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The Context of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2026 //
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Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was written in April 1963. Dr. King wrote in response to a public statement by Birmingham religious leaders who called on Dr. King to be patient and not to engage in demonstrations that would provoke resistance.

This context in which he wrote the letter appears on the website of The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

In April 1963 King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with Birmingham, Alabama’s existing local movement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in a massive direct action campaign to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year. As ACMHR founder Fred Shuttlesworth stated in the group’s “Birmingham Manifesto,” the campaign was “a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive” (ACMHR, 3 April 1963). 

The campaign was originally scheduled to begin in early March 1963, but was postponed until 2 April when the relatively moderate Albert Boutwell defeated Birmingham’s segregationist commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, in a run-off mayoral election. On 3 April the desegregation campaign was launched with a series of mass meetings, direct actions, lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall, and a boycott of downtown merchants. King spoke to black citizens about the philosophy of nonviolence and its methods, and extended appeals for volunteers at the end of the mass meetings. With the number of volunteers increasing daily, actions soon expanded to kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library, and a march on the county building to register voters. Hundreds were arrested. 

On 10 April the city government obtained a state circuit court injunction against the protests. After heavy debate, campaign leaders decided to disobey the court order. King declared: “We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction which is an unjust, undemocratic and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process” (ACMHR, 11 April 1963). Plans to continue to submit to arrest were threatened, however, because the money available for cash bonds was depleted, so leaders could no longer guarantee that arrested protesters would be released. King contemplated whether he and Ralph Abernathy should be arrested. Given the lack of bail funds, King’s services as a fundraiser were desperately needed, but King also worried that his failure to submit to arrests might undermine his credibility. King concluded that he must risk going to jail in Birmingham. He told his colleagues: “I don’t know what will happen; I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act” (King, 73). 

On Good Friday, 12 April, King was arrested in Birmingham after violating the anti-protest injunction and was kept in solitary confinement. During this time King penned the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on the margins of the Birmingham News, in reaction to a statement published in that newspaper by eight Birmingham clergymen condemning the protests. King’s request to call his wife, Coretta Scott King, who was at home in Atlanta recovering from the birth of their fourth child, was denied. After she communicated her concern to the Kennedy administration, Birmingham officials permitted King to call home. Bail money was made available, and he was released on 20 April 1963. 

In order to sustain the campaign, SCLC organizer James Bevel proposed using young children in demonstrations. Bevel’s rationale for the Children’s Crusade was that young people represented an untapped source of freedom fighters without the prohibitive responsibilities of older activists. On 2 May more than 1,000 African American students attempted to march into downtown Birmingham, and hundreds were arrested. When hundreds more gathered the following day, Commissioner Connor directed local police and fire departments to use force to halt the demonstrations. During the next few days images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, clubbed by police officers, and attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, triggering international outrage. While leading a group of child marchers, Shuttlesworth himself was hit with the full force of a fire hose and had to be hospitalized. King offered encouragement to parents of the young protesters: “Don’t worry about your children, they’re going to be alright. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job for not only themselves, but for all of America and for all mankind” (King, 6 May 1963). 

In the meantime, the white business structure was weakening under adverse publicity and the unexpected decline in business due to the boycott, but many business owners and city officials were reluctant to negotiate with the protesters. With national pressure on the White House also mounting, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent Burke Marshall, his chief civil rights assistant, to facilitate negotiations between prominent black citizens and representatives of Birmingham’s Senior Citizen’s Council, the city’s business leadership. 

The Senior Citizen’s Council sought a moratorium on street protests as an act of good faith before any final settlement was declared, and Marshall encouraged campaign leaders to halt demonstrations, accept an interim compromise that would provide partial success, and negotiate the rest of their demands afterward. Some black negotiators were open to the idea, and although the hospitalized Shuttlesworth was not present at the negotiations, on 8 May King told the negotiators he would accept the compromise and call the demonstrations to a halt. 

When Shuttlesworth learned that King intended to announce a moratorium he was furious—about both the decision to ease pressure off white business owners and the fact that he, as the acknowledged leader of the local movement, had not been consulted. Feeling betrayed, Shuttlesworth reminded King that he could not legitimately speak for the black population of Birmingham on his own: “Go ahead and call it off … When I see it on TV, that you have called it off, I will get up out of this, my sickbed, with what little ounce of strength I have, and lead them back into the street. And your name’ll be Mud” (Hampton and Fayer, 136). King made the announcement anyway, but indicated that demonstrations might be resumed if negotiations did not resolve the situation shortly. 

