More Than a Score (40 page)

HG:
Yeah. I clearly was not understanding something. We were prohibited from even answering parents' questions. We weren't having important dialogue within the school about overcrowding; the lack of resources that impacted the entire school was really a huge source of frustration internally as well. The district silence about this fueled the community anger, most of which came from outside of our school, and didn't help us internally address our needs. I tried to organize some staff people to do outreach, but I felt so inexperienced and overwhelmed by the media outrage and dialogue that was spinning far out of any one individual's control to address it. The following year, many of the programs designed to improve services for the ELL students were dismantled.

It was a really humbling lesson for me that the impact of education went far beyond my classroom. I decided to leave teaching and spend more time doing community-based work. I worked at Asian Americans United on campaigns and helped start a community charter school based around folk arts and serving immigrant and multilingual families. I helped start an education newspaper, the
Philadelphia Public School Notebook
, and did ethnic studies curriculum writing and antiracist/multiracial professional development. I tried to do things that would help me better understand the intersection between schools and communities and to hear the voices of families, parents, and students that were being ignored by people creating all these so-called reform policies. Most of all, I tried to understand where the possibilities were for renewed engagement and real improvement.

JH:
Can you talk about forming Parents United for Public Education and helping to coalesce a movement against a series of privatization efforts?

HG:
Yeah, so as much time as I spent in education—I had been a teacher, I had helped start an education newspaper, I had helped found a school, I had served on different boards—nothing prepared me more for understanding education than becoming a public school parent myself and being on the other side of everything that I thought I knew. I always thought that if you do the right thing, then it turns out right, or something. But being a parent and being on the receiving end of all these different corporate education policies was truly the most troubling and eye-opening experience that I've had.

We started Parents United in 2006 when our school faced a particularly severe and non-reported budget crisis, and we realized that there was no citywide vehicle through which parents' voices could be raised about critically important issues—having enough teachers and aides and support staff, addressing culture and race in curriculum and practices, talking about safety and the lack of it while trying to develop responsible disciplinary policies. Instead a lot of education coverage was on policy “reform” totally divorced from the experiences of children and families at the school level. A lot of us were active in our local schools, but without a citywide voice, there wasn't really much more you could do than just advocate for your own school, which could only go so far because ultimately it was really about what the district would do, what the district's situation was, and whether there were enough voices that were moving the district in the right direction. A group of us were coming together to these various board meetings—and there were very few parents at the time attending. The day the school district passed a budget that stripped out arts and music, eliminated hundreds of teachers from the schools—which feels quaint now because we just lost four thousand [educators] from our schools last year—

JH:
Ugh, that's atrocious.

HG:
—there were only five of us parents in the room to witness the passage of this budget that was just going to eviscerate schools. So we made a vow among ourselves that we weren't going to see that happen again and that we would try to engage parents to look at budgets—not really so much as an accounting document, but really make it a moral document that reflected the priorities of communities. The following year we had more than a hundred parents come together to demand resources in our schools, and we did win back arts and music, we won a lower class size mandate in the primary grades, and we developed a new voice of parents for our public schools that pushed back against the negative stereotypes of public school parenting—and that was the founding of Parents United for Public Education. And since then, we've grown because the stakes have grown so high. We came together to talk about schools, but there's also this real need to humanize the dialogue around how we talk about poverty, cities, and our children. Parents are uniquely poised to ensure that dialogue comes through a framework of human dignity, equity, justice, societal responsibility, and love for our children and those who care for them. And I think despite all the struggles we've seen over the years, we've held to those ideals.

JH:
I'm wondering if you can talk more about what corporate reform has looked like in Philadelphia. You've had scores of schools closed across the city, and seen privatization efforts first ushered in I think under Paul Vallas. Talk about what the corporate reform agenda has done to the schools there.

HG:
Philadelphia is a city that has the highest poverty rate of the ten largest metropolitan cities in the United States. It has always struggled around issues of poverty, but over the course of multiple recessions and declining
investments it has worsened. Philadelphia has just really fallen way, way, way down in terms of the quality of life for a lot of residents in general and our schools reflect that.

So in 2001 the school district of Philadelphia got taken over by the State of Pennsylvania and at the time . . . the plan was to bring in Edison Schools—back then the largest for-profit manager of schools in the country—for a $100-million-a-year contract to manage and run the entire school district of Philadelphia. Philadelphia would be the largest privatized public school district in the entire country run by a for-profit entity. Fifteen years later [Edison Schools] doesn't even exist anymore. It's now Edison Learning, an online educational services company, whatever that means. That to me is the story of corporate reform. You know, completely unfounded, unproven experimental ideas that come with grand promises, and they disappear and people don't remember that we did that already.

This struggle against the privatization of Philly public schools was one of the most formative experiences of my life. It was really about this vision between communities of parents and families and students and people versus the nonsense of Wall Street corporate interests.

JH:
That's right.

