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Progressive Social Movements and Educational Equity Jean Anyon City University of New York

This article places policy development in the context of progressive social movements. It describes how social movements develop, and delineates some of the accomplishments of such contestation in U.S. history as well as in changes of education policy. The article closes by considering the possibilities and challenges of current social movement building efforts for equity in U.S. education policies.

Keywords: social movements; equity; community organizing; education policy

This article argues that progressive social movements have been—andcontinue to constitute—an important impetus for more equitable educa- tion in the United States. To build my case, I discuss social movements as part and parcel of the process of change in a democracy; I describe how social movements develop and delineate some of the accomplishments of progressive movements in U.S. history generally as well as specifically in education. The article ends by considering the possibilities and challenges of current social movement building efforts.

Social Movements

A social movement connects what may feel like personal, individual exclusion or subordination to social structure and political causes. Social movements also provide a way of connecting with other individuals and groups across neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states to forge collective solutions to social problems. They offer a forum for working together to develop community power and to collaborate with others in making funda- mental shifts in the political and social arrangements that have caused inequities, exclusions, and subordination. Thus, social movements are not symptoms of a “dysfunctional” political system, as some earlier scholars

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argued (e.g., Neil Smelser, 1962). Rather, in a healthy democracy, social movements are part and parcel of the process of change.

The concept of a social movement does not apply just to workers in struggle for unions and higher wages. The concept applies to all people and groups struggling for what political philosopher Nancy Fraser (2000) calls recognition or redistribution—for racial rights, economic justice, women’s reproductive freedom, or educational opportunities. Social movements can also strive for negative goals like ending unpopular wars or seemingly unwarranted invasion of other countries.

There have of course been movements on the political Right (e.g., the “Right to Life” movement). But this chapter concerns progressive social movements and what those involved in school reform and public engagement can learn from them (to garner lessons from the Right; see Apple, 2006).1

A comprehensive definition of social movements, summarizing several decades of sociological research, is as follows: We have a social movement in process when individuals and organizations are involved in “collective conflictual relations with clearly identified opponents” (Della Porta & Diani, 2006, p. 20). The conflict involves “an oppositional relationship between actors who seek control of the same stake—be it political, economic or cul- tural power—and in the process make . . . claims on each other which, if real- ized, would damage the interests of the other actors” (Tilly, 1978, as cited in Della Porta & Diani, 2006, p. 21). Thus, the conflict can be cultural and/or political-economic. The conflict typically has as a goal to promote or oppose social change. In a social movement, the actors engaged in the collective action are linked by dense informal networks of organizations and individu- als. They share a collective identity or sense of shared mission. The networks and interactions between groups and members yield social and cultural capital, which are important to bridging locales, groups, and opportunities, and provide the skills involved in planning, mobilizing, and executing actions and campaigns. People involved in a social movement typically feel a collec- tive identity. They feel connected by a common purpose and share commit- ment to a cause; they feel linked or at least compatible with a broader collective mobilization (Della Porta & Diani, 2006; Touraine, 1981).

It is important to note that one organization, no matter how large, does not make a movement. The dense and sometimes overlapping networks that constitute a social movement are made up of multiple organizations, all of which are in pursuit of a common goal (Della Porta & Diani, 2006; see also Tilly, 2004; Touraine, 1981).

Nor are social movements isolated protest events or short-lived tempo- rary coalitions that form around an issue. They involve episodes of action

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that are perceived as components of longer lasting action, over time— typically multiple years of effort. Social movements use various forms of protest against the specified targets and may also involve cultural expres- sions of belief as in group singing and the production of art and music that contain a social message.

In sum, when people feel excluded or subordinated, when people face governments or other groups whose actions they believe are unjust, and when they belong to networks or organizations that share goals and collab- orate over long periods of time to attempt to increase equity through protest and sustained political and social contention against the targeted groups, they are engaged in a social movement, or social movement building.

Social Movements and Other Forms of Advocacy

In distinction from other forms of public advocacy for school reform, social movements generally try to transform, rather than work within, the political system. These other forms of public advocacy more commonly aim less fundamentally at specific rights within the existing political and social structures. Community organizing, for example, although occasionally aimed at fundamental social change, is more typically geared toward specific local issue campaigns. Thus, the Public Education Network is focused on school improvement in low-income districts. Housing groups are focused on the availability of affordable homes and apartments, and living wage campaigns focus on raising the minimum wage. One could argue that these groups seek fundamental changes to the social order, and indeed, I have argued before (Anyon, 2005) and will argue later here that they may in some cases constitute “small social movements.” But when compared, say, to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s or the Labor Movement of the 1930s, the goals of these efforts seem less tailored to effect fundamental political and economic changes than to solve community problems.

