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112: Keep Hope Alive w/ Deborah Meier image

112: Keep Hope Alive w/ Deborah Meier

E112 · Human Restoration Project
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17 Plays3 years ago

Today’s guest is Deborah Meier, who really needs no introduction for advocates of progressive education. Meier is the founder of the modern small schools movement, that aims to reorganize larger schools into smaller, democratic ones. She was founder and director of Central Park East, a Dewey-inspired progressive school in East Harlem, New York City. She also opened Central Park East II, River East, and the Central Park East Secondary School the same neighborhood. This led her to establish a network of similarly minded schools in New York City, and eventually founding Mission Hill School in Boston.

Meier is an advocate of democratic, progressive, public schools who has served on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, National Academy of Education, The Nation, Dissent, and more. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, as well as the author of multiple books including the recently co-authored These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon our Public Schools. Meier is a huge inspiration to us at Human Restoration Project and we frequently draw on her work in our materials and advocacy.

In this podcast, Meier and I talk about building a coalition of schools, educators, families, and community members to build and protect a progressive public education, discussing the importance of building a public education system that strengthens and models a democracy.

GUESTS

Deborah Meier, founding director of Central Park East and Mission Hill School, as well as various progressive democratic public schools, and author of various works including co-authoring These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon our Public Schools

RESOURCES

SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT TO END GUN VIOLENCE

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Transcript

Introduction and Call for Gun Reform

00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 112 of our podcast.
00:00:02
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:08
Speaker
Before we start this podcast, I wanted to address the recent events in Uvalde, Texas.
00:00:13
Speaker
Yet again, an American public space and yet again a school has had a massacre.
00:00:17
Speaker
In the wake of the shooting, we once again hear about ludicrous substitutions for obvious gun reform and repeat the same cyclical process which has dominated our American discourse for decades.
00:00:27
Speaker
Essentially, every media personality and organization has made statements offering support for what the vast majority of Americans want, which is common-sense gun reform.
00:00:36
Speaker
In spite of this, Republican politicians have turned their attention, yet again, to farcical ideas like arming teachers as opposed to addressing the obvious specific issue of guns in the United States.
00:00:46
Speaker
in conjunction with a well-funded propagandistic gun lobby.

Mobilizing for Gun Control

00:00:50
Speaker
It's a personal fear, as I'm sure it is for you as well, that this will be spoken about for a few weeks, it will make their hands on social media, then it will become a distant memory like Sandy Hook, those before it, and those in between, or perhaps even those in the future.
00:01:03
Speaker
This podcast, which was taped and somewhat framed around the events in Buffalo just two weeks ago, calls upon educators to organize and fight for schools, and of course gun control is a major part of that ongoing fight.
00:01:14
Speaker
And we would encourage our podcast listeners to sign up for the nationwide March for Our Lives rally on June 11th, 2022.
00:01:21
Speaker
No change can happen unless people band together and use their collective voice.
00:01:26
Speaker
We also encourage you to donate to the movement at MarchForOurLives.com, EveryTown.org, MomsDemandAction.org, SandyHookPromise.org, and any other organization working in tandem to demand change.
00:01:39
Speaker
We just can't let cynicism and apathy destroy our collective voice.
00:01:42
Speaker
We have to use it.

Guest Introduction: Deborah Meyer

00:01:54
Speaker
Today's guest is Deborah Meyer, who really needs no introduction for advocates of progressive education.
00:02:00
Speaker
Myer is the founder of the modern small schools movement that aims to reorganize larger schools into smaller democratic ones.
00:02:06
Speaker
She was founder and director of Central Park East, a Dewey-inspired progressive school in East Harlem, New York City.
00:02:12
Speaker
She also opened Central Park East II, River East, and the Central Park East Secondary School in the same neighborhood.
00:02:19
Speaker
This led her to establish a network of similar schools in New York City and eventually founding Mission Hill School in Boston.
00:02:25
Speaker
Meyer is an advocate of democratic progressive public schools who has served on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, National Academy of Education, The Nation, Dissent, and more.
00:02:36
Speaker
She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, as well as the author of multiple books, including the recently co-authored These Schools Belong to You and Me, Why We Can't Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools.
00:02:47
Speaker
Meyer is a huge inspiration to us at Human Restoration Project, and we frequently draw upon her work in our materials and advocacy.

