School Played Little Role in America's Most Dramatic Phase of Wealth Equalization and Are Unlikely to Play That Role Now

At a time when inequalities in wealth are greater than they have been at any time since the late 1920's, leaders of both parties are looking to changes in public education as the major vehicle for achieving greater opportunity and equity in our economic system. Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence that schools have ever played that role. Take a close look at the charts below in Paul Krugman's column. The most dramatic redistribution of wealth in American History took place in the years 1937 to 1947, when the percentage of income accruing to the top ten percent of earners plummeted to half its previous total and remained there for over 30 years. Not surprisingly, those were also the years when Black per capita income grew fastest relative to white per capita income ( from 44 % in 1940 t0 57% in 1950).

What was responsible for this redistribution of income? Was it increased investment in education or reform in the nations public schools? No, as it turns out, the major factors were increased taxation of high incomes, a substantial growth in the percentage of workers covered by union contracts ( from less than 5 million in 1937 to over 15 million in 1945), a reduction in racial discrimination in basic industry ( due to the Fair Employment Practices Commission), and rapid rural to urban migration as a result of wartime economic recovery. These policies led to a dramatically transformed and increasingly multiracial industrial working class that was highly organized and politically influential at both the local and national level and capable of defending its interest relative to large corporations and the wealthy far greater than its counterparts 20 years earlier

Now let's segue back to today. The idea that school reform strategies emphasizing testing, accountability, privatization, and limiting teacher union power will somehow result in greater economic and racial equality has become an article of faith in the Democratic as well as Republican Parties and has been embraced by the Obama Administration. But there is absolutely no evidence that it is working, Every social indicator of educational achievement, employment and wealth distribution suggests that our nation is MORE unequal now that it was when No Child Left Behind was passed ( 2001) and reflects no improvements since the introduction of Race to the Top ( 2009). So if these reforms aren't working now, and never worked in the past, why do many people believe they are effective?

Some of this reflects the power of foundations funded by the nation's wealthiest people ( Walton, Gates, Broad etc) in promoting school reform ideology, but it also reflects the discomfort of much of the American population with collectivist solutions to social problems even when they work.

The truth is, we can do a lot more to promote racial and economic equality through programs of progressive taxation, promotion of unionization in low wage enterprises, and efforts to uproot discrimination in the labor market and the criminal justice system than by trying to improve our public schools through competition and privatization. But those measures require sacrifices by the very wealthy that School Reform manages to avoid so it will take fierce grass roots pressure to bring them to fruition.


krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/

Today's History Lesson: Why "Ready to Die" Does Not Just Refer to Biggie Smalls

Today's History Lesson: Why "Ready to Die" Does Not Just Refer to Biggie Smalls

Sometimes we forget how much people sacrificed to secure the freedoms we have in a society where so many are under duress. When called, we may have to rise the occasion they way our forebears did. Here is a little know example from the Flint Sit-Down strikes which paved the way for collective bargaining rights in the nation's two largest companies, General Motors and US. Steel. The workers in Flint, organized by the fledgling United Auto Workers Union, had occupied General Motors plans for nearly five weeks, fighting off company spies, local police, a citizens group called "The Flint Alliance," and surviving two court injunctions and the deployment of the Michigan National Guard sent by the newly elected Democratic Governor Frank Murphy. Finally, Murphy, determined the break the strike, decided to used the National Guard to remove the strikers form their buildings, using all necessary force including rifles and machine guns. The leaders of the strike asked the workers in the buildings what they wanted to do, stay or leave. In response, half of the occupying workers signed "Ready to Die" agreements indicating they would resist the National Guard's attempt to evict them even if it meant losing their lives. The UAW conveyed this information to the Governor, and President Roosevelt, and Governor Murphy decided to back off, giving negotiations another chance. Within the next week, General Motors, fearing a bloodbath or an indefinite continuation of the strike, reached an agreement to put the occupied plants under a collective bargaining agreement with the UAW. Only the willingness of Flint Workers to put their lives on the line made this agreement possible. Because they were Ready to Die, several generations of auto workers were Able to Live.

Why Nothing About Trayvon Martin's Past Justifies His Murder

The campaign against vilification against Trayvon Martin, designed to justify his murder, enrages me more than words can describe. Because a young man got suspended from school and occasionally got in fights, does that mean he should be shot down in cold blood when he is unarmed? For the record- I was in trouble for fighting in elementary school and middle school, was nearly kicked out of Columbia for knocking out a conservative student during a demonstration, was beaten up in a station house by police after an incident in a Brooklyn coffee shop, and had countless other fights in schoolyards and on ball fields and NEVER, at any time in my life, felt my life was in danger from police or anyone else. If I were Black, would that have been in the case? You know the answer. I would have been dead a long time ago. Anybody who says race isn't at the center of this encounter doesn't know how America really works, or the huge added burden Black people carry in conflict ridden situations in every portion of this nation

Memories of a “Block Captain”- Why George Zimmerman’s Account of Trayvon Martin’s Murder Makes No Sense

Memories of a “Block Captain”- Why George Zimmerman’s Account of Trayvon Martin’s Murder Makes No Sense

During the late 70’s, when I moved to Brooklyn, the Park Slope neighborhood I settled in was a tough place very different from the gentrified community it is now. There was a long row of abandoned buildings along 7th Avenue south of 9th Street, there were abandoned buildings on Garfield Place between 7th and 6th Avenue, and 2nd Street between 4th and 5th Avenue looked like a block in East New York or the South Bronx, with only three apartment buildings left standing amidst vacant rubble filled lots. There were tough working class kids all over, mostly white, some Black and Latino and muggings, break ins and car thefts were common. The street that I moved to 6th Street between 8th and the Park, which had a mixture of old residents and artists and hip professionals, had a block association and I was soon recruited to help organize a security committee to protect block residents-especially senior citizens, who were especially vulnerable, from young people seeing trouble.

For this purpose, I kept a large metal bat near my door. When a group of tough looking kids whom I didn’t recognize came on the Block, I would come out of the house with my bat, and if looked like them might begin vandalizing cars or threatening people ( or bombarding them with eggs on Halloween!), I would come up to confront them directly. In all of those confrontations, never once did I have to use my weapon. There were a couple of times that I had to bang my bat on the sidewalk to remind them that I was serious, and potentially dangerous, but my most effective weapon was ironically, the respect with which I addressed them.

“Gentlemen” I would begin every encounter, “how may I help you?” I would then go on to explain that I lived on the block, had been assigned the task of making sure it was safe, and was there to tell them that they were welcome to come on the block any time so long as they treated its residents with the same respect they would want someone to treat them

To a surprising degree, these young people, of whatever racial background, responded extremely well to this approach. I was never cursed out, never attacked, and no encounter escalated into something that led to anyone being hurt. Perhaps the bat had something to do with this, perhaps not. But what I think made the biggest impression was that I tried to let them know that I was someone who would welcome talking to them, getting to know them, and perhaps coaching them if they joined some of the sports organizations that I was hoping to create in the neighborhood.

Given this experience, it is utterly astonishing to me that a George Zimmerman, a so called Block captain MURDERED, that’s right MURDERED, a young man he was questioning because he didn’t know him. We are talking about one, slightly built 17 year old, being confronted by a very large man. For the confrontation to escalate to the point it did, the older man’s behavior must have been extraordinarily confrontational and insulting and, from my perspective, truly irrational. As someone who repeatedly confronted four or five young men significantly larger than Trayvon Martin, the level of paranoia that George Zimmerman brought to the encounter with this poor child is terrifying and reflects on his neighbors judgment as well as his. Only a madman, or someone overcome with rage and fear, could act the way George Zimmerman did. His neighbors most have known something about his personality. How could they have let him assume this role in their community, much less carry a gun?

