Collaboration: War Against Our Schools

As part of a collaboration between the Puerto Rico Syllabus and Defend Puerto Rico, this Microsyllabus accompanies the documentary film, War Against Our Schools (2021) and provides viewers with several entry points to further explore and historicize the film’s central themes. 

Public education in Puerto Rico has been a key target of austerity governance over the past two decades, often legitimized through narratives of “school choice” and “consolidation.” The most recent waves of school closures coincided with the passage of an education reform bill just months after Hurricane Maria, which facilitated public to private transfers through vouchers and charter schools. As War Against Our Schools  demonstrates, school closures do more than empty buildings and relocate students. Rather, school closures tear apart the social fabric and disrupt the lives of families, communities, and teachers. Additionally, the communities most affected by school closures are those that have historically experienced deep state disinvestment as a result of race, class, and/or residential marginalization. School closures make already vulnerable communities even more so, while sowing the seeds for greater precarity in the future. 

Drawing on a long history of rescates in Puerto Rico, impacted communities have taken up school rescues to contest these processes and build alternatives through mutual aid. Education privatization and resistance efforts are not unique to Puerto Rico, but resonate with larger patterns of racial capitalism, displacement, and dispossession throughout the United States in places such as New Orleans, Chicago, and Detroit. We offer this microsyllabus and larger viewing guide in the hopes that the powerful examples of community control and empowerment highlighted in War Against Our Schools can inspire transformation and forge networks of solidarity necessary to defend public education.

To see the full Viewing Guide which accompanies the film visit: https://www.laguerrapr.com/guide