Alliance building is another form of public advocacy, and here again most alliances, when there is not a national social movement that has col- lected everybody in a sweep toward one goal, are aimed typically at local or metro area goals like job formation, public transportation access, or housing reform. I describe several metro area alliances below and argue that even though they may not be pursuing fundamental political or economic change, they do offer a model of cross-sector collaboration that public engagement efforts in education might emulate.

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Most successful social movements are national in scope. As the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement suggest, full-blown social movements engage the whole nation. This national scope and agenda are part of what gives the movements power to demand fundamental political or economic change. One of the important aspects sociologists identify in national movements is the existence of umbrella organizations (e.g., Morris, 1984). Umbrella groups provide coherence and organization to the many smaller groups agitating for change. Morris (1984) argues, for example, that without groups like Southern Christian Leadership Committee (SCLC) in the South, the Civil Rights Movement might have been rent by disagree- ments over agenda and strategy.

Finally, social movements differ from other forms of public advocacy like community organizing or creating networks and alliances in that when movements form and grow they usually emerge from and build on these other forms of activity. The Civil Rights Movement again provides an example. As Black churches in the South began to publicly confront Jim Crow segregation, the networks among women and families in congrega- tions became vital links between communities; these networks allowed news of activities to spread and encouraged participation in protest. Similarly, the alliances that arose between Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SCLC, Congress on Racial Equality, and other Civil Rights organizations were important spurs to growth of regional and then national planning.

Accomplishments of Social Movements

Progressive social movements have not always been successful (as the aborted immigrants’ rights movement of the early 21st century attests), but throughout U.S. history, social movements from the political Left (the focus of this article) have often had profound results. They have led to passage of a number of social policies that have increased the rights of working people, women, and minorities (e.g., the Populist Movement of the late 1800s, Socialist Movement of the early 1900s, the 1930s Labor Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and both women’s movements of the 20th century). These social movements led to important policy accommodations on the part of governments and social institutions.

Indeed, when social movements successfully apply national pressure, they often result in legal or constitutional changes that increase the pool of persons who can participate in U.S. democratic institutions.

The 20-yearlong women’s movement that culminated in women’s right to vote in 1920 is a case in point. This women’s movement produced national

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pressure that culminated in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified on August 18, 1920.

The Civil Rights Movement, of course, produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which applied a nationwide prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on the use of literacy tests common in the South. Enforced, this act allowed Black citizens to vote across the United States—most for the first time.

The Labor Movement as well produced legislation in the 1930s that made deep changes to the U.S. economic system; these transformations limited business owners’ power over workers and provided rights to workers that were new—including the legal right of unions to organize and bargain, an 8-hour limit to the legal work day, social security, and unemployment insurance among others. It is doubtful that the political and economic elites who governed would have passed such legislation limiting business owners’ rights over workers without the pressure of the social movements of the 1930s.

Social movements can sometimes change education, as well—as I will later describe in detail. Although in many ways education remains the same as in 1900, there have been significant progressive changes wrought by the concerted protest of social movements: Immigrant and labor organizations’ struggles for education in the late 19th and early 19th centuries yielded adult worker education and Catholic schools for children; the Civil Rights Movement led to national Head Start programs as well as increased recog- nition and educational opportunities nationwide; Latino struggles produced Bilingual education; the 1970s women’s movement yielded curricular change as well as increased entitlements in schools and districts; disabilities organizing also has prompted federal protections and entitlements. Low- income parents in urban neighborhoods are today organizing for better schools, and if their efforts continue and coalesce, they could potentially build a social movement for educational civil rights. Groups like Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) are in the forefront of this struggle. I will describe these groups later in this article.

There are many groups organizing for educational justice today (in New York City, more than 100 grassroots groups are active). For the most part, however, each group operates independently of the others; there is little if any cross-state or national collaboration. An important lesson history teaches is that no matter how active single actors or groups are in their struggle against injustice and no matter what other methods we use to promote equi- table education policies (e.g., research and scholarship, or collaboration

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with school principals, districts, and state legislatures), it typically occurs that efforts are strengthened if we make the long-term alliances and build the power of a social movement.

The Development of Social Movements

How do social movements form, and what catapults them to national attention at certain historical moments? Community and other grassroots organizers work to transform subordinated or excluded people’s fear into anger, moral indignation, and action directed at the system. Organizers therefore provide information that demonstrates ways the system contributes to personal difficulties. For people to take action against political or social oppression, they must see systematic causes of their subordination. To develop systemic analyses of subordination that accounts for people’s oppres- sion, organizers discuss local issues by connecting personal and neighbor- hood problems to regional, national, and sometimes global processes and powerful groups (Della Porta & Diani, 2006).

Moreover, for people to take action, they typically must believe that they have the power to bring about change (Piven & Cloward, 1977). To build this confidence, movement organizers work to provide fledging groups with small “wins.” To attract members, organizers may also demonstrate to recruits that participation in social movement organizations exhibits some of the deepest pleasures of life—a sense of community and connectedness, and meaning (Jasper, 1997).

