The Power in the Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment

by Jay Gillen

Overview

How community-centered, peer-to-peer, youth knowledge exchanges are evolving into a strong economic and political foundation on which to build radical public education.

Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic and educational thought, teacher-organizer Jay Gillen describes the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP) as a youth-run cooperative enterprise in which young people direct their peers’ and their own learning for a wage. BAP and similar enterprises are creating an educational network of empowered, employed students.

Gillen argues that this is a proactive political, economic, and educational structure that builds relationships among and between students and their communities. It’s a structure that meets communal needs—material and social, economic and political—both now and in the future. Through the story of the Baltimore Algebra Project, readers will learn why youth employment is a priority, how to develop democratic norms and cultures, how to foster positive community roles for 20–30 year-olds, and how to implement educational accountability from below.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807064702
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	899,790
File size:	798 KB

About the Author

Jay Gillen has taught and organized in and around Baltimore City Public Schools since 1987. In 1994, after a 2-year organizing campaign, he became teacher-director of the new Stadium Middle School, the first community-controlled public school in Baltimore in many years. Working with graduates of the Stadium School, Gillen developed the peer-tutoring Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP). He currently teaches in a juvenile detention center for young women and is helping to develop a peer-to-peer youth enterprise incubator. Gillen is the author of numerous articles and the book Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty.

Table of Contents

Foreword

INTRODUCTION
Organizing, Economics, and the African American Educational Tradition

PART I: Structures

CHAPTER 1
From Crawl Spaces to a Youth Economy

CHAPTER 2
Solving Our Own Problems

CHAPTER 3
Building Capacity

PART II: Re-rooting Education

CHAPTER 4
An Educational Bureaucracy Built on Violence

CHAPTER 5
Base Communities: Re-rooting Education

CHAPTER 6
Accountability, the National Student Bill of Rights, and the Legacy of Struggle

Acknowledgments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

09/06/2019

Teacher and activist Gillen (Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty) discusses how peer-to-peer education and entrepreneurship can create strong bonds between young people and their communities. His central example is the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP), a literacy program in which Baltimore students are paid to tutor their peers in math. Gillen, an adult facilitator in the program, argues that BAP has succeeded because of its employment of young people; its emphasis on advocacy, leadership, and education; and its connection and value to the community. Others seeking to replicate BAP's efforts, says Gillen, should pay close attention to these elements. He refers to the work of BAP founder Bob Moses, who wrote the book's foreword; Moses's Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project would pair well with this work. VERDICT Readers interested in the intersection of political activism, economics, community, and education will find ample food for thought in Gillen's insightful call for action.—Amber Gray, Fogler Lib., Univ. of Maine, Orono

Library Journal

Readers interested in the intersection of political activism, economics, community, and education will find ample food for thought in Gillen’s insightful call for action.”
—Library Journal

“A must-read for activists and theorists who are concerned about democratic life in contemporary America.”
—Theresa Perry, author of Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students

“A visionary tour de force built on a rock-solid foundation of teaching and organizing.”
—William Ayers, coauthor of “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!”: And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers’ Unions, and Public Education

“Anyone who wants to learn how to support youth development outside the dominant paradigms needs to wrestle with Gillen’s argument that economic empowerment, political activism, and education aren’t three different things; for Black people, they are three aspects of one thing. An extraordinarily important book, one Ella Baker would have loved.”
—Charles Payne, author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

From the Publisher