Education administrators in business suits are gathered, miniature complimentary bottles of San Pellegrino in hand. This is the “CPS Senior Staff Retreat,” and at the front of the Gleacher Center meeting room sits Ron Huberman, the newly-ordained CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, recently transferred by Mayor Daley from his position as the head of the Chicago Transit Authority. The meeting is nearly at an end, but first Huberman approaches the podium and declares his delight in introducing two final speakers, who turn out to be administrators from the CTA. As the woman at the podium begins to describe in-depth the methods of reducing gap times between city buses, I turn to look at the faces around me, searching for signs of incredulity or disbelief to match my own.
A few seats away sits a public school teacher in a sequined necktie. He seems out of place, but he’s actually a guest of honor, a recipient of a DRIVE (Delivering Results through Innovative and Visionary Education) Award. His name is Xian Barrett; he’s the man who invited me to the event.
In just his third year as a public high school teacher, Barrett seems to have a presence in every organization available that combines education and social justice; he is a member of Teachers for Social Justice, an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) site team member, a student coordinator for Student Development and Service Learning, and the faculty advisor for two organizations—the Social Justice Club and the Japanese Club—at Percy L. Julian High School, where he teaches. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000 with a degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures, he spent two years in Japan teaching English and Human Rights Education. The experience solidified his twin passions of teaching and social justice.
Following the meeting, I overhear Barrett talking to a friendly administrator who has approached him: “At first I was a little worried when they started talking about the CTA, but then I started to draw an interesting comparison…When something goes wrong with the Red Line, they get out and figure out how to fix it. They don’t get rid of the Red Line.”
The sting in Barrett’s comment is a reference to Renaissance 2010, an initiative drawn up by the Commercial Club of Chicago and presented by Mayor Daley back in 2004. The program calls for the creation of 100 new charter schools, funded privately by businesses, and the closing of 100 underachieving public schools in the Chicago area by 2010. The charter schools would still technically be public schools, but with a number of notable differences, including the use of an application process and no requirement for teacher’s unions.
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