Participation in movements is facilitated by a variety of personal and social resources—sufficient income and time to attend meetings and protests, available organizations and alliances to join, ties to these networks, and effective leadership, among other resources (Diani & McAdam, 2003; McAdam, 1982).

The prevailing cultural context may also influence participation in move- ments. If critical public discourses, or artistic works such as novels, on the topic of concern are available in the media—or if there is critical scholarship that reaches people in communities—then ideas in support of change may circulate in discussion and facilitate dissent and participation.

The political environment sometimes affects whether people join move- ments and may contribute to the form and intensity of collective action. For example, electoral instability in a country may encourage dissent and protest. Political opportunities such as the availability of influential allies, the tolerance for protest among elites, and the openness of the political

system may also facilitate social movement building (see McAdam, 1982; McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001; Tarrow, 1998). In sum, sympathetic schol- arly observers often see the “zeitgeist” as important to whether and when movements build and grow.

However, as I argued in a recent book (Anyon, 2005), a typically unac- knowledged factor influencing the ascendance of social movements is the decades of prior preparation, or what Civil Rights Movement activist Ella Baker called “spadework.” For example, Blacks in the South had been resisting, demonstrating, and working the courts for five decades before the movement gained national notice in the 1950s. The development over the years of activist networks, organizations, and sympathetic legal decisions laid the foundation for the success of the nationally catalyzing Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955.

Moreover, an open political system, an acceptance of protest by political elites, is not always necessary for movements to build or “erupt.” Movements sometimes grow rapidly and come to flower during decades of political conservatism and extreme repression. The decade in which the American Civil Rights Movement burst onto the national scene in the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a decade of virulent McCarthyism and conservative dominance in politics. Moreover, the five previous decades of organizing and building by community and labor organizers in the South took place in an exceedingly repressive environment regarding racial rights (see Kelly, 1990).

Of importance to public engagement efforts today may be that the political conservatism and federal attitude toward dissent in the 1950s was not terribly different from the zeitgeist of the current era, as the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts and the resulting abrogation of civil liberties to fight a “War on Terror” suggest. But there may be reason for optimism: The last quarter century of community organizing for school reform may have prepared the ground for substantial change. Ant the year 2000 brought with it 25 years of legal battles at the state level to remove urban educational inequities. More than 70% of these court cases have been successful, and many new state mandates have been written by the courts; more than a few await the public political pressure that might force full funding. These cases and the years of education organizing that are behind us and that continue may provide the legitimation and leverage needed for national movement building.

With collaboration, a joint vision, and a fortuitous catalyst, public engagement efforts like education organizing and alliance building could develop into a national social movement. What would facilitate this growth is that education reformers engage with the public conversations and actions that have emerged in low-income communities around issues that

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are intimately related to education achievement but have not been part of most education reform efforts to date—struggles for living wages, decent jobs, health care and housing, and immigrant rights (see Anyon, 2005, for suggestions). If education activists were to collaborate with groups already working in these social and economic arenas, we could conceivably think of our activity as social movement building: the development of a social movement for educational and economic justice.

Past Impacts of Social Movements on Educational Equity

Although not the only source of equity—upper class reformers, business groups, and politicians have at times advocated successfully for new educa- tional resources or opportunities—progressive social movements have made substantial gains in increasing educational equity in America. Although we do not usually think of social movements as characterizing U.S. educational history in the early/mid-19th century, one can document substantial pressure from below that contributed to important educational change during those years.

The 19th Century

Horace Mann and his colleagues were not the only force pressing for the establishment of common schools in America in the 19th century. Historian Joel Spring (2008) points out that

[t]raditional labor history . . . stresses the key role of working men’s parties in the late 1820s and 30s in fighting for common school reforms. This interpre- tation places the American worker at the forefront of the battle for common schools. Of particular importance . . . is the opposition of workers to the . . . charity schools, which they felt reinforced social-class distinctions. (p. 100)

Active in the northeastern states of the United States, the Workingmen’s Parties believed that “kept in ignorance, workers could be deprived of their rights, cheated in their daily business, and ‘gulled and deceived’ by . . . ‘par- asitic politicians,’ ‘greedy bank directors,’ and ‘heartless manufacturers’” (Russell, 1981, as cited in Spring, 2008, p. 100). These early union members believed that knowledge was power: Knowledge, to be acquired in schools available to everyone, was essential to protect workers’ rights in the economic system.

Irish Catholics also fought against the public schools they faced. Between 1850 and 1900, Irish church officials and Catholic parishioners fought tenaciously against the public schools created by upper class reformers. Catholics rebelled against the Protestantism and anti-Catholic sentiment expressed in reading materials and personnel of the public schools. By 1900, they had established a wide network of Catholic schools for their children (Ravitch, 2000; Spring, 2008). In addition to providing opportuni- ties for Irish families around the turn of the 20th century, the establishment of a system of Catholic Schools in America provided opportunities later for children of color in cities as an alternative to public schools deemed deficient by parents. The existence of a system of religious schools had ramifications as well on federal education policy that continues to this day.