HG:
And for the most part I think that the community won significantly. Edison Schools, as I said, no longer exists. They were reduced from privatizing the entire school district of Philadelphia to running twenty schools. We got the state to change their whole language and approach. It wasn't just about Edison; now it included universities and nonprofits running schools—and, again, not a single one of those education management organization [EMO] contracts exists today. At the same time, a community demand for public school investment helped lead to a huge capital effort under Paul Vallas to build new schools and renovate others. We saw a massive expansion of EMOs and charters, yes, but there was also investment in the public sector as well. The consequences of it were complicated, of course. We went bankrupt, for one thing, since inequities in state funding were never seriously tackled, and we undermined neighborhood high schools with a set of small, mostly admission-based select high schools. But at the same time, the community really led this amazing struggle against a singular corporate reform agenda and the contrast was undeniable.

JH:
That's beautiful.

HG:
Now we fast-forward and we've got a governor today who is just wedded to undermining public education not just in Philadelphia but all across the state of Pennsylvania. He cut nearly one billion dollars from the state education budget in his first year in office, saying his was a budget that separated the “must haves” from the “nice to haves.” Obviously schools would no longer be in the “must have” category. At the same time, we've seen a massive explosion in charter schools, and in particular charter management organizations. We've got 35 percent of our kids in eighty-six different charter schools. Our charter school population alone is the second largest school district in the state of Pennsylvania. So we're running effectively two parallel systems with less money, and that has been, whether it was purposeful or not, in combination with the rise of the testing industry, what has created the elements for the disastrous situation we face today.

Effectively what's happened is that the massively underfunded public school system is being cannibalized by the charter system . . . families are forced to choose between a school district with almost no resources and capacity to deal with their needs and a charter “system” with eighty-six charter schools that run the gamut from outright criminal endeavors to some pretty extraordinary and unique institutions. Throughout all this, we've never seriously addressed funding inequity. So we have had to close thirty public schools in the last two years; that forced out thousands of children into schools, every single one of which is worse than the school they attended the prior year. We lost four thousand staff people [from] last year into this year. We've had two children die in schools that lacked nurses, seen children's needs go unmet by the lack of school counselors, we can only afford to staff fourteen libraries in a school system with two hundred–plus buildings. We're running schools that our own superintendent calls a “doomsday scenario” for children.

JH:
That's shameful.

HG:
As painful as this is, we've seen an extraordinary amount of community action, students' voice, parent activity, and a real re-coalescing of the original state takeover coalition that brought together community members, staff people, parents, students, and teachers from all across the city to really make a stand for public education. There is a leadership vacuum, yes, but I hope people understand that the vision is being led and called for and enacted by a real grassroots movement to reclaim our schools.

JH:
That's what's been so incredible to watch, students saying we refuse to let you rob us of the last public institution guaranteed for all for free, and leading walkouts, and parents, students, and teachers uniting to take this stand against the decimation of public space has been just really inspiring for us here. What are some of the strategies you have used to combat the titans of corporate reform in Philly?

HG:
I've always felt that the corporate ed reform movement is homogenized, but the tools we use to push back are very local and unique to each place. We have a lot of strengths in Philadelphia—not the least of which is incredible student organizing and a pretty vibrant immigrant organizing movement. One worthy highlight is that we have independent homegrown media here in Philadelphia that has been key to the organizing effort. The
Philadelphia Public School Notebook
evolved mostly as a voice and a vehicle for communities to challenge the hegemonic dominant narrative of ed reform, and has become a major information outlet to get out research and studies and ask questions about the ed reform initiative. We founded the
Notebook
in 1994 to be a voice of the people, and today it holds the right people accountable.

We've had success in unmasking a number of reform charlatans and revealing that many of them are simply for-hire lobbyists. We've been successful in using city ethics and lobbying laws to confront foundations and self-styled reformers around work they had been labeling as “philanthropy” but which we successfully challenged as lobbying. We've also had success, with no small part due to the hubris and arrogance of these groups themselves, in exposing newer ed reform organizations to be the astroturf groups they are.

If people hear a lot about the Philadelphia movement, it's partly because we're producing a lot of media through outlets like the Media Mobilizing Project. We've been able to push out videos and publications and really spend a lot of time humanizing the story of Philadelphia so it just doesn't become full of statistics: “seven thousand children,” “thirty public schools to close,” “four thousand staff gone,” “$93 million debt.” I mean, your eyes can just glaze over as these numbers get bigger and bigger, and it can feel paralyzing. And the counterbalance to that for us, and a lesson and a strategy that we employ, is the need to humanize every situation. So when thousands of teachers were laid off, a group called Teacher Action Group Philadelphia started a website called Faces of the Layoff and told the stories of all these staff people who had spent their lives within the Philadelphia schools who were being laid off.

JH:
That's brilliant.

HG:
Philly people have created a ton of independent videos so that the student walkouts [against budget cuts] could be documented and deepened not just for that action but as political history and storytelling that we continue to use. It is really important to find the space for people to be able to educate one another on the politics and history as we go through this so that even among ourselves we don't get too beaten down, or as we are being beaten down, at least we remember that this has been a long fight and why we continue on.

JH:
That's a great point. If we don't know our history and if our movement is constantly having to reinvent itself at every attack, we don't stand a chance. That's also a really important lesson about independent media that I hadn't fully realized—that you have had such a focus on alternative media in building the movement. I think besides the alternative media something that has been effective in Philadelphia has been direct action in terms of the walkouts of students, but I think I also remember that you went inside the mayor's office and commandeered his podium? Is that right?