More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  So we’ve got to really push that forward and educate people on how to take [education] back through legislation and various other tools, so that’s where we as an organization see the movement is headed.

  JH: I’m excited to see the work you do in the next year. I think there’s never been more coordination of folks that want to have parents, students, and teachers driving the education conversation rather than billionaires who have never attended public schools.

  PR: Exactly.

  From “Shaming and Blaming” to the “Moral Agenda for Our Time”

  This interview was conducted on June 7, 2014, and has been edited and condensed.

  Jesse Hagopian: It’s been really exciting following the work you’ve been doing, especially over the last year; the movement of parents resisting corporate education reform has been an inspiration around the country. I wanted to start by asking you about how you got into education politics, and, more broadly, how you developed your political consciousness.

  Helen Gym: Those are really great questions. Well, I grew up in an immigrant household in Columbus, Ohio, in Ronald Reagan’s America, so I wouldn’t say that I developed a strong sense of politics as a teenager. The most important value I learned in Columbus came from growing up in a community where public spaces were highly valued, and so I really felt strongly that everything I had, especially since my parents were working and this was a new country for them, came through these public spaces—whether it was learning to read at the public library, swimming at the public pool, playing sports at my local rec center, and of course, going to public school. Having those opportunities had an enormous influence on my life and they inculcated in me the value of public spaces. These public spaces opened up the world around me, gave me new opportunities, and exposed me to a diversity of people and ideas. These public spaces were where people from all backgrounds came together and understood—in a deeply personal way—what it means when a society provides opportunities to its citizens. That was the lasting thing that I came away with from Columbus, but not a whole lot of sense of anything more than that. [I thought] most places are probably like this . . . I just didn’t know. I was seventeen years old and not very well informed in any kind of political way. I did not have any understanding of the inequities and deprivation that I later saw.

  I really didn’t have a political sensibility about injustice until I landed at Asian Americans United a few years after college graduation. AAU became my political home—it was where I could understand for the first time a more multiracial perspective on class inequities and other injustices. That was where I finally started to pull things together . . . where I met so many incredible activists who were informed by their experiences and histories as Asian Americans but also focused on bigger issues to build a broader multiracial justice-oriented coalition. It mattered when we talked about immigrant rights, or educational opportunity, or police abuse and language access. As we worked on campaigns, the relevance of an Asian American “voice” finally became clear to me.

  I came into education politics when I started out as a teacher in the Olney neighborhood of Philadelphia. I was the only Asian American teacher at a school that had a plurality of Asians, a near equal mix of black and Latino students, and a smaller percentage of white families. So it was truly diverse, but it was also enormously overcrowded—I had thirty-eight students in my classes, and I think there were twelve hundred students in one of the largest elementary schools in the city. Despite the diversity, there was not a lot of understanding about English language learners or Asian Americans or recent refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia in particular, who were a significant population in the neighborhood and school. I really spent a lot of time just trying to be a great teacher and being exposed to all these amazing educators all across the city. I also got involved with education justice groups like the National Coalition of Education Activists and met a number of people associated with Rethinking Schools. That’s where I met Bill [Bigelow] and Bob [Peterson] and Stan [Karp] and Linda [Christensen] and plenty of others.

  JH: Nice! I have also learned so much from those educators. . . . So what caused you to then leave teaching?

  HG: Well, I left teaching in part because of this horrible experience that we had at our school around race. In 1994, a series of newspaper articles were written about our school—claiming Asian American kids were living in paradise while African American kids languished in overcrowded classrooms. But the writer didn’t understand or didn’t bother to find out or really care much about the fact that the Asian kids were all ELL [English language learner] students taking language classes—many of them in converted bathroom and closet spaces. Instead, he wrote that they got special access to extra language services, they got extra teachers, they had smaller classes and nobody explained that these were all immigrant youth . . . this was what they are legally entitled to and we had fought to enlighten the school around this. But it didn’t matter because a major newspaper columnist wasn’t really concerned about our kids. He was more interested in taking down our superintendent who was honoring our school principal. So the major newspaper this columnist worked for ran a series of stories on the front page for weeks and it culminated in a march and protest all around our school. And, you know, it just made me realize that even after all this work, people did not understand the racial politics that created this terrible situation—where you had this horribly overcrowded, underfunded school and parents worried and upset about this; where you had so much diversity and people so ignorant of children’s needs within this diversity; where you had newspaper columnists exploiting these fears and stereotypes to get at political targets like our superintendent, who had infuriated certain powers because he called the state legislature “racist” for its underfunding of our schools. I could be a good teacher, but I, too, did not understand enough about race and community, inequity, and the general anger and fear that comes out of that.

