Working Within Public Education
Transcript: We've had a lot of teachers coming into our Undoing Racism Workshops in the last few years, and one of the things that I have found, as a person who also is a former teacher, is that when teachers realize there's this larger construct within which they're working, we get very angry. We get very distressed because we realize that we've been–as Malcolm X would say–we've been bamboozled. We've been taught to teach a certain way without any framework, without any understanding of the framework within which we're working. And it angers us so much that we don't know what to do because the system does not allow us any room for change.
Ironically, in the New York region there's been more flexibility within the independent private school realm than there has been in the public school realm because the public schools are so hamstrung and hampered by the terrible philosophies that are guiding us to teach to the test and to privatize education. So it's a very difficult challenge. Those of us who are teachers in classrooms, we're finding that the best way we can start to do that organizing is to get a core group of people inside of a school building, and from that school building start having informal conversations over lunch. Building those relationships inside the school building and starting very local. Because if we don't start local, if we try to start at the systemic level, teachers get too discouraged and administrators are too busy, and they just can't do it.