Webinar: Lift Us Up, Don't Push Us Out! Stories About Organizing Against the School-to-Prison Pipeline | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Webinar: Lift Us Up, Don't Push Us Out! Stories About Organizing Against the School-to-Prison Pipeline | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Webinar: Lift Us Up, Don't Push Us Out! Stories About Organizing Against the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The new book Lift Us Up, Don't Push Us Out! features voices from the frontlines of a growing movement for educational justice across the United States. Organizers and activists recount their journeys to movement building, lift up victories and successes, and offer practical organizing strategies and community-based alternatives to traditional education reform and privatization schemes.

These powerful stories teach us the hard-won lessons of organizers from across the country — and in conjunction with Dignity in Schools Campaign's new Toolkit on Organizing to Combat the School-to-Prison Pipeline they point a way forward for social movements today and tomorrow.

We discussed school discipline, organizing for educational justice, and more with Lift Us Up contributors.

Our speakers included:

• Zakiya Sankara-Jabar, National Field Organizer, Dignity in Schools Campaign
• Jonathan Stith, National Director, Alliance for Educational Justice
• Mark R. Warren, Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Marianna Islam (moderator), Director of Programs & Advocacy, Schott Foundation for Public Education

About the Speakers

Zakiya Sankara-Jabar

Zakiya is the National Field Organizer at Dignity in Schools Campaign. She came to advocacy, organizing, and policy work as a parent pushing back on the pre-school to prison pipeline. Prior to joining Dignity in Schools Campaign, she co-founded Racial Justice NOW! (RJN!) in Dayton, Ohio and served as Executive Director for 5 years. During her time at RJN! Zakiya organized Black parents to fight back against schools’ overly harsh discipline policies and practices that are ineffective, unfair and detrimental. Through this advocacy, organizing, and policy work-parents were able to win some significant victories; including a moratorium on out of schools suspensions for PK students and the creation of the ‘office of males of color,’ in the Dayton Public Schools. This work was the impetus in the new law passed in 2018 strictly limiting PK-3rd-grade suspensions and expulsions for public and charter schools in the State of Ohio.

Zakiya has received the Emerging Leader Award from the Center for Community Change in 2017 and the Community Advocacy Award from Advocates for Basic Legal Equality and Legal Aid of Western Ohio in 2016. Zakiya also received the Drum Major for Justice Award from the Dayton (OH) Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 2015.

Jonathan Stith

Jonathan Stith is a founding member and National Director for the Alliance for Educational Justice, a national network of intergenerational and youth-led organizations working to end the school-to-prison pipeline. He has over 20 years of experience organizing with youth and community organizations to address injustice in education. Alliance for Educational Justice played a critical role in shaping federal policy on school discipline, ending the access of school police departments to military grade weapons from the DFA 1033 program and the defense of Niya Kenny and Shakara in the #AssaultAtSpringValley. Jonathan is trainer with BOLD/ Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity.

Last and most importantly, he is a father of three young adults whom taught him everything he knows.

Mark R. Warren

Mark R. Warren is professor of public policy and public affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Mark studies and works with community and youth organizing groups seeking to promote equity and justice in education, community development and American democratic life. Mark is the author of several books, most recently Lift us up! Don’t push us out! Voices from the front lines of the educational justice movement. His other books include Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy, Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice, and A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform. Mark is a founder and co-chair of the Urban Research-Based Action Network (URBAN), a national network of scholars and community activists designed to promote collaborations that produce research that advances racial equity and social justice. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and has won many other awards and fellowships.

Marianna Islam
Marianna Islam is the Director of Programs and Advocacy at the Schott Foundation for Public Education where she works with the program team to develop and implement the Foundation’s resource delivery strategy. Marianna brings over a decade of experience in the philanthropic sector, having served as the Associate Project Director for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Roadmaps to Health Community Grants Programs at Community Catalyst and Vice President of Community Impact Initiatives at the United Way of Central Massachusetts. Marianna brings passion to her role as a philanthropic leader, youth worker and community organizer for racial, gender, economic and social justice.