By 10 May negotiators had reached an agreement, and despite his falling out with King, Shuttlesworth joined him and Abernathy to read the prepared statement that detailed the compromise: the removal of “Whites Only” and “Blacks Only” signs in restrooms and on drinking fountains, a plan to desegregate lunch counters, an ongoing “program of upgrading Negro employment,” the formation of a biracial committee to monitor the progress of the agreement, and the release of jailed protesters on bond (“The Birmingham Truce Agreement,” 10 May 1963). 

Birmingham segregationists responded to the agreement with a series of violent attacks. That night an explosive went off near the Gaston Motel room where King and SCLC leaders had previously stayed, and the next day the home of King’s brother Alfred Daniel King was bombed. President John F. Kennedy responded by ordering 3,000 federal troops into position near Birmingham and making preparations to federalize the Alabama National Guard. Four months later, on 15 September, Ku Klux Klan members bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. King delivered the eulogy at the 18 September joint funeral of three of the victims, preaching that the girls were “the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity” (King, “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” 18 September 1963). 

Footnotes

“The Birmingham Truce Agreement,” 10 May 1963, in Eyes on the Prize, ed. Carson et al., 1991. 

Douglas Brinkley, “The Man Who Kept King’s Secrets,” Vanity Fair (April 2006): 156–171.

Eskew, But for Birmingham, 1997. 

Hampton and Fayer, with Flynn, Voices of Freedom, 1990. 

King, Address delivered at mass meeting, 6 May 1963, FRC-DSI-FC. 

King, Eulogy for the Martyred Children, 18 September 1963, in A Call to Conscience, ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, Shuttlesworth, and Abernathy, Statement, “For engaging in peaceful desegregation demonstrations,” 11 April 1963, BWOF-AB.

King, Why We Can’t Wait, 1964.

Shuttlesworth and N. H. Smith, “Birmingham Manifesto,” 3 April 1963, MLKJP-GAMK. Back to Top

Stanford

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

Categories Alabama, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Freedom, History, Injustice

Trump Strips Protection from 58 Million Acres of Wilderness

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2025 //
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Henry David Thoreau wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau understood that as humans we need to be nourished by contact with or immersion in the natural world. Environmentalists understand this. They fight the inexorable march of what we call progress, which clear-cuts forest and paves over what once were boundless plains. Today, most of us get into a car and drive for hours to connect to wilderness. And we find solace in those encounters.

Most presidents take pride in the number of acres of wilderness that they have saved for future generations and the number of national monuments they designated to preserve unique natural formations. Not Trump. Trump has been openly hostile to environmental protection and to any measures that reduce the risks of climate change.

Yesterday the administration announced that it was opening up 58 million acres for commercial development.

Lisa Friedman wrote in The New York Times:

The Trump administration said on Monday that it would open up 58 million acres of back country in national forests to road construction and development, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to repeal the 2001 “roadless rule” that had preserved the wild nature of nearly a third of the land in national forests in the United States. Ms. Rollins said the regulation was outdated.

“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” Ms. Rollins said in a statement. She said the repeal “opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests.”

Environmental groups said the plan could destroy some of America’s untouched landscapes and promised to challenge it in court.

The unspoiled land in question includes Tongass National Forest in Alaska, North America’s largest temperate rainforest; Reddish Knob in the Shenandoah Mountains, one of the highest points in Virginia; and millions of acres of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho.

“Most Americans value these pristine backcountry areas for their sense of wildness, for the clean water they provide, for the fishing and hunting and wildlife habitat,” said Chris Wood, the chief executive of Trout Unlimited, an environmental group.

Businesses are eager to chop down the timber. There’s profit in those untouched forests, maybe even tracts for homes. The word “pristine” in not in their vocabulary.

