Where Were You Hillary?

When 168 schools were closed in New York City, and more than fifty in Chicago and Philadelphia

When New Orleans became an all charter district

When recess became test prep in high poverty schools throughout the nation and arts, music and sports were pushed aside

When school libraries were closed or became places where students took tests rather than read books

When veteran teachers in NY City became ATR's and were put in "Teacher Jails" in Los Angeles

When the average career of a teacher shrank from 15 years in the 1980's to 5 years now

When Bill Gates funding forced Common Core on an unsuspecting nation without any trials in local schools district

When teachers of color were pushed out of the classroom in urban school districts which were then deluged with teacher temps with 5 weeks training

When rating teachers on the basis of student test scores became the law of the land and students, teachers and families were filled with stress.

Did you say ANYTHING about these issues?

Did you do anything to suggest you understood the suffering these policies had caused?

If not, it is hard to understand why any group which claims to represent teachers would endorse your candidacy for President well before
primary season

New York: The City Where You Have to Pay to Play

Here are some of the things we gave up in New York City when bankers and national and state officials told us to "live more frugally" in the 1970's

Free tuition at the City Universities
Music programs in the public schools
After school and night centers in the public schools
Recreation supervisors at vest pocket parks around the city
Maintenance workers at parks capable of maintaining ball fields and trimming vegetation

As a result:

Public Schools only have after school and music programs through private grants, participation in special programs or funds raised by their PTA's
The city's most popular parks are maintained largely through private funding through organizations like the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance.
The city's baseball and soccer leagues are all maintained by private funding and large portions of the city's young people have no opportunity to play organized sports at all.

This was not the New York City I grew up in. In this city, you have to pay to play, whether it is a sport or a musical instrument

Thoughts on the Greek Crisis and The Proliferation of Global Debt

If you are wondering why financial institutions continue to give money to countries, companies and individuals who have little or any ability to pay back those loans, remember that those institutions receive COMMISSIONS from making loans, and even bigger commissions from packaging those loans into financial products like derivatives. It is from these commissions that huge profits are made for the institutions, and huge bonuses for their managers and executives

This gives financial institutions a built in incentive to cater to the appetite for funding that insolvent, or near insolvent entities, may have, whether it be a family who wants to purchase a home they can't afford, or a country desperate to fund pensions, or salaries of essential government workers when they have run out of cash.

It would be instructive to track all the commissions made by loans to the Greek government right up to the current crisis. I would suspect they add up to a very large amount of money

In short, calls for fiscal discipline on the part of Greece are a bit hypocritical coming from those who have profited handsomely from those who have extended loans to the Greek government, and Greek banks for the last ten years.

It would be very interesting to see whether this crisis would have taken a different form if commissions were sharply reduced on loans and financial products

But hey, what do I know. I am just a history professor.

The Slave Market, Not the Plantation, Was the Real Face of the Confederacy

 When you visit Monticello or Mount Vernon or even Colonial Williamsburg, you can come away with a picture of slavery as an ordered world where white families lived in symbiosis, albeit a hierarchical one, with black families they owned.

However, this architectural and social portrait is frozen in time, masking the  economic and social dynamics of a system which contained some of the most brutal features of the capitalist marketplace along with the ownership of human beings.

By the 1830's and 1840's, soil erosion and rise of cotton agriculture had rendered the coastal plantations of Virginia portrayed in those historic sites an economic anachronism. Most of the great plantations had gone bankrupt, and either tried to move Westward into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana or Texas, or had sold their slaves to agricultural entrepreneurs settling those regions. That's right, SOLD THEIR SLAVES.

  Forget paternalism. Forget respect for families. The economic dynamics of Westward settlement, soil exhaustion and the emergence of new crops and markets had made the selling of slaves an essential feature of the society that became the Confederacy.

 All you have to do is read a book called "Remembering Slavery" a compilation of the oral history of former slaves which were collected during the 1930's to realize that the selling of slaves, and the breaking up of families and communities, was an essential feature of the Slave South, more feared by those Black folk trapped within it than even physical brutality and sexual exploitation which were also endemic to the system

 Black people lived in constant terror of being sold away from their friends, family members, and their own children. And this happened all the time because the major salable asset of people engaged in plantation agriculture were their slaves!  The bank threatens to foreclose on your property- you sell a few slaves!  You want to buy new agricultural equipment or build a new house- you sell some more!

Slave markets were all over Southern towns and cities, filled on a regular basis with the most horrific scenes of crying people and bodies poked and prodded and auctioned off.

To take the false aura of romance from the Slave South, we need some new historic sites. Let's find and  restore slave markets and explain what really went on there and how essential they were to the Westward expansion and economic vitality of the South.

Hundreds of thousands of slaves were sold away from their families. And were being sold right up to the eve of the Civil War.

When I see the Confederate flag, that is what I see. I am still haunted by the stories of broken families and broken lives I read in "Remembering Slavery"

When New York City Was Greece- The Destruction of Youth Programs in the Name of Austerity in the late 70's

As the Greek crisis unfolds, it is instructive to turn to a moment in history when New York City went "bankrupt" and was put under the control of an Emergency Financial Control board who dictated what kind of budget cuts had to be made in order for the city to continue receiving financing from the nation's banks.

The year was 1976, Abraham Beame was the Mayor, and what transpired was an unalloyed tragedy for the young people of New York City, especially those growing up in the city's working class and middle class communities In fact, based on my own experience and scores of oral history interviews with people who attended or worked in Bronx public schools from the 1950's through the 1980's, many city neighborhoods, and the young people who lived in them, never recovered from what lost as a result of budget cuts made at that time.

