With A Brooklyn Accent

Education Reform and the American Working Class

2012-01-31T01:52:00.000-08:00

The corporate education juggernaut, funded by Gates, the Koch Brothers. the Waltons and hedge fund billionaires, and implemented by a cross section of politicians of both major parties fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the American working class.
American workers have not, historically, been revolutionary, but they do fight back when you push them to the wall. So if you keep piling on tests in the public schools and turn them into mini prisons with metal detectors, security guards and no music, no art, and no sports, all to prepare them for jobs that are either non existent or low paying, rigidly policed and require people to work long hours with little hope of advancement, don't be surprised if students turn off, drop out, or become so disorderly that schools have difficulty functioning. And also don't be surprised if a whole bunch choose the underground economy, with all its dangers, to work that is humiliating, low paying and denies people basic dignity. The leadership of this country seems to think that great wealth, and limitless police power, armed with advanced technology can cow an entire population into submission. They are about to discover how mistaken they are.

The Strange Genesis of "Education Reform"- How a Crackpot Theory Became National Policy

2012-01-29T15:09:00.001-08:00

In future generations, historians are likely to tell the following story. Some time during the early 21St Century, a cross section of the top leadership of American society began to panic. They looked at the growing chasm between the rich and poor, the huge size of the nation’s prison population, the growing gulf in educational achievement between blacks and whites and poor and middle class children and decided something dramatic had to be done to remedy these problems.

But instead of critically examining how these trends reflected twenty years of regressive taxation, a futile “war on drugs,” the deregulation of the financial industry, the breaking of unions and the movement of American companies abroad, America’s leaders decided the primary source of economic inequality could be found in failing schools, bad teachers, and powerful teachers unions.

No serious scholar, looking at the economic and social trends of the previous 20 years, or the major innovations in social policy that unleashed the power of big capital, would have given to slightest credence to this analysis of the sources of inequality, but the idea that educational failure was the prime source of all other social deficits took hold with the force of a religious conversion. Corporate leaders, heads of major foundations, civil rights leaders, politicians in both major parties, bought this explanation hook line and sinker and so began one of the strangest social movements in modern American history- the demonization of America’s teachers and the development of strategies to radically transform education by taking power away from them

The consequence of this leap of faith, supported by no serious research, was the idea that there has to be a centralized effort to monitor educational progress though quantifiable measures, coupled with accountability strategies which called for the removal of teachers and the closing of schools, if they didn’t meet those criteria. Through policies developed at the federal level but implemented locally so that they effected every school district in the nation, scrutinizing teacher effectiveness became a national mission introduced with as much fanfare as was America’s efforts to put a rocket in space during the 1950’s and 60’s.

The centerpiece of this mission was that teachers had to be judged on student performance of standardized tests, as there were no other “objective” criteria that could generate meaningful statistical information on a national scale. But America’s states and municipalities did not have consistent testing policies, so federal policies called for universal testing related to a nationally developed set of Common Core Standards, with the loss of federal funding being presented as the consequence of failure to comply.

This all sounds very rational until you look at it from the individual school level. To evaluate teachers via standardized tests, and do it across the board, you have to have tests in every grade and every subject. This not only means tests in English, Math, Science and Social Studies, it means tests in Art, Music and Gym.

No school in any country, at any time in history, ever tried doing something like this, and for good reason. It means that all that goes on in school is preparation for tests. There is no spontaneity, not creativity, no possibility of responding to new opportunities for learning that relate to events that occur locally, nationally, or globally. It also means play, and pleasure are erased from the school experience, and that students are put under constant stress, maximized by teachers who know that their own job security depends on student performance.

What you have here, in short, is a prescription for making the nation’s schools a place of Fear and Dread, ruled by test protocols that deaden minds and stifle creative thinking. Make no mistake about it, there are people who stand to benefit handsomely from this insanity, especially the companies who make the tests and the consultants who administer them, but anyone who thinks this level of testing will make America’s schools more effective or reduce social inequality has a capacity for self-delusion that staggers the imagination. Only people with no options would choose to send their children to schools run that way. The wealthy will send their children to private schools which eschew testing, the well organized will withdraw from the system and create their own cooperative schools or engage in home schooling.

The sad part about all of this is that the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, continues to push this program, with the support of both major parties and a cross section of America’s corporate leadership.

There are not too many other examples in American history where such a crackpot theory guided social policy this way. The last example I can think of was the passage of the Prohibition Amendment to the US constitution, based on the conviction that the banning of alcoholic beverages would somehow create greater social stability and save America from corruption.

Someday, Test Based Education Reform will go the way of Prohibition. But not before incalculable damage is done to the nations children

Mark Naison
January 19, 2012

Educators Letter to President Obama Now Online and Ready For Signatures

2012-01-28T15:07:00.000-08:00

Friends

Here is the link to the Educators Letter to President Obama that asks him to withdraw his support of policies which mandate high stakes testing, to include teachers and parents in all educational policy discussions in his administration and replace Sec of Ed Arne Duncan with an educator who has the confidence of the nation's teachers. Please sign and circulate widely!

; http://dumpduncan.org/fulltex/

Petition Text
Dear President Obama,

We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s teachers and their supporters, wish to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although many of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, it is unlikely that you will receive continued support unless the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives are changed:

The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership.
The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on “bad teachers” rather than poverty and neighborhood distress.
The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools.
Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation’s educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”

We therefore submit the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort:

The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
The incorporation of parents, teachers, and school administrators in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers, preferring charter schools to existing public schools, and requiring closure of low performing schools.
Create a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of America’s schools.
We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing could ever hope to do.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Draft of Teachers Letter to President Obama

2012-01-27T16:26:00.000-08:00

We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s educators, want to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although the majority of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, we are reluctant to do so again unless we see some modification of the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives:

1. The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership

2. The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on "bad teachers" rather than poverty and neighborhood distress

3. The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools

Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation's educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”

We therefore recommend the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort

1. The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.

2. The incorporation of teachers in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.

3. .An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers.

4. An end to policies that use incentives or penalties to encourage states and municipalities to prefer charter schools to existing public schools.

5. An end to federal policies that require the closing of low performing schools based on student test scores and the creation of a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of such schools.

We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote both creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing, could ever hope to do

Sincerely,

When Teachers Are Seen But Not Heard

2012-01-27T01:43:00.001-08:00

What would you say about a President who emphasizes improving America's schools in all of his speeches and invites a teacher to sit next to the First Lady during his State of the Union address, but fails to invite a single teacher to an "Educational Summit" he holds at the White House and appoints someone with no teaching experience as Secretary of Education? That is the dilemma teachers face in confronting the Obama administration's education policies. They are told the work they is crucial to the future of the nation, but find their voices are completely excluded from the discourse of how to remake America's schools, while those of America's business leaders are pushed to the forefront. The result is not only an explanation for failing schools that blames bad teachers rather than poverty and inequality for that condition, but the imposition of policies which take power away from teachers and turns them into automatons who do little more than administer tests while looking over their shoulder to see whether they meet "National Standards." There is nothing progressive about such a policy. It drips with paternalistic contempt. And it won't work. Ten years later, we will wake up and find that schools are actually worse than they were before universal testing became the measure of learning, but by that time, a generation of teachers and students will be beaten down and demoralized by a policies that represent the application of management methods honed by the pursuit of profit to a helping profession.

Hypocrisy Not Democracy

2012-01-22T04:11:00.000-08:00

How does it feel to live in a country where the people making education policy, the Barack Obamas, Arne Duncans, Bill Gates, and Michael Bloombergs, send their children to private schools where classes are capped at 15, where there are no standardized tests, where teachers creativity is honored and there is plenty of art, music, science and sports, but want YOUR children to sit at a desk all day preparing for standardized tests, taught by teachers who work in terror of losing their jobs, in schools where art music and sports are cut to make room for testing? If you think this unfair, if you think it is wrong, if you think it is hypocritical, then join parents, teachers, students and concerned citizens at "Occupy the DOE" in Washington DC March 30-April 2! It's time to stand up for democratic education and fight off the bogus "education reform movement" which wants to create a two tier education system that reserves creative thinking for the children of the wealthy while condemning the vast majority of American children to a regime of rote learning.

unitedoptout.com/event/we-endorse-occupy-wall-street-with-action/

"Data Driven Instruction" and the Orwellian World of Education Reform

2012-01-21T03:26:00.000-08:00

In the increasingly Orwellian world of "Education Reform" a new term has achieved a particular cachet- "Data Driven Instruction." With deadly seriousness, school chancellors and superintendents hold workshops on how to do this for their principals and teachers, offering euphemistic language for something really quite crude and brutal- TEACHING TO THE TEST! And why are they doing this? It's because the US Department of Education, through No Child Left Behind and Race To the Top, threatens to close schools, and fire teachers and principals, who do not produce the proper data! Anyone who thinks this approach is going to improve the quality of instruction, and create better relationships between teachers, students and parents, is sorely mistaken. It will increase the stress level on all concerned and squeeze out compassion, empathy and community building along with creative instruction. But the school reformers don't care. They are determined to bring a "business atmosphere" into public education, with teachers poring over test scores the way executives pore over sales data!
Initially, the response will be sullen compliance, along with more than a few departures of those who cannot accept the corruption of a profession to which they have devoted their lives, but in the long run the result will be a combination of sabotage ( forging test results) and open revolt.

And since I like to use music as a metaphor for events in "real life" I dedicate this Grateful Dead song to the architects of these awful policies, as what they have created is a truly a Ship of Fools

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9eL9QKlp0g

What Is Your Legacy?:A Story for Those Who Think Merit Pay Will Motivate Teachers

2012-01-18T04:37:00.000-08:00

I have two cousins who grew up with me in Brooklyn, were neighborhood ball players and attended local public schools. They went into business and became very successful, probably making 3 to 4 times my salary ( and I am paid decently). They are both having serious health problems, and at one of our dinners last year, they got very serious and asked me, "What is your legacy?" I said, without a moments hesitation, "the accomplishments of the hundreds of students I have worked with whom I am still in touch with. They validate what I have tried to do in my life." A sad look came over their face, and they said, they" wished they had a legacy like that." Their legacy was " the money they are leaving to their children and grandchildren." The conversation hit home to me why I chose teaching as a profession. Teaching not only has different rewards than business, it has, in its best manifestations, an entirely different atmosphere. My cousins, who worked for large companies, made a lot of money, but they worked in a climate of fear because they could be fired at any time, either because their company had been bought by a larger global corporation( which happened to one of my cousins) or because a new management team had come in. In contrast, I was never going to become rich on my job, but I had the ability to speak freely, security against arbitrary changes in management, and the chance to change lives. I would not trade that experience for the opportunity to double my salary, or even make 10 million dollars a year, if I lost the freedom, autonomy, and ability to build lifetime relationships with students that my job has given me. It is those "soft" attributes that motivate those who love teaching, not the prospect of financial rewards

The Orwellian Components of the Teacher Evaluation System that Duncan, Bloomberg and Cuomo are Trying to Impose in New York City and New York State

2012-01-17T07:22:00.001-08:00

Let me clarify something about the teacher evalution system that Arne Duncan is threatening to withhold 1 billion dollars from New York State if it doesn't implement. Right now, in NY City elemenatary schools, testing only occurs in two grades, in two subjects. If you are going to have a comprehensive system of teacher evaluation, you then have to impose standarized tests in all grades, including kindergarten and in all subjects, including art, music and gym! Creating those tests will cost tens of millions of dollars, money that will have to be taken away from school budgets used to hire teachers. The result will be higher class size! And who gets the funds that to create the new tests? Test companies like McGraw Hill and Pearson! That's the economic dimension. And then there is the human dimension-- students being tested from the moment they enter the school in every subject they take. The result is that class time will be little more than test prep, within even the arts being geared largely to quantifiable skills. If anyone thinks that the result will be a more equitable and productive educational system, and better teaching and learning, try to imagine putting into practice what I have just described. That this nightmare scenario is somehow described as the current manifestation of the "Civil Rights Struggle" is something so bizarre that even George Orwell could not have imagined it

"Education Reform" As Collective Bullying

2012-01-16T00:43:00.000-08:00

When I see the most powerful, and wealthiest people in this country, representing both major parties, attack public school teachers, it makes my blood boil. The education reform juggernaut, a "big tent movement" incorporating figures ranging from Barack Obama to Chris Christie to Michael Bloomberg to Bill Gates, is not only bereft of research which shows its preferred innovations improve educational achievement, it involves an ugly mixture of stigmatization and coercion that represents collective bullying on a grand scale. I have seen the impact of this campaign first hand in shattered morale, early retirements and premature departure from the profession on the part of our best young teachers. People of courage and vision must come to the defense of our teachers, not only to defend public education as a communal space where creativity and education for citizenship are not smothered by mindless testing, but to defend a vulnerable group of people who are being made the scapegoat for the nation's failures

January 17, 2012

Letter from a Teacher in a School Designated for Closing by the DOE in order to receive "Race To The Top Money"

2012-01-14T12:55:00.001-08:00

I am a teacher at ...... one of the PLA schools. .... has been a "Transformation School" since September 2010. I have been a Social Studies teacher at this school since September 1990.
Yesterday, we were summoned to the auditorium for a special faculty meeting. Our very well-liked principal, . . . conveyed the information he'd received from his superiors: the City intended to change our school to a Turnaround Model. The implications were not completely clear, but it almost certainly meant that we teachers and our supervisors would have to re-apply for our positions to come back in September 2012, and around half of us would not be re-employed.
This news was shocking and deeply distressing to us. We have done everything we were asked to do by State and City. We have learned and implemented new technology for the classroom, spent hours in Professional Development, devoted an hour a week to working in Inquiry Teams, decorated our classrooms with student work, differentiated instruction, and redesigned all our lesson plans to introduce the Common Core Curriculum. We have done this conscientiously despite the doubts many of us had as to the efficacy of these innovations.
The State has been extremely impressed by our progress, writing strongly positive reports, available on the PLA pages of the NYSED website. Our Quality Review last spring was favorable, and we raised our 4-year graduation rate last year by about 7 percentage points.
Despite this, the City had decided to subject us to this awful and humiliating process, in which perhaps an arbitrary figure of half of us would be dismissed from the school.
Our students were given letters to explain this to their parents, describing the school as "Persistently Lowest Achieving" and conveying the message that it is the teachers' to blame, and that the City will "measure and screen existing staff using rigorous standards for student success. . ." and rehire only a portion. One teacher commented in our meeting that distributing these letters to our students was "like cutting our own throats."
I'm certain similar events played out in the other two dozen plus schools hit by this news. Regardless of his intentions, Bloomberg is seriously demoralizing hundreds of hard-working and gifted teachers, making it harder for us to enthusiastically adopt any future changes. He is creating a negative image of their schools and their children's teachers in the eyes of parents and community. The damage will persist long after this spat between DOE and UFT has been resolved.

We Need Leaders Among the People, Not Of the People"- Lessons From My Political Mentor Rev Claude Williams

2012-01-14T06:59:00.001-08:00

For those on the left who don’t understand my willingness to work with whites they regard as conservative or racist, let me tell you a little bit about my political mentor, Rev. Claude Williams. Rev. Williams, with whom I spent four summers with during the early 70’s organizing his personal papers, was a Presbyterian minister brought up in the hills of Tennessee in an evangelical tradition ( a credo he described as “God said it, Jesus did it, I believe it, and that settles it”) who had a conversion experience in his late 30’s and became an advocate of the social gospel and an opponent of southern segregation. He had an opportunity to put these principles into action when he became a minister in a mining town called Paris Arkansas during the Depression where he devoted his ministry to strike support, moved to Commonwealth Labor College when he was forced out of Paris, and there became a supporter of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an interracial organization that fought for the rights of sharecroppers and tenant farmers being forced off the land by Depression conditions and New Deal agricultural program

When organizing for the STFU, Williams developed a unique strategy for organizing southern blacks and white for progressive unionism by employing biblical imagery common to both. His fiery preaching and innovative charts and posters, using quotes from the bible to promote interracial solidarity and a cooperative commonwealth, made him one of the South’s most effective organizers, and a hated figure among local elites, who literally ran him out of Arkansas in the late Thirties . From there, Williams moved to Memphis, where he helped organize interracial locals of the Food and Tobacco Workers Union and in North Carolina and then was brought up to Detroit during World War II by the UAw to help preach to the Southern Blacks and Whites working in easy proximity during that city’s auto plants.

After the war, Williams moved back to a farm South of Birmigham where he began working with interracial locals of the Mine Mill and Smelters Union and holding meetings on his property to help people register to vote. When a wave of McCarthyite reaction set in, Williams became a target of the local Klan, who set fires on his property, killed his dogs, and forced him to stop holding interracial meetings on his farm. But his white neighbors, who had been the recipient of many acts of generosity on the part of Williams and his wife Joyce, refused to let the Klan kill him, so he remained on his farm through the worst days of Klan and Citizen’s Council Terror until and opening came in the middle 60’s and a strong civil rights movement came to the Birmingham area

I had learned about Williams amazing work when writing my Master’s essay on the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, but meeting him in person, an being given responsibility for organizing and filing his personal papers was a transformative experience. Williams was a big, powerful, hard drinking man who held a deep conviction that Southern working class whites, when they could overcome their racism, were far more reliable allies to Blacks than northern white liberals because they had a common religious heritage as well as a common class interest. He had shown the potential of this approach in labor struggle after labor struggle before McCarthyism had sidelined him and believed it was the only one that would allow progressives to challenge domination of American politics by the rich and powerful.

Having the opportunity to live with a person who not only articulated such a view with great eloquence, but practiced it every day, and survived attacks that would have silenced most people, made a tremendous impression on me. Wiliams challenged me, as he did all leftists, to relinquish elitist contempt of working class people and meet them on their own ground, using arguments rooted in their own culture and traditions, and providing an example of courage and generosity they would respect. As he told me on countless occasions “ We don’t need leaders of the people, we need leaders among the people.!”

Throughout my life of political activism,, I have tried to take that message to heart and reach out to people of diverse political perspectives while fighting for racial and economic justice.

Nothing I have experienced in 40 plus years of activism, including my experience with the Occupy Movement and the 99 Percent Clubs in the last 6 months, has convinced me this approach is wrong..

January 14, 2012

Deja Vue All Over Again: What Happened to Industrial Workers in the 80’s and 90’s is Happening to Teachers and Government Workers Today

2012-01-13T13:58:00.000-08:00

In preparation for my course, The Worker in American Life, I am reading about the broad based assault on industrial labor that took place during the 80’s and 90’s in a broad swath of the US from New England through the Pacific Northwest. Plant closings, transfer of family business to international conglomerates, union busting, and finally, the destruction of a wage scale and union rules that allowed factory workers to live in comfort and security and have dignity on the job hit the nation with the force of a juggernaut. In industrial cities, and in small towns which depended on industrial production, the results were devastating. The were beset by drug epidemics, domestic violence and gang activity, foreclosures, evictions, arson and the erosion of once proud business districts. The scores of communities where this drama played out eventually achieved a precarious stability, but the prosperity of the post war years never returned, as wage levels lowered to the point where a person had to work two, possibly three jobs, to achieve the income a unionized factory worker once made, or turn to illegal activity to supplement legal income.

Now, an equally comprehensive effort to undermine the bargaining rights of workers dignity and standard of living is underway in the country On a state and local level, it is being led by Republican politicians who are systematically trying to strip away collective bargaining rights of government workers and to pass “right to work” laws which make the union shop illegal Initiatives of the first kind have succeeded in states which were sites of landmark labor conflicts and strong unions, Wisconsin and Ohio, and the second initiative is on the verge of being voted into law in Indiana

It would be comforting to think that this attack on public workers is coming only from the Republican Party and the Political Right, but one of the most powerful, and insidious efforts to undermine public worker unionism – the attack on Teachers Unions- has been driven by foundations and funding sources traditionally associated with the Democratic Party and has been enthusiastically endorsed by the Obama Administration. Not only did the Secretary of Education and the President praise the firing of union teachers in Central Falls Rhode Island who refused to accept the unilateral revision of union rules by the local Superintendent, they have provided huge financial incentives to states and municipalities to create privately managed, non union charter schools and to adopt procedures for rating teachers based on student test scores which will allow for the mass firing of teachers judged “incompetent” by these criteria.

Make no mistake about it, the sum effect of these initiatives, if successful will be strikingly similar to the offensive against industrial unions in the 80’s and 90’s- it will drive down wage levels substantially and erode dignity on the job for those subject to new managerial prerogatives.

How this will help the communities in which this large group of workers lose income, self-respect, and in some cases, employment, is hard to imagine. It will hurt families, businesses, the housing market, and in all probability, lower wage levels in the private sector as a new source of surplus labor is created. What benefits accrue in lower taxes will hardly compensate for the losses.

If you don’t believe me, just visit Buffalo New York, Youngstown Ohio, or Johnstown Pennsylvania ( I have spent time in all three) and other once thriving cities where high worker incomes and job security produced thriving neighborhoods of working class homeowners Now they have huge stretches of the city where every other lot is vacant, where business district feature groceries, liquor stores, and storefront churches, and where the drug business is the major source of income for a significant group of young men and growing number of young women.

Let me put the matter bluntly. The last wave of union busting left physical and moral damage that we have not fully recovered from. The new wave about to descend on us will add to the destruction and, perhaps push the social fabric to the breaking point.

There is a phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Unfortunately, the reverse is true as well. If we stand by and let teachers and other government workers have their unions broken, their dignity undermined, and their wage levels shattered by powerful interests who profit from their distress, we will accelerate the transformation of the United States into a plutocracy where the majority of people are living on the edge of poverty while a small elite controls all levels of government and parlays that into unimaginable benefits for themselves

This is the future that awaits us. Which side are you on?

January 13, 2012

If You Want to Know the Human Impact of The Current Recession, Ask America’s Teachers

2012-01-12T11:59:00.001-08:00

One of the things I’ve discovered in recent years is that when it comes to education policy, the last people asked for input are America’s teachers. We have a President who holds an” education summit” that includes the nation’s top business leaders and foundation heads, but no teachers; we have billionaires lobbying to privatize education and break teachers unions; we have an organization that purports to work for educational equity that encourages it’s recruits to leave teaching after two years because they can influence policy more by moving into other, more prestigious careers, rather than spending a lifetime as a “mere teacher.”

The results are plain to see. After ten years of No Child Left Behind, three years of Race to the Top, and twenty years of Teach for America, we have seen no change in the global standing of America’s schools and no reduction in the test score gap between racially and economically disadvantaged groups and the rest of the population.

But we lose something more than an opportunity to improve our schools by excluding teacher’s voice- we lose a chance to understand the human impact of poverty and economic distress, not only those locked in inner generational poverty, but those made newly poor by the economic crisis. Students bring the wounds of poverty into their classrooms every day, in ways that break teachers hearts, keep them up at nights, and make the accountability protocols based on test scores that “education reformers” are now imposing seem totally divorced from reality.

As someone who is married to an elementary school principal, and talks to teachers almost daily because of my work in Bronx schools and my contact with former students who have chosen to teach, I have, even second hand, been haunted by the portrait of what this Recession is doing to young people and their families

One thing that leaps out at me from the teacher’ss stories I hear, is how many students in poor and working class neighborhoods have no secure place to stay. Students move from apartment to apartment or house to house when their parents or /grandparents can’t pay rent; experience bouts of homelessness where they sleep in shelters, temporary residences, and occasionally subways or cars; and move in an out of foster care. Sometimes students disappear for days or weeks at a time, sometimes they disappear altogether. But even those who come in somewhat regularly often fall asleep in class because the places they are staying are so crowded or noisy that it is difficult to sleep. I have heard these stories from teachers in inner city schools in New York, Buffalo and Philadelphia, but I have also heard them from teachers in suburban communities where people are sinking into poverty. Those who think the housing and foreclosure crisis in America has no impact on education need to talk to teachers – but we won’t do that if we believe that low attention spans in school are largely the result of “ bad teachers” protected by evil unions

That’s one portion of the stories teachers tell The other relates to the lack of food and medical care students in poor communities get and how it affects their concentration levels and general well being. I will never forget how a principal and two teachers at a school located in the most decayed and dangerous housing project in the Bronx closed the door on my Sudanese colleague and I after taking us on an upbeat tour of several classes and said “ Let us tell you what is really going on here” “Every Friday,” the principal said, “students in the school start crying because they afraid they may have little or nothing to eat all weekend The only time they know they are going to are going to have three meals a day is on schools days. And because they closed down the health clinic in the project, students bring their whole families to see the school nurse. This is place that God forgot.” My Sudanese colleague, by the time he had finished, started crying and said “This is like a refugee camp in Africa.” You think that this is the only place in the country where this kind of story could be told, think again. Hunger and lack of medical care is a huge and growing problem among America’s school children and has a tremendous affect on their academic performance

Then there is the growing level of violence and stress that young people experience in homes and communities where people are losing jobs, losing homes, and losing hope, violence that they bring into the school environment. I have been hearing more and more stories from teachers of kids exploding in rage at school, at one another and at teachers, sometimes individually, sometimes in large groups. Bedlam in hallways and classrooms is increasingly common, often set off by the minutest provocation. Some of this disorder can be attributed to chaotic school environments, but some of it stems from the extraordinary stress which students are under out of school, rooted in a toxic mixture of food insecurity, unstable living situations, and violence inflicted on them by people in their own households or by neighborhood gangs and crews.

None of what I am describing is new. You could have heard similar stories from teachers in poor and working class neighborhoods in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. What is new is the extent of the suffering as more and more families whose lives were once stable get pushed into poverty.

All through out the nation, in small towns and suburbs, in once middle class communities as well as inner city neighborhoods, teachers are ready to tell these stories.

Will we listen, or will we continue to put our head in the sand and blame the messenger for the message

January 12, 2012

99 Percent Club Comes to Hollis Presbyterian Church in Queens!

2012-01-11T19:00:00.001-08:00

Just came from an inspiring meeting of the 99 Percent Club at Hollis Presbyterian Church in Queens. More than 20 people were there, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, representing three churches, the local community development corporation and several schools and youth organizations. The group developed an action plan around five abandoned buildings on Hollis Avenue, across the street from a school and several churches, that have been a danger and an eyesore for several years. The goal will be to start a community campaign to turn these buildings into affordable housing, beginning with community meetings, moving to demonstrations and a picket line, and possibly ending with "occupations" if enough activists from around the city join in support of the campaign. It is hard to put in words how exciting it was to see how the model of Occupy Wall Street has energized this congregation and others in the Hollis neighborhood who have been waiting for some time to fight against the steady the erosion of their standard of living and the deterioration of their community!

January 11, 2012

Where is the Love? Thoughts on Teachers and Teaching That Educational Reformers Don’t Seem To Get

2012-01-08T16:42:00.000-08:00

I have been teaching for 45 years. My first students, in the Columbia Upward Bound Program, included a 15 year old who was destined for greatness and a 15 year old who wouldn’t say a word to me or his peers. Being able to connect to both of them, using very different methods, hooked me for life on the challenge of building the confidence and trust required to make learning possible among a diverse group of people.

It is precisely the importance of building trust which is absent from the dominant discourse about education today. Achieving mastery of a fixed body of material is prioritized; opening minds, healing hearts, and building confidence are widely neglected as “soft” attributes not amenable to measurement and evaluation.

Che Guevara once said “ The true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.” I would say the same about teaching. “The true teacher is guided by feelings of great love.”

How do you measure love? How do you assess it?

Governments are now spending billions of dollars on complex mathematical formulas to rate teacher effectiveness. Every single measure they have created circumvents the attributes that make teachers love their jobs and which influence students the most

A great teacher gets inside a student’s head, becomes part of the student’s conscience, becomes a moral compass that may offer guidance ten, twenty years after the student was in their class. Things the teacher said during a lecture, wrote in the margin of a research paper, whispered to the student in a private meeting, may come up in the most unexpected times and places. Books, films and songs the teacher recommended may be ones passed on to friends, co-workers and children.