CONTINUE READING: Webinar: Lift Us Up, Don't Push Us Out! Stories About Organizing Against the School-to-Prison Pipeline | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Sac City Teachers Association: $60 million in SCUSD cuts | The Sacramento Bee

Sac City Teachers Association: $60 million in SCUSD cuts | The Sacramento Bee

Sacramento City Teachers Association proposes $60 million in SCUSD cuts

Amid Sacramento City Unified School District’s dismal financial situation, the Sacramento City Teachers Association proposed its plan Thursday evening to balance the budget while also funding student programs.

The teachers union presented its “Students First Budget Rebalancing Proposal” at a Board of Education meeting, claiming that it could save the district $60 million, balance the budget, improve student experience, and still have cash left over afterward.

SCTA’s proposed savings would come in part through cuts to administration, including $16 million from reducing the number of central office administrators from 267 to 190, and $600,000 from reducing administrators’ pay to “a more reasonable level.” The proposal also outlined $16 million in health care savings that the district has already voiced interest in.

SCTA submitted a previous savings proposal in September that also called for significant cuts in administration shortly after the district’s budget was rejected for the first time ever. That proposal was not adopted by the district.

SCTA president David Fisher said he is optimistic the district will be open to discussion on the new proposal going forward in part because the union believes it offers comprehensive steps to improve the district.

After saving $60 million through administrative cuts, eliminating vacation buyouts for administration and management, limiting the use of third-party services and reducing health care costs, SCTA suggested the district focus on “students first priorities” with its funds.

Of those savings, $16 million would go toward balancing the budget and $24.4 million toward improving learning by reducing class sizes, implementing professional development practices for teachers — which would include cultural sensitivity training to CONTINUE READING: Sac City Teachers Association: $60 million in SCUSD cuts | The Sacramento Bee

Juvenile Justice Reform Bill Quietly Passes Senate | The Marshall Project

Juvenile Justice Reform Bill Quietly Passes Senate | The Marshall Project

The Criminal Justice Reform Bill You’ve Never Heard Of
Mitch McConnell’s Senate has quietly passed juvenile justice legislation that would ban states from holding children in adult jails.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. It now will go to the White House for President Donald Trump's signature.

The criminal justice buzz on Capitol Hill this week is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after stalling for weeks, will finally allow a prison reform bill called the First Step Act to come up for a vote. The legislation, which would reduce some federal mandatory-minimum sentences, could make it to President Trump’s desk by the end of this year.

But that’s not the only perpetually-in-limbo crime bill that, in the span of a few days, suddenly appears likely to make it through a logjammed Congress and get signed into law.

With much less fanfare, the Senate on Tuesday passed major juvenile justice legislation that has been postponed and picked over for more than a decade—and that would ban states from holding children in adult jails even if they’ve been charged with adult crimes.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which is expected to pass the House as soon as today, would also require states receiving federal dollars to collect data on racial disparities in the juvenile system and to come up with concrete plans for addressing those inequities. It would ban the shackling of pregnant girls, as well as provide funding for tutoring, mental health, and drug and alcohol programs for kids.

Despite the president’s usual tough-on-crime rhetoric, congressional staffers and youth advocates said he appears unlikely to veto the bill, which has CONTINUE READING: Juvenile Justice Reform Bill Quietly Passes Senate | The Marshall Project

What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances? | janresseger

What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances? | janresseger

What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances?

  Merry Christmas and Good Wishes for the Season!   This blog will take a holiday break.  Look for a new post early in the new year.