Tags
Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Alabama, Albuquerque, Cruelty, Deregulation, Disruption, Environment, Extremism

Alabama: Democrat Wins Special Election by Focusing on Abortion

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2024 //
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Alabama has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, and its highest court recently banned in vitro fertilization. In a special election for the legislation, candidate Marilyn Lands swept to victory by emphasizing reproductive rights.

Politico reported:

An Alabama Democrat who campaigned aggressively on abortion access won a special election in the state Legislature on Tuesday, sending a message that abortion remains a winning issue for Democrats, even in the deep South.

Marilyn Lands won a state House seat in a rare competitive race to represent a district that includes parts of Huntsville. Lands, a mental health professional, centered her bid on reproductive rights and criticized the state’s near-total abortion ban along with a recent state Supreme Court ruling that temporarily banned in vitro fertilization. 

“Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation,” Lands said in a statement. “Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.”

Her opponent, Madison City Council member Teddy Powell, focused his campaign on economic development and infrastructure.

Lands spoke openly about her own abortion experience, when she had a nonviable pregnancy that ended in abortion two decades ago. Her campaign ran a television ad sharing that story.

“It’s shameful that today women have fewer freedoms than I had two decades ago,” Lands says in the ad.

Open the link to finish the story.

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Democrats, Elections, Gender

Alexandra Petri: Congratulations! That Cluster of Cells is a child!

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2024 //
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Alexandra Petri is a humorist for The Washington Post. She wrote today about the crazy decision by the Alabama Supreme Court that a frozen embryo (a fertilized egg) is a child. Destroying the frozen embryo is murder.

She begins:

Having kids is nothing like they tell you it will be! How tiny they are, and how you can hardly see them without a microscope. How you can’t hold them, not even once. How they don’t have anything that could be regarded, even optimistically, as a laugh, or a face. Isn’t being a parent the best? Isn’t it laughably cruel that the Alabama Supreme Court says that this is already a child? That this cluster of hopeful cells that you have been dreaming could become a baby is actually a person already? You would be laughing, if you could stop crying.

What an appallingly cruel thing to say to people already going through so much to have a child, people who were prepared to endure the grueling in vitro fertilization process of treatments and injections and embryo development before their pregnancy could even begin. What a ridiculous thing to say to anyone with a modicum of sense.

Don’t believe the evidence of your senses. Embryos are children. Flour is cake. These acorns are an old-growth forest. This half-baked insulting nonsense of a ruling is justice.

You know what they always say about people: They are invisible to the naked eye and can be stored conveniently in vials in a hospital freezer. They are discernible only to God and the Alabama judiciary. You don’t need to feed them, ever. They don’t need books. They don’t need clean water or fresh air or sunshine — in fact, they couldn’t survive a minute outside the glass dish.

How did the Alabama judges know? God told them.

Trump came out against the Alabama decision, and most Republicans are rapidly backtracking. They say they want motmre children to be born, and IVF is good. Now that Trump has given his blessing to IVF, watch the Republicans pivot. only poor Nikki Haley is left out in the cold, because her snap reaction was to praise the decision.

Categories Alabama, Childhood, Humor, Religion, Science

These Tanks Are Storing Tens of Thousands of Frozen Embryos

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2024 //
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Nitrogen tanks held tens of thousands of frozen embryos and eggs at a fertility lab in New York. CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Do you think that the judges on the Alabama Supreme Court ever saw a storage room in an IVF Clinic that was holding tens of thousands of “extrauterine” children in containers?

The New Republic provided context for the Alabama ruling that frozen embryos are children.

For the first time, a frozen embryo has been recognized by the law as a person with rights. This decision by the Alabama Supreme Court last week is a huge victory for anti-abortion groups, who have long sought to pass fetal personhood laws. This time, by declaring not just a fetus but a fertilized egg in a lab the equivalent of an “unborn child,” the courts have done them one better. If this keeps up, anti-abortion groups may succeed at outlawing both abortion and in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

This case was about whether couples whose embryos have been inadvertently destroyed in a lab can sue for wrongful death. The embryos in question are eggs that have been fertilized outside the uterus and cryopreserved by a fertility clinic for later implantation. The couples’ attorneys cast embryos cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen as “embryonic children” and “human lives.” They seem to have found a receptive audience on the Alabama Supreme Court, with the decision referring multiple times to what the majority called “extrauterine children.”

