On this day, we remember the life and work of the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is inspiring to read his speeches, and I urge you to do so.
Today you will hear politicians praise his legacy even while they betray that same legacy.
Dr. King was a champion of the weak and powerless. He fought for the rights and dignity of Black Americans, and he was a champion for all Americans whose basic needs had been ignored and whose rights had been trampled upon.
These days, one is likely to hear wealthy and powerful people claim that they are “leading the civil rights issue of our time” by pushing to eliminate public schools; Dr. King never, never opposed public schools. He wanted them to be desegregated and he wanted them to provide equality of educational opportunity to all children, so that every child had the ability to develop to his or her full potential. It is jarring indeed to hear Donald Trump declare (as he did in his first State of the Union Address) that “school choice” is the “civil rights issue of our time.” No, it is not. Dr. King never said that. His words should not be appropriated by billionaires, hedge fund managers, and those oppose Dr. King’s fight to eliminate poverty.
Steven Singer wrote this post about Dr. King’s education philosophy.
He writes:
When we think of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we usually think of the towering figure of the Civil Rights Movement who gave the “I have a dream” speech during the March on Washington in 1963.
However, as a teacher, I find myself turning to something he wrote in 1947 when he was just an 18-year-old student at Morehouse College.
While finishing his undergraduate studies in sociology, he published an essay in the student paper called “The Purpose of Education.”
Two sections immediately jump off the page. The first is this:
“We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.”
So for King it wasn’t enough for schools to teach facts. It wasn’t enough to teach skills, math, writing, reading, history and science. The schools are also responsible for teaching children character – how to be good people, how to get along with each other.
It’s a worthy goal.
Singer goes on to analyze the kind of school–public, private, or charter–that is likeliest to achieve Dr. King’s goals.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course, Deformers and Distrupters, as dim and narrowly focused on achieving their rapacious ends as they are, also understand that character, for good or ill, is one of the products of that part of enculturation that we refer to as education. That’s why they are so exciting about teaching grit. This is all about a kind of education for the children of the Proles that will teach them to sit down, shut up, and attend with servility to whatever inane, tedious task their betters put in front of them via depersonalized education software. This is the true meaning of the Deformish/Reformish phrase
21st century skills.” The primary one of these is gritful servility, for what few jobs there are in the near future will be low-paying, gig economy service jobs. “Will you be taking that latte on the veranda, Mr. Gates?”
cx: are so excited about teaching “grit.”
From the Reformish Lexicon:
21st-century Workforce Skills. Absolute, utter, unqualified servility; grit, tenacity, and perseverance in pursuit of the same.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/from-the-reformish-lexicon/
Slight revision:
From the Reformish Lexicon:
21st-century Workforce Skills. Absolute, utter, unqualified servility; grit (tenacity, or perseverance) in pursuit of the same. Required for the low-paid gig economy and service Prole jobs of the future. “Will you be taking that latte on the verandah, Mr. Gates?”
Integrated public schools where diverse students work together are an expression of Dr. King’s vision for our country. We need schools that serve all students and teach students to accept individual differences and treat each other with respect. While teachers are so busy with the demands of teaching, part of a teacher’s responsibility is to encourage students to be kind and respectful to each other. Students spend a lot more time at home than they do in school. Students arrive at school with varying attitudes towards others. The schools can model acceptance and kindness towards others as well as the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
Teaching in Florida, I’ve seen this first-hand–the sons and daughters of racist parents who, going to school with kids of other races, learn better. Racism is a distillation of two combined products: ignorance (of the Other) and fear (born of that ignorance).
And, of course, ignorance, fear, and racism have for some time now been stoked by Don the Con and his borrowed brain, Propaganda Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Miller. I am reminded of a sign often carried by elderly people in protests today: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this s**t.”
I can’t believe it either. We should be more evolved than where we are. Racism remains a scourge. It is more subtle in many areas like real estate or privatization of public education, but it is still very much present. Unfortunately, having a black president caused all the fear and hate to bubble up to the surface. DJT and his band of deplorables are a catalyst for latent white supremacy.
For some reason, it is appropriate to refer to “a basket of deplorables.” I prefer a “rabble of deplorables.”
an additional sign: I can’t believe I have to protest that democracy is better than fascism
I love this!
I fear we’re not teaching kids WHY democracy is so good. To do this, it seems to me one must contrast democracy to the old feudal order, monarchy, and the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. This is a long, slow, hard labor. But it’s out of fashion. Instead we’re having kids exercise mental skills on random historical topics, privileging mental weightlifting over the instilling of the mind-shaping knowledge of the ways humans have organized themselves politically. This approach is the opposite of what Jefferson, Madison and MLK prescribed. We ignore their advice at our peril.
Depends on who you’re talking about, Ponderosa. I teach about this every day, and I know a lot of colleagues who also teach about democracy and how to protect it.
TOW: I’m thinking of the approach that the new CA history frameworks prescribe. Is there no push to elevate skills over content in Utah?