I am saying this from experience as well as inference. I had teachers who inspired me to do things I never dreamed were possible. They did this not only by modeling a passion for learning in their lectures and the way they comported themselves, but by letting me know that despite my rough edges and uneven writing stills,, there was nothing I couldn’t achieve as a scholar if I dared to give myself wholly to the subject I was investigating and kept trying to hone and refine my prose style.
Those teachers- and I will name them because they are all worth honoring- Edward Said, Paul Noyes, Walter Metzger, James Shenton- provided me with a model of the teacher and scholar I wanted to be. They are with me every time I walk into a classroom

How do you measure that ?

I know so many great teachers and they are all filled with love for their students and love for their jobs. Every single reform measure introduced in the last ten years is crushing and demoralizing them

Someday, we will realize that if we really want to instill a passion for learning in young people, we have to honor and support our best teachers and encourage our most talented and idealistic young people to be teachers for life.

And that means we have to leave room for intangibles like love and trust in how we judge what goes on in schools and understand that the results of great teaching are experienced over a life time, not by tests you administer three or four times a year

Mark Naison
January 9, 2010

The Legacy of Driving Down Wages is the Collapse of Consumer Demand

2012-01-05T02:52:00.000-08:00

For the last thirty years, the most powerful corporations in the nation have followed a strategy of paying top management huge salaries to ruthlessly trim labor costs, either by moving operations abroad, or keeping wage rates of the domestic labor force low. Walmart, the nation's largest employer, symbolizes this strategy, paying its CEO
$16,000 an hour while offering a starting salary of $6.50 an hour for new employees.

In the short run, this has worked well for individual companies, but in the long run, it has destabilized the American economy by crippling consumer demand, which could only be sustained by various forms of debt-ranging from credit cards, to second mortgages on homes, to student loans. Now, as the first two of these strategies for sustaining consumption has collapsed- with the student loan bubble coming next- where is the buying power of the American public going to come from? Half of this country is either living in poverty, or on danger of falling into it. How can you sustain a healthy market economy when the wages of the majority of the population can't sustain a middle class standard of living? You can only do so through developing a huge, off the books alternate economy, participation in which is increasingly becoming a necessity for many Americans who were once proud of their status as workers and taxpayers. Not a pretty picture. But it's a logical consequences of the greed and the shortsightedness of those rulers of the American economy that Occupy Wall street has dubbed "The One Percent."

January 5, 2011

The Drug Economy, Neo Liberalism and the Social Basis of Ron Paul’s Appeal to Young Voters

2012-01-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

“New York streets where killers'll walk like Pistol Pete
And Pappy Mason, gave the young boys admiration
Prince from Queens and Fritz from Harlem
Street legends, the drugs kept the hood from starving”

Nas, “Get Down”

That big ol' building was the textile mill
It fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
We can't make it here anymore
See all those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They're just gonna set there till they rot
'Cause there's nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks
Empty storefronts around the square
There's a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don't come down here 'less you're looking to score
We can't make it here anymore

James Mc Murty “ We Can’t Make It Here Anymore”

The strength of the Ron Paul candidacy continues to astound many liberals and leftists. How can a 76 year old man who opposes, and continues to oppose, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was the featured speaker at the John Birch Society 50th Anniversary Dinner attract thousands of young supporters, not all of whom think of themselves as conservatives, some of whom are gay or people of color.

It is tempting to see Paul’s mass appeal to young people as a form of false consciousness, attributable to his anti-war position, which blinds them to the conservative implications of his libertarian philosophy. But such a posture overlooks ways in which one portion of the Paul platform, his opposition to the drug war, and the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, speaks directly to their material interests in the way no other candidate, Republican or Democratic does. For young people of all racial backgrounds, the drug economy has become an essential income supplement in a society where work has become scarce, and wages have been driven down to the point that few people can support themselves in the legal economy without some off the books activity, a good portion of it drug related.

There has been a great deal of research done on the drug economy in inner city neighborhoods, where de-industrialism, and neo-liberalism hit first and hardest. From Charles and Bettylou Valentine’s pioneering anthropological study, Hustling and Other Hard Work, to Phillipe Bourgeois brilliant book on crack dealers in East Harlem, In Search of Respect, scholars have demonstrated that a significant portion of the income stream in inner city neighborhoods from the early 70’s through the present has come from the drug economy, shoring up local businesses and producing for a level of consumption among local residents, that official census data on incomes could not predict. Hip Hop artists and hop hop scholars alike have spoken about this with considerable frankness. In his book Hip Hop America, Nelson George estimated that 150,000 young people worked in the drug business during the height of the crack epidemic, a figure I have never heard anyone dispute

But what is less well known is the size of the drug economy in small town, rural and suburban America, and its role in supplementing wages in a nation where Wal Mart has replaced the automobile and steel industry as the largest employer. Even before partial legalization in states like California and Colorado, marijuana was the second largest cash crop in the nation, and it has now been supplemented by a thriving market in chrystal meth and prescription pills. Although I am not familiar with anthropological studies of the drug economy in rural, white America, I have gotten enough papers on small town drug dealing from students in my Worker in American Life class to get a sense that it’s proportions now equal, if not exceed, what is going on in inner city neighborhoods. If what my students tell me is true, a significant portion of young people working in Wal-Mart, K-Mart or other box stores sell drugs on the side ( prescription pills as well as pot) and almost no-one can survive on what those stores pay without some additional source of income. In poorer, more rural areas, chrystal meth, locally manufactured, is the drug of choice, and the violence associated with its trade can rival what you have in tough inner city neighborhoods.

In his powerful indictment of the new, low wage economy, “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore,” James Mc Murtry sings

Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO
See how far 5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
Bet you can't make it here anymore”

No body knows this better than the young people who work in these stores and their response has been to find alternative sources of income, many of them illegal, some involving the risk of violence, arrest and imprisonment

Enter Ron Paul with a call for legalization of drugs and release of non-violent prisoners. To millions of young people living in an economy where the route to the middle class can no longer go through the legal economy, that portion of his campaign speaks directly to their lived reality. It provides them with the hope of doing in the light of day, and in safety, that which they now do surreptitiously in order to have even a minimum access to what they perceive as an American standard of living

Given that no other candidate is willing to raise this issue as clearly and forthrightly as Ron Paul does, don’t be surprised if his support continues to grow among young people of all backgrounds. And it won’t be because of racism. It is because Ron Paul implicitly recognizes- alone among Presidential candidates- that without the drug economy “we can’t make it here anymore.”

Bullet Points on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Jim Crow South

2012-01-03T09:52:00.000-08:00

Anybody who opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act is profoundly uninformed about American History or is apologizing for terrible crimes against African Americans conducted under a racial caste system that nullified the US constitution in states where it was imposed. If you’re not convinced read Neil McMillen's book Dark Journey on the Jim Crow regime in Missiissippi, which had chliling similarities to Nazism except the goal was to extract labor rather than exterminate a people

The goal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965 was to make sure that African Americans were granted full citizenship rights in a section of the country which denied them the right to vote and serve on juries and therefore rendered them vulnerable to physical and sexual assault from whites without the protection of the law. I could go on for days about this, both from personal experience and from my studies of history. I had a girlfriend who grew up Black in Georgia in an upwardly mobile family that was literally terrorized for their economic success by their white neighbors. When you can't serve on juries and can't vote, you not only lack freedom of speech press and assembly, you need a white "protector" to prevent you from being terrorized by whites who resent your self-confidence or your success.

Blacks in the South living under Jim Crow weren't just segregated, they were terrorized,as were the whites who disagreed with the system. I worked closely with a white minister who tried to organize blacks and whites in the South together to form unions. He was, at various points in his life, tarred and feathered, pistol whipped, had his dogs shot, had crosses burned on his lawn, and was punched in a convenience store, at age 80, by a six foot 8 inch white ambulance driver who resented his activities. Fortunately, this minister, the Rev Claude Williams, was one of the toughest people I have ever met in my life and refused to leave the South. Anyone who apologizes for this kind of activity or makes believe it never happened...... may God forgive you

Ron Paul and Civil Rights

2012-01-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is ahistorical, misguided, and sanitizes the nature of the southern social system that the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, helped uproot. Black people in the South were not only segregated, they were denied the equal protection of the law because they could not vote and serve on juries The Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not apply. Black people lacked freedom of speech press and assembly, had their land and property repeatedly seized, and had their personal rights violated not only by authorities, by by invidiual whites who knew that they could not seek redress in the courts. This took the form of rape and sexual harassment, beatings, and occasionally murder. To use a metaphor libertarians like to employ, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 took the boot of the white population of the South off the neck of the black population of that region. It is one example of how government can liberate people who have been denied rights and subject to institutionalized humiliation through a poisonous combination of volunary action and armed force.

However, we live in a different world right now. While Ron Paul is wrong, disatrously wrong, on his interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he is right that the current face of racism is much more about drug enforcement, unjust imprisonment, and racial profiling by law enforcement than it is by the actions of white racists.:

Let's defend the memory and the lasting impactf the Civil Rights movements greatest victories, but less make sure we are not looking to old solutions to solve new problems,

What the Obama Administration Must Do To Bring Back Disillusioned Activists

2012-01-02T07:35:00.000-08:00

t's time that liberals stop trying to scare disillusioned activists with the prospect of a Republican presidency and start trying to scare the White House and the Democratic leadership into doing something to show they are worthy of activists votes. For starters, they need to

1 Repeal the NDAA with its provisions for preventive detention
2.Close Guantanomo
3. Stop using massive force, with Homeland Security collaboration, to evice peaceful Occupy protesters
4. Fire Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and replace him with a lifetime educator.
5. Come out in favor of legalizing marijuana and releasing non-violent drug offenders
6. Fire the entire White House economic team, beginning with Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner

If they don't do that, don't be surprised if lots of folks who worked for Obama in
2012 either sit out the election of vote for a Third Party candidate.

Mark Naison
January 2, 2011

How I Benefited From Growing Up Under Socialism: Reflections on a Brooklyn Childhood

2011-12-31T05:07:00.001-08:00

Like many Americans who consider themselves social justice activists, I am alarmed by the erosion of civil liberties in our country. From the insertion of a provision in the new Defense Act calling for preventive detention of suspected terrorists, to racial profiling in communities of color, to the use of Patriot Act protocols and overwhelming force to clear peaceful Occupy protesters, to massive government surveillance of private communications, I see the US moving rapidly toward a police/surveillance state where the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights are becoming a dead letter.

But unlike my libertarian friends, I do not consider government itself the enemy, not does the thought of the United States becoming more socialist alarm me. I see government as a powerful force for good in people’s lives if it is deployed properly, and is imbued with a democratic spirit, rather than used to protect the privileges of elites. Some of my reasons for appreciating the potentially liberating, as well as repressive, aspects of government action, come from my historical studies, especially those focusing on grass roots activism and government intervention during the Great Depression.

But some of it derives from the very positive experiences I had growing up in a socialist, or at least a social democratic society. This was not in Sweden, or Denmark, or Finland,. It was in Brooklyn in the 1950’s!

Brooklyn? Socialist? Are you kidding?

Well, consider this. Imagine a place where no one was very rich or very poor, where the majority of people in the labor force were members of unions, where museums and zoos were free, where colleges and universities were free, where all public schools were open 3-5 and 7-9 for sports and arts and music, where subways and buses cost 15 cents, where public libraries in every neighborhood were open 9 AM to 9 PM, where public hospitals offered medical care for a nominal fee, where every public park had recreation supervisors as well as cleaners, and where public schools had hundreds of musical instruments that any child who made the band or the orchestra could take home.

This is the world I grew up in. And it was a great way to grow up.

Here we were, all children of minorities, Jewish and Italian for the most part, with a small number of African Americans, whose parents and grandparents had gone through unspeakable hardships,who felt that the world was ours for the taking. Because of the public resources that surrounded us, we not only had a security in terms of food, clothing, housing and medical care, we had educational opportunities that left ample room for recreation, sports, science and the arts. School for me was not only about learning geography and math, it was punch ball games and school plays, science fairs and trips to museums, punctuated by an occasional fist fight.

And the result of this security was not stagnation, but creativity. Everybody I knew played a musical instrument, danced or tried to sing. When rock and roll hit our neighborhood, it swept all of us into its aura, as we learned all the dances, formed singing groups, and dreamed we would be performing at the Brooklyn Paramount or on American Bandstand.

The guys in the neighborhood (this was a heavily gendered world) played sports constantly, not only the sports we saw on television, but street games we made up, and as we got older,we began playing on teams for our high schools, churches and synagogues, and eventually for colleges, all the time dreaming of making it to the pros.

This wasn’t utopia. Gender barriers were powerful and omnipresent, keeping girls out of the sports activities that were the obsession of most boys. There was an undercurrent of racism in white families that rose powerfully to the surface when blacks began moving to the neighborhood in large numbers, leading to dramatic “white flight” in the mid 1960’s. There was alcoholism, domestic violence, and depression, most of it swept under the rug by a strong code of silence about personal problems. And working class solidarity, though it lived on the neighborhood code that you never crossed a picket line, was less powerful than the striving for upward mobility. Most people dreamed of moving into the middle class and getting a house with a lawn or renting an apartment with a terrace overlooking the water.

But though the experience I am describing was relatively circumscribed in time, lasting no more than 10 or 12 years, and confined largely to New York City ( see Josh Freeman’s Working Class New York for more about New York’s experiment in “Social Democracy”) it may hold some lessons for people today grappling with the consequences of extreme economic inequality and the proper role of government in finding a balance between liberty and democracy.

My own experience, and that of friends of mine who grew up in the Bronx at the same time, is that there are extraordinary benefits to living in a society where the good things in life --decent housing, medical care, sports, the arts, education, science and culture- are not only reserved for those who have money. ‘

As the child of two parents who grew up in desperate poverty, and made very modest incomes, I had access, free or nearly free, to things which today young people have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get. No one going to the most expensive private school in the country had a better exposure to sports or music or science than me or my friends did.

What did this mean? It meant when I went to Columbia in the early 60’s I could end up as captain of the tennis team even though I learned tennis in a public park from a mailman who charged $3.50 an hour. It meant that almost all top math and science students at the school were graduates of New York City public high schools, along with virtually all the stars of the basketball team, and many of the folk and classical musicians.

With inequality reaching unimaginable proportions- the top 1 percent of earners how make 44 percent of the city income rather than 9 percent during the 1950’s- and the public sector having shrunk, young people in working class and middle class neighborhoods no longer have the opportunities I had growing up.

I think that is a both a shame and a challenge. We can and should do better. And if that means becoming more socialist, well, based on my experience, that may not be the worst thing in the world

Mark Naison
December 31, 2011

The 99 Percent Clubs and the Creation of an Online Public Square and Free Speech Zone

2011-12-30T07:18:00.000-08:00

When Ira Shor and I suggested that activists create 99 Percent clubs in order to help the Occupy movements get through the winter months and emerge stronger than ever, we envisioned the clubs as support groups for Occupy activists- providing clothing, food, winter gear, and if needed legal help- as well as action groups in campuses and communities dealing with issues members deemed important.

The first 99 Percent club that we created at Fordham did both of those things- gave support to local Occupy movements and began planning education and action programs to address issues at the University. But what we did not envision, when we created the club, was how it would create an incredible on line free speech zone and public square ot only for club members, but for people with no direct connection to Fordham who found out what we were doing

The vehicle for this was the Fordham 99 Percent Club Facebook page. When the page was first set up, its primary activity was to announce Club meetings, but soon, people on the page began posting issues for discussion, first relating to the local and national Occupy movement, later on the two main issues the Club was concerned with – economic inequality and threats to free speech. By the beginning of December, these discussion threads had assumed a life of their own, presenting a remarkable array of viewpoints and perspectives all welcomed in an ecumenical spirit.

We have discussed the police attacks on Occupy movements, the new National Defense Act with provisions for preventive detention, the student debt conundrum, the Ron Paul campaign, the European economic crisis, the prospect for third party initiatives, and many, many other important subjects. The Club Facebook page, in effect, duplicated the atmosphere of Occupy Wall Street, where General Assemblies were reinforced by literally scores of discussion groups and special initiatives,

As I see it, what happened in the Fordham 99 Percent club for what could happen around the nation if people created 99 Percent Clubs on their campuses and communities. Each club could become a Free Speech Zone as well as an action group in behalf of economic justice and freedom of expression. And in a society where all too many campuses and city governments are closing off such zones, and where big money is controlling much of public discourse, this could be a shot in the arm for popular democracy’

So if the spirit moves you, create your own 99 Percent club and when you do, create your own club Facebook page where the issues of the day can be discussed freely and enthusiastically, creating a model which we can fight for in the public spaces our universities and local governments are supposed to protect

Mark Naison
December 30, 2011

Holiday Parties and the Econmic Crisis

2011-12-28T01:56:00.001-08:00

After spending a month going to holiday parties, I feel like I acquired a first hand view of the impact of this economic crisis. So many people I met had lost their jobs, were working part time without benefits, had student loans they had difficulty paying off or owned small businesses that were struggling. Others who were employed felt they were being asked to do the work of two people. Most of these people were still getting by one way or the other, but saw little hope of an imminent reversal of fortune. This crisis doesn't quite feel like the great Depression because however frayed we do have a safety net, but it doesn't feel like any time I have lived though either. Scary stuff. Scary and sobering

The Notorious Phd Challenge to Followers of Ron Paul

2011-12-27T03:12:00.001-08:00

I can’t say that I am surprised by the content of recently unearthed Ron Paul newsletters from the 1990’s that talk about a coming “race war,” or about Congressman Paul’s continuing connection to the John Birch society. Neo-Confederates, white supremacists, and those who hate immigrants and gays have been vocal supporters of the conservative wing of the Republican Party for the last 40 years so it is not surprising that Rep Paul would count people with such views among his most loyal supporters. Nor he is alone in such a posture. During her run for the Vice-Presidency, Sarah Palin attracted more than a few such people to the rallies she organized, to the great embarrassment of John McCain, while racist imagery was a fixture at early rallies of the Tea Party before leaders of that movement were able to persuade, or force, individuals with such views to go into deep cover.

But Ron Paul is not your ordinary conservative Republican. The success of his current run for the Republican nomination depends on him persuading Democrats attracted to his anti-war, pro civil liberties policies to register as Republican. Moreover, his presidential run, either as a Republican or an independent, cannot gain traction without gaining support from at least some people of color, leftists and liberals.
If these people are like me- a white leftist who lives in an heavily immigrant city, works in a predominantly black workplace and is part of a multiracial family- they will have something close to zero tolerance for racism, sexism and homophobia. They are not only going to look closely at how Rep Paul responds to these latest revelations, but how his most impassioned white followers act when he is raked over the coals in the media because of suggestion that his campaign is tainted by such prejudices

In my own way, I have been very closely observing how the libertarians to whom I have been connected by social media have dealt with the new revelations about Ron Paul’s past. Have they responded by calmly pointing out that the Ron Paul campaign, and the libertarian movement generally, is a big tent that welcomes blacks, immigrants and gays, or have they attacked those who demand that Rep Paul respond forthrightly and quickly to the new revelations as enemies of liberty whose motives are suspect?

The informal results of my little survey may surprise my friends on the left. The majority of the libertarians I work or correspond with have pointed out that the sentiments in those newsletters do not represent what Rep Paul, or the vast majority of his followers stand for and insist that the movement they are a part of will remain inclusive and multiracial. I don’t necessarily agree with all their conclusions, but the manner in which they have responded has been re-assuring. In defending Rep Paul, they have not allowed themselves to become the very people they were accused of apologizing for or protecting.

However, a few of the Ron Paul supporters in my networks have completely flipped out over the new accusations and have struck out at anyone and everyone who raises questions about the Paul campaign with injured innocence and a torrent of abuse.

Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they have said that racism is no longer an issue in American society, and that critics of Rep Paul are “playing the race card” to undermine the campaign of a great patriot and a great American

This argument is not only unconvincing, it is counter-productive. It suggests that supporters of Rep Paul have something to hide, most probably the very attitudes that critics accuse the movement of harboring

Let me conclude with the following suggestion. If supporters of Rep Paul want to continue to attract a multiracial following, they will have to deal in a serious and principled way with accusations of racism, homophobia, and anti-immigrant prejudice, not move into a posture of denial

In our very NON post racial society, denying racism’s existence is a posture that arouses, rather than defuses, suspicion among racism’s long time victims.

Healing America’s racial wounds requires open discussion and debate. Those who call for a cover up when real issues arise contribute to the continuation and intensification of the very divisions they claim to abhor.

Mark Naison
December 27, 2011

Some New Year's Resolutions

2011-12-26T05:52:00.000-08:00

My main New Year's resolution is to try to be nicer to everybody I communicate with, and to really listen to what they have to say, but I also have a few political resolutions

1. I am going to continue to support the Occupy movements, which I consider the best hope for democratic change in the last 40 years, in every way I can

2. I am going to continue to expose the Corporate led School Reform movement- as a force driving creativity and joy from our nation's classrooms without doing anything to achieve real educational equity or undermine the school to prison pipeline.

3. I am going to keep lines of communication open to Libertarians, even though I disagree with them on many issues, because I consider the erosion of Civil Liberties a grave threat to the future of this nation.

And if I am wrong about all of these things, it is not because of bad intentions. My goal is always, to quote Biggie "to spread love, it's the Brooklyn way."

Peace and Happy Holidays to All!

December 26, 2011

My Response to the Controversy Surrounding the Ron Paul NEwsletters

2011-12-23T11:27:00.001-08:00

In between grading finals, I have been reading through the comment threads on the racist sentiments expressed in Ron Paul Newsletters from the and have come to a couple of conclusions

1. That the sentiments expressed in those Newsletters, whoever wrote them, had far greater currency than most Americans would like to believe, and probably helped Rep Paul in his district far more than it hurt him

2. That Ron Paul, whatever you think of him, is probably FAR less racist than many of his white followers.

What we have , whether we like it or not, is a great "teaching moment" for the entire nation. Ron Paul, for the first time in his long career, has become a major force in mainstream American politics with a following that is increasingly multiracial. Now that a discourse about race has emerged around his candidacy, will Rep Paul emerge as a force for healing longstanding racial wounds, or a force for greater rage and division.

I honestly do not know which way this controversy is going to play out. Rep Paul is probably not going to be elected President, but his influence on our public life will in some measure depend on how he, and his more farsighted followers, respond to this very difficult challenge.

Mark Naison
December 24, 2011

Why Hip Hop Is The Poetry of the 99 Percent

2011-12-21T17:13:00.000-08:00

During the 1980's and 1990's a toxic combination of de-industrialization and drug epidemics pushed a large proportion of working class young people out of school and the legal economy and into the street economy and the prison system. As schools were decimated by budget cuts and torn by violence, young people, deprived of classroom outlets and arts programs their parents generation had, found a voice in hip hop which provided not only an opportunity to create a narrative of their lives, but to create poetry of great beauty and power. While the 1 Percent increased their share of the nation’s wealth while working class incomes stagnated and poor people’s incomes plummeted, these young people created art for the ages. That's why I call Hip Hop the Poetry of the 99 Percent

A Student Proposal to Have Fordham Adopt the Public High Schools Across the Street From It's Bronx Campus

2011-12-21T03:14:00.001-08:00

A Proposal in which Fordham University Shall Provide Learning Amenities for the Roosevelt Educational Campus
by Laura Dragonetti, Thomas Gill, Angel Melendez, Christopher DeRose, Alexander Sachs, Drenica Camaj, Mercedes Aquino, and Samantha Zimmer
Dr. Mark Naison’s Senior Values Seminar: Affirmative Action and the American Dream
Fordham University

In times of economic uncertainty where the majority of wealth is concentrated in a small portion of the population, we as students at a Jesuit institution[i] asked ourselves what small changes we could make in our own community that could possibly contribute to a larger societal change in the distribution of wealth. One aspect of society that we focused on in our class was educational access and attainment; we discussed many policies for admission into universities and grad programs, and learned about the advantages and disadvantages that often determine which people have the chance to attend a university, as well as the disadvantages that keep many people from applying in the first place. Many capable young people do not have the chance to attend a four-year university for financial reasons, and many others do not even graduate high school because they attend under funded public schools in low-income neighborhoods. As Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus is located in a low-income neighborhood, we believe that it is university’s responsibility to see that the students living there have the same opportunities that other students have. In order to do this, we are proposing that Fordham University adopts the schools within the Roosevelt Educational Campus. Our intention is also for Fordham to admit students from Roosevelt into their freshman class each year, as well as provide support to the schools in terms of resources and mentorship.
This idea arose from our realization that even with the existence of affirmative action, students from lower-income neighborhoods have much less of a chance of making it into a selective university. Cedric Jennings, a student who worked his way from the inner city in Washington D.C. to Brown University, whose story is told in Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen[ii] is quite an extraordinary case, that has not been replicated on many occasions. We as a class have learned that in addition to being controversial, that race-based affirmative action often benefits minorities or are already members of the middle or upper classes. Socio-economic-based affirmative action programs, which are inherently less controversial than race-based programs, also tend to increase diversity at schools that implement them. While increasing diversity at Fordham or making up for past disadvantages that specific groups of people have encountered is not what our proposed program is seeking to accomplish, they may end up being consequences of Fordham adopting Roosevelt. Our program’s true aim, however, is improving educational access for individual students and enhancing the relationship between Fordham and its surrounding community. Fordham would certainly not be the first university to adopt a neighboring high school. While other colleges, such as Remington College[iii], The College of New Jersey[iv], and Dade Medical College[v] have had similar programs, we intend for Fordham to institute a program of which the extent of involvement is yet unmatched.
Though Fordham already has a presence in its surrounding community, there is always room for improvement. Many students and faculty at Fordham may not realize the extent to which Theodore Roosevelt High School could have used Fordham’s assistance in the past. The two schools were incomparable, one being a selective university, the other, a high school struggling to stay afloat. Theodore Roosevelt High School, which was first opened in 1919, had the lowest graduation rate in New York City in 2005 of only 3%, and was closed the following year. The building now houses six autonomous schools: Belmont Preparatory High School[vi], West Bronx Academy for the Future[vii], Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology[viii], Fordham High School for the Arts[ix], KAPPA International High School[x], and the Bronx High School for Law and Community Service[xi], in what is called the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus. These schools are not in the same shape as Theodore Roosevelt High School was before it was closed; they have much higher graduation rates and have some advanced placement classes. This does not mean, however, that they have anywhere near the same number of resources as many other public schools. For example, these schools do not have the resources needed to expand arts or sports programs. For security reasons, these schools also have SSA officers and metal detectors[xii] present in the schools, which, though arguably necessary, add an aspect of distrust that likely does not encourage students to feel more enthusiastic about learning. We are not proposing that these should be taken away, but it is our hope that our program will foster a more amiable learning environment for the high school students.
Before making a proposal about what we think Fordham should do for the schools within the Roosevelt Educational Campus, it is important that we acknowledge what the university already does for schools within low-income communities. Fordham’s Graduate School of Education already has a partnership with 31 schools in the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, through which they provide a range of technical assistance and support tailored to the needs of each school. These services include consultant coaching support, developing a customized action plan for each school, fundraising and grant writing, college tours, and much more[xiii]. Fordham’s community service office, the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice, also has opportunities for students to volunteer at the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus, however there has not been consistent student involvement there. In summation, while there are some affiliations between Fordham and the high schools in the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus, they seem to be minimal, and not something highly prioritized by the administration, the community service center, or the student body.
Keeping in mind that our own initial ideas for Roosevelt may differ from those of their administration and teachers, we began correspondence with some of the professionals from the individual schools. Some of our representatives were able to meet with the Assistant Principal at the West Bronx Academy for the Future, Elizabeth Wasson, and discussed what she thought of her school and what could possibly be improved. The extent of her knowledge of Fordham and the West Bronx Academy’s partnership was through a program called RISE[xiv] that provides the Academy with something called the PLATO grant, which gives students from the school an opportunity to make up courses they have failed at the computer labs at Fordham. Students in Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business’ honors program mentor these students as part of their community service requirement. However, this seems to be the greatest extent to which Fordham students work with students from the West Bronx Academy for the Future. Though it is a good start, we believe that the Fordham community should have a greater involvement in the West Bronx Academy, and the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus as a whole.
When asked what she would hope for from a partnership with Fordham University, Wasson listed several aspects of her school that she believes need improvement many of them incorporating active involvement on the part of Fordham University students, others involve Fordham’s sharing of resources with Roosevelt. Wasson advocated a shadowing program through which students from Roosevelt could attend classes and club events with a student from Fordham for a day, and building relationships between kids, counselors, teachers, and administrators, at both schools in general. Her ideas emphasized the importance of involvement on both Fordham’s campus and on the Roosevelt campus. She advocated both bringing Roosevelt students on Fordham’s campus for classes and bringing Fordham clubs to the Roosevelt campus to attend and participate in programs and events. Other needs that she expressed for the West Bronx Academy for the Future, and for the Roosevelt Educational Campus in general, are health classes (in order to change attitudes about consequences of sex and having children), green space for sports activities, and space for general after school activities.
Our proposal for Fordham involves combining what the assistant principal Roosevelt stated are their needs, as well as a program that would ensure that students from Roosevelt would be admitted to Fordham every year. Not only do we want to improve the educational experience of students at the high school level, but we also want to guarantee educational access at the college level to individual students who are part of a larger system that often does not see the admittance of people from low-income neighborhoods to selective or Ivy League schools. (This program is not about race. We are referring more generally to socioeconomic disadvantage that leaves many public schools under-funded and many students without the opportunities that their counterparts at well-funded schools have. As a class studying affirmative action and its effects, we understand the implications of instituting any sort of policy that provides advantages to some races over others, even when it is meant to make up for past disadvantages. Instead, we are looking to work specifically with the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus because it is both part of a low-income neighborhood and part of our surrounding neighborhood. What better place to start being “men and women for others” than across the street from our campus?) The program we hope for Fordham to establish concerns several different aspects of education and progress through the educational system.
We are proposing that Fordham develop a program through which its students will become tutors and mentors to students at the schools in the Roosevelt Educational Campus. This could be done through a club or society, not run or directed by students, but by faculty members, in order to ensure its continued quality and commitment. The Fordham students in this club or society would also be involved in a shadowing program with the students they mentor. Not only would they help their students with their schoolwork and the college application process, they would also take them to classes on campus in order to introduce them to college-level courses. Not all students from Fordham involved in the partnership with the Roosevelt schools would be a mentor or tutor; they could also assist in running after-school programs or coaching sports teams.
Ideally, Fordham’s adoption of the Roosevelt schools would not end there. It would also entail sharing its sports fields and courts with the Roosevelt schools and Fordham’s financial support to Roosevelt. Financial support could involve help with purchasing school supplies or maintaining facilities. One of the most important aspects of Fordham’s adoption of Roosevelt would be the system through which a number of students from Roosevelt would be guaranteed admission to Fordham each year. This number should be set each year, and should increase from one year to the next, reaching a cap at 50 (however, there should never be a cap on how many students from Roosevelt could be admitted to Fordham, just how many are required). Through these combined efforts, Fordham could change the face of high school education in the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus, bringing the students new resources, increasing their self-confidence as scholars, and subsequently, providing them with new expectations about their own futures. Today, most of these students do not expect to attend selective universities. Together, Fordham University and the Roosevelt Educational Campus can change that.