The Need for Progressive Education

00:02:54
Speaker
In this podcast, Meyer and I talk about building a coalition of schools, educators, families, and community members to build and protect a progressive public education, discussing the importance of building a public education system that strengthens and models a democracy.
00:03:09
Speaker
Let's start off just by talking a little bit about what is going on in terms of what's happening at schools throughout the country, in terms of progressive education at large, and also just public schools and the concept of equity.
00:03:24
Speaker
These things that are vitally important, and they're increasingly under attack by conservatives.
00:03:29
Speaker
And to an extent, I would argue by liberal politicians as well in terms of the defense not being as strong as it could be.
00:03:37
Speaker
Given your experience in various ways from Central Park East to all the different various schools you started and boards you've served on, what should we be doing?
00:03:47
Speaker
What can we do in order to support these schools?
00:03:49
Speaker
Oh, I was hoping you could answer that question.
00:03:54
Speaker
To tell you one little development, they had decided to close the school that I started in Boston.
00:04:01
Speaker
This was part of a pilot school initiative that the union proposed in the 1990s.
00:04:06
Speaker
And then at one point, there was some 30-plus pilot schools.
00:04:13
Speaker
that were union schools, but they were sort of exempt from a great many of the rules that are part of the contract.
00:04:22
Speaker
On the other hand, they also insisted that some rules had to remain, like there had to be a process where we couldn't just fire people.
00:04:31
Speaker
Teachers had a voice in making decisions.
00:04:34
Speaker
It was, I thought, in the right direction.
00:04:39
Speaker
I'm trying to solve the problem that I face about a certain amount of autonomy on the local level that involves all the adults and ideally even students and some of the other equity issues because very often the autonomy can play against equity and just as choice can play against equity.
00:05:01
Speaker
So how to have some choice, some systems of both choice and autonomy,
00:05:07
Speaker
for local actors, for local school, that it's a real community that makes decisions about self-governing.
00:05:14
Speaker
At the same time, there are somewhat unworked out problems about that idea.
00:05:20
Speaker
It can run in conflict with other values.
00:05:22
Speaker
And that's, in a sense, the dilemma we're facing about democracy is that we've never really thought too deeply about it.
00:05:30
Speaker
What we mean, the left, about it.
00:05:33
Speaker
And that it depends, my new phrase, it depends upon the time, the circumstances, the nature of the community, the issues facing that community.
00:05:44
Speaker
And it won't always look the same.
00:05:46
Speaker
I think we'd like to think that we can solve problems by having

Teaching Democracy Through Experience

00:05:50
Speaker
a model.
00:05:50
Speaker
You know, there's a single answer to things and not conflicting answers.
00:05:55
Speaker
If you do this, there's a price to be paid over here, which is, do you want to pay, so to speak, if you make a choice?
00:06:02
Speaker
I wonder then, in terms of our obsession with having simple solutions to problems, how do we spread the practice that you're setting up at these different schools and setting up almost a coalition of sorts
00:06:17
Speaker
Between traditional public schools and the small schools that you've branched off to, as in, how do we convince educators and students that these schools are worth fighting for, as opposed to the schools that might currently be attending, if that makes sense?
00:06:36
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:06:37
Speaker
So if having a little faith in what I think is a basic democratic idea that self-governance means that whoever the selves are, they need to play a role in deciding how they're going to be governed.
00:06:51
Speaker
And if we want to teach young people about democracy, and I think maybe it starts there.
00:06:58
Speaker
in asking ourselves more seriously what the point of schools are and what the point of democracy is.
00:07:03
Speaker
If democracy is really important, then where are we supposed to play with it, learn about it?
00:07:09
Speaker
It would be like starting a baseball team, but the one thing you don't do is ever play baseball.
00:07:14
Speaker
And you certainly wouldn't assume that going to a soccer game would necessarily help you play baseball.
00:07:19
Speaker
So we have created schools that in no way, not only are not democratic, but they are a model of authoritarianism.

Reimagining Authoritarian Education

00:07:27
Speaker
even most good schools.
00:07:28
Speaker
There's no place where young people see adults living, even the adults in their lives, that they look and think, what does it mean to become a full citizen, an adult, an 18-year-old?
00:07:40
Speaker
There's no place they can see are playing the democratic roles in the community they're living.
00:07:46
Speaker
Not in their workplace, most of the time not in the city they live in, not in the nation they live in.
00:07:52
Speaker
So that's why I've often started with adults.
00:07:55
Speaker
that the issue of student voice is very important, but I don't think you can convince teachers that it's important when they don't have a voice.
00:08:04
Speaker
Students can only pass on values that they understand themselves.
00:08:09
Speaker
So sometimes I think, well, I'm trying to think of, is there a law we could pass on?
00:08:14
Speaker
My pretend law was that every community, that we have to define community, that every community has to create a definition of democracy that they will try in their school and they will document and that they have whatever model they produce, they can get together and change.
00:08:34
Speaker
But they have to defend the grounds that it increases the voice of all the parties, all the constituents.
00:08:41
Speaker
They have a greater voice and say in their institution, their lives, and so forth.
00:08:48
Speaker
So that we begin to demand that that be a community project to try to imagine how the community might be more democratic, including its schools.
00:08:58
Speaker
Right.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, the ability to be able to model that process and teach students by doing it, I think is often enacted as something like project-based learning or students working hands-on in something.
00:09:13
Speaker
But I think the...
00:09:15
Speaker
larger, grander concept of teaching things like responsibility, purposeful actions, empathy, or democracy is often lost because of how the school itself functions.