This case was the culmination of explicit anti-abortion campaigning. The judges based their ruling in part on a recent amendment to the state constitution, enshrining the “rights of unborn children” in law. When voters considered this amendment in a 2018 ballot initiative, the political director of the anti-abortion group Alliance for a Pro-Life Alabama told the Associated Press that the amendment would “position Alabama in the future for public policy decisions on abortion if Roe. v. Wade was overturned.” Indeed, the Christian-right legal advocacy organization that brought the case overturning Roe, Alliance Defending Freedom, celebrated the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in the IVF case, the group’s senior counsel adding they hoped “that this ruling encourages voters, lawmakers, and courts to recognize that life is a human right, no matter the circumstances.”

The article goes on to explain that the next frontier for the anti-abortion movement is embryo adoption.

Categories Alabama, Health, Science

Alabama: Governor Fires Director of Early Childhood Education for Using “Woke” Teacher Training Book

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2023 //
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Insensitivity and indifference to racism seem to be deeply embedded in the Republican Party. Especially, though not exclusively, in the South.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey just forced Secretary of Early Childhood Education Barbara Cooper to resign over a book designed to train teachers to be aware of the different backgrounds and challenges of their students.

In a Friday afternoon news release, Gina Maiola, communications director for the governor’s office, said Ivey had accepted Cooper’s resignation after learning of a pre-K educator resource book that included “woke concepts.”

The book is the National Association for the Education of Young Children Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book, 4th Edition. It focuses on teaching children up to age of 8.

Cooper was unable to be reached Friday afternoon. The NAEYC said in a statement Friday evening that the program had been used for almost four decades and served as “the foundation for high-quality early childhood education across states and communities.”

“While not a curriculum, it is a responsive, educator-developed, educator-informed, and research-based resource that has been honed over multiple generations to support teachers in helping all children thrive and reach their full potential, ” the statement said. “Building on the good work that is happening in states and communities, NAEYC looks forward to continuing its partnership with families, educators, and policymakers to further our shared goals of offering joyful learning environments that see, support, and reflect all children and their families.”

In her email, Maiola said the governor’s office received a complaint about the book teaching white privilege, structural racism and messaging promoting “equality, dignity and worth” around LGBTQIA+ identities.

An Alabama Reflector review of the book, running over 800 pages in electronic form, found it focused on encouraging teachers to be aware of inequities, implicit bias and the diverse backgrounds of children in order to be better teachers and create welcoming environments for their students.

The book does not appear to tell teachers to discuss these issues with children directly.

“Teachers need to be particularly aware of providing supporting environments and responses to children who are members of marginalized groups and those who have been targets of bias and stereotyping,” one passage said.

Please open the link and read the rest of this shameful episode.

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Curriculum, Research, Stupid

Alabama: $311,000 Missing from Charter School But No One Is Accountable

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2022 //
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For the first time, the state of Alabama audited a charter school. The audit discovered that $311,000 was missing. But no one will be held accountable because the bbookkeeping was so sloppy.

Birmingham’s Legacy Prep Charter School misspent or did not accurately track $311,517 in spending, over the course of two years, a state audit recently found. Some of that money was from public funds.

The audit, performed at special request of the Alabama State Department of Education, marked the first time the Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts was asked to conduct an audit of a charter school.

“Compliance monitoring led us to know there were issues,” State Superintendent Eric Mackey said, referring to the regular monitoring cycle of schools and districts. “It was serious enough that it got elevated,” he added, and resulted in the department asking for the special audit.

Many of the audit’s findings were related to the school’s lack of proper record-keeping; others were related to the school’s governance and compliance with the school’s charter contract, according to documents reviewed by AL.com.

The school’s CEO and founder, Jonta Morris, who resigned in 2021, was initially asked to repay $311,000, some of which was initially spent on TopGolf, airfare, gift cards and Life Touch Massage.

Chief Examiner Rachel Riddle said Morris eventually provided documentation and did not have to repay any amount. Ultimately, no one will repay any amount, she said.

“Our audit could not find one person that was culpable or should owe back the $311,000,” Riddle said, because of “the lack of organization and adequate documentation.”

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud

How Alabama Takes from the Poor and Gives to the Rich

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2022 //
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The New York Times Magazine recently published a startling article about Alabama’s tax system is designed to impoverish the poor and enrich the rich. Written by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, the article documents why Alabama remains a poor state with a high rate of poverty and underfunded public services. If you want to read a road map to how to institutionalize extreme poverty, racism, and underdevelopment, read “Alabama Takes from the Poor and Gives to the Rich.”

The author explains that the state constitution was written in 1904 by a convention controlled by rich landowners. It capped property taxes at a low rate, which meant that any public services had to be paid for by other taxes, fines, and fees. Fines and fees are assessed for almost every interaction with government.

He writes:

In states like Alabama, almost every interaction a person has with the criminal justice system comes with a financial cost. If you’re assigned to a pretrial program to reduce your sentence, each class attended incurs a fee. If you’re on probation, you’ll pay a fee to take your mandatory urine test. If you appear in drug court, you will face more fees, sometimes dozens of times a year. Often, you don’t even have to break the law; you’ll pay fees to pull a public record or apply for a permit. For poor people, this system is a trap, sucking them into a cycle of sometimes unpayable debt that constrains their lives and almost guarantees financial hardship.

While almost every state in the country, both red and blue, levies fines and fees that fall disproportionately on the bottom rung of the income ladder, the situation in Alabama is far more dramatic, thanks to the peculiarities of its Constitution. Over a century ago, wealthy landowners and businessmen rewrote the Constitution to cap taxes permanently. As a result, today, Alabama has one of the cruelest tax systems in the country.

Taxes on most property, for example, are exceptionally low. In 2019, property taxes accounted for just 7 percent of state and local revenue, the lowest among the states. (Even Mississippi, which also has low property taxes, got roughly 12 percent from property taxes. New Jersey, by contrast, got 29 percent.) Strapped for cash, all levels of government look for money anywhere they can get it. And often, that means creating revenue from fines and fees. A 2016 studyshowed that the median assessment for a felony in Alabama doubled between 1995 and 2005, to $2,000.

How did this unjust system take root?

In 1874, less than a decade into Reconstruction, the Democratic Party, representing the landowning, formerly slave-owning class, took over the state government in a rigged election and quickly passed a new Constitution that mandated taxes on property would remain permanently low.

In the next couple of decades, as cotton prices crashed, poor sharecroppers, both white and Black, banded together in a populist movement to unseat the elites who controlled the state. In response, in another set of contested elections, the elites called another constitutional convention to further consolidate their power over the state. “What is it that we want to do?” the convention president, John B. Knox, asked. “Establish white supremacy in this state.” But this time, he said, they wanted to “establish it by law — not by force or fraud.”

People like Knox weren’t just racist; they were virulently classist, too, and hoped to exclude all poor people from the political process. The result of the 1901 Constitution was the mass disenfranchisement and subjugation of poor people — white and Black. The Constitution established the basis for a literacy test, a poll tax and stringent residency requirements. By 1943, according to the Alabama Policy Institute, an estimated 520,000 Black people and 600,000 white people had been disqualified from voting by different aspects of the 1901 Constitution. “In most counties more whites were disenfranchised than registered,” the historian Wayne Flynt writes in his authoritative book “Alabama in the Twentieth Century,” “limiting the vote to a select elite.”

This system of minority rule starved public administration in the name of small government. The result was a “government of, by and for special interests,” writes Mr. Flynt. “The citizens of Alabama did not control their government. Trial lawyers, the Business Council of Alabama, ALFA, A.E.A. and their cohorts did.” And this government went about protecting the property owned by some of the wealthiest families and businesses in the state from any meaningful taxation. In 1920, property taxes accounted for 63 percent of state revenue, but by 1978, it was down to a measly 3.6 percent. In 1992, it was below 2 percent, he writes.

Alabama is an “internal colony,” controlled by out-of-state corporations and an elite, with no interest in change, progress, equality, or justice.

Sounds un-American to me.

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Funding, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Poverty, Racism

Alabama: Politicians Win, Educators Lose

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2021 //
16

Larry Lee, a close follower of education politics in Alabama and former board member in Montgomery, writes here about an ill-informed decision by Governor Kay Ivey. Over the objections of experienced educators, Governor Ivey vetoed a bill that would have delayed implementation of the Alabama Literacy Act by two years. The Act requires that third grades be retained if they can’t the third grade reading test.