[i] In its online mission statement, Fordham University, as a Jesuit institution vows that it is “committed to research and education that assist in the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of justice, the protection of human rights and respect for the environment.” The university also acknowledges its debt to the city of New York, and recognizes its responsibility to share its resources in order to enrich the city, the nation, and the world as a whole. Our program would help Fordham fulfill these intentions, both as a program that promotes justice, and as a program that directly benefits the city that the University calls home. ;

Appendix B

[ii] A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey From the Inner City to the Ivy League is a biographic novel by Ron Suskind, published in 1998, which tells the story of Cedric Jennings, as he transitions from Ballou high school, an inner city school in Washington D.C., to Brown University. The book highlights the challenges that students from low-income areas face. These challenges manifest themselves at all stages in their education: passing classing, graduating from high school, getting into universities, and the struggles they will face once they have been admitted to a university. In high school, Cedric excelled academically, but faced challenges in terms of feeling ostracized from his fellow classmates, and was even bullied by other kids for being such a dedicated student. Once Cedric reached Brown University, he felt more accepted by other students because they too were passionate about learning. However, he had to face cultural differences that arose from the amount of privilege that other students had in terms of financial security. He also had to work harder than many other students because his high school education did not prepare him to the same extent that theirs did. Though it is a daunting task, we hope to make it more common for students from inner-city high schools to make it to selective universities, and to better prepare them for attending these universities than they historically have been, by beginning with the schools in the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus.

Appendix C

[iii] Remington College, a group of privately owned non-profit post-secondary educational institutions, operating in twenty campuses across the United States, has established a program called “Adopt Our School” in addition to several other community involvement programs. Through this program, Remington College “adopted” Humble High School, Walanae High School, and Bossier High School, donating $2,000 worth of school supplies to each. ; ; ;

Appendix D

[iv] The College of New Jersey, a public university located in Ewing Township, New Jersey adopted the library at Trenton Central High School in 2011, through a project called “Adopt-A-Classroom.” The “Adopt-A-Classroom” project itself allows educators to register their classrooms that need help allowing benefactors to support their needs. Like our program between Fordham and Roosevelt, the students at the College of New Jersey who implemented the adoption of Trenton Central High School’s library did so because they wanted to support a school in their college’s neighboring community. Through this adoption, TCNJ improved this actual library space by purchasing items, such as new curtains, and increased the number of books available to students by running a book drive.
< http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2011/04/tcnj_education_majors_adopt_tr.html>;

Appendix E

[v] Dade Medical College, located in Hialeah, FL, has implemented an “Adopt-a-School” program, through which they adopted Hialeah Senior High School in 2009. This adoption involved Dade’s donation of $5,000 to the local high school, in order to benefit the school’s band program and the Academy of Medicine and Health. Dade’s representatives committed to helping the schools in their community during times of economic hardship.
;

Appendix F

[vi] Belmont Preparatory High School’s 2010-2011 overall progress report grade was actually an A (70.9 out of a possible 100 points). Its student progress was scored as a 41 of 60 points and their performance was scored as an 18.1 out of a total of 25 possible points, however their school environment was rated with 7.8 points out of a possible 15, and a 4.0 out of 14 possible points for closing the achievement gap. The School Environment grade is based on student attendance, as well as the school’s NYC School Survey, completed by parents, teachers, and students, through which they rate the school’s expectations, safety and respect, communication, and engagement. Points for the ‘Closing the Achievement Gap’ are given to schools with exceptional graduation results among students with disabilities and English Language Learners, and for exceptional graduation and/or Regents results among students with the lowest proficiency citywide. Belmont Preparatory High School was among the 33% of schools that received A’s during the 2010-2011 progress report period. ;

Belmont Preparatory NYC School Survey 2010-2011 Report: ;

Though Belmont Preparatory High School was generally rated as satisfactory in its progress report, it’s Annual Arts in Schools Report for the 2010-2011 academic year showed that there is minimal involvement in the arts among its students.
;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X434/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;

Appendix G

[vii] The West Bronx Academy for the Future received a C as its overall grade for its 2010-2011 progress report. The school received 31.9 out of 60 points for student progress, 10 out of 25 points for student performance, 8.9 out of 15 points for its environment, and 3 points of 14 for closing the achievement gap. The low scores in student progress and student performance reflect students’ struggle to meet the state’s graduation requirements for passing State Regents exams, and poor graduation rates.
;

According to the school’s NYC School Survey Report for the 2010-2011 academic year, the school actually scored lower in certain areas than in the year before, specifically in communication and safety & respect. In taking the survey, parents also emphasized their desire for their children to be better prepared for standardized state tests, and for smaller class sizes.
;

Students at the West Bronx Academy for the Future were involved in more arts programs than those at Belmont Preparatory School in the during the 2010-2011 academic year, particularly in dance, music, and the visual arts.
;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X243/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;
Appendix H

[viii] The Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology received a D on its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year, with a meager 40 out of 100 possible points. It received a D in student progress, F’s in student performance and school and environment, and only 1 point in closing the achievement gap. Only 12% of schools in NYC received a D or lower on their progress report. According to the report, a D or an F indicates that students at the school are demonstrating a slower pace of learning and progress than students at similar schools.
;

According to the NYC School Survey Report for 2010-201l, the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology’s scores declined in all but one area (safety & respect), each score well below the city average.
;

Students from the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology in the 2010-2011 year were also not involved with a lot of arts programs, but there was some extracurricular involvement in music and visual arts. (There was no involvement in dance, theater, or film). However, several students did attend classes in the visual arts.
;

;

Appendix I

[ix] Fordham High School for the Arts received an A in its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year, with a B in student progress, an A in student performance, an A in school environment, and 4 points (of 14) for closing the achievement gap. Overall, the school received 77.6 points out of 100.
;

According to the school’s NYC School Survey Report for 2010-2011, Fordham High School for the Arts’ scores improved in every category from the previous year, aside from engagement, which remained the same. It was very rare that parents on this survey would report negatively about feeling informed or feeling that the school was concerned with their child’s progress.
;

As expected from the school’s name, the students from Fordham High School for the Arts were much more involved in arts than students from the other schools in the Roosevelt Educational Campus. Though no students were involved in film, there were students in every grade (9-12) involved in dance, music, theater, and visual arts. Students took between 8 and 10 credits in all forms of the arts aside from film (in which they took none).
;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X437/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;
Appendix J

[x] The Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy International High School (KAPPA) received an A on its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year with a total of 78.4 points out of a possible 100. KAPPA International received a B in student progress, an A in student performance (with a near perfect score of 22.7 out of 25), an A in school environment, and 4 out of 14 possible points for closing the achievement gap.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Progress_Report_Overview_2011_HS_X374.pdf>;

Despite its high scoring progress report, KAPPA International actually declined in nearly every score on its NYC School Survey for 2010-2011. (However, each of its scores remained above average). Although its scores decreased in academic expectations, communication, and engagement, they all remained higher than those of the majority of schools in the area.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Survey_2011_X374.pdf>;

KAPPA International’s students in the 2010-2011 academic year were highly involved in music, with some involvement in theater. There was no involvement in film visual arts, or dance. This is likely because of the possibility to earn class credit in these areas.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/documents/ArtsReport/2010-11/ArtsReport_X374.pdf>;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X374/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;
Appendix K

[xi] Despite receiving C’s in student progress, student performance, and school environment, the Bronx High School For Law and Community was able to achieve a B on its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year, arguable a result of the 6 points that it received for closing the achievement gap. In fact, if it had received only one less point for closing the achievement gap, it would have fallen into the point range of a C.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Progress_Report_Overview_2011_HS_X439.pdf>;

According to the school’s NYC School Survey Report for 2010-2011, Bronx High School For Law and Community improved in some areas, while declining or remaining the same in others. Its scores in academic expectations and safety & respect improved, while engagement declined, and communication remained constant.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Survey_2011_X439.pdf>;

Aside from the visual arts, students at this school were not involved in the arts at all. However, involvement in the visual arts was higher than in the other schools in the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus, with 19% involvement among Freshmen, 81% involvement among sophomores and seniors, and 100% involvement among juniors. Half of all students graduated with at least 3 credits in the arts.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/documents/ArtsReport/2010-11/ArtsReport_X439.pdf>;

Appendix L

[xii]While it may seem necessary for security purposes, the presence of SSA officers and metal detectors in high schools is creating a hostile environment that likely does not make students feel welcome to learn.

At Aviation High School, the school was forced to cancel all “zero-period” Advanced Placement classes because of “disruptions caused by the NYPD,” and attendance dropped from 94 percent to 70 percent because of the lines caused by the metal detectors (11). “Students and families who attempted to protest the NYPD police action at Aviation High School were threatened or silenced” (11). At the Community School for Social Justice and the Health Opportunities High School, female students were searched by male officers in what was a “clear violation of the Chancellor’s Regulations” (12). A teacher even protested in a note: “can we please no treat...teenagers who have gotten themselves to school like they’ve committed a crime?” (13). The principal of Curtis High School described the officers as abrasive and complained that they “treated students with disrespect” (14).

82% percent of students surveyed reported that they had been late to class because of the metal detectors. 53% of students surveyed reported that officers have spoken with them in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. 27% of students surveyed reported that officers touched or treated them in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. “The Bloomberg administration claims that increased policing in schools responsible for a significant decline in school crime, but the National Center for School and Communities at Fordham University shows that such claims are inflated” (19).

Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools by Elora Mukherjee, Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow (2006-2007)
Appendix M
[xiii] The Fordham Partnership Support Organization provides a range of technical assistance and support including:
Fordham Faculty and Consultant Coaching Support
Fundraising/Grant Writing
College Tours
Student Teachers
Leadership Development
Special Education Support
Professional Development
Study Groups
among other equally important services.

“Our goal has been to engage our partner schools, districts and governmental agencies in the process of helping teachers teach more effectively and have all students, regardless of background, learn at higher levels. We conduct our work by drawing on the best scholarship and applying that cutting edge knowledge to the challenges of the classroom. Simply stated, we are research-based and outcomes oriented. Since 2007, there has been a huge investment of time, skill, energy, and emotion supporting our PSO network schools. The Fordham PSO embraces the individuality of every school and works with each principal to strengthen school capacity, whether through workshops, curriculum support, or in the pursuit of additional funding for special projects.”
http://www.fordham.edu/academics/colleges__graduate_s/graduate__profession/educati on/centers/center_for_education/partnership_support_/
Appendix N
[xiv] “Dr. Steven D’Agustino, director of the RETC, brought the project participants together in response to the RETC’s mission of community involvement and closing the digital divide. Fordham High School for the Arts (FHSFTA) lacks the technology infrastructure to effectively implement the PLATO credit recovery software, so the RETC offered to allow students to use their facilities. FHSFTA teachers and students named the program Project R.I.S.E., or "Rediscovering Inspiration for Student Excellence."

But, more than just using the software, the students will be able to interact with Fordham University students. The Boyle Scholars, an honors society from the Gabelli School of Business, are required to fulfill a community service component and will serve as mentors. The high school students are encouraged to think about their own aspirations for college, while the Fordham students will have a positive impact on the local community outside the University gates. Project R.I.S.E. is considered a model program that serves as a basis for grant and funding proposals.”
;

Appendix A

[1] In its online mission statement, Fordham University, as a Jesuit institution vows that it is “committed to research and education that assist in the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of justice, the protection of human rights and respect for the environment.” The university also acknowledges its debt to the city of New York, and recognizes its responsibility to share its resources in order to enrich the city, the nation, and the world as a whole. Our program would help Fordham fulfill these intentions, both as a program that promotes justice, and as a program that directly benefits the city that the University calls home. ;

Appendix B

[1] A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey From the Inner City to the Ivy League is a biographic novel by Ron Suskind, published in 1998, which tells the story of Cedric Jennings, as he transitions from Ballou high school, an inner city school in Washington D.C., to Brown University. The book highlights the challenges that students from low-income areas face. These challenges manifest themselves at all stages in their education: passing classing, graduating from high school, getting into universities, and the struggles they will face once they have been admitted to a university. In high school, Cedric excelled academically, but faced challenges in terms of feeling ostracized from his fellow classmates, and was even bullied by other kids for being such a dedicated student. Once Cedric reached Brown University, he felt more accepted by other students because they too were passionate about learning. However, he had to face cultural differences that arose from the amount of privilege that other students had in terms of financial security. He also had to work harder than many other students because his high school education did not prepare him to the same extent that theirs did. Though it is a daunting task, we hope to make it more common for students from inner-city high schools to make it to selective universities, and to better prepare them for attending these universities than they historically have been, by beginning with the schools in the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus.

Appendix C

[1] Remington College, a group of privately owned non-profit post-secondary educational institutions, operating in twenty campuses across the United States, has established a program called “Adopt Our School” in addition to several other community involvement programs. Through this program, Remington College “adopted” Humble High School, Walanae High School, and Bossier High School, donating $2,000 worth of school supplies to each. ; ; ;

Appendix D

[1] The College of New Jersey, a public university located in Ewing Township, New Jersey adopted the library at Trenton Central High School in 2011, through a project called “Adopt-A-Classroom.” The “Adopt-A-Classroom” project itself allows educators to register their classrooms that need help allowing benefactors to support their needs. Like our program between Fordham and Roosevelt, the students at the College of New Jersey who implemented the adoption of Trenton Central High School’s library did so because they wanted to support a school in their college’s neighboring community. Through this adoption, TCNJ improved this actual library space by purchasing items, such as new curtains, and increased the number of books available to students by running a book drive.
< http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2011/04/tcnj_education_majors_adopt_tr.html>;

Appendix E

[1] Dade Medical College, located in Hialeah, FL, has implemented an “Adopt-a-School” program, through which they adopted Hialeah Senior High School in 2009. This adoption involved Dade’s donation of $5,000 to the local high school, in order to benefit the school’s band program and the Academy of Medicine and Health. Dade’s representatives committed to helping the schools in their community during times of economic hardship.
;

Appendix F

[1] Belmont Preparatory High School’s 2010-2011 overall progress report grade was actually an A (70.9 out of a possible 100 points). Its student progress was scored as a 41 of 60 points and their performance was scored as an 18.1 out of a total of 25 possible points, however their school environment was rated with 7.8 points out of a possible 15, and a 4.0 out of 14 possible points for closing the achievement gap. The School Environment grade is based on student attendance, as well as the school’s NYC School Survey, completed by parents, teachers, and students, through which they rate the school’s expectations, safety and respect, communication, and engagement. Points for the ‘Closing the Achievement Gap’ are given to schools with exceptional graduation results among students with disabilities and English Language Learners, and for exceptional graduation and/or Regents results among students with the lowest proficiency citywide. Belmont Preparatory High School was among the 33% of schools that received A’s during the 2010-2011 progress report period. ;

Belmont Preparatory NYC School Survey 2010-2011 Report: ;

Though Belmont Preparatory High School was generally rated as satisfactory in its progress report, it’s Annual Arts in Schools Report for the 2010-2011 academic year showed that there is minimal involvement in the arts among its students.
;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X434/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;

Appendix G

[1] The West Bronx Academy for the Future received a C as its overall grade for its 2010-2011 progress report. The school received 31.9 out of 60 points for student progress, 10 out of 25 points for student performance, 8.9 out of 15 points for its environment, and 3 points of 14 for closing the achievement gap. The low scores in student progress and student performance reflect students’ struggle to meet the state’s graduation requirements for passing State Regents exams, and poor graduation rates.
;

According to the school’s NYC School Survey Report for the 2010-2011 academic year, the school actually scored lower in certain areas than in the year before, specifically in communication and safety & respect. In taking the survey, parents also emphasized their desire for their children to be better prepared for standardized state tests, and for smaller class sizes.
;

Students at the West Bronx Academy for the Future were involved in more arts programs than those at Belmont Preparatory School in the during the 2010-2011 academic year, particularly in dance, music, and the visual arts.
;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X243/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;
Appendix H

[1] The Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology received a D on its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year, with a meager 40 out of 100 possible points. It received a D in student progress, F’s in student performance and school and environment, and only 1 point in closing the achievement gap. Only 12% of schools in NYC received a D or lower on their progress report. According to the report, a D or an F indicates that students at the school are demonstrating a slower pace of learning and progress than students at similar schools.
;

According to the NYC School Survey Report for 2010-201l, the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology’s scores declined in all but one area (safety & respect), each score well below the city average.
;

Students from the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology in the 2010-2011 year were also not involved with a lot of arts programs, but there was some extracurricular involvement in music and visual arts. (There was no involvement in dance, theater, or film). However, several students did attend classes in the visual arts.
;

;

Appendix I

[1] Fordham High School for the Arts received an A in its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year, with a B in student progress, an A in student performance, an A in school environment, and 4 points (of 14) for closing the achievement gap. Overall, the school received 77.6 points out of 100.
;

According to the school’s NYC School Survey Report for 2010-2011, Fordham High School for the Arts’ scores improved in every category from the previous year, aside from engagement, which remained the same. It was very rare that parents on this survey would report negatively about feeling informed or feeling that the school was concerned with their child’s progress.
;

As expected from the school’s name, the students from Fordham High School for the Arts were much more involved in arts than students from the other schools in the Roosevelt Educational Campus. Though no students were involved in film, there were students in every grade (9-12) involved in dance, music, theater, and visual arts. Students took between 8 and 10 credits in all forms of the arts aside from film (in which they took none).
;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X437/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;
Appendix J

[1] The Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy International High School (KAPPA) received an A on its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year with a total of 78.4 points out of a possible 100. KAPPA International received a B in student progress, an A in student performance (with a near perfect score of 22.7 out of 25), an A in school environment, and 4 out of 14 possible points for closing the achievement gap.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Progress_Report_Overview_2011_HS_X374.pdf>;

Despite its high scoring progress report, KAPPA International actually declined in nearly every score on its NYC School Survey for 2010-2011. (However, each of its scores remained above average). Although its scores decreased in academic expectations, communication, and engagement, they all remained higher than those of the majority of schools in the area.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Survey_2011_X374.pdf>;

KAPPA International’s students in the 2010-2011 academic year were highly involved in music, with some involvement in theater. There was no involvement in film visual arts, or dance. This is likely because of the possibility to earn class credit in these areas.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/documents/ArtsReport/2010-11/ArtsReport_X374.pdf>;

< http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/10/X374/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm>;
Appendix K

[1] Despite receiving C’s in student progress, student performance, and school environment, the Bronx High School For Law and Community was able to achieve a B on its overall progress report for the 2010-2011 academic year, arguable a result of the 6 points that it received for closing the achievement gap. In fact, if it had received only one less point for closing the achievement gap, it would have fallen into the point range of a C.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Progress_Report_Overview_2011_HS_X439.pdf>;

According to the school’s NYC School Survey Report for 2010-2011, Bronx High School For Law and Community improved in some areas, while declining or remaining the same in others. Its scores in academic expectations and safety & respect improved, while engagement declined, and communication remained constant.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Survey_2011_X439.pdf>;

Aside from the visual arts, students at this school were not involved in the arts at all. However, involvement in the visual arts was higher than in the other schools in the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus, with 19% involvement among Freshmen, 81% involvement among sophomores and seniors, and 100% involvement among juniors. Half of all students graduated with at least 3 credits in the arts.
< http://schools.nyc.gov/documents/ArtsReport/2010-11/ArtsReport_X439.pdf>;

Appendix L

[1]While it may seem necessary for security purposes, the presence of SSA officers and metal detectors in high schools is creating a hostile environment that likely does not make students feel welcome to learn.

At Aviation High School, the school was forced to cancel all “zero-period” Advanced Placement classes because of “disruptions caused by the NYPD,” and attendance dropped from 94 percent to 70 percent because of the lines caused by the metal detectors (11). “Students and families who attempted to protest the NYPD police action at Aviation High School were threatened or silenced” (11). At the Community School for Social Justice and the Health Opportunities High School, female students were searched by male officers in what was a “clear violation of the Chancellor’s Regulations” (12). A teacher even protested in a note: “can we please no treat...teenagers who have gotten themselves to school like they’ve committed a crime?” (13). The principal of Curtis High School described the officers as abrasive and complained that they “treated students with disrespect” (14).

82% percent of students surveyed reported that they had been late to class because of the metal detectors. 53% of students surveyed reported that officers have spoken with them in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. 27% of students surveyed reported that officers touched or treated them in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. “The Bloomberg administration claims that increased policing in schools responsible for a significant decline in school crime, but the National Center for School and Communities at Fordham University shows that such claims are inflated” (19).

Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools by Elora Mukherjee, Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow (2006-2007)
Appendix M
[1] The Fordham Partnership Support Organization provides a range of technical assistance and support including:
Fordham Faculty and Consultant Coaching Support
Fundraising/Grant Writing
College Tours
Student Teachers
Leadership Development
Special Education Support
Professional Development
Study Groups
among other equally important services.

“Our goal has been to engage our partner schools, districts and governmental agencies in the process of helping teachers teach more effectively and have all students, regardless of background, learn at higher levels. We conduct our work by drawing on the best scholarship and applying that cutting edge knowledge to the challenges of the classroom. Simply stated, we are research-based and outcomes oriented. Since 2007, there has been a huge investment of time, skill, energy, and emotion supporting our PSO network schools. The Fordham PSO embraces the individuality of every school and works with each principal to strengthen school capacity, whether through workshops, curriculum support, or in the pursuit of additional funding for special projects.”
http://www.fordham.edu/academics/colleges__graduate_s/graduate__profession/educati on/centers/center_for_education/partnership_support_/
Appendix N
[1] “Dr. Steven D’Agustino, director of the RETC, brought the project participants together in response to the RETC’s mission of community involvement and closing the digital divide. Fordham High School for the Arts (FHSFTA) lacks the technology infrastructure to effectively implement the PLATO credit recovery software, so the RETC offered to allow students to use their facilities. FHSFTA teachers and students named the program Project R.I.S.E., or "Rediscovering Inspiration for Student Excellence."

