NSFS: Not Safe for School Origin Story

It all started when…

After becoming known as a "quit lit" queen when my blog Post-PhD went viral in 2017, I was blessed with an amazing following of fiercely intelligent and driven activists of all forms-- from the fight for Open Access to learning about activists fighting for graduate student unions.

But, I got tired of speaking to academics who weren't interested in making real, tangible steps towards equity and reform in higher education to safeguard exploitation of graduate students and adjunct professors (who now teach 75% of all classes in the U.S. while getting paid 26k with no benefits).

Over and over, I was asked to speak about my somewhat infamous "Why I Left Academia," only to be told I was "hysterical" or "overreacting," I decided that academia didn't deserve my hellbent By Any Means Necessary education activism.

But, I knew who did: BIPOC students, who continue to be taught overwhelmingly by inexperienced white teachers, who are unaware of even their own racial bias and who were not teaching a generation to transgress, as bell hooks famously says.

So, I decided to take my feminist and critical race theory into secondary education. At the least, hopefully I could help instill cultural pride and a love of learning in a handful of kids. At the most, perhaps my six years of teaching introduction to college writing could be put to good use teaching them essay writing and critical thinking skills they would need in college.

And now that I've seen some shit, and participated in some shit. I'm blowing the whistle on whiteness and the thriving legacy of white supremacy in urban public education.

For the past three years, I've done a deep dive into urban education by first becoming a high school teacher at both a public and charter school in the Greater NYC area, where I committed to using my phd to enact a culturally-responsive and anti-racist pedagogy. With bell hooks and Paulo Freire as my guidelines, I worked with wonderful Black women principals whose commitment is nothing short of awe-inspiring. I also worked with white principals, younger than me, with no advanced degrees.Their commitment was nothing short of nauseating. I fell in love with teaching high schoolers.

I taught Elizabeth Acevedo alongside Shakespeare to Black and Dominican-American students.  I honed how I taught writing and critical thinking, bringing in Gayatri Spivak and Beyonce alike. I tried & failed to secure my NY teachers license for reasons too inane to list. Then, I went on dozens of charter school interviews. I went to private recruiting companies for charter school teachers, and schools run by EMOs with exacting yet meaningless curriculum plans that barely even "teach to the test."

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