Defending Public Education's Purpose

00:09:29
Speaker
For example,
00:09:30
Speaker
You can integrate project-based learning into a seven-period day where students are just told what to do, but integrating something like democracy or responsibility is going to take a lot more reform or a lot more reimagining of what a school looks like and how it feels and what capabilities students have during the day.
00:09:49
Speaker
And I know that you've written about a lot, your critiques of education and children's personal liberty, what they're able to do during the day,
00:09:58
Speaker
what a traditional school day looks like in terms of sitting at your desk and not really having the freedom to even move around, let alone voice your opinion on something.
00:10:07
Speaker
I'm curious then how we tow that line between promoting progressive education while simultaneously ensuring that public education is still vital, recognizing that we still need to defend public education in spite of those flaws.
00:10:24
Speaker
How do we both reimagine but still defend the concept of public ed?
00:10:28
Speaker
That's why we need to keep public education, because underlying the idea of self-governance is that we are responsible.
00:10:37
Speaker
It's not just a personal self-governance.
00:10:40
Speaker
It's self-governance of the institution, of the nation.
00:10:44
Speaker
And that means that the purpose of schooling is not entirely your success, the individual.
00:10:49
Speaker
It's not a private.
00:10:51
Speaker
It's paid for by public funds because it's supposed to have a public purpose.
00:10:56
Speaker
as we often do, that it's worth dying for democracy, then one important public purpose must be to teach people to value and understand it and play a part in it.
00:11:08
Speaker
And how can they possibly learn when there is simply no institution in America who considers that their responsibility?
00:11:15
Speaker
You know, if you want to be a cook, you go to a cooking school.
00:11:17
Speaker
But if you want to learn about democracy, what do you do?

Challenges in Progressive Schooling

00:11:20
Speaker
It's a course taught undemocratically by an adult in high school.
00:11:24
Speaker
And occasionally when something doesn't matter much at all, you let the kids vote on it.
00:11:29
Speaker
So you are teaching a definition of democracy, which is really quite scary.
00:11:34
Speaker
But it's only good for things you don't care too much about.
00:11:37
Speaker
and that don't have any serious consequences, then it's okay to vote on it.
00:11:41
Speaker
If it's really something of importance, then you need to have some other system.
00:11:45
Speaker
The other thing is that we function, which is the hope of democracy, that you don't function by fear alone, and that schools are arranged for each level to fear the other.
00:11:55
Speaker
Kids are supposed to be afraid of.
00:11:57
Speaker
What we mean by the word respect when we say you don't respect me, we mean you act as though you're not afraid of me.
00:12:04
Speaker
And that's when policemen use that or teachers use it or the principal uses it to a teacher.
00:12:08
Speaker
You're not being respectful.
00:12:10
Speaker
What she really means is you're not acting as though you're afraid of me.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really powerful statement to make.
00:12:16
Speaker
And I think that it connects really well to what we're seeing on the national political scale in terms of this post-truth society.
00:12:27
Speaker
We're seeing a growth in authoritarianism.
00:12:30
Speaker
The election in 2024 will likely be unprecedented, as many things are.
00:12:36
Speaker
And social justice movements, equity movements, even simple just...
00:12:42
Speaker
like LGBT rights in schools are being censored and attacked and put down.
00:12:49
Speaker
What teachers can teach about?
00:12:51
Speaker
You can't teach about reality.
00:12:52
Speaker
You have to teach, you know, our version of history.
00:12:56
Speaker
Someone's and that and you should be afraid because if you don't do that, you might lose your job.
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:02
Speaker
And it's it's scary, right?
00:13:03
Speaker
Like it's it's terrifying.
00:13:05
Speaker
You know, as I was mentioning earlier, they are planning to close Mission Hill School and the process of
00:13:10
Speaker
Of course, there's nothing to do with the school people making decisions.
00:13:14
Speaker
And it's too long to explain what's going on there.
00:13:18
Speaker
But years ago, there was a man named Seymour Sarris.
00:13:21
Speaker
And he wrote a book shortly before he died called The Inevitable Failure of School Reform.
00:13:27
Speaker
He wrote that book, and I was reading it about the time I was starting one of the new schools.
00:13:33
Speaker
And we would talk about, is there anything I can do now that will prevent

