Jesse Hagopian

Jesse Hagopian

Jesse Hagopian teaches history and is the co-adviser to the Black Student Union at Garfield High School — the site of the historic boycott of the MAP test in 2013. Since the fall of 2020, Jesse has been on leave from the classroom to work as a lead organizer with the Zinn Education Project.

Jesse is an editor for the social justice periodical Rethinking Schools, co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter at School, and editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.

Jesse is a founding national steering committee member the Black Lives Matter at School, a founding member of Social Equality Educators (SEE), a recipient of the 2012 Abe Keller Foundation award for “excellence and innovation in peace education,” and won the 2013 “Secondary School Teacher of Year” award and the Special Achievement “Courageous Leadership” award from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences.

In 2015, Jesse received the Seattle/King County NAACP Service Award, was named as an Education Fellow to The Progressive magazine, as well as a “Cultural Freedom Fellow” for the Lannan Foundation for his nationally recognized work in promoting critical thinking and opposing high-stakes testing. Read more at www.iamaneducator.com.

All Content By This Author

What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should

By Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian
Black Panther Party history holds vital lessons for today’s movement to confront racism and police violence, yet textbooks either misrepresent or minimize the significance of the Black Panthers.

This local organizing that Panthers engaged in has been erased in the textbooks, yet it is precisely what won them such widespread support. Armed with a revolutionary socialist ideology, as the Panthers grew, so did what they organized around. They fought in Black communities across the nation for giving the poor access to decent housing, health care, education, and much more.