Foreshadowing later Civil Rights struggles, in the 1820s Boston’s African American community, led by Black Abolitionist David Walker, began a 30-year fight against segregated public schools in that city. Their contestation ulti- mately led to a formal decision by the Massachusetts governor to end legal segregation in the state. In September 1855, the Boston public schools were legally integrated “without any violent hostilities” (Spring, 2008, p. 121). As we are aware, there would be more struggle necessary in the next century.

The 20th Century

During the Progressive Era, labor organizations, settlement house reformers, and immigrant families all put pressure on public school admin- istrators to respond to the needs of the immigrant working-class population. Although there was a substantial effort in these reforms to “Americanize” newcomers, the schools were also responding to the pressures of the working- class majority in cities like New York. Schools as social centers with services enjoyed by many thousands of students and immigrant adults were the result; the school as a social center soon developed throughout the country at the turn of the 20th century (Spring, 2008).

The movement to establish teachers’ unions radically changed the politics of U.S. public education and increased equity for the teaching force. Unionization of teachers increased their salaries and removed the most egregious forms of administrative control over their employment.

Most teachers associations in the early part of the 20th century were politically conservative. But teacher organizations in those years in New York and Chicago had a radical ideology and developed out of the Labor Movement (in the case of Chicago, there were close ties to the early women’s move- ment as well). The teacher federations in both cities fought openly with

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conservative business interests and school administrators (Spring, 2008). Out of these struggles—and in concert with less radical pressures exerted by the more cautious teachers organizations—policies regulating the teach- ing force were instituted that made teachers salaries and working conditions considerably more equitable than they had been.

The 20th century Civil Rights Movement, of course, achieved many educational victories for minorities. Although the Brown decisions in the 1950s did not initially bring about education integration in the South, they did renew and strengthen activist organizing toward that end, and ultimately, the decision delegitimated separate but equal accommodations in the civil sphere. As a consequence of the national social movement for political rights of Black Americans, this decision and others following it produced vastly increased opportunities in education for people of color—in educa- tional admissions, the availability of administrative positions, K-16 curricu- lum offerings, expanded programs for students of color in public school, and in federal, state, and local policies and programs that supported these and other advances.2

The Head Start program, for instance, was a product of pressure from the Civil Rights Movement. Black and White Civil Rights workers, most of whom were involved in the 1960s in building Freedom Schools and the 1964 “Freedom Summer” (when scores of Northern college students went South to assist in voter registration drives), developed a program in rural Mississippi that provided education and services for poor children. Funded with War on Poverty money, the centers were staffed by Civil Rights activists and local people. After 2 years, in 1966, southern White politicians in Congress succeeded in defunding these early Head Start centers in Mississippi. With money from wealthy Northern supporters, activists and families took two busloads of preschool children to Washington in protest.

There, with their teachers and teacher’s aides, they would show what Head Start in Mississippi was all about. “A romper lobby from Mississippi petitioned Congress today for a redress of grievances,” was The New York Times’ lead in its February 12 story on what others were calling “the children’s crusade.” Forty-eight Black children and their teachers turned the hearing room of the House Education and Labor Committee into a kinder- garten, complete with pictures and children dragging “quacking Donald Ducks across the floor” (Dittmer, 1994, pp. 374-375).

Two weeks later, the Office of Economic Opportunity awarded the group a grant to continue operations. Head Start moved to center stage in the Johnson administration’s efforts to support the education of low-income

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minorities and has remained a major source of opportunity for the educa- tion of young low-income children.

The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s also was responsible for increased opportunities in education, specifically for female students. A confluence of Civil Rights and feminist organizing during these decades yielded not only laws and programs to protect and support people of color but women as well. What follows is from a 1997 report by Bernice Sandler, whose activism was central to the passage of Title IX, which outlaws and provides penalties for discrimination against women in educational institu- tions from elementary through university settings.

“The year was 1969. I had been teaching part-time at the University of Maryland for several years during the time I worked on my doctorate and shortly after I finished it. There were seven openings in the department, and I had just asked a faculty member, a friend of mine, why I was not even con- sidered for any of the openings. It was not my qualifications; they were excel- lent. “But let’s face it,” he said. “You come on too strong for a woman.”

Was this really a question of my being “too strong”? After all, there were many strong men in the department. In the next few months, I had two more similar rejections. A research executive who interviewed me for a position spent nearly an hour explaining to me why he wouldn’t hire women because they stayed at home when their children were sick. (That my children were in high school was deemed irrelevant.) Then, an employment agency counselor looked at my resume and told me that I was “not really a professional” but “just a housewife who went back to school.”3

But this was 1969. Although sex discrimination was indeed illegal in certain circumstances, I quickly discovered that none of the laws prohibit- ing discrimination covered sex discrimination in education.

