Read Online More Than a Score by Jesse Hagopian - Free Book Online Page A

demanding that this choice be given to them. In a concentration with many vulnerable faculty—either contract (such as myself) or pre-tenure—someone had to lead. While my role as coordinator and director of student teaching made me the logical choice, we all knew that this was a risky move. But it was a risk I had been preparing myself to take. One colleague from another concentration was increasingly anxious as I questioned the TPA and Pearson’s involvement. One day she told me I “frightened” her. I was going too far. But I, as I told her, felt I was not going far enough—not compared to the women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties who were traveling to protest the Israeli occupation of Gaza, getting arrested at the nearby nuclear power plant, relentlessly knocking on doors and initiating conversations, and getting up each day to continue the struggle.
    The school of education administration eventually relented to our demands and agreed that students had to be given the option to participate or not in the Pearson field test. The day I brought the forms for the students to sign and indicate if they were opting in or out of the field test the mood was both serious and joyful. Each student took his or her time to read through the information, to mark his or her form with care and conviction. Signatures had a force we had forgotten. And in the silence of the moment was forged a unity many of us had never before known.
    I shared this story with the New York Times as an example of resistance to the corporate juggernaut. 1 The picture that accompanied the article speaks to the strength the students knew together. That I was targeted to suffer consequences is not unusual. Oppressors often single out one person as a fear-inducing example. But fear and a single person acting alone is not the lesson of this story. We stood strong together. I stood with people who knew me and who did not know me. I stand strong now with new comrades from within this struggle, including the student-community group Can’t Be Neutral, which developed in the fight for my job and has grown to lead workshops across the country about resisting neoliberal policies in education. I have emerged from the nonrenewal and subsequent grievance as an officer of our local union and am running for president of our statewide teachers association under the banner of our progressive caucus. As I work to build an activist grassroots union, I experience again the joyful strength of the struggle. I see the multitudes of which I am a part rising up to either side and ahead of me. Each of us walking, along many paths, until we recognize we are not alone. This is how we come to say no. Together.

The Rise of the Badass Teachers Association

    The rise of the Badass Teachers Association is one of most intriguing and startling aspects of the growth of education activism during the presidency of Barack Obama. At the time of this writing and editing (July 2014), the BATS—which is what most people call us—have more than fifty thousand members on our Facebook page, fifty state organizations, a Twitter account followed by more than six thousand, numerous themed subgroups (for example, BATS in Special Ed), and are involved in local and national actions several times a week to defend teachers, students, and public education. We have been publicly endorsed by Diane Ravitch—who has challenged us to be the ACT-UP of education activism—and are carefully watched and sometimes called upon for help by leaders of the national teachers unions. Elected officials and heads of the US Department of Education also know who we are, as we have organized many actions designed to influence their policies. The group with the name people love to hate is now a major force in social justice activism. SUNY Buffalo historian Dr. Henry Louis Taylor has described the rise of the BATS as “one of the ten most important stories in the USA in