1. Separate Journeys
THE ROAD TO NEW SMALL SCHOOLS

Whitman Elementary School in 2000 exemplified the conditions in Oakland’s worst schools that mobilized parents and OCCA leaders to push for new small schools. It provided suitably dramatic images of chaos, contamination, and crisis to conjure up shame among Oakland’s liberal power holders, especially when compared to the orderly and relatively high-performing smaller schools of the predominantly white and affluent hills neighborhoods. One of the most overcrowded schools in the district, Whitman Elementary School served 1,400 students in a building designed for 700. At least 700 was the number most frequently cited by advocates for new small schools, but I also heard 500; and official reports (such as the figures released by the district for the newspapers) said that the building was designed for 1,200 students. In any case, what was clear was that there were 1,400 students, and there was not enough room for them. The school managed to serve this many (if “serve” is an appropriate word) through a year-round, multitrack schedule in which four tracks of students had staggered vacation breaks, and a system of “roving,” in which teachers and students packed up their classrooms every month and moved to another classroom, to make room for an incoming class that was coming back from vacation. I never quite understood how the roving system saved space, the official reason for its existence, but my confusion was apparently shared by many students, teachers, and parents who experienced this system daily. Both advocates and opponents of new small schools agree that roving is a terrible, detrimental practice, extremely disorienting to children, and ultimately harmful to learning.

How was it possible that 1,400 mostly Latino children (at Whitman Elementary School alone) could be allowed to go to school in such conditions for so long? The demand for new small schools was quickly sutured to a discourse of equity and social justice for Oakland’s communities of color, creating a seemingly unstoppable force that had the potential to unite dispossessed parents and community members, progressive teachers and administrators, and city officials behind a clear agenda for change. But while the deplorable conditions of multitrack year-round schools and their racial implications were irrefutable, different parties had distinct relationships to these conditions, and distinct vantage points from which to envision new small schools. In the first year of United Community School, when Madres Unidas interviewed parents and teachers about their reasons for joining the small schools effort, a pattern of distinct motivations and experiences between parents and school staff emerged. Teachers and parents brought different memories of Whitman Elementary School, of what it had taken to open the new school, and different ideas of what the small school was about. These distinct imaginaries, shaped by varying personal relationships to the “injustice” represented in schools like Whitman, set the stage for ensuing conflicts over the vision, values, and planning process of the new small school.

To set the scene for the chapters that follow, this chapter explores the perspectives of reformers, organizers, teachers, and parents on the history of small schools in Oakland and their reasons for getting involved in the reform, beginning with the conditions at Whitman Elementary School that served as the impetus for the small schools movement. I draw on my own ethnographic observations and interviews with reformers and organizers, as well as focus groups and interviews conducted by the Madres to highlight key differences between professionals (teachers and administrators) and parents around a central question of this book: what motivates and enables people to work for change? The patterns in the responses hint at a tension that would later become significant, around the relative importance of experience in the community versus professional expertise. Teachers’ motivations to start a new small school were rooted in their professional experience, including the desire for increased professional development and autonomy to better implement their educational philosophy, revealing a value system that eclipsed the role of community participation in the school-reform process. For educators who did not live in the community and did not send their children to the overcrowded schools, the effort to reform these schools was experienced less as an effort to work with the community than to do for the community—to put one’s professional training to work to improve the outcomes for disadvantaged children. The unquestioned commitment to professional training and expertise, coupled with sincerely held social-justice values and ideals, had the unintended effect of blinding educators to the importance of personal experience of injustice as a resource in the struggle for school reform and social change.

The need for new small schools might have been apparent to anyone visiting Whitman Elementary School in 2000. My own introduction to the disorder governing the school came when I began my fieldwork with the small schools working group, the team of teachers and parents forming to design a new small school. As I followed this group over an eight-month period, I was given firsthand experience in the chaos and confusion that teachers and students at Whitman faced daily. Whitman had two adjoining campuses, spanning two city blocks. The small schools working group’s first meeting, which was my first visit to Whitman, was held in the main building. When I entered the school from what I thought was the main entrance, overstuffed boxes were stacked precariously on either side of the hallway, as if the school was moving, or in a permanent state of transience, overflowing. Several repeated visits confirmed that this was in fact the school’s permanent state. The meeting was in the library, a cramped room much smaller than most classrooms, and I had to ask someone if this was the school’s only library. I was told that it was, and that the school was lucky to have this.

The second meeting, two weeks later, was held in the cafeteria of the adjoining campus, called Dalton School. Not knowing, I parked my car in front of the main building where the first meeting had been, and had to follow a janitor’s directions through several long corridors and two playgrounds to the adjoining campus. On my third visit to Whitman, I arrived several minutes late for a parent meeting to find the parents standing in the hallway by the front entrance, waiting expectantly. Baudelia joined us shortly. She explained that there was some confusion about the room assignment: the principal claimed not to know about our meeting, although Baudelia insisted that she had told her. Finally, the principal came out, saw us, suddenly “remembered” about our meeting, and apologized laughingly to Baudelia. We were shuffled off to an empty classroom.

The third meeting for the small schools design team was held in a Dalton School classroom. We had so far never met in the same room twice, although the last two meetings had both been on the same campus. For the fourth meeting, on its now regular Thursday evening, expecting the meeting to be at Dalton School, I parked my car in front of Dalton School, but ended up following a mother with a stroller and two kids across the enormous campus to the Whitman cafeteria. By this time I wondered if the constant change in meeting place was a reflection of the principal’s unwillingness to give the small schools working group a regular space. Baudelia had mentioned a similar problem with the “parent support group” sponsored by a community clinic—that group was also moved to a different room each week, for which Baudelia directly blamed “la directora.”

Each week, several parents trickled in late, perhaps partly because they had arrived at the wrong campus. Indeed, it was difficult to recruit and motivate parents to participate without a consistent meeting place. I found it hard to believe that there was no classroom that was available every Thursday evening for this meeting: it was held, after all, at 5 p.m., long after school let out. What, then, was responsible for the constant shuffling of meeting places? Was it, as Baudelia suspected, a sign of the principal’s opposition? Or was it simply negligence, the failure to plan properly and reserve a regular meeting place? More likely, both were true. Negligence on the part of the principal was likely a sign that she did not care to accommodate the small schools working group, and the parents left to shuffle around felt distinctly their lack of value in the school. So too must students and teachers feel who are subject to the indignities of the roving system.

Multitrack, year-round schedules, and the practice of roving that accompanies them, were a major factor motivating activists for new small schools in Oakland. At the OCCA action for new small schools described in the Introduction, OCCA leaders also pushed district and city officials to put an end to multitrack year-round schedules in all Oakland public schools by 2003. This reflected the desire of small schools activists to create system-wide change, not just a few new options for some students. Anyone who was involved with Oakland public schools—whether as a teacher, parent, student, or organizer—knew about the suffering that roving caused, and knew this was no way to educate children. When OCCA organized the action for new small schools, which drew more than two thousand people, it was not because a New York reformer had written a book that said that small schools work for urban kids. It was because around the city, over and over again in house meetings and one-to-ones, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers were complaining about their children’s overcrowded schools. Overcrowding was a condition that required a citywide solution. OCCA’s Martha recalled, “We’d done like hundreds of one-to-ones with teachers that worked in multitrack year-round [schools], thousands of one-to-ones with parents whose kids were in multitrack year-round, so we knew when we went for the action that ending multitrack was like this total no-brainer that everybody, absolutely everybody, could say yes to … And the idea of the small schools also resonated deeply with those folks, of course, because those were the most horrendously overcrowded schools in the city.”

Erica, a former teacher at Washington, explained the practice of roving from a teachers’ perspective: “Once a month, pretty much anywhere from three weeks to six weeks, you pack up your room and your kids and you move into someone else’s room who’s out on vacation … So the people that are roving never really have a classroom that’s theirs. So you can imagine like with first-graders, if you’re in one classroom for a month, and then you’re across campus, so they often don’t even know where they’re supposed to go. And a really important part of education is having routines, and things in the same place, so that those kinds of things don’t take up your educational time. You don’t have to look for the pencils, you just get your pencils and you start working. So every sort of hour that’s eaten up by reacclimating children, and often children who are struggling the most academically, are finding school the most emotional, and suddenly they’re in this room that’s not familiar, a space that’s not familiar, with, you know, an environment that’s not familiar, and you don’t know where your books are, and you often have, if you’re lucky you get a couple hours on a Friday to rove, so you can start school on Monday in your new classroom. So the teacher that’s moving out has to move her stuff out, the teacher that’s moving in has to move her stuff in, and if you’re lucky you’ll have a couple of extra hours, they’ll let you have, like, a minimum day to do that. And then on Monday morning your kids show up, hopefully to the right room, and you are expected to teach.”

Linda, a bilingual teacher at Whitman, explained how the practice was a fact of life for Whitman teachers: “I roved my third year when I taught first grade, and that was every two to four weeks … I had taught two years of K where you share a room, and then my first year on my own with my own classroom, I didn’t have a classroom! So that was really horrific, that was really, really, horrific, and the attitude was like, ‘Oh, you know, everyone has to do it. It’s part of the game, part of the job.’ ”

Baudelia, a parent of three, described the sadness of seeing “the teacher rotating every month, from room to room, running all over the school, going around carrying her books and all her classroom materials, and the children, too, carting their classroom around.” The year-round schedule, she said, was especially hard on small children who take a while to adjust to school. As soon as they adjust, she said, it’s time for vacation, and then when they come back, they have to adjust all over again. During one small schools meeting, another mother angrily complained, “The children are moved from room to room as if they were monkeys!”

Trying to juggle the multitrack schedule presented a particular burden for parents of more than one child in the school. Leticia, a parent of three, explained: “They put one of my daughters in one track, another in another, and another in a third track. And when it was time for one of them to go on vacation, the others couldn’t go. And when I would go to ask permission [to take the others out], they would tell me, ‘I don’t know anything! Go away! Go away!’ And then, when you go ahead without permission, they come and tell you that they’re going to take your kid out of that class because she didn’t come! And that’s wrong, [if something happens with a relative], you can’t go because they don’t give you permission.”¹

Stories about life at Whitman often sound more like a three-ring circus than a school. My first impression of a state of permanent transience turned out to be a more accurate descriptor of the school than I could have imagined. In the fall of 2000, 150 students were evacuated from Whitman because of a contaminated classroom building. The mold was not detected until students and teachers started getting sick. Up to the last minute, parents were not informed about what was going on. Linda explains: “We had to be evacuated for three months because of the mold. And we were given like forty-five minutes to gather what we wanted, and they wanted to throw our stuff away … So they said, ‘Collect the things that you’re going to use for the next month’ (well, they said they were going to take a month, but things always take longer than they say), and so we had to move. We were used to team-teaching in the same classroom, and then we had to be in two separate classrooms and do all this transition, and our stuff was put into these big bins, and a lot of it was thrown away … So we had to go through that last year.”

It was conditions like these that created the urgency behind the small schools movement. As Martha from OCCA explained, “There was so much suffering at Whitman School that it was imperative to take out the greatest number of students that we could take. Because it was a physical suffering. The children were getting sick, the teachers were getting sick. I mean, they were horrible conditions.” At a community meeting to discuss the construction of new schools in the neighborhood, Superintendent Costas bellowed at the crowd, “We should be ashamed that we’ve let kids go to school in this warehouse for so long!”

But although everyone could agree on the need to eliminate multitrack year-round schools, the urgency was felt differently by parents and teachers. When Madres Unidas began conducting interviews with teachers in the first year of United Community School, they were surprised to discover that many teachers had been happy at Whitman and had not originally intended to start a new small school. The mothers would later recall this as one of their most striking findings, and one of the first to alert them to the dramatically different perspectives of teachers and parents on the road to new small schools.

The Principal

Perhaps most revealing of the distinct values and motivations of teachers and parents on the road to new small schools was the Madres’ interview with the principal of United Community School, Marie, who had been a teacher at Whitman Elementary School and a member of the design team. Mexican-American and Spanish-speaking, Marie had been chosen by teachers and parents on the design team to be the new school’s principal. Parents appreciated the fact that she spoke Spanish and could relate to the local community. However, by the time the new school opened, Marie had already had a number of conflicts with parents, and was often nervous and short with parents in school meetings. The Madres decided to interview her individually early in the year, to better understand her perspective on the school’s founding and in hopes of developing a more personal rapport with her. They wanted to know, how had she become involved in the process of planning a new small school? What motivated her to participate in the reform? What motivated her to take the post of director? What did she think about the relationship between the school and the community? How did she view the role of parents in the school? Baudelia and Ofelia conducted the interview as a pair, with myself as observer and note taker. They reported on the interview to the other mothers at our next Friday meeting.