In 2012, Mike Rose published Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, a book about the potential of community colleges to help people discover their interests, widen their experiences, and perhaps change the direction of their lives.  He begins: “This is a book about people in tough circumstances who find their way, who get a second… or third.. or fourth chance, who in some cases feel like they are reinventing themselves.  Education can play a powerful role in creating that second chance…  One of the defining characteristics of the United States is its promise of a second chance; this promise is central to our vision of ourselves and to our economic and civic dynamism. When we are at our best as a society, our citizens are not trapped by their histories.” (Back to School, p. xiii)

But we live in an age when work requirements—and participation in sometimes endless workplace training programs—have been added as conditions to qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and when some states have made eligibility for Medicaid and even SNAP (food stamps) contingent on working or participating in basic and overly generalized training programs.  What does it mean when education ceases to be seen as a second chance and is instead conceptualized as a punishment for the those we disdain as dependent.  What if our society were to recover our belief in second chances?  What if we were to begin to consider in human terms the people who care for our grandparents or our children or pour our coffee or change the beds after we leave our hotel rooms—people whose employers may not regularly assign them enough hours to qualify for social program work requirements—people who never know their work schedules in advance—people working at minimum wage?  And how does our opinion of the people struggling to find jobs that pay so little affect the programs we design supposedly to provide that second chance?

To consider this question, in 2013, Rose published a piece in Dissent Magazine, The Inner Life of the Poor, an article he later added as a new chapter in the revised and expanded 2014 edition of his extraordinary Why School?   Rose republished the article last month on his personal blog.  Here’s why: “I reprint it now, for I think it is especially relevant in these times of brutal social policy and the day-to-day dehumanization of vulnerable people both within and at our borders.”

Here is what Rose asks us to consider as he profiles the woman who served as the primary CONTINUE READING: What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances? | janresseger

¿¿ What Are YOU Resisting ?? – redqueeninla #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

¿¿ What Are YOU Resisting ?? – redqueeninla

¿¿ What Are YOU Resisting ??

I’m resisting the attack on our public school system.  And we need to defend it now, right now, or else it will be gone.

¿¿When Are You Gonna Do It ??

Now. THE MOMENT IS NOW, THIS SATURDAY.  Really:

Now is the time for you to stand up, march and be counted.  Now is when the big push is going down to privatize that Jewel in the Crown of Public Education:  LAUSD.

I know, you and everyone else loves to hate on LAUSD.  It’s the second-largest school district in the country, the largest one run by a publicly-elected school board.  But it’s not a hell-hole of incompetence.  Really.  My children graduated from there and they’re not incompetents and neither are their teachers.  Really. The school sites are not a viper’s den of scary gangsters.  Really. (It’s actually downtown, in the District’s central headquarters (“Beaudry”) that the true financial criminals are stored. Really.)

Because “Education Reform” is just one instance of Privatizing All Our Public Works, Everything.  And that’s what’s on the table, right now, coming to a head in this fair city of ours. 

I know what I’m resisting: the flow of money, ever-increasing in the going, into just a tiny few number of private pocketsies.  We the millions are just standing around while it makes this giant sucking sound from out of our wallets and into their precious few accounts:  Eli Broad’s, Alice Walton’s, Reed Hasting’s, Austin Beutner’s, etc….  You know, the same old.

Right Now, all the stars carefully positioned over such along time are coming into alignment – for them. They’ve got a school board stacked with Privatizers, and it’s under threat from long-time progressive activist Jackie Goldberg running for the seat vacated by CCSA’s last anointed lackey, the felon from LAUSD BD5 (Vote Jackie, LAUSD5 on March 5, 2019!).

They’ve got a superintendent from their stable of Ideological Privateers, the venture capitalist Austin Beutner of Blackstone Group/Russian-privatization/Oaktree Capital/Evercore/Villaraigosa-Riordan-Broad/LAPD fame. He’s all poised and scripted-up for disparaging his own team of personnel, school teachers and their support staff.

And they’ve got one of America’s largest remaining unions with its back up against that proverbial negotiating wall, penned in on oneside by public opinion, CONTINUE READING: ¿¿ What Are YOU Resisting ?? – redqueeninla

What Happened to 2018 As The Year of the Teacher? | gadflyonthewallblog

What Happened to 2018 As The Year of the Teacher? | gadflyonthewallblog

What Happened to 2018 As The Year of the Teacher?

This year teachers took their mission way beyond the classroom.

Starting in West Virginia, we staged half-a-dozen walkouts in red states across the country demanding a better investment in children’s educations and often getting it.

