The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  Like Chicago and Camden, community members in Charleston, South Carolina, mobilized in 2015 to block initiatives to convert Burke High School into a charter school.24 Resistance inspired confrontational public comments, signs, a student march and protest, and a proposed moratorium against conversion, all of which coalesced into a grassroots organization, the Quality Education Project.25 Five years later, Burke remains a traditional public high school—for the moment.

  Similar success occurred in Memphis, where direct community involvement derailed several attempts by charter management organizations to take over traditional public schools. One community-led effort blocked Green Dot Public Schools, a national charter chain, from taking over Raleigh Egypt High School in 2014. Parents and community activists—citing a fear of losing control of a local school, expressing support for a principal they trusted, and calling the attempt by Green Dot a “hostile takeover”—successfully organized to block the move.26 Spurred by fierce resistance, the Houston-based YES Prep Public School organization announced plans to withdraw from Memphis altogether, and the national KIPP chain scaled back its efforts there as well, though it has remained in the city. Such resistance included parents, community organizers, teachers, and school board member Stephanie Love, who fought for the families in her district to be informed and stay informed about proposed charters.27

  Parents in Chicago organized to defeat the school board’s plan there to close the National Teaching Academy (NTA), an elementary school that originally educated children who lived in the Harold Ickes Homes, a public housing development. As White parents began to gentrify this area of the city, referred to as the South Loop, they refused to send their kids to the school. Though the school was performing well according to city standards, the school board proposed to close it and repurpose it as a high school to accommodate the growing demands of White parents. Local parents such as Elisabeth Greer organized to keep NTA a neighborhood elementary school. After sustained pressure on the board and city council, and after pursuing legal action, parents organized under the name We Are NTA and protected the school from closure. It remained open as a neighborhood elementary school, serving children who continued to live in the area.28

  Protests like this across the nation effected a modest retreat from the frontal assault on traditional public schools. When met with such fierce resistance locally, charter organizers backed off. Such resistance requires disruptive politics: protests, signs, sharp questioning of charter representatives, and some heckles and boos.

  These victories may be few in number, but they are significant as a demonstration of community organization and strength. They also make state leaders think twice about trying to control community schools. In some cases, resistance to school choice has restored some local control to the community.

  Coalition building is a critical part of the education justice movement, and there are several organizations that form the foundation of a critical alliance. Journey for Justice (J4J) is one that fights the privatization of public schools as part of a larger struggle for educational equity. Its goals include twenty-five thousand sustainable, high-quality, community-based public schools across the country by 2025, ending “zero tolerance” policies that punish students for infractions, equity mandates for public education at the state and local level, protection of Black teachers, ending state takeovers and mayoral control, and eliminating overreliance on standardized tests. Started in 2012 as a national organization, with members from Chicago, Detroit, Newark, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, among other cities, J4J has organized marches and a protest outside the Department of Education that attracted over five thousand participants. In one protest that drew national attention in 2015, Jitu Brown and other organizers went on a thirty-four-day hunger strike in order to reopen Chicago’s Dyett High School in ways that followed the interests and demands of the local community. And they won.29

  The organization’s platform against school privatization calls for a moratorium on privatization under school choice. Their platform states:

  School privatization has failed in improving the education outcomes for young people. There is no such thing as “school choice” in Black and Brown communities in this country. We want the choice of a world class neighborhood school within safe walking distance of our homes. We want an end to school closings, turnarounds, phase-outs, and charter expansion. We have an evidence-based solution for America’s struggling, neglected schools.30

  The national director of Journey for Justice, Jitu Brown, notes: “J4J operates in the spirit of Ella Baker and Septima Clark: we trust and believe in the brilliance of human beings, regardless of whether they’re a PhD or a no D.”31

  Ronsha Dickerson organized Camden in the tradition of such civil rights activists as Baker and Clark and was asked to join Journey for Justice to serve as its national director. Dickerson in essence became a full-time organizer for justice. While working with J4J across the country, she continued to organize locally in Camden and across New Jersey, applying the same strategies the organization used across the nation. After forming Camden We Choose in 2019, engaging in a legal struggle in the courts and then registering voters, Dickerson maintained a fierce level of commitment. She helped organize an “equity walk” from Camden to Beverly to Willingboro to Trenton for people to talk with state representatives about the dire situation of public education in New Jersey. She then organized an “equity bus tour” that showed legislators around Camden to illustrate how a controversial tax break of over $1 billion did not benefit or empower Black and Latinx communities.32 Dickerson’s work also illustrates how coalition building necessarily entails connecting education to larger issues. As Keith Benson notes, you have to “connect what’s happening on the outside to what is happening on the inside.”33 Through connections to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and other organizations in New Jersey, Dickerson shaped movements from the local to the national level. For her, the coalition was an effective way to “fight the machine back.”34