If Marie believed that the needs of the community were central to the school’s founding and existence, she did not reveal as much in the interview. When asked what motivated her to get involved in the small schools reform, her response was, “theory”: ideas, she explained, from professional journals and conferences. She explained that the situation at Whitman had limited her ability to carry out these ideas, and even the limitations of Whitman were explained in terms of theory: “research shows that it’s hard to create schools within schools,” she said. Foreshadowing what the mothers would learn from the teachers, Marie saw the new small school as an opportunity to develop and implement her professional expertise. Most surprisingly to Baudelia and Ofelia, Marie said that she had never had the goal of starting a new small school or becoming a principal. She was approached by teachers and parents at Whitman, who enlisted her participation on the design team and later convinced her to consider the directorship. Far from the mothers’ image of the school as a symbol of a long-fought struggle for safety, respect, and a better education for their children, Marie had practically stumbled onto the new small school. The nonchalance with which she described her decision to become principal was shocking to Baudelia and Ofelia. Ofelia wrote in her reflection:

Lo que más me impresionó fue que ella no tenía la visión de ser directora, no tenía esa meta, mencionó que fueron las maestras las que la involucraron, y también padres. Su sueño siempre fue ser maestra, y creo que hay mucha diferencia en ser maestra y desempeñar un trabajo como directora. Siento que ella no estaba lista ni preparada para esta posición.

What most struck me was that she did not have the vision of being principal, she didn’t have that goal, she mentioned that it was the teachers who got her involved, and also parents. Her dream was always to be a teacher, and I think there’s a big difference between being a teacher and carrying out a job like the principal’s. I feel that she was not ready or prepared for this position.

Lacking from Marie’s interview was any evidence of her vision for being principal or her awareness of the community’s struggle in the history of the school. In the mothers’ view, Marie was an unlikely candidate for a leader. Although she was certainly aware of the community organizing behind the new school, it is significant that she did not choose to mention this in her interview with two parent leaders from the community. When Baudelia and Ofelia asked her what she thought about the school’s relationship to the community, Marie responded, “We haven’t had a lot of interaction,” and added that the school was just beginning this journey.

For Madres Unidas, to consider the school’s opening just the beginning of its relationship to the community was to ignore the long history of community struggle that had led to its creation and to omit the critical role of parents in its founding. The discovery of a distinct teacher consciousness, in which parents’ roles and realities figured little or not at all, was dismaying to the mothers. But, as we shall see, their insights into this consciousness would empower them in future interactions with school staff. Examining the history of the new small school from the perspective of teachers and parents allowed the mothers to uncover the roots of parent silencing, and to see how this history shaped parents’ roles once the new school opened.

Teachers: “It’s Time to Leave This Comfortable Place”

Madres Unidas conducted two focus groups with teachers: one for bilingual teachers and a second for Sheltered English teachers. “Sheltered English” teachers were trained to provide academic instruction in English in a way that would be accessible to students who spoke English as their second language. Because it was a small school, with one bilingual and one English classroom in each grade, these two focus groups included all of the school’s classroom teachers (only physical education and prep teachers were excluded). All of the teachers had taught at Whitman and had been part of the design team that created the UCS proposal. The principal, who was interviewed separately, did not participate in the focus groups. The bilingual teacher focus group was conducted in Spanish, with Baudelia and Carmen as facilitators; the Sheltered English teachers were interviewed in English. Ofelia, as the parent in the group with the best English skills, was nominated to facilitate the English focus group. Both teacher focus groups, as all the focus groups, were videotaped and transcribed. These focus groups were eye-opening for the Madres in many ways, yielding sometimes painful insights into teachers’ perspectives on parents and on the purpose of new small schools.

The most surprising discovery to the Madres was around the question of why teachers became involved in the new small school. From both teacher focus groups, the Madres learned that many teachers had not planned to open a new small school, but became involved in the effort primarily to improve their collaboration with each other at Whitman. Teachers viewed the small school reform effort as a professional development opportunity for themselves. When they decided to join the team to design a new small school, it was often to stay with colleagues they had worked with at Whitman. As Susan, a first-grade Sheltered English teacher explained:

I realized that the teachers who were staying and coming back to the meetings were teachers that I wanted to work with or already worked with, and I realized that if I wanted to push myself as a teacher, these were the kind of people I wanted to work with. I didn’t know if that meant in a new school, if that were truly a possibility, or if it just meant a different way of working at Whitman. And it was a long time before I really decided that I [did] want to leave Whitman … So it was getting involved with a group of people who stimulated me and help[ed] me, ’cause I’m not very visionary, become more visionary, and say, it’s time to leave this comfortable or relatively comfortable place and do something different.