Then we took that momentum and stormed our state capitals and Washington, DC, with thousands of grassroots campaigns that translated into seats in government.

It was so effective and unprecedented that the story began circulating that 2018 would be known as “The Year of the Teacher.”

And then, just as suddenly, the story stopped.

No more headlines. No more editorials. No more exposes.

So what happened?

The gum in the works seems to have been a story in The Atlantic by Alia Wong called “The Questionable Year of the Teacher Politician.”

In it, she writes that the teacher insurgence was overblown by unions and marks little more than a moment in time and not an authentic movement.

It really comes down to a numbers game. Numerous sources cite high numbers of teachers running for office. Wong disputes them.

National Education Association (NEA) senior political director Carrie Pugh says about CONTINUE READING: What Happened to 2018 As The Year of the Teacher? | gadflyonthewallblog

Looting Public Education for the One Percent: Support the UTLA Resistance - LA Progressive #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

Looting Public Education for the One Percent: Support the UTLA Resistance - LA Progressive

Looting Public Education for the One Percent: Support the UTLA Resistance

When the pro-charter LAUSD school board majority appointed investment banker Austin Beutner to superintendent earlier this year it effectively declared war on schools of color and communities of color.  Nationwide, public schools have been gutted by the rising tide of charterization, privatization, high stakes testing, union-busting, civil rights rollbacks engineered by the Trump/DeVos Department of Education. Teacher walkouts have reverberated across the country as states slash public education funding and schools re-segregate to pre-Brown v. Board levels.

The cynical appointment of the grossly underqualified Beutner (a one percenter white male with no prior public school teaching or administrative experience) signified that the board was essentially handing over the District to these forces on a silver platter in a swaggering f-you to parents, teachers, and students who’ve seen their schools reduced to detention centers.

When the pro-charter LAUSD school board majority appointed investment banker Austin Beutner to superintendent earlier this year it effectively declared war on schools of color and communities of color.

When I attended Hamilton High School in the LAUSD in the eighties there were no school police, random searches or metal detectors.  College preparation was largely the domain of middle-class kids who could afford expensive Kaplan SAT test prep classes, and “guidance” counselors routinely advised students of color to go to vocational school or try their luck finding a low wage job “if” they graduated.

Flash forward and I’m the parent of a child who attends one of the last predominantly Black magnet elementary schools in a district that has morphed into a bloated police state bureaucracy.  With a dedicated police presence at virtually every campus of color, the district is a national leader in school paramilitarization.

In this Orwellian LAUSD, lorded over by pro-charter privatizer shills and developers, students of color must navigate searches by deans, patrolling by police, and campus aides. Black, Latinx and Indigenous students in overpoliced schools struggle to gain access to college preparation opportunities and classes that reflect their social histories, while full-time college counselors, social workers, nurses and other resource providers are a luxury for affluent white schools.

In resistance to these blatant inequities, the UTLA is holding a massive demonstration downtown at Grand Park this Saturday at 10 a.m. The event is a clarion call to save public education from the privatization regime espoused by Beutner and his billionaire allies from the Broad and Walton CONTINUE READING: Looting Public Education for the One Percent: Support the UTLA Resistance - LA Progressive

Reflecting On Six Years Of The Education Opportunity Network

Reflecting On Six Years Of The Education Opportunity Network

Reflecting On Six Years Of The Education Opportunity Network

A little more than six years ago, a group of public school advocates, political strategists, and progressive-minded educators from around the country met in an informal gathering in Washington, DC, to address the burning question of how to lead a resurgence in progressive values in education policy and politics.

At the time, Republican state governors and legislators were engaged in a withering assault on public schools to strip them of financial resources they needed to educate a population of students increasingly wracked by poverty, homelessness, and the traumas of widespread racism and economic inequity. A Democratic presidential administration led by Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was continuing its campaign to ratchet down more pressure on schools and teachers to conform to practices most educators objected to and increase standardized test scores or face punitive actions. Influential billionaires and private foundations were stoking the coffers of political candidates and think tanks to back charter schools and other market-based forms of competition to public schools. And education policy makers and influential media pundits seemed stuck in a consensus that the nation’s public schools had failed and bad teachers were the problem.