Larry talked to some of the educators he respects most, and they were appalled.

The phone rang about 8 p.m. on Thursday night, May 27.  The person on the other end was dejected and discouraged.  I immediately recognized the voice of Hope Zeanah, a 40-year veteran educator, assistant superintendent of the Baldwin County school system and a former Alabama Elementary Principal of the Year.

In my book, Zeanah is one of the best educators anywhere.  She has learned a lot in her 40 years and knows how to convey her knowledge in a way that makes sense and is guided by what is best for children.

“I just wish politicians WOULD NOT make educational policies and leave educating children up to educators,” she said  “It makes us feel like they are saying we are not smart enough to make a decision for our students whether or not they should be promoted to the next grade. I feel like these type decisions are the reason we are seeing fewer young people going into education.”

Larry reviewed the literature about third grade retention and saw that it was not only controversial but some of the most respected experts thought it was detrimental to children.

But Alabama has been looking jealously at Mississippi’s NAEP scores and trying to copy the state next door. The secret to Mississippi’s success in fourth-grade NAEP is that it retains poor readers in third grade. That’s not really a strategy, it’s cheating. But it works for Mississippi. Apparently the illusion of success works as well as genuine success. A recent issue of The Economist lauded Mississippi as a national leader in literacy. But Mississippi gets those scores by retaining more third graders than any other state.

He writes:

“The so-called “Gold Standard” of all testing is the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).  This test is given across the country every two years to a random selection of fourth and eighth graders.  Only about 5,000 students in both grades are tested in each state.  This is probably themost misunderstood and abused test in the U.S.  (Especially by politicians who constantly want to break education down into only numbers.)

“(Go back to 2016 for a great example of misusing NAEP scores.  The state school board picked a new state superintendent that year.  Governor Robert Bentley had a vote and used it to be the deciding vote to hire Mike Sentance, a Boston attorney who had never been a teacher, principal or local superintendent.  His reason?  Massachusetts had the highest fourth-grade NAEP  scores on math in the country.  Sentance was a disaster and lasted only one year.)

“Truthfully, while no one pays much attention to retention info, they do like to compare NAEP scores.

“And Mississippi has done very well on NAEP in the last few years.  In fact, they have made larger gains, particularly for fourth-graders, since 2013 than any other state.  But it should be pointed out that Mississippi retains a higher percent of third-graders than any other state.

“So Mississippi is making sure its poorest performing kids are not taking the fourth-grade NAEP tests.  It’s just like you told the third-grade teacher that you wanted to weigh all her students and get the average weight–but you can’t weigh the fat kids.“

Categories Alabama, Hoax, Literacy, Mississippi, NAEP

New Yorker: Union Vote in Bessemer Is Crucial to Revival of Labor and the Fairness of the Economy

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2021 //
3

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in the New Yorker about the importance of the vote on whether to unionize at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama. The workers are paid $15 an hour. They are organizing against a behemoth corporation owned by the richest man in the world over working conditions, pay too. The vote concludes Monday. Six thousand workers will define the future for millions of others. Bernie Sanders tweeted recently that the 50 richest Americans own more than the bottom 50%. Is this our future?

He writes:

Most contemporary union drives are ultimately about the past—about the contrast that they draw between the more even prosperity of previous decades and the jarring inequalities of the present. But one that will culminate on Monday, the deadline for nearly six thousand employees of an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, to cast ballots on whether to affiliate with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, is the rare union campaign that is obviously about the future. In this case, hyperbole is possible. The Democratic congressman Andy Levin, of Michigan, a union stalwart, has described it as “the most important election for the working class in this country in the twenty-first century.” On Monday, the Reverend Dr. William Barber, as prominent a figure as exists in the modern civil-rights movement, travelled to Alabama and said, “Bessemer is now our Selma.”

