Educators in Seattle are starting off the school year dressed for success. In the fist action of this scale, many hundreds of Seattle teachers, counselors, instructional assistants, paraprofessionals, custodians, nurses, and other educators, will wear shirts to school on Wednesday, October 19th, that read, “Black Lives Matter.” This action is part of a Seattle Education …
Category: School-to-prison-pipeline
Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter
A world where Black lives matter and Black education is empowering will not come easily. It won't be funded by benevolent philanthropists. It won't be promoted by corporate lobbyists or legislated by the politicians they own. It will only happen with an uprising beyond even the scale and militancy of the last century's civil rights and Black Power movements. The contradictions of unhinged police murder of Black people in the "land of the free," coupled with corporate education reformers' racist schooling policies enacted in the name of "closing the achievement gap," are already producing large-scale, renewed social unrest. The question of how powerful this movement grows is up to us.
“It’s about collective struggle”: Interview with Jesse Hagopian on education & the movement for Black Lives
As the one-year anniversary of a Seattle police officer pepper spraying me on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day approaches, I sat down with the Seattle Weekly reporter, Casey Jaywork, to discuss ongoing struggles for social justice. Here are my reflections on police brutality, the intersection of race and class, and disrupting the school-to-prison-pipeline. --- Teacher …
Resistance to High Stakes Tests Serves the Cause of Equity in Education: A Reply to “We Oppose Anti-Testing Efforts”
Twelve national civil rights organizations released a statement today in opposition to parents and students who opt out of high-stakes standardized testing--what has now become a truly mass direct action campaign against the multi-billion dollar testing industry. I believe that their statement titled, “We Oppose Anti-Testing Efforts,” misses the key role that standardized testing has …
Hands Up, Don’t Test: Police brutality and the repurposing of education
While in Boston speaking about my recently released edited book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with the great EduShyster, who asked me important questions about the connection between the recent rise in student protests against police brutality and high-stakes, standardized testing. Here's what …
Continue reading Hands Up, Don’t Test: Police brutality and the repurposing of education

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