But, more than just using the software, the students will be able to interact with Fordham University students. The Boyle Scholars, an honors society from the Gabelli School of Business, are required to fulfill a community service component and will serve as mentors. The high school students are encouraged to think about their own aspirations for college, while the Fordham students will have a positive impact on the local community outside the University gates. Project R.I.S.E. is considered a model program that serves as a basis for grant and funding proposals.”
;

The Sixties Student Movement and the Working Class- Clearing Up Misconceptions

2011-12-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

During the 1960’s, New York city was the scene of an incredibly powerful anti-war and student movement. Like Occupy Wall Street, this movement was often attacked for being unrepresentative of the city’s working class. In reality, this movement was far more diverse in class and race than critics at the time, or historians, realized. As both a participant in this movement, and a historian trying to make sense of it, I want to give a sense of how important the working class component of the anti—war and student movements in New York City were in the 1960’s and early 70’s . In doing so, I will present some rarely discussed features of the Columbia Strike, the most publicized of student movements during the period, as well as the struggle for Open Admissions in the City University, anti-war activism in the city’s high schools, and neighborhood organizing projects spawned by SDS, the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party
The Columbia Strike, a building occupation which lasted seven days, has often been held up as an prototypical example of elite leadership of the student movement and the anti-war movement. This is not entirely wrong. The vast majority of the leadership and membership of Columbia SDS, along with the majority of the white students who occupied four of the five buildings, were from middle class and upper middle class families. However, the Black students who occupied Hamilton hall, without whose leadership and militancy the “occupation” strategy would have never been introduced, were fare more diverse in class origins than SDS members. Many of the students occupying Hamilton Hall, including my own girlfriend at the time, came from working class and lower middle class families, products of a new admissions policy which Columbia had introduced beginning in 1966 which multiplied the number of black students at the school more than sixfold. In addition, leaders from Harlem organizations were regular participants in the Hamilton Hall occupation, giving the entire movement space to operate because Columbia administrators were afraid they might cause rioting in Harlem, leading to attacks on the university, if they used police action to pull Hamilton Hall occupants out. In addition, high school students from Harlem and the Upper West Wide played a major role in the strike when they marched, five hundred strong, on to the Columbia campus to break through a blockade of the buildings that conservative athletes had set up to try to “starve out” protesters. Without a highly politicized Harlem community, and strong student movements in largely working class New York City High Schools, both of whom mobilized in support of Black student occupiers and the movement as a whole, the Columbia strike would have likely ended in one or two days, and would not have won its most important victory- the prevention of the construction of a private gymnasium for Columbia students in a public park adjoining the campus.
But though the Columbia strike was the most publicized student movement in that era, not only in New York City, but the nation, it terms of material consequences, it was far surpassed by an entirely working class movement- the struggle for open admissions in the City University of New York. In 1969 Black and Latino students at City College initiated a strike, and blockaded the school, to demand that the overwhelming white 4 year colleges of CUNY open their doors to students of color who had become the majority in the city’s high schools. This fierce battle, supported by SDS chapters around the city won an incredible victory. The City University Board voted to radically change admissions standards for its 4 year colleges and initiate a broad based remediation program to accommodate the new students. The results were astonishing. Within one year, the number of freshmen attending CUNY 4 year colleges rose from 20,000 to 35,000 and the number of students of color tripled. This was arguably the greatest single victory won by the student movement in New York City during the entire period, and was organized and led by students from working class backgrounds.
Where did these students come from? How were they politicized? Here we have to look at the impact of Black students organizations founded in the city’s high schools and colleges, as well as the impact of community organizing and political education carried on by the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party. When the Black Power slogan was launched by Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, it captured the imagination of Black students around the nation. The idea that Black people had to create separate organizations to achieve true self-determination touched a particular chord with Black students at predominantly white institutions and led to the formation of Black student unions on every City University campus and at private colleges like Columbia, NYU and Fordham. The college Black student unions, in turn, reached out to black students at public high schools to form student organizations of their own, a process which was often resisted by recalcitrant administrators, and to demand that black history be taught as part of the curriculum. The result was considerable political turmoil at the city high schools around issues of race and representation, a tension only increased by the 1968 teachers strike which pitted community groups in Black and Latino neighborhoods seeking local control of all aspects of school management against a teachers union determined to have hiring and firing of teachers immune to local pressures
These students were also exposed almost daily, in their neighborhoods, and outside their schools to representatives of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party. Men in black suits and bow ties selling Muhammed Speaks were a fixture of life in the city’s black neighborhoods, as well as neighborhoods near schools and colleges ( we had our salesman at Columbia ever day). By 1969, men and women selling the Black Panther Party newspaper were almost as visible. High school students of color purchased and read these newspapers, giving them an exposure to a critical view of American society which was a reinforced by neighborhood and school newspapers sold and distributed on the streets by white radical students and activists.
This student activism was supplemented by community organizing, some of it around the war, some of it around issues of health care and labor rights. In the fall of 1969, some activists in a now splintered SDS decided to launch organizing projects in working class neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens while the Black Panthers and Young Lords joined initiated a remarkable campaign to improve health care and empower staff members and patients at the notoriously badly run and dangerous Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx

As a participant in one of these initiatives, the Bronx Coalition, I saw how deeply student and community activism had become embedded into what was then a largely white, but rapidly becoming multiracial section of the Bronx. I was the only “Columbia” person in the group, which consisted of faculty in the Seek Programs ( the new remediation initiative in CUNY) of Lehman and City colleges, nurses, teachers and postal workers, students from Lehman, Clinton, Taft, and Roosevelt High Schools as well as Bronx High School of Science, and students from SDS chapters at Lehman, Bronx Community, Fordham and NYU. We participated in anti-war marches and demonstrations in support of imprisoned members of the Black Panther Party, but we also organized support for striking postal workers, did draft counseling for neighborhood youth, and ran a storefront women’s health clinic that eventually evolved into the first abortion clinic at a New York City Hospital ( Montefiore). We promoted all our activities through a community newspaper, The Cross Bronx Express, which we sold on the streets and outside schools for anywhere from a penny to 25 cents, usually selling out a print run of more than 3,000 papers. We also held street rallies and concerts, picketed the local armed forces recruiting station and tried to take our message to the youth by playing basketball in schoolyards and parks. The abortion clinic was our most lasting achievement, along with the collective accomplishment of helping to the war, but during the two years we were together, we gave a voice to a working class people who were often left out of public discourse, and whose role in building sixties protest movements has often been overlooked. One powerful example of the working class participation in the movement to end the war took place after the invasion of Cambodia. Not only did every university in the borough go on strike, but 5000 high school students, including those from Clinton and Roosevelt, marched out of school and commandeered buses and subway trains to express their outrage at this expansion of the war.
I hope this brief overview will be helpful to Occupy Wall Street as it begins to embed itself in working class communities and to take up issues that are central to those communities economic and social health. Certainly, the greatest victory of that period, the struggle for open admissions at City University, holds numerous lessons for current activists, but so does the role of the Harlem community and high school students in defending, protecting and extending the Columbia strike. Now as then, involvement of the working class is key to endowing justice movements with the energy, power, and moral stature required to extract concessions from the powerful

Mark Naison
December 20, 2011

From Exposure to Action- A New Turn in the Occupy Movement

2011-12-19T15:24:00.000-08:00

When the history books are written, this winter may be the remembered at the time when Occupy Wall Street moved from the exposure of the economic system's inequities to the active defense of the disfranchised. The actions taken to prevent evictions and foreclosures in Brooklyn to Atlanta show the potential of OWS to renegotiate the social contract for people who have lost their homes. The same thing can eventually be done for people who can't pay their student loans. The Eviction of the Occupiers has given the movement a priceless opportunity to help people fight back against impoverishment and marginalization. By next year, there may be thousands of once empty, now occupied homes and apartments throughout this country. There won't be enough police to evict them. And if that happens, local governments may declare this occupations "legal" as they did in Berlin after the fall of the wall, when artists from all over Germany and all over the world occupied abandoned space in the former "Eastern Zone" of the city!

Mark Naison
December 19, 2011

Something's Happening Here

2011-12-19T03:00:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I met with 150 OWS activists, not one of whom I recognized from any past organizing activity, who asked me to talk about the 1930's rent strikes and anti-eviction protests as models for anti-foreclosure actions OWS is spawning around the country.

The energy, idealism, and organizational savvy I saw in that room was simply electrifying. It was the same thing I experienced when Ira Shor and I spoke at Hollis Presbyterian Church in Queens a week ago, at the 99 Percent Club meeting we had at Fordham last Tuesday, and at the International Socialist Organization meeting in the Bronx I spoke to the week before. There is something stirring on the ground in this nation that is quite formidable. Some of it is connected to Obama Administration initiatives such as Promise Neighborhoods; but some of it is coming from people who feel the Obama Administration has completely abandoned them and that they have to carve their own path

How do you reconcile these two very different organizing perspectives? First, let's recognize that there is no "one size fits all" strategy Some progressives will work like hell to elect Obama; others will concentrate their energies on grass roots protests; some might choose to work for a third party.

The political climate is toxic, but we also have more opportunities to build a real left in this country than we have in a generation

I am taking that opportunity to the limit.

Let the chips fall where they may

Mark Naison
December 19, 2011

Tim Tebow and the Politics of Whiteness

2011-12-17T06:58:00.000-08:00

When some of my favorite left wing sports commentators go after Tim Tebow, I find it hard not take it personally. Not because I share any of Tebow’s religious convictions or political beliefs- I have as much in common with him on that score as I do with Newt Gingrich-- but because I was once, on a much lower level, a white athlete who had a lot of the same skill set, physical traits and limitations as Tebow does, and had to prove myself constantly in mostly black ball games and leagues

From the late sixties through the mid 70’s, when I wasn’t writing, teaching or trying to make the revolution, I was playing basketball in schoolyards and gyms in Harlem, the Upper West Side and the Bronx, and playing on multiracial football teams in Riverside and Central Park. As a white guy playing in mostly black games during the height of the Black Power movement, I was always under careful scrutiny. Not everyone appreciated my presence, and I was being tested on two levels- first, was I fast, enough strong enough and athletic enough to compete in the games and second, did I try to boss people around and act like a “coach on the field,” something white players did with numbing regularity and which pissed people I played with off to an incredible degree

Pretty much, I passed muster on both counts. I was not the most skilled player in the world, but I was very strong, very tough, decently fast and a pretty good leaper ( at 6’0 I could grab the rim from a standing position). Though I was never a superstar, the guys I played with concluded I was a valuable teammate because I backed down from no one, could run the court in top competition,, and deferred to players who were more skilled and knowledgeable than me But the main thing that won me acceptance was that I kept my mouth shut and let people who knew the game better than me direct the action. If I was going to be a white player in mostly or all black games, it was going to be my “game” that earned respect, not my mouth, and it was defense and rebounding that were going to be my meal tickets

Now what does this have to do with Tim Tebow? Well, from the first time I saw him in college, I felt he was a player who earned respect through strength and toughness rather than some mythical “cerebral” quality that racist announcers liked to attribute to white athletes. He wasn’t talkative, he wasn’t arrogant, he got the ball to his teammates when he could, and ran people over when he couldn’t. He was white, yes, and he probably got undue attention because of his whiteness, but he never tried to steal the limelight from his teammates, many of whom were gifted athletes, and who had ample opportunity to shine in the offense he ran

Best of all, he didn’t confirm racial stereotypes. He was strong, tough, athletic, dominating the game because defensive players couldn’t tackle him. And he had clearly won the respect of his black teammates. I liked that. That’s what I played for and it thought it was kind of cool to see a white player gain respect through some of the same strategies I used

Now fast forward to the last two months. As result of the victories he has won since become the Denver Bronco’s starting quarterback, Tim Tebow has become perhaps the most talked about figure in American sports. To much of the country, Tebow has become a folk hero, a symbol of triumph over adversity; to some of my friends, he has become a symbol of white privilege and preferential opportunities given to white quarterbacks.

I refuse to buy into either of these narratives. To me, Tebow is still the tough white kid earning respect in a mostly black game by sacrificing his body for the good of the team and finding ways of enhancing the talents of his team mates.

He plays the way I played, the way my son Eric played, the way my daughter Sara played, and the way I would teach any ball player to play

That he is made into some kind of hero for achievements that might gain little attention were he black, is not his fault. It’s not what he asked for, not what he wants.

Even to the privileged, race can be a double edged sword, causing one’s achievements to be so exaggerated that they end up being minimized

Eminem’s ironic comments on his own career apply well to Tebow’s peculiar odyssey

#look at my sales, let's do the math, if I was black, I would've sold half, I
Ain't have to graduate from Lincoln high school to know that”

Let the man play. Over time, the miracles will cease and he will just be another good quarterback in a tough league. And when the attention dies down, his ”whiteness” will cease to be a source of either excitement or rage and he can go back to being what he always wanted to be – a hard nosed player respect by his teammates.

Mark Naison
December 17, 2011

Why Young Activists Won't Rally to the Obama Campaign

2011-12-16T17:51:00.000-08:00

Although I agree that the country is on the whole quite conservative, I think Occupy Wall Street is a "game changer" which over time will create an activist left in this nation of a kind we have not seen since the 60's and possibly since the 30's. If I am right about this- and my assessment comes from in depth work with four different groups of young activists since the late summer, one of them connected to the Save Our Schools March, the other three to the Occupy movements, I am convinced that there is no chance at all mobilizing these young people for Obama's re-election. I also think that the Occupy movement is more important to the long term cause of social justice than the Obama Presidency. My message to young activists is therefore to keep building grass roots movements and stay independent of electoral politics except in those rare instance when involvement won't compromise important goals ( e.g. the referendum to remove Scott Walker in Wisconsin; Elizabeth Warren's Senatorial campaign). As for the Obama campaign, leave that to allies in the labor movement who feel their bread and butter interests are advanced by a Democrat in the White House.

That message is one that has great resonance with my young comrades and co-workers. They see Obama as a President who supports those who would gas them, detain them, and, in the case of the young teachers, destroy the opportunity for them to have any creativity and self-respect in their jobs

All I ask is that Obama supporters, especially those in positions of authority, whether in universities or in government, don't try to suppress grass roots activism that remains independent of their campaign.

But that may be a tall order

Why The Next Great Wave of Unrest Will Come from Working Class Youth- And Why Elites Have Themselves to Blame If This Happens

2011-12-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

“Don’t push me, cause I ‘m close to the edge.
I’m trying not to lose my head
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from going under”

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five “The Message”

While the mayors of America’s big cities may be congratulating themselves for their nationally coordinated effort to evict Occupy camps, in the very near future, they are likely to face unrest of far greater proportions that will be much more difficult to control

This time, it will not be coming from underemployed, ex college students laboring under unsustainable student loan debt- it will be coming from young people in working class and poor neighborhoods whose school experiences are being made increasing barren by budget cuts and excessive testing, all to prepare them for a future that consists of little more than entry into minimum wage jobs, colleges that have become unaffordable, continuous police harassment, and a ticket to the nation’s prisons.

The forms this unrest will take may be ugly and frightening, ranging from uncontrolled fighting to school walkouts,, to flash mob robberies, to full scale riots in response to acts of police violence, but when they begin to reach epidemic proportions, policy makers won’t have radical activists to blame. It is their own policies which drove these young people to the wall

The following are creating a “tinder box” of conditions in working class and poor communities which it will not take much of a spark to ignite

1. Repressive school policies. During the current recession, school budgets throughout the country have been cut to the bone, greatly increasing class size, reducing or eliminating arts and sports programs, and reducing the number of social workers and guidance counselors. At the same time these cuts are taking place, students are being deluged with standardized tests which reduce classroom learning into little more than test prep. In working class and poor neighborhoods, the combination of budget cuts and uncontrolled testing made school even more boring and repressive than it was before, creating tremendous resentment among students and teachers. If there was some reward at the end of the day for six hours of pure boredom and repetition, students might tolerate it, but because of the grim news on the job and college front, students are increasingly resentful of what they are being put through, and are beginning to act out by leaving school, or disrupting school routines.
2. A Terrible Job Market. Youth unemployment in many cities is over 40 percent, for Black teenagers, it is often 70 percent. Worse yet, the few jobs available for high school graduates, largely in fast food restaurants and chain stores, involve low wages, no benefits, little job security, no union protection and harsh management strategies. While many young people eagerly take such jobs as the only alternative to unemployment and the underground economy, it does not mean that they are happy about where they have ended up, or are unaware of how much more privileged the growing upper middle class population the gentrifying cities the live in is. As inequality grows more glaring and visible, and as elites continue to blithely line their own pockets at the expense of workers ( the CEO of Wal-Mart Makes $16,000 and hour while the starting wage there is $6.50 an hour), young people facing a lifetime of poverty and low wage work are going to grow increasingly resentful. Don’t be surprised if that resentment explodes to the surface sooner rather than later
3. Unaffordable College Education. In response to budget cuts from state legislatures, public universities around the nation, including community colleges, are raising their tuitions, making them unaffordable for young people from working class and poor families who see these institutions as the one life line out of the school to prison/minimum wage pipeline. When young people from families of modest means find they can’t afford to attend college or are forced to drop out, they confront a job market that offers them little dignity, opportunity, or security. They are quite literally trapped, in a way that smothers what little hope they had of a better life

Now put these things together- oppressive, boring schools, a grim job market, colleges no one can afford, coupled with gentrification, a growing wealth gap and ferocious police harassment and you have an almost ideal set of conditions for unrest, especially since these young people have watched some of their more privileged counterparts mount a revolt of their own.

I have no idea when this unrest will emerge on a large scale, or what forms it will take, but I will be very surprised if we don’t see signs of it this coming spring and summer

I would love to see political activists give this unrest constructive direction, so we might avoid violent actions where innocent people are hurt, but I am not such activists are numerous enough or well organized enough to do this

More likely, we are all going to reap the whirlwind from policies driven by uncontrolled selfishness and greed on the part of the rich and the powerful

Mark Naison
September 16, 2011

What Occupy Wall Street Has Accomplished in Three Short Months

2011-12-15T11:28:00.001-08:00

Many people in the media, as well as many citizens, complain that Occupy Wall Street has no leaders and no goals. While Occupy Wall Street and its spin offs around the nation have certainly not developed “leaders” who articulate its goals to the media or negotiate with public officials, it has already registered a formidable list of accomplishments for a movement this young. The evictions of Occupy protesters by law enforcement authorities using helicopters, tear gas, pepper spray, bulldozers and rubber bullets and occasionally using Patriot Act protocols to prevent journalists from reporting on the evictions have only made the movement stronger, encouraging it to take the Occupy movement into working class communities of color who have long been under duress from regressive and discriminatory economic policies and the abuse of police power.

Here is my list of some of the important things this movement has done, with more to come as it grows and matures

1 Put the question of economic inequality in the center of national discourse for the first time since the 1960’s, even though such inequality has been growing dramatically for the last 20 years. The vocabulary the movement has developed to describe this inequality “ the 1 % and the 99%” have become a permanent part of our political discourse and has focused great attention on how the mal distribution of wealth has undermined democracy and eroded the living standards of the great majority of Americans

2 Called attention to the stifling impact of student loan debt on young college, professional and trade school graduates who face the double whammy of a stagnant job market and crippling debt. The attention given this issue inspired President Obama to marginally ease the loan burden of current recipients. In the future, it might well prompt a radical reconfiguration of the debt or a major program of loan forgiveness

3. Created political pressures that prompted the postponement of a decision by President Obama to begin construction of the controversial Keystone XL natural gas pipeline

4. Forced New York Governor Cuomo, whose promise not to renew the state’s millionaire’s drew national attention, to negotiate with state legislators a tax increase in the higher brackets, to go into effect next year, which will prevent 2 billion dollars in anticipated budget cuts

4 Inspired a wide variety of actions to prevent foreclosures and evictions and to bring relief to beleaguered home owners and tenants, including preventing the eviction of a 103 year old woman in Atlanta, forcing a Harlem landlord to restore heat to tenants, and occupying a foreclosed house in the East New York Section of Brooklyn

5. Put the undemocratic character of many education reform policies, particularly school closings, under much greater scrutiny, creating pressures on policy makers that will make these closings much more difficult to implement them without more consultation and input from parents, students, teachers and community members

6. Given the labor movement a new vocabulary to challenge attacks on collective bargaining and union recognition, providing added ammunition to the successful campaign to defeat anti-collective bargaining bill sin the states of Ohio and New Hampshire.

7 Focused attention on the issue of police brutality and the militarization of urban police forces in ways that reinforces longstanding complaints of police misconduct and abuse in Black and Latino communities

8. Helped create a political climate which persuaded the Philadelphia District Attorney to remove the death sentence from human rights activist and journalist Mumia Abu Jamal.

9 Sparked protests against tuition increases at the nation's public universities, especially in the California public colleges, and the City University of New York.

10. Closed down several West Coast ports in support of striking port workers.

This would be an impressive list of accomplishments for a movement that has lasted two years. But Occupy Wall Street has only been with us for three months!

My Barack Obama Problem

2011-12-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

Like many people on the Left, I have become disillusioned with the Obama Presidency. As one of those people who devoted huge amounts of time, money and energy to getting Obama elected, and who cried on election night when his victory was assured, I found myself hoping against hope that there was some redemptive quality to his leadership amidst expansion of foreign wars, attacks on public school teachers, bailouts of banks unaccompanied by serious controls, and a host of other policies that appeared to contradict everything he stood for during his campaign.

Although my heart wasn’t in it, I tried to justify his policies as the result of a powerful congressional opposition that refused to support policies that brought the full power of the federal government behind job creation and income policies designed to ease the pain of the nation’s struggling working class and middle class, along with those long trapped in poverty

But recently, I have started to think that the “real” Barack Obama is not the community organizer pictured Dreams from My Father or the fierce defender of the middle class that emerged on the campaign trail, but a cynical, ambitious, politician who loves spending time with the rich and the powerful and who has tied his administration’s and his own future to gaining their support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, after many disappointments, was the image of the President regaling a $2,500 a plate dinner in San Francisco while Occupy Oakland was being attacked by an army of police using tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and bulldozers. The Obama of
Dreams from My Father would have rushed across the Bay to stand with the Occupiers, but this Obama didn’t so much as give the protesters a second thought. The President was totally relaxed and in his element with the hedge fund and dot com executives, and media moguls, supporting his campaign. THEY, not the Occupiers, were now his real constituency. Not only were they the ones funding his presidential campaign, they were the ones who were going to be employing him after he left the Presidency, assuring that he, and his family would be part of the 1 Percent for the foreseeable future!

As a young man, who like the President, grew up in a lower middle class family and went to an Ivy League college and graduate school, I can understand the lure of great wealth and power to someone who grew up with neither. When you are a talented person from a family of modest means, it can be very heady to be courted by and praised by some of the nation’s smartest, wealthiest and most powerful people. And if you are so talented and charismatic that these people decide to groom you to become one of them , it can definitely persuade you to make compromises that end up affecting your conscience and your social consciousness.

For very personal reasons, I never enjoyed hanging out in the clubs and restaurants and vacation houses of the wealthy as much as the times I spent in neighborhood ball fields, schoolyards, and community centers interacting with working class and middle class people. I keep my feet in both worlds but I consider “the hood” to be my moral compass, the place where I have to go to find out if my life’s mission has any real traction, any real meaning.

But I fear the President is different. The people who come to the White House , whether the professional basketball players who show up at his birthday parties, the talented musicians who come to entertain, or the CEO’s and political kingmakers who come to discuss policy, are always a cross session of the most successful people in whatever field they are in. The President never tries to bring in ordinary people to talk to him privately and find out what is going on in their workplaces and neighborhoods. Those are not the people he trust, those are not the people he is comfortable with; those are not the people he wants to spend time with when he leaves the Presidency

A real cue to the President’s character came when he decided to host an Education Summit. To this event, he invited CEO’s of the nation’s largest corporations, and executives in some of the nation’s wealthiest foundations, but not one teacher. This is the real Barack Obama--someone who has left the world he grew up in, and the communities in Chicago he organized in, and who craves the company and advice of people, like himself, who have accomplished great things or accumulated great wealth.

In some ways, he is the perfect President for a country where ambition is honored above loyalty, generosity, and concern for those who have fallen in hard times and where we honor those who have overcome great obstacles to “rise to the top”

But whether he is the right President to lead us through the worst economic crisis in 70 years and stand up for all the people who have lost jobs and homes and hope is another matter entirely

Mark Naison
December 15, 2011

Schools Are The Next Great Front of Struggle in the Occupy Movement in NYC

2011-12-09T02:07:00.001-08:00

I have said it before and I will say it again- school closures-along with evictions and foreclosures- should be the next great front of struggle for the Occupy Movement in New York City. Nowhere is the subversion of democracy by the Bloomberg Administration more visible than in its control of the schools- from its rubber stamp Panel for Education Policy- to its hiring of expensive consultants while school aids are laid off- to its utter refusal to accept the input of students, teachers and parents on policies which undermine the relationship between schools and neighborhoods. This issue will be heating up in coming months, and is a perfect vehicle to get high school students involved in political activism, where they will learn a lot more than in schools who, on the Mayor's orders, are driving out any kind of creative learning in the name of test prep!

In Defense of Michael Eric Dyson and JZ- Thoughts on Teaching Hip Hop

2011-12-08T03:40:00.000-08:00

Those who criticize Michael Eric Dyson's course on JZ as a symbol of the degenertation of university curricula have not spent a great deal of time examining hip hop lyrics or exploring the setting the music arose in. JZ, like many other great hip hop lyricists- Wu Tang, Nas, Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Big Pun, DMX- experienced the impact of the crack epidemmc on their families and communities first hand, and provide the best stories we have of that experience, written from multiple vantage points ( dealer, user, distressed parent, frightened community leader, "duck and run kid") in our public discourse, better than novels, newspaper articles, journalistic accounts, sociological works.Plus their songs- at least the best of them- have the added bonus of being embedded in hauting musical backgrounds which add to the weight of their words.

As a product of the 60's, hip hop was never my music of choice, but I first began to appreciate it for its formidable storytelling power when I was coaching and community organizing in the early and mid 90's. Songs like Wu Tang Clan's C.R.E.A.M. describing the experience of young people watching the communities around them collapse while offering them unimaginable opportunities to make quick cash, hit me like a ton of bricks. I began using them in my courses to explain things I was observing first hand that were not described anywhere else paricularly the generational war between young people becoming the wealthiest and best armed people in their communities, and an older generation who watched the civilities they had grown up with disappear in a hail of bullets. JZ is one of the best of those story tellers and I could definitely spend a whole semester using his music to bring the history of inner city Brooklyn- and communities arond the country- to life from the late 70's through the early 90s. As it is, these songs are the bulwark of a course I teach at Fordham called "From Rock and Roll to Hip Hop' which is not only one of the most popular courses at my university, but one of the most difficult and most challenging. You don't believe me ask my studens, not only how much work the course entails, but how much it illuminates the social and cultural history of the United States during the past 50 years

Mark Naison
December 7, 2011

Occupy Wall Street in New York Still Going Strong!

2011-12-07T13:23:00.001-08:00

Occupy Wall Street is, rather than fading, slowly embedding itself into the lives of working class and middle class New Yorkers. Consider the following- yesterday, OWS protesters occupied a foreclosed home inn the East New York Section of Brooklyn; tonight Occupy the Bronx and supporters around the city will be packing a meeitng of the 40 Precinct Community Council to protest the illegal arrest of... Occupy the Bronx members outside a community garden over the weekend; there are ongoing hunger strikes in front of Trinity Church to protest the church's refusal to let the movement Occupy a vacant lot owned by the Church on Canal Street; there is a 99 Percent Club, in full operation at Fordham with new clubs on the verge of forming at other area colleges. Couple that with CUNY tuition protests, movements to resist school clusings
and charter school co-locations and you have a remarkable range of political activism around the city inspired by or supported by OWS.

Will The Occupy Movement Fade Into the Night Now That The Major Urban Occupations Have Been Cleared?

2011-12-03T04:47:00.001-08:00

Mark Naison

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared. Big city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream. Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for congress, realizing- with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill informed Republican presidential aspirants--, that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets

It’s a plausible scenario, to be sure, neat and rational. As many liberal pundits have pointed out, taking practical steps to address the economic inequality issues Occupy Wall street has raised- such as shifting the tax burden from the working class and middle class to the very wealthy- can only be done by creating electoral majorities in favor of such policies that don’t currently exist, and that can only be achieved through the “grunt work” of voter registration an organizing election campaigns in behalf of progressive candidates. And there is no question that many constituencies who were uneasily allied with the Occupy movements, particularly labor unions, plan to do just that in coming months and coming years.

But I am not sure that the experience of the last three months can be nearly excised from the national consciousness and the energy of Occupy supporters nearly directed into electoral activity

First of all, the experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement has had a profound, even transformative effect, on those who have participated, one that will not be so easy to persuade those who have experienced it to relinquish. The young people in this movement, part of an entire generation facing a stagnant job market and crippling debt, discovered they had the power to make the whole world pay attention to what they were saying by occupying public spaces, working outside normal political channels and refusing to anoint leaders to speak for them. But it was more than the reaction of the outside world that was transformative. It was the transformation of the Occupy spaces themselves into places where free discussion and debate could flourish in ways that existed nowhere else in the society, certainly not in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized universities, stressed filled public schools under pressure to deliver higher test scores, or workplaces ruled by dictatorial managers cognizant that a tight job market assured them of worker compliance. When Occupiers chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” they were proclaiming what few people have been willing to acknowledge- that lived democracy and freedom of expression have been eroding in the United States for some time, as institutions become more hierarchical and wealth has been more concentrated at the top. What the Occupy movement was created a space for a no holds bar discussion of a huge array of issues where people, thanks to the mic check method of repeating comments, actually listened to one another. Do such free zones exist in our schools, universities and workplaces? If they did, the Occupy movements would not have generated the levels of participation they did! There is a reason why Occupy movements sprung up in over 300 towns and cities and that is because they embodied a deeply felt need for freedom of expressions as well as a hunger to address issues of economic inequality and the mal distribution of wealth

Which brings us to the next point about why this movement is likely to persist and that is the reaction of authorities, whether mayors, or college presidents, to its emergence. The size, technological sophistication, and at times the astonishing violence of police mobilizations against Occupy protests dramatized to the nation, and the world, the degree to which the United States has become a police/national security state willing to go to extraordinary attempts to intimidate its own citizens. To immigrants, and to people living in minority and working class communities, particularly young men, this insight is nothing new- they have experienced intimidation by police forces and other government authorities on an almost daily basis, not only in their neighborhoods, but in prisons and detention centers. But until the Occupy movement, most middle class Americans including college educated youth, could ignore abuses of police power or pretend that the most extreme examples ( the police murder of an unarmed Sean Bell in Queens NY) were more the exception than the rule

But now, for three months, the people of the United States have been exposed to a steady array of images police forces using helicopters, bulldozers, sound cannons, tear gas and pepper spray not only against protesters peacefully assembling in universities and public parks, but against representatives of the press covering these events, and doing so with the collusion of the federal office of Homeland Security. Not only were such police tactics borrowed from the playbook used by police in gentrifying cities to intimidate and contain minority youth, they drew upon post 9/11 National Security protocols used to combat terrorism such as closing bridges and subways and placing limits on what photographs might appear in the press!

In the repression of the Occupy movement, images of free speech under attack were created that cannot be neatly excised from the national imagination any more than pictures of Bull Connor unleashing police dogs and water hoses on teenage marchers in Birmingham in 1963.
If the Occupy movement’s showed us, in words and deeds, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” those attacking the Occupations showed the world, albeit unintentionally “This is What a Police State Looks Like,”

It would be nice, our liberal friends tell us, if we could forget all of this unpleasantness and go back to the days of the first Obama presidential campaign when youth idealism and energy were directed to electing the first black president. Now, they say, it’s time to give him a second term, with a strong Democratic congress, so he can finish the job he started.

