Charter Schools, the repression of free speech and authoritarian autocracy: the new but old, educational reform

Charter Schools, the repression of free speech and authoritarian autocracy: the new but old, educational reform

     You might have heard of Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss, but chances are you haven’t.  They were two courageous charter school teachers who worked at the Celerity Nascent Charter School in southwest Los Angeles until 2007.  In concert with some of their students, they tried to learn about the story of Emmet Till and participate in power and decision-making at their school in terms of what curriculum they found appropriate for student learning. That is when the two teachers were fired and the students’ resistance was suffocated.  Their story, like many other disenfranchised narratives left out of the corporate press, is simply one more in the sordid saga of surveillance and authoritarianism cropping up in the neo-liberal minds of the new charter school CEO’s; it is a reflection of the thinking deeply implicated in the need for vaulted test scores and intensely imbedded in the autocratic charter school movement in general.  But it’s a must tell story, for its rancid resonance seems to broaden each day. 

     Chances are you haven’t heard the story of Aurora Ponce either; she is the young senior high school valedictorian who was denied her freedom of speech rights at another Los Angeles charter school chain by another autocratic and out-of-touch managerial elite. Her story, like those of the two teachers at Celerity Nascent Charter School, is also a story of ‘non-profit’ retribution by the new –school turnaround artists’ and resistance to repression through community struggle.  Ponce’s story is also a must tell, for there is a continuous movement towards both juked-up fear and anti-democratic authoritarian decision making at many charter school sites; sites that love to euphemistically refer to themselves as ‘innovative centers of learning and experimentation’. This anti-democratic movement, bathed as it is in managerial doublespeak and gross populist imagery, must be directly confronted by organized community struggles. The good news is that it is and has been; however, as these stories attempt to illustrate, albeit with mixed results.

Academic freedom and the new autocracy

     In most cases, charter school CEO’s, directors and a few bloated autocrats decide what teachers are going to teach, who will do the ‘teaching’, what is appropriate curriculum and how teachers will ‘administer’ learning using the “best practices” – virtually training scripts that promise to boost test scores as part of the numerology of No Child Left Behind .  The squalid scenario is then subjected to intense work-place managerial surveillance in an effort to ferret out the so-called “best practices” that teachers must use and of course arrest any tendency on the part of teachers to stray from the educational scripts.  It’s a culling factory for curriculum design and teacher control and the aroma of centralized authority is as pungent, as the scent of workplace and educational fear is caustic.

     Take the recent case of Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss.  Even though you might not have had the occasion to have heard about Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss (after all, public schools are hardly ever discussed in the national corporate press) you no doubt have heard of the case of Emmet Till, in which a black teenager was beaten to death in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman.  In 1955 white racists had tortured, mutilated and killed the young fourteen year old boy.  Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, insistent that her son’s brutalized body become a testimony to white racism, purposely left the coffin open with Emmett’s body on public view for four days that year in the windy city.  The decision by Ms. Till was consciously and bravely designed to create a “teachable moment” for an emerging public enshrined in Empire and clothed in racism and imperialism – to prevent historical amnesia and the subjugation of history, the erasure of memory.

     The mainstream media, of course, avoided the incident at the time like a plague, refusing to cover the story or show the boy’s mutilated and brutalized face.  Jet Magazine, however, did publish a horrifying and unedited photo of the boy’s face while still in the coffin.  Till had been castrated, his tongue had been cut out of his head, his nose severed from his face with an ax; one of his eyes was missing. The photo immediately received national and international attention which then fueled public anger and helped launch the beginnings of what was to become the ‘Civil Rights Movement’.

     The story you are about to read is about the mordant irony of the legacy of Emmet Till and the academic case of Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss, two audacious teachers and their seventh grade students who until recently found themselves in the new “saw mills” of education – the non-profit charter school.  It’s the story of what happens when teachers lose their union affiliations and/or hock their tenure rights for higher salaries, as School Chancellor Michelle Rhee would like them to do in Washington, D.C. and as the Obama administration is encouraging as a new educational policy, through technocrat Arne Duncan.  It is also the story of Aurora Ponce, the young class president and valedictorian of Accelerated Charter School, another Los Angeles firm, who was recently severely retaliated against in her efforts to protest class sizes and cuts in public school budgets in a silent sit-in and how the community rallied to her successful defense. 

     These two stories represent just some of the myriad of similar testimonials and struggles going on throughout the nation and speak sharply to the issue of charter school authoritarian decision-making, academic freedom, students’ right to learn, disdain for teacher driven innovation in curriculum development (contrary to public pronouncements), freedom of speech and the need and growing recognition for resistance to un-checked power. 

