Mark Naison, a co-founder of the Badass Teachers Association, explains how he became an education activist. He was trained as a historian, and he became increasingly interested in recovering the history of African-Americans in the Bronx. He worked in many schools and saw the power of community history, how it awakened students’ interest in study and research and digging deeper. But along came No Child Left Behind, and the community studies were left behind. Then came the Race to the Top, and he saw the pressure building in every school to focus only on testing, nothing else. He saw what was happening to students and to teachers. He saw the transformation of the schools, and it was awful.
And he knew he had to do whatever he could to reverse these terrible trends. And he has. Read his moving story. And do what you can to join with Mark, join with your friends, try to set our education system right again for children and for learning.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Worth reading for this observation alone:
“Worse yet, the pressures had been transferred to their students. All over the Bronx, I was hearing, recess and after schools programs were being used for test prep rather than exercise and play because everyone was terrified by the consequences if test scores went down.”
Doing that anywhere approaches the definition of child abuse- doing it in the borough with the highest child obesity rates in the nation approaches cruel and unusual punishment.”
How is it that were a teacher to have individually done this in the past it would have been considered as Naison describes it the teacher rightly disciplined. Yet now it is becoming an accepted, even required practice”? There can be no double standard – abuse is abuse regardless of who initiates it.
Inspiring! Thank you for your work Mark Naison & BATS!
That is indeed a heartbreaking story, and those folks absolutely need a champion. I signed on to BAT’s early on but ended up leaving of my own accord, though, when the banning and the overarching control of the subject matter became very restrictive. I still don’t support RttT and not CCSS (especially the early grades, where I think it’s particularly damaging), but the iron fisted “Thou Shalt Not Discuss X” mandates discouraged me enough to leave before I could get banned – and countless others have indeed been banned from BAT’s, whether it’s for raising the point that not all standards are bad, not all TFA teachers are incompetent fly-by-nights, that sort of thing. 😦 Dialogues were being shut down and members banned before a discussion could even fully get underway in many cases.
While I totally get behind the movement as a whole, I don’t see anything good coming of this approach. As many members as BAT boasts, how many more might they have had fewer been driven away? Fortunately, my state group is more level-headed, and there are some offshoots where rational discussion regularly takes place, but unless someone specifically links a BAT post to the state group, I no longer have any idea what goes on over there. It’s my opinion that the firebrand activism that our kids need is competing with…. well, I’m not sure what it’s competing with, but the BAT’s aren’t what they started out to be. If reason ever returns, I would like to as well.
While I feel bad for some of the people who have been pushed out of BATS, the group remains a powerful force at the disposal of education activists around the nation. We have been called on to help teachers under attack in California, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana; have helped mobilize against Education Reform media events in New York and Alabama, have helped teachers and community groups fighting school closings in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City, and have been a major force in the push back against Common Core and uncontrolled testing throughout New York State. Those who are not familiar with these efforts should be wary of critiquing its strategies for creating an action group with a very politically diverse membership. All decisions, including deleting threads and removing people from the group, are made democratically by our group of 60 plus administrators, most of whom are public school teachers. We are strong, we are militant, we are growing and we are not going away. Join us on July 28 for our Teachers March on Washington!
There’s power in numbers. There’s more power in numbers of good lawyers. START FILING LAWSUITS.
The evidence that HARM is being done to children is incontrivertible
Sometimes we tend to judge rather than learn – this is part of human nature, and no one is immune from erring on one side or the other. So it is not inconceivable that your ‘slice’ of a BAT experience translated to you as domineering and you exited.
I recall the first time I learned of BATs, I was put-off by the name. I didn’t stick around. But then (I forget ‘why’) I went back and started reading. Posts connected with a deep passion within me that the BATs here shared – that teaching, for them, deeply MATTERS, that some PROFOUNDLY disturbing trends in education have gutted the heart and soul out of a profession I have loved since 1972.
In the short time I have known of BATs, the passion and urgency to make changes before it is entirely too late for this generation and the next, I have found COUNTLESS people via BATs whose deeper thoughts ring true with mine. Yes, this is all via Facebook (vs. actually sitting in and observing someone ‘at work’) … but ya know what??? – I have this deep-to-my-bones ‘felt sense’ about the BATs that they truly represent – at a fundamental level – the passion I sensed has been ‘cut away’ from the teaching profession in so many ways.
I have no clue as to what planning occurred prior to the launching of BadAss Teachers Association. To me, the longer I associate with BATS, the deeper I sense that this group is led by people who deeply know the tenets of good teaching and learning. I do NOT see this so readily within various teachers unions or professional organizations. Maybe this is because, as a ‘start up’ (vs. a bricks and mortar or NPO or ???) BATs has the fluidity to direct itself in a way that can’t be accomplished when you are a 150 year old teachers union or an already established ‘professional organization’. To me, BATs represents an approach that IS the future.