  Organizing leads to more organizing. In a similar fashion, Chicago parents and community advocates formed Raise Your Hand and the Chicago United for Equity, both of which were connected to and supportive of efforts to combat budget cuts, school closings, and the politics of “Renaissance schools” in the city. These organizations are grassroots and local, led by and for those closest to the front lines. They also represent the local coalition efforts to push back and defend public education.35

  Alongside Journey 4 Justice, the Network for Public Education (NPE) is another organization that leads national efforts to build a broad base of resistance against choice. Education reform stalwarts Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody formed the network in 2013. Their mission is to “preserve, promote, improve and strengthen public schools for both current and future generations of students” by connecting reformers across the nation who are committed to quality public education reform. With chapters in 139 cities, the NPE is one of the largest grassroots organizations committed to public education advocacy. Like other advocates, the NPE has shared irrefutable evidence about the failure and wasteful spending of charter schools. In its 2019 publication Asleep at the Wheel, the NPE reported that nearly one-third of recipients of federal aid for charter schools either never opened or were forced to shut down, amounting to nearly $1 billion in wasted public spending.36

  For Marla Kilfoyle, the grassroots liaison for NPE, coalitions formed by her organization and J4J indicate the growing strength of the movement to preserve and invigorate public education. As Kilfoyle observed, many coalitions—she counts just under 140, including organizations such as Save Our Schools, Rethinking Schools, Badass Teachers Association, and the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools—are working together as opposed to “in silos.”37

  Building alliances harkens back to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, a campaign cut tragically short yet inspiring North Carolina–based Rev. William J. Barber II today. As Barber reflects:

  In 1968,
the idea—a Poor People’s Campaign to unite activists from across the nation and bring them to Washington to shut down the government, to bring the issue of poverty compellingly to the fore—looked impossible. Except there was no other way. . . . Only by joining together and asserting our authority as children of God can we shift the moral narrative in this nation and create a movement that will challenge those in power to form the “more perfect union” to which we aspire. Now as in 1968, this notion looks impossible. Except, again, there is no other way.38

  The urgent need for a broad coalition continues today. Jitu Brown has reached out to national organizations—such as the Network for Public Education, Save Our Schools, and the NAACP—to organize around a common education platform. As Brown elaborated: “Alone in our local groups, we can’t beat the highly organized infrastructure behind school privatization. That’s like throwing rocks at tanks. We have to organize strong membership-based grassroots community organizations and link them together to win education equity in our time. . . . Our main priority is advancing community voices in public education.”39

  The coalition exemplifies how resistance operates on the front lines of the debate over choice. In some cases, people resist choice in order to keep historically Black or Latinx schools open. In others, parents resist choice to pressure district officials to identify better solutions for traditional public schools. Without the financial backing of leading philanthropists, local resisters depend on moral and rational appeals to parents who seek to leave the public system. Outnumbered and underfunded, school choice resisters often constitute the last line of defense for public education. Keith Benson draws a distinction between grassroots organizers who fight choice and those who advocate for it. He notes, “There are, however, real Black leaders out here working to improve education for our next generation while upholding their commitment to our history and protecting our communities.” Yet “most folks will never know their names because they’re too busy working, not given a corporate-subsidized platform, and too strapped for cash to host anything.”40 Cognizant of the serious issues they face, advocates have demanded political power—and they have gained it.

  The power of local organizing, or what Chicago-based activist scholar David Stovall referenced as poder popular, or “popular power,” cannot be underestimated. The productive efforts it yielded in Chicago literally took a village. Stovall—alongside parent advocates of La Villita, or Little Village, a West Side neighborhood—inquired into the funding Mayor Richard Daley had promised for a new high school during his 1997 mayoral campaign. The grassroots coalition with Stovall and La Villita renewed efforts after the city built two selective-admission high schools—Walter Payton and Northside College Prep—to attract students from across the city. Both required entrance exams, and together they did not alleviate the overcrowding of students in Little Village. They were part of Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan and opened at the turn of the millennium just before Arne Duncan was appointed head of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Unhappy with the situation, Little Village parents used confrontational politics and applied direct pressure on the Chicago Board of Education and Chicago Public Schools, organizing a nineteen-day hunger strike and establishing a vibrant tent city they called Camp Cesar Chavez. Under pressure, Paul Vallas, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and Gary Chico, president of the school board, resigned. More significantly, under Arne Duncan, plans were started for the creation of the Greater Lawndale High School for Social Justice as part of the larger Little Village Lawndale High School, a $60 million city initiative that matched the aspirations of parents and community organizers: a 282,000-square-foot facility with two gyms, a swimming pool, and four separate schools on one campus—a school for world languages, a school for math and science, a school for the arts, and a school committed to social justice.41

