 I just want to start with how I got into this work. I started teaching in 2001 and you know the same year the No Child Left Behind Act came online and I was teaching in Washington, D.C. in a completely segregated school. I think we actually got one white student my third year of teaching there. It really highlighted just how segregated it was in a totally impoverished neighborhood and I would drive by the White House on my way to work and then 10 minutes later I was in a forsaken land that was a complete food desert that the only public service that was there was the school buildings that were crumbling and the overfunded police that were there to brutalize my students and my students' families and you know the first assignment I ever assigned to my students the first research project they were researching someone they admired from history that had helped create social change and they came in and these beautiful posters that they produced and we were going to celebrate their posters on Monday and have them present them to the class and when we got back to school on Monday all of the posters were destroyed because there was a hole in the ceiling I didn't know about and it had just reigned in our classroom over the weekend and flooded the room with like a inch of standing water and so they were never able to present that poster and you remember 2001 is also the year of the attacks of 9-11 and we could see the the smoke rising from the Pentagon from my classroom window on that terrifying day but there was something else that was terrifying that happened and that I learned from that experience which was that our government could mobilize untold billions of dollars to go bomb children in the Middle East but couldn't fix the hole in the ceiling of my classroom just minutes away from the halls of government and that experience was deeply troubling to me and set me on a path of wanting to figure out how can I not only bring social justice and anti-racist pedagogy in the classroom but how can I be part of collective efforts to transform those egregious conditions in our country and in my time teaching in DC our union had negotiated a 9% raise and then inexplicably the DC public schools announced that our 9% raise was going to be canceled that there just wasn't the budget to do that and so we would no longer have that and our union organized a rally at City Hall and there were speakers enchanting and the union was you know having its usual lineup of speakers and and then all of a sudden the teachers just broke free and took the streets unplanned and just outraged that we could have worked that hard for a contract that could just be ripped up and then they not only blocked traffic but then poured into City Hall and we marched up to the mayor's office where somebody quickly ran in and locked the door so we couldn't get to his actual physical space but as we walked up the stairs to his office everyone was chanting no 9% October 1 no work October 2 and that that chant really filled me with energy and I think launched me on a whole path of my life because it was only a week later after that rally that all of a sudden lo and behold they found the money for our race and I learned the power of collective struggle and the power of unionism to create change and so I want to talk about the Black Lives Matter at school movement and how it got started and its intersection with social justice unionism but I don't think you can really tell that story without first acknowledging the story of enslaved Black people who snuck off plantations to teach each other how to read and write even though it was illegal and the punishment could be maiming or death right and I don't I want to tell this story about Black Lives Matter at school but I don't think you can tell it without first acknowledging the struggle during reconstruction where Black people created public schooling in the South and that incredible effort of the Freedman's Bureau and so many Black educators found finally founding public schools in the South after the Civil War also benefited poor White people who hadn't had access to education and I you know I think we have to acknowledge all before we can talk about Black Lives Matter at school let's look at the teachers union in the 1930s in New York that formed it was largely the impetus of the Communist Party at the time and they wanted to create a social justice union approach to organizing and you know they partnered with the NAACP and they worked to fight to get racist textbooks out of the curriculum that were glorifying the Klu Klux Klan you know we before we can talk about Black Lives Matter at school we have to talk about the freedom schools during the civil rights movement in the South where the final exam wasn't a high-stakes standardized test but going to register to vote right and or the Panther Liberation Schools in the the whole history of Afrocentric schools in in the late 60s and 70s that flourished across this country and that's really the legacy of what this this movement stands in that tradition and I think we also have to talk about the conditions that created the need to organize a campaign for Black Lives in schools and that was painfully brought home to me last night when I saw a story here in Seattle where I teach about a kid named Jaleel and he goes to an elementary school second grader here in Seattle and it was revealed by investigative journalism in our local NPR station that Jaleel was locked in what they called the cage at his school because they said he had disruptive behavior and this is a kid who was suffering from PTSD from an abusive father and instead of figuring out how to nurture this student, how to mentor him, how to heal his psychological wounds, this principal ordered that he be locked in the cage an enclosed area that was fenced off outside and he was brought his meals where he had to sit on the cold concrete and at some point didn't even have shoes on just sitting out there with kids walking by pointing and laughing this is the the conditions that Black children face in this in this school system across America Black students are four times more likely to be suspended for the same infractions and Black girls are the most disproportionately disciplined at seven seven times the rate of white girls you have a situation in the U.S. public school system where 1.6 million children go to a school that has a police officer but doesn't have a counselor and if you want to talk about all the other resources our kids need there are 14 million kids that go to a school that have a police officer but are missing one of the following a school nurse a school counselor a school psychologist a school librarian these vital services for our youth that and you can see the priorities of the system that's building a school to prison pipeline and it ends up the situations like a six-year-old girl last year in a Florida school who was having a tamper tantrum which is a developmentally appropriate behavior for a six-year-old and instead of figuring out how to nurture and support her the police officer handcuffs her and there's a heartbreaking video of her being dragged to his his cop car where she's screaming please give me a second chance but in this country second chances are reserved for hedge fund managers billionaires who sabotage the global economy in the great recession and then float to the ground with golden parachutes but for six-year-old black girls they get driven to the police precinct she was taken to the youth jail where she was fingerprinted and had her mugshot taken right and her grandma came and picked her up and explained that the reason why she was having a hard time in schools because she suffered from sleep apnea right so we need to understand that in this country we don't have an achievement gap we have an education debt there is a great debt that is owed to our