Role of Teacher Unions and Activism

00:13:38
Speaker
them from...
00:13:40
Speaker
destroying this school in the long run because they did it with the high school in New York.
00:13:44
Speaker
Now there they did it right after I left.
00:13:46
Speaker
They just sent a principal in to replace me and they had the legal right to do that.
00:13:51
Speaker
And his message was to change the school, make it a traditional high school for select kids.
00:14:00
Speaker
The opposite of everything we had stood for.
00:14:03
Speaker
Now in the case of Mission Hill, I was so pleased because I left there in about 2003 or
00:14:10
Speaker
four maybe.
00:14:11
Speaker
You know, it survived a long time.
00:14:13
Speaker
This would be its 25th year.
00:14:16
Speaker
So I thought somehow they were safe, that it wasn't something that they worked
00:14:20
Speaker
because they finally got rid of me.
00:14:22
Speaker
But apparently it's not.
00:14:24
Speaker
And I don't know around the country how many other progressive schools have.
00:14:29
Speaker
I mean, first of all, I'd like someone to investigate what's happened to schools that were known for being public schools, that were known for being very progressive, and whether it's had an effect on the private progressive schools also.
00:14:42
Speaker
I went to a private...
00:14:46
Speaker
I have the impression that they have actually in some ways stayed true to their progressive tradition.
00:14:52
Speaker
But the progressive tradition that was seen to me did not, it did informally, but it didn't formally give parents and teachers a voice in the governance of the school.
00:15:04
Speaker
I mean, if you read Do it, I don't think he talks about the adult culture that children learn by osmosis.
00:15:11
Speaker
I mean, there's more about how to give children democratic rights
00:15:15
Speaker
than the adults in the school, in progressive education tradition, how to make the classroom more democratic, not how to make the school more democratic.
00:15:26
Speaker
I think that that builds well into what we do
00:15:31
Speaker
about the fact that so many different schools are under attack, both public institutions and progressive schools at large.
00:15:38
Speaker
In my opinion, that would look like teachers as activists.
00:15:42
Speaker
We know that typically top down reform movements don't work, especially not in a national or state level because of how many different times progressive schools have come under attack by politicians.
00:15:55
Speaker
I think that really the only way forward are teachers banding together, demanding more and doing a more grassroots style.
00:16:02
Speaker
How can we get the unions to be that?
00:16:05
Speaker
Are we there?
00:16:07
Speaker
Is there a way to reform the unions so that they are the advocates for it?
00:16:12
Speaker
Not collective bargaining entirely seen as something that's done to teachers, but that the bargaining is close to the place, you know, that more is left.
00:16:21
Speaker
Now, I think they did some of that in Rochester under Adam Urbanski, left more things on the school level rather than on the metropolitan level.
00:16:29
Speaker
He was one of the few leading people in the union in the AFT who agreed with me about democracy.
00:16:37
Speaker
In other words, the best of them did verbally, but you know what I mean.
00:16:39
Speaker
Adam fought for trying to figure out a way which a union can be a supporter for local democracy so that teachers felt less afraid and more like full citizens of the school.
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the idea that the school might be a democratic site in which...
00:16:58
Speaker
Now, there might be exceptions in terms of depending on the age of the students and so forth.
00:17:04
Speaker
You know, I don't think infants should have the same democratic say as 12-year-olds who might, or 18-year-olds.
00:17:11
Speaker
There's a certain arbitrariness about when you are considered old enough to be self-governing.
00:17:17
Speaker
But when it comes to schools, nobody is old enough to be self-governing, even the principal.
00:17:24
Speaker
It's scary to think that...
00:17:28
Speaker
I wonder myself, like, how much is it really going to take for activists, union members, teachers, etc.
00:17:35
Speaker
to band together and make that change, given what we're seeing every day in terms of censoring public education through like divisive concepts?

