PL

I think the Dyett hunger strike has not only local but actually national significance. It demonstrated a number of things. One, that the board of education and the mayor — the authorities in Chicago Public Schools — do not care about black children and would be willing to allow black parents to starve themselves before they act to provide them with a quality education. It’s a deep reflection of the racism underlying all of these neoliberal policies.

Most importantly, it’s a reflection of the determination of parents and grandparents in that community to persist in struggling for an equitable, quality education for their children, and for some community control over the education their children should have. The Dyett struggle is against privatization, but I think it’s more than that. It’s about racial justice and self-determination.

The hunger strike really exposed the racism behind these policies. And the community’s proposal for a High School of Global Leadership and Green Technology was not simply a demand to reopen Dyett High School. It was really a proposal for the kinds of schools our children deserve, a school that embodied the vision of the community.

The Dyett plan was far-sighted and grounded in educational research. There were strong partnerships with the Chicago Botanical Gardens, Teachers for Social Justice, UIC College of Education, the DuSable Museum of African-American History, and others. And it really was a vision of the kind of school that the parents in Bronzeville wanted and was inspirational for the campaign that’s going on right now for fifty sustainable community schools.

The Dyett campaign over five years, culminating in the hunger strike, exemplifies that people in Chicago are not simply resisting CPS’s policies, they actually have their own proposals for how to transform public education, particularly in black and brown communities.

The courage of the parents, and the fact that they actually forced CPS to reopen a school that it had closed — which is, as far as I know, the only time that has ever happened — is a real victory.

It has been inspirational for people around the country and has more tightly linked and clarified the relationship between the privatization agenda and the racist agenda behind these policies.

It really clarified the inequities in Chicago Public Schools as a whole. At the very time parents had to go on a hunger strike to get a school reopened, CPS was planning to open a second, selective-enrollment high school in the Gold Coast area, just three blocks from Walter Payton High School, an elite, selective-enrollment school.

So another Walter Payton, three blocks away. While parents in Bronzeville had to go on a thirty-four-day hunger strike to get one open-enrollment neighborhood school in their community. Dyett was the last open-enrollment, neighborhood school in Bronzeville.

That tells you a lot about the landscape of education in Chicago.