Archives for category: History
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Kevin Lee: Discovering the History of Lynchings in Mobile

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2018 //
3

Kevin Lee is an editor at Lagniappe and a native of Alabama. He recently visited the National Lynching Memorial (formally called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice) in Montgomery and explored Mobile’s history in that awful story.

He tracked the history of each victim of this brutality in Mobile, and the cumulative effect is powerful in reminding us of the depths of human depravity, the ultimate expression of racism, and man’s bottomless capacity for pure evil.

As the world learns again and again, then forgets, it is easy to overlook the deaths of hundreds or thousands or millions, yet impossible to turn away from the fate of individuals.

Categories Alabama, Evil, History, Racism

Denis Smith: Historians’ Alert! A Vandal in the White House!

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2018 //
38

Denis Smith discovered a bizarre fact about Trump: he tears up documents that are supposed to be archived for future generations. The White House archivists empty his wastebasket and painstakingly tape together letters that were ripped apart or shredded.

Smith predicts that the Trump Presidential Library will be housed in a very small building.

Categories History

Tom Ultican: A Book That Explains Why Public Schools Are an Integral Part of a Democratic Society

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2018 //
10

Tom Ultican here reviews Johann Neem’s history of public schools in early America: “Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.”

Neem, a historian of American education, is an immigrant to the United States from India. He attended public schools. He met students from many different background. From his own life experience, he understood the genius of public education in fostering a democratic culture.

Ultican found Neem’s history to be especially relevant in understanding debates today.

He reviews important topics in the book and sees how they relate to today’s battles over curriculum, pedagogy, religion, and charter schools.

He writes:

My main take away from this read is that in developing universal free public education in America the foundation for democracy was forged. That foundation is under attack today. Read this book and you will deepen and reinforce your own need to protect America’s public schools.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, History

Elizabeth Warren on Bobby Kennedy’s Legacy

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2018 //
15

Elizabeth Warren sent a blast email today:

Here in Massachusetts, I love it when when people proudly come up to me and say, “I was with Jack Kennedy in 1960” or “I was with Teddy Kennedy in ’94.” The energy and passion hasn’t faded in their voices one bit – and it’s infectious.

But there’s something different about the way people say: “I was with Bobby in 1968.” Often it comes in a whisper. Some choke back tears. You can still see the hope – and the pain – in their eyes.

It always hits me like a punch in the gut.

Robert Kennedy’s life – and his brief, tragic campaign in 1968 – has had an enduring impact on so many generations of Americans. The reason, I think, is because Bobby had the courage to challenge a divided nation to face up to its own failings. To challenge a divided nation to acknowledge their own contributions to our nations’ problems. To challenge us to step back from the stale, cheap politics of the moment. To challenge us to do better by each other.

Bobby spoke about some of the issues that brought a lot of us to the fight over the past half century. Good jobs. Affordable housing. Investments in education.

But he also spoke at a moment when our people seemed divided beyond repair. With the credibility of our government in doubt, with neighbor pitted against neighbor, and our politics dominated by anger and resentment, America itself seemed to be falling apart at the seams.

Kennedy warned:

“[T]he essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer – not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.”

History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. Things are different now, but a lot of the anxiety that swept through the country in 1968 echoes the anxiety of today. The anxiety felt by millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but feel the opportunity slipping away from themselves and their children. The anxiety felt by African American and Latino families that those opportunities never truly existed to begin with.

Half a century later, we face another moment of crisis – a crisis in our government, a crisis in our politics, and, indeed, a crisis in democracy itself.

You see it in the way this administration is trampling on the laws and traditions that are supposed to keep the most powerful in our country accountable to the people.

You see it in the cesspool of money and power that is our nation’s capital – those same billionaires and giant corporations gobbling down their huge new tax cuts, then spending millions of dollars on Super PAC ads and lobbyists to keep the game going.

You even see it in the way some politicians are working to rig our elections: gerrymandering and voter ID laws and Citizens United – it’s all designed to make sure we, the people, can’t hold them accountable.

