This month I had the pleasure of participating in Ammunition Theatre’s Ammo-nymous Plays West Hollywood. My play “Urban Scholars” was one of six thrown into a hat and drawn for an on-the-spot cold reading with very talented company actors. This happened over three nights on the rooftop of the famed West Hollywood Fiesta Cantina, and I had the great fortune of hearing my play aloud for the very first time. The audience experience was delightful and satisfying on so many levels. Firstly, the acting chops of the readers were stellar (Eric Lyons: Matthew Harris; Nia Thao: Tina Huang; Jericho Thompson: Bubba Proctor; Heaven Ford: Tiana Randall Quant Stage Directions: Roxana Ortega). I could not believe how well they were cast and how adeptly they took on their roles having never read the script. The play turned out so much funnier than I had remembered. This was unintentional, and so, a pleasant surprise. But also, the play took me back to a very specific time in my life and dealt with an issue that I have been grappling with intellectually for a long time—charter schools.
My first full-time professional job as an educator was at high school in East Harlem. I’d taught before that in Japan, but that had felt more like a paid study abroad program where I traveled classrooms as a teacher’s aide to facilitate conversational English games. Those ordered, pristine hallways were far different from the ones housed within the New York City Board of Education. I worked at the Urban Peace Academy, which was a euphemism for failing public school, and less than five years after I left, the school permanently shuttered, no doubt at the mercy of changing political winds and the latest performative resolve to overhaul a broken educational system. Whatever the reasons for the closure, my experience there very quickly disabused me of the notion that public school was always the best option for everyone. I went from thinking I would never send my kid to private school to I would never send my kid to this public school. Of course, at the time, I didn’t have any kids, so all of that was just righteous indignation. Having gone to a very reputable public high school, I had been a champion of public education, scoffing at the elitism of any other alternative. Yes, I had studied inequities in education; that was why I was there in the first place. But my doe-eyed naivete about how to impact student learning came up against all the obvious challenges that I’d only read about in collegiate academic settings –ie. poverty, hunger, disability, domestic abuse, racism obviously. Not to mention, all the challenges that I might (and did) face as young, petite, Asian American woman teaching classrooms full of Black and Latinx students who were less than a decade younger than I was, amidst teachers who were twice my age. I had always been greatly offended by how inner-city schools were portrayed on television and in movies; the depictions were racist, stereotypical, reductive, and over the top. But teaching in an inner-city school, I was loathe to admit that, at least on the surface, much of the chaos and authoritarianism tracked. The disrespect towards students and from them is an endless feedback loop.
The most memorable day of my brief high school teaching career was the day before the Winter holiday, when our school principal was escorted out of the building by Board of Education officials in dark suits. They stood outside her office so as not to allow her access to her computer or anything else. To make matters worse, students had been told there’d be an early dismissal, but our school visitors determined that we had not been authorized to permit an early dismissal. I distinctly remember forcing students to remain in an auditorium where we were showing a completely, inappropriate R-rated film and barring them from exiting when the film ended. At day’s end, all the teaching staff were gathered in a classroom and told that when we returned from our Winter holiday, we would have a new principal. And this was a promise kept; we never again saw or heard from our old school principal. This day was emblematic of many more memories I have of my time there.
It should’ve been a tell when I went in for my interview. The principal did not get up from her desk to greet me, nor did she walk me around the school. Instead, she presented me with a trifold brochure of the school with colored photos of the basketball team and some other clubs. She was most definitely selling harder to me than the other way around, and I, being young, new to New York, and hungry for employment didn’t think twice that she didn’t ask me a single question about myself or my philosophy on teaching as she marveled at my very spare resume.
Anyway, I digress. I’ve always been against charter schools. After teaching in a public school, I understood the moral outrage behind the anti-charter school movement. I learned the talking points—how charter schools siphoned away money from the regular public schools and created greater inequities despite claiming to remedy them; how they were largely unregulated and often discriminatory; how they partnered with large corporations with ulterior motives; how they manipulated their enrollments and results to fulfill their mandates; how they stole the brightest kids from the student populations of traditional public schools. Now many years later, as a parent learning about the strategies to get your child into the best public school, I see the other side of the charter school debate. I can’t tell you how many times I hear parents say, “I don’t want to send my kid to a charter school, but I have no other option.” I know it reeks of class and privilege, but I can’t say I entirely blame them.
To further drive a wedge in the debate is the common practice of charters co-locating with larger, traditional public schools. Co-location is when a small school is housed within as larger multi-story school buildings owned by the district. For example, Urban Peace Academy was a small school, housed on a single floor of a three-story public school building. While my school was not a charter school, we experienced much of the tension between school communities forced to share key spaces; such as, the auditorium, the cafeteria, the gymnasium, etc.
“Urban Scholars” is a play that aims to explore the complexities of the charter school debate through the relationship between two warring principals, Ms. Thao and Mr. Lyons as they are forced in a co-location agreement by the district. Further, the play addresses the micro-aggressions of race, gender, and age in the workplace, and the ways in which authority and power are constantly mediated between colleagues, teachers, and students. In the end, amidst all the educational politicking, it is the students who suffer. That sounds so cliché that it’s easy to forget what that could look like, and I hope this play offers a glimpse.
Some interesting links on charters and co-location:
