More Than a Score (11 page)

In the months after the student resistance, during the battle for my job and since, I have met many people who say they admire my actions but that they cannot do the same because they see “what happened” to me. I feel so disconnected from the speaker each time these words are spoken. Others look at me and see a story of job loss, of pain, and isolation. But my internal experience is much more complicated, as rich with joy and freedom as it is fraught with anxiety and fear. It is confusing that the story of my resistance gets interpreted as a cautionary tale, when for me it is a story of the power and solidarity of activism. I realize that I need to not only tell the story of the action and its direct outcomes but also the history of its development and the fullness of what followed. If we are going to win this struggle for public education, economic and racial justice, and the flowering of the democratic project, we need to tell our stories of how we came to act in resistance.

When do we become the person who says
no
? From the outside looking in, acts of resistance can seem to emerge out of nowhere or from some trait of character akin to superhuman powers. “You are so courageous,” I am told. But the words do not sit with my experience of myself. I am often frightened and uncertain. I know that I do not act alone, that others stand by me, that courage is not an individual attribute. Within the narratives of capitalism, which foster individualism and competition, activism is individualistic. The “hero” is the person who acts alone. This narrative not only denies the facts of organizing, but, even more perniciously, conceals the power of solidarity that fuels our courage and brings joy to the struggle. In joining with students to resist Pearson, Inc., I learned profound lessons of solidarity and hope. These were a culmination of years of building alliances and learning from the activists around me.

Before I was a teacher educator, I was a high school English teacher. I had come to teaching in middle age, looking at the classroom as a space to grow democracy, empathy, creativity, and the capacity to ask questions, speak, listen, and be an active member of the community. I came to education because I was afraid that the hopes for our democratic project were dwindling, and education seemed to be the space to save it. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, when I was not yet tenured in the district where I was teaching, I angered the principal by telling her that she shouldn't laugh at students who were planning a protest of the US invasion. My speaking out about this, coupled with questions I'd been asking about what she meant when she insisted on “rigor” in our classrooms, led to a series of observations, which resulted in a poor evaluation. Her comments following the observations reflect a neoliberal vision of education: “When are you going to tell the students what the book means?” “I hope they realize this is not a democracy.” “Too much emphasis on process and not enough on content.” Without the protection of tenure, I had little recourse even as parents and students across the school community spoke up in my defense and demanded that I continue at my job. With union, parent, and student support, I would be able to return to the high school for a fourth year to be evaluated by the superintendent and a person of my choosing. Though there was every indication that I would be reinstated, I was offered a job at the university before the year was out and left the high school to enter higher education.

My initial dismissal garnered community and media attention. I was a popular teacher among parents and students. Reporters called for interviews. I deferred. I was blindsided by the job loss. Even though parents, students, and colleagues told me that the evaluation did not reflect my teaching, I found myself insecure and uncertain. I had not planned to run into trouble. I withdrew. I had entered teaching as a political act, as my space for activism. But I had not thought through or planned for the real consequences of teaching as activism.

I imagined that the university would magically offer me a space to engage my social justice work at less risk. I was wrong. While there was more freedom to acknowledge the horrors of US imperialism, the growing encroachment of accountability, surveillance, and demands for attention to “resource generation” was having its own silencing impact on teacher education, deforming our purpose and possibilities. It was only a matter of time before I would be faced with the choice to live in accordance with my conscience or remain silent.

There is not single linear path upon which to relate my story. From the time I left the high school to the moment when students in the student teaching seminar sat in deep solidarity refusing to send their work to Pearson, I traveled many paths at once. Together they brought me to the space of confidence and certainty of the rightness and necessity of my support for the students, at whatever risk.

The Community Activism Path

The neoliberal policies that are deforming and undoing public education are wreaking havoc on wages, job security, health care, and housing. They are behind our endless wars and occupations, surveillance state, and increasingly limited possibilities for democracy. I left psychology to become a teacher in the 1990s, horrified by Clinton's dismantling of welfare and acquiescence to the racist characterizations of poor and working people. The stolen elections of 2000, the United States's nationalistic and militaristic response to the events of 9/11, and then the ongoing wars and occupation, brought me out on the streets and into meetings with longtime activists and newcomers: all of us trying to find our way to stop the violence being perpetrated in our name. I met some amazing people on this path. One, Frances Crowe, now ninety-four years old, was active in the struggle for divestment from South Africa back in the 1970s and '80s, was a leader of the antinuke movement, had been arrested dozens and dozens of times, and was still exhorting us to get out in the streets, connect with young people, take risks. In the aftermath of the US attack on Iraq, I worked with comrades to organize a teach-in, and then to bring a “budget for all” question to the town council and on local ballots across the state. I attended meetings of the fledgling Fund Our Communities and Not War group in Massachusetts. I watched and listened. I stood out and demonstrated. I took notes and passed them on. I wrote press releases and got people to sign petitions. I never did enough—my paid work pulled me away, but I was deeply inspired by the courage, persistence, and commitment to peace and love that I saw in my comrades. I knew I needed to do more.

At the same time, in the spring of 2011, a group of education activists came together to develop Education Radio. We started producing a once-a-week podcast that we made available to local community access station across the country, as well as distributing it online through Facebook and other sites. The work was intensive—interviews, project development, narration, working on sound, piecing together a story, getting it out there once a week. But it brought me into contact with amazing people, both those who were producing the programs and those I had a chance to interview. While I was too often sitting in meetings on campus where I found myself alone and isolated because of my perspective, outside of work I was talking to people who shared my outrage, were organizing opt-out campaigns, and speaking out against corporate deform and for public education.

