While Student Union focuses its organizing in Philadelphia, we believe that we can only be effective if we stay aware of and understand trends in education policy on a national level.  In the past few years, a definite direction in education policy has been increasingly evident in big cities throughout the country including New Orleans, Chicago, Washington D.C. and even here in Philadelphia.

 After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the school system (which was already struggling) was left devastated.  It the wake of the devastation, the Recovery School District was born, and 107 schools were re-opened as charter schools. Before the hurricane, only 2% of students were in charters, recent figures put charter school enrollment at 53% of total enrollment. The New Orleans school district currently only runs 8 schools. This reform parallels changes in public housing, and has been met with resistance from community organizations and the teacher’s union.

In Chicago, a plan called Renaissance 2010 called for the closure of 100 public schools and the opening of 60 new charters. The plan is designed to increase the quality of education by giving students and parents a choice as to what school they attend. It has been met with resistance from community groups who say that Renaissance 2010 is primarily a business strategy to use schools to attract new higher-income residents to neighborhoods.  They have also spoken out about the instability caused by school closing and displacement of students.

In D.C., chancellor of schools Michelle Rhee has been pushing for a number of reforms, including a new system for paying teachers based on forfeiting union rights in exchange for a huge increase in salary and regular evaluations. The plan was developed in the hopes of increasing the quality and motivation of teachers in the district. The teacher’s union has resisted the plan and some groups have said that it doesn’t address the roots of the teacher quality problem in the city. D.C. has also seen a number of new charters in the past few years.

The public education system is looked at by many as a $600 billion industry, and although many areas have great public schools (usually the wealthier suburbs), ‘public education’ (read the education of poor, and minority students) is associated with failure, leaving the door open for reforms that in turn suffer a lack of accountability and transparency in the way they are implemented.

As students, poor people, and people of color on the ground in schools, we are discouraged from thinking about the national landscape of education, which ultimately makes us only objects (complete with potential dollar signs attached) to be acted upon as those with a financial stake in the system battle it out at the policy level. Meanwhile, the families on the ground are encouraged to think of ourselves as merely consumers of education, a belief which removes the basis for change through collective action.

Nevertheless, poor communities ar-ound the country are collaborating with each other to seize this moment to take advantage of key opportunities in the landscape - to make teacher quality and equity a top priority across the nation, to make the school funding system equitable in every state, to ensure real parent and student involvement in school governance, to end the school to prison pipeline, to advance models of whole school transformation from the ground up, and to stem the drop-out crisis.

This emerging network is called the Alliance for Educational Justice, and the Philadelphia Student Union is providing leadership for building this from the ground up.  Look for us soon on the national scene!