Safe

 Driving my daughter to school is safe. Driving back home is unsafe. Sitting at a stop light listening to loud Japanese prog house is safe. Sitting at a stop light with my thoughts is unsafe. Left turns are unsafe. 

When I was working with high school students at a large, underfunded Chicago high school in a neighborhood inundated with "White on everybody else violence", a number of my students in our social justice club had learned from their sister organization a technique (it was either VOYCE or Mikva) which sought to push the conversation about student safety beyond sterile surveys. 

They unfurled a large piece of butcher paper to reveal a detailed map of our school. They talked a bit about the feelings of being unwelcome and unsafe in the very building they were being asked to be vulnerable enough to learn in. 

They asked the other students present to take Red, Green and Yellow pencils and mark the places in the building they felt unsafe, safe or sometimes unsafe. They said they were interested in teachers' perceptions as well, but asked us to step aside so this particular map could be exclusive to students' voices and experiences. 

Parking in the garage is unsafe. Listening to my partner and our shared students talk about empathy on the phone while driving is safe. Pedestrians are safe. Semi-trucks barreling along belching pollutants into our community are unsafe. 

When all of the students had finished, the students leading the activity appended the map to the wall. We silently contemplated as the map they co-created screamed a furious red. "Ms. C"'s room: green. The school cops' station red. Bathrooms bright red. The first floor hallway yellow. The second floor hallway yellow speckled red. 

Playing with my kid is safe. Sitting up alone at night is unsafe. 

I knew that my students felt unsafe in the building. I saw the fights, the students being attacked and arrested by police outside or on the way to school, the police looking in to find a student in a classroom before being met and stopped at the classroom door. 

I didn't know it was this bad. I tried to imagine how one was expected to learn--to be tested and punished for lack of performance in this context. I searched for any explanation for the behavior of the people who contracted those tests and failed to provide safety to the students. 

This wasn't the end of the conversation by a long shot. They joined with other students to fight to destroy the school-to-prison-pipeline. And they won a lot--pay for behavior and zero tolerance policies at a nearby charter network, restorative justice policies within the school piloted with the 9th grade class, a change in district-wide policy around discipline, and the beginning of mass student involvement in police and prison abolition movements. Our schools are still not as safe as they must be for students to have equitable chances to learn. Our streets are still occupied by a violent, armed force that has antipathy toward many students. Our communities are still massively unsafe due to corporate pollution and racist pandemic policy. 

Trying to live when 100% of your self-worth is based on your utility to other is deadly unsafe. Teaching students is safe. Talking about trees with the Sprout is safe. Following students into just action is safe. 
 
Stay safe. Please.

Which side are you on?

Today, I returned to my classroom after a week at the bargaining table with Chicago Public Schools representatives and their lawyers. On Tuesday, the board had returned with none of the language they promised to deliver and essentially ended any concrete negotiations. We were on the verge of a strike--the third strike since my group, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators took over the Chicago Teachers Union leadership in 2010. I was happy to see my students and they had lots of questions about how the bargaining went and what came next. I wrote two sentences on the board:

A) All people have a human right to an equitable education.

B) It is too expensive to ensure that everyone has access to an equitable education.

After reminding my students the nature of "equitable" rather than "equal", they discussed the two statements in their table groups. After five minutes every group preferred the first statement, and most groups had already jumped to discussing examples of inequity in their own school lives.

I asked them whether the need for equity in this case was similar to everyone wanting an expensive car or extra spending money and they protested emphasizing that "education is not a thing you want, it's something you need to have a good life. We should all have it."

So, I asked them, what do you say to someone who says, "There's just not enough money to do that"? They said, "This is what's most important so that's where we should spend our money as a city." From there, we looked up and wrote on the board the Chicago Public Schools total budget:

$7,700,000,000 

(I miswrote one of the numbers, but this is the accurate number)

They were pissed. The money is there. Why isn't it used on what it should be? 

We talked about the four options that the students had:

1) Ignore the strike. Rest, play and come back once it's concluded. 

2) Support the board. Speak loudly about the need to end the strike and defer to the city leadership. 

3) Support the union. Come to the picket line and voice and demonstrate solidarity with the educators in the hopes that we will win. 

4) Support yourselves. Decide together what issues you see in your schools and use this opportunity to fight for them. They may overlap or not with the union's issues. In some cases, they may oppose the educators issues. 

Some students began listing issues they cared about and I took notes on the board. "Sports", "Health and Safety at school", "Materials", "Access to a gym and other facilities" (We are in a shared building where the other school's principal limits access to the two gyms in the building meaning many of our students have to take two of three Physical Education classes in a classroom space.),  and "less crowded classrooms" (their class has 34 sixth graders in it).

