Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty

A manifesto for today’s broken schools.

Desegregation has failed. Schools filled with black and brown students have become plantations of social control, where the policing of behavior trumps the expanding of minds. Radical teachers and organizers in American public schools must help young people fashion an insurgency. That means, at the very least, seeing each student’s rebellion not as violation, but as communication.

Jay Gillen writes with passion and compassion about the daily lives of poor students trapped in institutions that dismiss and degrade them. In the spirit of Paulo Freire, and using the historical models of slave rebellions and Civil Rights struggles as guides, Gillen explains what sort of insurgency is needed and how to create it: the tools and techniques required to build social, intellectual, and political power.

This poetic manifesto of revolutionary “educational reform” belongs in the pocket of anyone who currently works in, suffers through, or simply cares about public schooling in this country.

Jay Gillen teaches English in a Baltimore public school and has worked with the Baltimore Algebra Project since 1995, building math literacy among youth of color and youth experiencing poverty in US public schools.

Bob Moses is an educator and Civil Rights activist. He founded the Algebra Project in 1982.

In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

• Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project
• "You Can't Fire the Bad Ones!": And 18 Other Myths about Teachers, Teachers Unions, and Public Education
• The Power in the Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment
• Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
• For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy)
• A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (Justice, Power, and Politics)
• Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
• We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Harvest in Translation)
• Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools