CADRE Parents at the Helm of Transformative Educational Justice: Championing the Human Right to Education

CADRE believes that education is a fundamental human right. Our Human Right to Education campaign ensures every child, regardless of background, receives quality education in a safe, inclusive environment. Empowering Black and Brown parents in South Los Angeles is crucial to transforming our educational system, emphasizing accountability and community involvement. We foster partnerships between schools and communities to dismantle systemic barriers and replace punitive practices with restorative justice, eliminating the school-to-prison pipeline and creating nurturing environments for all students. 

Authentic parent leadership is the cornerstone of our campaign. When parents are empowered, they become formidable advocates for their children’s rights. CADRE parents’ achievements in grassroots organizing and participatory action research testify to transformative leadership, creating major shifts in public policy, debate, and narrative around school discipline, racial disparities, parents’ roles, school climate, and closing the achievement gap for low-income students of color. CADRE has solidified major educational policies locally, statewide, and nationally, including California SB274, which keeps students in school by eliminating suspensions for “willful defiance,” addressing minor misbehaviors through in-school interventions. 

In essence, CADRE’s Human Right to Education campaign is about reclaiming the promise of education as a universal right. Our campaign gets us closer to ending the school-to-prison pipeline, which will require a complete transformation and redesign of public education, schools, and schools’ relationships with structurally marginalized and oppressed families and geographic communities. By centering parent leadership, we ensure every child can succeed in a just and equitable system. The Schott Foundation’s support for grassroots movements and shifting power to communities aligns with our goals of equity and justice, amplifying our campaign’s impact. Together, we strive to build a multi-racial democracy through equitable education.  

~Élice Hennessee, CADRE Co-Executive Director 

Youth Empowerment Through Rhizome’s Youth Voice Campaign

Rhizome is a nonprofit launched by 90 youth co-founders in 2021, on a mission to activate young people’s identities into action and help youth treat civic service as the work of a lifetime. Their fundamental purpose is to build collective power for young people to create the safer, happier, healthier world they want to live in. To do this, Rhizome trains young people to organize and increase civic engagement. Less than 3 years after launching, they have Civic Service Fellows in 1% of U.S. high schools. 

Going into the 2024 election, Rhizome is launching a Youth Voice Campaign for young people to publicly speak to the question: “Why are we organizing, at a time when there is so much reason for young people to feel cynical about democracy?” 

This campaign exists against the backdrop of Project 2025, youth organizers advocating for immediate changes to U.S. foreign policy and deteriorating mental health and democratic integrity. Rhizome has already registered and pre-registered over 20,000 students to vote in the last two years, and is laser focused on ensuring that young people have a platform to make their voices heard in this election. Rather than focusing just on what youth are against, Rhizome is focused on what youth are for.  

To learn more about Rhizome’s origin story and long-term vision, visit www.WeRhize.org. You can also email christ@WeRhize.org and jacobm@WeRhize.org to learn more, get involved as a funding partner, or amplify Rhizome’s Youth Voice Campaign. 

~Jacob Merkle Rhizome Co-Founder and CEO 

(Group photo is from Rhizome’s first in-person retreat where around 80 Youth Organizers gathered in Miami in January 2024) 

Reporting from the front lines of the conservative war on public education: a new wave of mass public school closures

Recently, we at Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization supporting grassroots organizations around the country, have begun to hear from local groups asking for help saving their local schools. We tracked at least 70 school districts that announced permanent closures of public schools during the 2023-24 school year. As state legislators continue to defund public education by diverting more funds to charter and private schools, and with Project 2025 looming in the federal landscape, we expect this trend to worsen.  

We have been hearing the same story in each place: school district leaders facing budget crises hire consultants who measure the district’s school “utilization” rates and then recommend that districts close the schools with the lowest rates. “Utilization” is stacked against schools that have experienced historic underfunding and disinvestment in facilities repairs, curricula, extracurricular opportunities, and staff. These same schools disproportionately serve Black and Latine students, English Learner students, students with disabilities, and students living in poverty—and as we saw in the last mass wave of closures—these communities are the first to lose local public schools and the services and access to democratic self-control that come with them.  

Although school district leaders often try to sell their plans to close schools as equitable, academic research has well-established that closing schools harms children, families, and communities, and that it disproportionately happens to majority-Black schools. There is also no evidence that closing schools even saves money unless it is coupled with mass layoffs. It is becoming clearer that the think tanks and consultants promoting the need to “right size” are really on an agenda to close all public schools and replace them with private and charter schools that open and shutter at the whims of the market and cater to customers of their choosing. 

Public school communities are fighting back.  Our new Action Kit provides strategies to defend against closures, and we are pushing the federal government to take proactive steps to protect against the harms of closures. Join us! 

~Jessica Alcantara, Senior Staff Attorney, and Laura Petty, Staff Attorney, at Advancement Project