As regular readers know, our good friend Phyllis Bush is fighting what we used to call “the Big C,” but what she calls “cancer-shmanzer.”
Phyllis had a setback and needed emergency surgery.
She came through with her usual spunk, humor, and fight.
The world may be in desperate trouble but Phyllis inspires us to face our troubles with wit and courage.
Paul Thomas considers some of the research verities that have recently been exploded, like “the marshmallow test,” “growth mindset,” and “the word gap.”
He might have added “grit” to the list of recently debunked nostrums. Christine Yeh of the University of San Francisco wrote a terrific piece in Education Week last year titled “Forget Grit. Focus on Inequality.” She is right, of course. If a child is hungry, grit won’t fill her tummy. If she is hungry and homeless, grit doesn’t change the objective facts of her life.
He writes:
“It may well be true that everything you know is wrong, but that doesn’t mean it must stay that way. Good intentions and missionary zeal must be replaced by greater philosophical awareness and the sort of skepticism a critical lens provides.
“This is not about fatalism—giving up on research—but about finding a better way forward, one that rejects programs and blanket ideologies and keeps our focus on students and learning along with the promises of formal schooling as a path to equity and justice, not test scores and compliant students.”
It takes courage to think for yourself, especially in a culture that values compliance and conformity.
Henry Giroux places the recent wave of teacher strikes in historical perspective. The teachers are fighting a battle on behalf of the public good against an assault by reactionary neoliberalism.
He writes:
“The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism in which they and their students are treated with little respect, dignity and value. They have had enough of corrupt politicians, hedge fund managers and civically illiterate pundits seduced by the power of the corporate and political demagogues who are waging a war on critical teaching, critical pedagogy and the creativity and autonomy of classroom teachers.
“Since the 1980s, an extreme form of capitalism — or what in the current moment I want to call neoliberal fascism — has waged a war against public education and all vestiges of the common good and social contract. In addition, this is a war rooted in class and gender discrimination — one that deskills teachers, exploits their labor and bears down particularly hard on women, who make up a dominant segment of the teaching force. In doing so, it not only undermines schooling as a public good, but also weaponizes and weakens the formative cultures, values and social relations that enable schools to create the conditions for students to become critical and engaged citizens.
“Schools have been underfunded, increasingly privatized and turned into testing factories that deliver poor students of color to the violence of the school-to-prison pipeline. Moreover, they have also been restructured in order to weaken unions, subject teachers to horrendous working conditions and expose students to overcrowded classrooms. In some cases, the dire working environment and dilapidated conditions of schools and classrooms appear incomprehensible in the richest nation in the world…
“Moreover, as state and corporate violence engulfs the entire society, schools have been subject to forms of extreme violence that in the past existed exclusively outside of their doors. Under such circumstances, youth are increasingly viewed as suspects and are targeted both by a gun culture that places profits above student lives and by a neoliberal machinery of cruelty, misery and violence dedicated to widespread educational failure. Instead of imbuing students with a sense of ethical and social responsibility while preparing them for a life of social and economic mobility, public schools have been converted into high-tech security spheres whose defining principles are fear, uncertainty and anxiety. In this view, a corporate vision of the U.S. has reduced the culture of schooling to the culture of business and an armed camp, and in doing so, imposed a real and symbolic threat of violence on schools, teachers and students. As such, thinking has become the enemy of freedom, and profits have become more important than human lives…
“Rejecting the idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold, teachers and students across the country are reclaiming education as a public good and a human right, a protective space that should be free of violence and open to critical teaching and learning. Not only is it a place to think, engage in critical dialogue, encourage human potential and contribute to the vibrancy of a democratic polity, it is also a place in which the social flourishes, in that students and teachers learn to think and act together.”
It has often been said that the true test of free speech is whether you protect the speech you disagree with. Popular speech does not need protection. Dissent does.
David French is a senior writer at the National Review and a military veteran. He wrote this article for The New York Times. It is titled “Conservatives Fail the NFL’s Free Speech Test.”
I love this article.
The United States is in the grips of a free-speech paradox. At the same time that the law provides more protection to personal expression than at any time in the nation’s history, large numbers of Americans feel less free to speak. The culprit isn’t government censorship but instead corporate, community and peer intimidation.
Conservatives can recite the names of the publicly shamed from memory. There was Brendan Eich, hounded out of Mozilla for donating to a California ballot initiative that defined marriage as the union of a man and woman. There was James Damore, abruptly terminated from Google after he wrote an essay attributing the company’s difficulty in attracting female software engineers more to biology and free choice than to systemic discrimination. On campus, the list is as long and grows longer every semester.
