagine someone sitting next to you had expressed their intention to press a button that would hurt a percentage of the children you see, cause another portion to dropout, and put another portion six feet underground. What would you be willing to do to stop them from pressing that button? Would you reason with them? Would you beg? Would you march around? Or would you do more?

Now, in Chicago, if the kids you are envisioning are rich or white, the likelihood that you would have to treat this as more than a thought exercise is very low. After all, this is a nationwide experiment on poor children of color—“other people’s children”.

Our corporate overlords have taken historically under resourced schools and placed them under constant siege in a barrage of overtesting, charterization, constant chaos and now is the moment they expect our neighborhood schools to fall.

This is unjust. It is disgusting. It is a slow genocide. It is Tuskegee and Jim Crow, and “Kill the Indian, save the man.” It is the death knell of Brown v. Board aborted before it could even sniff its potential.

And it must not stand.

What are you willing to do to stop it?

There are specific actions we must take to save these young people’s lives. They may risk your job or your freedom; are our kids’ lives worth it to you? I must admit, while my heart never wavers on these matters (as I have shown in action in the past), my mind sometimes questions.

But when it does, I think of a brave young woman. I think of Vicki Soto, who faced with a mass murderer armed with an automatic weapon, walked out to almost certain death in order to increase the likelihood of her students surviving. And I remember what it means to be a teacher. I think of my own students like Araceli Medrano who snuck into the principal’s conference room to scrawl on the data board a powerful message, “Reading scores aren’t everything. Reevaluate the rules you have imposed for next year because students and teachers agree the atmosphere is ‘suppressive’. ; we have all lost our spirits. Do not take offense; take action. Listen to those you work for” and then signed it in her own name with her graduation year.

And I am ready to protest.

And resist.

And speak truth.

And suffer punishment.

And risk livelihood, profession, personal safety,

And even life.

Rahm Emanuel and his minions—our bosses—are on the verge of becoming mass murderers. Let’s save their victims—Chicago’s children—but also let’s save them from themselves and ourselves from being accomplices.

Let’s fight to build a bridge from this dark day to the day when our schools belong to the only group who could ever actually develop the school system Chicago’s children deserve—our communities themselves. Whatever harm and danger that we may encounter together on that journey, let us dance the desperate dance of justice together.

Where policy comes from

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Obama's impending victory

First of all, I want to congratulate many of you on your hard work. 

I still hold hope and as critical as I've been, I'm relieved that the election results for this one day seem about as good as they can get for a single election's results. But we need far more--long, life-shaking civic engagement that can really change the landscape of a society.

I hold serious hope that everyone who has assured me that we just needed to come together and ensure Obama's re-election so that we could subsequently switch into accountability mode was not just saying what needed to be said, but really honestly believes that's the next step.

Because with all that hope, I also know one harsh reality: starting tomorrow, all of the corporate influences that sidetracked Hope and Change throughout the first-term will have already had their first second-term conversations with the administration and we will have not.

The other thing that worried me about this cycle was the constant refrain of how bad Romney would make it and that there'd be nothing we could do about it. This assumes that we are at the mercy of people in power and their agenda. If this is the case, we might as well just give up now. We cannot vote our way to the free society we deserve, and there are going to be moments where we have to get mad and active and use civil disobedience to push those in power to act justly. If we do that effectively, we can win over the unjust rule of law.

We will likely need to do that under this administration as well. We must stand for what just and we should expect this administration to oppose us in many areas:

1. We need to bring people together now and resolve that we will not vote for any candidate that enters the current debate pact to exclude third-party voices. We need to act quickly and decisively to throw corporate money out of politics and grab grassroots control of policymaking in as many areas as possible. Those with power should offer resources to execute our plans, not demand that we accept the plans they impose on us.

2. We need to draw a line on due process. No President from any party should have license to employ killer robot planes to execute 16 year-old American citizens who have neither committed, nor been accused of any crime. Gibbs' comments on this case--blaming the victim for essentially having a bad dad are crazy and he should have been fired on the spot. 

3. We need serious immigration reform and it should fully acknowledge the vast contributions of immigrants--both documented and undocumented--to the country. It should seek to decriminalize immigrant populations and provide expedient pathways to citizenship rather than the fragmenting of families.

4. The final margin in the Superintendent race in Indiana and several other Congressional races suggests that Corporate Education Reform dollars only go so far in certainly contexts. They are often beating us soundly in the policy arena, but the general public is neither asking for these policies nor particularly resolute in following this corporate narrative. We need to call out the current administration's disastrous direction on privatizing education and testing the crap out of our kids for what it is: junk science that will pour over a hundred billion dollars into making our students' educations worse.

5. We need to look at making public education all the way through college free, accessible and equitably outstanding for all young people. Education should be a right, not a privilege, and we should be able to pursue it regardless of our background without being criminalized or put into veritable debt slavery for large portions of our lives.

