The Save Our Schools Coalition for Action (SOS) rally and conference July 8 and 9, in Washington D.C. brought together nearly 500 community activists and educators from around the country. The event offered a window into the current state of the resistance movement against corporate reforms in public education. A resounding theme emerging from the two-day event was: FIGHT BACK!
The rally and march July 8, in which the Party for Socialism and Liberation participated, featured a full day of speeches and protest music by an ethnically diverse mix of elders and youth united around the SOS platform:
· Full, equitable funding for all public schools
· Safe, racially just schools and communities
· Community leadership in public school policies
· Professional, diverse educators for all students
· Child-centered, culturally appropriate curriculum for all
· No high-stakes standardized testing
In the wake of the police killings of Philandro Castile and Anton Sterling, speakers connected the SOS platform to the movement for Black lives. As a result, the rally sent the clear message that what goes on in schools is intimately connected to the larger society and that one of the most important ways to support Black and Brown lives is to support the education of Black and Brown youth.
The SOS conference July 9 at Howard University continued and expanded upon this crucial theme. The SOS conference was intentionally scheduled to take place right after the National Education Association conference. In her speech at the NEA conference Hillary Clinton (who the NEA had endorsed without consulting their rank and file) praised corporate charter schools, and was subsequently booed by thousands of offended teachers.
Perhaps this turn of events helps to explain what seemed to be, at the SOS conference, widespread opposition to Hillary Clinton despite having just been endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Since receiving such negative feedback from teachers the Clinton campaign has radically improved its position on public education. However, as we know, this in no way indicates that a Clinton presidency, in practice, would deviate from Clinton’s record supporting the very corporate reforms in education that community activists and educators are fighting back against across the country.
For example, the first keynote speaker, Jitu Brown, from the South side of Chicago and the national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, stressed the importance of the self-determination of oppressed communities and their fight to struggle against national educational policies that degrade and damage the lives of Brown and Black youth. J4J is a national alliance of community organizations “demanding community driven alternatives to the privatization and dismantling of public school systems.”
Not only is J4J fighting against the replacement of public schools and public school teachers with privatized charter schools and corporate-controlled “Teach For America” staff, they are fighting for a better quality, community controlled curriculum and against high stakes testing. The movement of students and families to “Opt Out” of high stakes tests is therefore an integral part of their alliance. Consequently, another theme emerging from the SOS conference was a rejection of the condescending sentiment that Opt Out is a product of white privilege.
Bringing many of the conference themes together was Seattle public school teacher and activist, Jesse Hagopian, who focused on the success of the Opt Out movement in Seattle and the white supremacist nature of the tests themselves. This discussion was historical and relevant. The ways in which the testing movement contributes to the school to prison pipeline, in the context of the movement for Black lives, was electrifying. Building upon this Hagopian argued that we should start talking about the school to death pipeline because testing dehumanizes. That is, the national curriculum suggests that cops are not killing Black and Brown kids, but they are removing “failures” (i.e. failing test scores) and criminals deemed not to amount to anything anyway.
The educators and community activists at the event demonstrated that they have a very good sense of what the best forms of culturally relevant and critically engaging education are. This knowledge and these practices are crucial for the movement for Black and Brown lives. These activists and educators also sent the clear message that these forms of education are a human right.
However, just like it is not practical to think that exploitation can ever be eliminated within capitalism, or that Black or Brown lives will ever really matter in U.S. bourgeois society, it is also not practical to assume that the kind of education people have a right to can ever be obtained within capitalism. While small and large victories can and have been won, they are never complete, always under attack, and therefore never permanent. Achieving justice is far more practical under socialism. If justice is in fact our goal, then we cannot afford to deny that we need an education that can teach us how to begin playing an active role in transforming capitalism into socialism.