But the given what is happened in the last three months, I don’t think that is likely to happen. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Young people who have had a tasted of lived democracy of a kind they had never experienced and then watched it snuffed out by highly militarized police units using war on terror tactics will not become obedient doorbell ringers for a president who ignored their protest and may have secretly encouraged its suppression.

The Occupy movement may not take the same form as it did this fall, but it is very likely to reinvent itself in forms that will not please its liberal would be controllers, or its conservative
Critics

And that is a very good thing for the country

December 3, 2011

The Occupy Movements and The Stubborness of History

2011-12-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

History can be very stubborn. In three short months, the Occupy movements have accumlated two very powerful weapons, some inadvertently handed to them by those they have threatened- facts and images. The facts are about inequality in American soceity and government collusion in the malfeasance and enrichment by the nation's financial institutions. The images are of violent actions and huge concentrations of force by law enforcement agencies, some in cities, some on college campuses throughout the nation. This combination of facts and images remains while particular protests, or even organizations, rise and fall. And they have the capacity to regenerate activism when it appears to be on the wane. They are there in quiet moments as well as moments of turbulence, reminding us of the depth of the injustices being challenged, and the desperation and amorality of those defending their power and privileges.

Organizing Principles for 99 Percent Clubs

2011-11-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

99 Percent Clubs can be organized at your school, at your workplace, in your home, at your neighborhood community or senior center or in your church, synagogue or mosque, Here are four simple organizing principles for these clubs

1. To disseminate accurate information about the Occupy movements in the US and around the world.

2. To provide material support ( which may in the form of food and clothing, legal assistance, or pressure on elected officials) to the Occcupy movement in your own city and town

3. To organize around economic inequality issues and threats to freedom of expression where you live and/or where you work.

4. To create networks among people who support the Occupy movement that enable them to mobilze support for demonstrations organized by that movement.

The strength of these clubs is that they allow people a wide variety of situations , including those who are homebound or disabled, to participate in the Occupy movement.

Mark Naison and Ira Shor

Protests and Elections in the Great Depressions- Some Useful Examples for the Occupy Movements

2011-11-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

Just to set the record straight on the Left's role in elections during the Great Depression. The Communist Party, the most important force organizing mass protest during the 1930's, did not support FDR, even indirectly, at the polls until 1936. Between 1929 and 1935, the Communist Party ran its own candidates for office, virtually none of whom won elections, while concentrating the vast majority of its energies on organizing people in their workplaces and communities for protest activities ranging from resistance to evictions and foreclosures, to hunger marches on charities and government agencies,to protests against lynching and Jim Crow, and to strikes, boycotts and campaigns for union recognition.

These protests some of which attracted hundreds of thousands of people nationwide, some of which brought whole cities (eg. San Francisco, Minneapolis) to a standstill, helped create a climate where the Roosevelt Administration had to provide cash and work relief to the jobless, institute unemployment insurance and old age pensions, and provide legal protection for workers seeking recognition of their unions

Of course, the Communist Party and other radical organizations were hardly the only forces organizing the working class during those years. Labor unions, unaffiliated with the Communist or Socialist Parties mobilized in behalf of progressive, pro union candidates, the vast majority of whom were Democrats, helping assure not only multiple terms of office for FDR, but a Congress that for the most part- at least from 1933-1938, was willing to pass progressive legislation

But there was an informal division of labor. The "grunt work" of organizing Depression Era protests- at least until 1936- was done by radicals who for the most part eschewed, or de emphasized electoral politics

I think we need a comparable division of labor now, with the Occupy forces building the mass protest movement and others mobilizing for local and national elections

Mark Naison
November 29, 2011

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"That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It"-More on Occupy Wall Street and Elections

2011-11-29T04:05:00.001-08:00

If allies of the Occupy movements-particularly labor unions- want to get involved in electoral politics, that would be certainly advance the movements long term goals.

But for the movement itself to link itself to the Democratic Party, or to support President Obama's re-election campaign would undermine its moral force, dissipate its energy and destroy the very "visionary" quality that has energized a generation of young people previously regarded as apathetic or hopelessly materialistic ( Miley Cyrus, for God's sake, has just produced a video supporting the occupations)

Supporting the Obama re-election campaign, in particular, would be the death knell of the Occupy movements.

This is a President whose Secretary of Education just handed off responsibility for teacher recruitment to Microsoft, who is responsible for deporting more immigrants than George W Bush, and under whose watch Democratic mayors and college presidents unleashed a level of force on peaceful Occupy protests comparable to what Southern segregationists used on Civil Rights demonstrators in the early 60's

He is a President of the 1 Percent, just like his predecessor, and the Occupy movements need to hammer home that fact day in day out even while some of their allies mobilize the vote for him.

I think the abolitionist analogy is interesting, but I take a long view

Using the analogy of the anti-slavery movement, I think we are in the 1830's not the 1850's. It took 30 years for American Plutocracy to develop into the political juggernaut it is now, and it may take 30 years to dismantle it. The last thing we need is for forces who dream of a more just social order to compromise those dreams now by relinquishing mass protest for involvement in an electoral process corrupted by big money.

The Occupy movements should retain their role as the conscience of the progressive movement, and as the voice of a newly politicized generation who realize that their future is dismal unless they make huge changes in the way the society is organized

To quote a famous country song "That's my Story and I'm Sticking to It"

Mark Naison

Why Occupy Movements Unattached to Any Political Party Are The Only Hope for Real Change in a Frozen Social Order

2011-11-28T13:26:00.001-08:00

Why Occupy Movements Unattached to Any Political Party Are The Only Hope for Real Change in a Frozen Social Order

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

Now that Occupy Movements are being evicted from public parks in cities throughout the country, almost invariably by Democratic mayors, many Democratic Party organizes and some labor activists are hoping the movement will fade away and concentrate its energies on electing progressive candidates for office and putting forth a progressive political agenda.

In my opinion, that would be a grave mistake. There are a bevy of important issues that given current political alignments, and the power of money in American politics, cannot be translated into a viable legislative agenda. It will take years of disruptive protest- strikes, boycotts, walkouts, sit ins and occupations- to place them on the national agenda and the only force in American society capable of employing those tactics for a sustained period is the Occupy movement.

Here are some key issues that neither party is willing to take on that the Occupy movement can influence if it keeps growing and becoming more diverse in the next five years.

1. The student loan crisis and the escalating cost of a college education. There is no way, without major disruptions of university life, and pressure on the banks, that student loan debt can be erased, or significantly reduced, and tuition at public colleges frozen or lowered. Until universities cannot carry on their normal business without making dramatic changes in looan collections and tuition charges, you can be sure elected officials won’t touch these issues with a ten foot pole.

2. The legalization of drugs and the release of non-violent drug offenders from the nation’s prisons. Given the powerful interests fighting any dismantling of the prison industrial complex-ranging from prison guards unions, to elected officials in communities where prisons are located, to corporations who benefit from cheap prison labor, it will require massive social movements, to force states, localities, and eventually the federal government, to end the irrational arrest and imprisonment of people who sell drugs no more dangerous than alcohol or prescription medications.

3. The dismantling of a domestic police state apparatus which uses advanced weaponry and intrusive surveillance technology to suppress dissent and control and intimidate minority and working class youth. The weapons that were used against Occupy demonstrators in Oakland, at Zuccotti Park and at UC Davis have been used for many years against minority youth to prevent them from inhibiting the gentrification and re-segregation of American societies and to assure order in schools and communities stripped of resources. Libertarians, civil rights organizations, and a growing Occupy movement can create an alliance to undermine the domestic police state. The two major parties will never do it without immense outside pressure.

4. A moratorium on foreclosures and the passage of legislation to allow arts groups, youth groups, affordable housing organizations and advocates for the homeless to occupy abandoned commercial and residential space in America’s towns and cities. Such actions will only be taken if Occupy groups and their allies make foreclosures difficult, and begin occupying abovementioned properties in such numbers that it will be counterproductive for authorities to evict them. There is no way elected officials will take such steps without being presented with a “fait accompli” by protesters.

5. A radical reformation of the tax system that places the burden of taxation on the 1 Percent and reduces taxes on individuals and small businesses. There is no way, given current political alignments, and the vast power of corporate and Wall Street lobbies, that that such a revolution in the tax code could be legislated. But five more years of disruptive protest could change that Occupy movements have to create a scenario where the only path to restoring social order would be a revision of the tax burden to benefit ordinary citizens

These five policy areas are hardly the only ones which would require years of protest to attain-I am sure people reading this could identify issues in education, environmental protection, job creation and US military policy that would require movements of equal force to implement

But I have identified these five areas to show have far away we are from any real political change in this country through the two major parties We need grass roots social movements of such force that it will reinvent what is possible in mainstream American politics. The Occupy movements have started such a process. It would be a shame if they prematurely embraced the electoral process rather than pushing protests activity to much higher levels

Thanksgiving Message to My Fordham Family

2011-11-24T02:18:00.001-08:00

To My Fordham Family

On the morning of this day of celebration, I want to take the opportunity to thank you for the privilege of teaching you, working with you, and counting you as friends.

Thanks to you, I get up every day fired to go to work, inspired to learn new things, and hopeful of applying what I have learned to creating a more just society and a more peaceful world.

Don't worry. I have no plans to retire any time soon! But I just had to express my gratitude to all of you because you are in large part responsible for my having a life so filled with joy and meaning

One final thing. When I came to Fordham in 1970, Columbia was the biggest center of student activism in New York City. But that is no longer the case. During the latest round of demonstrations associated with Occupy Wall Street, Fordham was more visible than Columbia!

I am very proud of that, and very proud of all of you

Happy Thanksgiving

Love, Dr Naison

It’s Time to Start “ 99 Percent Clubs” at Your School or in Your Neighborhood to Support the Occupations

2011-11-21T04:52:00.001-08:00

If you part of a large and growing number of Americans who support the Occupy movement, but may or may not be able to “Occupy” yourself, you might want to form a 99 Percent Club at your school, your workplace or in your neighborhood, to organize financial, legal and political support for the Occupy movement and educate people in your community about what it stands for.

The idea for these 99 Percent Clubs came from renowned educator Ira Shor and they are modeled on the “Friends of SNCC” organization that mobilized support for the non violent Southern civil rights movement in the early 1960’s. Given that the Occupy movement is under assault from elected officials and university presidents around the country, and that people in this movement, like their counterparts in the southern civil rights movement, face arrest and beatings, along with more modern police weaponry such as pepper spray and rubber bullets, it is definitely time to create a support group to raise funds and educate the public about these brave activists

A 99 Percent Club is one vehicle that can do just that. We have called for a first meeting of such a club at Fordham and the response, from students, alumni, and staff has been overwhelming. Our Fordham group does not have a program- just a commitment to support the Occupations. So far, nearly 30 people are committed to attend

Occupy Wall Street and its counterparts around the nation have put the questions of economic inequality on the nation’s agenda for the first time since the 1960’s. And the response from policy makers has been ferocious as that of southern segregationists confronting a challenge to their way of life

It’s time for Americans who support the goals of the Occupy Movement,even if they don’t feel they can participate in it directly, to mobilize in support of popular democracy and economic justice. Forming 99 Percent Clubs is one way to do so.

If you would like to start a 99 Percent Club in your area, please email Ira Shor at irashor@comcast.net with a cc to me at Naison@fordham.edu

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

Why Non Violent Guerilla Warfare Should be OWS Preferred Strategy

2011-11-20T14:29:00.000-08:00

If we have learned anything in the last week, it is that the Occupy movements have NO friends in high places. Liberal mayors and university presidents, with the tacit if not open encouragement of the Obama White House, have used police violence against non violent Occupiers on level comparable to what Bull Connor used against civil rights protesters in Birmingham and Jim Clark used against voting right marchers in Selma. So wedded are they to trickle down economics and protecting the privileges of the very wealthy that they have used little more than raw intimidation to suppress the first redistributionist movement in the US since the Great Depression. Given the virtually unanimous determination of elites to defend the status quo, OWS should find ways of embedding itself among middle class and working class communities, organize quick effective protests then disperse- essentially following the strategy of the Viet Cong in Southeast Asia while maintaining strict non violence.

We can learn a lot from Vo Ngyen Giap, the brilliant history teacher turned military strategist of the Vietnamese Revolution, even though our weapons are ideas not guns. Like our Vietnamese brothers and sisters, we are engaged in a protracted struggle against very powerful enemies, and it may take ten or 20 years to achieve any of our major goals. But we cannot be discouraged by the difficulty of the taskS we face. Our cause is just and with patience, hard work, and continuous revision of our tactics in response to changed conditions we will eventually prevail.

What Occupy Wall Street Has Accomplished in Two Short Months

2011-11-16T11:35:00.001-08:00

What Occupy Wall Street Has Accomplished in Two Short Months

Mark Naison
Fordham University

Many people in the media, as well as many citizens, complain that Occupy Wall Street has no leaders and no goals. While Occupy Wall Street and its spinoffs around the nation have certainly not developed “leaders” who articulate its goals to the media or negotiate with public officials, it has already registered a formidable list of accomplishments for a movement this young

Here is my list of some of the important things this movement has done, with more to come as it grows and matures

1 Put the question of economic inequality in the center of national discourse for the first time since the 1960’s, even though such inequality has been growing dramatically for the last 20 years. The vocabulary the movement has developed to describe this inequality “ the 1 % and the 99%” have become a permanent part of our political discourse and has focused great attention on how the mal distribution of wealth has undermined democracy and eroded the living standards of the great majority of Americans

2 Called attention to the stifling impact of student loan debt on young college, professional and trade school graduates who face the double whammy of a stagnant job market and crippling debt. The attention given this issue inspired President Obama to marginally ease the loan burden of current recipients. In the future, it might well prompt a radical reconfiguration of the debt or a major program of loan forgiveness

3. Created political pressures that prompted the postponement of a decision by President Obama to begin construction of the controversial Keystone XL natural gas pipeline

4 Inspired a wide variety of actions to prevent foreclosures and evictions and to bring relief to beleaguered home owners and tenants

5. Put the undemocratic character of many education reform policies, particularly school closings, under much greater scrutiny, creating pressures on policy makers that will make these closings much more difficult to implement them without more consultation and input from parents, students, teachers and community members

6. Given the labor movement a new vocabulary to challenge attacks on collective bargaining and union recognition, providing added ammunition to the successful campaign to defeat an anti-collective bargaining bill in the state of Ohio.

7 Focused attention on the issue of police brutality and the militarization of urban police forces in ways that reinforces longstanding complaints of police misconduct and abuse in Black and Latino communities

This would be an impressive list of accomplishment for a movement that has lasted two years. But Occupy Wall Street has only been with us for two months!

November 16, 2011

Thoughts About the Bloomberg Dictatorship While OWS Is Under Attack

2011-11-15T02:45:00.000-08:00

Occupy Wall Street is Under Attack by a huge force while the subways have been closed, along with the Brooklyn Bridge

Here are some key components of the Bloomberg policies that might explain what the Mayor has to take such extreme measure to crush dissent

1. Subsidize luxury housing in Brooklyn and Manhattan and concentrate all afforable housing in the hyper-segregated sections of the Bronx and East New York

2 Undermine public education by closing schools over the opposition of parents students teachers and community members and replace them with charter schools that promote rote learning, obedience and militarized discipline for the children of the poor

3 When when a movement finally arises that challenges the Mayor's plan to turn Manhattan and parts of North Brooklyn into a city for the wealthy of the globe at the expense of the city's working class, middle class and poor who live in the outer boroughs,you close the bridges and subways, bar the press and crush that movement with Riot Police, pepper spray, water hoses.

Not since 9/11 have the police of this city been mobilized to this degree!!!

And for what?

Democracy has been under attack in this city for some time. Now even the illusion of Democracy has been removed

Resist, Resist. Resist

A Novel Coming Your Way in April

2011-11-13T00:51:00.001-08:00

PURE BRONX Synopsis

Pure Bronx is the story of a young couple from the South Bronx trying to make it out of the ghetto and have a taste of the prosperity middle class Americans take for granted. Khalil, 21, is an intelligent, respectful young man forced into Heroin dealing by circumstance. Born and raised in the Patterson Houses, he is also the main provider for his mother, two younger brothers, younger sister and her two children. Rasheeda, 19, moved to the nearby Mitchell Houses when she was 8 and has fought her whole life to stay in school and not become a statistic. Now in college, she is struggling to make ends meet for her mother and younger brother as well as pay her tuition by stripping at a local club, Cheetahs. After falling behind in her tuition payments and getting suspended from work, Rasheeda breaks down in front of Khalil, revealing her intense hatred at having to strip to go to school. As a joke she suggests kidnapping her richest client, Robert Seidman, who also happens to be one of the wealthiest men on Wall Street. Powerless to help Rasheeda, Khalil takes her suggestions seriously and they hatch a plan with the help of Khalil’s friends Mamadoo and Juno to kidnap and ransom Seidman. However, after drugging him and hiding him out at Juno’s garage, they find out that Seidman has been involved in a Ponzi scheme this whole time. There is NO money and on top of that, Seidman’s wife is so betrayed she tells the kidnappers
they might as well kill him.

Action packed, set in the first year of Barack Obama's presidency, Pure Bronx is more than just a story of two kids that make it out of the ghetto. It’s a story of the Bronx and diverse people who make it what it is, including hustlers, gang bangers, immigrants, the working poor, and powerful interests trying to make money off its struggling people. But it also has a twist new to Street Literature- a secret organization that helps people in poor communities even the odds against those trying to exploit them, ignore them and push them aside. Khalil and Rasheeda have love on their side, but they also have the PJC, a mysterious organization headed by a Professor named Nelson Temple who knows how to beat the rich and the powerful at their own game.

My Theory About the Penn State Scandal

2011-11-10T07:21:00.000-08:00

I have theory about the Penn State Scandal. I think that Joe P and the athletic director knew about Sandusky's awful sexual proclivities well before the rape in the shower, but were afraid to blow the whistle on him because he knew where
" the bodies were buried" in Penn State football- about the illegal inducements football recruits were given to come to Penn States, and the illegal payments ...they were given while playing for the school. These under the table payments-usually given by alumni- have been part of the fabric of big time college football for decades, but attract immediate retaliation from the hypocritical NCAA whenever they are publicly exposed. Given the threat of having seasons forfeited and bowl payments returned if Sandusky "came clean" the Penn State hierarchy chose to remain silent, even at the cost of the creation of new victims. To me, this is yet another example of the deep corruption at the root of big time college sports and yet another reason why college athletes in revenue producing sports should be paid for their services.

Mark Naison
November 10, 2011

Letter to the Teachers of PS 140 in the South Bronx

2011-11-09T04:58:00.001-08:00

To The Teachers of PS 140

I want to thank you for your hospitality, your honesty, and your eloquent descriptions of the issues you face as educators during my presentation at your Professional Development Day. It confirmed my conviction that the teaching staff of PS 140 provides a model of integrity, resilience, creativity and commitment to students that those making education policy would do well to experience and observe first hand

No group in our society does a more difficult or important job than our public school teachers, and yet no group is more maligned and unjustly blamed for our society’s problems. The result, as you all know, is that creative teaching , and the mentoring and relationship building that accompanies all great teaching, is being undermined by excessive testing, and the imposition of “accountability” standards based on student test scores that put teachers, and school administrators, under enormous stress.

But not everyone agrees that teachers should be the nation’s punching bags! There is a growing number of people who feel that the work teachers are doing at schools like PS 140, which includes nurturing students, working with their families, and making the school a place where music, the arts, science and history thrive, are what real education is all about. There is a reason why I take people from all over the world to visit PS 140 when I am taking them on tours of the Bronx. Right here, in this school, in the poorest Congressional district in the nation, great things are taking place in every classroom and in a school community which embraces the culture and history of the neighborhood it is located in while trying to cope with the very real problems poverty creates for students and their families.

Someday, America will realize that this nation’s true heroes are teachers in schools like PS 140, people who work under daunting conditions, in the face of great public skepticism and a misguided obsession with high stakes testing, without every losing their passion for their jobs or their love for the children they work with

Please know that while I cannot change the direction of education policy in this city, this state, or the nation, I will stand up for you in every public forum I have access to and point to PS 140 as an example of a public school that is a true community institution and a place which keeps the best traditions of American Democracy alive as day to day practice

And also know that I will always be available to you to correspond, to talk, to visit your school and your classrooms and to help you fight for the respect you deserve, and you have earned

With Deepest Appreciation

Dr Mark Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University
Founder and Principal Investigator
The Bronx African American History Project

Why Teachers Must Become Community Organizers and Justice Fighters

2011-11-06T02:48:00.000-08:00

Why Teachers Must Become Community Organizers and Justice Fighters

Mark Naison

There is a long history of Teacher Activism in the United States. In New York City, the tradition goes back to the late 1930s when teachers associated with the Communist Party and the New York City Teachers Union fought to have Negro History Month honored in the NYC Public schools, to force the replacement or reassignment of racist teachers and to challenge the placement of Black students in the lowest tracks and most decayed schools in a highly tracked school system. This legacy of anti-racist activism, always done in collaboration with civil rights organizations and community groups, lasted into the late 50’s when many of the most effective teacher activists were pushed out of the New York school system during the Cold War. This forgotten tradition is described in depth in Clarence Taylor’s new book" Reds and the Black Board: Communism, Civil Rights and the New York City Teachers Union "

After the old Teachers Union faded from the scene, another group of teacher activists, drawing upon a broad coalition of liberals, Socialists and moderate trade unionists,, won recognition for the United Federation of Teachers as official bargaining agent for New York City School teachers, winning them decent salaries , job security, and some level of freedom of expression inside and outside their schools. The UFT from its outset worked to improve conditions in schools for all students and supported the non violent civil rights struggle in the South and the North. Unfortunately in 1968, the UFT found itself engaged in a conflict with some community leaders in Harlem and Ocean Hill Brownsville during a series of brutal strikes challenging community control of school policies in those neighborhoods. These strikes not only created a fissure between UFT and civil rights organizations, it created fissures within the UFT between supporters and opponents of the strike that left a legacy of bitterness that lasted for years to come.

In the wake of that strike the UFT proved powerless to resist a devastating attack on the New York City Public schools orchestrated by bankers who dominated the Emergency Financial Board which took the city into financial receivership following the Fiscal Crisis of 1975. The Board of Education was forced by this unelected body to make budget cuts which closed down the world class music programs in the city’s junior high schools ( most junior high schools had upwards of 200 musical instruments which were lent out free of charge to anyone who had made their bands or orchestras) and ended the after school programs and night centers which were a fixture of every public school in the city in the 1940’s 1950’s and 1960’s. These programs were never fully replaced, leaving children in the city’s schools, from the late 1970s on, with far less in the way of arts and sports and after school mentoring than their parents generation had enjoyed in those very same schools

Nearly 40 years have passed since the Fiscal Crisis budget cuts and our public schools now face a challenge more insidious and perhaps, more formidable. All across the nation, a poisonous coalition of multi billionaire business leaders, test and technology companies, charitable foundations and elected officials are pushing a nationwide education agenda that involves the introduction of high stakes testing at all grade levels, evaluation of teachers and schools based on student test scores, and the introduction of “competition” into public education by the creation of independently managed charter schools given special advantages in funding and recruitment.

This Education Reform agenda, embraced by both the Bush and Obama Administrations and embodied in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, represents a formidable assault on teachers hard won collective bargaining rights as well as their classroom autonomy and freedom of expression, but it also represents a devastating attack on children in America’s working class and poor communities at a time when our nation is experiencing a redistribution of wealth upward and a sharp increase in poverty levels. Not only does corporate education reform reduce schooling in the nation’s poor communities to test prep and obedience training , squeezing out critical thinking and the arts, it divides those communities against themselves by transforming charter schools into privileged enclaves which promise passage out of the neighborhood to a few lucky children and view the remaining public schools, and their students, with aversion and contempt.

Given the complex challenge corporate education reform poses, today’s teacher activists cannot just have a strategy which is solely school or teacher centered. They must become community organizers who fight school closings, the proliferation of tests, and the weakening of teacher bargaining rights as attacks on the ability of working class people and people of color to fight for better opportunities for themselves and their children. In this setting, Teacher Activists must put forth a vision of Radical Democracy which envisions an education which empowers students as critical thinkers and agents of historical change, not just as obedient test takers and which envisions schools playing a central role in neighborhoods united and mobilized to get a fair share of the nation’s resources. Occupy Wall Street has provided a language and an example to put that model of Radical Democracy into practice. But it cannot work unless teachers link their own fate to that of the students they work with and the people in the communities where their schools are located. Unless Teacher activists become community organizers and justice fighters in the broadest sense, they will lose the battle to defend their classrooms from the incursions of corporate interests..

You Down With O.D.D.? Notorious Phd’s Tribute to Oppositional Defiant Disorder

2011-11-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

You Down With O.D.D.? Notorious Phd’s Tribute to Oppositional Defiant Disorder
You Down With O.D.D.? Notorious Phd’s Tribute to Oppositional Defiant Disorder

There’s a new term current in our society
For students who won’t respect authority
Ask questions, walk around, rock beats on the table
Oppositional Defiance Disorder will be your label

CHORUS
You down wit ODD
Yeah you know me
You down wit ODD
Every last homie
When schools become prisons
And testing’s all you see
Every student with heart
Should be ODD

If you doodle during tests or have poems in your head
They’re likely to expel you or drug you brain dead
Tupac, Nas and Biggie, Missy and JZ
They all would have been diagnosed ODD

CHORUS
You down wit ODD
Yeah you know me
You down wit ODD
Every last homie
When schools become prisons
And testing’s all you see
Every student with heart
Should be ODD

If we want to have justice in this nation
Then schools should join the Occupation
We can’t have a country that’s really free
Until most of our students become ODD

CHORUS
You down wit ODD
Yeah you know me
You down wit ODD
Every last homie
When schools become prisons
And testing’s all you see
Every student with heart
Should be ODD

There’s a new term current in our society
For students who won’t respect authority
Ask questions, walk around, rock beats on the table
Oppositional Defiance Disorder will be your label

CHORUS
You down wit ODD
Yeah you know me
You down wit ODD
Every last homie
When schools become prisons
And testing’s all you see
Every student with heart
Should be ODD

If you doodle during tests or have poems in your head
They’re likely to expel you or drug you brain dead
Tupac, Nas and Biggie, Missy and JZ
They all would have been diagnosed ODD

CHORUS
You down wit ODD
Yeah you know me
You down wit ODD
Every last homie
When schools become prisons
And testing’s all you see
Every student with heart
Should be ODD

If we want to have justice in this nation
Then schools should join the Occupation
We can’t have a country that’s really free
Until most of our students become ODD

CHORUS
You down wit ODD
Yeah you know me
You down wit ODD
Every last homie
When schools become prisons
And testing’s all you see
Every student with heart
Should be ODD

The Occupy Movements and the Universities

2011-10-29T03:14:00.001-07:00

The Occupy Movements and the Universities

Mark Naison
Fordham University

The Occupation movements spreading around the nation and the world have the potential to revitalize University life, particularly those initiatives involving community activism and the arts.. The role of arts activists in Occupy Wall Street is a story that has not been fully told,. Community arts organizations in New York such as the South Bronx's Rebel Diaz Arts Collective and Brooklyn's Global Block Collective have been involved with Occupy Wall Street for almost a month, making music videos on the site, documenting the movement's growth through film, and trying to bring working class people and people of colore into the movement. The Occupation has become an essential stopping point for a wide variety of performing artists, none of whom have asked for payment for their appearances ( see videos below)

Musicians Occupy Wall Street - YouTube
2 min - Oct 13, 2011
Uploaded by okayafrica
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCRm_zXrwEc

Bronx Hip-Hop Duo Rebel Diaz, Live From Occupy Wall Street ...
3 min - Oct 6, 2011
Uploaded by democracynow
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkPzXW1hpbA

Occupy Wall St. Hip Hop Anthem: Occupation Freedom ... - YouTube
3 min - Oct 10, 2011
Uploaded by djvibetv
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pl0pHJg_

University faculty and participants in community outreach initiatives can only benefit from tapping into this tremendous source of energy and idealism. I have never seen students on my campus so excited about anything political or artistic as they have about these Occupation movements, which have spread into outer borough New York neighborhoods ( We have had "Occupy the Bronx") as well as cities throughout the nation and the world. What the movement has done is reinvigorate democratic practice- much of it face to face- widely regarded as nearly extinct among young people allegedly atomized by their cell phones and ipods. One my students, a soccer player at Fordham said the following about her experience on a march across the Brooklyn Bridge that led to mass arrests

"Going to the protest I felt like this was the closest I was going to get to reliving my father/uncle's young adulthood! While we were stuck on the bridge people were passing around cigarettes, water, food anything anyone had they shared. Announcements were organized so everyone knew what was going on. People were yelling were changing the world! THE WOLRD IS WATCHING. I called my father on the bridge told him I was getting arrested, and I could tell he was proud! It was unbelievable".