Celerity Nascent Charter School:  Sealing the coffin of Emmet Till

     In March of 2007 the Los Angeles Times had a long report on a outrage involving Celerity Nascent Charter School and the firing of two of its teachers http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/19/local/me-newcharter19).  The story is important not simply because it points to what happens when charter school teachers have no union or collective bargaining and wish to exercise their constitutional rights, but it also raises the issue of how teachers and their students in general become silenced and lose their academic freedoms in designing, implementing and profiting from curriculum relevant to the historical and civic educational necessities of students.  But let’s face it: teacher inspired innovation, creating a curriculum that is relevant, historical and one which requires critical thinking about democracy (and in this case as we will see, race), is not the type of innovation or “best practices” either Arne Duncan or the new mayoral puppets of the charter school movement want; in fact it’s a headache.  For the new retail charter school advocates or “portfolio school” proponents, teachers are to be reduced to neo-functionalists who concentrate their efforts on preparing students to take tests mandated under No Child Left Behind in the new innovative schools of tomorrow.   Why?  Ask Bill Gates or Eli Broad, among others.  They help fund it all.  It’s the ‘new’ global economy stupid! Remember?  Competition with China and India!

     The incident took place in 2007 at Celerity Nascent Charter School and involved two teachers: Marisol Alba, Sean Strauss and a scheduled poetic ‘reading’ by their seventh grade students, of “A Wreath for Emmett Till.”, by Marilyn Nelson, a former poet laureate of Connecticut.  The poem was both a narrative poem and an elegy for Till and was written especially for young readers, like the teachers’ seventh graders. The Celerity Nascent Charter School students were anxious to recite lines from Nelson’s book during a school program for Black History Month. The students also eagerly planned to place flowers, as if they were a wreath, over a picture of Emmett Till in effigy.  This was all part of the lesson plan the teachers and students coordinated and collaboratively designed in the interest of  understanding both Black History month, the life of Emmett Till and the situation on the ground as well as the forces for progressive struggles that launched the civil rights movement.

     However the planned reading and wreath setting never took place. The day before the event, Celerity Nascent Charter School administrators said the assembly they had scheduled was designed to promote pride and achievement and the Emmett Till story was just simply too graphic and inappropriate for younger children, so they refused to allow it.  This is post-racial America, remember?  Tell that to Mamie Till’s family.

     The school’s administration went on to suggest that the Till case was not fitting for a program intended to be celebratory.  They even went so far as to indicate that Till’s actions themselves could be viewed as sexual harassment (ibid).  That’s right!  Till as sexual perpetrator.

     According to Marisol Alba, when the principal informed the class that they could not recite their poem, she gave an example of a construction worker whistling at her as she walked down the street as rational for cancelling the Black History month event saying that this would be inappropriate.  According to Alba:

She said that she would be offended by that and that what Emmett Till did could be considered sexual harassment. She used the phrase a couple of times and when I objected, she said ‘OK, inappropriately whistled at a woman.’ (ibid)

As indicated by a Los Angeles Times article at the time:

Many parents said their children affirmed that account. Marcia Alston, mother of a seventh-grader, called the school to say she was appalled at its interpretation of history and the treatment of the teachers. She said that in the conversation, the principal used the term “rude” to describe Till’s actions (ibid).

The news came as a shock to parents, students and teachers and was simply deemed unacceptable to many of the students involved.  Some students took it upon themselves to fight back, formulating, drafting and circulating petitions against the cancellation of the event by the charter school cabal.  Both Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss were asked by students, in an act of civic engagement, if they would sign the student led petitions. The teachers heartily agreed. That’s when they were fired.

“Mr. Strauss and Ms. Alba were excellent teachers,” said Alston. “The fact that they and the students had signed a letter, I thought, was good; it was something they were passionate about and it could be used as a learning tool.”

Verna Hampton, whose daughter was in Alba’s homeroom and signed a letter, said she was especially offended that the incident occurred during Black History Month. Hampton said her daughter told her there was nothing offensive in the letter she signed.

“Those teachers should not have lost their jobs for standing up for what they felt was right; that sends the wrong message,” Hampton said. “The kids didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye (ibid).