It is right to decry this culture of intolerance and advocate for civility and engagement instead of boycotts and reprisals. The cure for bad speech is better speech — not censorship. Take that message to the heartland, and conservatives cheer.
Until, that is, Colin Kaepernick chose to kneel. Until, that is, the president demanded that the N.F.L. fire the other players who picked up on his protest after he was essentially banished from the league.
That was when the conservative mob called for heads to roll. Conform or face the consequences.
On Wednesday, the mob won. The N.F.L. announced its anthem rules for 2018, and the message was clear: Respect the flag by standing for the national anthem or stay in the locker room. If you break the rules and kneel, your team can be fined for your behavior.
This isn’t a “middle ground,” as the N.F.L. claims. It’s not a compromise. It’s corporate censorship backed up with a promise of corporate punishment. It’s every bit as oppressive as the campus or corporate attacks on expression that conservatives rightly decry.
But this is different, they say. This isn’t about politics. It’s about the flag.
I agree. It is different. Because it’s about the flag, the censorship is even worse.
One of the most compelling expressions of America’s constitutional values is contained in Justice Robert Jackson’s 1943 majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. At the height of World War II, two sisters, both Jehovah’s Witnesses, challenged the state’s mandate that they salute the flag in school. America was locked in a struggle for its very existence. The outcome was in doubt. National unity was essential.
But even in the darkest days of war, the court wrote liberating words that echo in legal history: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Make no mistake, I want football players to stand for the anthem. I want them to respect the flag. As a veteran of the war in Iraq, I’ve saluted that flag in foreign lands and deployed with it proudly on my uniform. But as much as I love the flag, I love liberty even more.
The N.F.L. isn’t the government. It has the ability to craft the speech rules its owners want. So does Google. So does Mozilla. So does Yale. American citizens can shame whomever they want to shame.
But what should they do? Should they use their liberty to punish dissent? Or should a free people protect a culture of freedom?
In our polarized times, I’ve adopted a simple standard, a civil liberties corollary to the golden rule: Fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself. Do you want corporations obliterating speech the state can’t touch? Do you want the price of participation in public debate to include the fear of lost livelihoods? Then, by all means, support the N.F.L. Cheer Silicon Valley’s terminations. Join the boycotts and shame campaigns. Watch this country’s culture of liberty wither in front of your eyes.
The vice president tweeted news of the N.F.L.’s new policy and called it “#Winning.” He’s dead wrong. It diminishes the marketplace of ideas. It mocks the convictions of his fellow citizens. And it divides in the name of a false, coerced uniformity. Writing in the Barnette decision, Justice Jackson wisely observed, “As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be.”
The N.F.L. should let players kneel. If it lets them kneel, it increases immeasurably the chances that when they do rise, they will rise with respect and joy, not fear and resentment. That’s the “winning” America needs.
Jason Seaman, a seventh grade science teacher, tackled a gunman who entered his classroom in Noblesville, Indiana, and was shot three times as he protected his students.
“A brave science teacher did not hesitate when a student walked into his classroom at Noblesville West Middle School with a pair of handguns and then opened fire.
“Jason Seaman, identified by his mother and students as the hero teacher, was shot three times Friday morning as he lunged at the gunman in a bid to protect his class.
“The shooter fired off several rounds before “Mr. Seaman started running at him, he’s a teacher, a science teacher — he tackled him to the ground,” a student, who did not wish to be identified, told Fox 59.
“He’s a hero. If he didn’t do anything he probably would have continued shooting and a lot more of us would have been injured and possibly killed, so it was just something that most people would not have done but he was really brave to do it.”
Brave indeed!
Jason Seaman joins the honor roll.
Watch this powerful 2-minute video, in which civil rights leader Jitu Brown tells the dramatic story of the Dyett hunger strike in Chicago, which lasted 34 days and compelled the city to keep Dyett open and invest $16 Million in the new Dyett.
Jitu Brown leads the Journey for Justice, which is leading a national campaign to stop school closings, privatization, and charter schools. They are fighting to create thousands of community schools.
This video was created by videographers Michael Elliot and Kemala Karmen. It was funded by the Network for Public Education.
There are very few people I have met in my lifetime where I had one meeting and was instantly smitten. Karen Lewis is one of them. In the fall of 2010, I was traveling the country to talk about my somewhat explosive new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Within the world of education, it was a bombshell, because I was renouncing many years of advocacy, switching sides, and losing many friends in the process. On the substantive side, I was explaining and describing the true nature of the powerful movement that would reveal its ugly face later that same year with the release of “Waiting for Superman.”