For Susan, it was her fellow teachers who convinced her that it was “time to leave this comfortable or relatively comfortable place.” Similarly, Helen recalled, “Just looking around the room and seeing the faces of the people that were there, they were all people that I would have been honored to work with … I think it was the teachers that really drew me.”

Many of the teachers had been part of a teaching collaborative at Whitman that had tried to implement some instructional innovations—particularly team-teaching and teacher collaboration—within the unsupportive context of a large, multitrack, year-round school. For Janice, a fifth-grade Sheltered English teacher, the experience of collaboration was powerful, and when her colleague from the collaborative system, Dora, joined the small school design team, Janice followed her. She explained:

Working with another teacher challenged me in new ways that were very exciting for me … So Dora was the one who got involved with the collaborative first, with the people who were looking at forming a small school, and I wasn’t really that interested, but Dora said she was going … So, basically, I got involved because Dora was involved, but the more I started looking at the things that really were making me unhappy and started thinking about the possibility that things could be different for the children, and that I could be a teacher in a different way, the more excited I got. So I got dragged into it.

As these quotes reveal, the teachers were motivated by profound respect for their colleagues and a desire to continue collaborating with each other in a more supportive context. Teachers were often ambivalent about leaving Whitman Elementary School. Janice told us, “I had been at Whitman for ten years and loved it there; there were many, many things that I loved about Whitman … And there were a lot of things that I wasn’t happy with, but that I just kind of accepted as being inevitable in such a big setting.” Similarly, Susan said, “There were a lot of things that I really liked about Whitman. And the things that frustrated me, I just tried hard to ignore.” Linda recalled that she and a colleague began attending small schools meetings to show their support for the movement, but not to start a new school themselves, because, they said at the time, “we’re happy and we probably wouldn’t want to leave Whitman.”

But teachers also realized that many of the instructional reforms they hoped to implement were doomed to failure in the context of Whitman. Laurie, a bilingual kindergarten teacher, put it this way: “After thirty years of teaching children in Oakland, I know that it is impossible to make the changes that need to be made when every month there are teachers coming and going, one day they’re there, and the next day they’re gone.” Yvonne, another bilingual teacher, explained:

One of the hard things that we found when we started the collaboration was passing our kids from one grade to the next at the end of the year was very difficult, because there were all these pressures to move kids around, or teachers were moving, or we never even knew really what teacher was going to stay from year to year, and just working with 1,400 students when it came time to figure out which kids were going to which classrooms, we got less support than we needed in order to make sure … that there was a smooth way of passing students.

Teachers hoped that a small school would facilitate the reform work they had attempted at Whitman. As Helen said, “I think that by having the consistency here, by having really excellent teachers in a smaller environment, a lot of the things that we attempted to do at Whitman will really finally come to fruition here.”

Teachers were also motivated by their commitment to equity and their belief that children in Oakland, particularly in flatland schools, were being underserved. Although inequities between hills schools and flatland schools were mentioned as a driving factor by several teachers, they arrived at this understanding in different ways. Susan said she first learned about inequities in graduate school:

I went to a suburban school district that had pretty good funding and very good schools; it worked out great for me and I got a really good education. But once I got to graduate school, I realized that the education I got wasn’t equitable. That there were a whole bunch of kids even in the community where I lived who did not get the same education that I got. And once I started getting my credential and getting my master’s degree and teaching, it became even more apparent that the vast majority of children in public schools were not getting the education that other children got … So I started doing research in graduate school on inequities in education, and when this project [the small school] came up, I just saw, this is the chance, at least for 240 kids, to make a difference.

Susan’s understanding of inequity, and her desire to change it, was framed in the world of educational research and theory. Others were motivated by firsthand experience teaching children in underfunded schools. As Janice put it:

For me, wanting to be involved with reform has to do with ten years in Oakland, loving these children, and thinking that they deserve so much more than they got. And feeling frustrated that no matter how hard I worked, the way it was set up, I couldn’t give them what they needed, and it broke my heart.

