Community organizing

My in-laws are very cool people. They both just recently retired – my mother-in-law from teaching and my father-in-law from a career in journalism – but you would never know it from how busy they are. And they’re not just busy with stamp collecting or Alaskan cruises. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’ve worked for forty years and have decided that stamps and cruises are your thing, then God bless. You’ve earned the right to spend your time any way you want to, short of torturing small animals or grandchildren.) One of the things that they are busy with is community organizing. Remember the sneer on Rudy Guiliani’s face when he spat out that term during the Republican convention a couple of months ago? “Barack Obama was a community organizer.” Pause, sneer, snort. “What is that?” Applause. What an ass he was. I enjoyed the editorializing in response to that speech: “Jesus was a community organizer” and “Our nation was founded by a band of community organizers.” Community organizers do good work.

One of the projects in which my in-laws are involved is an attempt to get a college-prep charter high school approved to be built in a nearby town. The town is less than ten miles away from the upscale town where we live, but it couldn’t be more different in its demographics and income levels. It is impoverished old industrial town and, I’m estimating, inhabited by about 80% black people and Latinos. They have scant resources, huge classes, high dropout rates, and low test scores. My mother-in-law recently invited me to go to a meeting to “learn more about” the charter school proposal. I am in fact concerned about education reform, so I eagerly accepted the invitation. I figured I would be listening to a presentation, perhaps offering some perspective or advice or otherwise getting involved in working on a strategic plan. I like watching presentations and working on strategic plans. These activities are fun and interesting to me.

After my in-laws picked me up to drive to the meeting, I learned a little more about where we were heading, and I realized that I need to ask more questions the next time I am invited to a meeting by community organizers. It wasn’t exactly a strategic planning session. It was a demonstration to demand that the charter school be approved by the town’s school board at its monthly meeting. We met in a church basement with about two- or three-hundred other people, mostly families from that community but also a number of people from surrounding areas who were there with church groups or social service organizations. In the church basement, a light-skinned black woman in red boots and a red wrap gave us our instructions – stick with the group as we walked together to the high school for a school board meeting, sit together in the middle of the auditorium, cheer for the charter school proposal presenters, and leave together at exactly 8:30 PM, whether or not the school board meeting was over. Then another woman, more cheerleader-ish than the first woman and also wearing red, stood up and led the “pep rally” portion of the meeting, encouraging the crowd to chant, whoop, and holler good-naturedly as we walked the two blocks to the school.

Before I knew it, I was handed a red t-shirt and swept out the door with the crowd. We walked to the high school together, marching and chanting:
What do we want: CHARTER SCHOOLS!
When do we want it: NOW!
This was a bit out of my comfort zone. As my husband pointed out after I told him about the demonstration, “You usually don’t like to dive right into things.” My typical style is to observe and gather information before I become a vocal proponent of something. I’ve never been involved in a march or a protest. I have, though, knocked on doors and gotten into verbal scuffles over political issues, but only after I’ve done my homework. There was no time for homework in this situation. These families wanted a charter school now, and I was there to help. Marching and chanting were the kinds of help they needed at that moment.

After we arrived at the meeting and settled into our seats, the school district’s superintendent introduced a number of school board members and district officers, who were sitting in a row up on the stage in front of us. The president of the school board, seated in the middle like a Grand Inquisitor, was a white woman who looked a little bit like a toad. She sternly reminded the audience members of the rules and time limits for guest speakers. She seemed particularly surly in her admonishment to parents of young children that they take unruly children outside so they wouldn’t disturb the proceedings. Then, after a brief introduction of the charter school leadership team, the head of the charter school company, a small, youngish white woman wearing a pantsuit and boasting both a PhD and a great vocabulary stood at a microphone on the floor of the auditorium and began to address her remarks to the members of the school board.

As if on cue, every child under the age of five (there were at least ten in the auditorium) promptly started to throw tantrums, except for the sweet little boy in the row right in front of me. He seemed to be around four, the same age as my daughter, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. He didn’t have any crayons or toys, but he amused himself by looking around at the crowd and giving his mother hugs and kisses. He was at that wonderful age when he was in love with his mama, just like my daughter is right now. Ten times a day my little girl sighs, “Mama, I love you,” or “You are so pwetty.” I wish I could bottle these moments up to uncork and savor when she is a teenager, stomping and slamming doors.

After a number of parents shuffled their wailing toddlers out of the hall, the presentation continued and evolved into a Q and A between the charter school leadership team and the school board about finances and taxes. The school board clearly opposed the charter school on the basis of the lost tax revenue that it would entail for the main high school in the community. As planned, our group of two- or three-hundred red-shirt wearing fellow demonstrators rose and left the auditorium en masse before the meeting adjourned, so I don’t know if things started to look up for the charter school team, but the board didn’t seem very happy with the plan at the time we left.

Despite my marching and chanting, I still don’t know how I feel about the charter school plan that was presented that night. I can’t imagine how helpless it must feel to have a child in a crappy, dangerous school and to have such limited resources that they are stuck there, without any alternatives. Charter schools offer alternatives, and for that reason I hope that the school board approves it. The families who were demonstrating for their right to provide their children with a better education deserve to win their battle.

The flip side, though, is that charter schools come at a cost to the other schools in the district. What happens to the students who don’t have the motivation or the family support to apply to the charter school? I would like to think that introducing some competition into the system raises everybody’s game, but I don’t know if the rules of capitalism apply to schools. (Given what’s happening in our economy, I don’t even know if the rules of capitalism apply to capitalism.) It goes without saying, though, that raising the level of educational opportunities for all children is good for everyone in our society, and that every kid deserves a good education.