The Battle Against Corporate School Reform Must Be Waged Locally Before It Can Succeed Natinonally

For the foreseeable future, the battle to save public education from uncontrolled testing and Corporate control will not be won at the national level. Both political parties are in the pockets of the Billionaire reformers, and the national leadership of teachers unions are desperately trying to save their organizations by making compromises that will leave them free to fight another day, if in fact there is anything left worth fighting for. This means that teachers, students and parents are on their own in challenging policies which dumb down the curriculum, undermine creative thinking, squeeze out the arts, and put young people’s health at risk by eliminating physical activity both during and after school. Every policy being promoted nationally, by both political parties, works to turn schools into zones of fear and stress for students and those who work in them. All across the nation, these policies are producing a simmering rage. But since that rage gets no support or recognition from elected officials, and is largely disregarded by commercial media, most people nurture their rage in private, or in small groups discussions among families or friends. This is where we- education activists- come in. Whether we are teachers, principals, parents, students or just concerned citizens-we must provide leadership on the local level which affirms the validity of this rage and turns it into action. The first step is to join the discussions about how public education is being destroyed wherever it takes place. At the workplace, in the hair salon, at little league practice, in the doctors office, at PTA and union meetings. Let people know that they are not alone, that there are national organizations working to help people fight back to against excessive testing, restore play arts and recess, and stop the closing of schools against the wishes of the communities they are located in. Wear buttons, pass out flyers, make everyone in contact with you know where you stand. And don’t worry about political affiliation. When it comes to fighting to make sure children enjoy school and are not beaten down by testing,, you will find support runs the gamut from the Tea Party to revolutionary Socialists. Then start organizing local actions that are winnable, whether it involves picketing school boards to demand the restoration of sports arts and music, or collective actions that involve opting out or walking out of tests. Make your protests fun and sponsor dinners and picnics and benefit concerts to promote your activities. And once you get a following, start working on local elected officials to get them to support you. You are much likely to make headway with people who depend on their election for parent and teacher votes, than with national party officials who depend on big contributions from billionaire education reforms to fund their campaigns. Having raised my voice about the threat to public education at every venue I have mentioned- at the salon where I get my hair cut, at my grand daughter’s track practice, in my office at work, at my tennis club and at family gatherings and parties to which I have been invited, I can assure you that a growing variety of people agree with me that excessive testing is destroying our schools. So don’t give up and don’t beat your head against the wall because your Governor and both Presidential candidates won’t listen to a word you stay. This battle has to be won one neighborhood, one school, and one city at a time. When something this wrong has been unleashed, we have to give people the confidence to follow their own best instincts.. We must not only become leaders, we must try to become the heroes we spent our lives looking up to. The crisis we face demands nothing less.

I Am A Teacher

I am a teacher. Just for the record I did not give a Triple A rating to 5,000 worthless mortgages bundled into derivatives so they could be sold around the world at a huge commissions by the world's great financial institutions I did not take a 40 million dollar golden parachute for running an auto company into the ground and requiring to get a federal bailout I did not close a factory in the middle of the night and move it's operations to Southeast Asia, leaving 2,000 people without jobs they had held for decades. I did not buy up buildings in Harlem and raise the rents, forcing longtime tenants to move to apartments in the Bronx where they were sometimes doubled and tripled up with other families I did not sit on a Fiscal Control Board that require New York City Public schools, in the late 70's, to close their after school programs and night centers and shut down music programs in the schools that were the best in the country and probably the best in the world I did not decided to use stop and frisk tactics to terrorize and intimidate young people of color in cities and towns around the country, nor did I pass drug laws which ended up putting more than 2 million people in the nation's prisons and jails So if you want to blame poverty, inequality, racism and the decline of the middle class on me, be my guest History has a way of taking revenge on liars and thieves.

A Culture Of Intimidation for the Poor- The Ugly Underside of Hipster New York

During the last two weeks , I visited two remarkable restaurants and gathering spots in once struggling sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx,the Clock Wine and Martini Bar on Lincoln Avenue in the Bronx, just South of the Bruckner Expressway, and Peaches on Lewis Avenue in the heart of Bed Stuy. In both places, the atmosphere was hip, and informal, the crowd multiracial and clearly at ease. Thought I was there on the invitation of friends, these were both spots I might come back to on my own because I felt so comfortable there This is not the first such experience I have had in neighborhood spots in what were once considered tough neighborhoods. I felt the same way at Teddy’s Bar and Grill in Williamsbugh, where I have guest dj’d at the invitation of my friend Dennis O’Neill, at the Bruckner Bar and Grill in the Bronx, and at Camaradas El Barrio, the amazing bar, restaurant and music venue owned by my friend and former student Orlando Plaza in the heart of East Harlem I love places where the clientele is multiracial, where the food is affordable and good ( and in the case of Caramarads El Barrio, better than good) and where I can find my favorite beers. If I looked at these places in isolation, I would think New York, under Michael Bloomberg, had become a kind of Hipster Heaven, where young cool people from different racial and cultural backgrounds, and from all over the world, could find their culture and sociability institutionalized in neighborhood spots all over the city But when meeting my friend and former student Tiffany Raspberry, a political consultant who lives on Myrtle Avenue, two blocks from the Marcy houses, I got a chilling picture of how Hipster Heaven is maintained in neighborhoods which adjoin large low income housing projects. Tiffany said, quite bluntly,” you never see kids from the Marcy Houses on Myrtle Avenue.” The police, she said, send a message that they are not welcome on those streets, where hipsters ride bikes and Hasidic families can be seen in growing numbers shopping and sending their kids to school. “So this is what stop and frisk accomplishes” I asked her. “Exactly” she said. I then thought about a couple of similar situations I had been in recently where a similar dynamic was at work. Every Thursday afternoon, I take my grand daughter Avery to track practice in Red Hook Park, passing by the Red Hook project on my way to and from the track. On the more than fifteen occasions I have gone to Red Hook, I have not seen one group of tough looking adolescents congregating in the school yard, hanging in the street, or walking through the park. If this had been fifteen years ago, their presence would have been unmistakable, and something to be ignored at one’s peril. What happened? Are all those kids working? We know that can’t be true, given Black, Latino and youth unemployment rates? Are they all in jail? As full as the jails are, they aren’t holding the majority of adolescents in the city’s low income projects What seems to be going on is that intrusive, intimidating policing, and stop and frisk tactics, are keeping young people of color confined to social spaces where they aren’t seen as a threat to middle class people. Where those spaces are it would take young people themselves- or an urban ethnographer- to enumerate, but it sure isn’t in Red Hook park , it sure isn’t on Myrtle Avenue, it sure isn’t on the Smith Street Restaurant district, it sure isn’t on 7th Avenue in Park Slope, and apparently, it sure isn’t outside Peaches on Lewis Avenue or the Clock Win Bar in the South Bronx! And though I believed Tiffany, it took something I saw heading down to Peaches to hip the point home. As we were heading into Bed Stuy, four blocks South of the Marcy houses, I saw a group of five, young white cops walking together in a group, heading North. Never had I seen so many police patrolling in those numbers. But that was nothing! Three blocks south of that, I saw a group of eight policy officers,two black, six white ( or Latino) walking north in the same direction. This totally freaked me out. I had never seen so many police officers walking in a group? Why were they there? Why this concentration of overwhelming force. And then I thought about what Tiffany said. It required this concentration of police manpower to keep young people trapped in poverty penned into their project grounds while the increasing wealthy people moving into their neighborhood enjoy the upscale restaurants and cafes without fears for their safety. I certainly felt safe in Peaches, surrounded by Black folks of all ages, but at what price my safety. New York is the greatest city in the world if you have cash in your pocket and love culture and the arts, but if you are poor, and a person of color, Michael Bloomberg’s New Y ork can be an expensively maintained prison that nullifies your existence.

Why Business Leaders Make a Mess When They Are Put In Charge of Schools- A Personal Reflection

Every time I have a conversation with someone who has been successful in business- something that happens more than you might think because of the sports I play, tennis and golf- it strikes me they have no understanding of what motivates a teacher. As people who have marked their own success in life through the accumulation of income, investments and property, they find it hard to respect people whose personal satisfaction comes largely through non-material rewards. They think it odd that a person as competitive as I am on the court could possibly devote myself to a field which has no chance of making me rich and look on most teachers and professors with a bemused contempt that I only get an exemption from because of my sports skills. This is why it is frightening that business leaders have taken charge of education in the United States. Because the only things they take seriously as motivation are material rewards and fear of losing one's job or business they are convinced that schools in the US can only be improved a business style reward and punishment system is given primacy. They love the idea of performance evaluation based on hard data ( with student test scores being the equivalent of sales figures and/or profits), of merit increments for those who succeed, and removal of those who fail. However, because they fail to understand how much of a teachers job satisfaction comes from relationship building and watching students develop over a lifetime, they create systems of evaluation which totally eliminate such experiences because they cannot be reliably measured. The result, sad to say, is that measurement trumps real learning. The inevitable results are massive demoralization of the teaching force,(teacher morale is now at the lowest in recorded history),a narrowing of the curriculum to constant test preparation, and a "brain drain" of talented teachers from high poverty schools to those located in more prosperous neighborhoods Why we actually allowed people who are successful in one field to be given control of a field in which they have no experience and no track record is a question historians of the future will need to ponder, but the results, so far, have been near catastrophic. All across the country, we have more and more teachers who hate their jobs because their job security has been destroyed, and more and more children who hate school because of the constant testing It's time to change course.The Great Recession should have shattered once and for all the idea that the measurement and motivation systems of American business are superior to those in the public sector ( eg Do we want the same quality of teacher ratings as Moody's and Standard and Poors applied to mortgage based derivatives?) American business needs to clean up its own act, not applied its flawed methods to other fields. If we continue on the path we are on, we may well see the American Education system become as corrupt, and unstable as the Global Financial System.