I began to do research on the status of women and the law, and read a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which examined the impact of antidiscrimination laws on race discrimination. The report described a presidential Executive Order prohibiting federal contractors from discrimi- nation in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, and national ori- gin. There was a footnote, and being an academic, I quickly turned to the back of the report to read it. It stated that Executive Order 11246 had been amended by President Johnson, effective October 13, 1968, to include discrimination based on sex. This was what I needed!”

Sander then describes the research and organizing she and women all around the country took part in to advocate for a law that would eliminate sex discrimination in educational institutions. Several years later, they suc- ceeded in arranging 7 days of Congressional hearings.

On June 23, 1972, 2 years after the hearings, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was passed by the Congress and on July 1 was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.

The historic passage of Title IX was hardly noticed (by the press). I remember only one or two sentences in the Washington papers.

But Title IX would have a huge impact on education. It protects students, faculty, and staff in federally funded education programs at all levels. Title IX also applies to programs and activities affiliated with schools that receive federal funds (such as internships or School-to-Work programs) and to feder- ally funded education programs run by other entities, such as correctional facilities, health care entities, unions, and businesses. The act covers admis- sions, recruitment, educational programs and activities, course offerings and access, counseling, financial aid, employment assistance, facilities and housing, health and insurance benefits and services, scholarships, and athletics. It also protects from discrimination against marital and parental status. Both male and female students are protected from harassment regardless of who is committing the harassing behavior.

A further example of increases in opportunities and resources resulting from social movement pressure is the right to learn and be taught in one’s native language. Federal legislation creating bilingual programs was imple- mented in most parts of the nation originally as a result of organizing by Puerto Ricans in New York City and Chinese residents of San Francisco (Miguel & Miguel, 2004).

Tony De Jesús and Madeline Pérez (in press) describe the first legal decree that resulted in bilingual education. During the late 1950s and 1960s in New York City, Puerto Ricans, aided by sympathetic African Americans and Whites, continually protested at the Board of Education and met with and petitioned the Board for the establishment of programs to support the education of what were by the 1960s 80,000 Puerto Rican students in New York City schools. Frustrated, ASPIRA (in conjunction with United Bronx Parents, Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and other Puerto Rican organizations) in 1972 sued the Board for bilingual education programs. ASPIRA activists wrote that

[we] chose to pursue the goal of establishing bilingual education for several reasons, among them the need for the Puerto Rican community to demon- strate that it was capable of defining policy solutions for the needs of its children. Luis Nieves, director of ASPIRA during the time of the lawsuit, described the organizations decision to pursue bilingual education services not necessarily as a sound philosophy of teaching but “rather as a tool for

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political organization; as a means of preserving community identity, maintain- ing children in neighborhood schools, and reinforcing language and culture; and a route for Puerto Ricans to access jobs and the benefits of the education system.” While these political goals were clear, [activist] Isaura Santiago identified three structural and instructional goals that ASPIRA also sought to obtain through the lawsuit. These included the provision of special education programs for Limited English Proficient (LEP) students, compensatory services for bilingual students as opposed to “sink or swim” teaching prac- tices, and a guarantee that Puerto Rican parents could choose maintenance bilingual education for their children. (De Jesús & Pérez, in press)

Dejesus and Pérez point out that

the result of the case was a court-monitored consent decree, a binding legal agreement between ASPIRA and the Board of Education that established a transitional bilingual education program in New York City’s schools. . . . [T]he Consent decree became a model nationwide and . . . the case was sig- nificant because it involved the largest school system in the country as well as the largest plaintiff group at the time (over 80,000 Puerto Rican students were potentially affected).

Two years before the ASPIRA suit, the Supreme Court had held—in a case brought by Chinese families in San Francisco—that the failure to have instruction in one’s native language was a violation of the right to an equal education:

The Lau v. Nichols case was a major victory for bilingual education nation- ally, upholding bilingual cases throughout the country. It provided leverage for the plaintiffs in ASPIRA v. Board of Education to enter into a Consent decree with New York City as its corporation council realized that a new legal precedent had been established recognizing the language rights of English language learners. (De Jesús & Pérez, in press)

We can see that pressure from below has been a force for educational equity in the United States for a long period of time. The struggle continues.

Recent Organizing for Educational Equity

The past 15 years have witnessed the appearance and rapid growth across the nation of community organizing specifically for school reform, or education organizing. This type of advocacy involves the actions of parents and other community residents to change neighborhood schools

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through an “intentional building of power” (Mediratta, Fruchter, and Lewis, 2002, p. 5). Education organizing aims to create social capital in commu- nities and to encourage parents and other residents to use their collective strength to force system change. Education organizing attempts to build leadership in parents by providing skill training, mentoring, and opportunity for public actions. Parents conduct community and school surveys, speak at rallies, mobilize other parents and community residents, and plan and enact campaigns aimed at school and district personnel and practices.