That this election is about the future has something to do with the workers themselves, who embody the political transformation of the South to which progressives pin their dreams. According to union officials, a majority of the people employed at the facility, which is outside of Birmingham, are Black, and a majority are women. On the drive up to the facility, supporters of the R.W.D.S.U. planted a sign featuring the Democratic politician and voting-rights advocate Stacey Abrams striking a Rosie the Riveter pose. A high-ranking labor official in Washington pointed me to a detail from an interview, published in The American Prospect, with the campaign’s on-the-ground leader, a thirty-three-year-old organizer named Josh Brewer. Brewer said that many of the workers who supported the union had been involved in demonstrations to bring down Confederate statues in Birmingham, and they often organized themselves.

But the significance of the drive has more to do with the company itself. Amazon is now among the largest private employers in the United States; its founder, Jeff Bezos, is arguably the wealthiest man in modern history. The company has paid every one of its workers fifteen dollars per hour since November, 2018, while also pioneering second-by-second monitoring of its employees. “This isn’t just about wages,” Stuart Appelbaum, the R.W.D.S.U.’s president, told me, on Monday. It is also about the strenuous pace of work, and the real-time surveillance methods that Amazon has used to monitor employees. Appelbaum said some of the workers that his union has represented have had employers that monitored their locations with G.P.S. chips in their delivery trucks, “but there’s nothing like this, where you’re expected to touch a package every eight seconds.” It had been hard to organize within the Bessemer facility, he said, in part because many of the workers did not know one another. “It’s hyper-Taylorism,” Damon Silvers, the director of policy and the special counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said. “Amazon has determined an optimal set of motions that they want their employees to do, and they have the ability to monitor the employee at all times and measure the difference between what the employee does and what they want them to do, and there is nowhere to hide.” Appelbaum said, “People tell us they feel like robots who are being managed by robots.”

The Amazon union drive has drawn a rare intensity out of the usual suspects. Abrams, Levin, and Bernie Sanders have announced their support for it, and so has President Joe Biden, who recorded a strong message encouraging the organizers and discouraging any effort to interfere with them. It has also drawn some unusual allies, above all the conservative Republican senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, who published an op-ed in USA Today declaring his support for the organizing workers and his opposition to Amazon’s ways: “The days of conservatives being taken for granted by the business community are over.”

Amazon’s influence is so vast—touching on issues from wealth and income inequality to antitrust policy, the American relationship with China, the omnipotence of workplace surveillance, and the atomizing effect of big business, in its most concentrated and powerful form, on families and communities—that it can scramble ordinary politics. For a moment, at least, it can put Marco Rubio and Stacey Abrams on the same side. Most organizing campaigns have a symbolic quality, in which the employer and its workers stand for different models of economic organization. The fight in Bessemer is different because it is so direct. Amazon isn’t a proxy for the future of the economy but its heart.

A year into a pandemic that has kept many Americans cooped up at home, ordering supplies and streaming their entertainment, seems an unpromising time to take on Amazon, which supplies many of those services. Amazon’s revenue grew by nearly forty per cent in 2020, and its workforce grew by about fifty per cent; Jeff Bezos’s wealth reportedly increased by nearly seventy billion dollars last year. The company has become so ubiquitous that even to inquire about it entangles you in its machinery: type “is Amazon popular?” into a search engine and you might find, as I did, that most of the top results are books about popularity which are sold on Amazon. You can find evidence that Amazon both is and isn’t popular in survey data. In one poll, ninety-one per cent of respondents said that they had a favorable view of Amazon; in another, fifty-nine per cent thought the company was bad for small business. To count on broad opposition to Amazon right now is to assume such cognitive dissonance: that Americans may increasingly rely on Amazon and view it favorably while also believing that the company needs to change...


The labor leaders in Washington seemed to see Republican support as welcome but mostly ornamental—like if a distant relative had sent, for Christmas, a very large painting of a duck. They found the Democrats’ reaction more significant. In Biden’s message of support earlier this month, he warned employers not to interfere with union elections: “You should all remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that unions are allowed to exist. It said that we should encourage unions.” Silvers, of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said he thought that Biden was speaking directly to the workers who were organizing. “The way he’s talking is not unprecedented, but the precedents are in the Roosevelt Administration,” he said. Appelbaum, of the R.W.D.S.U., said that there had been more talk about the importance of unions in the last Presidential campaign than he’d ever heard before. “We used to talk about how even those Democratic Presidents who we like would barely talk about unions. Biden is different.”


Categories Alabama, Economy, Education Reform, Inequality, Justice, Unions
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