A Tale if Two Bronx Neighborhoods

Two Bronx neighborhoods I have studied through a research project I direct, the Bronx African American History Project ( www.fordham.edu/baahp) havve produced more varieties of popular music than any neighborhood in the world. From the 1940's through the 1970's these two neighborhoods, Morrisania and Hunts Point, were the home to musicians, and students in the public schools, who helped create Mambo, Be-Bop, Rock and Roll,Doo Wop, Salss, Funk,and Latin Soul.. Some of the key artists who lived , performed in those communities were Tito Puete, Arsenio Rodriguez, Thelonious Monk,Mongo Santamaria, Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, the Chords, the Chantels, Lou Donaldson, Nancy Wilson, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and Ashford and Simpson. Later, from the 1970's to the present, when Grandmaster Flash was living and performing in Morrisania, these same neighborhoods helped spawn hip hop, and more recently Bachata, Cumbia, and Hip Life, the music of Dominican, Mexioan and Ghanaian immigrants. The key to the musical creativity of these communities was their unique ethnic mix. In the 1940's and 1950's, African Americans, West Indians, and Puerto Ricans moved into these neighborhoods which were largely populated by Jews and Italians. The Jews and Italians didn't move out right away, creating communities which were more racially and culturally diverse than any other neighborhoood in New York City, quite possibly the country. The result, people shared their music and created hybrid musical traditions, and the schools, which had great music programs, helped nurture them. When people discover how many great artists and great musical genres came out of these neighborhoods, they get very excited. Today, I hold musical walking tours of these communities for people from all over the country and all over the world!

The Cruelty at the Heart of School Reform

The cruelty at the heart of current school reform initiatives was tellingly revealed in New York City yesterday when 3,500 pink slips were sent out to teachers, administrators and school workers in 24 schools targeted for closing as part of the national "school turnaround" strategy supported by the Obama Administration and most Republicans. Who are these people? Most of them are people from working class families, a good proportion women of color, who grew up in the same or similar communities these schools were located in. That they are being blamed for the failures of these schools is unconscionable, but their firing also shreds the social fabric in hard pressed neighborhoods suffering terribly during the current economic crisis. Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people around the country have lost their jobs as a result of school turnaround initiatives and thus far, the only gains that we see have been in profits for test companies, contracts for charter schools, and jobs for high paid consultants who Departments of Education locally and nationally hire to evaluate the data. School Reformers say they are in a life and death battle- for what To undermine the middle class in communities of color? To fill schools in low income communities with fear lest they too be closed? To make students hate school by deluging them with tests which are necessary to determine which schools and teachers are effective? To crowd out arts, play and recess less they get in the way of testing? Where are the results in equity and performance that justify this level of pain? Of does profit and greed, in a country this unequal, undermine compassion and common sense

Undermining What Works in Low Income Communities to Install Standardized Tests

Only people with little understanding of life in low-income communities and no sense of history would allow arts and after school programs to be cut to make room for standardized tests, as is currently happening in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, much of California, and communities around the nation. In the more than 300 oral history interviews we conducted for the Bronx African American History Project, person after person referred to a music teacher, a coach, or a director of an after school center, as the person most responsible for saving them from the streets and/or inspiring them to pursue higher education. As someone who attended NYC public schools, went to "night center" three days a week, and ended up on a team and in the school band in high school, I can testify to the accuracy of those observations. Teacher/mentors whom help students develop strengths in things they are passionate about and which bring joy in to their lives are a priceless resource in working class and poor neighborhoods. Turn them into drill instructors for tests and you undermine the transformative power of schools in the very places that power is most needed