More Than a Score (39 page)

JH:
I totally agree. To have examples like United Opt Out or like the MAP test boycott or the CTU doing the work they're doing seems like it's created a situation not just of despair, but now of hope that we can build an actual civil rights movement to reclaim education, you know, not the corporate-style, billionaire-backed, “civil rights movement” that Duncan keeps prattling on about, but a real movement.

PR:
Yeah. I sure do hope—I mean thinking about the MAP boycott, what's so funny for me is I watched that whole thing, Jesse, and I was amazed, but I thought, Colorado is so far from getting there. So I just hope that other cities are going to do that next year. I feel like next year is the year, you know?

JH:
I actually got a phone call from a parent somewhere in Colorado who is working with teachers to try to organize a boycott.

PR:
Oh, thank God.

JH:
So I wouldn't be surprised if we saw one there soon. You know I got calls from teachers in Chicago and New York who are organizing a boycott, and I think one of the incredible opportunities we have in the next coming period is to unite parents and teachers in common struggles against these tests. You know, teachers refusing to give them and parents opting their kids out has proven to be a powerful model in Seattle and Chicago and New York and I hope that spreads.

But just in terms of where you see this movement going and for parents, students, and teachers who will be reading this book—how they can join with United Opt Out and what resources do you have to offer them to help strengthen their movement to defend their schools from reducing them to test scores?

PR:
Right. Well, in terms of resources, our website with an opt-out guide for all fifty states—I'm sure you know it was hacked and destroyed, so I'm rebuilding that right now. We still don't know who did it, but literally I can't even tell you what a mess. I mean they really pulled the rug out from under us.

JH:
I hadn't heard that! That's really horrible.

PR:
Oh, I mean, Jesse, this. . . . So our website was hacked and destroyed on the last day of our conference here in Denver and the folks I had look into it said, “Peggy, this is not your normal hack job, this person has dismantled every . . . .” They called it a SQ3 something, I don't even know what it is, but I mean completely gone, like destroyed, very intentionally destroyed. So I reported that to the FBI. Of course I've heard nothing back because, you know, who am I? I doubt they'll even look at it, but that really pulled the rug out from under us right there in the midst of testing season, the last day of our conference here in Denver. I have been since that moment working on trying to rebuild that website. We had to raise money. What was cool was within forty-eight hours people donated enough money to rebuild it.

Cynthia Lu from K12 News Network helped us with the rebuild and now that it's summer we're trying to upload all the documents. I got a bit uploaded a couple of days ago and I'm going to keep working on it all month. Obviously our Facebook group is a resource. We are going to with this new website we have with Cynthia to K12; we are organizing our opt-out groups by region, and it's going to be very strategic this coming year because we're going to be able to really hone in on a particular region of the United States and see what people need and send them news items or opt-out information that would be specific to that area.

In terms of where we're headed from here, I know a lot of people think we opt out of a test and that's it. . . . But we want to opt out of the whole corporate conversation and so the next step for us is coming here to really push forward reclaiming education and owning the conversation. So if we can push forward this opting out of the test, we also need to push for opting out of their conversation and owning ours. The moment is ours, we've just got to grab it and we've got to educate the public to see, yes, you can have portfolio-based assessment. Yes, you can have your neighborhood public schools. . . .

I mean the charters are not equal. They do not provide choice. They are less choice actually, and that's another funny thing that I run into again and again. I have charter parents constantly e-mailing me, wanting to opt out of curriculum or wanting to opt out of tests. And what happens is by the end of our conversation, and this goes on sometimes a whole week, the parents will realize, “Oh, wow, I have less choice.”

JH:
That's incredible.

PR:
“I could help you very easily,” I tell them, “but you're at a charter school and you have less choice in a charter and the bottom line is that you could opt out—go ahead and do it, but you may get kicked out.” So they are waking up to that.

JH:
I hadn't thought of it like that, but that's a great way to highlight the fake narrative of choice that they push.

PR:
I know. In my emails to parents in Chicago and New York I always say, Now, you understand charters are really less choice because they can't opt out, or they do opt out and they get kicked out. . . .

So we've got to really push that forward and educate people on how to take [education] back through legislation and various other tools, so that's where we as an organization see the movement is headed.

JH:
I'm excited to see the work you do in the next year. I think there's never been more coordination of folks that want to have parents, students, and teachers driving the education conversation rather than billionaires who have never attended public schools.

PR:
Exactly.