Conference to Restore Humanity

00:17:44
Speaker
But even like sadly what we saw yesterday in Buffalo, where you have an 18 year old young person who was radicalized.
00:17:54
Speaker
I can only question like what classroom experiences that they have leading up to that point.
00:17:59
Speaker
Not saying that it's the teacher's fault, but there's certainly a systemic failure there that makes me wonder like how bad will it get before we start to change course.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yes, there's a dilemma.
00:18:11
Speaker
And sometimes maybe it has to get a little better for people to have hope.
00:18:16
Speaker
That's very important is to think about what lessons the school does teach.
00:18:22
Speaker
And one of them is the resentment that the people in the lower tracks in schools must develop over the years towards educated elite.
00:18:32
Speaker
I mean, 12 years in an institution that only thinks you're smart if you're a certain type of person.
00:18:39
Speaker
with a certain kind of smarts and to have spent all those years being put down by the faculty, other students, for being the dumb kids.
00:18:48
Speaker
And I think some of the resentment that we sometimes annoys us because it doesn't seem to be in their own self-interest, poorer and lower class and working class people feel towards the educated elite has been built.
00:19:02
Speaker
consciously over 12 years in school.
00:19:04
Speaker
For example, when my daughter first school in New York City, that's what they went to after we left Chicago.
00:19:10
Speaker
And they were put in a top track class, all three of my children, on the basis of nothing other than that I went in and I was white.
00:19:17
Speaker
No one knew what it was, but my children were placed in the top tracks.
00:19:21
Speaker
And then the top tracks were responsible for, they had some self-governance, so to speak, and including governance over the other tracks.
00:19:30
Speaker
They were the hall guards and they had the authority roles as young people.
00:19:37
Speaker
She was in third grade, fourth grade, I don't know.
00:19:40
Speaker
Anyway, we had fifth grade, actually.
00:19:43
Speaker
We went and talked with some of the teachers about the fact that she did not want to be enforcing rules against other students who had no say in them.
00:19:54
Speaker
I insisted they should not make her play that role.
00:20:04
Speaker
The Conference to Restore Humanity is an invitation for K-12 and college educators to engage in a human-centered system reboot, centering the needs of students and educators toward a praxis of social justice.
00:20:16
Speaker
The traditional conference format doesn't work for everyone.
00:20:19
Speaker
It's costly to attend, environmentally unfriendly, and it doesn't allow everyone to engage or have a voice in the learning community.
00:20:27
Speaker
Our conference is designed around the accessibility and sustainability of virtual learning while engaging participants in a classroom environment that models the same progressive pedagogy we value with students.
00:20:38
Speaker
Instead of long Zoom presentations with a brief Q&A, keynotes are flipped.
00:20:43
Speaker
and attendees will have the opportunity for extended conversation with our speakers, Dr. Henry Giroux, the founding theorist of critical pedagogy, Dr. Denisha Jones, educator, activist, and co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School, and the Circle Keepers from Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, a student collective focused on social justice.
00:21:04
Speaker
And instead of back-to-back online workshops, we are offering asynchronous learning tracks.
00:21:09
Speaker
You can engage with the content and the community at any time on topics like anti-carceral pedagogy, disrupting linguistic discrimination, designing for neurodivergence, promoting childism in the classroom, and supporting feedback over grades.
00:21:24
Speaker
The Conference to Restore Humanity runs July 25th through the 28th.
00:21:29
Speaker
And as of recording, early bird tickets are still available.
00:21:32
Speaker
It's $150 for four days with discounts available for individuals from historically marginalized communities, as well as group rates.
00:21:40
Speaker
Plus, we'll award certificates for teacher training and continuing education credits.
00:21:45
Speaker
See our website humanrestorationproject.org for more information and let's restore humanity together.

