More Than a Score (12 page)

The school of education administration eventually relented to our demands and agreed that students had to be given the option to participate or not in the Pearson field test. The day I brought the forms for the students to sign and indicate if they were opting in or out of the field test the mood was both serious and joyful. Each student took his or her time to read through the information, to mark his or her form with care and conviction. Signatures had a force we had forgotten. And in the silence of the moment was forged a unity many of us had never before known.

I shared this story with the
New York Times
as an example of resistance to the corporate juggernaut.
1
The picture that accompanied the article speaks to the strength the students knew together. That I was targeted to suffer consequences is not unusual. Oppressors often single out one person as a fear-inducing example. But fear and a single person acting alone is not the lesson of this story. We stood strong together. I stood with people who knew me and who did not know me. I stand strong now with new comrades from within this struggle, including the student-community group Can't Be Neutral, which developed in the fight for my job and has grown to lead workshops across the country about resisting neoliberal policies in education. I have emerged from the nonrenewal and subsequent grievance as an officer of our local union and am running for president of our statewide teachers association under the banner of our progressive caucus. As I work to build an activist grassroots union, I experience again the joyful strength of the struggle. I see the multitudes of which I am a part rising up to either side and ahead of me. Each of us walking, along many paths, until we recognize we are not alone. This is how we come to say no. Together.

The Rise of the Badass Teachers
Association

The rise of the Badass Teachers Association is one of most intriguing and startling aspects of the growth of education activism during the presidency of Barack Obama. At the time of this writing and editing (July 2014), the BATS—which is what most people call us—have more than fifty thousand members on our Facebook page, fifty state organizations, a Twitter account followed by more than six thousand, numerous themed subgroups (for example, BATS in Special Ed), and are involved in local and national actions several times a week to defend teachers, students, and public education. We have been publicly endorsed by Diane Ravitch—who has challenged us to be the ACT-UP of education activism—and are carefully watched and sometimes called upon for help by leaders of the national teachers unions. Elected officials and heads of the US Department of Education also know who we are, as we have organized many actions designed to influence their policies. The group with the name people love to hate is now a major force in social justice activism. SUNY Buffalo historian Dr. Henry Louis Taylor has described the rise of the BATS as “one of the ten most important stories in the USA in 2013.”

Let me be honest. When education activist Priscilla Sanstead and I decided to create the Badass Teachers Association Facebook page on June 14, 2013, at 4:30 p.m., we had no idea that it would trigger a groundswell of teacher rage and activism the likes of which neither of us had seen. We knew teachers were angry but we had underestimated both the depth of that anger and the wellspring of creativity ready to be tapped if someone provided the right outlet. We also didn't realize that an approach to organizing we had both been exposed to during the great New York parents' test revolt of April 2013—one that allowed parents of vastly different political perspectives to work together—would prove to be so valuable in building a national movement. A defiant, in-your-face name; a unique multipartisan style of organizing; a pair of founders that included one who liked speaking in public (me) and one who liked creating organizational structures behind the scenes (Priscilla); and, as it turns out, perfect timing proved to be the kindling for a fiery protest movement that is still burning brightly.

Let's first consider two of the key elements in this mix, the timing and the name. In March 2012 more than a year before Priscilla and I started the Badass Teachers Association Facebook page, just before I was scheduled to speak at a United Opt Out protest in Washington, I helped the Bronx-based Rebel Diaz Arts Collective create a design for a Badass Teachers Association T-shirt and even produced a video to promote it. Neither the concept nor the shirt set the world on fire—Rebel Diaz sold sixty of the shirts, mostly to well-known education activists and to teachers involved with the remnants of the Occupy movement. And after Occupy DOE 2.0 in April 2012, the idea seemed to die.

So why did it take off in June 2014? What had changed? Here's my view. In March 2012, teachers throughout the nation still had hopes that the newly reelected Barack Obama would back off on testing and give teachers more respect and more input into shaping education policies. By June 2013, those hopes had been shattered. Not only did the president double down on Race to the Top policies promoting school closings and test-based teacher evaluations, he ignored National Teacher Appreciation week to celebrate National Charter School week and continued to give his full support to much-hated Secretary of Education Duncan. When you couple this with the actions of former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel during and after the Chicago teachers strike, you can see why many public school teachers felt completely alone—deserted by the Democrats and put under direct assault by Republicans, who in most states pursued a privatization agenda coupled with vicious attacks on teachers unions.

