PSAT for 12-3-13: Ponder truth stories in your heart
Last night I attended a meeting where truth was told to power in a way that was simply stunning, and a bad outcome we thought was inevitable turned into something potentially very good.This was not a PURE-related meeting, so I won’t share the details. But it was the kind of experience I have had from time to time in the course of my work, and I know many of you have had them, too. It’s a transcendent experience of the power of good people speaking their truth against the expectation of privileged elites. To quote from the Christmas story, these are experiences to “ponder in your heart.”
My first such experience happened nearly 25 years ago at the very first meeting of our neighborhood school’s very first local school council. A group of us who were not among the privileged elite of the school community had been elected. From the beginning, we asserted our truths. We set the tone by moving the meeting table down close to the public instead of sitting above them on a stage. We refused to rubber-stamp budget transfers we had not seen. During the year, we united to stop the practice of diverting funds to a tracked magnet program at the expense of bilingual programs and the (mostly African-American) children consigned to the non-magnet programs. When the principal’s contract was up, we carried out a careful, fair process in the face of internal faculty coercion, threats to LSC members’ jobs, and even one quite credible death