Addressing Systemic Issues in Education

00:22:00
Speaker
Yeah, that hidden curriculum, like those things that you're internalizing over time that you could grow up within that system and never make that recollection and never piece together the fact that
00:22:14
Speaker
In many ways, the way the school is structured because it's so competitive and underlyingly in many systemic ways, racist and classist, et cetera, you could go through 12 years of schooling and never recognize all those different ways in which school can be harmful because of the way it's set up.
00:22:32
Speaker
And it kind of morphs our society at large, right?
00:22:34
Speaker
To create a better society, you have to look at those systemic structures in school and make that change.
00:22:39
Speaker
And the language.
00:22:41
Speaker
I mean, you know, I was thinking that it wasn't until very recently that it occurred to me that the word respect has this other powerful meaning.
00:22:50
Speaker
Because it was a word I often used.
00:22:52
Speaker
We need to respect each other.
00:22:54
Speaker
Mutual respect is it.
00:22:55
Speaker
And I didn't realize that actually, by another definition, there can't be mutual respect.
00:23:01
Speaker
I mean, we're both afraid of each other.
00:23:04
Speaker
Or maybe that is one way.
00:23:06
Speaker
We're both afraid of each other, in which case we can never collaborate.
00:23:09
Speaker
out of our mutual self-respect.
00:23:11
Speaker
It's interesting how the word respect, and it wasn't until I saw it played on television with the police that I realized how eerie when the police is saying to someone, sit down, then lie down, put your face down, and then saying, you have learned to respect me.
00:23:32
Speaker
Watching the two, this person being totally disrespected in the most extreme form,
00:23:39
Speaker
The word respect was the word the policeman went back to.
00:23:43
Speaker
Where did he learn that?
00:23:44
Speaker
He did not respect me.
00:23:45
Speaker
That was what teachers say to kids all the time.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yeah, it has that carceral effect, which is, yeah, exactly.
00:23:53
Speaker
And I do want to steer the conversation towards something that you said earlier, which is how do we inspire then hope?
00:24:01
Speaker
Like we have all these terrible things going on.
00:24:04
Speaker
And you see an exodus of teachers from the teaching profession, especially in public schools who are being regulated and they were already really not paid well and they work very long hours.
00:24:16
Speaker
And many of them are just saying, hey, I'm just going to go do something else.
00:24:19
Speaker
How do we keep educators there?
00:24:23
Speaker
Like, how do we retain educators?
00:24:24
Speaker
How do we build schools that attract educators?
00:24:27
Speaker
How do we inspire hope that there is a future in this, that that teachers will desire change?
00:24:33
Speaker
You know, the fact is, when I think about my entering the profession, which was completely unexpected on my part, and it was in a period in which there was a lot of social interest in schools in the 60s.
00:24:48
Speaker
I mean, I started teaching in the 60s, even though part of me thought of, especially elementary school teaching,
00:24:56
Speaker
And it's something a smart person, a well-educated person doesn't do.
00:25:01
Speaker
On the other hand, I was also excited by it because there was this conversation and we were struggling with ideas.
00:25:09
Speaker
And when I came to New York, there was something called the Workshop Center in Open Education at City College and a woman named Lillian Weber.
00:25:16
Speaker
And it wasn't just teaching.
00:25:18
Speaker
I was joining a community of people who were exploring the same thing I was.
00:25:23
Speaker
And I don't know where that is anymore.
00:25:26
Speaker
When the coalition went out of existence, it was a real loss for me because at least once a year, we all got together and shared with her part of some larger force.
00:25:38
Speaker
The union isn't playing that role these days.
00:25:41
Speaker
And I don't, you know, there are groups like yours.
00:25:44
Speaker
How do we tie them in some way together so they begin to think not just a local player, but they could tackle some of the issues that are more systemic?
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
Almost like a nationwide union, like a collective.
00:25:57
Speaker
I don't know the answer to that, but I think it's your, that's partly because the answer is,
00:26:03
Speaker
probably comes out of the experiences and what are the shared experiences that teachers are having and parents too.
00:26:10
Speaker
Because the other thing is they've always managed, whoever they are, they've managed to keep parents and teachers from trusting each other.
00:26:19
Speaker
Parents have often, and when I came to New York was when we had the big struggle between parents and teachers over who was going to run the schools.
00:26:27
Speaker
So the notion of, and especially if you add race to that, which is,
00:26:32
Speaker
was of course part of the New York issue.
00:26:35
Speaker
It divides teachers from parents, Black parents from white parents, Black teachers from white teachers, so that it becomes almost impossible.
00:26:46
Speaker
But we did have it a few times.
00:26:48
Speaker
We've had it a few times.
00:26:50
Speaker
So what was it that enabled us for a while to think we all belonged in the same movement?
00:26:56
Speaker
That shared meaning-making and shared experience to do better.
00:27:00
Speaker
I mean, there's an argument that probably could be made that in times where all hope seems lost and things are as bad as they possibly can be, you would hopefully have a small collective of educators who want to change that because they believe in a future where that's not the case.
00:27:18
Speaker
History suggests the opposite, though.
00:27:21
Speaker
The very worst is not a good time for hope.
00:27:25
Speaker
I remember, you know, as a socialist most of my life, realizing, I know, you know, doing some projects in which we realized it was usually as things began to get better.
00:27:35
Speaker
So we need some victories behind us.
00:27:37
Speaker
And that's, we've not had very many.
00:27:40
Speaker
What do you think will be next?
00:27:42
Speaker
What inspires you to potentially shift things forward?
00:27:45
Speaker
Or do you think that it will just keep going downhill?
00:27:48
Speaker
No, I think, since I think there's something about the human species,
00:27:53
Speaker
comfortable with the society we've created.
00:27:57
Speaker
I think people will keep trying in some way.
00:28:01
Speaker
There will be an opposition, not by all the people, but by some people.
00:28:05
Speaker
Sometimes that opposition will have victory and that will encourage other people to join it.
00:28:10
Speaker
You know, I sometimes get annoyed at some of my left-wing friends who don't want us to have any victory because they think that if the Democrats win, then we'll be satisfied with Democrats.
00:28:21
Speaker
I think we have to convince also our own side to realize how important even half victories are.

