Free More Than a Score by Jesse Hagopian

approach—Parents and Teachers Against the Common Core and the Badass Parents Association, formed with my help by a libertarian intellectual named Michael Bohr, who said only a “multipartisan” approach could defeat Common Core, one in which people kept their core beliefs but worked across the spectrum to defeat policies that threatened their schools and their children.
    It was in these groups that I met the two key figures who would help make the Badass Teachers Association the force it is today: Priscilla Sanstead, whom I met in the Badass Parents Association, and Marla Kilfoyle, a Long Island teacher and parent who was a major force in Parents and Teachers Against the Common Core. While Priscilla and I founded the group, it was Marla’s idea to have a recruiting contest on Sunday, June 16, that put us on the map. In one hour that afternoon teachers competing for the designation “Badass Teacher of the Month” drew more than a thousand members into the newly formed group. By the end of that weekend there was a buzz surrounding the group that began to resemble what Occupy Wall Street had inspired. For the second time in two years, a movement with an improbable name was moving to the forefront of social justice activism in the nation.
    However, there the resemblance to Occupy Wall Street ended. Whereas Occupy Wall Street was committed to an anarchic, hyper-democratic governance structure, Priscilla and Marla, who were both organizational gurus, decided to create a complex structure that allowed for the creativity of the membership to find organizational outlets while clamping down hard on those who promoted positions that would split the group. Their first stroke of genius was to do everything possible to encourage members to use the arts to express discontent with current education policies—whether poems, songs, music videos, memes, innovative designs for everything from bumper stickers to T-shirts—and adopt the symbol of the bat, along with Batman imagery, to give the group a distinctive identity. The result was an explosion of creativity, much of it with a humorous edge, that made the Badass Teachers Association Facebook page an exciting, fun-filled place. What took place could be described as “the revenge of the arts teachers”—as the test-driven policies of the Obama and Bush administrations had succeeded in marginalizing the arts in public schools throughout the nation. Payback could be seen every day on the BATS Facebook page.
    Another organizational innovation Priscilla and Marla introduced, with my full support, was to create a structure to carefully monitor the BATS Facebook page to delete posts that might prevent teachers of diverse political perspectives from being comfortable in the group or that took time and energy away from the group’s political actions. We developed a team of trusted page administrators—now numbering sixty-one—to carry out this function, inspiring charges of censorship from those whose posts were deleted but allowing the fragile unity of all teachers committed to defending public education from attack—whether left, center, or right—to be preserved. To keep discussion on mission, we clamped down on any posts that challenged the name of the group; on posts that took a position on guns or religion; on posts that attacked the noneducation policies of either of the major parties; on posts that were racist, sexist, or homophobic; and on posts that used political clichés to demonize people on the right or the left. Many people predicted this approach would destroy the group; in fact, it may have made more teachers feel safe to join it, as discussion was generally kept focused on issues directly related to policies that affected teachers and their experiences “on the ground.”
    But perhaps most important of all, the group’s founders—and this was more Priscilla and Marla than me—created a decentralized