When Bobby Kennedy was killed 50 years ago today, the promise of a different America – a better America – seemed to vanish. America continued down a dangerous road where the rich got richer, and everyone else got left behind. We became a country that said, “I got mine, the rest of you are on your own.”

But that promise isn’t gone – not by a long shot. It’s not gone in the eyes of the people I meet who remember that campaign in 1968. It’s not gone in the children who pass by his photo with his big brother John at the Kennedy Library here in Boston. And it’s not gone in the millions of people – young and old, rich and poor, black, white, brown – who still believe that we can build a better future for our children and grandchildren.

Our democracy is fractured in deep and terrible ways. The darkness may seem all-encompassing. But I still believe in Bobby Kennedy’s tiny ripple of hope. I believe that history is shaped from numberless diverse acts of courage. And I believe that all of us together will write the history of this generation – and in doing so, continue to write the legacy of Bobby Kennedy for generations to come.

Thanks for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

All content © 2018 Elizabeth for MA, All Rights Reserved
PO Box 290568, Boston, MA 02129
This email was sent to gardendr@gmail.com
We’ll miss you, but you can always unsubscribe.

Categories History

RFK Jr. Does Not Believe Sirhan Sirhan Killed His Father

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2018 //
4

Another twist in a very strange century.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to visit the man convicted of assassinating his father. He believes there was another shooter.

At the time, it seemed open and shut.

It’s not.

Categories Education Reform, History

Denis Smith: Waiting for RFK’s Funeral Train

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2018 //
3

This is a beautiful memory of a terrible time.

Please watch the YouTube video that Denis includes.

If you aren’t old enough to remember, you can’t imagine how sad it was.

Categories History

An Interesting History Lesson about Robert F. Kennedy and Paul Schrade

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2018 //
5

From Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect. I get these missives almost daily from the American Prospect and they are invariably thought-provoking. Click here and you too can get a daily briefing (very short) from the American Prospect.

Meyerson on TAP

Paul Schrade: Not Just the Other Guy Who Was Shot in the Ambassador Kitchen. Today’s New York Times has a story on the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s murder, featuring interviews with Kennedy staffers and supporters. But the piece misidentifies Paul Schrade, who was also critically wounded when Kennedy was shot, as “a campaign aide” (in the caption) and doesn’t quite get it right in calling him “a labor organizer who worked on the campaign” in the text of the article.

It’s important to get Paul Schrade’s actual identity right, though—because he was a key figure in California and union history during the pivotal decade of the ‘60s.

As a young man, Paul had worked as an assistant to United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther, who headed what today has to be viewed as by far the most important progressive union in American history. In the 1950s, Paul headed a UAW local at North American Aviation in Los Angeles, and became the UAW’s western regional director in the early 1960s. As such, he became, in 1965, the first established union leader to provide resources and assistance to the fledgling union of farmworkers that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were organizing. That same year, in the aftermath of the Watts Riots, he devoted union resources to establishing the Watts Labor Community Action Council and the East Los Angeles Community Union (TELACU), which became longstanding political powerhouses in LA’s black and Latino communities, respectively.

One year later, Paul put Chavez in touch with Robert Kennedy, who came to California to champion the farmworkers’ cause. Paul also opposed the Vietnam War early on—and when Kennedy declared his presidential candidacy in early 1968, Paul became his most prominent labor backer. By so doing, he also became the odd man out on the UAW’s national executive committee, on which he was by far the youngest member. Reuther certainly had profound misgivings about the war, and had helped form Negotiations Now, an organization that sought to bring the war to a halt but stopped short of advocating a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops. But Reuther was also an old friend and comrade of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with whom he had founded Americans for Democratic Action in 1948. Humphrey was a solid liberal, but was tethered to Lyndon Johnson’s war policy and refused to break with it. Like most labor leaders, Reuther supported Humphrey’s presidential bid when Johnson announced in late March that he wouldn’t seek re-election.

The Kennedy-Humphrey rift between Schrade and Reuther was the UAW’s top-level, in-house version of the rift between the New Left and the Old. Over the next couple of years, Schrade grew more critical of UAW practices, and in 1970, Reuther’s successor as president, Leonard Woodcock, made sure that Paul wasn’t re-elected to the executive committee or the western regional directorship.