nation's youth especially the black youth of this nation and that debt looks like the fact that according to a recent report the formula authorized for title one should have appropriated 48 billion dollars to title one schools but instead congress appropriated 15 billion dollars so there's a shortfall of 33 billion dollars that are supposed to be going to our neediest schools and as well npr recently reported that 23 billion more dollars go to predominantly white school districts compared with districts that serve mostly students of color and that is really why black lives matter at school erupted across this country and it started in seattle and it's really an incredible story and i just want to tell that story and end with some conclusions about how black lives matter at school and social justice unionism can help transform this country and so i think before i tell you the specific origin of black lives matter at school people should know that i helped to found a union caucus called the social equity educators and this was when i moved back to seattle and the school district was getting ready to close um 10 schools in seattle and of course they were all predominantly black and brown uh students of color um schools and so i helped to organize a coalition to oppose those school closures because unfortunately our union voted to support the school closure saying that if the district saved money on these schools then there would be less teacher layoffs and i thought that was extremely backwards and that we should join together with the communities and fight to keep all the schools open and the city is rich as ours and uh we got five of the schools off the list but they went forward with closing five schools and it was out of that we founded the social equity educators and went on to help lead um the map test boycott and at my high school um the faculty voted unanimously to refuse to give a high-stakes standardized test the map test and we were you know the tested subject teachers were threatened with a 10-day suspension without pay and not a single one of them back down and it started an international campaign that um put so much pressure with rallies and letters and speakouts on the school district that by the end of the year not only did they not suspend any teacher but they actually got rid of the map test for all of Seattle's high schools and it was just a resounding victory for our struggle and it was uh those past victories that helped us lay the groundwork for what happened with BLM at school and so it really started at John Muir Elementary School with a group of educators that wanted to celebrate their black youth in the wake of the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016 they wanted to start the school year off uh supporting the black youth uh and nurturing them letting them know they were cared for and so they organized an event with a group called Black Men United to Change the Narrative and the School PTA where they were going to have all the black families and everybody else and the educators come and high-five all the youth that were coming in the school that morning and then hold an assembly on black culture and history at the school and the art teacher a wonderful woman named Julie Trout designed a shirt that said Black Lives Matter we stand together with the picture of a tree with the many branches coming down into the trunk and when that uh image of the t-shirt went to the media far-right organizations like Breitbart and Blue Lives Matter started publicizing this and the school was bombarded with hate mail and then one particularly hateful person made a bomb threat against John Muir Elementary School just for the audacity of the educators to claim that their black students' lives have value and so the school district officially cancelled that event and they brought in bomb sniffing dogs that morning to see if the threat was credible to the great credit of the educators and families they carried through with the event but it was much smaller than it would have been and so I was deeply troubled by that and I reached out to them and we brought them to the caucus of the social equity educators and we came up with the plan to have our union support them and we said if we really support you we won't just pass a resolution saying that we'll actually all wear the shirts to school and so we picked October 19th as Black Lives Matter at school day and we called on every educator to come to school with the shirts and we and our union passed the resolution overwhelmingly and then our caucus working with the union helped to organize the day of action and we got together with the local NAACP and the Black Student Unions and the PTA and the t-shirt order started coming in first the ones and twos then the dozens then the hundreds and then we had some 3,000 teachers out of the 5,000 teachers in Seattle 5,000 educators in Seattle come to school wearing those shirts and it was just this eruption of struggle that caught the eye of the teachers in Philadelphia and they continued the movement and took it to the next level by taking it from a day of action to an entire week of action and now every year we have the first week of February as Black Lives Matter at school and you can go to Black Lives Matter at school.com and learn how to participate in the week of action and now the year of purpose. So I think the fundamental problem with our education system is this fundamental problem we have with all of our systems and institutions in this country and that is that they are a product of an economic and political structure that is built on profit racism oppression and inequality namely capitalism and you see that when the eight richest people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people we are going to have severe problems in healthcare and education and housing and all the rest of it and I just want to say that these numbers don't run parallel it's not just that there simply happen to be eight people with that much wealth and the rest of us at the bottom it's that there are rich people as a consequence of mass poverty and so I think Occupy movement was right that we have to figure out how to organize the 99% against the richest 1% but we will never be able to unite that 99% in a struggle for the resources we need to survive if we don't make the fight against racism central to our to our movements right and so that's how we can unite us and that's the important role that the unions can play in this struggle because I think that when you look at the history of social movement unionism you can see a mechanism a lever that can actually exercise power in in support of our movements and you can see that really where the term emerged out of South Africa in the struggle against apartheid when the union the kasatu union of mine workers joined together with the student movement in the streets against apartheid and when the economy was shut down because of the striking mine workers then the movement that youth were leading across South Africa had a new power and I think that we need to learn that lesson and apply it here today when you look at the strike wave of educators that that Rebecca was talking about over the last few years it's demonstrated that the captains of industry aren't the only people who have power and in Chicago and in LA and in the red state revolts we saw how collective struggle can transform the world not only winning better pay and benefits for for our teachers but also like in LA winning a million-dollar fund to help support undocumented youth in in legal fees or or stopping the random quote-unquote random searches of youth by the police and so that's the power of our striking educators and I think it underscores the old saying that teachers on strike are still teaching and that's the struggle that that I want to be a part of for racial and social justice