Roll call at the revolution

The official name for the Vegas conference I'm at now is the School Summit. The word 'summit' has a certain Reagan-Gorbachev mojo for me, as if someone might at any moment whip out a nuclear arms treaty and start signing it. But in the sense of a summit being a gathering of powerful entities that need to hash things out, the title is a very accurate. The 99 schools represented here in Vegas are truly educational forces to be reckoned with, as are the people involved. The main reason for this is because teaching at an urban charter school in our network these days is at least as hard as governing a superpower during the Cold War, with no prospect of a Camp David, presidential library or Nobel Peace Prize on the other end.

This charter network without doubt considers itself a movement as well as a collection of schools deeply involved in the business of helping low-income students of color succeed in college and beyond. Our movement is not to be confused with "the charter movement," a media-inspired umbrella terms for charters in general that doesn't describe a movement at all. (The roughly 3,000 charter schools throughout the United States are too diverse in their goals and reasons for being to be lumped into 'one' anything.) We consider ourselves a movement because the work of educating students who are routinely marginalized, ignored and discriminated against in the public system confronts head on the diseases of racism and classism. These are also issues that engage people's hearts and souls, as well as minds, and inspire the kind of zealous dedication that moves the conversation beyond lesson planning and into the heady realm of societal transformation. Hence the term 'movement.'

As with any movement, the Summit has its rituals. A kind of liturgy has developed around the act of coming together as a now-enormous group of teachers and talking about what we do for three solid days (pretty much without taking a breath even once). One of these rituals involves holding hands and reciting what is essentially a creed, a statement about what we believe. It actually begins with the words "I believe," and goes from there. To you, the mostly non-initiated, this may sound a little creepy/cultish. Let me assure you that it is. But it also works. Communal recitation strengthens belief and builds community, a two-for-one combo that any successful organization needs to sustain energy for its mission. And no one needs energy quite like 2,700 teachers who are working to change education in America.

Another ritual is the roll call. In this ritual, schools or school regions are allotted about 30 seconds to announce their presence at the Summit by whooping it up pep-rally style. At the first Summit I went to (waaay back in 2004), there were a mere 24 chants, cheers or songs to open the conference. This year, whole regions combined (the Austin region, where I work now, for example, has four schools) and still, the roll call was divided into four different items on the agenda because it would have taken too long to get through everyone at once. Some places write a chant or song for the occasion and practice it carefully beforehand (as the Austin crew did). Others use their school cheers. Still others put on a whole skit. The school in Indianapolis staged a mock Indy 500 around the conference hall. The LA schools donned sunglasses and turned their seating section into a glamorous red carpet. The Houston schools (all 18 of them) dressed my friend's husband up as an astronaut and passed him hand over hand (as he flailed in slow motion to signify his 'weightlessness'). Their punchline? "Houston, we have a...solution."

I'm sure sociologists or anthropologists would have a field day analyzing the way the roll call opens a kind of tribal space where everyone's voice (in the form of songs and chants) is added to the collective whole, symbolically preparing the way for all voices to be heard during the conference that follows. For me, though, it's fun to watch what other schools do. It's the kind of thing where everyone smiles the entire time, pride flowing one way from the schools in the spotlight and appreciation flowing the other way from the audience (who will soon be in the spotlight themselves).

It is possible that one day we, as a movement) will fit a stadium instead of a large room in a Vegas hotel, that roll call will need to be spread over days instead of minutes. It is also possible that we will work our way out of a job, as the conversations around what makes excellent teaching and learning hit a point that tips public education into a positive direction none of us can anticipate at this point. Just as history showed us with the summits of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, there may be a time when the hashing out in public is done or one power recedes to be replace by another that calls for an entirely new response. Until then, though, the roll call goes on..