Below is an excerpt from The City of Hope Statement:Another World is Possible/Another Education is Necessary drafted during the US Social Forum. Please take a moment to read the full pdf document here.
Possible Steps, Campaigns, and Connections:
1. This is our city/this is our education. Imagine the creation of vast, messy, democratic community assemblies that are organized explicitlyto draw on the wisdom of everyone to rethink and renew curriculum and teaching, and the meaning and location of school…
2. The “Septima Clark Teacher Corps.” Imagine a massive initiative to bring parents and unemployed folks into the schools as aids and teacher candidates, and to bring school people into communities as peers and colleagues…
3. Peer restorative justice. Imagine building in every school and every community a movement to end the criminalization of youth, and to open creative spaces for moral reflection and positive action, redemption
and recovery, whenever someone has made a mistake or wronged the community…
4. Take the profit out of education. Imagine a giant upheaval to put an end to privatizing the public space…
5. Re-think and redesign assessment. Imagine groups of parents, teachers, and students fighting to end valorizing test scores as a proxy for either intelligence, worth, or achievement, and moving away from high-stakes, sort-and-punish approaches, toward authentic assessment…
6. Toward equity and simple justice. Imagine a popular drive to end to segregation based on race, class, ability, status, or background in terms of access and funding…
7. Demilitarize our schools. Imagine drawing a bright line between military training and recruitment, and education as a human right…
8. “No Excuses.” Imagine a community focus on reclaiming “accountability” and “standards” as they apply to every
institution and entity, not teachers alone or students in isolation—after all, high asthma rates, health disparities, poverty, access to guns, militarization, consumerism as an ideology (and more) cannot sensibly be laid at the feet of teachers; they are the responsibility of all, especially the wealthy and the powerful…
9. Connect the dots, reframe the debates. Each of these possible campaigns and initiatives has the potential to unleash enormous popular power to re-imagine, re-frame, and rebuild education from the bottom up. Whatever we initiate, whatever we take up and organize around, let’s remember to connect the dots, to see the links and unite the issues.
Our program for this moment is straight-forward: build Freedom Schools and Freedom School thinking in every classroom, school, community, or public space within your reach. We look to the Freedom School tradition for inspiration and attitude, sustenance and stance, and as an orientation toward launch. In essence this program is oriented toward action and designed to contribute to building a new movement and a transformed education toward the creation of a new society.