Because education organizing gives parents a base outside of school— typically in alliance with other community groups—parents are not depen- dent on school personnel for approval or legitimacy. When successful, parent organizing in poor communities yields the clout that parents create among themselves in affluent suburbs—where, with their skills and eco- nomic and political influence, they closely monitor the actions of district educators and politicians.

Several studies of parent organizing groups in low-income neighborhoods around the country document their rapid increase in number and influence, especially since the early 1990s (Mediratta et al., 2002).4 Moreover, 80% of 66 parent organizing groups studied by the Collaborative Communications Group are working not only in local neighborhoods but also in regional or state coalitions formed to improve district or state education policy. One such group is Mississippi-based Southern Echo, which has grassroots com- munity organizations in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, and West Virginia.

Southern Echo is an exemplar in several ways: It is regional, multigen- erational, and led by former Civil Rights and labor union activists. The group describes itself as a “leadership development, education and training orga- nization working to develop new, grassroots leadership in African American communities in Mississippi and the surrounding region.” Until 1992, their work focused on jobs, affordable housing, and rebuilding community orga- nizations. When they shifted their attention to education in the early 1990s, they began to organize around minority rights in education.

Southern Echo worked to create a force that could put pressure on state education officials. They provided training and technical assistance to help community groups carry out local campaigns, created residential training schools that lasted 2 days or more, and published training manuals and delivered hundreds of workshops in communities. One result of the work of Southern Echo and an affiliate, Mississippi Education Working Group, is that on October 23, 2002, the Mississippi State Board of Education agreed to fully comply with federal requirements for providing services to special

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education students—for the first time in 35 years. Echo leaders report that this was “the first time the community came together to force legislators, the state board of education, superintendents, special education administra- tors and curriculum coordinators to sit down together.”

A particularly impressive education organizing group in the North is the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) in Chicago—founded in the 1960s to work with the variety of problems local residents faced in their community. In 1988, when the Chicago School Reform Law created local schools councils, LSNA began to assist parents and community members work to improve their schools (Mediratta et al., 2002, p. 27). Among the accomplishments of the LSNA and parents are construction of seven new school buildings, evening community learning centers in six schools, mort- gage lender programs to offer incentives for educators to buy housing in the area, parent training as reading tutors and cultural mentors of classroom teachers, the establishment of bilingual lending libraries for parents, a new bilingual teacher-training program for neighborhood parents interested in becoming teachers, and collaboration with Chicago State University to offer courses at the neighborhood school at no cost to participants (Mediratta et al., 2002, p. 28). Mediratta et al. (2002) report that the exten- sive parent engagement and Lana’s other initiatives

have contributed to achievement gains at its member schools. In its six core schools, the percent of students reading at or above the national average in 1990 ranged from 10.9 percent to 22.5 percent. By 2000, the percent of students reading at or above national average ranged from 25.4 to 35.9 per- cent. (Mediratta et al., 2002, p. 28)

The final example of education organizing comes from South Bronx, New York. This group, Community Collaborative for District 9 (CC9), is an important instance of coalition building—between parents, community- based organizations (CBOs), the teachers union, and a university partner (Mediratta et al., 2002, p. 29). Organizational members include ACORN (which has been organizing parents in Districts 7, 9, and 12 for a decade), the New York City American Federation of Teachers, Citizens Advice Bureau (a local CBO providing educational services to residents for 30 years), High Bridge Community Life Center (a CBO providing job training and educational services since 1979), Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council (one of the largest Cobs in the South Bronx), parents from New Settlement Apartments, Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (which unites 10 neighborhood housing reform groups), and the Institute for

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Education and Social Policy (which conducts research and evaluation and provides other technical assistance to community organizing groups).

The CC9 coalition researched educational best practices to determine what reform it was going to pursue. It decided that stabilizing the teaching force was critical and that increased staff development and lead teachers at every grade level in the schools would give teachers skills to be more successful with their students and thus encourage them to remain in district classrooms. The coalition then organized residents, petitioned, demon- strated, and engaged in other direct action campaigns to obtain New York City Department of Education funding to pay for the reforms. At every step, neighborhood parents were in the forefront. In April 2004, New York City provided $1.6 million for lead teachers and staff development throughout the 10-school district. Since that time, CC9 has expanded to include collabo- rations across the city and has been engaged in efforts to improve middle school education system wide.

But these efforts have been confined to education. Although that is of course important for educational equity, it may be necessary to collaborate across social sectors, if we are to build the power to make changes that will be fundamental and sustainable.