  JH: Yeah, it sounds like a horrible divide-and-conquer strategy was implemented in your school to pit communities of color against each other over scarce resources.

  HG: Exactly. It was pretty devastating.

  JH: So that experience led you to want to figure out what is going on with education policies and racism in your city?

  HG: Yeah. I clearly was not understanding something. We were prohibited from even answering parents’ questions. We weren’t having important dialogue within the school about overcrowding; the lack of resources that impacted the entire school was really a huge source of frustration internally as well. The district silence about this fueled the community anger, most of which came from outside of our school, and didn’t help us internally address our needs. I tried to organize some staff people to do outreach, but I felt so inexperienced and overwhelmed by the media outrage and dialogue that was spinning far out of any one individual’s control to address it. The following year, many of the programs designed to improve services for the ELL students were dismantled.

  It was a really humbling lesson for me that the impact of education went far beyond my classroom. I decided to leave teaching and spend more time doing community-based work. I worked at Asian Americans United on campaigns and helped start a community charter school based around folk arts and serving immigrant and multilingual families. I helped start an education newspaper, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, and did ethnic studies curriculum writing and antiracist/multiracial professional development. I tried to do things that would help me better understand the intersection between schools and communities and to hear the voices of families, parents, and students that were being ignored by people creating all these so-called reform policies. Most of all, I tried to understand where the possibilities were for renewed engagement and real improvement.

  JH: Can you talk about forming Parents United for Public Education and helping to coalesce a movement against a series of privatization efforts?

  HG: Yeah, so as much time as I spent in education—I had been a teacher, I ha
d helped start an education newspaper, I had helped found a school, I had served on different boards—nothing prepared me more for understanding education than becoming a public school parent myself and being on the other side of everything that I thought I knew. I always thought that if you do the right thing, then it turns out right, or something. But being a parent and being on the receiving end of all these different corporate education policies was truly the most troubling and eye-opening experience that I’ve had.

  We started Parents United in 2006 when our school faced a particularly severe and non-reported budget crisis, and we realized that there was no citywide vehicle through which parents’ voices could be raised about critically important issues—having enough teachers and aides and support staff, addressing culture and race in curriculum and practices, talking about safety and the lack of it while trying to develop responsible disciplinary policies. Instead a lot of education coverage was on policy “reform” totally divorced from the experiences of children and families at the school level. A lot of us were active in our local schools, but without a citywide voice, there wasn’t really much more you could do than just advocate for your own school, which could only go so far because ultimately it was really about what the district would do, what the district’s situation was, and whether there were enough voices that were moving the district in the right direction. A group of us were coming together to these various board meetings—and there were very few parents at the time attending. The day the school district passed a budget that stripped out arts and music, eliminated hundreds of teachers from the schools—which feels quaint now because we just lost four thousand [educators] from our schools last year—

  JH: Ugh, that’s atrocious.

  HG: —there were only five of us parents in the room to witness the passage of this budget that was just going to eviscerate schools. So we made a vow among ourselves that we weren’t going to see that happen again and that we would try to engage parents to look at budgets—not really so much as an accounting document, but really make it a moral document that reflected the priorities of communities. The following year we had more than a hundred parents come together to demand resources in our schools, and we did win back arts and music, we won a lower class size mandate in the primary grades, and we developed a new voice of parents for our public schools that pushed back against the negative stereotypes of public school parenting—and that was the founding of Parents United for Public Education. And since then, we’ve grown because the stakes have grown so high. We came together to talk about schools, but there’s also this real need to humanize the dialogue around how we talk about poverty, cities, and our children. Parents are uniquely poised to ensure that dialogue comes through a framework of human dignity, equity, justice, societal responsibility, and love for our children and those who care for them. And I think despite all the struggles we’ve seen over the years, we’ve held to those ideals.

  JH: I’m wondering if you can talk more about what corporate reform has looked like in Philadelphia. You’ve had scores of schools closed across the city, and seen privatization efforts first ushered in I think under Paul Vallas. Talk about what the corporate reform agenda has done to the schools there.

  HG: Philadelphia is a city that has the highest poverty rate of the ten largest metropolitan cities in the United States. It has always struggled around issues of poverty, but over the course of multiple recessions and declining

  investments it has worsened. Philadelphia has just really fallen way, way, way down in terms of the quality of life for a lot of residents in general and our schools reflect that.

