Rick Ayers looks back on a career on the front lines of education reform
Rick Ayers taught at Berkeley High School for 11 years, and in that time, helped guide generations of kids through Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS), the small school within BHS he founded with fellow teachers to promote modes of academia they deemed lacking in the traditional classroom setting. CAS was formed around a vision of combatting this model, taking aim at conventions like test-taking, homework, antiquated curriculums, and arbitrary punishment for seemingly non-negotiable mistakes. Ayers fought for an academic space where students could be recognized and celebrated as individuals, experts, and visionaries through often controversial methods.
Along the way, Rick has never pulled punches in sharing his opinions either, offering harsh and honest critiques of an educational system he sees as fundamentally flawed. It’s been six or seven years since either of us have seen the inside of our own CAS classrooms, but Ayers is still on the front line of radical education reform, and as I learned in our conversation, as candid about his opinions as ever.
Ayers’ gift for uncensored expression of actual, honest human experience is tied up closely with his theories about academia. Ironically, much of Rick’s work serves to undermine an assumption that he might concede is mostly true: that educators tend to be old, white and therefore inherently out of touch with their students. More importantly though, his way of communicating reflects a belief that personal language and culture are immensely valuable. For his PhD dissertation, Ayers chose to investigate the implications of language and power in the classroom. Additionally, many B-high alums might also remember back in 2004, when Ayers channeled that interest into the student-compiled Slang Dictionary he published to celebrate so-called “improper” language – a powerful tool which he believes has been used against students and their communities.
Here, Ayers is alluding to the infamous Weather Underground, co-founded by Bill. The revolutionary organization has been historically characterized by controversy based on its history of violence and radical politics, but was also a breeding ground for progressive intellectual ideas, anti-war and anti-capitalist efforts, and from what I could tell, an ambiguously defined version of “living off the grid.” While underground, Ayers had his first child, Aisha, who he credits time and again as his impetus for getting into education. While trying to help her through the C’s and D’s and weed that define the experience of so many Berkeley High kids, Rick realized he had a true passion for education, as well as his own critiques.
Now let me break this down: Berkeley High School has some 3,000 students. It’s like a small city. So in the early 90s the administration started to break the school up into what they called “small schools” in order to better keep track of and provide for students. As compared to other small schools, CAS stands in most contrast to Academic Choice (and now the International Baccalaureate program), which is marked by a rigorous college preparatory and AP-test readiness curriculum. According to Ayers, the rise of AC and its traditional, college-prep curriculum created a panic among BHS’ whiter, more affluent parents looking for the most reliable way to ensure their kids’ entry into a top college. For a while, CAS had trouble recruiting any white students at all. Years ago, Ayers wrote a now-infamous piece for his Huffington Post column in which he addressed the dynamics at play in this small-scale version of white flight:
“An interesting aspect of the breathless protestations of the Parents of Privilege is the way they evoke the term ‘choice.’ They should have a choice of which teacher they have, a choice of the curriculum, a choice of the way city parcel tax money is spent, a choice of how the schedule is set up. So much freedom! But really ‘choice’ here has a similar ring as the ‘state’s rights’ calls of the southern whites who were resisting integration…Yes, racism comes dressed up in many covers and Berkeley has its own liberal version of it.”
Ayers’ goal while at Berkeley High was essentially to confront real-world issues of racial and class inequality head on, with students, by forcing kids from different backgrounds to sit in the same classrooms–and present them with real, real shit. And I remember it well. Like how on my first day of Freshman year I learned about the Armenian Genocide in Identity and Ethnic Studies class, and how Zinn’s People’s History was our textbook Junior year. This stuff also blew up in our faces all the time, like when a white student told a black friend of mine to “go back to Africa” and she socked him in the face. Or when a CAS sophomore hiked up the steps of City Hall at a protest and yelled “Berkeley is the most covertly racist city in the country!” and everyone cheered and followed. But despite the tension, I feel like the success of CAS is actually immeasurable. CAS is able to provide groups of diverse young people with an opportunity to learn honestly from their collective history–and that experience is profound.
“Are you serious?” I interrupt. “But it was really cool!” he ensures me, “And that should be okay!”
These days, Rick’s work teaching teachers allows him to step into a position of change in an alternative way with his students that sometimes remind him how far we still have to go to provide for youth effectively. “I’ve come to think that the problem with even progressive educators, even your radical educators, very often is with what we used to joke about as the ‘Save One Black Kid Strategy’” he says, citing his own comedically honest name for the popular belief that the sole measure of an ‘underprivileged’ student’s success is the extent to which they can navigate the traditional path to college, the middle class, and most importantly, away from their original community. “It’s also a rescue strategy,” he says, “It’s like ‘Get out of the ghetto, we’re going to get you out!’,” a strategy that casts the middle-class, white world as inherently good, and theirs as inherently bad.
“But we’re never going to do that. We’re never going to rescue everyone, even if that was a good thing. And there’s no ethics to that,” he pleads, “You have to think about what the elevation to the middle class in an oppressive and imperialist system means.”
On the other hand, Ayers admits he can’t be a white radical with a PhD just casually hauling around disses at pursuing a college education. “[But] we need to have an approach that talks about all the kids, not the three you’re going to ‘save’ this year…but as a teacher the good stuff will always just happen,” he assures me. “It happens because human beings get in the same room and communicate and make knowledge.”
He closed our conversation with a thought:
“Ultimately, education is about social constructional knowledge – you don’t really gain knowledge sitting with a book in a library. You do some, but you have to engage with people to learn. It has to happen. Everyone is so concerned with assessments and tests, meanwhile our kids our getting killed. Those are some realities. Some 5,000 youth a year are killed in gun violence. That’s a reality and we don’t talk about it and we just sort of keep plunging ahead as if that’s not happening, [as if] kids can keep working with the kind of trauma they have and the stress they live with. And we just say that they’re just low level thinkers – we want to get them up to ‘critical thinking’. No. You have to have critical thinking to get to school in the morning. To get down the street.”
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