If you are involved in Block Security, the main trait you want to have is the ability to stay calm under pressure, talk to people sincerely and honestly and convey no fear. George Zimmerman failed all those simple tests. There is no excuse for what he did. None. He is clearly a sick, tormented man, but that his neighbors put him in that position suggest deep seated problems on their part as well. In this country, racism can reach the level of a sickness. It provides the only possible explanation for George Zimmerman’s murderous behavior, and the excuses made for it by so many white Americans

"Whole Lotta Cheating Going On"

"Cheat Duncan Cheat"- A Notorious Phd Jam
To Be Sung to "Whole Lotta Shakin Going On"


Come on Arne Duncan
Whole lotta cheating going on
I said come on Arne Duncan
Baby, you’re tests are all wrong.
Every district is Faking
Whole lotta Cheating Going on

Come on over Duncan
Michelle Rhee is leading the pack
Just like in Atlanta
DC forges tests and holds teachers back
Every district is Faking
A Whole Lotta Cheating Going on

I say, cheat Duncan cheat
I say cheat Duncan cheat
I say cheat Duncan cheat
I say cheat Duncan cheat
Every District is Faking
Whole lotta cheating going on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yRdDnrB5kM

Notes from the Testing Wars from a 4th Grade Teacher in Massachusetts

I teach fourth grade in an urban district in MA and today my students took the first part of the Reading MCAS. Two days ago they spent four hours writing their long compositions and we still have another Reading session to complete. It is one of the most stressful situations I have ever experienced.
Teachers come to school with long faces, visibly filled with anxiety. They complain of lost sleep and they fret over the days ahead. They anguish over the lack of sufficient accommodations for children with special needs and emotional issues, while also worrying about the punitive measures certain to accompany the scores. They remind each other to keep a game face on so the kids won’t see their anxiety.
Let’s look at how this process affects the kids with a snapshot from today. I greeted my class and fed them breakfast while explaining how their daily schedule would change. I signed the testing materials out of the security area and passed out sharpened number two pencils. I introduced the proctor assigned to monitor my implementation of the test. I want to scream, “Have you seen our scores? We don’t cheat!” I read my script, verbatim, inundating my students with directions and warnings not to cheat. I’m sure my students are wondering where their normally friendly teacher went.
The students then begin to read on demand, a difficult task even for adults. How many of us have found ourselves at the bottom of a page not knowing what we just read? Meanwhile, I am expected to walk up and down the rows of desks, looking at the tests to be sure the students are working in the correct portion of their booklet. However, I am not allowed to read any questions or look to see if they missed filling in any bubbles. How on earth does one look for the correct section without “seeing” the words on the page? I feel guilty hovering over the kids as they work, but I am being watched so I don’t dare sit down.
Student A raises his hand and asks me if he can underline parts of the text. With all the directions I just gave, I guess he doesn’t remember I said he could, despite all our test prep. I am impressed that he wants to underline because a few months ago he did little to no work. Sadly, I tell him I can’t answer his question. My stomach begins to feel queasy.
Student B turns a page on her test and realizes she has a lot more to do even after an hour of intense concentration. She looks up at me and mouths the words, “Can I go home?” I smile at her even though the security manual clearly says I am not to alter my facial expression in any manner. She shakes her head and looks down. My stomach is sicker by the minute.
Student C works on an open response question for a considerable amount of time, but fails to put his answer in the correct booklet. I want to point out this oversight to him because I know he will get no credit despite his beautiful effort, but I can’t.
Student D is crying softly to himself because his favorite green pencil is missing from his desk. Only a classroom teacher understands the trauma these seemingly small events cause.
Three hours later, when all the testing is done and the snacking begins, Student A asks me if I’m proud of him. Tears well up in my eyes as I put my arm on his shoulder and truthfully tell him he made me very happy with all his effort. But I am not feeling very proud of who I am at the moment.
Exactly how does any of this test reading comprehension? These tests measure listening skills, an ability to attend, and stamina. They measure what type of morning a child had, and they measure the environment in which these students live. Our school is over 90% free and reduced lunch and the majority of our kids deal with issues like hunger, violence, drug-addicted parents, jailed parents, neglect, and homelessness. Many speak broken English while others have serious learning disabilities.
These tests do nothing to measure the growth my students have shown, nor do they help them to really think. They serve only to humiliate and degrade our entire school community. My kids have difficult, tragic lives and we make their educational experience less than desirable. I find myself wondering if the students in the outlying suburbs have the same experience. While I’m sure they have their issues, somehow I doubt they suffer the same indignities my kids do.

Letter from a Bronx Teacher that Everyone Mandating More Testing For Our Public Schools Should Read

Hi Mark,

I just read your piece entitled, "When Teachers Become Overseers...." and it made me cry. I think of myself as one of those "sensitive, creative and compassionate" teachers that you spoke about. I understand the importance of building relationships with my children to foster personal growth, trust and a desire to learn. Each day I do something to connect with my 8th grade "bubalas". I feed them daily. I conference with them about school work or personal issues. We set social growth goals such as "be kinder to Jonathan". We write thank you notes and go on many school trips. I play catch with them at lunchtime. I've taken them bowling or out for dinner as a reward for their academic efforts. I handwrite notes to them at Thanksgiving and
Christmas. It's such a love fest in my room, that, without thinking, the kids often call me "mom". I believe, with all my heart, that it is this nurturing environment that has, in large part, been responsible for my success as a teacher.

However, the other day I was anything but a caring, thoughtful teacher (I'm literally crying as I type this).A student of mine had diarrhea and rather than send him home right away, I kept him in class so he could engage in test prep. I moved his seat closer to the door so he could go to the bathroom on an as-needed-basis but I didn't send him to the nurse. I thought to myself, "He cannot afford to be out while we are doing this." "He'll get better." Instead of thinking, "Oh the poor kid." No maternal instincts on that day just a steel eye set on the ELA test. Thank God my para had the good sense to pack him up. She, at least, maintained her humanity.

I know you cannot check off a box entitled, "demonstrates love for her students" on an evaluation sheet so perhaps I am still considered a good teacher. But in my mind, I failed that day and it haunts me. Does that incident foreshadow my future? Or will it serve as a warning to remind me of who I do not want to become?



Bronx Teacher

How Barack Obama's Education Policies May Lose Him the 2012 Election

How Barack Obama's Education Policies May Lose Him the 2012 Election



Many supporters of Barack Obama have been reluctant to support the initiative, organized entirely by teachers, to remove Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education for fear it might compromise Barack Obama's 2012 Election campaign. In fact, the reverse is true. This campaign, if successful, might save the Obama campaign from a loss of several key states dues to indifference or hostility to the ticket on the part of the nation's public school teachers, all 4 million of them.


Those who disagree me with might say that the nation's largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association. have both endorsed President Obama and plan to campaign for him vigorously in 2012. But that endorsement covers over a simmering discontent with the Administration's education policies among the membership of these two organizations that even their leaders had to acknowledge in their press releases. But this discontent is not merely passive. It has risen to the level of a deep seated rage in many teachers that will prevent them from campaigning for the President unless there is a relaxation of Administration pressure to rate teachers on the basis of student test scores or create charter schools. And it is particularly significant in the swing states. I am in regular contact with teachers in Florida, Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona, Ohio, Washington, and Michigan, who will boycott the Obama campaign unless Arne Duncan is removed as Secretary of Education. Since the margin of victory in these states at best will be small, their refusal to join the campaign, support it financially, and even go to the polls, could swing those states into the Republican camp.


This is still an avoidable outcome. Many of those teachers campaigned enthusiastically for the President in 2012 and would be glad to do so again if the President wasn't supporting policies that undermine their best practices and subject them to public attacks. But as long as Arne Duncan is Secretary of Education, that will not happen


So if any of you are close to the Obama brain trust, you might pass my words of advice along.


America's teachers are a sleeping giant, and you do not want to be the object of their wrath when they awaken.

Why Try To Deal With Poverty, Unemployment and Racism When We Can "Re-Form" Education?