That's just a start, but we need to nail down these commitments today and stay engaged. It is impossible for us to build the free and fair country we envision through a single election day, but we can achieve that lofty goal by applying increased organizing energy to the struggle between these elections.

Much love.

x

Open Letter to Newark Teachers

The Newark Teachers Union is facing a critical contract vote that was supposed to be Monday, October 28th although the hurricane is pushing back the date. It's a particularly interesting vote in light of the emergence of the NEW  (Newark Education Workers) Caucus as a group within the union opposing the contract and the current NTU leadership, along with Randi Weingarten, AFT President and Republican Celebrity Governor Chris Christie supporting it. Hear more about it here: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14087/newark_teachers_union_new_caucus_contract_vote_del_grosso_ratification_owen/

Unlike the AFT leadership and the annoying head of state of New Jersey, I don't think it's right for me to presume to know what's best for the educators of Newark--they certain can and must figure that out in vibrant, democratic and grassroots fashion.

On the other hand, it's vital to show support for fellow educators and to remind them that they are not alone in the fight to defend public education, so:

October 28, 2012

Dear Newark Teachers:

You stand at the crossroads of an immense and democratic decision. Many may try to make you feel like you are making a horrible mistake if you don’t vote a certain way, but I want to ensure you that it is far more important to engage in your profession, union and the policy that governs the daily learning of your students than to vote one way or another.

As a recently returned striking Chicago Teacher, I can tell you that there are plenty of things worth striking over. It’s worth standing up and saying what needs to be improved in your working conditions even if a single strike or contract negotiation cannot address all of them. I cannot think of a time in my teaching career when I was prouder than standing on the picket line to fight for smaller class sizes and humane classroom conditions with my fellow educators, students and parents.

Like in Chicago, I’m sure there are many challenges in Newark Public Schools, and some of them are unique to your situation. However, I’m quite sure that we share many similarities. We work extremely hard. We are under-appreciated  We often put our students and their families ahead of the needs of our own families. Most of all, we are under attack by the same corporate forces that seek to blame us for the problems they've created in our public school system and use that as an opportunity to divide us. They intend to take full control of the resources of our schools.

They are spending billions of dollars to sell us policies that studies tell us will hurt our students:

1. Districts controlled by the richest of the rich who do not send their own kids to the schools we teach in
2. Evaluations dictated by the employer and predicated on inaccurate high stakes tests not intended for this purpose
3. Charter and turnaround schools that contextually underperform their counterparts
4. Multi-tiered employment that will cast us as unequal based on when we were hired
5. Merit pay
6.  A continued erosion of our voice into the conditions of our own profession.
7. Extended work hours without the necessary resources or adding more employees so that we are stretched more thinly
8. Destruction of our retirement plans, so once we’ve given our all to students, we get nothing in return

You’ll recognize many of these corporate goals in the contract you are being asked to vote on. You’ll also recognize them as policies that serve a corporate purpose but in no way help your instruction. Now you are faced with a decision to make: “Would voting for this contract help or hinder my teaching and the quality of life for my students and my own family?”

It is a shame it has come to this—I, like many of you, wish I lived in a time where I could just close my classroom door and be an awesome teacher to my students—but it’s also an opportunity. Heroic battles are not waged and won by superhuman heroes, but by every day people inspired to do what they never thought themselves capable of.

So go forth and vote what you feel to be best for students, but look beyond that too. The fight for our profession, the public school system and our very American democracy is at hand. The bigger question is not whether or not Newark teachers should accept this contract. It is whether we as educators will continue to allow the super-rich to fund and push separate and unequal education or we will force them to step aside so with our parents and students voices combine we can shape our schools and classrooms in the ways we know to be best.

Be courageous, and stand up for what you know to be right. This is a glorious teaching moment, and you are just the educator to shine in it!

Xian Barrett, Law and Chicago History Teacher, Gage Park High School, Chicago Public Schools
2009-2010 U.S. Department of Education Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow
VIVA Teacher Leader

"Real parents"

The director of Education Reform Now which is a differently named part of Democrats for Education Reform, Ms. Nieves Huffman recently wrote an article on Catalyst: "Real Parents Have Been Standing Up" to respond to a thoughtful piece from Wendy Katten, director of Raise Your Hand for Public Education.

I'll try to avoid snark until the last paragraph as I respect that we can have reasonable discussions within our differences about educational policy. We can be polite. We can be respectful. That is, until the last paragraph, then we get to treat each other and all bets are off.

I think Ms. Nieves Huffman's story illustrates exactly why CPS should be expected to adhere to state law and common decency into major facilities decisions. I would include attendance boundary changes.

What she describes is exactly why hedge fund managers should not dictate policy in Chicago; parents and students should and educators should be supported to implement that policy.  It sounds like Ms. Huffman-Nieves agrees in her emphasis on the need for parents and key stakeholders (like students and educators) to be involved in the process.

