The Best Decision I Ever Made

In the late 80's, I made a momentous decision. I decided to return the advance on a book that was 3/5 finished- a book that might well have taken me from Fordham to Columbia or Princeton or Yale- and devote the next ten years of my life to coaching and running youth programs in my Brooklyn neighborhood. It is a decision that I have never regretted. Not only did I have a chance to see my own two children mature into top flight athletes who played their sports in college, I had an opportunity to spend long hours with young people who came from some of Brooklyn's most hard pressed neighborhoods as well as Park Slope, which was then a mixed income community. Those experiences had a profound impact on me as a teacher and a scholar as well as bringing me great joy and a feeling of accomplishment. It is the players I coached who gave me an intensive exposure to hip hop, often on car rides around Brooklyn and Queens and up and down the Eastern seaboard , while revealing its relevance to their lives and experience. It was in those car rides in the early and mid 90's that I first heard Wu Tang, DMX, Biggie and JZ; along with stories that placed their music in context. It is through the basketball program I ran on Saturdays in JHS 51 that I learned that even the toughest young men, people most other coaches feared, could be reached with the right combination of love, respect and discipline, along with an opportunity to take leadership.

I came away from this experience with a deep belief in the potential of the most marginalized young people in our society, along with a deep respect for the power of teachers and coaches to change the world for the better.

Everything I have done since that time, as a scholar and teacher and public citizen, rests on what I learned during a time when the young people of Brooklyn were my teachers as well as people I coached.

School Reform, Charters and Gentrification; The Bronx Connection (with reference to Camden, Detroit, Buffalo and Newark)

Those in the Bronx who want to know what happens when the nation's most battered urban spaces get in the crosshairs of developers, investors and their kissing cousins, school reformers, have many places to choose from-Detroit, Camden, Newark, Buffalo are among the best examples
In all of those places, the public schools are one of the first institutions to come under assault. Using the rhetoric of "school failure" to go after institutions which stood virtually alone as community spaces in the face of disinvestment, abandonment and the crack epidemic, financiers and developers, along with local politicians, launch a campaign to close public schools and replace them with charter schools FROM WHICH THEY DIRECTLY benefit, through a 39 percent tax credit. In the process, they eliminate one of the few places where local residents can meet, and which has some tradition of democratic governance, with institutions that are privately managed to which the community has no access. Charterization is not just an attack on public education, it undermines poor communities capacity to resist undermocratic attacks on their communities. It clears the path to gentrification!

This is why Bronx activists should look very carefully at what is happening in education in their borough. 33 of 144 receivership schools in New York state are in the Bronx, many of them located in neighborhoods targeted by developers. All of these schools are in danger of being turned into charters if their test scores don't dramatically improve. Coincidently- though perhaps not- the Bronx Borough President just announced himself to be a strong supporter of charter schools and spoke at a big charter school rally organized by Eva Moskowitz of Success Academies.

The prospect of the South Bronx and West Bronx becoming majority charter school areas at a time when developers have an eye on those areas for major investments is truly frightening. It is why those fighting gentrification in the Bronx, and those fighting to preserve public education in the borough need to work together.

In both instances, the voice of community residents will be smothered in favor of powerful investors who benefit from what is promoted as reform and opportunity.

Time for a 180 Degree Reversal on Education Policy

As economic conditions worsen for both the middle class and the poor many children are coming to school harboring extreme stress. They are fearful, tense, in the worst instances lacking sleep and nourishment, wondering if anyone can care for them

The LAST thing they need when they get to school is more pressure, and more stress.

We need to make schools places where they are nurtured, loved, supported and given confidence.

But to do that, we need to cut back radically on the testing, and hire teachers who have the right personality to nurture students and the freedom to respond to them individually.

Teacher temps fearful for their jobs- which is what current reforms are flooding our schools with- is exactly what we don't need.

If we are going to save this generation of children, the ENTIRE array of reforms which this administration and the last one have endorsed have to be discarded, to be replaced by child centered pedagogy and entirely new methods of identifying, recruiting, and supporting great teachers.

And we must cherish and empower those great teachers we still have.

It is time for a 180 Degree reversal on school policies

Get rid of Common Core
Drastically reduce testing
Stop closing schools on the basis of tests
Do everything possible to keep our best teachers
Find new teachers who love children and plan to stay in their jobs for life

Why It's Not Irrational to Fear Gentrification- Especially in the Bronx

Gentrification is nothing new. There have always been urban development initiatives which have displaced poor and working class people, sometimes associated with urban renewal, sometimes shaped by market forces

But what makes gentrification so toxic and dangerous today, not only locally but globally, is that the immense concentration of wealth in a small number of hands, coupled with declining incomes for working class and middle class people. This gives large developers unprecedented economic and political power. The wealth of a single developer can exceed the combined wealth of an entire neighborhood! This gives them the power, not only to buy off politicians, but to get local business leaders and non profit organizations to support their plans, even if such plans may in the long run, damage their standing.because they will displace so many of their long time clients and customers.

