While I’ve been focused on what each person in a school building can still do that s/he believes is good for kids, I also recognize that the system keeps coming down tighter and harder.
After this weekend’s Network for Public Education Conference where we heard many stories of organizing that led to results, I keep thinking about what people can do inside their own schools when the school is in trouble.
It is one thing to band together to protest or fight outside your building for a systemic change. But how can it happen inside your building where everyone is known and where you have a day to day job? What can you do to save your school?
I know one story of a school where teachers organized to make public the dysfunctional dynamic with administration in a way that got attention from those above and led to action.
In order to keep going, I suspect we need to not only find ways to keep meaningful teaching in our classrooms. We need to have a voice, some agency for the good of the school.
It looks like there isn’t one place or person where I can find a formula for action. It looks like it may start with learning how to think in order to come up with action.
Here are some thoughts from Marshall Ganz, an organizer from Mississippi Civil Rights Days, Cesar Chavez actions, and now with Kennedy School for Government.
Leadership is not just someone giving a good speech. Leaders are people actually capable of mobilizing other people and getting them engaged in public life and public action. Participation isn’t just a million individuals making individual choices: it’s a social activity in which some people take responsibility to mobilize others.
This may sound simplistic, but leadership means knowing how to have a good meeting: how to hear all sides, how to make a decision, how to include different points of view. It’s not a particularly mysterious skill set, but if people haven’t been trained in it, or they’ve only learned it as individuals and not as a group, then they don’t know how to do it.
….the traditional formulation is that there’s two kinds of resources that can yield power: money and people. Democracy is a way to balance money with people. And for that to work, people have got to act together, because it’s through collective power that people can challenge the economic power of private wealth. So the goal is the power to alter policy, to alter circumstances, to change the world around you.