     The 2007 teacher firings of Alba and Strauss highlights the tenuous job security for non-union teachers in charter schools — schools which are publicly financed but independently run by for-profit or non-profit providers who can then turn around and hire teachers as ‘at will employees’, meaning no access to due process, no grievance no academic freedom, procedures and the ‘new providers’ never have to explain their hiring and firing actions nor any of their other decision making.    There are simply no teacher protections at these schools; teachers are treated as mere cattle subject to hiring and firing by a managerial staff oblivious of history.  They are under surveillance when it comes to the creation and the implementation of lesson plans, as this case reveals.  All of this in spite of the fact that California charter schools have mushroomed over the years to more than 700 (Cal STRS, [email protected]) and their ranks continue to swell.  Yet according to the California Teachers Association less than 10% of all the state’s charter school staff is represented by unions.  

     Celerity Nascent Charter School is part of the Celerity Educational Group which at its website describes itself as:

The Celerity Educational Group is a non-profit organization, which serves Los Angeles-area schools, children and families. Our mission is to provide quality education in under-served communities by creating alternative schools that focus on the potential of every child (http://www.celerityschools.org/about_us.html).

     In the letter from the non-profit terminating Strauss’s employment, dated March 6, 2007, Strauss was described by the school administration at Celerity Nascent Charter School to have been “disparaging the school to students and parents and authorizing by physical (sic) signature a non-supportive message to the administrative staff (Times).  In other words Strauss didn’t go along with the spoon-fed “best practices” and dared to exercise his freedom of speech and sign a student-led petition. He rebelled against authority and would not capitulate to autocratic power structures at the charter school and he had the guts to protest with his students regarding the authoritarian elimination of students’ and teachers’ civil rights to freedom of speech and assembly, not to mention his support for the construction of relevant and authentic curriculum.  One can hardly think of a better role model for civic education than Marisol Alba, Sean Strauss and their students.  The charter school ‘officials’ on the other hand didn’t see it that way. Issuing an excuse for the dictatorial and unilateral censorship, Director of the school, Vielka McFarlane commented:

Our whole goal is how do we get these kids to not look at all of the bad things that could happen to them and instead focus on the process of how do we become the next surgeon or the next politician.  We don’t want to focus on how the history of the country has been checkered but on how do we dress for success, walk proud and celebrate all the accomplishments we’ve made (http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/19/local/me-newcharter19).

When asked about the incident, Marisol Alba commented:

I never thought it would come to this. I thought the most that would happen to me [after the event was canceled] is that I’d get talked to and it would be turned into learning and teaching experience (ibid)

     Scot Brown, associate professor of history and African American studies at UCLA, said that it was unfortunate the school officials and the teachers did not find common ground.

I’m surprised that the teachers and principal could not work out a way for students to do this presentation in a way that highlights the significance and importance of Emmett Till’s loss to the larger black freedom struggle. It’s much bigger than the acts of violence you don’t want kids exposed to.

It sounds to me that by laying a wreath and saying a poem, the students and teachers were working through the meaning of his sacrifice to the black freedom struggle, and that’s very important (ibid)

     Management had and generally has no interest in ‘teachable moments’, ‘historical consciousness’ nor ‘reconciliation and mediation’ with teachers like Alba and Strauss for they are precisely the kind of teachers Celerity Nascent Charter School doesn’t want – teachers who think for themselves, work collaboratively with their students to design authentic curriculum to help their students do the same, are civically committed and perhaps, god forbid, even start or advocate unions.  They are socially literate educators who understand the need to produce and implement curriculum that is relevant, historical, gives voice to disenfranchised narratives and inspires critical thinking about history and race in the interest of critical multicultural literacy.

     Brown’s no fool.  He certainly must know that fighting diligently to include the disenfranchised narratives of history, too often left out of the historical lessons regarding the anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-class struggles in US history, along with the creating opportunities for participation in decision making and power structures is precisely the lesson that the civil rights struggle teaches — so too do the events at Celerity Nascent Charter School, for they are part and parcel of the same struggle.  What students hopefully learned, or at least many of them, was the necessity for continued struggle as a component of personal and social responsibility in order to advance civil rights, academic freedom and freedom of speech in furtherance of a democratic society.  It was a lesson they needed to learn, a lesson about power, morality, equity and the struggle for relevant education that can help build a radically new and sustainable future instructed by history, not denied its lessons.

     Although one can hardly over-generalize from one case at the Celerity Nascent Charter School, as we will see when we look at the case of Aurora Ponce, the disturbing trends underway at charter schools you are reading about are growing, and they are now especially aimed at student resistance accompanied often, too often, with dire consequences.  Silencing teachers and students is the norm at many schools and has been for decades. However, in this case Alba and Strauss not only had zero academic freedom with no ability to design their own curriculum based on legitimate historical concerns they found to be relevant to their students, they also fundamentally lost their rights to free speech because ‘academic freedom’ for teachers is not found in the new charter school employment contract.  They are not tenured and without tenure there is no academic freedom.