Her sense of excitement about the energy and communal spirit at OWN mirrors my own. Each time I have been at OWS I have sat in on discusion groups created on topics ranging from Mideast politics, to understanding derivatives, to educational reform. The discussions I have participated in have been rigorous, political diverse, and to be honest much more virbrant than most comparable discussions I have been part of at universities.

Those of us who work at Universities need to find ways of connecting to a movement which has inspired so much creativity and intellectual vitality.. As someone who has been to many “Occupation” events, ranging from teach ins, to grade ins, to marches, and has spoken about this movement at my own university and to global media, I have experienced this energy and vitality first hand. But most important, my STUDENTS have experienced this and it has given them a sense that they have the power to make changes in a society which they feared had become hopelessly stagnant and hierarchical. Consider the remarks of 2010 Fordham grad Johanne Sterling who works at Fordham's Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice, about what participating in this movement meant to her, even though the experience got her arrested and sprayed with mace
"
"I had plans to attend a peaceful protest on Wall Street . . . I was happy to know that I was offering my voice and my support to a movement I believed in. As a young person in this country, I cannot say that I have not grown more and more unnerved with the injustices I see every day. The fact that our governmet is quietly but surely taking away our democratic rights (First with the Patriot Act, ironically named, and then with new voting restrictions that are being put into law), the fact that so many of my fellow graduates cannot find meaningful, rewarding work no matter how hard they try, the fact that our country's infrastruture is falling apart while the richest 1% continue to increase astronomical amounts of wealth, and the fact our justice system was able to execute and continue to execute and/or imprison innocent individuals disproportionatey based on their socio-economic position and their ethnicity are simply a few reasons as to why I decided to attend the rally."

This kind of civic consciousness and social justice activism is precisely what so many progressive scholars and university based community outreach programs have sought to inspire. It is being brought to life by young people themselves in this growing national movement.

There are now over 100 Occupations in cities throughout the nation. They are part of a global awakening of young people that has caused governments around the world to tremble, and financial elites to face the first real challenge to their power in decades

We in the Universities did not create this movement. But we ignore it at our peril. It brings to life many things we have been teaching. And it does something that we should be doing, but aren't doing enough- it empowers our students!

Occupy History! The Fall Fundraising Drive of the Bronx African American History Project

2011-10-28T05:03:00.000-07:00

October 29, 2011

Friends
We live in challenging and exciting times. While the global recession continues to impose severe hardships, young people throughout the world are rising up to demand that governments respond to the will of their people and distribute wealth and resources more equitably.
Never has the uncovering and sharing of historical knowledge become more important and no research project in the nation does this more effectively than the Bronx African American History Project. The BAAHP is not merely an internationally known community history project, it creates partnerships between scholars, community leaders, and ordinary citizens that gives a voice to people who would otherwise be left out of history books and neglected by those formulating social policy. Members of our research team not only write books and articles, and archive oral histories as a data base for scholars around the world, we are out in the community giving tours, workshops and lectures and helping residents tell their stories in ways that empower them and bring needed resources to their neighborhoods.

Here are some examples of ways the BAAHP brings history to life:
Worked with community leaders to rename a park and a street in the Bronx’s Historic Morrisania neighborhood after the great coach and mentor Hilton White and to rename a street in that same neighborhood after a pioneering singing group “The Chords”
Collaborated with social workers, teachers and performing artists to have a third group from Berlin come to New York as part of the Bronx Berlin Youth exchange and a first group from the Bronx go to Berlin.
Sponsored conferences, health fairs, and cultural festivals in collaboration with leaders of the Bronx’s growing African immigrant community to make more resources available to this dynamic new population and to make scholars and public officials more aware of this community’s cultural traditions and needs.
Helped affordable housing groups plan and construct a new apartment building in the Bronx- the Melody- that honors the music traditions of the neighborhood, while working with our longtime community partner WHEDco ( Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation) to create the Bronx Heritage Music Center, an innovative complex which will include apartments, a school, and a performance space.
Worked with educators to create a “Teachers Talk Back Project” which helps teachers in the Bronx, and throughout the nation, fight for more arts, more history, and more community outreach projects in the public schools and encourages teachers to challenge testing and privatization schemes which erase creativity from the classroom.

If you are interested in promoting research that empowers Bronx residents, that creates an archive on Bronx history consulted by scholars around the world and inspires Fordham to place more of its resources at the disposal of people in Bronx communities, there is there is no better way of doing so than contributing the Bronx African American History Project.

Please make your checks out to the “Bronx African American History Project” and send them to BAAHP, 641 Dealy Hall, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458

Or, if you would like to Donate Online, go to http://fordham.edu/gifts_to_fordham/ Click on “Make a Gift Online” then select “BAAHP” under “Annual Giving and Resticted Funds”

Thank you for considering the BAAHP!

Sincerely

Mark D Naison
Founder and Principal Investigator
Bronx African American History Project

The Best Response to Police Violence: A Lesson From the Great Depression

2011-10-26T14:45:00.001-07:00

The Best Response to Police Violence- A Lesson From the Great Depression

Mark Naison
In 1931, the Communist led Unemployed Councils started a movement to put back the furniture of families evicted from their apartments, and organize their neighbors to resist when the police and marshals tried to put the furniture back. Several months after the campaign began, three black Communists in Chicago were killed by police during such an eviction protest. Two days later, 50,000 people, from every one of Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods, joined a funeral march for the 3 men that police looked upon in silence and awe. No one was ever killed again resisting an eviction in Chicago and in some Chicago neighborhoods, it was impossible to kick families out of their homes!! The same was true in the Bronx. By the beginning of 1933, it was virtually impossible to conduct an eviction in the Bronx because so many people would congregate in the street and block the marshals.
When the police and the state use force to suppress protest, and use deadly violence against innocent people, the best weapon of organizers is the mass indignation and mass mobilization of those who suffer from the very conditions that protesters were challenging

There IS strength in numbers. I hope that our brothers and sisters- in Oakland and elsewhere- take this lesson to heart. The Oakland police and Oakland Mayor and those who would take similar actions around the nation must see-and feel- the full strength of our movement

The Progessive Roots and Disastrous Consequences of Test Driven Pedagogy

2011-10-23T15:54:00.001-07:00

The Progressive Roots and Disastrous Consequences of Test Driven Pedagogy
A Brief Reflection

Mark Naison

When the nation turned to the right in the 1980's and 1990's and neo-liberalism in its many manifestations began to dominate the policies of both political parties, parents in inner city neighborhoods desperate to do something in their increasingly violent, impoverished neighborhoods turned to schools to try to reverse the growing class and race inequality in the nation which they feared- quite accurately- was putting their children gravely at risk. In looking for help, they turned their attention to the one institution that had not abandoned their neighborhoods, the public schools and tried to figure out some way to have schools serve their needs. In trying to make schools work better, they ended up, making what turned out to be a Faustian bargain with leaders in corporations and foundatioins looking to revolutionize American education through technology. In city after city across the country, inner city parents and their advocates decided to endorse the application of universal testing in the schools to show how far their children were falling behind, and with it, the imposition of a test driven pedagogy, pioneered by charter schools, desgned to bring their children up to the levels of middle class and upper middlle class children in the acquisition of basic skills, and with it give their children an opportunity, in an increasingly hierarchical society, to gain entry into the middle class

Unfortunately, the whole strategy was destined to fail. It is difficult, if not impossible, to use the public schools to create greater class and race equality , when tax policy, income policy, and numerous informal dimensions of class privilege maximize those polarities., especially when the pedagogy involved discouraged creativity and critical thinking. The result proved to be the exact opposite of what is intended, despite the enthusiastic support of all levels of government and corporations and private philanthpy. Since No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have been institutioned, Black, Lationo and poor pepole, have fallen further behind the white middle class and upper class in every important social indicator, from unemployment rates, to the wealth gap, to home ownership and life expectancy.

And this leaves supporters of democratic education in a difficult position. We have to challenge a strategy that originally had widespread support in inner city communities. But challenge it we must. Just because minority parents, in their desperation to do SOMETHING about rampant inequality, decided to push for more testing and more accountability for schools based on those tests, doesn't mean the strategy was sound. In my judgment, it made schools in poor communities less able to prepare their students for college and a demanding job market than schools in middle class communities- including the ones policy makers send their children- which rely far less on standardized tests.

Moreover, such pedagogy discourages introducing young people in struggling neighborhoods to the critical thinking skills necessary to foster social justice activism--the only force that can realistically reduce racial and class in equality in this society. Teaching students individual mobility skills is a poor substitute for direct involvement in neighborhood redevelopment and in political movements- like Occupy Wall Street-that put demands on all levels of government for a redistribution of wealth.

A test driven pedagogy aimed at reducing "The Achivement Gap" is not only counterproductive in its own terms, it underminds the acquisition of the very skills necessary to reinvigorate democracy and fight effectively for racial and economic equality.

.
Or to put the matter more bluntly, anyone who supports the imposition of more standardized tests in the nation's public schools is PLAYING THE MAN'S GAME!!!

A Buffalo Story: How School Turnaround Mandates Undermine Effective Community Organizing

2011-10-22T05:49:00.000-07:00

A Buffalo Story: How Mindless Application of Federal and State School Turnaround Mandates Undermine Effective Community Organizing

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

During mid October, I had the privilege of spending two days getting an in-depth exposure to one of the most radical experiments in democratic urban transformation in the nation- a Choice Neighborhoods initiative in the East Side of Buffalo created by SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies in partnership with Buffalo’s Municipal Housing Authority and Erie County’s community action agency. The brainchild of the Center for Urban Studies visionary leader, Dr Henry Taylor, the initiative seeks to engage residents in some of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhood in redesigning and transforming public housing projects, business districts, schools, and vacant properties in the target area. Improving schools is one of the key objectives of the initiative; but it seeks to do that not by insulating school children from the forces surrounding them and educating them to escape the neighborhood, but by engaging them in a democratic community planning process along with their teachers, their parents and their neighbors and by making a problem centered pedagogy part of the school curriculum. Even before the Choice Grant, the Center had gotten students in one of the schools involved in the initiative- Futures Academy- involved in transforming a rubble strewn lot across the street from the school into a beautiful park and vegetable garden and another smaller lot nearby into a bird park. The students had also done remarkable arts work for the initiative, both in public spaces, and the school. They had become agents of neighborhood change

What the students had accomplished was nothing short of miraculous, but unfortunately, such accomplishments did not register on the metrics mandated for low performing schools by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and mechanically applied by the State Education Department in Albany. As a result, Futures Academy, whose school population was drawn from students who could not get into or were pushed out of charter schools and magnet schools, went through three different principals in the ten years the Center had worked in it, each one forced out solely because of poor student performance on standardized tests. Student participation on democratic neighborhood transformation could not save those principals; they were judged solely test performance and Futures Academy, for school administrators, became a revolving door.

While Professor Taylor and his colleagues realize they cannot change educational policies being shaped in Washington and Albany, it is sad to see how these policies place handicaps on what they are trying to accomplish. In a neighborhood where over 90 percent of the residents are black, most are poor, half of the land sits vacant, public transportation is inadequate, and abandoned stores and factories dot local business districts, the public schools are one of the few remaining neighborhood anchors. They are not only the largest remaining buildings in the East Side neighborhood, they contain space and resources – auditoriums, gymnasiums, class rooms computer labs- which could be vital assets to all neighborhood residents as they participate in the planning ,well as underutilized cultural capital in the form of student creativity/ Professor Taylor’s goal, through in school and after school programs is to enlist public school students in every part of the neighborhood redevelopment initiative, from having them involved in public art projects, neighborhood beautification initiatives and urban agriculture, to having them help redesign local business districts, to having them imagine new neighborhood institutions which enhance public safety and democratic participation. But to have students play this role effectively, the project needs on stability and continuity in the administration in the administration of the three public schools included in the initiative- Futures Academy and ML King School, both K-8 schools, and East High School. And unfortunately state and federal mandates are making that difficult to impossible.

Let us take East High School, the one secondary school in the planning zone. Although East has had a rich history serving Buffalo’s Black community, producing many famous and accomplished graduates, in recent years, as the East Side neighborhood has undergone disinvestment, depopulation and decay, it has become a school of “last choice” in the Buffalo school district and a revolving door for principals. Now, a brilliant new principal has been brought in who specializes in “turning around” tough schools and who is an enthusiastic partner in Professor Taylor’s initiative. But as he told me when we met, the first day he entered the school, he realized he would be out in three years because he could never raise graduation rates to meet national and state mandates. Why?
Because of the 160 students in his freshman class, 157 were “1’s” ( on state reading and math tests), 2 were “2’s, and 1 was a “3”! Essentially, ONE student in his freshmen class tested above grade level, 157 below!!

How did this happen? Basically because after magnet schools and charter schools picked their students, those who were left went to schools like East Side. Not only did these students test poorly, they disproportionately came from troubled families that moved from house to house with great frequency and occasionally disappeared. Given this population, it was going to be virtually impossible to meet the graduation rate targets established by the state and the school would have to be placed in receivership once again with the principal removed, and up to 50 percent of the teachers replaced!

Given this tragic and absurd outcome, why did the principal take the job and why did Dr Taylor choose to make East High School one of the anchors of his community development initiative.. The answer is simple. Because both saw East students as more than the sum total of their scores on standardized tests, and the problems they experienced in their homes and places of residence. They saw them as citizens in the making possessed of invaluable knowledge about their neighborhood and a deep reservoir of cultural capital not only in artistic and musical talent, but in resilience, endurance and ability to overcome great obstacles. They wanted to incorporate them in the neighborhood planning process, get their frank assessment of what needed to be preserved and what needed to be retained, and involve them in hands on tasks ranging from cleaning up the local business district, to organizing talent shows and oral history projects to highlight the community’s past strengths and future potential. In the process, their test scores might go up, and attendance might improve. But that was not the major goal. The goal was to tap the full range of East students talents in a process of community renewal and to encourage them to see East Buffalo as a place to be re-imagined and rebuilt, not as human toxic waste site that all people with skill and talent seek to escape/

This kind of idealism and faith in the human potential of students and neighborhoods is at the very heart of what Democratic Education should be about. Unfortunately, it is being undermined, in the name of equity, by federal and state policies which reduce students to test scores and graduation rates,

Dr Taylor,the Principal of East High School, the principal of the other two schools in the East Buffalo Choice neighborhood initiative will persevere no matter what, but wouldn’t it be better if state and federal authorities relaxed automatic school closing triggers and allowed schools the flexibility to become true centers of community empowerment?

We can only hope that at some point, sanity will prevail in the US Department of Education and the New York State Board of Regents. Hopefully, that moment will come sooner, rather than later

Mark Naison
October 21, 2011

Parliament of the People

2011-10-17T04:01:00.001-07:00

Parliament of the People: Occupy Wall Street Brings Back a Great New York Tradition of Street Speaking and Open Air Debate
Dr Mark Naison

One of the most remarkable features of Occupy Wall Street is the number of teach ins, discussions and debates that take place at Zucotti during day light hours. Discussion and debate is continuous, some of it one on one, some of it in small groups, some taking the form of large
assemblies. And the range of topics is broad, ranging from education policy, to problems in the middle east, to the sources of the current economic crisis, to problems of racism and anti-semitism, to how to diversify the Occupation. I have not, since the days I was an undergraduate at Columbia in the mid 60’s and participated in debates and rallies at the Sundial in the middle of campus experienced this much intellectual vitality in an outdoor setting. And it was something I had never seen first hand in a New York neighborhood.

But as a historian of social movements, who had once written a book about Harlem in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s this was all familiar to me. There was once a time in the history of New York City when Harlem, and to a lesser degree the Lower East Side, Brownsville and the South Bronx were filled with speakers on every corner explaining Socialism and Capitalism, promoting or attacking organized religion, extolling the value Zionism, Black Nationalism, or Irish Independence, and at times, giving impromptu courses on world history.

No place was this tradition of street speaking more developed than in Harlem, the nation’s largest and most diverse Black community during the years in question, where one commentator referred to it as the “Parliament of the People.” On any afternoon in
1919, you might fight Marcus Garvey, A Phillip Randolph, Richard Moore and the Hubert Harrison on different street corners, each espousing their particular philosophies before large and enthusiastic crowds. During the 1930’s, those same streets featured debates between Communists and Garveyites, while leftists organized community members to put back the furniture back of evicted families, nationalists urged them join “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns,” and religious orators promised salvation in various forms. This tradition continued on into the 50’s and early 60’s where on a given day, you could hear Malcolm X holding forth about the Nation of Islam, Queen Mother Moore and Carlos Cooks talking about reparations, or Charles Kenyatta urging the community to “Buy Black.”

This open air forum created an atmosphere where working class people in Harlem and other New York neighborhoods, whether domestics, Pullman porter, cab drivers, factory workers or teachers and nurses,, had an almost daily exposure to politics, religion, history and current events right in their own neighborhood. It created a working class public that was alert, vigilant, and politically active and fought for its interests. It was no accident that in the post war years, New York was a city which had free zoos and museums, great after school programs and sports and arts in its public schools, and free tuition at its City Universities, as well as a vibrant civil rights movement that fought discrimination in housing, education and employment.

Through the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s this tradition of street speaking and public debate gradually disappeared. The streets of working class neighborhoods retained their vitality, but it came largely from street vendors and religious speakers rather than people promoting political activism or knowledge of world history.

Now however, at Zuccotti Park, the Parliament of the People seems to have returned. Debates, both organized and spontaneous, break out at all hours of the day (and for all Iknow, the night!) and people are able to get many points of view across to eager listeners. All of a sudden, political discussion has become cool again, but more importantly, people are beginning to feel their views matter because they have seen, as the Occupation evolves, how ordinary people when joined together for action can do things they previously thought were impossible.

Now you can say that Occupy Wall Street is an elitist movement and that the political vitality in open space displayed there once spread to the working class communities where it is most needed. But there are signs that it is spreading to communities of color around New York
On Saturday, I was at an Occupy the Bronx event on Fordham road which began with a Teach in about green cooperatives and ended with a speak out on conditions in the Bronx at which more than 15 people presented their views. There were 75 to 100 people assembled, but passerby’s often stopped to listen. When I got up to speak, it was an incredibly moving experience because I had not given a speech on Fordham road since the heyday of the anti-war movement in the early 70’s. But the issues here were not ones that were going away-unemployment, the mal-distribution of wealth, poor health care , lack of affordable housing, police harassment of Black and Latino youth. If the Occupation Movement continues to grow, discussions like this may proliferate, bringing with it a renewed confidence, not only that ideas matter, but that people can change their communities through collective action

Space matters. The ability of the Occupy Wall Street movement to hold Zuccotti Park in the for more than five weeks in the face of first profound skepticism of the movement’s staying power and more recently of efforts by authorities to evict it has turned that park into a center of grass roots democratic practice and discourse. But thought the occupation is new, the discourse is not! It is something we once had in many New York working class neighborhoods.

So let us follow the example of the Occupation and transform streets like Fordham Road, 125th Street, Jamaica Avenue and Fulton Street into “Parliaments of the People” where political discussion and debate and thrive and people can plan the next steps to revitalize neighborhoods without driving working class people out, and to use the wealth created in our city to advance the common good rather than the interest of the 1 Percent

Mark Naison
October 17, 2011

Occupy The Public Schools?

2011-10-16T04:09:00.000-07:00

Occupy The Public Schools? Will ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Trigger A Movement to Reclaim Our Schools From Test Driven Pedagogy

Dr Mark Naison

Yesterday’s Global Day of Protest was a milestone in modern history. Demonstrations in support of Occupy Wall Street took place in more than 950 cities around the world, with more than 300,000 coming out in Madrid, and 100,000 in Rome. In the US, demonstrations and marches took place in more than 240 cities. Young people in the US, watching the news, listening to the radio, or even seeing first hand what was going on in their neighborhood, or their city’s downtown business district, couldn’t help but be aware that there was a protest movement taking place that involved many people their age and that the mood of these protests was alternately defiant, festive and joyful.

But when Monday comes around, will there be any discussion of these events in our public schools? The Occupation movement would be a perfect subject for classes in History or Social Studies. It could
Involve discussion of the global economic system, the impact of the current recession on employment prospects for young people , the history of social justice movements, the role of young people in movements for social change and many other important issues. It could allow students to connect what is going on in their own lives to historical events, something which any teachers knows is a great way to get students excited about studying history.

But given the pressure put on students teachers and principals to register high scores on standardized tests, there is little chance of this happening unless these constituencies join together in a mini-revolt. The way current social studies curricula are set up in most public schools, virtually every day is devoted to some form of test prep, and since teachers and administrators job prospects are increasingly determined by results on those tests, little risk taking can be expected in opening up classes to free discussion .

Or can it? Could this be the moment that teachers say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH and actually teach about something that students are interested in, and which open up avenues for students to become critical thinkers and social activists who think they have the power to make history.

We have seen hundreds of thousands of people in the US, during these past weeks, overcome their fears and apathy, to step forward and protest against an economic system that has left large portions of the nation’s population without employment, without security, without hope. They have marched, they have chanted, they have camped out in the cold and rain to make their point.

And they have prevailed in the face of police violence, and threats of eviction from the spaces they have gathered, to build a movement that grows larger every day.
Perhaps the same thing can happen in our schools. Perhaps teachers, students and parents can step forward and demand that schools make standardized tests secondary, that they set aside time for students to discuss issues of the day, that they give students outlets to express their thoughts, and over time real influence over what goes on in their schools.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has marked a new phase in US and World History. The Global Economic system is broken and those of in education must adapt to the times. This is the moment to begin transforming our schools from centers of obedience into center of critical thought and action that will allow young people to participate in the greatest change movement of the 21st Century. They have little to lose The tests that are being shoved down their throats prepare them for jobs that no longer exist. It’s time to tell them the truth, let them draw their own conclusions, and take actions they deem appropriate

Isn’t that what education is supposed to be about. To give students confidence in themselves and the power to make positive changes, not only in their own lives, but in the lives of those around them

The Revolution in our nation’s classrooms can begin Monday. It’s time to “Occupy Our Public Schools”

Teachers, students, and parents, are you ready?

October 16, 2011

At Occupy the Bronx

2011-10-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

In the early afternoon of Saturday, October 15, Bert Schultz, an old Frodham SDS comrade and I spent an hour and a half at "Occupy the Bronx" in Fordham Plaza and came away totally inspired. There were between 75 and 100 people there, the vast majority of them Bronx residents and people of color, plus maybe 10-15 Fordham
students and a handful of old timers like me and Bert. We proudly held up the Fordham SDS banner, handed it to current Fordham students and got some pretty good film footage of the event

But what was most impressive was the people running the event and speaking at it. Passionate, clear, well organized with a message of community empowerment that rang very true with the people passing by as well as the folks assembled there and a clear straegic message- we need to take the Occupation movement to "the hood" so that working class peopleand families can have input to it and draw strength from its power. The main local issues they raised were the need to take control of the
Bronx's economy through worker cooperatives and the need to combat police harassment and violence against Black and Latino youth.But the overarching message was that the Occupation needed to establish a major center in the Bronx or Harlem

I will have more to say about this in the future, but for both me and Bert, it was an experience we will remember for some time. The energy here brought back memories of some of the best days of our movement

And the best is yet to come. The young people who organized this- Bronx Residents of Color All-, which included people in their teens through their early 40'swill not be denied

Why We Are Having a REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale At Fordham

2011-10-05T06:50:00.001-07:00

Why We Are Having a REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale At Fordham

Dr Mark Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University

The REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale, organized by the Affirmative Action Senior Seminar at Fordham University, not only represents my classes’ outrage at the “Promote Diversity” Bake sale organized by College Republicans at the University of California Berkeley, it reflects my own frustration at the misinformation about Affirmative Action that prevails among large sections of the American public.

If you would believe Donald Trump --who claimed Barack Obama only got into Columbia and Harvard Law School because of Affirmative Action--and millions of other Americans, including many of my student’s friends and relatives, you would think that preferences given minorities are the major departure from an otherwise meritocratic admissions process at the nation’s top college.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. As I know from both my own research and from personal experience, preferences given recruited athletes and children of alumni are far more powerful than those given under represented minorities and affect a far larger number of students. According to James Shulman and William Bowen, in their book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, recruited male athletes, in the 1999 cohort, received a 48 percent admissions advantage, as compared to 25 percent for legacies, and 18 percent for minorities ( the comparable figures for women athletes were 54 percent, 24 percent, and 20 percent, respectively). Not only do athletes get a larger admissions advantage, Bowen and Shapiro report, they constitute a larger portion of the student population than under-represented minorities at the nation’s top colleges, averaging 20 percent at the Ivy League colleges and 40 percent at Williams. And the vast majority of the recruited athletes at those colleges who get those admissions advantages are white, including participants in sports like men’s and women’s lacrosse, golf, tennis and sailing, which few minorities participate in.

But it was not the material in The Game of Life which most outraged my students, it was the analysis offered in a book I used in my course for the first time, Peter Schmidt’s Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning The War Over College Affirmative Action. According to Schmidt, higher education has become a plutocracy, where “ a rich child has about 25 times as much chances as a poor one of someday enrolling in a college rated as highly selective or better.” In the last twenty years, Schmidt claims, universities have quietly given significant admissions advantages to students whose parents can pay full tuition, make a donation to the school, or have ties to influential politicians. Schmidt’s statistics, showing 74 percent of students in the top two tiers of universities come from families making over $83,000, as compared to 3 percent come from families making under $27,000 a year, enraged my students. They had no idea that students from wealthy families had such a huge advantage getting into college and when they read a September 21, 2011 New York Times article by Tamar Lewin, “Universities Seeking Out Students of Means” which confirmed all of Schmidt’s conclusions, they got even angrier

Enter the College Republicans “Increase Diversity” Bake Sale at Berkeley which charged Whites, Asians and Males higher prices than Blacks, Latinos and Women, and left athletes, legacies and children of the wealthy out of the equation. When I suggested that we might consider organizing a bake sale whose categories and pricing structure were based on the materials we had been covering in class, they jumped all over the idea. They formed committees to write press releases, secure support of campus organizations, develop a price structure consistent with what really goes on in college admissions and make sure we have an ample supply of baked goods. Thanks to all their hard work, thee sale will take place Friday, October 7, from 11 AM to 3 PM, in Fordham’s McGinley Student Center, and use the following price structure, based on the latest research on actual advantages in college admissions

Women (General Admission) $1.30

Men (General Admission) $1.25

Under-Represented Minorities $1.00

Legacies (Children of Alumni) $1.00

Recruited Athletes $.50

Children of the Very Wealthy $.25

We are also calling on students in other Universities to follow our example and organize bakes sales of their own based on sound research, not rumors and myths. The goal is not only to dramatize the extraordinary power of great wealth in American society- something highlighted by the Wall Street Occupation and the protests inspired by it around the country- but to remove the stigma that has been placed on minority students as recipients of unfair preferences. These students are tired of being attacked as an affront to American “meritocracy.” Enough is enough!

My students are excited and confident, looking forward to the discussion and debate on and off campus their bake sale will inspire

I am very proud that of the courage and energy they have displayed in organizing this ground breaking event!

The REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale

2011-10-04T22:15:00.001-07:00

October 4, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale
Sponsored by the Affirmative Action Senior Seminar, Fall 2011, Fordham University
When: October 7, 2011, 11 AM to 3 PM
Where: McGinley Center Lobby, Fordham University
To: Fordham Students, Faculty, Administrators, Representatives of the Media
On Friday, October 7, 2011, Fordham University’s Senior Values Affirmative Action class will host a REAL Affirmative Action Bake Sale held at the Rose Hill campus’ McGinley Center. This is in response to the UC Berkeley’s bake sale, which did not factually represent the breakdown of affirmative action. The Berkeley sale showed underrepresented minorities and women to be the primary beneficiaries in college admissions. The Fordham students, in conjunction with the University’s Jesuit Tradition, hope to raise awareness on the realities of preferential treatment in college admissions with corresponding bake sale pricing. The prices are as follows:

Women (General Admission) $1.30
Men (General Admission) $1.25
Underrepresented Minorities $1.00
Legacies $1.00
Recruited Athletes $.50
Children of The Very Wealthy $.25

This project was undertaken under the guidance of Dr. Mark Naison, Professor of African American Studies and History, Principal Investigator, Bronx African American History Project. All Donations Go to P.O.T.S. Soup Kitchen.

For Further Information, Please Contact:
Thomas Gill - (201) 919-5134 – gilman110@gmail.com
Angel Melendez - (617) 304-0317 – amelendez@fordham.edu

For Access to Campus (for Media) Contact Bob Howe at Howe@Fordham.Edu

The Wall Street Occupations and the Making of a Global Counter Culture

2011-10-03T03:27:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Occupations and the Making of a Global Counter Culture

Mark Naison
Fordham University

Yesterday, I spent about an hour in Liberty Plaza sitting, walking around and talking to people before the event I had come for- a Grade In organized by teacher activists- finally began, and was stunned by how different the occupation was from any demonstration I had attended recently.

First of all, in contrast to the last two protests I had participated in – a Wisconsin Solidarity rally at City Hall, and the Save Our Schools March on Washinton-I saw few people my own age and no one I recognized- at least until the “Grade In” started. When I arrived, at 11 AM, most of the people in Liberty Plaza were the ones who had slept their overnight, and the vast majority were in their 20’s and 30’s- a half to a third my age. They were drumming, sweeping the sidewalk, talking to curious visitors- whom were still few in number- eating or chilling with one another and their relaxed demeanor blew me away given the tumultuous events of the day before when more than 700 protesters had been arrested by the NYPD after marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

They were also, to my surprise, thoroughly international. Many of the people I met at the information desk, or who spontaneously started conversations with me, had accents which indicated they had been born in, or had recently come from, countries outside the United States.I felt like I was in Berlin or Barcelona, where you could always count on meeting young people from all over the world at any music performance or cultural event, only this was a political action in the heart of New York’s financial district.I felt like I was in the midst of a global youth community I had certainly seen emerging during my travels and teaching- after all, I had helped organize a “Bronx Berlin Youth Exchange”- but I had not expected to see at this particular protest. But it was there, no doubt. And definitely made the discipline, determination and camaraderie of the protesters that more impressive

But as much as the age and global character of the occupation seemed strange, it also seemed oddly familiar, though it took a while for that familiarity to sink in. The longer I stayed at Liberty Plaza, the more it felt like the countercultural communities I had spent time in during the late 60’s, from Maine to Madison to Portland Oregon, where discontent with war and a corrupt social system had bred a communal spirit marked by incredible generosity and openness to strangers. During the years when I traveled the country regularly as a political organizer and revolutionary- 1968 to 1971- I never had to stay in a hotel or pay for a meal in the more than 20 cities I visited. Every one of these cities had a countercultural community and I was always able to “crash” with people I knew or with people whose names I had been given by friends. And I did the same for people in NYC. My apartment on West 99th Street was a crash pad for people around the country who had come to NY for demonstrations, or for revolutionaries from other countries who had somehow gotten my name. I still remember making huge pots of chili for anyone who showed up with Goya chili beans, canned tomatoes, chop mean, bay leaves and chili powder. And it was not unusual for 20 or 30 to show up.

I had feared those days would never return- erased by decades of consumerism, materialism and cheap electronic devices— but when I visited Liberty Plaza, I realized that the global economic crisis had recreated something which I often thought of as an artifact of my own nostalgia. Because right here in New York were hundreds of representatives of a whole generation of educated young people around the world, numbering tens if not hundreds millions of young people, who might never land in the secure professional jobs they had been promised or experience the cornucopia of material goods that came with them. Described as a “lost generation” by economists, a critical mass of these young people, in cities throughout Europe and Latin America- and now right here in the United States-- had decided to build community in the midst of scarcity, challenge consumerism and the profit motive, and call out the powerful financial interests whose speculation and greed had helped put them in the economic predicament they were in.

Serious questions remain about the long term significance of this global movement. Would these middle class( or ex middle class)protesters connect with the even larger group of people in their own countries- workers, immigrants, minorities- who had been living in poverty well before the current crash? Would their community survive even a modest revival of the world economy, sending them back into a lifestyle of acquisitive individualism which the global consumer market depends on to yield profits? Could they connect with people in poor or working class neighborhoods who were already practicing communalism and mutual aid to create a truly multiracial, multiclass movement?

The jury is still out on all of those issues. But there are some promising signs. The chants of “We are all Troy Davis” during several of the movement’s marches. The increasing participation of labor unions in the protest. The involvement of more and more activists from the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods in support for the Occupation.

And those who lived through the 60’s should remember this. Oppositional cultures of all kinds-ranging from hippie communities to the Black arts movement-represented the soil in which political protest flourished during those heady years

And the same is true in this era. The emergence of a global youth counterculture should be be seen as a powerful complement if not an actual component, of a global movement for freedom, democracy, and economic justice

October 3, 2011

The Romance is Over : President Obama’s Silence on Troy Davis Execution Gives Young Progressives License to Launch Their Own Fight for A Just Society

2011-09-25T16:16:00.001-07:00

Mark Naison
Fordham University

The refusal of President Obama to commute Troy Davis’s death sentence, or even ask local authorities to postpone his execution, brings to a decisive end the faltering romance with the President among young Americans, freeing them to lead much needed justice movements on their own.

It would be a mistake to regard young Americans of this generation as politically passive. It was their energy and idealism that drove the remarkable and unexpected victory over Hilary Clinton in the Democratic Primary, and the history making campaign that made Barack Obama our first African American president.

It was understandable, given the atmosphere of that campaign and the idealistic, activist rhetoric candidate Obama employed to excite hopes of an American Renewal
( “Yes We Can”) that many young people relaxed after the election, assuming their future was in good hands and that the vision of a just society which drove them to participate in the campaign would drive the President’s policies.

Over the last three years, that expectation of moral leadership has been disappointed on many fronts. The huge expenditure to bail out the banks, the failure to mount an effective jobs campaign, the refusal to fight for a public option in the health care plan, the continuation of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most recently, the acceptance of a budget compromise which eviscerated programs ranging from student loans, to public radio, to environmental projects made the President seem as though he lacked a moral compass, or worse yet, was unwilling to challenge policies which might jeopardize his election chances or hurt the interests of his Wall Street donors.

The President’s compromises and evasions, coming at a time when poverty rates were growing, the racial wealth gap was escalating, and young people, whether educated or not faced the worst job market since the Depression, left many young people confused and demoralized. Many could not believe what was happening to them economically; they were still hoping that the economy would correct itself, or the President they had placed so much hope in would find some way of righting the ship that was sinking around them

But while disappointment with the President was growing, the political warfare waged against him by the Republicans, particularly after the 2010 Congressional elections, left him with a residue of credibility. Weren’t the President’s opponents responsible for the tepid and ineffective policies coming out of Washington. Didn’t Republicans try to obstruct every positive initiative he tried to launch, from asking the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes, to rebuilding the crumbling American infra structure.

Enter the Troy Davis case. Here was a defendant who had been on death row for twenty years, insisting on his innocence, while the witnesses against him were steadily recanting their testimony. The thought of executing someone with this much doubt surrounding his conviction had created a worldwide protest movement involving millions of people around the world, not just because of the cruelty of capital punishment and the injustice of this particular case,, but because of the disproportionate application of the death penalty in the US to poor people and people of color.

To many young people in this country, and elsewhere, the execution of Troy Davis was a moral wrong of startling clarity, and given the hopes they had invested in Barack Obama when he ran for President, they expected him, at the very least to speak out against Troy Davis’s execution, and if possible, to use his power to stop it.

When the President did neither, and Troy Davis died, Barack Obama’s image as a visionary leader died with it.

But in this case, the cloud had a sliver lining.

While Troy Davis courage in the face of state murder inspired young people to fight harder against injustice, Barack Obama’s silence freed them to lead themselves. No longer could they expect someone in a position of power to stand up for the weak and powerless, to confront deeply entrenched patterns of racial and economic equality, or even insure that young people in this country would have a secure economic future

If there was going to be a fight on all those fronts, it would have to be led by young people themselves, in the streets as well as in the political arena, and they would have to fight harder than they had ever fought in their life.

The Wall Street occupation currently taking place is a sign that more and more young people have gotten this message

While they may- or may not- give their vote to Barack Obama in 2012, they most important thing they will be doing will be acting collectively to change the course of American and world history, and in doing so they will have lots of solidarity and support from young activists around the world facing similar problems

\Mark Naison
\September 25, 2011

The Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance

2011-09-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Bloomberg School Legacy: Flawed Policies Poisoned by a Fatal Arrogance

Mark Naison
Fordham University

It should surprise no one that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Michael Bloomberg’s education policies, the policy area within which the Mayor most hoped to create a legacy. The Mayor not only introduced numerous questionable initiatives- ranging from school closings, to preferential treatment of charter schools, to attempts to rate teacher performance based on student test scores-he did so with an arrogant disregard not only for the most experienced teachers and administrators in the system, but of parents and community leaders and elected officials who tried to make their voices heard in matters of educational policy.

This top down approach to reorganizing the City public school system not only reflected the ideology of the national School Reform movement- which viewed public schools as corrupt institutions in dire need of the kind of competition and accountability allegedly characteristic of the private sector- but an egotistical effort to reproduce the success of Bloomberg LP by importing its management techniques into the Department Education.

Within weeks of taking office, The Mayor put his mark on the school system by insisting the central headquarters of the NYC Department of Education, as well as all of its district offices, look exactly like an office of Bloomberg Inc, with cubicles replacing offices.

This astonishing reorganization, done without the input of anyone in the system, was designed to show that this Mayor was determined to put his own personal stamp on the system down to the smallest detail, and a penchant for Mayoral micromanagement has been a characteristic of the New York Department of Education ever since.

Among the highlights of Mayoral Micromanagement have been

Replacing four members of the Panel on Educational Policy, the major policy making body governing the Department of Education, when it refused to determine the promotion of third graders exclusively on their performance of standardized tests.

Publicly denouncing principals who questioned the school grades issued by the Department of Education after it became clear that the formulae used to compute those grades produced results that defied common sense, as well as school performance on state and national tests.

Appointing publishing executive Cathy Black as School Chancellor without the advice or input of anyone
In the Department of Education, including outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein

Showing favoritism to charter school advocates who were personal friends of the Mayor, such as Harlem Success Academy director Eve Moskowitz, giving them license to seize facilities from existing public schools and discourage the enrollment of students who might lower their institution’s test profiles

It is one thing to try to convince educators and the public that schools , administrators and teachers should be evaluated regularly on the basis of student test scores, and that public schools would benefit from competition from charters, it is another thing to implement those policies unilaterally, from the top down, while stifling public discussion and trying browbeat and intimidate opponents.

Lost in the process were not only principles of democratic governance, but any kind of institutional way to subject Mayoral policies to external oversight, critical evaluation, or adherence to the most basic rules of evidence. Among the most damaging results have been, favoritism, cronyism, and corruption in the awarding of Department of Education contracts, and the creation of evaluation systems, first of schools, now of teachers, that are wildly inaccurate, and counterintuitive to what parents , teachers and administrators believe.

When you have a system without checks and balances of any kind and without any institutionalized or marginally respected input from the major stakeholders in the system- parents, students, teachers and administrators- don’t be surprised if you generate tremendous opposition.

What we have now in New York is a school system filled with teachers and administrators working under extreme duress, convinced the Mayor is their enemy, of students whose school experience is defined by one test after another, and of parents who feel their voices don’t matter.

This is Mayoral Control Michael Bloomberg style.

Many people in this city-teachers and principals foremost among them- will breathe a huge sigh of relief when his third term is finally up.

Mark Naison
September 8, 2011

Communalism and Cooperation in Park Slope in the 1970's and 1980's

2011-09-07T03:01:00.000-07:00

Communalism and Cooperation in Park Slope in the 70’s and 80’s: Lessons from a Forgotten Era in the City’s History

Mark Naison
Fordham University

The year Liz and I moved to Park Slope, 1976, was a tough time in New York City. The city had just been saved from bankruptcy by an Emergency Financial Control Board that just mandated draconian cuts in all city services, especially parks, education, fire and sanitation, a policy, which, coupled with the wave of arson and abandonment that had swept through the city’s poorer neighborhoods, created the atmosphere of a city under siege. Buildings and neighborhoods which could afford it hired their own security forces, others, like ours on West 99th Street created volunteer security patrols to protect residents during evening hours

The Park Slope we moved to was hardly immune from these ills. Portions of the neighborhood, which contained a few wealthy people , but was still mostly middle class and working class had been hit hard by the arson and abandonment cycle. Abandoned buildings lined the neighborhoods main commercial strip, 7th Avenue, from 9th Street to 15th Street, and on the North side of Garfield place between 7th and 6th Avenue; 2nd street between 5th and 4th Avenue was virtually uninhabited. Drug activity dominated large stretches of 5th Avenue, exacerbated by racial tensions between Italians, Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the blocks adjoining Union Street.

Liz and I took note of these problems, which were no different from what we experienced on the Upper West Side, but we also saw opportunity in the neighborhood because of the large group of 60’s activists who had moved to Park Slope and were creating new institutions and new living arrangements based on communal ideals that had emerged from the Sixties Counterculture, given new relevance by the economic hardships that surrounded us and the collapse of basic government services

The cooperation began at home. When we bought half a brownstone ( for around $40,000), we ran it as an informal cooperative with our upstairs neighbors the Menashes. We not only shared all building expenses equally, we ate dinner together two to three nights a week and created joint child care arrangements for our daughter Sara, and their son, David, who were born within three months of one another. Next door was a commune created by two families and a few unattached adults, with whom we shared dinners on a regular basis, and when our son Eric was born, we did the same kind of shared child care with the Archer/ Rosenthal family next door, whose daughter Dana was born around the same time as Eric. These family/house hold based arrangements to share child care and food were reproduced –on a larger scale by two major institutions- the Park Slope Food Cooperative ( which still exists) and the Park Slope Child Care Collective. Many people we knew used these institutions- some as a supplement to private child care and food shopping- others as the organizing principal of their personal and family lives

Those institutions and arrangements, it should be emphasized, largely served those Park Slope residents with Left wing or countercultural politics. But there were many places where ex-Sixties activists made common cause with long time working class residents of the area. One of these was building block associations, the other was in creating recreational opportunities for neighborhood youth.

One of the major activities of the Block associations was security. Street crime, especially muggings, and house break- ins were a huge issue in Park Slope in the late 70’s into the 80’s, and the Block associations dealt with them through cooperative action. On 6th Street, where Liz and I lived, we not only had regularly meetings about security with police and elected officials, we organized our own Block patrols and Block watch arrangements during moments of peak crime activity and on Halloween, when bands of young people roamed the neighborhood with boxes of eggs and shaving cream.

But the Block associations did more than prevent crime. They organized Block parties to get neighborhood residents to know one another better and participated in a wonderful neighborhood softball league in which teams from more than ten different blocks participated. This was an activity bringing together old and new residents, and in which women and children were welcome, although the playoffs and league championships, when things got “serious,” tended to be dominated by those men and women who were ex high school and college athletes.

But the most impressive example of cross class, cross race community building may have come in the area of sports and youth services. Park Slope contained two remarkable organizations, Camp Friendship and Project Reach Youth, which provided education , recreation and counseling to neighborhood youth irrespective of their ability to pay, and which had close working relationships with local public schools and church based neighborhood sports leagues. Two of the latter, St. Saviour’s Youth Council and St Francis Xavier Youth Sports, grew into huge diverse community sports leagues in the early and mid 1980’s, enrolling thousands of young people from diverse religious backgrounds and filling neighborhood parks and gymnasiums with ball games twelve months a year. Both of these organizations depended entirely on volunteer coaches and organizers through the 80’s and thus were able to keep entry fees low, often giving scholarships for young people unable to pay.

The result was a neighborhood transformed. By the middle and late 1980’s, Park Slope was the site of an extraordinary array of activity in public space, from Block parties, to street fairs, to soccer, baseball and basketball games, bringing together people from a wide variety of backgrounds, and in the process, making the neighborhood a much safer place for all its residents

None of the activities I have mentioned came as a result of private investment decisions, or activity done in the pursuit of profit. It was done by people who believed that enlightened self interest, in a difficult economy, required people to act cooperatively, not only to reduce the expense of food and child care and house maintenance, but to improve the quality of life for everyone who lived in a particular area. Not everyone joined these activities out of ideological commitment, but the spirit of cooperation ultimately crossed every line of race and class and religion, creating a neighborhood were young people of all backgrounds had opportunities in sports, recreation, and the arts which matched what was being offered in the wealthiest suburbs.

In the next twenty years, private investors would “discover” Park Slope, restoring abandoned buildings, transforming business districts into sites of upscale restaurants and boutiques, and raising house prices and rents to astronomical levels, ironically driving out many of the neighborhood residents whose hard work had made investments possible.

But for ten or fifteen years, Park Slope was a place where cooperative and communal principles proved their efficacy in creating safe, viable communities for people of a wide variety of backgrounds.

That experience needs to be examined closely as we enter another era of economic hardship and political retrenchment.

Mark Naison
September 14, 2011

Nick Ashford, Jerry Leiber and the Soundtrack of a Multiracial America

2011-08-30T15:40:00.001-07:00

Nick Ashford, Jerry Leiber and the Soundtrack of a Multiracial America

Mark Naison

When I discovered that two of the greatest rock and roll songwriters of all time, Nick Ashford (of the duo Ashford and Simpson) and Jerry Leiber ( of Leiber and Stoller) died in a single day, my first impulse was to go into mourning. As someone who grew up in Brooklyn in the 50’s and came of age as a civil rights and anti-war activist at Columbia University in the 60’s, I looked to songs that they had written ( from “Hound Dog” and “Stand By Me” to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Solid as a Rock”) as part of the sound track of my life and markers of my personal and political evolution.

But after thinking about their music, not only on its impact on tens of millions of people in my generation, but on the cultural politics their songwriting reflected, I think it’s important to understand that they were figures who in their own way helped redefine race in United States by creating a sonic universe which people of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds could enter, and find joy and meaning within.

It is easy to forget how unique this multiracial sonic universe, which evolved with the popularity of Rock and Roll in the middle 1950’s and lasted through the late 60’s, was in its historic moment. There are certain songs, most, but not all of them performed by Black artists, most involving themes of love and loyalty, which young people in every single part of the country, regardless of racial or cultural background, adopted as their own personal anthems and retain powerful associations to this day.

At a time of unprecedented economic growth, when unions were strong, wealth was far more evenly distributed than it is now, and working class people of all racial backgrounds strode through America with a confidence and optimism that would be unimaginable today, songwriters, record producers, radio dj’s and singers managed to capture that optimistic spirit by adapting rhythm and blues- a music forged in postwar urban black communities to a broader youth market. And while the driving impulse here was commerce, the music that resulted had a joyous spirit that cut across racial boundaries more than anything the nation had ever seen.

But it could only work because some of those boundaries were being crossed in daily life. In cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit, young blacks and whites not only found themselves working in the same factories, they sometimes attended the same high schools and lived in the same housing projects. And if the majority of people who moved through these integrated settings kept to their own cohort, there were enough people who crossed those boundaries in friendship, and occasionally in love to understand that there were some very real commonalities in material aspirations and cultural values. Young people in those times, irrespective of their racial backgrounds, wanted cars, and houses, good jobs and good times, and hoped, at some point after they had their fun, to find love and marriage!

Songwriters like Nick Ashford and Jerry Leiber knew this. They were part of a generation of young people who believed in “love” ( however gendered their definition of that was) and who believed that their economic prospects were promising enough to imagine love leading to marriage. That deindustrialization, war, and stubbornly persistent racism might undermine that possibility, and that women’s empowerment would render the ideal problematic, goes without saying, but for a good ten year period, a whole generation raised in those heady times was emotionally entranced by the vision of love and loyalty put forward in songs like” Stand By Me” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.

Look at the lyrics of each of these songs:

Stand by Me

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
Oh I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand by me

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

If you need me, no matter where you are
No matter how far, don’t worry baby
Just call my name, I’ll be there in a hurry
You don’t have to worry
Cause ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley
Low enough, ain’t no river wide enough, to keep me
From getting to you baby

These heroic visions of devotion and loyalty might elicit laughter today, but they were as much part of what it meant to be young in the early and middle 60’s as the draft, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Star Spangled Banner, and wherever you go, whether it be the Deep South, the Pacific Northwest, New England or the Great Plains or the Mesabi range, you put these songs on for a 60 and over group, irrespective of race, and it will being a moment of reverence, not just for lost youth, not just for broken ideals, but for passions that emerge when you live life to the fullest

That these two songwriters, one black, one white, could capture those feelings with such perfect pitch, with such startling universality, reflected not just as astute reading of a moment in American history, but the creation of a cross racial sensibility that had never existed before and might never quite exist again in exactly the same form.

Whatever this nation has become, since that time; whatever changes in gender and economics have rendered the ideals and visions captured in those songs problematic, at least for our time, the song captures a time when people dared to dream that love and loyalty were possible and that they could dream together across racial and cultural boundaries in a way that their parents generation could never imagine.

Mark Naison
August 21, 2011

School Reform, Community Development and the Mal-Distribution of Wealth: The Road Not Taken

2011-08-20T14:47:00.001-07:00

School Reform, Community Development and the Mal-Distribution of Wealth: The Road Not Taken

Mark Naison

Reading Sarah Mosle’s review of Steven Brill’s new book on School Reform in the New York Times reminded me of the incredible expenditure of time, money and political capital this movement has engendered. I can think of no cause in recent American history which has brought together philanthropy, government and the media, along with a bi- partisan coalition encompassing elements of the Right and the Left, in behalf of an imperative to transform an important sector of American society . Using rhetoric which enlists egalitarian ideals ( No Child Left Behind) alongside the goal of improving the nation’s place in global capitalist competition ( Race to the Top) this movement has proven well nigh irresistible in shaping the way educational policy is being formed at the state, local and national level.

Unfortunately, in terms of either egalitarianism or competitiveness, this movement has failed miserably. Not only has the nation become far more unequal in terms of every important statistical indicator ( wealth distribution, youth poverty, minority unemployment, black/white wealth gap) since No Child Left behind was passed, but we have seen no change in the nation’s position in the global hierarchy in terms of performance on standardized tests.

Why has a movement which has inspired such elevated rhetoric ( “Education Reform is the Civil Rights Cause of the 21st Century), such bi-partisan political support, and such huge expenditures of money achieved so little?

Perhaps the most obvious answer is a simple one: there is no evidence schools alone, not matter how well funded they are, can lift people out of poverty when every other social policy drives them down.

But that answer doesn’t mean we should completely give up on transforming schools.
Schools and school reform can serve as instruments of community development if the resources put into them are deployed in ways which strengthen local economies immediately, not just in some distant future when the beneficiaries of school reform graduate from college and launch successful careers

Let’s use a little imagination. What if the hundreds of billions of dollars contributed by philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and hedge fund entrepreneurs to charter schools, Teach for America and local school districts who follow their model of “accountability” were used instead to hire local residents of poor communities to work in schools as school aids, recreation supervisors, and personnel in child care centers? Not only would such a policy help transform schools into dawn to dusk community centers for struggling neighborhoods, it would create tens, if not hundreds of thousands of new jobs in neighborhoods which are starved for employment and where families are under the severest economic stress.

Right now the vast majority of School Reform dollars go into the pockets of middle class and upper middle class professionals who live far from the neighborhoods in which “failing” schools are located- management consultants, employees of test companies, computer and information system managers, teachers and administrators in charter schools. They do nothing to develop local economies, strengthen families in need, provide employment to marginalized people, or redistribute income from the very wealthy to the very poor. If you wanted to by cynical, you can say that School Reform, in the name of helping the poor, has created a wonderful job program for the children of the middle class.

But that can only happen because most ( but not all) School Reformers divorce the goal of improving schools from the goal of lifting communities out of poverty.

As progressives, our job is to insist that the School/Community linkage be foremost in all Reform efforts, and that the vast majority of the funds to improve schools in poor communities be used to create jobs and programs for people who live in those communities. No more consultants, no more tests, no more computer systems, no more hot shot teachers who spend two years in low performing schools then leave. Let’s give bonuses for teachers and principals who live in the communities they teach in, stay in schools in poverty areas for ten or more years, and lets hire tens of thousands of local residents for useful and necessary work that turn schools into places where everyone in the neighborhood wants to be

If you do that, you might not only contribute to the goal of greater equality, you will help put a dent in what all experts agree is the major hindrance to America’s global competitiveness in educational performance- our extraordinarily high rate of child poverty.

Mark Naison
August 19,2011

Move Over Tea Party! Young Americans Are About to Rise Up and Make

2011-08-17T10:33:00.001-07:00

Move Over Tea Party! Young Americans Are About to Rise Up and Make
History

Mark Naison

During the last two years, a political revolt on the Right has
changed the landscape of American politics. A movement which calls
itself the Tea Party, overwhelmingly composed of white Americans over
the age of fifty, has taken over the Republican Party, and with it the
House of Representatives, with a program calling for drastic curbs on
government expenditure and a moratorium on new taxation. The startling
growth of this movement is in large measure attributable to racial
fears triggered by Barack Obama’s election as president. but those
fears are connected to demographic shifts which have made school
populations majority minority in many states, and prefigure a future
when whites are no longer the nation’s dominant group. Economic
anxiety and racial fears have produced a truly vindictive approach to
politics on the American Right. To put the matter bluntly, the Tea
Party has declared war on American youth by trying to cut school
budgets, library budgets, publicly subsidized recreation programs, and
access to college scholarships.

Until quite recently. young people in the country, who do not
vote in the same proportions as their elders, ( the 2008 Presidential
Election excepted) have mounted little no significant resistance to the
Tea Party offensive and showed few signs of dissatisfaction. But this
could change with startling rapidity A wave of protest in other
nations, starting in the Arab World, spreading to continental Europe
and most recently taking the form of massive riots in England, all have
originated among young people using social media to spread their
message. It is not difficult to imagine that this wave of global
protest, both non violent and violent, will soon spread to the US,
taking forms uniquely adapted to American conditions.

Some of this protest has already started.. It is significant that
the most important recent youth protests in the US have taken place in
our prison system, a sector which dwarfs its counterparts in the Arab
world or Europe. There have been two huge hunger strikes in prisons in
the last six months, the first in Georgia, the second in California, in
each case ending when authorities made concessions. Since a
significant portion of the American working class lives in communities
where people move in and out of prison with startling frequency, such
protests are a sign of growing discontent among that section of the US
population steadily being beaten down, not only by Depression imposed
job losses and foreclosures,, but by the budget cuts Tea Party
activists have helped negotiate.

Another sign of this discontent is are electronically
organized commodity riots which the media have called “flash mobs,”
groups of adolescents from poor neighborhoods, who, with the help of
cell phone communication, suddenly descend on a downtown business
district, or a store, and rob everyone in sight, disappearing as
quickly as they’ve congregated. Incidents of this kind have taken place
in Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Maryland, prompting moral
panic among politicians and religious leaaders who view these outbursts
as a consequences of faulty childrearing and parental neglect

But while it is hard to endorse indiscriminate acts of violence
which put forth no program and make no demands, it is also naïve to
condemn them without referring to the increasing poverty and isolation
of the young people responsible for these actions , or to the blithe
indifference to their plight among urban elites and young
professionals whose prosperity has been untouched by the recession.
Can you really expect young people to stand by and suffer in silence
while libraries and recreation centers are shut, while food becomes
scares, while many among them are being forced into homelessness, and
when schools become test factories, especially since their older
siblings in prison are starting to organize and protest against their
plight. As conditions worsen among the working class and the poor,
expect more flash mobs, more school takeovers and walkouts, and more
actual riots, especially when and if police over react to these other
forms of protest.