Finding Hope and Achieving Victories

00:28:29
Speaker
Just to sense that your work can lead to something that you've been told it can't do.
00:28:35
Speaker
Breaking that barrier in small ways helps build
00:28:39
Speaker
the belief that you can change something even bigger.
00:28:43
Speaker
I'm curious what words of advice you would offer classroom teachers who are struggling, who are trying to achieve those small victories.
00:28:50
Speaker
I know that you have always been a fan of the idea of creative noncompliance.
00:28:55
Speaker
I'm curious what that looks like in an environment today.
00:28:58
Speaker
What advice would you offer teachers who are trying to do better and trying to band together and they're just looking for what they can do next?
00:29:06
Speaker
Well, get together with other teachers like you and try to play with that idea.
00:29:10
Speaker
I think that's the first step, that people have to have find even five other people who they learn from and who learn from them, who then become 10 other people.
00:29:21
Speaker
You need a support group so you're not trying to do this all on your own.
00:29:25
Speaker
And I used to say to teachers when I did some teacher education that when you go to a new school, see who your allies might be.
00:29:34
Speaker
If they come after you, see among parents and teachers and see if you can build some kind of.
00:29:42
Speaker
In Philadelphia, there was a group called the Teachers Learning Center.
00:29:46
Speaker
It kept something going there.
00:29:49
Speaker
Didn't win, but they kept something going there that was very impressive over many years.
00:29:56
Speaker
It didn't end up leading where they hoped.
00:29:59
Speaker
but it kept those people in the field too.
00:30:03
Speaker
It kept them teaching and learning and they taught, thinking about their relationship with their students because they had some trust with the allies where they could play these ideas out with them, where they could make mistakes, where they could discuss when they're feeling defeated and so forth, and who they also knew would be at their side if the system went after them.
00:30:25
Speaker
I think people over in New York,
00:30:28
Speaker
thought I had more power than I did.
00:30:29
Speaker
They let me get by with some things.
00:30:32
Speaker
They thought the Union and Shanker and Sandy Feldman, who were my friends.
00:30:38
Speaker
would come to my aid, which I doubt.
00:30:42
Speaker
We were friends, but they weren't going to put the union movement behind me just because the system went after me.
00:30:47
Speaker
There were a number of situations like that where people were mistakenly intimidated by me.
00:30:53
Speaker
You know, most people go into teaching right after they finish college, and they had been in a system of authoritarianism all their life.
00:31:05
Speaker
teaching in my 30s.
00:31:07
Speaker
I was active in community organizing and the socialist movement, the civil rights movement.
00:31:11
Speaker
So I was already thought of myself as having some power, collective power.
00:31:18
Speaker
I thought, and also I wasn't the sole breadwinner.
00:31:22
Speaker
My family could survive if I was kicked, if they did fire me.
00:31:26
Speaker
So I, and I think we've, I often forget that for people who are the sole breadwinner, the idea of being fired is far more dangerous.
00:31:35
Speaker
than it was to me.
00:31:37
Speaker
So the worst thing they could do to me was fire me.
00:31:39
Speaker
Building that coalition, right?
00:31:40
Speaker
That gets into like Jonathan Kozel's work, being able to recognize that you have other people behind you that in the event that you were fired, or at least would come under fire for something, that there's enough people in your court that you could bounce back.
00:31:55
Speaker
Find other jobs for