     This happens at many charter schools, where too often teachers are simply bereft of any protections afforded by unionization – protections, like tenure, that promise to safeguard their rights as professional employees.   This leaves them subject to an atmosphere of fear, hardly the font for innovation that the charter school operators love to rhetorically cultivate as collective consciousness and never cease to remind us of.  In this case, as in many, many others, with no arbitration agreements let alone collective bargaining agreements, the teachers were simply labeled as troublemakers and given the bum’s rush out of the public premises – told to clean their desks out like typical truants.  Much like truants, they will also find it hard to find another job in Los Angeles for the personnel record compiled by the school accusing them of “disparaging the school” will stalk their reputations at whatever school they might wish to apply to in the future.  So, like many of their students they thought to teach, they’ve been marked, hexed by a managerial staff that does not even teach.

     What could have been a teachable moment in civics and critical thinking instead became a tortured lesson in authoritarianism and the consequences of what happens when resistance is met with brute force.  The incident, we can’t forget, also served as a bleak warning to other teachers at the school and indeed elsewhere, who might have the audacity to think they too can exercise independent judgment when it comes to activities that surround their labor, those they teach and the curriculum they develop and implement.  The whole thing was another cruel reminder, carried on the back of the memory of Emmett Till to today’s students, to hold your head down and get through a day – a reminder of the power of the subjugating class when it comes to suffocating historical memory and resistance. 

     At the same time, the incident also served as a vital and hopeful lesson for the need to continue student resistance as schools begin to become more militarized, their curriculums more penalizing in terms of testing, their education irrelevant in terms of living and surviving and their environments more “SuperMax” than sustainable environment of civility and inquiry. 

     This provides an apt segue that aptly now calls our attention to the case of Aurora Ponce, for nowhere can these lessons be better seen than in the case of the young high school student body president, a valedictorian at a charter school who was barred in June of 2009 from making a her graduation speech.  The story of Aurora Ponce, much like Alba’s, Strauss’s and their students, is simply another troubling yet dialectically hopeful episode in the long march to resisting neo-liberal education.  Unlike the unfortunate suppression of resistance suffered by those at Celerity Nascent Charter School, in the case of Ponce, the struggle by the community and union was victorious and hold significant consequences for thinking about the future of public education, student and teacher resistance and the struggle to reclaim public space.

Accelerated School: “Where every child is treated as gifted”, except those that dare to protest

If you go to Accelerated School’s mission statement, which you can find on line, the school boasts that:

The Accelerated School is a national public/private partnership model that comprehensively serves the education and wellness needs of its students in preparing them to take their rightful place as confident and courageous citizens eager to achieve and contribute to a global society (http://www.accelerated.org/Mission_Vision.php).

     The Accelerated School’s “family of schools” serves more than 1,300 students from pre-school to 12^th grade.  They are a charter school chain with long waiting lists for admissions.  Yet according to a report in the LA Times, parents, teachers, and students have complained that in recent years, what started as a collaborative effort rich with teacher and parent input has given way to top down management decisions, a lack of transparency and non-disclosure – all complaints, by the way, leveled at many if not most charter schools throughout the nation.

     The story of Aurora Ponce is one that while on the one hand, sparks outrage, also represents what parents, teachers and students can do when confronted with managerial authoritarianism and arbitrary and capricious anti-democratic decision making.

     Annenberg is an Accelerated School where Aurora Ponce, an A student, participated May 15, 2009 in a silent student sit in protesting increase class sizes, budget cuts and the elimination of the college prep program at her school.  As a result of her first amendment activism and exercise of her freedom of speech, the first penalty the administration of the charter school imposed was to deny Ponce the opportunity to speak at her high school graduation.  But the retribution for daring to raise her voice didn’t stop there.  She was then denied a summer tutoring job at the Jaime Escalante Tutoring Program, which was housed on the Accelerated School campus during the summer. She volunteered with the program in 2008 and Ponce had taken almost a dozen college level courses.  Had the administration not retaliated against Ponce, she would have been paid to tutor 25 hours a week.  She lost that opportunity due to the brutish actions of the charter school ‘capos’.