Certainly, teachers and parents shared the desire to create something better for the children, and hoped that the new small school would provide better opportunities for the children of Oakland. But, as the quotes above suggest, teachers differed from parents in the nature of their experience with inequities, and in their understanding of how a small school would translate into better opportunities. For the teachers, the most hopeful part of the small schools reform seemed to be the new opportunities for professional development and collaboration. As Lorraine put it, “The thought of having a whole school of incredible teachers and dedicated teachers is—was—like a foreign concept!”

For Ofelia, the parent facilitator of the English teacher focus group, what was missing from the teachers’ responses was the role of the community in the reform. Ofelia wrote in her reflection:

Me pareció muy interesante escuchar a la mayoría decir que nunca pensaban en tener una escuela pequeña, que sólo pensaban trabajar juntas en Whitman. Me he puesto a pensar desde que escuché esas respuestas y siento que esta escuela está fundada más por el esfuerzo de padres y de la comunidad porque las maestras no tenían esa meta o no pensaban ni luchaban tanto para que fuese así. Siento que todas querían trabajar en una escuela pequeña pero no pusieron fe y lucha para que juntos comunidad, padres y maestros lo pudiéramos lograr.

También reconozco que sí han trabajado bien duro y muchas horas, he sido testigo de eso. Pero siento que ellas trabajaron para lograr que aseptaran su propuesta, para saber cómo y quiénes asistieran a la escuela, se frustraban pensando que no tenían suficientes niños en las clases de inglés, pero siento que no se enfocaron en lograr el terreno para la escuela.

En ningún momento mencionaron que trabajaron con padres o representantes de la comunidad … Esto me hace sentir poco triste.

It was very interesting to hear the teachers say that they never planned to have a new small school; they only wanted to work together at Whitman. I have been thinking about this ever since I heard those responses and I feel that this school was founded more by the effort of parents and the community because the teachers didn’t have that goal, or didn’t struggle for that. I feel that they all wanted to work in a small school, but they didn’t commit themselves to the struggle so that the community, parents, and teachers could achieve it together.

I also recognize that they have worked very hard and many hours, I have been witness to that. But I feel that they worked to get their proposal accepted, to know who would attend the new school; they got frustrated thinking that there weren’t enough children in the English classes, but I feel that they didn’t focus on getting the land for the school.

At no point [in the interview] did they mention that they worked with parents or representatives from the community … This makes me feel a little sad. (Emphasis added)

It was significant to Ofelia that the teachers did not mention the struggle for the land on which the school opened, which many parents remembered as a dramatic chapter of the school’s history. Community members organized by OCCA had fought for several years and overcome strident opposition to secure access to abandoned city property for the construction of new small schools. Although some teachers had participated in this organizing, attending at least some community meetings that I observed, they did not recall this as central to the school’s origins.

Given their own experiences as parents organizing for new small schools, the mothers in Madres Unidas were surprised to discover how little these experiences figured in teachers’ accounts of the history of the school or the movement. Whereas the Madres’ own memories and their interviews with other parents emphasized “the need” and “the struggle” behind the new small school, teachers confessed to being motivated more by ideas and professional collaboration to leave the “relatively comfortable” place of Whitman Elementary School. When asked about the origin of the new small schools, few teachers talked about the role of the local community or OCCA’s organizing. For most teachers, the reform was seen as emanating from the ideas of Deborah Meier in New York’s Harlem. The following response of Tracy, from the English teacher focus group, is illustrative:

I read The Power of Their Ideas when I was in Texas [other teachers nod in agreement], and I read it and I had been teaching for a year and a half, and I thought, man! I gotta start a school! Yeah, so, it mostly started on the East Coast, right? In New York and Chicago. I don’t know much about here.

Tracy’s response is interesting because she did not seem to remember that she was speaking to a parent (Ofelia) who had been involved in small schools organizing in Oakland, and who might not know what The Power of Their Ideas was. I often wondered whether teachers would adjust their responses for parent interviewers. In this case, it seemed that Ofelia’s identity as a parent was irrelevant—or insignificant—to the teachers. Tracy assumed shared background knowledge about an educational reform book, and claimed ignorance about the local context, in spite of the fact that she was speaking to a parent who had been active in the local organizing: “I don’t know much about here.” I interjected, “in case Ofelia didn’t know,” that The Power of Their Ideas was a book written by Debbie Meier, a teacher who started a small school in New York.² It turned out that most of the teachers had read the book. The following exchange reveals their esteem for the New York educator:

Helen: One time there was a conference in Emeryville at the Holiday Inn … and we snuck in to hear Debbie Meier! [everyone laughs]

Susan: You crashed?!