Current Efforts to Build Social Movements Across Social Sectors

I have been arguing that progressive social movements are an important force for increasing equity in education, but it may be that to wring sus- tainable, systemic change from the education system, we will have to work with groups active on other fronts as well. Indeed, we would not have to build a collaborative social movement for economic and educational rights from scratch. Five separate but interrelated “small movements” have been growing rapidly since the late 1980s. They are renewed community orga- nizing for economic justice in cities across the country, an increasingly sophisticated movement of education and parent organizers in urban neigh- borhoods, an active group of progressive labor unions whose members are immigrant and other minority workers, a living wage movement in munici- palities across the country, and an emerging movement of organized inner-city youth. Here, I briefly describe two organizations active in the building of these small movements.

ACORN is the nation’s largest organization of low- and moderate-income families, with about 150,000 member families organized into 750 neigh- borhood chapters in 60 cities across the country (www.acorn.org). ACORN

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has been organizing low- and moderate-income communities for more than 30 years around such issues as affordable housing, public safety, predatory lending, living wage, community reinvestment, and most recently, education.

They are skilled at public demonstrations that call out parents and community residents in high-profile, media-covered events. The New York Times gave extensive coverage to ACORN’S successful 2002 effort to orga- nize Brooklyn, New York, parents to vote against privatization of a local school by Edison, Inc. ACORN and the parents then began pressuring the Board of Education to provide increased resources to the school. ACORN has recently launched ambitious political campaigns aimed at state legisla- tures, including a press for $10 million from the State of Illinois to increase parent engagement in Chicago school reform.

Since 1999, ACORN has been engaged in a major effort to protect urban neighborhoods from predatory lending by companies such as Wells Fargo. Predatory loans are made in concentrated volume in poor and minority neigh- borhoods, where better loans are not readily available. The loss of equity and foreclosure when the loans cannot be repaid at the high interest can devastate already fragile communities. ACORN has been campaigning to stop these abuses by promoting state legislation and federal regulation, putting pressure on particular offenders, and education and outreach in communities.

They have played a leading role in passing city and state legislation to restrict this practice, winning reforms from federal regulators, and waging an ongoing fight to block a bill in Congress aimed at preempting state and local protections. ACORN has organized thousands of victims of predatory loans to tell their stories and to get involved in efforts to keep others from encountering the same problems. These ACORN members have protested at lending company offices and the homes of CEOs, rallied outside legislative sessions, and testified in city, state, and federal hearings. At the same time, neighborhood actions have prevented foreclosures and forced lenders to repair the worst loans, empowering ACORN members to keep pushing for bigger victories (see www.acorn.org).

The other community organizing group with a strong national presence is the IAF. The IAF is an organization of organizations, primarily of churches in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in the Southwest, Chicago area, and the Northeast (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Paterson, New Jersey). IAF employs about 150 full-time professional organizers. There are about 60 IAF locals in 20 states and the District of Columbia. These groups are made up of nearly 3,000 congregations and associations and tens of thousands of ministers, pastors, some rabbis, women religious leaders, and state and metropolitan lay and civic leaders. Between 3 and 4 million Americans are members.

The IAF is descended from the organization of the same name started by Saul Links in 1940 in Chicago. The IAF does not organize around issues until it has organized a neighborhood. They begin by meeting with leaders and members of churches and associations that reflect the racial and religious diversity of a community. They are financially independent in that local leaders and institutions must commit their own dues money of $250,000 for organizing projects before they may pursue foundation money. The IAF trains neighborhood residents and leaders from local congregations in 10-day institutes that develop residents’ skills of organizing, writing petitions, negotiating with city hall, and public speaking. The “iron rule” of the IAF is “don’t do for others what they can do for themselves” (Shirley, 1997).

Member congregations of the IAF are organized in a federated regional and state structure that gives them power on a larger level without abandon- ing the priorities and ultimate authority of local organizations. State IAF net- works cannot dictate to local affiliates. State policy is developed by leaders from the local organizations, as they meet to build relationships, or social capital, bridging across localities and local racial groupings. With its feder- ated structure, the IAF overcomes the limitations of local organizing and yet does not become a national or regional organization that has no real ties to its local constituents.

The IAF used this strategy with success in Texas in its school reform efforts—the Alliance Schools program. By 1999, the program covered more than 100 schools and had pressured the state legislature to substantially increase the funding, resources, and technical expertise of each school. There has been improvement in test scores. However, the main success of the Alliance Initiative is the development of a culture of engagement, protest, and organization among the parents and communities in which the schools are located. IAF affiliates in Albuquerque, Tucson, Phoenix, and Omaha, in addi- tion to the rest of the Southwest, have joined the IAF in these efforts (Shirley, 1997). In Brooklyn and Bronx, New York City, IAF founded three public high schools; two are among the highest performing schools in the city.

If we could create alliances between these groups, others involved in education organizing, and additional groups active in the struggle for equity in wages, housing, jobs, and immigrant rights, we might be able to develop the force of a national social moment for education and economic equity.