According to Ponce, this won’t phase her:

I’m going to college, I’m going to be broke.  I was going to save that money for books. It’s going to be hard (Mehta, Seema, Valedictorian says Accelerated School barred her from making speech, June 25, 2009  http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/25/local/me-valedictorian25#)

     The ruthless management of Accelerated Charter School Charter School’s excellence and innovation didn’t stop there.  Ponce had other punishments dribbled out by the administration of the school.  She was denied honors and she was prohibited from attending grad night with her classmates at Disneyland — all of this in retaliation for exercising her constitutional rights.

     Charter school officials involved in the actions regarding Ponce refused to return calls from the LA Times seeking comment about the incident at the time. Those management officials included bureaucrats Patrick Judd, who is in charge of the umbrella organization that oversees the Accelerated Schools; Elizabeth Oberreiter, principal of the Wallis Annenberg High School, Ponce’s campus; and Sandra Phillips, principal of the Accelerated School’s K-8 school.  At least one of the above three referred questions to school co-founder Johnathan Williams, who said he was not familiar with the matter and would not release student information to the media in any event.  He doesn’t have to.  They are ‘non-profit’ and charter schools love this monicker for it releases them from public disclosure under the Public Records Act.  Annenberg is a non-profit charter school and they are exempt from many disclosure laws begging the question if they are public at all?  Finally, a desperate Williams put out the following statement:

            All I’ll say is this school is doing wonderfully by the children and the families and all the rest.  There’s no story here. Everyone is treated fairly here at the Accelerated School and Wallis Annenberg High School (ibid)

Resistance to the Annenberg Decision

     Dozens of parents and students who protested outside the Annenberg, many carrying posters calling for Judd’s firing didn’t agree.  Aurelia Teodoro, whose three children attend the schools stated:

I’m so angry because they are abusing our kids and the parents and the teachers.  Teodoro said one of her children, an eighth-grader, was suspended for two days for participating in the sit-in (ibid)

     The parents, teachers and other community minded activists were savvy, used Face Book, YouTube, twitter, personal contact and demonstrations to rally in support of Aurora Ponce’s right to speak and protest peacefully.  The protests by community members paid off.  The teenager, along with her family and supporters, met with officials of the Accelerated School Charter Schools for two hours in June, just prior to the graduation ceremony, but the matter continued to remain unresolved.  However, in a rapid turnaround, no doubt fostered by the dogged activism on behalf of those supporting Ponce, the school management reneged.  Evidently their better judgment got the best of them, for common sense tells the arrogant that when school officials invoke disciplinary policies which violate the First Amendment they teach a dangerous lesson to students as well as make donkeys out of themselves.  Hardly the publicity for the innovation and self-authored thinking charters promise to deliver.

     Ponce eventually prepared her speech and the school officials, like the good censors they are, reviewed the speech one day after the administration meeting and then gave their obligatory approval for Ponce to give her talk just minutes before the ceremony (Seema, Mehta, June 29, 2009, School relents on barring valedictorian from graduation speechhttp://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/06/valedictorian-initially-barried-from-speaking-at-graduation-allowed-to-give-speech.html).

     Ponce’s bitter fight, along with those of her adamant supporters, to obtain her rights as a citizen and student to speak freely not only allowed her to win her battle with misguided charter school administrators more interested in control, power and ‘measured outcomes, but the outlandish and oafish response from the charter school retail chain  stimulated publicity around the whole toxic matter of academic freedom.  As an example, CutsHurtKids.org, a website devoted to grassroots protest against further LAUSD budget cuts, presented Aurora Ponce an over-sized check in the sum of $1683.34 from the cites successful Twitter-based scholarship fundraiser held in her honor.  And that’s not all — United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) later provided Ponce its own scholarship in the amount of $1000. 

     What the two incidents represent is not simply the problems associated with charter school management, autocracy, and denial of student and teacher rights, but it also takes a Parthian shot at the argument that charter schools seek curriculum innovation and work to instruct students to be independent thinkers and civic minded citizens.  What Marisol Alba, Sean Strauss, the students of Celerity Nascent Charter School and Aurora Ponce have in common is that they all engaged in resistance against undemocratic authoritarianism, a civic form of thinking critically about public life.  The lesson they invoked by their example is the need to continuously struggle for democracy, to implacably protect labor rights and conditions and to assiduously secure democratic decision making. According to Ponce:

We as students, we feel like we are not being heard.  The administration treats us like we’re ignorant (ibid).

Not anymore.  Look for Ponce’s face at the growing demonstrations planned at the University of California by students and faculty over more budget cuts.  You might just see Alba and Strauss there as well.