I had two speaking engagements one week, first in Detroit, then in Los Angeles. I planned to change planes in Chicago. But before I embarked, I got an e-mail from Karen Lewis, whom I had never met. She asked if I would change my flight and arrange a stopover of several hours in Chicago. I did. She and her husband John met me at O’Hare. We drove to a nearby hotel where they had rented time in an empty conference room, and Karen and I talked nonstop for four hours. When we were done, we left as close friends. She is brilliant, funny, passionate, compassionate.
We met from time to time after that and emailed often. She led a historic teachers strike in 2012 to protest the city’s underinvestment in the schools and Rahm Emanuel’s endless school closings. The year before, the legislature had passed a law to curtail teachers’ job rights and prevent teschers’ strikes, saying that a strike vote had to be approved by 75% of the members, thinking that would never happen. This was when Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children showed that he and his organization had sold out to the hedge funders. He engineered the deal and hoped to crush the Chicago Teachers Union (when caught on tape bragging about his coup at the Aspen Ideas Festival, seated next to James Crown, a prominent Chicago equities guy, he had to apologize. The session was about outsmarting the teachers’ unions by buying up the best lobbyists and was titled “If it Could Happen There, it Could Happen Anywhere.”)
The CTU didn’t get 75% of the membership, it got more than 90%. It went out on strike. While the national press was almost universally hostile, hated the very idea of a teachers’ strike, the parents and working people of Chicago supported the teachers.
Ben Joravsky writes here that Karen Lewis was the inspiration for the current wave of walkouts, insurrections, protests, but this time the teachers are winning broad public support. In Chicago, the teachers wore red. Today it is #RedForEd.
Rahm got even with the CTU in 2013 by closing 50 public schools in one day. It too was historic, in an evil way. Charters continued to open.
Karen Lewis planned to run against Rahm for Mayor in 2014–she was far more popular than he and would have likely won. But she discovered she had a malignant brain tumor. Her life changed. She had surgery and survived. Last fall she had a minor strike. She took these blows with courage, dignity and even humor.
I last saw her when The Network for Public Education held its annual meeting in Chicago n 2015. I interviewed her and the video is here. She was physically weak but spiritually strong.
Yes, she showed us that teachers must work in and with their communities to build public support. She said that those ties were essential. She showed us what teachers could do even in the worst of circumstances. And now that she is in the worst of circumstances, we remember her and thank her for her leadership, her example, and the life lessons she taught us.
I posted earlier today that the ACLU was defending a school board member against intimidation tactics by a charter school leader, who threatened to sue her for doing her job and asking questions.
The board member, Claudia Rossi, posted this comment on the blog:
“I am a Latina who won a seat on the Santa Clara County Board of Education despite the over 200k the California Charter School Association spent against my campaign. I will continue to fight for our children using my vote and my voice to protect them from profiteering CMOS. Children are not commodities! This threat to sue me and other tactics only expose the true motives of the privatization jaugernaut. Mi voz y mi voto no se venden! My voice and my vote are not for sale! Nuestros hijos tampoco! Neither are our children!”
Betsy DeVos has spent decades advocating for school choice.
What a shock for her when she met the teachers of the year and they told her that charters and vouchers were defunding their schools.
The spring of 2018 may well be remembered as the beginning of a mass movement by working people against the domination of corporations and the 1%.
The leadership in red states and the federal government have tilted the tax system to favor the very wealthy, while demanding sacrifices from the powerless majority.
The teachers in West Virginia were first to say “Enough!”
But they are far from last.
The ALEC-inspired Republican legislatures killed collective bargaining, and the Supreme Court in expected to hobble labor unions with the Janus decision.
But that’s not going to stop working people from organizing and demanding a fair share of the bounty that they produced.
For all of Facebook’s sins and transgressions, it has nonetheless created a way for voiceless people to organize and act. Teachers and others created collectives on Facebook and used them to mobilize for mass actions.
The teachers’ strikes were organized by grassroots efforts that began on Facebook. Powerless teachers discovered that by acting in concert, they became powerful. They have used their numbers to demand fair pay and benefits and have stood up courageously to legislatures known to be in the pockets of the oil and gas industries and other malefactors of vast wealth.
Piece by piece, day by day, as they lead us, we will recover our democracy. We will rebuild the institutions now under assault by Trumpism and its variants. The names of the leaders are not well-known. They won’t be on the covers of magazines or interviewed by late night TV hosts. They are ordinary citizens who have stepped forward to demand justice, equity, and fairness and to revive our democracy.
