I honored Chris Weaver, a charter school teacher in North Carolina who spoke out against the governor and legislature’s wanton attacks on public schools. He even rejected his local paper’s effort to honor him. Here he responds to those who wrote letters about his actions.

Dear Diane & Readers,

Terry Kalb, my NY friend who sent my newspaper letter to Diane, sent me the link, and it’s the first time I’ve visited the blog (but not the last). Thank you Diane for the “honor roll” honor, and no, I surely don’t reject it. Thanks also for the most enheartening comments from readers. Here are a few follow-up thoughts:

For Joanna Best: I am with you 100% on the “best teacher” category in the “retail popularity contest” Best-Of issue of our news weekly. It does more harm than good, and I hope my letter helped folks to think a little more deeply.

For Michael Fiorillo: I appreciate your comment as well. As a teacher who has taught for eight years in district public schools in two states and for seven years in my current charter school, here is my take on the issue you raise, and some of my questions (I have many as-yet-unanswered questions–as all critical thinkers do):

I am opposed to any charter schools being managed by for-profit corporations.

I know that charter school legislation is used for political purposes as a “stepping stone” toward the privatization and dismantling of public education, and I am opposed to all such purposes.

I do consider the charter school where I work to be a public school. (I am open to different views.) We serve any student and family who enters our doors. We abide by strict fair-lottery rules. We are governed by a board elected by our public community. All board meetings are open and all financial and policy decisions are transparent. We do not serve an economically privileged student body.

I will share some of the ways that our school falls short as a public school. One of the “arguments” in favor of public charter schools is that they can serve as laboratories of innovation, which can develop and share best practices with the public school community. My school IS a laboratory of innovation, but we have, as of yet, been inadequate in our efforts to share best practices. The idea of sharing best practices is an ineffective idea if there are no structures in place to facilitate that sharing. I am working on developing structures for this in my own school and hopefully beyond, but my sense is that on the whole, charter schools focus on the needs of their own school communities (like independent schools do) and do not engage in all kinds of essential possible actions that could place them in true solidarity with the public school community (where I want to be). My school also, like most charter schools, does not offer breakfasts, lunches, or transportation to our students, rendering us inaccessible to many of the families in our city in the greatest need.

So why do I teach in a charter school? At the moment, I choose this setting because I believe in school self-governance. I believe in local school control of curriculum and staffing decisions. At heart, more important than any other factor in my teaching life, I am committed to child-centered education, which to me is holistic, hands-on, community-centered, and honoring of teacher autonomy, creativity, innovation, and academic freedom. Public charter schools CAN be, and SOMETIMES are, places where teachers are free to develop curriculum that is highly responsive to the gifts and needs of our students. District public school CAN be, and SOMETIMES are, the same.

When I taught in district schools, I did not teach any differently than I do now, but I was out on the experiential lunatic fringe among teachers, and I found myself bending and breaking more rules in order to meet my students’ (and my own) needs than I do in my current position. My school is full of innovative teachers, and if a rule or requirement is not right or does not make sense, we can take our ideas and concerns to our own administrators or board of directors and propose a change, and these folks have the authority to make many of these changes, and they listen to us (and when they don’t, we can become very persuasive)..

A specific example is that here in NC, the new state budget basically mandates the firing of all assistant teachers in 2nd and 3rd grades in public elementary schools statewide. The tragedy is two-fold. The decision itself is criminal in its destructive impact, but the structural centralization that allows such a thing to happen is equally a part of the problem. In my school, we take the hit of the budget cuts, but we will never remove the second teacher that we have in our primary grades, because the students need these teachers and we have the local autonomy to preserve the positions and make our cuts elsewhere.

I am interested in the movements in public schools and districts that are moving public education more in this direction of local autonomy.

At this point in my career, as I am about to turn 50, I am raising my head and looking around. In many ways I have been teaching in a “utopian bubble,” and I am satisfied and excited to break the bubble from the inside and not to be so self-centered and school-centered. To me, the most important best practices right now are process innovations and structural innovations that allow large organizations to be more decentralized and self-organizing. There is a lot of critical excellent work to be done in this arena. I have more thoughts about that of course, but I’ll save it for another time.

For now, I send my gratitude out to Diane and to the readers of this blog. I call on my fellow public school teachers to take heart, and keep our attention fully on the present needs of our students (holistically, not just academically), while simultaneously mobilizing to defuse the wave of misguided political stupidity as it crashes through our communities. This ignorance, like all ignorance, is not as mighty as it appears. We know about teaching and learning, a knowledge that is true, ancient, and unshakable. Now is the time to speak up, act as collectives, and, as I wrote in my letter to the paper, allow our unity and our wisdom to be self-evident. Every small step matters.

With Respect,

Chris Weaver, Asheville, NC