We compared the students' priorities to the educators' priorities and found a lot of overlap. I told them they we had written ours based on the principle of equity that they had chosen at the beginning of class. 

We talked about equity as something that in our neighborhood, we have always had to fight for. (I reminded some of them that the major high school campus in our neighborhood was only built after a long hunger strike by mothers and grandmothers in the neighborhood and survived due to student protests)

They wrote up their plans for the coming strike and shared with their groups. Some students planned to catch up on sleep and game; some made plans to join picket lines and downtown marches and others planned to head to the library to learn more. We dismissed and walking into the unknown, wondering when we would see each other again.

These struggles may see very familiar to many; but also utterly foreign to others. A simple read of the comments on local education articles (NEVER READ THE COMMENTS ;)) shows a deep divide between CPS students, their families, CPS educators and the more conservative readers whose own experiences are quite different. 

In these cases, sometimes it's useful to envision (we often use these exercises to prepare for writing in our classrooms):

Imagine for a moment a far away land in a far away time where children of color and of the impoverished are educated under an entirely separate school code than everyone else in the principality. Youth fear the onset of beautiful summer weather because it brings more shootings and more police violence. They sip from lead contaminated water while government officials deny the contamination risk. A beautiful child with disabilities lies lifeless at the bottom of a school pool after the school officials ignore his and thousands of other students’ federal rights to services under their Individualized Education Plan. Neighborhood schools are closed and defunded and they learn in squalid conditions where the leaders sign rich contracts with private firms who let rat and pest populations breed and spread rather than spending their ill-gotten gains on students’ safety. The leaders constantly cut positions and refuse to put together an effective substitute system, meaning that many students lack a consistent educator and others learn in overcrowded classrooms. When a student is injured or has an urgent medical need, they have to hope that it is that one day at the one time per week that a certified nurse is in the building. The previous mayor led a “war on literacy” that removed libraries from nearly every black school and most Latinx schools in the city while truncating public library hours and staffing. Through struggle, the people have secured an extra billion dollars in resources for the schools--an investment that is a tiny, fleeting flame of hope that flickers and dies in the face of a city and school leadership that is already directing those riches elsewhere.

This place you are imagining is our beloved Chicago. You are visualizing the beautiful schools where I have taught thousands of students and will send my own daughter the moment she reaches the age she can enroll (she missed by 2 weeks this year). Chicago’s new Mayor Lori Lightfoot was elected to lead our city with a billion new dollars from the State of Illinois and promises to end the machine’s oppressive, inequitable education system. She entered office with the platform and resources to accomplish this change. And yet, five months later, we are living on the verge of a huge municipal strike led not only by Chicago Teachers Union educators, but also SEIU special education assistants and security guards, and Park District employees. It is a battle not just for fair salaries and access to affordable benefits, but it is a fight against the deep inequities that plague our system.

Returning from teacher training in Japan to start a new teaching career in Chicago, I learned a great deal from my students and the veteran black teachers in the buildings. As they emphasized that merely surviving an unequal system was not enough; only equity would suffice, it echoed my own upbringing in some ways.

When I was about to turn seven, I remember listening to some of my father’s Irish Rebel Songs. I loved them so much that I would sit with my ear to the speaker and sing along at the top of my lungs. He asked me what I thought about them, and I asked, “It doesn’t say, but don’t they all die at the end?” “Yes, they definitely do.” “Why would they fight if they knew that they were almost certainly going to lose and die?” He told me that “Our ancestors dreamed of a day where a child of a child of a child of theirs would be born into a free Ireland. That dream kept us fighting and it’s not just an Irish dream, it’s a dream that belongs to all of us.”

Later my mother would say something similar about why our ancestors endured constant abuse, deportation, Chinese exclusion and prejudice to keep returning to the U.S. over generations until we could forge documents to stay.

As we come together tomorrow and every day forward until Chicago's political leadership meets our demands for equity, I would ask people consider two questions: 1) Do our children and students deserve what other students mere miles away receive automatically? Are our children as worthy of respect, love and support? 2) Which side are you on?

Our story is not unique; it is part of a struggle raging in every city, every community. As our battle in Chicago takes center stage, we ask that you lift us up and join us. As you kindle the same battles in your own cities and communities, we ask that you reach out and we will join you in solidarity.

When Teacher Evaluation is Driven by Bigoted Testing

So today, on the last possible day to administer my End of Year REACH performance task (the test used to check how much I taught students and used to assign me a portion of my rating), I pushed aside our incredible sexual education curriculum to give one of my seventh grade classes the test.