Helen: We crashed. She was the keynote speaker and we were just like, Oh! If we could just start our own school! But I have to confess, I used to think, oh, you know, piece of cake!

Lorraine, a kindergarten teacher, revealed a vague knowledge that the community had been involved in the Oakland reform:

And then a group of parents, I don’t if this was before or after Washington,³ but a group of parents, school board members, and, of course, no teachers, some people from OCCA went back and looked at the New York City small schools … And no teachers were involved at that point.

Lorraine’s reference to the fact that teachers had not been included on the trip OCCA organized to visit small schools in New York reveals the separateness with which teachers and parents experienced and participated in the movement.⁴ Lorraine had heard about this trip but didn’t know much about it. Her comment that “of course, no teachers” went suggests some resentment that parents should have had this opportunity, and not teachers. Again, the source of expertise and inspiration for the reform was seen as New York, and parents’ participation in the reform, in her mind, hinged on their exposure to the schools in New York. There was no recognition of the urgency of the situation in Oakland, or the organizing of parents locally, which had given rise to the movement in Oakland.

Some teachers did discuss the role of parents and the community in the origins of the reform. Yvonne, a bilingual teacher, explained: “The idea is from the East Coast, New York, but also from OCCA and what they tried to do at Washington [Elementary]. Washington parents … organized for a new small school, but the district didn’t grant it.” In Yvonne’s mind, it was the coming together of these two forces that created the new small schools in Oakland:

It sounded like there were two things coming together; there was the OCCA and the movement, and I’m not sure where that started, I’m not sure if that started after hearing about what was happening back east, or if they just happened to come together at the same time … But it definitely was coming from the community, from Washington, and I think from BACEE.

In general, bilingual teachers were more familiar with OCCA and better informed about the community’s organizing than were Sheltered English teachers. Those who had participated in OCCA meetings had received some training on working with parents. As Linda recalled, “Erica [BACEE coach] and Evelyn [OCCA organizer] were always talking about parents and teachers working together.” Still, references to the roles parents had played were vague and fragmented—in this case, tied to something the BACEE coach or OCCA organizer had said—and not the result of firsthand experience with parents. More to the point, the role of parents in the reform, or the experiences of parents at Whitman, were not central in the teachers’ minds about how the reform had come about or what had motivated them as teachers to get involved.

Parents, by contrast, spoke exclusively of bad experiences at Whitman and the role of community organizing when discussing their reasons for becoming involved in the new small school. Parents had countless stories of being mistreated by school staff at Whitman in what they perceived as a hostile environment to Spanish-speaking parents. Stories of their children’s suffering in an overcrowded school were often intertwined with stories of their own experiences in an unresponsive bureaucracy. Recall Leticia’s story earlier, who, when asking for permission to take her three children out at the same time, was shooed away by the administration, only later to be told that her children were dropped from the roster for having missed classes. The confusions of roving and the multitrack schedule were exacerbated by poor communication between school staff and parents. Parents often complained that the principal and office staff at Whitman did not speak Spanish—in spite of the fact that 77 percent of the student body was Latino—and did not respond kindly to Spanish-speaking parents. In the small school, they liked the fact that the principal and secretaries spoke Spanish and attended to them respectfully when they came to the office. The need for better relationships (“relaciones más familiares”) between staff and parents was often cited as a reason for joining the small schools effort.

Baudelia explained her motivation for organizing for new small schools by describing the myriad problems she and her children faced at Whitman Elementary School: “en base de la necesidad que estaba viviendo yo en Whitman” (based on the need I was living at Whitman). Like most parents (and teachers), she did not like the year-round, multitrack schedule of the school. But beyond the obvious organizational problems of an over-crowded school like Whitman, Baudelia was concerned by what she saw as a lack of respect for parents’ rights. This was a theme echoed by several parents in discussions at design team meetings. Like the mother who said that children were moved around “as if they were monkeys,” Baudelia was angered by the administration’s tendency to pull children out of classes and put them into other classes without communicating to the parents. In some cases, she said, children were moved from the bilingual program to all-English classes simply because of space constraints. When parents confronted the principal, they were told that there was no room for their kids. “Son cosas que no tienen que estar pasando, ¿si me entiende?” (These are things that shouldn’t be happening, do you understand?).