We live in a society that is obsessed with improving schools while showing little interest in reducing poverty and homelessness, lowering unemployment and raising wages, or addressing the daily humiliations people of color and the poor face in the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex. Should we therefore be surprised the the "reforms" the elite suggest ( note the latest Joel Klein/Condaleeza Rice report) invariably take power away from teachers and subject students to increasing regimentation. We, as a nation, cannot afford to have students revolt against the conditions in their neighborhoods or policies that steadily narrow their economic options. So lets make their schools more like prisons and deluge them with tests! Think this is wrong? Then help us get rid of the nations Master Tester, Arne Duncan

http://dumpduncan.org/

When Teachers Become Overseers: Casualties of the School Reform Plantation in the Bronx and Places Like it

This is a strange time to be involved in education. Either those shaping education policy on the state and federal level- many of whom have never been teachers- are incapable of imagining the consequences of their policies in actual classrooms, or they are cynically trying to destroy public education in the United States

No better example of this is the now widely practiced policy of rating teachers based on student test scores, and using variations in those scores, through the “value added” formula, as the basis for determining teachers professional standing. All throughout the nation teachers are being told that if they don’t raise student test scores, they could lose their tenure, lose their jobs, and in some places be publicly humiliated as an “incompetent teacher.” If they work in a high poverty school, their school could be closed and their entire teaching staff fired

While this performance based model may make sense in a business environment,, it can have dangerous consequences in a class room, especially in high poverty schools. When teachers are told they can lose their jobs if they don’t get students to perform well on standardized tests, it puts them in an adversarial relationship with young people who are often wounded, needy, and in desperate need of individual attention. Nowhere is this tension more manifest than in the community I have the deepest connection to people working in the public schools, the Bronx

Yesterday, I received the following email from a retired teacher involved in teacher training and mentoring:

“ I was just talking to close friend who works in PS 33 Bx. Jerome, near Fordham He told me of three young teachers crying, saying they couldn't take it any more. One was taken away in an ambulance with panic attack. This is why we have to speak out.”
I wish I could say this situation was idiosyncratic. But last spring, one of my former students, a brilliant young English teacher at a Bronx high school, left her job because she couldn’t stand the pressure to achieve results on standardized tests in the face of overwhelming personal issues her students confronted . When she told her students that she was going, one wrote “Why do the best ones always leave.”
Tough luck you might say. These young people clearly aren’t suited to be teachers in the new standards and performance based environment we are creating.
But you can only say that, I contend, if you don’t know the young people in Bronx schools. Many come emotionally wounded, some are hungry (literally), others are sleep deprived, many have language issues due to their recent immigrant status. All can learn, but some need special help in acquiring skills and others, many others, need emotional support and nurturing. In this setting abstract discipline universally imposed rarely works; multiple strategies based on individual relationships with children are required, reinforced by activities and relationships that extend outside the classroom. A good teacher in the Bronx must be part performer, part social worker, part tutor and part surrogate parent. The goal is not only skill acquisition, but learning to positively in a group environment without withdrawing into a shell or striking out in rage. If you think this is easy, I invite you to try it. Even in the best of circumstances, it is one of the most demanding jobs on the planet
Now take a teacher who is using all of these strategies and tell her, or him, that they could lose their jobs if their students don’t do better on standardized tests. This fundamentally changes their multifaceted relationships with students to a single one-Overseer on an Educational Plantation. They not only have to make students absorb information at rate many of them can’t handle, but they have to make them sit still through days and days of testing that many, because of skill deficits, find profoundly humiliating.
This story, just told to me this morning, brings that conundrum to life with overwhelming force
"An 18 year-old special needs child (but someone who still apparently had to pass one of the January tests) just kept looking at the test and putting his head on the desk. (My husband was a proctor in the room.) He said to his teacher (a new teacher of 2 years), "Miss XXXXX - am I stupid?"" She just sobbed and sobbed while assuring the child that he was NOT stupid and would do just fine in life. My husband came home (a veteran teacher of 34 years) and was sick all night."
I could not- and still cannot- read this story without my eyes tearing up. Is this the atmosphere we want to have in high needs schools? Do we want them to be a place where performance imperatives are imposed with a casual impersonality that ignores the circumstances of student’s lives because we have told ourselves “Poverty is not an excuse.” Do we want teachers who love and nurture young people or do we want cold, hard classroom leaders who drive students to perform at a pace they may not be ready to go, and in the process humiliate some students, enrage others, and drive others out.
Let me be blunt. Making teacher’s professional status dependent on student test scores is going to drive our most sensitive, creative, compassionate people out of the teaching profession. And with the best teachers gone, and instruction reduced to impersonal drilling by people who have immunized themselves against compassion, it will lead a whole generation of students to turn off school
Both of these are happening as I speak. And they will only accelerate as new performance based assessments, such as the ones recently passed by the New York State Legislature, become law.

When Teachers Become Overseers: Casualties of the School Reform Plantation in the Bronx and Places Like it

This is a strange time to be involved in education. Either those shaping education policy on the state and federal level- many of whom have never been teachers- are incapable of imagining the consequences of their policies in actual classrooms, or they are cynically trying to destroy public education in the United States

No better example of this is the now widely practiced policy of rating teachers based on student test scores, and using variations in those scores, through the “value added” formula, as the basis for determining teachers professional standing. All throughout the nation teachers are being told that if they don’t y raise student test scores, they could lose their tenure, lose their jobs, and in some places be publicly humiliated as an “incompetent teachers.” If they work in a high poverty school, their school could be closed and their entire teaching staff fired

While this performance based model may make sense in a business environment,, it can have dangerous consequences in a class room, especially in high poverty schools. When teachers are told they can lose their jobs if they don’t get students to perform well on standardized tests, it puts them in an adversarial relationship with young people who are often wounded, needy, and in desperate need of individual attention. Nowhere is this tension more manifest than in the community I have the deepest connection to people working in the public schools, the Bronx

Yesterday, I received the following email from a retired teacher involved in teacher training and mentoring:

“ I was just talking to close friend who works in PS 33 Bx. Jerome, near Fordham He told me of three young teachers crying, saying they couldn't take it any more. One was taken away in an ambulance with panic attack. This is why we have to speak out.”
I wish I could say this situation was idiosyncratic. But last spring, one of my former students, a brilliant young English teacher at a Bronx high school, left her job because she couldn’t stand the pressure to achieve results on standardized tests in the face of overwhelming personal issues her students confronted . When she told her students that she was going, one wrote “Why do the best ones always leave.”
Tough luck you might say. These young people clearly aren’t suited to be teachers in the new standards and performance based environment we are creating.
But you can only say that, I contend, if you don’t know the young people in Bronx schools. Many come emotionally wounded, some are hungry (literally), others are sleep deprived, many have language issues due to their recent immigrant status. All can learn, but some need special help in acquiring skills and others, many others, need emotional support and nurturing. In this setting abstract discipline universally imposed rarely works; multiple strategies based on individual relationships with children are required, reinforced by activities and relationships that extend outside the classroom. A good teacher in the Bronx must be part performer, part social worker, part tutor and part surrogate parent. The goal is not only skill acquisition, but learning to positively in a group environment without withdrawing into a shell or striking out in rage. If you think this is easy, I invite you to try it. Even in the best of circumstances, it is one of the most demanding jobs on the planet
Now take a teacher who is using all of these strategies and tell her, or him, that they could lose their jobs if their students don’t do better on standardized tests. This fundamentally changes their multifaceted relationships with students to a single one-Overseer on an Educational Plantation. They not only have to make students absorb information at rate many of them can’t handle, but they have to make them sit still through days and days of testing that many, because of skill deficits, find profoundly humiliating.
This story, just told to me this morning, brings that conundrum to life with overwhelming force
"An 18 year-old special needs child (but someone who still apparently had to pass one of the January tests) just kept looking at the test and putting his head on the desk. (My husband was a proctor in the room.) He said to his teacher (a new teacher of 2 years), "Miss XXXXX - am I stupid?"" She just sobbed and sobbed while assuring the child that he was NOT stupid and would do just fine in life. My husband came home (a veteran teacher of 34 years) and was sick all night."
I could not- and still cannot- read this story without my eyes tearing up. Is this the atmosphere we want to have in high needs schools? Do we want them to be a place where performance imperatives are imposed with a casual impersonality that ignores the circumstances of student’s lives because we have told ourselves “Poverty is not an excuse.” Do we want teachers who love and nurture young people or do we want cold, hard classroom leaders who drive students to perform at a pace they may not be ready to go, and in the process humiliate some students, enrage others, and drive others out.
Let me be blunt. Making teacher’s professional status dependent on student test scores is going to drive our most sensitive, creative, compassionate people out of the teaching profession. And with the best teachers gone, and instruction reduced to impersonal drilling by people who have immunized themselves against compassion, it will lead a whole generation of students to turn off school
Both of these are happening as I speak. And they will only accelerate as new performance based assessments, such as the ones recently passed by the New York State Legislature, become law.

School Reform and Its Amazing Accomplishments

These are great days in public education in the United States. Thanks to collaboration between the public and private sector, we have introduced competition to what was stagnant dimension of the public sector, providing under-served communities with new resources, giving parents new choices through charters schools and vouchers, weeding out incompetent teachers and creating room for brilliant young teachers through programs like Teach for America, and creating a new regime of accountability for students and teachers through the Common Core Standards and value added Teacher Ratings. As a result of these reforms, education in the United States is on the recovery path and we should see all of the following taking place in our great country!

1. A sharp decline in the test score gaps between children in different racial and economic groups.

2. A rapid improvement in America's global standing on standardized tests

3. A steady rise in the employment rate in working class communities of color and a corresponding decline in the prison population

All you have to do is look around you and observe how these three wonderful outcomes are coming to pass, right?

Those Beautiful New Town Houses in the Bronx May Really Be Rooming Houses

Yesterday at the housing panel at the Left Forum, one of the panelists reminded us that the construction of thousands of new town houses in the Bronx and East NY was not quite the Affordable housing success story it might look like from the surface. "In a lot of those houses" he said " every floor has been subdivided into three four rented rooms with a shared kitchen and bathroom" His remarks helped make sense of what had previously been a mystery to me, namely how in communities where the per capita family income was less than $25,000 a year you could find enough families to afford the down payment and carrying costs on a town house, especially with Section 8 subsidies being phased out. Now I had the answer. A lot of those town houses, built to be 2 and 3 family residences, had been turned into de facto rooming houses! I had never seen an article about this is any publication, but it made sense of what I was seeing on Bronx streets, hearing about from people who worked in Bronx schools and knew about the Bronx from local community activists. This is what happens when a so called "affordable housing " organizations charge far more for apartments, or co-operatives, than the average resident can pay, when there is a 13 year wait to get into public housing, when few of the jobs available to neighborhood resident pay a living wage, and when significant numbers of residents are forced to rely on the underground economy for income because of their immigration status, or because they have criminal records. It's wonderful to see the South Bronx rebuild, but the reality behind those new constructions may be grimmer than their spanking new exteriors may suggest

The Casualties of Testing

The relentless testing that is invading and taking over America's classrooms is not without its casualties. The latest is Fordham's "Take Your Children to Work Day", scheduled for April 26, which had to be cancelled because it conflicted with New York State math tests. April and May used to be a time for school projects. Six years ago, I was invited to organize long community history projects in 13 Bronx schools that culminated in day long festivals involving parents, grandparents, as well as the entire staff of the schools (including security and custodial personnel). Such projects are now impossible. April is now TEST MONTH in New York State. No history. No trips. Nothing but Test Prep and in third grade, 6 straight days of testing!

If you want to slow down the Test Juggernaut, please sign and circulate our petition. These policies are being coordinated nationally by the US Dept of Education

"An imagination is a terrible thing to waste."

" http://dumpduncan.org/

“The True Teacher is Guided by Feelings of Great Love”- A Personal Reflection on Bruce Springsteen’s “Wrecking Ball

Anybody who knows me well sometimes finds themselves wondering how I ended up as their friend. I can be egotistical, competitive, arrogant and at times startlingly insensitive. I have good traits too, but the less savory ones are always there ready to rise up at the most inconvenient times.

But amidst all this emotional baggage, flowing from injuries endured and injuries inflicted, I have one character trait that remains startlingly pure and that is my love of teaching. This is not something I possess alone, it is a trait that many teachers have, but I am not sure that most people understand it operates so I want to give an example based on an experience many people have- listening to a new album by their favorite recording artist or singer

Yesterday was such a moment for me. I had two hours to kill between a meeting in the South Bronx and my grand daughter’s track practice so I started listening to Bruce Springsteen’s New Album, “Wrecking Ball.” Given my love of Bruce’s music, which went back to “Born to Run” in the mid 70’s and the powerful connection I already had through the first song on the album
“We Take Care of Our Own” which was regularly played on the radio, this promised to be an almost religious experience for me. And I wasn’t disappointed, The first two songs, “We Take Care of Our Own” and “Easy Money” had me in a state of righteous rage about those whose reckless speculation had destroyed the jobs, and jeopardized the homes and savings of millions of Americans and that cathartic self-rightousness” continued into the third song ” Shackled and Drawn” until I heard the following lines
“Gambling man rolls the dice
Working man pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on Bankers hill
Up on Bankers Hill, The Party’s Going Strong
Down Here Below We’re Shackled and Drawn”

All of I sudden, I stopped thinking about my own emotions and started thinking about my Worker in American Life class which had spent half of a recent class listening to Woodie Guthrie songs from the Great Depression, one of which, “I Ain’t Got No Home” contains the following lines

“Gambling man is rich,
While the working man is poor
I ain’t got no home
In this land anymore”

And I started imagining” how would I teach this album” because it embodied so many themes we were talking about in the course, themes which Springsteen had embedded into his music in the past, but which now emerged with even greater clarity now that we were in the midst of an Economic Crisis whose causes were startlingly similar to those which triggered the Great Depression.

The next song, “Shackled and Drawn,” which had even more Guthriesque images, only intensified my determination to play this album in class Consider these lines:

“The Banker Man Grows Fat
Working Man Grows Thin
It’s All Happened Before And It’ll Happen Again
It’s Happen Again, Yeah They’ll Bet Your Life
I’m A Jack of All Trades
Darling We’ll Be All Right”

I now had a priceless opportunity to do what every history teacher dreams of- bring the past to life with images that connect to present realities that touch a chord with your students. Woodie Guthrie, through this album, would be as real as if he were walking along the highways or the streets of our big cities today

But it is not just the Depression that Springsteen was invoking. It was also de-inustrialization, disinvestment and globalization which left many neighborhoods of the nation’s great industrial cities look as though they had suffered aerial bombardment. That theme, which we were going to cover in depth in the second half of the course, was evoked with rage and irony in the fifth song in the album “Death to My Hometown”. Consider these lines

“They destroyed Our Families, Factories
And they took our Homes
They Left Our Bodies on the Plains
The Vultures Picked Our Bones”
. . . .
Send the Robber Barons Straight to Hell
The Greedy Thieves Who Came Around
And Ate the Flesh of Everything They Found
Whose Crimes Have Gone Unpunished Now
Who Walk the Streets as Free Men Now.”

To say this was a teaching moment would be an understatement. I had come across something which was going to bring the whole epic journey of American workers from the late 19th Century to the present with startling clarity, and an indignation rooted in the fear that those who did most to build this country would be the one’s most asked to sacrifice when the nation fell on hard times. My students were already beginning to get this, to start to identify with the workers, slaves and immigrants from which all of them were descended, but to have Bruce Springsteen anoint this journey with dignity and beauty, I knew, would touch them more than any lecture I could give. Consider this paen to workingclass heroism and sacrifice “We Are Alive”

We Are Alive
And Though Our Bodies Lie
Alone Here In the Dark
Our Spirits Rise
To Carry the Fire and Light the Spark
To Stand Shoulder and Shoulder And Heart to Heart

A Voice Cried I was Killed in Maryland in 1877
When the Railroad Workers Made Their Stand
I Was Killed in 1963
One Sunday Morning in Birmingham
I Died Last Year Crossing the Southern Desert
My Children Left Behind in San Pablo
We’ll They’ve Left Our Bodies Here to Rot
Oh Please Let Them Know

Have you ever heard a more powerful call for the restoration of historic memory, so that the sacrifices of working people who tried to make better lives for themselves and their families would not go unrecognized? I haven’t. It made me like teaching my course was a sacred obligation.

But it was the final song, American Land, which moved me most of all. This haunting tale with sounds drawn from traditional Irish folk music, was the closest thing to a Paul Robeson speech on the multiracial, multicultural roots of the American working class I had ever hear in song. It not only was a priceless evocation of a message I was trying to get across in my class, it was that message carved in a poetic form that would echo through the ages and provide a moral compass for all those prepared to see what the nation looked like from the perspective of those who built it

The McNicholses, The Polaskis, The Smiths Zerellis Too
The Blacks, The Irishy, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
They Came Across The Water A Thousand Miles from Below
With Nothing in Their Bellies But the Fire Down Below

They Died Building the Railroads
They Worked To Bones and Skin
They Died in Fields and Factories
Names Scattered to the Wind
They Died to Get Here A Hundred Years Ago
They’re Still Dyin’ Now
The Hands That Build the Country
We’re Always Trying to Keep Out”

There is my lesson. A teacher’s dream. Poetic images put to music that evoke events great and small, that bring the lives of those who worked in shadows to life, and invest them with dignity and stature. I can’t wait till the class after the Midterm when I can share this music with my students and learn how they make sense of what Springsteen does in this album.

But I am not that unusual in this regard. Because that is what teachers do- they dream about how to make everything they come across, 24 hours a day, relevant to their students. If you crush those dreams, you take the soul, and the love, out of the nation’s classrooms.

Squeezing the Life out of Children- The Deadly Impact of Testing Protocols Derived from No Child Left Behind and Race the Top

When I first started work on this "Educators Letter to
President Obama" early in January, my first thought was all the teachers being demoralized by a campaign of demonization, orchestrated from Washington, that aimed to hold them accountable to student performance on standardized tests. I feared that the best teachers would be driven out of our schools, and that teaching would become a stress-filled, temporary job in a public school system viewed as a source of profit by the nation's most powerful corporations. None of those initial fears have receded, but they have been increasingly supplemented by another concern- that the strategies developed to rate teachers- which involve the proliferation of high stakes tests beginning in the lowest grades- are squeezing the life out of students and making them hate school

This is not a concern I have made up based on second hand information. It reflects conversations, some solicited, some overheard, with and among parents of elementary school students who cannot believe how the learning expectations on their children have been ratcheted up at the expense of play and class projects. "My son is seven years old. How can they expect him to sit at his desk for six hours a day writing things down." one mother at my grand daughter's track practice said yesterday." " Just wait," another mother said." I third grade, they will have 6 days in a row of tests for 90 minutes a day. My son is a nervous wreck." A few people I know have responded to this atmosphere by home schooling their children, but as these friends pointed out to me, this is not a realistic option for most working class parents.

Are these people and their children doomed to ten years of torture introduced in the name of "restoring national competitiveness," "preparing young people for the job market" and "weeding out bad teachers?"

They are unless you do something about it. Signing and circulating this petition is one way of sending a message that excessive testing is demoralizing our children as well as undermining the teaching profession and that Washington needs to start listening to teachers, parents, and students themselves



http://dumpduncan.org/

Bruce Springsteen's New Album

I spent about 3 hours today in the car listening the Bruce Springsteen's new album "The Wrecking Ball." It is dark, defiant, poetic, infused with a profound sense of history, and deeply spiritual. Almost every song merits multiple plays and close lyrical analysis. I feel a deeply personal connection to it because it touches on almost every theme I am trying to get across in my Worker in American Life glass. The spirit of Woodie Guthrie guides Springsteen's hand in song after song there is a tribute to the late Clarence Clemons in the liner notes that alternately reduced me to tears and reinforced my determination to live every day as if it were my last. I will listen to this album over and over again and share it with everyone I love and everyone who needs a helping hand to get through the travails of life. This album epitomizes what it means to Bear Witness, to stand up for justice even when justice cannot be achieved, and to speak in behalf of the powerless even when the arrogance of power seems to rule unchecked. Somehow, though the darkest of thoughts are expressed here without embellishment or compromise, I felt much less alone, and oddly, more hopeful, listening to it than I did before. This truly is art in the service of humanity

Should Teach for America Be "Mic Checked"

I was incredibly disturbed to hear, from a friend in Detroit, that the local education authority plans to bring in 200 Teach for America Corps members after nearly a score of Detroit public schools are closed and hundreds of veteran teachers let go. This is the second city in the last two weeks- Montgomery Ala is the other- which is replacing fired veteran teachers with young teachers from TFA.

If past history is an indicator, you can bet that in Detroit, a far higher percentage of the teachers let go than the teachers TFA will be bringing in will be Black and Latino.

But that race and class dynamic only compounds the moral and political issue that we need to confront- namely that an organization founded with high ideals when there was a national teacher shortage has become an empire building octopus that now routinely sings contracts with municipalities to hire TFA teachers when those same municipalities close allegedly "failing schools" ( judged as failing entirely on graduation rates and test scores) and fires veteran teachers

To me,that behavior is the moral equivalent of strikebreaking. I have had many wonderful students join TFA over the past ten years, but none of them got jobs by having someone else fired

Now, the dynamics have changed. If TFA doesn't stop encouraging municipalities to fire veteran teachers to make room for its Corps members, perhaps it is time for Occupy groups, and other social justice advocates to start "Mic Checking" TFA recruiters when they come to University?

I pose this question to Occupy Groups, labor unions, and TFA Corps members past and present

Have TFA's current labor policies- which turn it into a source of "replacement labor" -placed it beyond the pale in the progressive community?

Save Money, Make Money, Create Jobs for the Children of the Elite What School Reform Is Really About

In recent months, I lost whatever illusions I used to have that there is a shred of idealism behind the Education Reform movement touted by the American Legislative Exchange Program and the U.S. Department of Education. No one is even pretending anymore that their reforms will raise student achievement or reduce class and race inequities. Since the reforms are accompanied by draconian budget cuts that raise class size and dramatically reduce arts sports and science programs which keep students motivated, they wouldn’t improve student outcomes even if they were actually designed to do so, or were capable of doing sounder ideal conditions.

So since current economic conditions are far from ideal and the reforms won’t ever realize their original objective, which was to improve student achievement, why are political leaders going ahead with them full steam

1. They save money. Every time you replace a public school with a charter school or initiate a school turnaround program which requires you to replace half of the teaching staff, you end up dramatically reducing budget outlays for pensions and salaries both in the short run and the long run. Privatization and firing of veteran teachers is a huge benefit to states facing budget deficits. Who cares if they make so called “failing schools” worse and end up increasing gaps in achievement and attendance between schools in wealthy and poor neighborhoods.

2. The make money for private interests. Increasing the number of tests makes money for those who produce the tests and those who create software to use the results to assess teacher performance. Creation of charter schools also puts profits in the pockets of school management companies and even hedge funds who invest in charter school construction.

3. They create jobs for the children of the elite. At a time when youth unemployment is at an all time high and there is no longer a national teacher shortage, firing veteran teachers through school turnaround programs creates jobs for young people from elite backgrounds in programs like Teach for America, who otherwise would not be able to get teaching positions. Who cares if the people being fired are often Black and Latino, and from the neighborhoods they teach and most of those being hired are white and from wealthy suburbs. We all know we are living in a post racial society and that the race and class of teachers doesn’t matter, right?

Origins of the "Dump Duncan" Petiton Drive

Most teachers in the US not only voted for President Obama, they spent considerable time and money campaigning for him. Like many other Americans, they thought the Obama presidency would bring new initiatives to help working families and help people rise out of poverty after 8 years of policieswhich favored large corporations and concentrated wealth among top earners. However, they were shocked when President Obama appointed Arne Duncan, a man who had never been a teacher, as Secretary of Education,and when policies began emanating from the new administration favoring
charter schools over public schools, requiring student test scores as a basis of teacher evaluation, and encouraging "school turnaround"strategies which led to mass firing of teachers. Worse yet, the rhetoric emanating from Mr Duncan often portrayed "bad teachers" ratherthan deeply entrenched poverty, as the reason for race and class inequities in educational achievement, and for poor US performance
globally on standardized tests, a concern heightened when Mr Duncan praised the mass firing of teachers in Central Falls Rhode Island and called Hurricane Katrina " the best thing that had happened to education in New Orleans" because it allowed local officials to replace public schools with charter schools

Over the last three years, teacher concern about the education policies of the Obama administration only continued to heighten as The Department of Education used the lure of Race to The Top Funding to try to lure, and eventually compel states to ratchet up the number and importance of standardized tests and use them as a basis to evaluate and reward teachers. Discontent with administration policies led teachers to organize the Save Our School March last summer and inJanuary of this year launch a petition drive to have Arne Duncanremoved as Secretary of Education and a lifetime educator put in his place

The campaign was jointly launched by two veteran educators who had never met in person, Robert Valiant of Eastern Washington and Professor Mark Naison of Brooklyn New York. Both had not only spent a life time teaching and working in schools,they were in regular contact with large groups of teachers and administrators who felt betrayed by the policies of an Administration they had worked so hard to elect. Very quickly, this campaign drew support form teachers all over the country,along with parents and other concerned citizens, in rural, small town and big city districts, from kindergarten to college. But their campaign has thus far been ignored by major media outlets and even bypublications which cover education. In a nation where teachers voices are largely excluded from education policy, this exclusion further
damages the morale of the nation's teachers, already the lowest in recent history


"If you Want to Save America's Public Schools: Replace Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan With a Lifetime Educator." http://dumpduncan.org/

Turning Hardship into Tragedy: The Destructive Consequences of “School Turnaround Policies” for Neighborhoods and Children

One of the cornerstones of the Obama Administrations “Race to the Top”program is its “school turnaround” initiative. In order to qualify for Race to the Top funds, a state must agree to shut down “failing” schools, as determined by test scores or, in the case of high schools, graduation rates, replace at least half of their teaching staffs, and put a new school in its place, either a reconfigured public schools with new leadership, or a charter school.

As a longtime community organizer and coach, and someone who has spend the last eight years doing community history projects in Bronx schools, I am astonished and appalled by this policy. If low income communities, battered by factory closings, job losses, drug epidemics and over aggressive policing are going to create an environment conducive to educational achievement for the majority of its young people, schools are going to have to play a role in educating the entire neighborhood and helping relieve its economic distress. Instead of closing down failing schools on the basis of test scores and graduation rates, those schools should be given additional resources to run after school and night programs for both students and neighborhood residents, and hire parents along with teachers to help staff them. Such a policy would make everyone in the community look to the school as a beacon of hope and transformation, would make teacher/student/parent relationships less adversarial, and would give parents additional resources that would allow them to stay in their homes and apartments and avoid three outcomes which absolutely cripple educational engagement and performance- homelessness, taking in boarders, and constant moving from apartment to apartment. Any teacher or coach who works in a working class or poor neighborhood knows what I am talking about. Unfortunately, education reformers with a “no excuses” philosophy write off student living conditions, or family income, as irrelevant to educational achievement or as something that can be overcome with superhuman effort by teachers who are presented with financial incentives if they succeed, and termination if they fail

Now lets look at the school turnaround model. Here the only variable that matters is teaching and administration. Schools are given no extra resources to make the community welcome in the school, or give extra income to the neighborhood’s struggling families. Teachers and principals are simply presented with an ultimatum- improve test scores and graduation rates or you are fired!

As someone who has spent the last 45 years teaching, and who spent more than 15 years coaching and running youth programs in North Brooklyn, I will tell you flat out that trying to improve academic performance, or any other performance, on the part of young people in poverty and on the edge of homelessness without making additional resources available to them and their families, building on the cultural capital of the community they live in, and giving them love, mentoring and respect, is impossible. No amount of homework and stress filled drilling for tests will accomplish that. The inevitable result of that will either be cheating by school officials or subtle, and not so subtle pressures to push young people in the most difficult circumstances out of the school.

I am not pessimistic about young people in difficult circumstances achieving great things. In the youth organization I worked in the 78th Precinct youth council, a small group of coaches and referees had great success taking young people who were in deep trouble in school, who had difficulties with the law, and who had families that had drug and alcohol problems and getting them through middle school, high schools and into college. But what did it take? We gave them money for food and clothing. We paid for tutors to help them in subjects where they were weak. We got them jobs, and sometimes helped get jobs for their parents. When they were kicked out of their homes, we let them stay with us. We sent them to high schools where we knew there were coaches who looked out for them. We organized reading groups for them featuring books that talked about issues in their families and neighborhood. We exposed them to music we grew up with and let them expose us to the hip hop music which was the sound track of their lives, And when all else failed, we were available to them 24/7, no questions, whether they called us on the phone, or knocked on our door.

Using those methods, we didn’t lose a single child. But if we did anything less, we might have lost all of them!

No lets go back to the schools. There is no way, I repeat, no way, that destabilizing schools environments, and playing musical chairs with teachers and principals, is good for young people such as the ones I had the privilege of working with. They need teacher/ mentors who will be there for their entire lives, not ones who will try to teach them measurable skills for two and three years and then leave. They also need the school to provide them with additional resources that will help stave off the most damaging dimensions of poverty, and to incorporate the cultural traditions of their neighborhoods into the school mission and culture.

But that means reconfiguring schools a institutions that serve neighborhoods and families, not as way stations for the lucky and ambitious that will enable them to leave behind the hardships that surround them

The “school turnaround path” we are on now is tragically flawed It will leave the neighborhoods such schools are located in worse shape than they were before, and undermine long term chances of reducing class and race inequities in education and economic status.

But if you don’t believe me, why don’t you do something revolutionary and actually ask young people what THEY want a school to provide. And then develop a school transformation policy that incorporates those suggestions. I would be very surprised if they didn’t want some of the things from their schools, that we, in the 78th Precinct Youth Council, offered some of our players, along with some great ideas that we never thought of.

March 13, 2012

Has Teach for America Become a Scab Labor Agency?

Has Teach for America become a scab labor agency? All over the country, school districts are contracting to bring in TFA corps members after firing veteran teachers through "school turnaround strategies" enthusiastically supported by the US Department of Education. This is happening right now in Montgomery Alabama and is about to happen in New York City if the NYC Department of Education can get away with it's plans to close 33 allegedly " failing schools." Since there is no longer a teacher shortage in the US it seems like the only way TFA can justify the funds it gets from Gates and Walton is encourage school districts to fire veteran teachers to make room for its corps members.

At a time when workers in the US need to relearn the concept of Solidarity to defend- and eventually improve- their living standards, this policy represents its antithesis. Young people considering joining TFA should think long and hard whether they want to take a job that has been created by firing someone else and Occupy groups and progressive faculty should consider whether TFA should be allowed to recruit on their campuses without being vigorously challenged on this dangerous new policy. And as for young progressives who are in, or were once in TFA, they might want to consider openly pressing the TFA leadership to change direction.

The War on Teachers: Why America’s Shrinking Middle Class and Battered Working Class Is Eating Its Own And What Can Be Done About it.

All over the nation, teachers are under attack. Politicians of both parties, in every state in the union, have blamed teachers and teachers unions for the nation’s low standing in international tests, and our nation’s inability to create the educated labor force our economy needs. Mass firing of teachers in so called failing schools has taken place in municipalities throughout the nation and some states have made a public ritual of teacher’s humiliation. In Los Angeles and New York, wildly inaccurate teacher ratings based on student test scores have been published by the press, leading to some of those cities best teachers being attacked as incompetent, resulting in resignations, and one actual suicide among those defamed by this campaign. Big budget films such as “Bad Teacher” and the documentary “Waiting For Superman” popularize the idea that public school teachers prevent poor children of color from getting a good education; while corporate funded organizations such as “Children First,” and “Stand For Children” put forth the idea that teachers must work in fear of firing or loss of pay if children are to excel. It is no accident that teachers all over the country are thinking of leaving their jobs. A recent student showed that teacher morale in the country is the lowest it has been in the last twenty years

One question we must ask is why this campaign has acquired such strong bipartisan support and why the public has not spoken out more against it. It is true that attacks on teachers have occurred in the midst of a broad based attack on the bargaining rights and benefits of all public workers, but even by that standard ,teachers have been singled out. In New York State, where teacher evaluations were just released to the press, there is a state law exempting police and firefighters from having their evaluations released to the public. Nothing better symbolizes the way teachers have become “fair game” for public demonization in ways that will make talented people think once, twice and three times, not only about entering teaching, but about remaining in the field. Needless to say, it also fosters an atmosphere of skepticism, disrespect and hostility on the part of parents and students that will not contribute to a good learning atmosphere in what will remains of the public schools

I can understand why corporate America would want to make teachers scapegoats for an attack on public education and teachers unions; there are huge profits to be made in the testing industry, in educational technologies which replace teachers, and in constructing and managing charter schools

But why are so many parents and the general public buying into this campaign and cheering it on! After all, politicians wouldn’t be bashing teachers if they didn’t think it would get votes, no matter how much money they were getting from the testing companies!

And here, we have to take a hard look at the way American’s shrinking middle class and battered working class looks at the teachers in their midst. While large numbers of people are losing their jobs, getting foreclosed on their homes, making wages that can’t pay their mortgages or basic expenses, finding themselves with children living at home who have school loan debt they will never be able to pay off; here is a group of people, 80 percent of them women, who make better salaries than they do, have better health plans and pensions, and to boot get 2 months off in the summer!! “Damn,” many say to themselves, “who do teachers think they are? Why should they live so well on my tax dollars why I can barely keep my head above water? At the very least, they should feel some of the insecurity I feel every day and face the kind of performance assessments workers in the private sector deal with all the time. Yeah! If it helps my kids learn, rate them and fire them. I don’t want my tax dollars wasted!”

Given what has happened in the American economy in the last four years, or for that matter the last thirty years, that is a very difficult argument to counter. It is exactly the kind of sentiment that America’s unionized blue collar workers faced in the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s when big corporations started closing factories and ruthlessly cutting wages and benefits. The non unionized work force in big industrial states refused to rally to the defense of their unionized counterparts and so almost without exception, industrial unions lost battles to maintain their wage and benefit levels which allowed them to live a middle class life style or prevent plants from relocating. Rather than looking on unionized workers as people whose work conditions and lifestyle they should aspire to, possibly by organizing unions themselves, most people allowed envy, resentment or indifference to prevent them from speaking up or organizing in their behalf.