Now as for middle class students and ex students trapped in an
unfavorable job market, will they remain silent in the face of working
class violence and dissent, or join forces with their elders in calling
for its suppression? I don’t think so. There is not only a growing
awareness among college students about racial and economic disparities
in the country, there are signs of actual activism. College and high
school students were a central component of the protests , marches and
occupations surrounding the elimination of collective bargaining for
public workers in Wisconsin, they have major participants in protests
against repressive immigration laws in Arizona, and they have been
active in protests against police violence and police brutality from
New York to Oakland.. Because of economic pressures as well as moral
incentives, more and more college graduates are choosing to participate
in programs which place them in low income communities, whether it
Vista, Americorps, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, or alternative
certification programs like Teach for America. As the residents of
these communities erupt in protest, they are going to inevitably pull
along a portion of the middle class community workers and teachers in
their midst

In five years, I predict, there are going to be youth movements in
the US, multiracial, multicultural, and multi-class in their
composition, which dwarf the Tea Party in size and importance. Like
their counterparts around the world, they will take a wide variety of
forms, some violent and even nihilistic, some visionary, carefully
organized and inspirational. But they will make demands on this nation
that will require it to sharply change direction in favor of greater
inclusiveness, greater compassion, and greater equality. No younger
generation worth its salt will allow the poor and the weak in its midst
to be driven into the dust, by smug, racist movements, financed by
self-interested elites!

The current concentration of wealth at the top of our nation- that
allows 400 of the nations wealthiest individuals to make as much as the
bottom 150 million- will not go unchallenged forever.

The youth of this country will rise up and demand something better,
and the people running the country had better listen, if they want to
have a country left to govern

Mark Naison

August 17, 2011

Education and Plutocracy

2011-08-17T03:44:00.001-07:00

Education and Plutocracy

Mark Naison

The two most powerful people shaping public education in New York State,
Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, and Merryl Tisch, chair of
the New York State Board of Regents, are both billionaires! On their
watch, private interests- test publishers, software companies, and
educational consulting firms- have gained a huge foothold in the
state's public schools. This is the logical consequence of Plutocratic
Rule. Once they leave office, public vigilance should keep people of
great wealth out of any positions of control in our educational system.
To quote the old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice,
shame on me!”

Notorious Phd's "Rules for Schools"

2011-08-15T06:01:00.001-07:00

Notorious Phd's "Rules for Schools."

Rule 1. Never trust a school chancellor or charter school
administrator who accepts the title of "CEO." Dollars will get you
donuts that they support privatization of public education.

Rule 2. Keep billionaires as far away from public schools as
possible. Their "philanthropy" inevitably results in reforms which will fatten
their own pockets (e.g new computer and information systems!)

What I Would Do If I Had Arne Duncan's Job

2011-08-11T00:54:00.000-07:00

What I Would Do If I Had Arne Duncan's Job

Mark Naison

First of all, I would state, for the record, that there is no quick or instant way to make our schools perform better unless we have a major initiative to reduce poverty that encompasses employment, health care, nutrition and housing as well as education.

Then, I would end Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, deemphazie standardized testing and make schools places where young people, especially those from poor and working class backgrounds want to spend time in and where they get skills that lead to useful employment. Here would be the keystones of my program.

1 Create first rate vocational and technical education programs like the kind they have in Germany and like they used to have in New York City in the 1950's. Help train the technicians needed to build a new energy efficient economy for the 21St Century.

2. Create after school progarms and night centers in the public schools which featues sports, the arts, and modern information technology, all led by teacher mentors, helped by teachers in training. Young people in NY City also had programs like this when I was growing up. They were elminated in the 1970's fiscal crisis

3. Vastly expand the hours and resources of public libraries so they not only create safe zones where young people can do their homework free of harassment and noise, but are places where they can have access to computer and information technology they might not have in their home.

4. Create CCC and WPA type jobs program for out of work out of school teens and young adults, paying them to help rebuild our rotting infastructure and mentor young people in their neighborhoods.

I can assure you that these programs would be much more effective engaging young people than our current strategy of deluging them with standarized tests to make them competitive with young people in other countries.

The Basis of My Current Optimism About Youth Activism

2011-08-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

The Basis of My Current Optimism About Youth Activism
Mark Naison

A lot of people I respect have been extremely skeptical about my prediction that we are seeing , in its early stages, a new wave of youth activism. They think I am being a starry-eyed optimist based on my limited contacts in liberal NY, especially in the Bronx

But based on the same kind of contacts, in the same place, in the middle and late 1970’s, I predicted, correctly as it turned out, a long period of Conservative hegemony in American politics, with young people leading the way. Let me explain how I came to that conclusion before moving back to the current situation.

The early and mid 70’s were a rough time in New York City, in the Bronx in particular. We suffered deindustrialization and disinvestment, a heroin epidemic, rising crime rates, white and middle class flight and finally a fiscal crisis and bank takeover of city government which decimated education, recreation and youth services. I experienced all of these things, directly and indirectly, and also watched large sections of the Bronx burn as I took the 3rd Avenue El and the 4 Train from my apartment in Manhattan to my new job at Fordham

But what made me most pessimistic was not all of these real life tragedies, it was the attitude of my students at Fordham. By 1975 and 1976, the vast majority of my white students at Fordham had come to look at any form of idealism and social consciousness as a luxury they couldn’t afford ( my Black and Latino students, whose numbers were shrinking, still shared many of my views). They looked on me as comical and pathetic, a 60’s relic who still thought that the pursuit of justice and equality was a realistic life goal. Their strategy was clear. They were going to survive, and if possible prosper, by keeping as far away from the problems of the inner city as they could, and by not wasting any energy on causes that had no chance of succeeding. Whereas my first students and Fordham in 1970-71 were comrades in struggle who shared my dreams of a better world, these young people were going to make sure that they were untouched by the tragedies that surrounded them

The attitudes I encountered then lasted for at least ten years, not receding until the late 1980’s. It let me to withdraw much of my energy from teaching and put it into research , physical fitness ( I won 7 straight Brooklyn public parks tennis championships in the late 70’s/early 80’s) and bringing up my children as competitive athletes. I continued to work with students who were justice activists, but they were few and far between and virtually all of the people I worked with in community organizations were 60’s veterans.

Now fast forward to the present. My classes at Fordham are packed with students who are committed to justice work, and who do wonderful community service projects in the Bronx and all over the globe. More and more of these students are becoming radicalized by the inequalities that surround them and are thinking of ways they can make an impact through the work they do. Many have gone to work for non-profits, some have gone into the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and the Peace Corps, some have helped found innovative social justice organizations in New York City, among them Momma's Hip Hop Kitchen, the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective and The Space at Tompkins. More than a few have decided to enter teaching as a career, some through graduate programs, some through alternate certification programs like the New York City Teaching Fellows and Teach for America

Equally important, ever since I began writing and speaking in defense of public schools teachers, and challenging the testing/privatization model dominating mainstream education discourse, I have been literally deluged with emails from young teachers, in New York and around the country, fighting the same battles , some of them looking for support, some of them looking to connect with existing networks, some of them launching remarkable initiatives on their own. These emails have only accelerated since the Save Our Schools Conference and March, convincing me that event was only going to increase the level of organizing among teachers around the nation, especially among those new to the profession

So while the political situation in the nation today is at least as grim as it was in the middle and late 70’s it FEELS different to me because I am surrounded by young people who feel the same way about the injustices of this society that I do, and what’s more, are willing to do something about those problems.

Their energy and their passion gives me hope.

Mark Naison
August 10,2011

Why We Need Teacher Activist Groups- and More

2011-08-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

Why We Need Teacher Activist Groups- and More

Mark Naison

Fordham University

I think the concept of Teacher Activist Groups, first brought to my attention by educator/organizer Katie Strom (see http://teacheractivistgroups.org-)
is a perfect vehicle for challenging the corporate takeover of public education because it encourages all teachers, whether veterans or new to the schools, whether graduates of education programs or products of alternative certification, to unite around a common agenda of resistance to testing and privatization.

But unless those TAG's work within community based coalitions to fight for economic justice, their protests against corporate control of schools will be easily isolated. Teachers must not only fight for the right to teach creatively, they must reinvent themselves as social justice activists who use their position as educators to help give students and their families a greater sense of power and agency so they can fight back against the forces driving them deeper into poverty.

These two roles must go hand in hand because the more teachers create linkages to students, parents and community activists, the more they can transform their own classrooms, and eventually their own schools, into "liberated space."

None of this will be easy. But can we afford to do anything less given the mass misery budget cuts are going to impose on the communities our schools are located in?

I am frightened by where our nation is going, but I am also inspired by all the young teachers who have decided to fight back, and all the veteran educators and organizers wiling to link up with them and given them full support.

We are on the verge of something I believe is truly momentous- the rebirth of a Progressive Justice Movement that will equal the ones that swept through American in the Great Depression and the Sixties

To those who are fearful that we lack the numbers or the will to bring this new movement into being, I will close with my favorite slogan from the Sixties, which for all I know could have come from Mao Tse Tung:

"Dare To Struggle, Dare to Win!"

Peace

Mark Naison/Notorious Phd

The Return of Solidarity: Young Americans Band Together To

2011-08-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

The Return of Solidarity: Young Americans Band Together To Organize for Justice,

Mark Naison
Fordham Univeristy

During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, many Americans, thoughbrought up on “rags to riches” stories of individual mobility, began to cautiously embrace the concept of “Solidarity”- the idea that working people could only survive, and ultimately prosper, if they helped one another when they were in need and organized together to demand that government and business provide them with economic security. Such an ideal fueled the growth of the industrial labor movement, which called on workers to sacrifice for once another, rather than compete for the favors of employers. But it was also visible in the emergence of an ethic of mutual aid that honored those who helped people in trouble, whether it was feeding a hungry person who came to the door asking for food, or taking in a family who just lost their farm or got evicted from their apartment. The music of Woodie Guthrie and the novels of John Steinbeck, especially the Grapes of Wrath captured the moral grandeur of solidarity both as a personal credo and a political ideal, but it was also institutionalized, through an alliance of the New Deal and the emerging labor movement, in unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and the legal protection of collective bargaining rights in basic industry.

For the last three years, I have been looking for signs that young college educated Americans, along with their working class counterparts, are beginning to rediscover the concept of Solidarity.Young people have been hammered especially hard in the current economic crisis. As of the Spring of 2011, youth unemployment in the US had topped 20 percent, with sections of that labor force (minority youth,high school graduates) having rates double that total. Even graduates of elite universities were having trouble finding work they were trained for, as many returned home to live with parents rather than striking out on their own.

For a while, I saw little evidence that young Americans were reading the handwriting on the wall and concluding that acquisitivei ndividualism and consumerism just weren’t going to work all that well for their generation. I watched in astonishment as young Americans failed to mobilize for the 2010 Congressional elections as they had in 2008, paving the way for Republican –and Tea Party-dominance of the House of Representatives.

But in the last six months, I have seen numerous signs that Solidarity is making a comeback among young people who are starting torealize that this economic crisis is not going away and that they hadbetter reach out to one another and fight for economic justic less their dignity, as well as their power to make a living, be permanently compromised.The first sign of this was in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of high school students and college students mobilized in support of union workers whose collective bargaining rights were being taken away through the actions of a Republican Governor and State Legislature. At the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington, I had the privilege of introducing Kas Schwerdtfeger, a Students for a Democratic Society organizer from Milwaukee who led walkouts of thousands of high school and college students in support of the occupation of the state legislature by union workers, as well as a semester long occupation of the student center at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Such actions equaled, and in many ways, exceeded those launched by the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980’s, the last major student movement in the US to mobilize around the concept of”Solidarity.”

But Wisconsin was not an isolated incident. In New York City, the concept of ”solidarity” has been embraced by many young teachers enraged by the testing and assessment protocols imposed by the Bloomberg Dictatorship in the NYC Department of Education as well as the huge propaganda campaign launched by wealthy philanthropists in behalf of charter schools and privatization of public education. In the last six moths, a multifaceted resistance movement, jointly led by young teachers and veteran education activists, has resulted in the organization of “Fight Back Fridays,” citywide protests by protests by teachers, students and parents and parents against excessive testing; the production of “The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting For Superman,” a devastating critique of dominant Education Reform ideology, and the organization of an amazing group called “The NewTeacher Underground” which brings together teachers in alternative certification programs like Teach for America with long time graduates of teacher education programs to fight for democracy and a fair distribution of resources in the city’s schools and the communities they are located in

As someone who has been directly or indirectly involved with these initiatives- I have marched on a picket line with young teacher activists at Lehman High School, written an article on charters schools with the help of the creators of “The Inconvenient Truth about Waiting For Superman,” and spoken at a meeting of the “New Teacher Underground”—I have seen, first hand, a level of energy and commitment on the part of young teacher activists in New York that reminds me of my own experience in justice movements in the Sixties and early Seventies

And I this is only the beginning.

As the government of the United States has set upon a course of action, affirmed by both major parties,that will intensify the hardshipof America’s poor and drive millions of middle class people into the edge of poverty, the young people of this nation, I now am confident,will organize, will resist, and ultimately, over time, will change the course of American history so that sacrifice and hardship is no longer concentrated on our society’s most vulnerable people

Mark Naison
August 8, 2011

The Achievement Rap on YouTube from Save Our Schools March

2011-08-07T03:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the "Achievement Rap" I performed at the Save Our Schools March in DC is being seized on by conservative commentators- the latest of which is Andrew Breitbart- as a symbol of everthing that's wrong with public education and teachers unions. Gee, all I did was say that Ed Reformers are poised to reap huge profits from testing and privitization Was I wrong?

.Notorious PhD. " The Achievement Rap"‏ - YouTube

If Floors Could Talk What Stories They Would Tell: The Fulbright Triptych and Memories of Brownsville

2011-08-07T02:34:00.001-07:00

If Floors Could Talk, What Stories They Would Tell: The Fulbright Triptych and Memories of Brownsville

Mark Naison

After many false starts, I finally got to see my friend Simon Dinnersein’s extraordinary Fulbright Tripych at the German Consulate in Manhattan. Accompanying me was a former student who grew up in a working class family in Queens, spent four years in he Navy after graduating from Fordham and is now completing his doctorate at Cambridge (UK)

Both of us were completely blown away by this work. We stood there for over a half an hour marveling at each detail, from snippets of children’s art work to family portraits large and small, to passports, to window scenes of the German countryside to historic figures, to an incredibly realistic collection of artist’s instruments on a kitchen table that brought to mind, given the location of the exhibit, and the times we are living in, weapons used to torture prisoners of war or dissect victims of genocide- mixed images of Guantanamo and Buchenwald

But the single part of the Triptych that captured my imagination the most, and which also did so for my young friend, was the floor, a dark red tile underpinning for the painting that crossed all three panels. It was scuffled, raised, filled with what appeared to e thousands of small cracks, a floor for a working class household that had taken incredible punishment and like those who used it, somehow survived but were marked for life by those experiences. It was a floor that was familiar to both of us, and yet that we never expected to see in a work of art, and it made us feel at home enough with the Triptych to claim the painting, and the artist, as “one of our own.”

For me in particular, who has known Simon and his entire family for many years, and knows something of Simon and Renee’s upbringing in the Jewish working class neighborhood of Brownsville, the floor was a deeply personal message

It brought me back to the Sundays in my childhood when I visited my grandparents on my father’s side in a second floor apartment in a three story walkup on Hopkinson Avenue in Brownsville. My grandparents were immigrants from Poland who spoke little English, people who had escaped God knows what to come to America. My grandfather was a deeply religious, highly literate man who sold herring from a barrel on the streets of Brownsville until he was 90, but was a leader in his Orthodox shul and read Shakespeare in Yiddish, and my grandmother was a tiny woman, no more than 4’10” tall, who brought us tea and cookies with shaking hands and eyes filled with love.

Everything around them was shabby. The walls of the apartment, the seemingly ancient refrigerator and stove in their tiny kitchen, the glasses and dishes they brought food to us with, were old and worn down, yet there was a dignity about my grandparents that affected me even as a child, though I would never have been able to put those sentiments into words. These were people who had sacrificed everything so their children and grandchildren could have a better life and that experience had ennobled them while taking a powerful physical toll

And the floor that Simon had painted-that were the floors they walked on. The floor in their apartment. The floor in the hallways of their building, which they would soon leave for a Brownsville housing project- red tile, made brownish with wear and tear, ripped, scuffed, defaced, marked with the stains of food, and dirt, and urine and blood. Floors that had seen history made a thousand times in the lives of working class people whose history was rarely recorded. If floors could talk, what stories they could tell.

Well, Simon Dinnerstein allowed those floors to talk. To him, to me, to the thousands of people able to see the Triptych. As I see it, those floors could only have been painted by someone who not only who had walked floors like them, but had heard their message and incorporated them into the core of his being.

And in allowing those floors to speak, he affirmed the dignity of the people who walked on them, and in so doing, connected me to experiences that made me the person I am today, that helped inspire me with a love of learning, an identification with the poor and the oppressed, and the endurance to survive pain and hardship.

One final comment. It was Simon who looked at me during one of our tours of Brownsville, pointed at me and said “Bulyak.’- a Yiddish term, he explained, for men of unusual physical strength in a neighborhood where many men were small and thin- the men who carved up carcasses in neighborhood butcher shops, fought off Irish and Italian kids who sought to victimize their Jewish schoolmates, beat up strikebreakers in the garment district, and disposed of bodies for the mob.

No appellation has ever made me prouder- none ever touched more of a chord.

Simon, thank you for that, thank you for your friendship, thank you for your amazing art work and thank you for that floor, upon whose foundation I now stand, proud of all the people then and now who walked across it and invested it with their personal and collective histories

The Lessons of History and the Save Our Schools March

2011-08-01T10:19:00.001-07:00

The Lessons of History and the Save Our Schools March

Mark Naison

Fordham University

The Save Our Schools Conference and March was the most inspiring single protest I have attended in the last thirty years. To see public school teachers from more than 40 states rally in defense of their maligned profession, and to hear the most important education scholars of our time tear apart the business/testing model driving education policy in the country, made me feel that I was part of a movement that was not only going to change school policies, but reinvigorate justice organizing in a nation that had lost its way.

At the “Activism” panel at the Save Our Schools Conference, I had an epiphany which I want to share, not only with education activists, but all people committed to progressive political change. And it had to do with how we should relate to initiatives such as Teach For America and charter schools, which began with a progressive mission, but now are deluged with corporate money and seem to be committed to the business/testing paradigm which encouraging privatization of public education and degrading the teaching profession.

And my epiphany was this. If historic circumstances have moved these initiatives to the right, different historical circumstances can move them back to the left. And it could happen pretty quickly. If the current debt ceiling deal goes through, working class and poor communities are going to suffer levels of hardship unseen in our lifetimes, making the prospect of schools, reformed or not, elevating people out of poverty seem improbable, if not absurd. Cuts in food support, housing grants, health care, youth recreation and college access grants, all part of the debt reduction formula, are going to have heart rending effects on students in working class communities, putting incredible pressure on every school and teacher in affected communities.

To think that Teach for America Corps members and charter school teachers and administrators will be permanently immune to the rapidly escalating pain and hardship of students and families they work with defies common sense. Many will start to rethink the business/testing model of pedagogy they have been exposed to; some will become justice fighters for the communities they are working in. And when that happens, progressives, whether in teachers unions or not, should be right there with them, encouraging them to participate in the broad struggle for democracy in America and to use their position as educators to do help organize beleaguered communities to rise up in protest and demand a fair share of the nation’s wealth.

And impossible dream? Not really. Something like this happened 70 years ago during the heyday of the industrial labor movement During the prosperous 1920’s, the nation’s largest corporations such as Ford Motor Company, General Electric, and US Steel, organized company unions and employee representation plans to prevent their workers from joining trade unions. The strategy was so successful that no one major industrial corporation was unionized when the Depression struck.

But Depression conditions, leading to 1/3 of the labor force unemployed, and 1/3 working part time when Franklin Roosevelt assumed the Presidency, produced a rapid change in working class attitudes. Organizers for industrial unions, largely ignored by workers during the 1920’s found workers receptive to their message in the three most important open shot industries- steel, automobile and electronics- and began to quietly infiltrate company unions. By the time

the CIO was founded in 1935, company unions in the automobile and electronics industry began to affiliate en masse with the new CIO unions, giving them an immediate base in the heart of America’s largest companies. The great sit down strikes in the automobile industry, which led to the unionization of US Steel and well as General Motors, would not have happened

had not company unions in the automobile industry become part of the CIO and the same dynamic occurred in the electrical industry, where both Westinghouse and General Electric ended being organized by CIO unions.

If company unions, supported by the most powerful and wealth corporations of that era, could move in a progressive direction in response to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, there is no reason to assume that the same thing could not happen to charter schools and Teach for American in the coming years, as the American economy goes into free fall and working class communities experience unspeakable hardship.

Given this, it behooves us, a progressive organizers and justice fighters, to keep lines of communication open to people in these organizations and be there to work with them if they

join us in resistance to policies which concentrate economic sacrifice among America’s poor.

Anything less than this would be selling our movement short. To stop the political juggernaut moving this nation to the right, we need to mobilize the broadest coalition of activists and organizers, including people we may have sharply disagreed with in the past.

Mark Naison

August 2, 2011

Notorious Phd’s “Achievement Rap” A Tribute to Those Who Invented the Achievement Gap

2011-07-27T13:57:00.001-07:00

While some people call “the achievement gap”

Inspired me to write an achievement rap

Exposing the hustlers who rule our nation

Who’ve hijacked the train and left us at the station

They’ve exported our jobs, treated us like fools

Now they are poised to take over our schools

And run them for profit, like they do our jails

So they make up some lies to say that we’ve failed

When the failure is theirs, cause they’ve stolen our wealth

Whatever is good, they’ve reserved for themselves

Now they’re saying that we hold the whole nation back

If we don’t pass the tests their companies fast track

When reality is they’re the ones who need testing

To see in whose pockets school profits are resting

From Murdoch to Klein, from Gates to Rhee

The achievement gap hustle is one big crime spree.

The Top Ten Things to Do in the Bronx That You Probably Won't Read About in New York Magazine

2011-07-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Top Ten Things to Do in the Bronx That You Probably Won't Read About in New York Magazine

Mark Naison

Fordham University

10. Hit tennis balls in Heffen Park in "The Valley" section of the Northeast Bronx, one of the real hidden jewels in the NYC Park System

9. Walk up White Plains Road from 219th Street to 241Street and experience one of the great Caribbean business strips in New York City

8. Play golf at the Pelham/Split Rock Golf courses and see the largest herd of wild turkeys in New York City ( but watch out for the poison ivy!)

7. Go to the "Bronx Classic" a professional tennis tournament in Crotona Park in late to mid-August whose winners get a wild card into the US Open Qualifiying Tournament

6. Go to "First Friday" at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on 165the Street and Grand Concourse which features great music and films that reflect the cultural diversity of the Bronx

5. Check out the Sunday Brunch at Giovanni's on 150th Street and Grand Concourse, where you will be served huge amounts of excellent food.

4. Visit the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective at 478 Austin Place near 149th Street and meet the hippest group of rappers, poets, music producers and political activists on the East Coast

3. Eat lunch at the Crab Shanty on City Island which has the best and most affordable seafood lunch specials in New York City

2. Go to the Thursday Night Old School Hip Hop James in Crotona Park during the summer, which feature some of the artists who created Hip Hop Culture in the middle and late 1970's

1. Starve yourself for a day and visit Johnson's BBQ at 163rd Street between Union and Tinton Avenues, where you will get the best BBQ and largest portions in New York City. Say "the professor sent you" and your portion may double!

My Problem With Charter Schools-Too Many Are"Bad Neighborhood Citizens"

2011-07-22T06:57:00.001-07:00

I am not in principle against charter schools. Experimenting with new models of school organization can be a good thing, and giving parents more options within the public school system can promote an atmosphere conducive to better teaching and learning

But in a society dominated by trickle down economics,where there is little commitment to improve public education as a whole, charter schools have not fulfilled their original promise. With rare exceptions, they have functioned as though their success requires the failure of neighboring institutions, refusing to work cooperatively with traditional public schools when they share a building, pushing out or excluding special needs, elll children, and those marked as "behavior problems" and embracing what amounts to a two tier styemm in inner city schools- one favored and amply funded- the other looked on with suspcion and contempt

Charter schools can lead to improvements in the quality of education, but only if they embrae all children and try to work with and support public schools they share space and neighborhoods with,not quarantine them as if they were carriers of a contagious disease

Right now, based on what I have seen in the Bronx, and other parts of New YorkCity, charter schools have not improved the quality of education in inner city neighorhoods. The best have supplied a small number of families with better educational options. But on the whole, charter schools have been "bad neighborhood citizens," viewing everyone outside their ranks as a threat to their educational mission,and doing everything possible to "stack the deck" against traditional public schools by indirectly or overtly excluding students who might not test well or be compliant learners

This "us againnst the neighborhood" is the last thing New York, and the nation's immigrant and working class communities need asthey find themselves starved of resources by budget cuts at the city, state and federal level

Until charter schools start fighting for ALL the children and families in the neighborhoods they are located in, rather than the 10 percent enrolled in their institutions, they will be unable to make a positive contribution to the struggle for racial and economic equality in the United States

Mark Naison
July 22,2011

NOTE: While there are some neighborhoods in which 10 percent of the students are enrolled in charter schools, in the nation as a whole, as Diane Ravitch points out, only 3.5 percent of students are in charter schools

Where I Find The Courage To Resist An Unjust Social Order-An Historian an Activist's Personal Credo

2011-07-19T01:17:00.000-07:00

Maybe I am too much the historian, but I am convinced no society can concentrate wealth in a small number of hands the way the US has today without undermining its own legitimacy. The so-called Education Reform movement is a classic case study of the corrupting power of great wealth. The attacks on teachers, the obsession with high stakes testing, the attempts to close failing schools, though presented as strategies to achieve greater equality, in real life clear the way for powerful corporations to profit from privatizing a great public resource. This movement has now been going on for more than ten years and amidst its political ascendency, we have seen the shrinking of the middle class, the improverishment of the working class, the warehousing and imprisonment of minority youth, the squandering of precious resources on cruel and needless wars and the continuing concentrat ion of wealth and power among a small number of people.
In such such a society, telling the truth matters. And while victory is hardly guaraneed for those who decry great abuses of power, it is important that we that we speak up, that we resist, that we organize, and that we set an example for those that come after us. We cannot allow a Plutocracy to dominate our nation's economic, political and cutlural life. We have to fight it on every terrain, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our schools and universities, in the political arena, and in culture and mass media. When trying to gain strength for what sometimes seems to be a hopeless battle, I think of Joe Hill, I think of Paul Robeson, I think of Ida B Wells and Fanny Lou Hamer, I think of Martin Louther King and Malcolm X, and in their memory and in their name, I will insist on holding this nation to a much higher standard of democratic ideals and democratic practice than its leaders currently do.
Mark Naison
July 19, 2011

Time to Create a Progressive Caucus in Teach for America?

2011-07-18T16:42:00.001-07:00

Although the leadership of TFA is closely allied with forces seeking to privatize public education, and use high stakes
testing as a vehicle to rate teachers and administrators, there are many TFA Corps members, past and present, who believe
that racism, poverty and regressive taxation, not failing schools, are the primary causes of neighborhood distress and economic
stagnation in the United States.

Perhaps it is time that these people, who now number in the thousands, organize a progressive caucus in TFA to fight within the
organizaiton to reduce its emphasis on high stakes testing, encourage TFA corps members to make teaching their lifetime career, and to have TFA
openly repudiate "trickle down economics" and support the redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation..

I for one would be willing to use all resources at my disposal to help such a caucus get started, and I know of many other progressive academics
around the country who would do the same,

TFA Corps members and alumni who think such a caucus is worth discussing should feel free to contact me via my Fordham ( naison@fordham.edu) or personal ( mnaison@aol.com) email

Sincerely

Mark D Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Forham University
Principal Investigator, Bronx African American History Proect