I had the opportunity over the last 3 days to participate in a “study tour” created by one of the organizations that our school received funds from this year. What I appreciate about this organization is this — the KIPPs the Uncommons and the AFs out there can’t TOUCH this money. Why? Because the money is specifically for leaders of color who are starting charter schools across the nation.
Those very leaders are the people I’ve been with for the last 72 hours- Truly inspiring me and amazing me for several reasons:
1) I realized that the world I had known as the “charter world” is actually infinitely larger than what I knew/saw
2) I am so humbled by the amount of COURAGE and tenacity it took all those that surrounded me to either pave the way where there was no path or fight a system that laughed in their faces
3) These were people who sacrificed everything because they knew that there were communities of children that looked like them who deserved so much better than what they were given
At my previous school, I felt like I was part of something but could never truly call it “a movement”, we were doing the work but nothing about it felt like a “movement”- the mobilization of a people around a common cause. I always felt odd saying that I was a part of the “charter school movement” because where I was, it was too easy, there was no struggle. Everything we needed was given to us because everyone was watching and everyone was waiting. A true “movement” entails struggle and fight and the very grass roots types of foot to the ground organizing of people, of communities that was completely nonexistent.
Fast forward to my move to Los Angeles, we opened our doors on Aug 23 expecting 80 of our 120 student goal. 40 of them actually showed up. Countless follow up phone calls later, we realized that not only were we shy of our goal of 120 students, we had just lost 40 MORE students that we thought we could count on. Some of the very students whose living rooms we sat in, were the ones that did not show up.
And so it began again. Hours spent in front of grocery stores, local parks, community centers, churches, libraries, the Crenshaw mall passing out fliers to families trying to convince everyone that our school was an option for their 5th grade child and to fill out an enrollment form for one of the 80 spots that still remained open. As we were doing this, I began to realize that the landscape of the charter school world out here in the southland is drastically different from what I had left in New York.
Here, one charter school represented ALL other charter schools and if one did poorly it became the burden of any other charter school that tried to enter to disprove the assumption that “all charter schools are bad”. Couple this with myths and flat out lies being told to our parents –
“charter schools charge money”
“they hand select their kids”
“you have to have good grades to attend”
and, perhaps the must offensive of all
“if you enroll with them and don’t have your papers, they will report you and you will be deported”
- all myths that meant most parents would not even consider crossing our threshold to find out more about the school.
So as we were out in the community recruiting parents and their children, the challenge was this- in the 3, sometimes 5 minutes that we held the parent’s attention we had to:
1) educate them on what a charter school was NOT
2) convince them to take their child out of their current school and put them in a brand new one by next week
3)convince them to fill out an enrollment form
4)overcome a language barrier and convince them that our school was worth any inconvenience it would be to take their child out of their current one
In October we adjusted our budget and our target number to 80 students.
January, 2011 we hit 93 and considered ourselves fully enrolled.
Listening to people speak from New Orleans, Texas, Memphis, Brooklyn, Chicago I realized that we were not alone and that what I experienced in NY was only a reality for a small percentage of the charter schools out there.
An advocate from a charter school advocacy/policy group gave this statistic:
70% of charter schools across the nation are independently run. Of those 70%, 60% of them are run by leaders of color.
Yet the only charter schools we hear about or those giant Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) with white leaders and administrators. (with the exception of the Harlem Children’s zone) However, even when you look at the beginnings of HCZ, their beginnings were radically different from the beginnings of the other CMOs– HCZ began as a community based organization and, to this day, remains a community based organization that not only provides educational opportunities for children of color but also health care and education to the students and their families. Within these large CMOS you always had the white administrator telling the black/brown educators how their children SHOULD be taught. While I don’t want to discount the success of many of these organizations, many of them have been extremely successful and many of my closest friends work for them, but even within those walls we always talked about how it always felt like something was missing-there was a certain grit and utter devotion that many of our leaders did not have.
Everyone I met on this tour was a pioneer in their communities, they went where no one else would and said, I’m going to make this work. No matter what happens, it will work. There were people that I met in ALL stages of the process, some were waiting for charter approval and others had been around since the beginning of the the concept of a charter school– literally selling an idea that no one knew ANYTHING about.
They all share a common thread- despite every obstacle, despite every surprise thrown at their way, despite every attempt to prevent them from reaching the children they wanted to serve, they made it happen.