Baudelia recounted several incidents in which there were problems at the school that the principal failed to communicate to parents. When asked about the administration’s communication with parents, Baudelia responded, “Pues, ¿cuál comunicación? ¡Es nula! … En primer lugar, el 75 por ciento de la población es Hispana. Ella no habla nada de español” (What communication? It’s null! In the first place, 75 percent of the population is Hispanic. She [the principal] doesn’t speak any Spanish).

In the end, Baudelia’s firsthand experience with the deep problems at Whitman provided the motivation for her to continue to work for new small schools:

Yo veo que necesitamos un cambio, necesitamos una escuela pequeña, necesitamos que haya comunicación … Eso me involucró, dije yo quiero ver un cambio en la escuela y a la vez que la nueva escuela haga la diferencia de, en todos los aspectos, en la educación, en la comunicación, en la organización, en todo.

I see that we need a change, we need a small school, we need there to be communication … That got me involved, I said I want to see a change in the school and at the same time for the new school to make the difference in all aspects, in education, in communication, in organization, in everything.

Ofelia, when reflecting on her own reasons for joining the small school design team, shared the following: “Me daba mucha tristeza ver todos los problemas que existían en la escuela donde iban mis niños. Seguido mis niños estaban con sangre en la camisa, porque tenían problemas con los niños afuera … Entonces yo me sentía frustrada, yo no sabía qué hacer, o sea, ¿qué hago? Decía yo, yo no me puedo mover, no tengo esa posibilidad. ¿Qué puedo hacer yo para mejorar la escuela de mis hijos?” (It made me so sad to see all the problems that existed in my children’s school. My children would regularly come home with blood on their shirts, because they had problems with children outside … So I felt frustrated, I didn’t know what to do, like, what do I do? I said, I can’t move, I don’t have that option. What can I do to improve my children’s school?). Other parents, too, shared stories of fights in the bathrooms and on the schoolyard at Whitman—violence that might be more expected at a junior high or high school than an elementary school—stemming from overcrowding and a lack of oversight. In these circumstances, as Ofelia put it, the small schools reform was “like an exit, an open door,” to be able to change the problems at Whitman.

If the conditions provided the motivation, for parents, OCCA offered the means to organize for change and make new small schools a reality. Baudelia, responding to the answers of other parents in a focus group, reflected, “A lot of people already explained [the reasons for new schools], to eliminate overcrowding, so that the children wouldn’t have to rove anymore, but why? I think it’s because somebody felt this need and these problems that we are facing. Because there is a lot, a lot of need, but if nobody feels that need and nobody understands us, nobody is going to take initiative. I think [this school] was founded because there was somebody who took an interest in our problems and thought of giving us a solution. And that somebody for me was OCCA.” Baudelia’s assertion that “if nobody feels that need” suggested her awareness that parents’ experiences alone, as members of a marginalized class, were not sufficient to mobilize for change; they needed allies with power to take “an interest in our problems.” The significance of OCCA, as an organization that represented parents and the community and took their concerns to the public sphere, figured prominently in Baudelia’s narrative about the origins of the new small schools.

Although not all parents recognized OCCA or the role it had played in organizing for new small schools (a fact that Baudelia would later lament), for all parents, the new small schools were seen as an answer to intensely personal need based on their own experiences at Whitman Elementary School. Many had participated in the large actions to demand new small schools and appropriate facilities, and recognized United Community School as the product of community struggle. The experience of injustice was a powerful shared narrative that explained both the need for new small schools and their participation as parents in the reform.

In this chapter, I have tried to highlight the different perspectives teachers and parents brought to the new small school based on their differing social locations. Teachers had a choice in joining the design team, and they described their motivation very much in the language of choice: the small school was an option they hoped would enrich their professional lives as well as their students’ learning. For parents, it was a necessity. Their children’s educational survival in no small way depended on it. In the following chapters, I explore how these distinct frames of reference shaped interactions between parents and teachers as they struggled to collaborate in the design of a new school. For it was not just that parents and teachers came from different places. Parents, as the Madres would discover, would have to fight for the recognition that the place they came from was a legitimate one from which to engage in school reform, and that their experience, no less than the teachers’ training, had uniquely positioned them to work for change.