In the political arena, the progressive left had generally left the education battlefield to centrist Democrats and radical Republicans who more often than not agree on how schools should be governed. Public schools had virtually no prominent champions in the progressive faction on Capitol Hill, and progressive advocacy groups uniformly left education policy off their checklists of issues they cared about.

Faced with this bleak landscape, the informal group gathered in the Beltway decided to create the Education Opportunity Network to be a strategy and messaging center to bring education policy back to its progressive roots and urge progressive Democrats to add progressive education policy to their lists of issues they would advocate for.

Beginning with a bold “Education Declaration to Rebuild America,” EON set out a principled agenda based on the progressive ideals of public CONTINUE READING: Reflecting On Six Years Of The Education Opportunity Network

Louisiana School TM Landry Co-founder Accused of Physical and Emotional Abuse, More Details Emerge

Louisiana School TM Landry Co-founder Accused of Physical and Emotional Abuse, More Details Emerge

Louisiana School Co-founder Accused of Making Student Eat Rat Feces, Stepping on Another Student’s Face

The horrifying story of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School is getting clearer and bleaker as more details of abuse come to light during a state police investigation.

According to the New York Times, which broke the original story, Louisiana State Police have been looking more closely at abusive behavior that seemingly ran rampant at the school. In addition to lying on students’ college applications, owner Michael Landry and other “educators” at the school have been accused of physical and emotional abuse against students, including acts such as making students kneel to learn “humility,” choking students, and slamming them.

‘It Was Like Building a House on Water’: Louisiana School Behind Viral College Acceptance Videos…

If it seems too good to be true, it just might be. But I have to admit: This one really hurts.

Read more

Because the school moved multiple times, the allegations of abuse fell within multiple jurisdictions, including Breaux Bridge County, which had previously closed a case about Michael Landry hitting children because it “was outside of its jurisdiction.” As such, state police have stepped in, though families have expressed skepticism after what they feel was a fumble by local law enforcement in handling these cases.

From the New York Times:

Since The Times published its article, more than a dozen people have reported additional incidents of what they called abuse to authorities, according to a law enforcement official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the cases. Those statements include allegations that Mr. Landry placed a developmentally disabled boy in a closet, lifted another student by his collar and shoved him to the ground on his knees, and hit elementary school students with a belt.

It should be moot at this point, but unfortunately it’s not: Any form of corporal punishment is unsuitable for children and can drive the exact CONTINUE READING: Louisiana School TM Landry Co-founder Accused of Physical and Emotional Abuse, More Details Emerge

America Is Sacrificing Black Education for a False Meritocracy - The stakes of New York City’s school integration plan.

The stakes of New York City’s school integration plan.

America Is Sacrificing Black Education for a False Meritocracy

In the weeks before her election on November 27, Cindy Hyde-Smith looked vulnerable. Not enough, perhaps, to scuttle her chances at winning: She was a white Republican, after all, running for U.S. Senate against a black Democrat in Mississippi, with the country’s least-elastic electorate all but guaranteeing a 60-40 split in her favor. But the knocks against her were damning, and there seemed to be new ones every week. She joked about public hangings and suppressing unfavorable votes in a state where white supremacists once made a pastime of lynching black people to deter them from voting. She wore a Confederate soldier’s hat and described it on Facebook as “Mississippi history at its best!” And in arguably the most flagrant example of her ties to the state’s racist history, local reporters foundshe had attended an all-white “segregation academy” as a teenager — and sent her daughter to one years later.

The last two were framed as especially scandalous. They seemed deeper-rooted, more fundamental to Hyde-Smith’s character than the racist tongue-slips that had preceded them. The Jackson Free Press story about her schooling was circulated breathlessly on social media, sparking a national discussion about racism and so-called “seg” academies — private schools that cropped up across the South during the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate white children whose parents wanted to avoid integration. But it also generated talk cautioning outsiders against casting segregation as uniquely southern. Some observers pointed to purportedly liberal New York City as having some of the most segregated schools in the country.