Challenges of Social Movement Building in a Global Age

Some scholars argue that a major impact of globalization on social move- ment building is that advanced technology like cell phones, e-mail, and the

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World Wide Web make social movement building faster, easier, and capable of reaching larger numbers of people more quickly than in previous times. This connectivity, they argue, increases the success of mass movements. Technology analyst Howard Rheingold (2002), for example, in Smart Mobs argues that because the masses of people who protest are typically now con- nected by text messaging and other forms of communicative technology, they are replacing older forms of dense local networks and organizations in building social movements. He describes as evidence for the success of new, international social movement building the following three cases:

In November 1999, autonomous but connected groups of demonstrators protested the World Trade Organization meeting and used “swarming” strategies like cell phones, Web sites, and laptop computers to prevail in the “Battle of Seattle.” In September 2000, thousands of British citizens used cell phones, e-mail from laptop computers, and taxi CB radios to coordi- nate a national protest against sharp increases in gas prices; the technology allowed them to coordinate dispersed groups to block fuel delivery in vari- ous strategic areas. In the 1990s, “Critical Mass Moving Demonstrations” in San Francisco began (and have since spread to other cities) in which members would alert each other to directional strategies by e-mail and cell phones.

Sociologist Charles Tilly (2004) comments on Rheingold’s argument, pointing out that indeed, as compared with traditional forms of protest in preceding times, “internationally organized networks of activists, interna- tional nongovernmental organizations, and internationally visible financial institutions all figure more prominently in recent social movements, espe- cially in the richer and better connected parts of the world” (p. 98). In this global picture, public engagement in the form of social movement organiz- ing has indeed taken new directions, increasing the possibilities for inter- national collaborations.

Yet as Tilly (2004) also notes, international technology-based movements have not replaced the local, regional, and national forms of protest and orga- nization that prevailed during the 20th century. Moreover, he argues, the advent of communicative technologies can make the world more unequal:

To the extent that internationally coordinated social movements rely on elec- tronic communications, they will have a much easier time of it in rich countries than in poor ones. Second, electronic communications connect social movement activists selectively both across countries and within countries. Anyone whom a Norwegian organizer can reach electronically in, say, India or Kazakhstan already belongs to a very small communications elite. . . . [T]his important aspect of globalization is making the world more unequal. (p. 104)

Late 20th- and 21st-century globalization has indeed made the problems that public engagement efforts seek to solve no longer purely local. The causes of neighborhood problems like poorly funded education or lack of jobs often lie outside of the neighborhood and city in regional, state, and often national and global developments and policies. But although the problems people face may not be local, Tilly (2004) points out that most organizing is still local. The vast majority of organizing, he notes, still takes place in communities rather than on the global stage.

It may be that the important challenge of globalization for social movement building efforts in education (and economic) justice is that our organizing campaigns need to transcend neighborhoods. By this, I mean to suggest that the issues public engagement groups develop campaigns around need to be those that affect people in most or all of the neighborhoods of a city and in most or all of the cities of the state and nation. And the analysis that informs public advocacy needs to make the link to global causes. In this regard, analyses ought to transcend local power sources as causes and be supple- mented by the identification of national and global developments and policies that affect neighborhoods. For instance, a local campaign against an under- funded urban school or district might connect the lack of public monies available for education to 25 years of diminished state and federal tax rates on corporations or to the huge federal spending on foreign wars. And as I have suggested earlier, we could expect synergy if we connected this local effort for increased education funding to alliances across sectors and indeed across the nation, in this case by joining education funding struggles to national antiwar and other alliances.

Notes

1. As Tom Pedroni (2007) importantly points out, however, there are some social move- ments (like the Nation of Islam, for example) that are not clearly of the Left or the Right, in that they exhibit characteristics of both.

2. It is interesting to note here that, as Jack Dougherty (2003) demonstrates in More Than One Struggle, many African Americans in the South supported desegregation to obtain better educational quality but did not support integration as a social goal. Indeed, as Vanessa Siddle Walker (1996) has pointed out, the desegregation of Southern schools removed from Black communities the embeddedness of their educational institutions.

3. In the “Preface” to the 2000 edition of The Great School Wars, Diane Ravitch relates what, in 1972, a celebrated historian at Columbia University told her when she sought advise- ment about applying to the history department for a doctorate. He told me not to waste my time and theirs because I had three strikes against me: First, I was too old (I was 34); second, I was a woman (yes, he did say that); and third, I was interested in education, and historians did not study education. (p. xiv)

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4. As Pedroni (2007) demonstrates, some of this organizing can have complex relation- ships with both the Left and the Right—as in the case of vouchers and some charter school movements.

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Jean Anyon is author of Theory and Educational Research: Toward Critical Social Explanation (2008) and Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement (2005). She teaches social and educational policy in the Doctoral Program in Urban Education at the City University of New York.

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