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Conference Overview
A school should be the center of a community -- a place that feeds the minds and hearts of its young people, a place that celebrates the neighborhood's cultural and linguistic heritage, a place that provides the tools for a community to deepen its self-understanding and broaden its understanding of its connections to the broader world.
Across the country, however, the ability of educational institutions to serve these purposes is being severely damaged. Schools are increasingly seen as opportunities for the wealthy and powerful to make a profit, or to further their own political agendas. While these agendas affect different groups in a variety of ways, in such seemingly disconnected policies as school closings, teacher bashing, and the banning of ethnic studies programs, a common thread emerges: disregard for the histories, needs and people served by local public schools.
But in response to these dehumanizing, profit-driven policies, communities are fighting back. People are coming together, supporting, valuing and caring for one another as individuals with unique histories and experiences, rather than as statistics. Communities are reaching out, forming new connections, building bridges, strengthening ties. From the Chicago teachers and the parents who supported them in their recent strike, to the work that teachers do in their classrooms, we are working to listen to one another, and to hear each other's voices over the din of the empty rhetoric of politicians, and to bring our voices together in a call for justice.
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