Now, most people who have children in the nation’s public schools are standing by while teachers are attacked and their job security and working conditions are being savagely undermined. Some are cheering the process on

That posture is short sighted for two reasons. First the same policies which create an insecure, deeply resentful teaching force will do grave damage to children. Not only will excessive testing make children hate their classroom experience, but they will be sorely missing the love and extra care that the best teachers gave their students. Beaten angry teachers will produce beaten angry students, hardened a daily dose of rigid, punitive discipline and test prep, deprived of opportunities for creativity, play, community building and self expression. Parents will discover soon enough, not only that their children are unhappy, but they are not well prepared for higher education or challenging careers. Their hopes that school will be a path to a better life for their children will be cruelly dashed.

But there is another more insidious consequence of the attack on teaching. Every time you undermine the job security, working conditions, and wages of one group of workers, it makes it easier for employers to undermine them for all workers. This is why, during the depression, many unemployed people organized in support of workers on strike, even though any body with a job, in that era, was relatively privileged. They believed in the concept of Solidarity- the idea that working people could only progress if they progressed together, and if one group of workers improved their conditions, it would ultimately improve conditions for all.

That kind of Solidarity, for the most part, is gone now, replaced by envy. But if American workers are ever going to regain their fair share of national income and win back respect on and off the jobs, it is something they are going to have to relearn. The Occupy Movement has brought back the idea of Solidarity with its image of “the 99 percent fighting the 1 Percent,” but this idea has not yet spread fast enough to stop the War on Teachers from gaining traction in every state in the Union.

But there are glimmers of hope In Chicago and New York, Occupy groups are uniting with teachers, parents and students to fight school closings; in New York, parents groups have rallied to the defense of teachers stigmatized by the publication of outrageously inaccurate teacher ratings; in Florida, a pernicious parent trigger law favoring charter schools was just defeated in the legislature.

These actions will hopefully be just the beginning of a transformation of public consciousness inspired by the Occupy Movement that will transform teachers from symbols of national decline to symbols of popular resistance fighting for the rights of all working people as well as the nation’s children

Can we do this? To borrow a slogan from a well known politician. Oh yes. Yes we CAN!!!

A Quote to End All Quotes from Arne Duncan's Chief of Staff:

A Quote to End All Quotes from Arne Duncan's Chief of Staff:

If new standards will do nothing to improve learning, why were they pushed so aggressively? The comments of Joanne Weiss, chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, are telling. She wrote in the Harvard Business Review that the
Common Core "radically alters the market ... Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on adistrict-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs
will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale."
http://dumpduncan.org/

The Occupy Movement and Organized Labor- Speech to Communication Workers of America

It is a great honor for me to be asked to address this gathering.
The organization you represent was not only one of the first labor
unions in the nation to recognize that Occupy Wall Street was
spreading a message about economic inequality that organized labor had
been trying to get across for more than two decades; it is also a
union that made a major breakthrough in new organizing two months ago
by becoming the official bargaining agent for Cablevision employees in
an NLRB Election

Given this, I am not going to lecture you on the relationship
between Occupy Wall Street and labor movement in New York City,
something you know far more about than I do. Rather, I am going to
talk in broad terms about the relationship between the Occupy movement
and organized labor nationally, and try to put that relationship in
historical perspective.

It is my conviction, based on my historical studies, and my own
involvement with the Occupy movement- which include founding an Occupy
support group called the 99 Pct clubs as well as work with Occupy
groups in the Bronx, Queens, Connecticut and Eastern Long Island- that
Occupy Wall Street and its spin offs represent a critically important
ally for the labor movement. At a time when the labor movement is
under fierce attack, with state governments trying to undermine long
established collective bargaining rights, privatize public services,
and de-fund pension plans, the Occupy movement, virtually alone, has
created a discourse, backed up by a powerful grass roots movement,
which insists the burden of sacrifice in the current crisis should fall
upon the very wealthy, not unionized workers. This gives the labor
movement, for the first time in recent memory, a basis for taking its
message in defense of worker living standards to young, college
educated audiences which were previously hostile or indifferent to such
a world view. Essentially, Occupy Wall Street has given a moral and
intellectual rationale to what I would call “Trickle Up Economics”- the
idea that real prosperity and economic stability can only be secured
when wages levels for American workers rise enough so their buying
power is no longer dependent on second mortgages on homes and credit
card debt.

I have seen the impact of this first hand at my own University.
The organization we have created at Fordham in support of Occupy Wall
Street- the 99 Percent Clubs- has made as its first project, an
educational campaign around issues of economic inequality. In the last
week, our campus has been plastered with posters and flyers which show
how the top one percent of earners have monopolized a growing share of
national wealth and income. The poster which most moved me was the one
which pointed out that since 2009, 88 percent of corporate income has
gone to profits, and only 1 percent to wages! Here are a group of
students at an elite university pointing out that Wage Compression and
an attack on worker living standards are an attack that threaten the
well being of everyone except the very wealthy. It would have been
impossible to imagine a group of students bringing such an argument to
their peers even a year ago. This is all due to the influence of
Occupy Wall Street

The dissemination of this ”Trickle Up” discourse is still at an
early stage, and has not been strong enough or vital enough to prevent
successful attacks on worker bargaining rights in Indiana, Michigan and
New Jersey. But as the Occupy movement revives in the spring and
summer, it will not only provide additional support for labor campaigns
to protect bargaining rights and fight “right to work laws,” it may
also provide critical support for efforts to organize the unorganized
and expand labor union coverage to new sectors of the economy,
especially big box retailers, fast food providers, and the financial
services sector.. While the idea that Occupy Wall Street will give a
shot in the arm to recruiting new workers into the labor movement may
seen wildly optimistic to many of you, let me remind you that Occupy
Wall Street is less than 6 months old, and suggest that its full impact
on American society, and American labor, may be five or six years in
the future.

To put this moment n historical perspective, I want to go back 80
years in time. It is January 1933. Franklin Roosevelt has just been
elected president and the nation is in the throes of a terrible
Depression. Nearly a third of the work force is unemployed, another
third is working part time, and much of the great industrial capacity
of the nation lies idle. The steel industry is operating at 33 percent
of capacity, the auto industry at 20 percent of capacity, and the
construction industry has ground to a halt. Payrolls in Chicago in
private industry are 26 percent of what they were in 1929. The labor
movement is reeling under the stress of the crisis. Union membership is
down to 3 million, 60 percent of its high point of 5 million in 1919.
The nation’s workers and its labor leaders are in despair, wondering
what the future would bring.

Could anyone have imagined that the labor movement was on the verge
of its greatest growth spurt in American history, growing from 3
million members in 1933 to 8 million in 1941 and to 15 million in 1945,
and that the great open shop bastions of American society, the auto
industry, the steel industry, and the electronics industry, would all
become almost completely unionized by 1945?

What happened? Why this extraordinary growth in union representation
and union power and what lessons does this hold for us today.

One big change was the election of pro-labor public officials, not
only in the White House and Congress, but in State Capitals and City
Halls throughout the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Far West. By 1936,
there were pro-labor governors in key states like Michigan, Ohio,
Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and pro labor mayors in a huge number of
industrial cities. This meant when strikes did take place, officials
were reluctant to use the police, the national guard or federal troops
to break them, a factor which provide critical in the two most
successful strikes of the era, the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
and the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37, each of which involved
seizures of private property and public space which in a different time
would have prompted deployment of the national guard or federal troops
on behalf of the companies.