That hardly ended Paul’s work in and for labor. For some years, he returned to the assembly line; he also founded and led the California ACLU’s Worker Rights Committee and played a significant role in a host of worker causes. After the Ambassador Hotel (where Kennedy had been assassinated and Paul shot) closed down, he spent several decades leading the fight to build a badly needed high school on the site. That required defeating a number of other proposals, including one for a towering high-rise from Donald Trump. In time, Paul prevailed: The Robert F. Kennedy High School now stands where the Ambassador once stood. More controversially, Paul has also long believed that there was more than one shooter that June night 50 years ago in the Ambassador kitchen.

Paul’s sidelines are almost as interesting as his primary endeavors. He became an expert on Italian bread baking, and became a de facto consultant to LA’s tony La Brea Bakeries. A Wagner devotee, he made annual pilgrimages to Bayreuth. And as a longtime resident of Laurel Canyon, during one stretch in the ‘70s, his next-door neighbor on one side was Jerry Brown, and on the other side, Timothy Leary. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories History

No, Al Shanker Did Not Invent the Charter School Industry We Have Now

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
44

This article unintentionally explains where charter schools went wrong. When Shanker proposed the idea of charter schools in 1988, he thought of them as “schools within schools,” created by teachers and subject to both union rules and the school district. But it all changed when Minnesota passed the first charter law in 1992.

The article was written by Paul Peterson, the Harvard professor who supports charters, vouchers, and all kinds of choice. He is editor of Education Next. I have known Paul for many years (though I have not seen him for nearly a decade). I got to know him during my time as a member of the Koretz Task Force at the Hoover Institution from 1998-2008. He is a very genial man. I recall one night after a meeting at Hoover when David Packard (of Hewlett Packard) invited Paul and me to see the old-time movie theater that he purchased in Palo Alto. It was closed that evening, and he had the projectionist run a classic film for us. Then, as a treat, he had the old-fashioned organ rise from beneath the stage. Paul went onstage and played the organ, a talent he had developed many years earlier in church in Minnesota.

Paul writes in this article about the origins of the charter school. The article is titled, “No, Albert Shanker Did Not Invent the Charter School.” I was frankly happy to read it because I get tired of right-wingers pretending to be progressives and insisting that they are doing exactly what that esteemed labor leader recommended, and that charters are run by progressives and teachers.

Paul makes clear that Shanker’s vision of what a charter school should be was replaced by a very different vision in 1992.

Paul adds an interesting twist to the origins of the contemporary charter school idea. Shanker wanted charters to be authorized by schools and/or districts and subject to collective bargaining. But the first charter law was passed in Minnesota and its proponents were Joe Nathan (who often comments here) and Ted Kolderie. They wanted charter schools to be authorized by state entities, not limited to teachers or subject to collective bargaining, and to compete with public schools. Nathan and Kolderie won, and their model is the one that is dominant today. So now, instead of charter schools that are subject to school district’s needs and collective bargaining, we have corporate charter chains and charters opened by entrepreneurs.

Shanker wanted charters to serve as R&D for the public schools; he did not want them to undermine public schools. Nathan and Kolderie wanted them to compete with the public schools, according to Petersen. And now we have the most rightwing figures in American society–the DeVos family, the Koch brothers, and ALEC–fully embracing charter schools. They would never have tolerated or supported Shanker’s model. They want to use charters to smash public education as a public good.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, History

New York City: A Retired Teacher Who Is in Love with Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2018 //
5

Martin Raskin taught in the New York City public schools for many years, and he is now retired. He is obsessed with collecting memorabilia about the city’s public schools, especially his own elementary school, P.S. 202 in East New York, Brooklyn. His apartment, the New York Times writes, is a shrine to the public schools.

Maybe there is someone more crazy in love with New York City’s public schools than Martin Raskin, but who else would collect a panel of hundred-year-old brass steam heat switches from Brooklyn’s Manual Training High School that closed in 1959? Or load up his car trunk with a boiler gauge from P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village?