  Concerned parents are not the only organizers for better schools. So are youth who are victims of negligent, racist school reform. Students associated with the Baltimore branch of the Algebra Project—a grassroots national education reform initiative founded by Bob Moses—used the grassroots organizing, nonviolent ethos, and political consciousness of the civil rights movement to address a failing public and private school system. Students under the age of twenty-three run the Algebra Project in Baltimore. They have also participated in nonviolent demonstrations aimed at raising money for failing public schools and disrupting the State of Maryland’s plans to build a juvenile detention center, designed to house minors charged as adults. For a week in January 2012, students occupied the site of what was slotted to become the detention center until they were dispersed by police (and some arrested). When Maryland soon afterward released its 2013 budget, it did not include funding for the prison.42

  These students may not have been addressing privatization or charter schools directly. But they were well aware of historic disparities within public education and the debt accrued through the school choice movement: that which is owed to communities who still lack access to quality education. They also demonstrate that disruptive politics can effect change quickly. Sociologist Charles Payne labeled the Baltimore youth activists “Miss Baker’s Grandchildren,” referencing grassroots civil rights movement organizer Ella Baker, who was an advisor and mentor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Payne called the Baltimore Algebra Project “part of one of the most thoughtful, self-aware and other-aware traditions of American activism.”43

  Protests in Baltimore and Chicago illustrate the effectiveness of school protests in effecting real change, including more equitable funding.

  Grassroots, local organizing and coalition building comprise a historically grounded strategy of resistance that entails—or should entail—direct action. Chicago, a battleground of school choice, exemplified this in 2012 when approximately twenty-six thousand members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted to strike. They walked off the job and picketed for traditional bread-and-butter issues such as higher pay, better support staffing, stronger benefits, protection for teachers laid off in school closures, and reduced weight of standardized testing in teacher evaluations. The union won key provisions, including a raise of over 10 percent over four years, additional teaching staff, and other measures of modest job security (though not enough to prevent the massive closure of schools the following year).44 The strike also connected to issues of corporate reform that included bringing in charters to turn around schools—a hallmark of Arne Duncan (by 2012 secretary of education) and President Obama’s educational reform strategy. Given the complex issues of poverty and trauma intensified by decades of residential segregation, students in Chicago public schools presented serious challenges to an under-resourced teaching force. Phil Cantor, a strike captain, noted that the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers and schools nearly guaranteed failure. When schools failed, they would be turned over to a charter organizer, or the city would close them. As Cantor said, “There’s this constant threat over teachers that if you don’t get test scores up, your school will be privatized into a charter, you’ll lose your job, your community will lose a community-based school.”45 The strike was a significant demonstration of teacher strength, especially since it took place just two years after neighboring states Wisconsin and Michigan all but eradicated teachers’ unions.

  It also established precedent for the nation’s first charter school strike. In December 2018, hundreds of teachers working in a fifteen-school charter chain in Chicago walked off the job. Like their public school teacher counterparts, charter teachers in the Windy City struck for better class sizes, salary, and a longer school day and school year.46 The charter school was part of the “Red for Ed” movement that shook the nation in 2018 and 2019. Nearly four hundred thousand public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, and South Carolina went on strike as part of carefully coordinated movements in “red” or “purple” states.47 They fought against right-to-work legislation, a privatization movement
marked by charter school expansion, and budget-cutting austerity measures taken by conservative legislatures during the recession leading to losses that have not been recovered after economic growth and recovery.48 The Red for Ed movement invigorated the teaching profession, particularly in states that have antiunion laws.

  With the rising tide of teacher protests, some educators see themselves more and more as critical political actors. Keith Benson and Troy LaRaviere are exemplars. Keith Benson was born and raised in Camden. He attended college at the Rutgers campus there and later pursued his doctoral degree from the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers. While studying the history and politics of education as a teacher at Camden High School—a traditional public high school slated to be torn down to make way for charters—Benson decided to become more active. Seeing the big picture and the need to connect teachers to larger conversations and the community, Benson accepted an invitation to run for the presidency of the Camden Education Association, the local teachers’ union. Wanting to “bridge the gap between the union and the community,” Benson reached out to Ronsha Dickerson, who helped spread the word. He was elected in 2017.49

  After LaRaviere was dismissed from his administrative post in Chicago, he decided to run for mayor of the city. In 2018, he was the first to openly challenge the incumbent, Rahm Emanuel, and one of ten early candidates. (Emanuel would eventually decide not to run for reelection, LaRaviere would also withdraw, and the city would choose Lori Lightfoot in January 2019 in a runoff between two Black women candidates.) Having experienced the corruption of local education politics, LaRaviere knew from firsthand experience what issues had to be addressed. School funding, school closures, and school choice were the issues that inspired him to run. He connected these to the larger structural and institutional problems of racism and segregation that pushed Black and Latinx residents from the city through gentrification and perpetuated inequality. Running on a fundamentally progressive agenda, LaRaviere called for the hiring of ten thousand more teachers and support staff, drawing attention to the fact that CPS was the most understaffed district in the state.50 Though he did not succeed electorally, LaRaviere was a critical part of a rising wave of educators who sought public office to stem the attack on public education. By focusing on the issues that hit closest to home for teachers, he represented a significant departure from the policies of Emanuel, Duncan, and President Obama.51