From “Shaming and Blaming” to the “Moral Agenda for Our Time”

This interview was conducted on June 7, 2014, and has been edited and condensed.

Jesse Hagopian:
It's been really exciting following the work you've been doing, especially over the last year; the movement of parents resisting corporate education reform has been an inspiration around the country. I wanted to start by asking you about how you got into education politics, and, more broadly, how you developed your political consciousness.

Helen Gym:
Those are really great questions. Well, I grew up in an immigrant household in Columbus, Ohio, in Ronald Reagan's America, so I wouldn't say that I developed a strong sense of politics as a teenager. The most important value I learned in Columbus came from growing up in a community where public spaces were highly valued, and so I really felt strongly that everything I had, especially since my parents were working and this was a new country for them, came through these public spaces—whether it was learning to read at the public library, swimming at the public pool, playing sports at my local rec center, and of course, going to public school. Having those opportunities had an enormous influence on my life and they inculcated in me the value of public spaces. These public spaces opened up the world around me, gave me new opportunities, and exposed me to a diversity of people and ideas. These public spaces were where people from all backgrounds came together and understood—in a deeply personal way—what it means when a society provides opportunities to its citizens. That was the lasting thing that I came away with from Columbus, but not a whole lot of sense of anything more than that. [I thought] most places are probably like this . . . I just didn't know. I was seventeen years old and not very well informed in any kind of political way. I did not have any understanding of the inequities and deprivation that I later saw.

I really didn't have a political sensibility about injustice until I landed at Asian Americans United a few years after college graduation. AAU became my political home—it was where I could understand for the first time a more multiracial perspective on class inequities and other injustices. That was where I finally started to pull things together . . . where I met so many incredible activists who were informed by their experiences and histories as Asian Americans but also focused on bigger issues to build a broader multiracial justice-oriented coalition. It mattered when we talked about immigrant rights, or educational opportunity, or police abuse and language access. As we worked on campaigns, the relevance of an Asian American “voice” finally became clear to me.

I came into education politics when I started out as a teacher in the Olney neighborhood of Philadelphia. I was the only Asian American teacher at a school that had a plurality of Asians, a near equal mix of black and Latino students, and a smaller percentage of white families. So it was truly diverse, but it was also enormously overcrowded—I had thirty-eight students in my classes, and I think there were twelve hundred students in one of the largest elementary schools in the city. Despite the diversity, there was not a lot of understanding about English language learners or Asian Americans or recent refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia in particular, who were a significant population in the neighborhood and school. I really spent a lot of time just trying to be a great teacher and being exposed to all these amazing educators all across the city. I also got involved with education justice groups like the National Coalition of Education Activists and met a number of people associated with
Rethinking Schools
. That's where I met Bill [Bigelow] and Bob [Peterson] and Stan [Karp] and Linda [Christensen] and plenty of others.

JH:
Nice! I have also learned so much from those educators. . . . So what caused you to then leave teaching?

HG:
Well, I left teaching in part because of this horrible experience that we had at our school around race. In 1994, a series of newspaper articles were written about our school—claiming Asian American kids were living in paradise while African American kids languished in overcrowded classrooms. But the writer didn't understand or didn't bother to find out or really care much about the fact that the Asian kids were all ELL [English language learner] students taking language classes—many of them in converted bathroom and closet spaces. Instead, he wrote that they got special access to extra language services, they got extra teachers, they had smaller classes and nobody explained that these were all immigrant youth . . . this was what they are legally entitled to and we had fought to enlighten the school around this. But it didn't matter because a major newspaper columnist wasn't really concerned about our kids. He was more interested in taking down our superintendent who was honoring our school principal. So the major newspaper this columnist worked for ran a series of stories on the front page for weeks and it culminated in a march and protest all around our school. And, you know, it just made me realize that even after all this work, people did not understand the racial politics that created this terrible situation—where you had this horribly overcrowded, underfunded school and parents worried and upset about this; where you had so much diversity and people so ignorant of children's needs within this diversity; where you had newspaper columnists exploiting these fears and stereotypes to get at political targets like our superintendent, who had infuriated certain powers because he called the state legislature “racist” for its underfunding of our schools. I could be a good teacher, but I, too, did not understand enough about race and community, inequity, and the general anger and fear that comes out of that.

JH:
Yeah, it sounds like a horrible divide-and-conquer strategy was implemented in your school to pit communities of color against each other over scarce resources.

HG:
Exactly. It was pretty devastating.

JH:
So that experience led you to want to figure out what is going on with education policies and racism in your city?