Let us first look at the impact of budget cuts on New York City public schools, which had some of the best youth and cultural programs of any public school system in the world from the late 40's until the Emergency Financial Control Board took over.

  The after school programs in New York City public schools , which provided an enormous boon to working parents,were second to none. Every elementary school in the city was open 3-5 and 7-9 with supervised activity, run by New York City public school teachers paid with stipends that supplemented their regular salaries. The activities in these centers included arts and crafts, sports, music programs, talent shows, and occasionally school dances. I played basketball and nok hockey in the night center at PS 91 in Crown Heights, but some truly amazing things took place at schools in the Bronx, some of them serving predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. At PS 18 near the Patterson houses, the night center, run by former all American basketball player Floyd Lane and NY Knick player Ray Felix, scores of young people who played high school, college and even professional basektball learned the game, including the great Nate "Tiny Archibald." At PS 99 in Morrisania, in additional to sports activities, there were regular talents shows which featured young people who became some of the foremost "doo wop" singers in the nation, along with budding Latin musicians.  There amazing programs were all shut down for good in the late 70's thanks to EFB imposed budget cuts. Sportswriter and coach Howie Evans, who attended the center before working in them, said closing the afternoon and night centers was the worst single policy decision ever made affecting the youth of New York City

  Then there were the music programs in the public schools. During the same period- the late 40's through the late 70's- New York city public schools had the best music programs in the country. Ever junior high school, and many high schools had upwards of 300 musical instruments which could be taken home by any student who tried out for or made, school bands or orchestras. And the intruction was first rate. Many famous musicians taught music in the public schools and some of the greatest instrumental music in the world was produced by students who learned their art in the public schools. Take Salsa, which emerged in New York as a hybrid form of Latin music in the late 60's. Three Salsa giants, Eddie Palmierie, Ray Barretto and Dave Valentin, were products of the amazing music program at JHS 52 in Hunts point, and Willie Colon was taught music at Wagner JHS near St. Mary's Park by none other than Jazz giant Donald Byred, who was a music teacher in the school.

And what happened to these programs? ALL OF THEM, were shut down as a result of budget cuts during the fiscal crisis, and their instruments places in storage in school basements, or sold off to schools in other cities and other countries. Instrumental music never came back to most public schools and is only there now as a result of special school grants.  

And then there were the Parks. The NYC parks budget was cut in half during the fiscal crisis. One of the major casualties here were the Recreation Supervisors in the Parks, known as the "parkies" who supervised sports programs in city parks free of charge. And not only in the big green spaces. There were parkies in the thousands of concrete vest pocket parks around the cities and they offered supervised activity to hundreds of thousands of city youngsters. One example of this took place in a vest pocket park at 163rd Street and Caldwell Ave in the Bronx where a "parkie" named Hilton White ran a basketball program called "The Falcons" which produced scores of great college basketball players including three starters on the Texas Western basketball team which won the NCAA Championship in 1966 with an all-Black starting five ( as portrayed in the movie "Glory Road.).

Almost ALL of the parkies were laid, off and the recreation progams they ran ended. To give an idea of what this meant, there were once over 800 "parkies" in the Bronx ( according to the Bronx Parks Commissioner). Now there are 9

So lets add up the results of Banker imposed "austerity" on the youth of New York City

After School and Night Centers --GONE

Music Programs in the Schools-- GONE

Supervised Recreation Programs in the Park- GONE

None of these programs that were elminated ever returned.

Children growing up now have only a fraction of the supervised activities that I had access to growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950's and early 1960s'

And you wonder why I fear for Greece?

Nobody Cares About Teachers

After nearly 8 years of teacher advocacy, here is what I have concluded, albeit sadly
Nobody cares about teachers
They can steal your pensions, break your unions, lengthen your hours, script you, micromanage you, insult you and humiliate you and if you complain about what is happening, people will yawn, tell you you deserve it, or say "welcome to the club"
The only way you have any chance of making the general public care about your plight is if you tell them their children are going to be screwed if your profession is destroyed.
Remember, what is happening to teachers now happened to unionized industrial workers 30 years ago Proud people whose labor helped give the US the highest standard of living in the world were crushed by corporate America while their neighbors looked on passively and voted in people who accelerated the process.
I am not sure that the destruction of the teaching profession can be prevented, but if it can be, the only pathway to doing this is the defense of children and the presentation of a powerful vision of what is needed so that children in our schools get an eduction which does not script and insult and humiliate THEM.

Time for Some Real Talk About Charters- And Community Schools

 Yes. charter schools have huge issues with fiscal corruption and student and teacher abuse

 Yes, charter schools have been seized on by financial elites as a vehicle to break unions and open up public education as a field for private investment

 But in many inner city and low income communities, charters are extremely popular with parents

 And one of the reasons is that many of them are open from 7 AM to 7 PM every day so that parents or grandparents who work two jobs and can't arrange child care know that their children are safe.

In a country where fewer and fewer people can pay housing costs on a single income because wages have plummeted, this is a huge element in their appeal.

Defenders of public education who do not understand that face an uphill battle in resisting the charter onslaught. And this is why we have to demand that public schools be transformed into true community institutions which are open around the clock.

8 to 3 hours don't cut it anymore in public education. There are fewer and fewer safe places for children in low and moderate income neighborhoods. Not in homes, not in streets, not in community centers-which have been devastated by budget cuts even more than schools.  The schools must become that safe space. After school programs must become part of every public school.  If they don't, there may be no public schools left.

The Community School Model can't be treated just as a clever idea postponed to some distant future. It is the only hope for preserving public education in low and moderate income communities.. And must be fought for tooth and nail, not only by teachers, but by parents and all concerned citiens who want to keep the 1 Percent from privatizing education and using it to cement their control over every aspect of American life