  So in 2001 the school district of Philadelphia got taken over by the State of Pennsylvania and at the time . . . the plan was to bring in Edison Schools—back then the largest for-profit manager of schools in the country—for a $100-million-a-year contract to manage and run the entire school district of Philadelphia. Philadelphia would be the largest privatized public school district in the entire country run by a for-profit entity. Fifteen years later [Edison Schools] doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s now Edison Learning, an online educational services company, whatever that means. That to me is the story of corporate reform. You know, completely unfounded, unproven experimental ideas that come with grand promises, and they disappear and people don’t remember that we did that already.

  This struggle against the privatization of Philly public schools was one of the most formative experiences of my life. It was really about this vision between communities of parents and families and students and people versus the nonsense of Wall Street corporate interests.

  JH: That’s right.

  HG: And for the most part I think that the community won significantly. Edison Schools, as I said, no longer exists. They were reduced from privatizing the entire school district of Philadelphia to running twenty schools. We got the state to change their whole language and approach. It wasn’t just about Edison; now it included universities and nonprofits running schools—and, again, not a single one of those education management organization [EMO] contracts exists today. At the same time, a community demand for public school investment helped lead to a huge capital effort under Paul Vallas to build new schools and renovate others. We saw a massive expansion of EMOs and charters, yes, but there was also investment in the public sector as well. The consequences of it were complicated, of course. We went bankrupt, for one thing, since inequities in state funding were never seriously tackled, and we undermined neighborhood high schools with a set of small, mostly admission-based select high schools. But at the same time, the community really led this amazing struggle against a singular corporate reform agenda and the contrast was undeniable.

  JH: That’s beautiful.

  HG: Now we fast-forward and we’ve got a governor today who is just wedded to undermining public education not just in Philadelphia but all across the state of Pennsylvania. He cut nearly one billion dollars from the state education budget in his first year in office, saying his was a budget that separated the “must haves” from the “nice to haves.” Obviously schools would no longer be in the “must have” category. At the same time, we’ve seen a massive explosion in charter schools, and in particular charter management organizations. We’ve got 35 percent of our kids in eighty-six different charter schools. Our charter school population alone is the second largest school district in the state of Pennsylvania. So we’re running effectively two parallel systems with less money, and that has been, whether it was purposeful or not, in combination with the rise of the testing industry, what has created the elements for the disastrous situation we face today.

  Effectively what’s happened is that the massively underfunded public school system is being cannibalized by the charter system . . . families are forced to choose between a school district with almost no resources and capacity to deal with their needs and a charter “system” with eighty-six charter schools that run the gamut from outright criminal endeavors to some pretty extraordinary and unique institutions. Throughout all this, we’ve never seriously addressed funding inequity. So we have had to close thirty public schools in the last two years; that forced out thousands of children into schools, every single one of which is worse than the school they attended the prior year. We lost four thousand staff people [from] last year into this year. We’ve had two children die in schools that lacked nurses, seen children’s needs go unmet by the lack of school counselors, we can only afford to staff fourteen libraries in a school system with two hundred–plus buildings. We’re running schools that our own superintendent calls a “doomsday scenario” for children.

  JH: That’s shameful.

  HG: As painful as this is, we’ve seen an extraordinary amount of community action, students’ voice, parent activity, and a real re-coalescing of the original state takeover coalition that brought together community members, staff people, parents, students, and teachers from all across the city to really make a stand for public education. There is a leadership vacuum, yes, but I hope people unde
rstand that the vision is being led and called for and enacted by a real grassroots movement to reclaim our schools.

  JH: That’s what’s been so incredible to watch, students saying we refuse to let you rob us of the last public institution guaranteed for all for free, and leading walkouts, and parents, students, and teachers uniting to take this stand against the decimation of public space has been just really inspiring for us here. What are some of the strategies you have used to combat the titans of corporate reform in Philly?

  HG: I’ve always felt that the corporate ed reform movement is homogenized, but the tools we use to push back are very local and unique to each place. We have a lot of strengths in Philadelphia—not the least of which is incredible student organizing and a pretty vibrant immigrant organizing movement. One worthy highlight is that we have independent homegrown media here in Philadelphia that has been key to the organizing effort. The Philadelphia Public School Notebook evolved mostly as a voice and a vehicle for communities to challenge the hegemonic dominant narrative of ed reform, and has become a major information outlet to get out research and studies and ask questions about the ed reform initiative. We founded the Notebook in 1994 to be a voice of the people, and today it holds the right people accountable.

  We’ve had success in unmasking a number of reform charlatans and revealing that many of them are simply for-hire lobbyists. We’ve been successful in using city ethics and lobbying laws to confront foundations and self-styled reformers around work they had been labeling as “philanthropy” but which we successfully challenged as lobbying. We’ve also had success, with no small part due to the hubris and arrogance of these groups themselves, in exposing newer ed reform organizations to be the astroturf groups they are.