Building Networks for Advocacy

00:31:57
Speaker
you.
00:31:57
Speaker
You know, I always thought if I did get fired, the union would hire me.
00:32:01
Speaker
No, I totally get that.
00:32:02
Speaker
Where do we break into that?
00:32:04
Speaker
Now, to some extent, student organizations, people who are active as student radicals probably don't generally go into teaching.
00:32:12
Speaker
The people who go into teaching are the people who are good students, respectful students.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point.
00:32:19
Speaker
I know that you've spoken about that many times of the folks that you tended to want to hire were folks who didn't do well in school or didn't like school that much.
00:32:27
Speaker
I mean, I was truant multiple times in high school because I never wanted to be there.
00:32:33
Speaker
So the folks that tend to maybe not have the best school experience, but then go to school to potentially want to improve that, tend to be the folks who are more comfortable with making things more uncomfortable for those that would
00:32:47
Speaker
make school not so great.
00:32:48
Speaker
It's kind of a strange way to word that, but I think you know what I'm saying.
00:32:51
Speaker
And in some ways, people like that are, I think by their natures, slightly intimidating to the people with power.
00:32:59
Speaker
Maybe just because it's unusual.
00:33:02
Speaker
You know, they're not used to people acting as though they had power.
00:33:07
Speaker
If you act like you have powers and there's someone behind you, some people believe it, even though you may not.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:14
Speaker
Debra, thank you so much for joining us and talking about all these things.
00:33:17
Speaker
There's so many different snippets of things you said that I think are very powerful just about keeping hope alive.
00:33:23
Speaker
There is a lot of power and even very small groups of people making a difference.
00:33:28
Speaker
And in order for us to see that difference happen, it's going to require those small groups of people banding together and organizing because there isn't one person who's miraculously going to come out of nowhere and fix everything.
00:33:39
Speaker
There's not a solution in another political party.
00:33:41
Speaker
When I started teaching, which wasn't supposed to be, I wasn't assuming I would remain a teacher.
00:33:47
Speaker
It was something I was just doing.
00:33:49
Speaker
And my children were young and I could do as a substitute days I felt like it.
00:33:54
Speaker
And they bring in a little money.
00:33:55
Speaker
And then the school across the street had a morning kindergarten job open.
00:34:00
Speaker
And it was that morning kindergarten job that changed my life because it restored hope to those children.
00:34:08
Speaker
who I was told had no language and all these things that we claimed about low-income black children, it was clear to me that it wasn't true.
00:34:17
Speaker
These kids had all the potential for being powerful people in society.
00:34:24
Speaker
It wasn't a failure of the human species.
00:34:27
Speaker
It was what we had created.
00:34:29
Speaker
In any case, so it made a big difference.
00:34:32
Speaker
I looked at those kids with hope they could be a force for change.
00:34:37
Speaker
And it was...
00:34:38
Speaker
That was a time in my life when I think I was in between.
00:34:41
Speaker
You know, maybe hope is a silly thing because maybe the species is by its nature.
00:34:47
Speaker
And if all the people who are most oppressed lose language and so forth, and then to realize these kids had as much language as I ever had.
00:34:55
Speaker
It was a different language in some cases, but they were related to each other.
00:34:59
Speaker
They had the power that language gives us.
00:35:02
Speaker
The ability to see the growth and change and advocacy from students is really, I mean, that's what's kept me in the classroom as long as I did was when we talk about things that you don't like divisive concepts in class as a social science teacher originally, the students were the ones that gave me that hope because I saw them connecting the dots together and they themselves grew older.
00:35:24
Speaker
And now many of them are involved in trying to make a change.
00:35:27
Speaker
That's how I feel about the schools that I think they've destroyed.
00:35:31
Speaker
At least we had 20 years of graduates and they're out somewhere.
00:35:36
Speaker
And in fact, we were in the process of trying to make a movie interviewing graduates of Central Park East Secondary School who are now in their 40s.
00:35:44
Speaker
One thing these young people now have that we didn't have was social media.
00:35:48
Speaker
So they created their own websites and they let me into their websites and I realized they're out there doing things.
00:35:56
Speaker
Yeah, to me, that is the power in the modern ages movement towards connecting teachers together.
00:36:02
Speaker
I mean, our organization is based off that idea that there were all these fantastic movements of progressive education that existed for decades, arguably over a century.
00:36:12
Speaker
Now we have the ability to connect online and connect those different forces together underneath one banner where we can all learn and grow from each other without having to share a physical space.
00:36:22
Speaker
There's so much power in being able to connect with other educators online who are going through the same issues in their own context, but it's just a click away, and it's a lot easier to find people.
00:36:32
Speaker
Yeah, and that is helpful, but it hasn't produced what we I guess the other side can also figure that out a little bit.
00:36:41
Speaker
It's escalation on both sides.
00:36:43
Speaker
But I think it's true that, you know, what's interesting about these Hedgel Park East networks is they are both personal networks as well as, I mean, you know, partly they help each other get jobs, all the things that the old boys' networks would do for each other.
00:36:59
Speaker
When one moved to another city, they would find another old CPA there, they would, you know, get together and discuss where to
00:37:11
Speaker
system and probably more of a personal support system than a social system.
00:37:15
Speaker
So individually they may have been political, but they were not collectively.
00:37:21
Speaker
Most of what they were collectively was a network of allies, which is important, but they didn't turn into a political vehicle.
00:37:36
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
00:37:39
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:37:43
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.