This is why I worry when big developers set their sights on the Bronx. These individuals have billions of dollars at their disposal to distribute in communities where many people and businesses require heroic efforts to stay afloat. They can sweep aside opposition with breakneck speed and put through plans whose consequences won't be apparent until long after they are implemented.

Residents and activists need to organize now to at the very least slow down if not stop development, insist that it occur without displacement, and get community benefits agreements which strengthen local businesses and organizations.

It would also be good if they persuaded politicians to respect THEIR voice as much as billionaire developers, but that would be an uphill battle, to say the least.

An Oral History Inteview with the Bronx African American History Project With Lessons for Today

Yesterday, we resumed interviewing for the Bronx African American History Project by bringing in Mario Sprouse, a musician, composer, arranger, educator and musical director who grew up on Ritter Place in the Bronx in the 1950's and 1960's on the same block where the great jazz singer Maxine Sullivan lived. The story he told left everyone in the room enraptured. The community Mario Sprouse described growing up on a block of homeowners in the South Bronx defied every stereotype people have of Bronx neighborhoods during that period. It was multiracial and multicultural, filled with energy and, optimism, and provided a mentoring experience to many young people that prepared them for successful and productive lives. For Mario Sprouse, that mentoring came from his block, where people like Maxine Sullivan and the person who ran the dance studio down the street took a personal interest in him; in schools, where he got support and encouragement from teachers, most of them white, some black; and in the church he attended, St Augustine Presbyterian Church, whose minister Rev Edlar Hawkins was a powerful figure in the neighborhood and someone who influence hundreds of neighborhood youth to pursue professional careers. At St Augustine, Mario Sprouse sang in the choir, learned to play the organ, attended the Church's summer camp and performed with his musical group when he became a teenager. He also drew inspiration as a budding intellectual, from the famous African American political and cultural figures who came to the Church, among them Duke Ellington, Rev Martin Luther King, and Yaphet Kotto The story Mario Sprouse told us resembled the one told by civil rights leader and historian Vincent Harding. Both individuals benefited from mentoring they received in African American Churches and in Bronx schools, the first from Black ministers and Church elders, the second from a multiracial but largely white group of teachers..The combination prepared these two remarkable individuals for leadership in their chosen fields. There is a lesson here for those who chose to apply it, Strong communities and strong schools are BOTH needed for young people to flourish.

How Do I Explain "Gentrification?"

Imagine you and your family have been living in a neighborhood for decades. It's not perfect but its home. You have neighbors who are also friends. Stores that you feel comfortable in; Inexpensive restaurants that serve your favorite ethnic foods There is crime, but not as much as 20 years ago when you and your neighbors organized.to push the drug gangs out , get more police patroling during daylight hours and get the abandoned buildings knocked down and replaced with affordable housing.

Now after all that work you put into make the neighborhood safer and more livable, everything starts to change before your eyes. New people start moving in who never look at you when they pass you or when they do, look at you with pity and contempt, New buildings start going up, on the few remaining vacant lots, that none of your longtime neighbors can afford. Rents start creeping up, and then skyrocketing not only in apartments but in the commercial districts. Soon, the stores you have shopped in for years start closing, replaced by establishments which sell products you don't want at prices you can't afford.

And then the exodus begins. Friends and neighbors moving, not only out of the neighborhood, but out of the city, because it has become impossible for them to afford. After five years, you look around and you are a stranger where you once felt at home. None of the people who worked to bring back the neighborhood from crime and violence and disinvestment are still there

And the new people on your block look at you as if YOU represent crime and violence and danger, and the local police follow suit.

This is what has happened in city after city, neighborhood after neighborhood, from Fillmore in San Francisco to Harlem in NYC

It is the price of uncontrolled development in a nation where working class incomes are stagnant, the middle class is shrinking, and trickle down economics rules.

It has led to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people displaced from neighborhoods they have thought of as home, with more refugees being created every year

The Enemies Eva Moskowitz Has Made

Eva Moskowitz may be popular with Hedge Fund Managers, famous singers some politicians, and to be fair, many parents in her schools, but she is a lot less popular with

1. Parents, Teachers and Students in schools who are Co-Loated with Success Academy schools who have been insulted, ostracized deprived of classrooms, libraries and gymnasium space and treated like carriers of a dread disease that might "infect" Success Academy "scholars" and teachers. By now, these people number in the tens of thousands!

2. Parents whose children have been pushed out of Success Academy schools because they are considered behavioral problems who might undermine school discipline or lower test scores. This group now numbers in the hundreds.

3. Teachers who left Success Academies because they couldn't stand the authoritarian treatment, long hours, and lack of union protection. This group also now numbers in the hundreds.

Finally, and this is something few will talk about, there are Charter School founders, principals and teachers who abhor the authoritarian methods and relentless self promotion Eva employs and feel they give the entire Charter School Movement a bad name.

When you add up all these groups, you will see why Eva could NEVER be elected Mayor of New York City, and why so few people are defending her in the wake of revelations of abusive practices at her schools