A really important point, Ponderosa. This is why we must teach our students about Stalin and the NKVD, why we must have the read 1984 and “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “The Mystery of Heroism” and Johnny Got His Gun and Slaughterhouse Five and Player Piano.
“school choice” is itself a misnomer since ed reformers completely exclude public schools from their advocacy and work.
Go read any high profile ed reformer and look for something positive that applies to public schools or public school students. They simply don’t work for public school students. In fact, they’re deliberately excluded.
It’s fine to have charter school advocates in ed reform and it’s fine to have private school advocates in ed reform but public school advocates are barred.
Our students don’t exist in this “movement”, other than to be tested and even then the tests are only used to promote the schools they prefer.
90% of the kids in this country are “the control group” in ed reform. That’s their only value. If you’re electing ed reformers or hiring ed reformers in government you’re hiring people who return no value to public school students, because they’re ideologically opposed to the existence of their schools and hope to replace them with a different system.
It’s a bad deal for public school students and it hasn’t worked out well for them.
As an example, I can’t point to a single thing Ohio accomplished last year that even applies to public school students, let alone any benefit to them. Ohio expanded vouchers and increased funding to charter schools. Public school students? The dead last priority, once again. Nothing for them.
There is no choice of public schools in New Orleans, which is the deformer Mecca.
Here’s the ed reform promise to public school students- they won’t deliberately harm them.
Why would you hire people using that incredibly low standard? You don’t hire and pay people to NOT harm 90% of kids. That’s nuts.
You can demand more than that of politicians and other public employees. You can demand they actually contribute something. At minimum.
They’ve somehow convinced us all that “not harming public schools” is worth paying them. It’s not.
This piece shows how today’s teachers, including those who profess to revere King, have an almost diametrically opposite view of education than MLK. What teacher today believes schools should “transmit…the accumulated knowledge of the race”? MLK benefitted from a traditional, knowledge-rich education (he read and revered Plato among others). Modern pedagogues have nuked that and replaced it with a mutant, “21st century skills” education. Kids now get a mere fraction of what King got. Schools today insure intellectual poverty. King would be appalled.
Thanks to this holiday, one set of facts that we DO teach, thankfully, is the story of MLK (at least in cursory fashion). Every kid knows who he is. This is important, as even the anti-content crowd would probably acknowledge. But if knowing MLK –not just doing brain-training exercises around the topic of MLK –is important, aren’t there other things that are important to simply know? It occurred to me today that many of my seventh graders nowadays seem to know nothing about Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. I suspect one reason is the switch from celebrating their birthdays individually to celebrating generic “Presidents’ Day”. From a civics education perspective, this shift was a disaster.
As long as we think, political figures are the most important figures of history to learn about, we make politics more important than anything else.
Equality of education to all can only be achieved through a public school system. That system can assure that a quality of education is not based on profit or greed. As well the public school system draws the teachers most capable of providing that quality education.
However, it is extremely important to realize that the fundamental system of education was never designed to serve all children. We have an outdated fail system that feeds the pipeline to prison. We have letter grades that tell students that they are smart or stupid. We have a system that keeps advanced students back and refuses to wait for those who don’t blossom as fast as others. We teach math that is 90% useless. Who really needs to know about the quadratic equation.
Sand that is just the beginning. Teachers and handcuffed to a system where the political elite can call them failures.
It is time to Stop Politically Driven Education and let the system change from the classroom up. It will never change from the top down. Let the revolution begin!
School Choice? Who funds data science?
“In the first part of the talk, we will consider
the design of two-sided matching algorithms for problems
like residency matching and school choice.”
“Duke Computer Science Colloquium
Designing Matching Algorithms and Collaborative Project
Experiences in Computer Science
Brandon Fain
LSRC D106
Monday January 27 2020
12:00PM – 1:00PM
Lunch served at 11:45 am.
Abstract
Designing algorithms is a fundamental task for computer
scientists that goes from theory to implementation and
application. In the first part of the talk, we will consider
the design of two-sided matching algorithms for problems
like residency matching and school choice. We will practice
using enumeration, lists, and sets in Python in order to
create a working matching application, and will consider the
theoretical and practical design criteria that might make
one implementation preferable to another. Along the way, we
will see the famous Gale-Shapley algorithm for matching and
some real-world implementations of matching algorithms.In
the second half of the talk, we will step back and consider
how the approach of the first half reflects a larger goal of
engaging students in the process of becoming computer
scientists through active and collaborative learning. We
will discuss integrating collaborative and open-ended
student-driven projects in courses and co-curricular
experiences like CS+, a structured summer program for
computer science projects.
Biography
Brandon Fain is an assistant research professor of computer
science at Duke University, where he teaches courses on
algorithms and data science and organizes the CS+ summer
undergraduate projects program. His interests include
working with undergraduate researchers, developing
collaborative and project-driven courses, and conducting
research in algorithmic fairness and computational social
choice. He completed his PhD in algorithms at the Department
of Computer Science at Duke University in May 2019.
Host: Susan Rodge”