But it was not just teacher rage and disillusionment that allowed the newly formed Badass Teachers Association to take off, it was also the approach to organizing that it employed. In April 2014, provoked by a toxic package of “reforms” forced through the New York State legislature by governor Andrew Cuomo, which included Common Core–aligned tests that were so long and difficult they resembled a form of child abuse to many—ten thousand families throughout New York decided to opt out their children from state tests and start a movement to push back against the testing. What made this movement so unique was that many of its leaders were Republicans and conservatives, some of them aligned with the Tea Party, who welcomed working with liberals, leftists, and leaders of local teachers unions. Never before in the state, or perhaps anywhere else in the nation, had a movement this diverse arisen to defend local control of public schools and fight back against uncontrolled testing. Keeping such a politically diverse group together was difficult, but two groups were created in the midst of the test revolt that were committed to that approach—Parents and Teachers Against the Common Core and the Badass Parents Association, formed with my help by a libertarian intellectual named Michael Bohr, who said only a “multipartisan” approach could defeat Common Core, one in which people kept their core beliefs but worked across the spectrum to defeat policies that threatened their schools and their children.

It was in these groups that I met the two key figures who would help make the Badass Teachers Association the force it is today: Priscilla Sanstead, whom I met in the Badass Parents Association, and Marla Kilfoyle, a Long Island teacher and parent who was a major force in Parents and Teachers Against the Common Core. While Priscilla and I founded the group, it was Marla's idea to have a recruiting contest on Sunday, June 16, that put us on the map. In one hour that afternoon teachers competing for the designation “Badass Teacher of the Month” drew more than a thousand members into the newly formed group. By the end of that weekend there was a buzz surrounding the group that began to resemble what Occupy Wall Street had inspired. For the second time in two years, a movement with an improbable name was moving to the forefront of social justice activism in the nation.

However, there the resemblance to Occupy Wall Street ended. Whereas Occupy Wall Street was committed to an anarchic, hyper-democratic governance structure, Priscilla and Marla, who were both organizational gurus, decided to create a complex structure that allowed for the creativity of the membership to find organizational outlets while clamping down hard on those who promoted positions that would split the group. Their first stroke of genius was to do everything possible to encourage members to use the arts to express discontent with current education policies—whether poems, songs, music videos, memes, innovative designs for everything from bumper stickers to T-shirts—and adopt the symbol of the bat, along with Batman imagery, to give the group a distinctive identity. The result was an explosion of creativity, much of it with a humorous edge, that made the Badass Teachers Association Facebook page an exciting, fun-filled place. What took place could be described as “the revenge of the arts teachers”—as the test-driven policies of the Obama and Bush administrations had succeeded in marginalizing the arts in public schools throughout the nation. Payback could be seen every day on the BATS Facebook page.

Another organizational innovation Priscilla and Marla introduced, with my full support, was to create a structure to carefully monitor the BATS Facebook page to delete posts that might prevent teachers of diverse political perspectives from being comfortable in the group or that took time and energy away from the group's political actions. We developed a team of trusted page administrators—now numbering sixty-one—to carry out this function, inspiring charges of censorship from those whose posts were deleted but allowing the fragile unity of all teachers committed to defending public education from attack—whether left, center, or right—to be preserved. To keep discussion on mission, we clamped down on any posts that challenged the name of the group; on posts that took a position on guns or religion; on posts that attacked the noneducation policies of either of the major parties; on posts that were racist, sexist, or homophobic; and on posts that used political clichés to demonize people on the right or the left. Many people predicted this approach would destroy the group; in fact, it may have made more teachers feel safe to join it, as discussion was generally kept focused on issues directly related to policies that affected teachers and their experiences “on the ground.”

But perhaps most important of all, the group's founders—and this was more Priscilla and Marla than me—created a decentralized structure that allowed the incredible talents and energies of the teachers who gravitated to us to find an outlet. This took two forms: the creation of state BAT organizations that could mount actions based on local conditions, which varied greatly from state to state and region to region, and the creation of special-interest groups—BATS in Higher Education, BATS in Special Ed, BATS Under Fire, Author BATS—which reflected the full array of issues teachers were passionate about and challenges they face. This allowed BATS to simultaneously have a strong, clear, national identity while giving members the opportunity to launch actions and discussions with smaller groups of people who shared their concerns. There is no other education activist group in the nation that has a structure like this—a national organization with over a hundred functioning subgroups working within it. In that respect, BATS has more in common with the ACLU and the NAACP than with Dump Duncan, Network for Public Education, or Parents Across America, although Save Our Schools has some similar features.

None of this could work without a passionate investment of energy by thousands of teachers around the nation who participate in the state BAT groups and BAT special-interest groups. Who are these teachers? Although I have not made a formal survey I would say the following: the vast majority are veteran teachers, with twenty or more years of experience, who are enraged at how they are being demonized, marginalized, and disrespected by those shaping current education policy. These are confident, talented people whose wisdom is being squandered and whose professional standing is being undermined. By giving these teachers—90 percent of whom are women—an organizational outlet, BATS has created a movement that education policy makers around the nation have learned to reckon with, and in some cases to fear.