As if on cue, a group of Manhattan parents gathered on Monday to oppose integration. Facing a proposal from New York mayor Bill de Blasio that would expand the admissions process for the city’s coveted specialized public high schools — thereby securing more spots for black and Hispanic students at institutions that are currently dominated by Asian and white children — they made impassioned arguments for why it was a bad idea. One white parent disparaged it as a dangerous “social experiment.” Another claimed it would be unfair to the new black and Hispanic students, who would find themselves floundering and underprepared. Asian parents and their advocates saw the schools’ current admissions policy — which relies on a single, high-stakes standardized-test score — as a rare color-blind means of upward mobility in a city where Asians face high poverty rates but thrive academically.

But the single-mindedness of these warring interests belies a larger, more fundamental point. Every American wants their child to have a quality education, but few seem invested in a quality education for all children. In a country where the school districts with the most students of color receive 15 percent less money per child in state and local funding than the whitest, it is an unavoidable conclusion that advantage is distributed, and hoarded, according to race. During the civil-rights movement, integration was framed as the remedy to such inequality. More than half a century later, its promise remains unrealized. Americans from New York to Mississippi internalized CONTINUE READING: The stakes of New York City’s school integration plan.

Arizona charter school history: How leaders got the votes

Arizona charter school history: How leaders got the votes

History of Arizona charter schools: 'I don’t think we realized what we’d done'
IN 1994, LEGISLATORS CAME TOGETHER TO PASS A HISTORIC BILL THAT ALLOWED CHARTER SCHOOLS IN ARIZONA.

The charter gamble: In this series, we examine how Arizona committed 25 years ago to the then-untested concept of charter schools, and what the program has meant for the state. Today, Part 1, how it all began.

Fife Symington sounded defiant.

He had run for governor on a promise to overhaul Arizona's sluggish public education system. But by April 1994, three years into his administration, nothing significant had changed. 

Now he felt pressure from all sides. The public demanded change. His re-election was in doubt. His personal entanglements were beginning to make news. 

His best hope was to do something dramatic.  

So the governor called an ally. 

Lisa Graham, a Republican state representative and chairwoman of the House Education Committee, answered the phone. Graham felt defeated. She had poured years of work into an education-reform bill Symington had supported, and then watched from the Senate gallery as it died.

Let's go back, the governor told her. He would call a special session, and they would run the bill again. But this time without its most controversial component. 

We'll take out the vouchers.

Symington was convinced the bill's small voucher program — which allowed families to use public money to send their children to private schools — had doomed the legislation. Without it, Symington said, their reforms would sail through.

The rest of the bill seemed tame by comparison. It allowed "open enrollment," letting children go to schools outside their district boundaries. It created school report cards and expanded preschool for at-risk children. And it established a new breed of public schools designed to operate independently, with fewer rules and looser oversight than their district counterparts. They would fuel competition and parent choice.

They were called charter schools. 

It was more of an idea than a movement. Only a handful of states had passed charter laws, and in those, only a few schools had opened. 

Neither Symington nor Graham had ever visited one. 

Graham had doubts about the timing of a special session. She respected Symington's instincts, but worried it was too soon to try again. She tried to be tactful. 

"I don't know if you know this: People hate you right now. And they don't like me either," she recalled telling him. "I'm not sure if you want me to run this thing."

Symington was undeterred. The November election was six months away. Education reform could spark a rebound in his popularity and give fellow Republicans a talking point for their own campaigns. 

Their recent defeat, Symington assured Graham, was just part of the process. Though he wasn't exactly sure what charter schools were, he knew they would change everything. 

We're coming back, he told her. I'm not asking you. We're coming back.

Changing the system deemed 'impossible'

The push for better schools was a nationwide concern.

In a 1993 report to Congress, the National Center for Education Statistics concluded that the country's lagging schools "continue to have serious implications." It detailed high dropout rates, stagnant test scores and wide racial gaps in American education. CONTINUE READING: Arizona charter school history: How leaders got the votes