But equally important, and perhaps more relevant for purposes of
comparison, is that the labor movement organized and grew in the midst
of a broad popular upheaval, led by radicals, that included hunger
marches and sit ins at relief agencies and protests against evictions
and foreclosures that sometimes involved thousands of people, and
spawned the growth of a culture of solidarity that blamed bankers and
the wealthy for causing the Depression and saw America’s common people
as the nation’s hope and its strength. In some ways, the cultural
symbols of that uprising bear a startling resemblance to those put
forward by Occupy Wall Street. Consider this passage from “The Ballad
of Pretty Boy Floyd” by the great balladeer Woodie Guthrie

as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

What did this mean for unions, on the ground? It meant when they
finally mobilized to try to organize new workers, at first in response
to the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 and the
passage of the Wagner Labor Relations Act in 1935, they could count on
tremendous support from the radicals of that era, Socialists and
Communists, and of a powerful grass roots movement of the unemployed.
The ethos of solidarity meant than when workers who were employed
were
on strike, organizations of the unemployed would mobilize in their
support because they had come to believe that when some workers gained
security, respect and a higher income, all workers would benefit. In
both Minneapolis and Flint, members of unemployed organizations stood
toe to toe with unionists in battles with the police and pro employer
citizens groups and in the case of Flint, actually helped workers
occupy the plants. Members of other unions in towns hundreds of miles
away mobilized to support these campaigns, along with radical activists
from all over the nation, because they viewed them as milestones in
workers attempt to win bargaining rights in critical industries and
would, if successful, change the way the entire American economy was
organized And they were right in that conviction, since the
Minneapolis strike led to the emergence of the Teamsters as a major
national union with over 400,000 members and the Flint Strike led to
winning collective bargaining rights in the nation’s two largest
corporations, General Motors and US. Steel. It was the spread of an
ethos of solidarity, first put forward by radical activists, and then
embraced by millions of working people, that made these victories
possible. Both of these strikes were communal uprisings, and without
the support of tens of thousands of people who did not work in the
industries in question, they would nave have succeeded
, Now segue to the present. The labor movement is far weaker, in
terms of membership,, than it was 20 years ago, and is under attack in
state after state by Republican governors and legislators who want to
strip away hard won bargaining rights. But while these anti-labor
attacks are going on, a huge movement for economic democracy has broken
out in the nation that has made the question of economic inequality and
the power of corporations center stage in public discourse. The
movement has not only put ideas about inequality on the agenda in new
ways, it has spawned hundreds of organizations which have tried to put
those ideas into practice. I have seen this first hand in New York city
where Occupy activists have been fighting foreclosures and evictions,
resisting school closings, fighting racial profiling and police
brutality and working with unions to demand that the state and city
governments tax the rich before they ask for give backs from workers.
Though media pundits like to say that Occupy Wall Street has
disappeared, it has started to evolve from a highly visible mass
movement that inspired an Economic Democracy Discourse, to a
decentralized, neighborhood based movement for economic justice.
And that is where the opportunity for labor lies. All over this
nation, Occupy groups exist, in cities, small towns, even some rural
areas, that will create alliances with labor unions to protect the
living standards of unionized workers, to elect pro labor candidates to
office, and to help unions organize the unorganized. As someone who
works in four such organizations, Occupy the Bronx, Occupy the
Hamptons, and the 99 Percent Clubs of Fordham University and Hollis
Presbyterian Church , I can tell you without equivocation, that the
labor movement has not, since the 1960’s, had more allies in
universities and working class communities, who share its vision of
what is wrong in American society and what needs to be done to correct
it. The Occupy movement has not only provided a moral and intellectual
framework for a campaign to raise the living standards of American
workers through union organizing and political action, it has created
something we haven’t had in this country for a long time-a cadre of
shock troops who will fight toe to toe with labor in battles in the
streets and in the nation’s workplaces.
If I dare to dream, I can see where this might lead- to the
unionization of Wal-Mart, to the unionization of McDonalds, to the
unionization of financial services workers in the nation’s largest
banks.
Impossible you say? Perhaps. But are these goals any more
impossible than the unionization of General Motors, US Steel and
General Electric seemed in 1933?
We are only in the very earliest stages of an economic justice
movement that could transform the way tens of millions of people live
and work. And when this happens, people like yourselves will be at the
absolute center of this struggle, both in the political arena, and in
the shops, and offices and warehouses where the movement for economic
democracy will reach its highest form. And when you do that, people in
the Occupy Movement will be standing shoulder to shoulder with you just
as their 1930’s radical forebears were in that era.
In closing, I will leave you with a slogan from the 60’s that
for me at, least has never lost its power

DARE TO STRUGGLE!! DARE TO WIN!!!

School Reformers and Crack Dealers

What do school reformers and crack dealers have in common? They both follow the principle "Never get high on your own supply." Crack dealers don't smoke their own product, and school reformers never send their own children to the schools their policies create for the children of the poor!

What a REAL Civil Rights Movement Would Look Like

Those who say that "School Reform is the Civil Rights Movement of the 21st Century" should ponder this: That unionizing Wal-Mart, K Mart, Target and Auto Zone, along with lower paid workers in the financial services industry, would do more to improve education in low performing districts than all their reforms put together since family income, not quality of teaching, is the single most determinant of educational achievement. Lift people out of poverty and schools will rise too, especially if we give students a curriculum that honors their history and culture and encourages them to work to improve conditions in the neighborhoods where they live . All the available evidence supports this conclusion, if those who promote data driven instruction, would actually take real data seriously

My Letter to an Idealistic, Young Teach for America Corps Member About How Destructive the Organization Has Become

Dear . . . .


Unlike many people on this list serve, I am not an expert on pedagogy, nor someone with a lifetime of experience teaching, or training teachers, in public
schools. However I have over forty years of teaching and research in labor history under my belt, and from that vantage point, I think Teach for America has become a profoundly destructive force in American society

My colleagues can talk much better about the role Teach for America has played in de-professionalizing the teaching profession--in convincing policy makers that six weeks of training in a summer program can be substituted for years of training and supervision in a graduate school of education

My comments will focus on the role TFA has played in union busting and wage compression in the public sector. In the last few years TFA has encouraged,or at least passively accepted, a pattern of school districts firing veteran teachers and replacing them with TFA corps members. This has happened most recently in Montgomery Alabama, a city where one of the education scholars on this list serve Katie Stafford Strom grew up, but it has happened in at least five cities I know of, mostly in the South. Such a policy is attractive to financially strapped municipalities who save money on pensions and labor costs, but its effect on public sector wages is absolutely devastating. Since there are no gains to be made in educational quality through such a policy, what you have is TFA becoming a the elite's chosen instrument to break unions and lower labor costs.

This is why the Walton Foundation has contributed so generously to TFA. The weaker public sector unions become, the less likely the labor movement is able to unionize Wal-mart, something, by the way, that would instantaneously lift hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty and do more to promote educational achievement than all current educational reform initiatives combined.

Let me be blunt. Unless you and other progressive teachers in TFA protest against the organization's policy encouraging districts to fire veteran teachers so that TFA can be brought in, you are guilty of condoning strikebreaking. In the 1930's they would have called you a "scab," and you would not have been treated very kindly by those losing their jobs, and members of their families

But of course this is 2012 and you are all wonderful idealistic young people devoted to helping young people escape poverty through education. You have received nothing but praise from the press, politicians and officials of the US Department of Education, and will have ample opportunities inside and out of education, when you leave teaching, as most of you will do. But while you may be wonderful individually, you are part of an organization which is ruining the careers of veteran teachers, weakening uninons, and driving down public sector wages.

I can't tell you what to do, but the first thing I recommend is doing dome serious soul searching about what your role will be in an organization which is doing serious long term damage to the standard of living of American workers

Sincerely,

Mark (Naison)

Why I Support Tanya McDowell, Mother Jailed for Falsifying Address, Even Though She Sold Drugs

During the last two days, I have taken flak from some friends for denouncing the injustice of the jail sentence for Tanya McDowell, the Connecticut mother who was convicted of falsifying her address to get her child into a better school. She was a bad candidate for "martyrdom" they told me, because she had a history of selling drugs, which also contributed to the length of her sentence.

But while Tanya McDowell may not be your preferred symbol of working class virtue, she remains a wonderful symbol of racial and economic inequality in the United States and the difficult choices working class people have to make in an economy which not only has high unemployment, but fewer and fewer jobs that pay a living wage

Let me pose the question to you. If you were homeless and desperate, wouldn't you consider forging your address to try to get your child into a better school, and selling drugs to make sure your child had enough to eat? If there were enough good schools around so that any school you chose would be acceptable, and if there were enough decent paying jobs to keep your head above water through legal work, that would be one thing. But what if NEITHER of those things were true. What are you supposed to do? Let your child go hungry to a terrible school.

And if you think children don't go hungry to school in this country, think again. I have been at schools in the Bronx where children start crying on Friday because the only times they are guaranteed eating decently is when they are at school and have heard about similar dynamics in Eastern Long Island.

As far as I am concerned, I would rather Tanya McDowell sell drugs to make sure her child eats, than have her child go hungry,and rather her forge her address to get into a good school rather than languish in a terrible one.

In this country, at this time, whether you want to recognize it or not, huge numbers of working class people have to live outside the law just to live barely over subsistence.And as long as they do so without causing violence to others, that's alright with me

I know I shouldn't say this. But I just have.

We are sowing exactly what we reaped when we let corporations destroy unions and move most of the decent paying blue collar jobs abroad

And this presents impossible choices to the millions of Tanya McDowell's in our country

March 1, 2012