The Classroom Activism Path

As a teacher educator my social justice work focuses on raising the consciousness of the mostly white, mostly middle-class students with whom I work to understand the ways capitalism and racism unite to limit our lives and visions of who and what we can be. In my classroom practice I commit to building community, uncovering the naturalized discourses of individualism, competition, and commodification, challenging students about their privilege and schools as sites of reproduction, and helping them to imagine and enact liberatory education. It is not easy going. Many students who enter teacher education programs were successful in school and want to repeat that “success” in their own classrooms; white student teachers struggle to see how whiteness impacts themselves, their perceptions, and the students of color with whom they work; and all of us labor under the increasingly intrusive surveillance and accountability that make teacher licensure a series of obstacles to overcome rather than an educative experience. But my classroom is a place of good struggle, loving disagreement, careful listening, and deep uncertainty.

I taught a foundations course called “The Work of the Middle and High School Teacher.” Graduate students usually took this course during the fall semester of the first year of the two-year masters program. The course was designed to peel back taken-for-granted notions of schools and education; to expose the ways power, privilege, race, and class impact how we fund schools; the kind of school experiences students have; and the ways we see our work and the young people with whom we work. The course requires a strong classroom community in order to engage questions that intersect the personal, the political, and our identities as teachers. Sometimes a group of students comes along that grows a very special intellectual community. In the fall of 2010 that group of students entered our masters program and this class. They included mothers and fathers who were balancing school and parenthood; recent college graduates who were excited about education as a space to ask questions; committed feminists and social activists; future teachers of Latin, Greek, biology, chemistry, history, mathematics, and English; and cautious philosophers. But they shared a spirit of questioning—each other and me—and a commitment to listening to our tentative answers. As a teacher I always work to build a classroom community based on trust, risk-taking, and vulnerability. For whatever reason, this group allowed itself to take chances that not all other classes had. Even as we disagreed about the relative impact of race, class, gender, and other oppressions or questioned each other about the nature of knowledge—the content to be taught and how we understood motivation and its relationship to learning—our arguments were infused with respect, with affection. In the spring of 2012, when the students refused Pearson, many of them were students from this class. They had experienced a sense of shared purpose and connection upon which to build their resistance to Pearson.

The Personal Readiness Path

My experience at the high school had left me shaken and uncertain. On the one hand, I understood that my ideas about education practices were more radical than the norm. On the other hand, I preserved some faith that doing my job well would allow me freedom beyond the strictures of the growing neoliberal regime in education. I was not prepared to lose my job. Neither was I prepared to accept the support offered me. I was not prepared for the vulnerability of how public the attack was. And when I got to the university, this unsettled feeling stayed with me. I retreated to good work in the classroom but caution in the public space of my work. As contract faculty and someone who came to the university on a nontraditional path, I was insecure in my knowledge and status. These first years at the university were painful. I could not live with myself without speaking my voice, but I had been seriously burned by speaking out.

My partner and I spent many a long walk talking through my confusion and pain. These conversations became more emphatic as the accountability regime hit teacher education. I was walking two paths at once. On the one hand, the fear of job loss left me anxious to try to work within the rules of the academy, even as that meant actively participating in the refining of the accountability system. On the other hand, I was working on my courses and with my students to name the accountability system for what it was and to consider ways to resist, what resistance would look like and what risks we were willing to take. In the privacy of conversations with my partner and in my own mind, I feared and loathed each act of compliance and complicity. I felt the soul of my work slipping away. Fortunately for me, these talks led to a deepening commitment between my partner and me that we could not live lives of silent compliance. Over time, the conversations shifted to preparing ourselves for when we would stand up and one of us would lose our job or get arrested. We talked about the privileges we had and how to use them. We talked about working our way through the fear and about being strategic in preparing to live a smaller material life in order to live a more honest work life. That we did not have children made this decision easier and was a part of our conscious choice: we could do this at little risk to others beside ourselves.

The Paths Join

I was teaching the Secondary English methods class in the fall of 2011 when Occupy Wall Street blossomed. I went to Liberty Plaza a number of times, interviewed people, came back, told the students stories, had them listen to my interview with the critical pedagogue Ira Shor that I'd recorded at Liberty Plaza, asked them to imagine the work of teaching as a political act. I went to local Occupy sites and continued to participate with local activists within the peace and justice movement. Some of the students in the methods class struggled to understand what this activism meant to their classrooms. We considered what we asked our students to read, talk about, and write; how we listened to them; what we knew of their lives; and how all of this fit or not with education for democracy and liberation. And in that struggle and within the conflicts, affection and courage grew.

At the same time, I found my voice and courage in department meetings. The Occupy movement was a part of this courage. Speaking with people in Liberty Plaza, marching to the Brooklyn Bridge, standing out in an early fall snowstorm in Springfield, Massachusetts, watching the police brutality when citizens across the country demanded their voices be heard: these added fuel to a soul already inspired by local activists. When my colleagues and I decided that our students should not have to participate in a field test unless they chose to, I willingly accepted the leadership role in demanding that this choice be given to them. In a concentration with many vulnerable faculty—either contract (such as myself) or pre-tenure—someone had to lead. While my role as coordinator and director of student teaching made me the logical choice, we all knew that this was a risky move. But it was a risk I had been preparing myself to take. One colleague from another concentration was increasingly anxious as I questioned the TPA and Pearson's involvement. One day she told me I “frightened” her. I was going too far. But I, as I told her, felt I was not going far enough—not compared to the women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties who were traveling to protest the Israeli occupation of Gaza, getting arrested at the nearby nuclear power plant, relentlessly knocking on doors and initiating conversations, and getting up each day to continue the struggle.