If it meant being housed in a church where they would have to pack up their things EVERY Friday and unpack it all on a Monday, that’s what would have to happen. If it meant that they had to walk past hostility to get to open the school they felt their children deserved, they made it happen. Every single person in that room had a similar story, and every single person knew that if they didn’t do it, who would?
One particularly inspiring story that I heard was about a small network of schools that decided that they were going to, very purposefully, co-exist with an LAUSD (or as the call it, “traditional”) school. They decided that they were not going to have that tense relationship that most co-located charters experience. They were granted a new site being built by LAUSD, because they went, year after year, to the local district and asked that they create a cooperative learning environment where their charter school would exist and work with a “traditional” school. The result was the most inspiring display of teamwork that I’ve ever seen. Not only are they happily co-located, they share a common recess, common lunch times and even a common teacher lounge. There is no “us vs. them” sentiment but rather a happy co-existence with the principals of both schools working together to divide up the responsibilities of running such a large school site. Unfortunately, this example is a rarity and often seen as an impossibility. However, there is an entire list here of people who are making it happen. At the core of this synergy is the belief that we’re all in this for the same thing — creating good schools for ALL children.
To close out the few days we spent with each other, Senator Gloria Romero, the first female senator to be named majority leader, spoke with us. She was a pioneer of California’s Parent Trigger law because she believed that if adults in the workforce are given the right to organize and create a voice to demand fair practice, why is the same not done for the parents of children in failing schools? (I realize that the former is also something that is still not entirely true but at least, it is written) In the same way that workers, by law, are given the right to advocate for the quality of their job, why can’t parents advocate for the quality of their child’s education? She began with this:
“We have a system of education defined by zipcode. 5 digits determine your success or your failure”
It was because of this that she knew that she had to do something to mobilize the primary stakeholders- the parents of children in these failing schools, failing zipcodes. The story she told of her road to the vote was incredible and it began with empowering the parents to demand more. At the time the bill was introduced, Senator Romero carried around a list of 700 chronically low performing schools– each of these schools pushing out generations and generations children ill-equipped and, in many ways, unable to define their own success within our society. It was with this information that she began to mobilize the parents. After petitioning, evading lobbyists and facing resistance, even within her own party, the bill finally made it to the floor. The bill almost didn’t pass, Senator Romero knew that she was not going to get the number of votes for it to pass with urgency (meaning the bill to law process is expedited) so, in the 11th hour, she made the decision to strip the bill of its urgency and allow it to pass with fewer votes. Late into the night, in the face of people celebrating what they thought was the death of a bill, the California Parent Trigger Law passed. This was truly a grass roots movement, championed by Senator Romero that led to the right of any parent in California to push for a change in the failing schools that their child attends and, most importantly, give parents a voice for their community.
Why is this work so important? There isn’t a moment to waste- we don’t have time to sit and discuss theoretically what works and what doesn’t, we have to act. We don’t have time to watch more children go through a system that is flawed and is failing. Each day a child spends in a failing school, we lose an entire generation. When there are children out there attending schools that have become factories of failure, our work is incredibly vital and urgent. Many would even say, it’s a matter of life or death. However, many either fail to see this, choose to ignore it or wait for someone else to do it. WE are the “someone else” and we can’t even scratch the surface of the amount of change necessary without the outpourings of support and dedication that we witnessed in the 60s.
Senator Romero spoke of marching along aside the likes of Cesar Chavez and Dr. King and remembering the passion, the grit, the fight it took she then said,
“People say education is a civil rights issue – we don’t act like it.”
And it’s true, too many people are complacent and don’t fight for the fact that in 2011, our schools which are more segregated than ever, are failing millions of children across the nation. If people really took to heart the buzz phrase they love to throw around that education being “the civil rights issue of our time”, we should be fighting, just as visibly and passionately as the leaders of the 60s. Why then, are we not? Why do we only have certain pockets of people outraged at the injustice and doing something about it? Most importantly, how do we re-empower communities of color and the parents in our communities to advocate for their children and organize to demand change and why, are we not all running to do it?
Everyone is waiting. Waiting for someone else to do it, some elected official, someone with “power”. As Senator Romero said, “It’s not the elected officials, [that create change] it’s people’s movements”. The question now is, what are we doing to ensure that “the movement” actually happens? People say that the charter movement started in 1992, but with the strength and the passion of the people that sat in that room today, I think we might one day look back and say that the movement (in it’s true sense) is really just beginning.