Within BATs, I have found my own ‘niche’ of people who share my own specific concerns. This is priceless! We are fast becoming a team with a real agenda. We already have some identified unique, concrete ways in which our own experiences lead us to positive, meaningful change in education. In decades of being a union member, I never sensed this power …
I would suggest that you be curious rather than judgmental. Most likely, if you are passionate about education issues, you will find similar kindred spirits. In BATs as in life, there will be disagreement about things … ask questions that evoke curiosity rather than blame and you will probably gain a better sense of what makes BATs such .a critically relevant group here in America today.
I have taught since 1972 … to me, Mark Naison and the BadAss Teachers Association encapsulates the potential we as teachers have to make schools a place where children sense they fundamentally matter as individuals and not as mere commodities for employment.
I certainly have no issue with the name, don’t find it off-putting in the least. And there’s no need to tell me to approach it with curiosity; I was a member for several weeks, even invited a number of other teachers to join, and I participated in a number of the BAT actions as well.
Where I took issue was when certain topics were expressly forbidden to be discussed. Any former TFA corps members who weren’t completely anti-TFA were being told off, for example, closing down any discussions that might include former members who not only had positive experiences as corps members, enough to remain in the classroom and continued on as teachers and now had something to add to the discussion. People WERE asking questions to evoke curiosity and finding blame in return. 😦 People DID want to add to the movement and many were cut off at the knees for daring to suggest that not all the standards were bad, that not all TFA corps members were dilettantes, things like that – that’s when I left.
I’m not “critiquing” the group, Mark. I’m relating my own experiences in it. And hearing from other former BATs, my experience was hardly the most negative out there. I was behind you all the way, I stuck up for the name, for the movement, until people started to be told what they would not be permitted to discuss. If things have changed, that’s wonderful, but I’m not in a hurry to try again. I’ve spent too much time getting rapped on the knuckles for the things I say against RttT and CCSS, and I have a sad feeling that it would only be a matter of time till I wasn’t welcome in what I originally thought was a like-minded group either. We were all happy to be able to speak out, but only when we all had the same things to say. Once we weren’t toeing the Party Line, it was degenerating into one more place where we could not in fact speak our minds.
As for joining Right and Left political forces, I am as yet unable to truly say that the enemy of my enemy is my friend; if BAT has found a way to make it work, wonderful, but there was definitely…. tension from the two sides at the time of my departure, and there continues to be in many other anti-CCSS groups.
I sincerely wish you well in your efforts, and I am supportive of my state BAT group and will remain so, and enjoy the cameraderie of the offshoot group to which I also belong. But I can no longer wholeheartedly commend the group to colleagues who have already found themselves in hot water in their own professional situations. The old maxim about a frying pan and a fire comes to mind, and having spent too much time in the professional frying pan already, I didn’t relish the increasing heat of the fire.
I am a longtime member of BAT and also one of the moderators of the page. Yes, many people have either left of their own accord or been banned for things such as supporting CCSS, TFA or Charter Schools. People have also been banned for teacher, parent or student bashing etc. I know we have lost some dedicated hard working teachers because of this policy, however, BAT was never meant to be a debate club. We have tried to make the page a teacher activist page, that fights against the deformers and pressures politicians and news media. We BAT mods do not want divisive discussions where people who act as trolls try to keep us off topic and deflect from our stated goals. The group is obviously not for everybody, by their choice or ours. The people who have stayed, understand what we are trying to do, and identify with the group. People proudly call themselves BATs, as I myself do. We have made mistakes, things have not always been pretty, and they will most certainly get uglier before this uprising against corporate reform is over. No one promised us a rose garden. I am a BadAss Teacher, I am so glad this group was started. I have become educated and empowered. We support and encourage teachers and parents. We have mobilized against so, so many deformers. BATs rule. But no, we are not there to take nonsense, we are there to fight back. And we are not going anywhere. 5 shows a day! Michael Flanagan, Ed.D, NYC teacher, parent and hardcore BAT.
“The educator has the duty of not being neutral.”
-Paulo Freire
Thank you, Mark and Diane, for being such wonderful voices against educational deform!
You rock my BAT socks!
~Amelia the BAT
I stopped by another teacher’s room the other day to bring a student to class I’d been helping between classes. My BAT colleague welcomed us, and one of the students called out “Mrs. S, I like your Batman lanyard!” We BATs looked at each other and giggled a little. BAT has given us a sense of fraternity and mutual support that we sorely need in these trying times. Many thanks to Mark for making me and many of the people I teach with rediscover our inner badass, and the courage to do what’s right for our students, not what’s mandated. Find your teacher voice, join us.