The Berkeley High Walkout

On November 5, 2015, students at my son’s high school, Berkeley High, walked out in protest of a hate crime. Read the article about it in Berkeleyside, with pictures and videos.

Today, a new article came out in the Daily Cal, Racial Achievement Gap in Berkeley Public Schools Persists. I left my blog post sitting in the draft box for a year, but the problem didn’t go away.

This is my experience that day and in the following week. 

The phone rang about 8 in the morning, but I missed it. I listened to the message a few minutes later; it was the Berkeley High principal calling to inform the school community about a hate-filled, racist threat left on a computer screen in the school library.

The news was already out in the school community, circulated by students who had heard about it somehow last night. Before my son left for school, he knew about a rally that was already being planned. By mid-morning, the Berkeley High students, along with some teachers and staff, were walking out of school, and the peaceful crowd of at least 700 moved in a large, chanting group up to Cal, rallied there joined by students from Cal and Berkeley City College, and then came back to BHS.

My son was texting me with updates.

“There is a walk out.”

“I’m at it.”

“Principal Pasarow is speaking”

“We’re on the move.”

I was out around town, hearing the helicopters, maneuvering around the crowds and police cars near Cal to meet a friend for lunch. After lunch, I watched the crowd of chanting students pass on their way back to the high school. I walked with them for a few blocks, moved and proud of their unity, kids standing up for their friends.

I came to BHS a little later for my volunteer shift at the desk in the front office. It was quiet, except for a few parents calling or coming by to ask what was going on. Some of the parents were upset, challenging the principal for letting the students walk out.

Should he have stood up against the protesters, stopped the rally, squelched the students’ uprising?  I’m glad he didn’t stand anywhere except with the students–anything else would have made him an opponent. Engaging with the world around them and speaking out against injustice is a virtue. Peaceful demonstration is not something to be punished.

A few days later, I was filling a friend in on the details at a coffee shop and an African-American woman sitting nearby overheard me. “Do you work at Berkeley High?” she asked me. I told her I’m a parent and a volunteer there. I expected her to agree with me that the walk out was great.

She didn’t.

She told me that if something should be protested, it’s not a prank on a school computer. Someone should be walking out over the systemic injustices that contribute to the appalling achievement gap between white kids and kids of color. She quoted some statistics that left me feeling both defensive and helpless.

“You have to start somewhere”, I told her. “I’m at the school trying to do something”, I told her.

I left with a heavy, hopeless feeling where there had been a smug sense of rightness before. The friend I was with comforted me, “You can’t change people’s minds sometimes.”

Thinking about it later, I realized that I don’t want to change that woman’s mind. I want to listen to her, even if what she says hurts, even if it feels like too much, especially if it shakes up ideas that I have let settle into a solid, useless mass.

The next day, I searched for reported test scores in my school district, looking at graphs comparing the achievement levels of students at our school broken down by race and income.

She’s right.

How can it be that less than 30 percent of minority students in our high school can do basic algebra? Why does the math program work for 80 percent of white kids? Why aren’t we teaching math to all the students? Statistics for reading and writing are no better.

I’m mystified, I’m upset, I’m uncomfortable. I’m angry. I’m forced to look outside my self and my own interests, beyond the success of my own children. I don’t  have the answers, but I’m finally hearing the problem. Our school does not work for everyone.

It’s not just about an isolated event, it’s not just about appreciating another culture, or about being a decent human being to other human beings. It’s not about working harder, acting better and taking the opportunities that come.

It goes deeper than that, to the very core of how our society works.

Still, I’m proud of the Berkeley High kids for speaking up, for not allowing one more incident go by unnoticed. They stood with their classmates. It is doing something; it is a start.