I expect that she will stand by that conviction and testify with us at future Board meetings, run expensive television ads and use her thoughtful, Broad reaching voice to contest CPS' atrociously bad school facilities process which has been excoriated by a honorable state panel of educators, community organizations and educators.

Furthermore, I hope that she will reconsider using an illegally obtained list of parents' private contact information to spam parents to watch a non-veiled piece of corporate funded propaganda that is rapidly emerging as one of the worst movies of all time. (#1 Worst Box Office Showing of the Last 30 years.)

I would not to presume to know better for her and her funders' organization than she does, but given her stated goals, I would advise the convening of some non-hedge fund connected parents who don't have the means to choose selective schools (charter or otherwise) and ask them where the ample dollars they have ought to be spent.

After all, that would be democratic parent voice, which would deliver better decision-making and may have helped avert the strike in the first place.

Finally, in reference to the titles of the pieces, I'd say that Huffman doesn't really address the key issue here at all: There's a difference between an independently formed advocacy group that builds itself from the ground up and a well financed organization that obtained its money and chose its positions before it spoke to its first grassroots parent voice. "Selected voice" is not the same as "grassroots voice" and is infinitely less useful for creating good policy. If I can find 200 parents to take $1000 to make their kids smoke cigarettes, that doesn't count as a grassroots parent advocacy group for child smoking, it's just me being a terrible person.

Xian Barrett
Prime Minister, Chicago Barretts for Billionaires Not Getting to Run Rabbit Proof Fence Experiments on Other People's Children

Postscript: What I hope is not lost in the playful sniping is that we do have an obligation to fight for true democratic voice. I know that may sound presumptuous, but I'm not saying that I have the right to define what is "true" voice. I think that everyone has a pretty good understanding that the law that lets billionaires buy elections and run constant and misleading ads through groups like DFER does not promote a fair marketplace of ideas. On the other hand, Raise Your Hand's labor of love has brought together people across communities and led to the development of new ideas that with advocacy and implementation will lead to a better education for Chicago students.

Why should we care? Because I believe that when we push aside these money groups and really get the voices of those who experience the daily indignities of our school system, that's when we'll finally have the opportunity to reform our schools for the betterment of kids, not moneyed folks.

Coming Home

In a few minutes, like 3.8 million other educators nationwide, I will enter my classroom to teach a handful of the 55 million students in our country's education system. Our motives and focus will be the same--to deliver the best future for the students we teach.

For the last week and a half, that mission hasn't changed, but for 25,000 Chicago educators, we chose a more unconventional route to fight for that mission--we went on strike. We decide that the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education had treated our students and ourselves so poorly, that the most prudent way to earn the best future for the students we teach was to leave our classrooms.

Looking at the final outcomes, and how far the Board moved, I'm proud to say we accomplished what we sacrificed and set out to do. Make no mistake--our students, their families and we sacrificed a great deal for this. After all, the only people still getting money to put food on the table through this were the CPS higher-ups and the Mayor; even as they stonewalled our student centered asks.

I also feel some disappointment. My classroom still won't have air conditioning. Our class sizes situation is incrementally improved, but it will still be a major issue. We may have a slightly less test centered culture, but we are still facing a tsunami of corporate profits and test-based child abuse.

But that disappointment doesn't lead to discouragement. We stood proudly, we fought, and we won for our students.  It is not a final victory or a resolution. We must continue to fight tomorrow and every day after that. We will just be doing so from our classrooms instead of from a picket line.

I hope we've shown that to our millions of colleagues who followed the strike closely and sent their support. I hope we've taught the country that billionaires not only don't have all the answers to the challenges of public education, but lack the basic knowledge and stake in the game to do much more than pad their pockets at our children's expense.

We must teach well in our classrooms, but as the leaders of the educational arena, we have a far greater calling. We must work with our communities, hear their needs, desires and grievances and develop a better education system by and of the communities we serve. We must lock out corporate voice and control--to be sure, if businesses want to help with best of motives and ample resources, they are welcome--but they must not set the agenda.

We are the leaders we have been waiting for. Let's create a vision for a better school system, and let's fight like hell to make it reality.

Thank you and much love to all of you. I can't wait to see where our paths cross.

A student addresses Rahm's dismissal of air conditioning as a real issue

The following student comment on Facebook has 16,304 likes:

Hi, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I am a student at Lincoln Park High School, and my father is an employee of the Cook County Jail. You stated yesterday in your news conference that air conditioning in schools is not an important factor in negotiations, but at my fathers job when a temperature reaches a certain degree for the detainees they must get relief or it is inhumane. Are you saying that detainees should have better conditions then CPS students and faculty? I know this cannot be a deciding factor in the contract so lets bring out the real issues at hand and take control of a situation and lead by example and by the mayor you were elected to be!

P.S. You should really be in on all meetings pertaining to the negotiations!

If the billionaires and millionaires running our city can't listen to the teachers, please let them listen to the students.