YSP Video Project

Art by Rini Templeton

YSP is embarking on a new video project. As a followup to our highly-demanded and useful Chronology of California School District Takeovers, we will be making a video on national educational reform trends. The video will feature how youth organizers, in each of their locales, from all over the country, are fighting back.

The video will also break down the web of power that's moving the agenda to run schools like businesses, including:

• Randolph Ward, California state-appointed head of Oakland public schools, trained at a school funded by Eli Broad that teaches school principles to be more like business managers.

• Eli Broad, Los Angeles billionaire who established the influential Broad Foundation to reform K-12 education by supporting school takeovers and promoting entreprenuerial school leadership.

• Illinois and California business roundtables that have gotten involved in school politics and helped push forward standardized tests, privatizing education, and union-bashing.

• Pioneer Institute, a right-wing think tank in Boston, promotes charter schools and one of the most stringent standardized tests in the country.

• American Diploma Project, headed by former California governor, Gray Davis. Massachusetts, Texas, and Nevada all participate in the Project and each has statewide standardized tests.

For further info contact YSP.

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Seeds of Fire

Art by Rini Templeton

For the second year in a row, DataCenter was invited to give a training at the Highlander Center's Seeds of Fire youth camp in June. The camp is a week-long summer retreat for youth organizers and adult allies from throughout the South. The focus is on low-income people of color and queer youth.

Our Youth Strategy Project and Criminal Justice Program gave a joint training on how to do strategic campaign research. Participants really enjoyed the popular education style of the workshop and the emphasis that anyone can do research, particularly our "Who Wants to be an Information Activist?" research game that challenges participants to quickly identify potential data sources to campaign-related research questions.

For further information see Highlander Center.

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Over 400 people showed up at an Oakland, CA rally to call on Congresswoman Barbara Lee to sponsor legislation to stop deportations that are devastating immigrant families. Organized by AYPAL, a youth organization seeking to change the relationship of power between young people and the policy makers, the rally followed an 18-month campaign that aims to reform and repeal the harshest elements of the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which mandates the detention and deportation of non-citizens convicted of non-violent crimes and misdemeanors like shoplifting, taking a car for a joy ride, drunk driving, possession of marijuana and vandalism/tagging. Due to IIRIRA, deportation of immigrants has increased 400%.

At the rally, AYPAL and DataCenter released Justice Detained, a report that documents the economic and emotional hardship that deportations cause to families left behind, and recommends specific legislative changes to IIRIRA. (Download report)

In May, AYPAL achieved a victory when Representative Barbara Lee agreed to co-sponsor legislation that addresses almost all the group's demands.

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School Takeover Documentation Builds Awareness & Strategy

Last winter, we released a first draft of our report Oakland Takeover, connecting what's happening locally to larger national educational trends of incapacitating public education and disenfranchising poor and people of color communities. Our goals are to build basic awareness and understanding on these issues, but also to hopefully help folks to identify targets, strategies, and tactics for your local campaigns and to make those national connections.

Using the research we gathered for this report, we have been doing presentations in the Bay Area for local youth organizations.

Last spring was the first-ever Youth Organizer & Training Exchange for Bay Area youth organizers, coordinated by SOUL, Movement Strategy Center, Youth Media Council, and DataCenter (See Summer 2003 Projects). Out of this organic collaboration, we together created the Youth Organizer Intermediary Council. In January, to follow up on last year's conference, the Council coordinated a Youth Movement Strategy Session with two tracks, Juvenile Justice and Educational Justice. Due to our work documenting school takeovers in the report Oakland Takeover, the DataCenter was asked to present on national trends in education at the strategy session. We focused on issues of privatization, standards and assessment, and school takeovers.

Chronology of California School District Takeovers - Corrections Addendum: After the release of this report in 11/2003, YSP was made aware of a number of factual errors and omissions. The report will be revised and re-released in the near future. YSP apologizes for any factual errors and thanks Oakland Tribune education reporter, Alex Katz, for his helpful corrections.

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