Of course, I was already pretty skeptical of this assessment after last year's fiasco where the 7th grade library test had an extremely racist question in which the test designers made up fictional anti-immigration African American and Latina and forced students to choose one to support.
http://www.wbez.org/news/critics-blast-cps-immigration-test-question-offensive-inaccurate-110232

This was today's test:
https://dochub.com/xianfranzingerbarrett/aXyzER/social-science_grade-7_student_eoy14-15?pg=6

It featured the exact transgender rights principle that I had taught earlier in the week: "People have the right to express their own gender identity and choose how they are addressed". Only the test modeled the bigoted approach:

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. 

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. 

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. 

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of interviews with her.

In fact, the title of the piece was printed on the top of every page:

I was pretty pissed. We've had discussions all week about identity, sexuality and gender, and it took considerable work to create a safe space where students were respectful of the concepts and each other's identification. Now I was administering a test--with my own job rating on the line--which directly violated those concepts.

One of my students raised their hand. "Why does it keep calling 'he' as 'she'"? I said, "Why do you ask?" "It seems like this test doesn't respect Charley's choice."

I said, "That's a great point. You can write that into your answer if you'd like."

The outcomes were incredible. The seventh graders were confused by the conflict of a test enforcing a transphobic narrative and what they knew was fair and right, and this what they came up with in response to the transphobic essay prompt, "Based on teh documents above (A-D), what are the reasons Charley Parker lived her life as a man? Be sure to explain your thinking and use evidence from 304 sources to support your answer."

DC (first crossed out all of the female pronouns and wrote in male ones to respect Charley's choices)
No one can be for sure about this since he hasn't been interviewed. I would say it was by choice and under his circumstances, it would seem relevant. It states in document A that "Another Charley Parkhurst story is that he was the first 'woman' to vote in Colifornia". This might be a reason why he made the transition by his choice. 

MG: The reason Charley Parker changed his gender was because he was a runaway and found his identity in being a male. Both documents A and C have information stating that Charley had family problems and decided to leave home. It also states that Charley loved his life as a male because he had a very important job and was very good at it without being judged by his gender. 

EA:
Charlie Parker (copying the wrong name from the question title) lived his life as a man for a couple of reasons. One of them was because he ran away from the orphanage. Another one was because he enjoyed driving and learning about horses.

JV: Charley Parker lived her life as a man because in Document A, it says that she voted so she was a guy. Also in Document C, Holiday said, "You are just the man I want". So Charley wanted to be a man and also because it was a good choice for her. 

Some of the other students just referred to the subject by his chosen name Charley Parkhurst over and over again to avoid using the incorrect pronouns proscribed by the test. 

Others got confused and thought that since the test was using female pronouns, that must have been Charley's choice, and so deduced that Charley must have been born a man but chose to be a woman because they couldn't believe that the testmakers could be that prejudiced. Others just wrote he/she in every sentence. 

Additionally, I had to help them understand how to connect the documents to the questions as due to the identification of the documents and questions with different alphabet letters, it was hard for them to follow. They knew what primary and secondary sources were, but they couldn't navigate the poor design of the test. My recollection was that the Beginning of Year REACH Performance Task was far shorter and easier than this round--which would destroy the integrity of the growth measurement--but it's no longer available online, so I can't remember for sure. 

In the end, they completed the test, we had a good chat and then they went off to the next class leaving me to input the scores for my rating.

But then the power and water went out at my school and we have no engineering position staffed by the district, so I couldn't put them in anyway. 

Yes, I Was Fired and Still We Will Win

At 9:11am Friday morning, on a quiet, scripted phone call from my principal, my teaching career ended. Again. 

Many of you have already read the exact details here:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/21411000-418/cps-calls-teachers-mom-to-tell-him-hes-getting-laid-off.html

And I hesitate to blog on it, as I could never match the beautiful words of friends and accomplished bloggers Stephanie Rivera and Fred Klonsky.

In many ways, I feel out of generous love, people have focused too much on my story and I don’t want to perpetuate that dynamic—there are some 3,000 other educators who are going through the same.

But I always teach my students that our voices may not be the strongest; our writing might not be the most polished; we may be nervous and stumble; but our experiences are precious and must be heard and we are the only ones who can make that happen.

I am deeply thankful to all of you who have reached out in this time. I am sure it is jarring and sad to watch someone’s life passion torn away, and it has been immeasurably helpful to have each and every one of you supporting me.  

Beyond that, I feel so blessed by my community. I feel fortunate to work with amazing students who communicate directly and frequently the difference my work makes, a supportive professional group of colleagues and the warmest community organizers and allies anyone could ask for.

I say all this because I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me.  I want them to start by acknowledging the beauty that my students and I conspired to build and understanding that it cannot ever be destroyed; even by an action as cruel as this.

I would ask each of you to pause to capture in your mind that one teacher or several that altered the course of your life. Now tear them from the fabric of your experience. What would it look like? How would you be changed?

Our city inflicts that sadistic exercise on our impoverished students of color as a regular occurrence.

I don’t pretend to have been that life changing teacher for every one or even most of my students, but like my 3,000 colleagues, each of us was the difference maker for some students.

And as it happens again and again, the message that the district sends to our students is clear, “You are uncared for. Even those you thought loved you dearly have abandoned you, and it’s your own fault.”  Again, this is not just a happenstance; it is a regular matter of practice. When I was let go in 2010, my principal first told students that I simply left, (He didn’t care about you) and later told them that “There wasn’t enough interest in Japanese” (You didn’t care enough). Both were lies—lies that made students feel worse about themselves.

So this time, I need my students to understand—we did nothing wrong. We did everything right, and through our honest collaboration we created many treasures. We spoke for justice when others were silent and we took consequences to fight for what we knew to be right. Now, as one of those consequences, I must go on a journey, but it is not out of lack of love.

This was my best teaching year by far. Better than the year that I raised the scores the most; better than the year I won that national teaching award. This year I listened most deeply to the largest portion of my students and learned to support them in all the right battles: for student voice, against sexism, homophobia, ableism, and racism, for student/teacher unity and against the school-to-prison pipeline. The classroom was open and the youth shared amazing personal stories that I will share-with their consent-in this space over the next few months.  I would not trade this year away for 100 years as the football star I dreamt I would become when I was a tiny little 10 year old who didn’t really understand the physics of Professional Football.

I know that in the reactions, many people were shocked that with what I do each day, I could be treated in this fashion. Thank you for your outrage. But I want to be very clear about your dismay:

This was not those who run the Chicago Public Schools System failing in their mission; it was them succeeding.  While it took me by surprise when I was laid off in 2010, I had planned for it this time. I was relatively sure I would be one of the thousands of people who devote their lives to the children of Chicago who would be mechanically thanked for our service and tossed aside as if our students didn’t need us anymore, so I made plans in case of this situation.  A former student understood:

Janai Cooks ‏@Kitty_luvs_Unot19m (Japanese/Social Justice at Julian 2008-2010)
Why is the CPS board so scared of @xianb8 ? Because that man has got more heart and drive to actually educate teens & watch us grow !!!!

If I had taught what I taught in Mayor Emanuel’s hometown, I would still be employed. If the children I taught had been rich enough and white enough, I would have continued to collect my paycheck and accolades and they would have been affirmed in all of their accomplishments.  I am unemployed and my students are without their teacher today because I chose to teach students of highest need. I chose to actually address the opportunity gaps in our society, and not in theory but in reality supporting impoverished young people of color to fight to improve their own lives and demand to be treated as equals.



But it was more than worth it. While to many these constant horrible disparities can cause resignation and hopelessness, what students have taught me is that while consistent injustice can numb some, they have reached a stage of consistent righteous struggle beyond where others despair.They have shown me that it's not enough to urge those in power to treat us humanely; if they will not, they must be removed.

This is exactly what we need at this time. Rather than be models for the students who are the victims of this injustice, let them be your models. The deep, consistent social inequities that transport our students from their crib to the jailhouse door will not be vanquished with a phone call or momentary righteous indignation. Unlike the white abolitionist that John Brown spoke of derisively who can be outraged and then quit whenever he wants, this struggle is our students’ and communities’ daily struggle. And they must and will lead it.

So I thank you for your anger at my unjust firing, but I would ask you to reserve the same rage for the educations ruined by arrests on school grounds, over testing and under resourcing.  Get furious at the total indignity of a system that calls a dedicated worker’s momma to inform him of his termination, but get more livid about the teen mothers who get shamed into giving up the education they so desperately want for themselves and their children. Get angry that I didn't get due process, but get madder about the millions of young people who had to plea bargain out to a crime they didn't commit or go another day without employment opportunities or access to health care. 

The depth of the injustice in our society is so deep that it’s a miracle that many of our young people can see any light at all, and yet they pursue it with all they have.

And so we must too. This fight must continue, and it must not end until Rahm Emanuel and those he serves are vanquished from any position of power that they could use to further hurt the children of the City of Chicago..

For me, I've decided to that this might be the right time to step away from the classroom for a moment. I realize looking back that I've neglected self-care for quite a long time, and do not have the energy to work with a new group of amazing youth people to build to a new vista.  This isn't a permanent state, but with each heartbreak, we must heal.

While I won’t be in the classroom, I will be teaching next year. In our broken city, in this jacked up state of Illinois, in this great country of ours that seems to have forgotten that education and such things are basic rights, there are a few people in need of instruction more than my students. I will take my expertise to teach those failing to run our society. Are they prepared for their lessons?

We all continue this beautiful struggle and we will win because we must.

And one day I will return to my classroom, and another adventure will begin.

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

If we race and leave childrans behind only then will will know is our childrans learning.

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