“I’m a little bit compulsive,” admitted Mr. Raskin, a 77-year-old retired teacher who taught at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn and the Queens School for Career Development and is aflame with ardor for all things Board of Education, which, he said, “paved the way I am today — I’m blessed.”

When last heard from (in a 2010 article in The New York Times), the salt-and-pepper-whiskered schmoozer who could talk the paint off a wall had turned his Upper East Side of Manhattan apartment into a shrine to P.S. 202 in East New York, Brooklyn, where he spent kindergarten through eighth grade, graduating in 1955, before going on to Franklin K. Lane High School.

His mock classroom showcased ink-stained attached desks, Regulator clocks, milky glass chandeliers, tall teacher’s reading chair, class photos, oval brass doorknobs, wardrobe hooks, window pole, yellow report cards, merit certificates, black and white composition notebooks, even the original enamel number plate from his homeroom, 516.

It’s all still there, along with Mr. Raskin’s prize piece, the chair splinter extracted from the rear of his principal, Charles G. Eichel, and preserved in an envelope with the (unlucky) date of the encounter, Friday, March 13, 1942. Mr. Raskin had scooped it up along with other discarded P.S. 202 material in the 1980s, a fateful discovery that set off his freely acknowledged obsession, since abetted by eBay, Etsy and other collectibles dealers.

But that, it turns out, was only the beginning. “I’m now amassing a shrine to the whole educational system,” Mr. Raskin said.

He recently paid $450 on eBay for an 1850s New England dunce chair, which stands amid a table of vintage readers, including the complete Eichel oeuvre, student magazines, multicolored high school beanies and buttons, class rings and pins, diplomas, teacher ledgers, autograph albums, lunchroom tickets, commencement programs, and oddities like the news photo of the “Black Hand Stampede,” a panic over rumors of Mafia presence that terrified students at P.S. 177 in Little Italy on June 17, 1926.

He wants to find a permanent home for his collection, but so far has had no luck. He showed it to representatives from the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Historical Society, but they were not interested.

“There’s a fire museum, a police museum, a food museum, even a sex museum,” Mr. Raskin said. “But there’s nothing to honor teachers and students.”

I am reminded that when I finished my first book in 1974, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools, 1805-1973, I spoke to representatives of the same museums and met the same lack of interest. I did not have the wonderful treasure trove that Martin Raskin has amassed. But nearly half a century ago, it was clear that there was no interest in creating an exhibition or museum space to honor education in the city.

Congratulations, Mr. Raskin. Your passion is admirable. I hope you find a permanent home for your collection. Maybe UFT headquarters?

Categories Education Reform, History, New York City

Will Fitzhugh: Common Core, Close Reading, and the Death of History in the Schools

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2018 //
201

Will Fitzhugh is founder and editor of The Concord Review, which publishes outstanding historical essays by high school students. I have long been an admirer of the publication and of Will for sustaining it without support from any major foundation, which are too engaged in reinventing the schools rather than supporting the work of excellent history students and teachers. You can subscribe by contacting him at fitzhugh@tcr.org.

 

He writes:

 

A few years ago, at a conference in Boston, David Steiner, then Commissioner of Education for New York State, said, about History: “It is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”

Since then, David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical topic, for instance the Gettysburg Address, should be taught in the absence of any historical context—about the Civil War, President Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg—or anything else. This fits well with the “Close Reading” teachings of the “New Criticism” approach to literature in which Coleman received his academic training. This doctrine insists that any knowledge about the author or the historical context should be avoided in the analytic study of “texts.”

The Common Core, thanks to Coleman, has promoted the message that History, too, is nothing but a collection of “texts,” and it all should be studied as just language, not as knowledge dependent on the context in which it is embedded.

Not only does this promote ignorance, it also encourages schools to form Humanities Departments, in which English teachers, who may or may not know any History, are assigned to teach History as “text.”  This is already happening in a few Massachusetts high schools, and may be found elsewhere in the country. 

The dominance of English teachers over reading and writing in our schools has long meant that the great majority of our high school graduates have never been asked to read one complete History book in their academic careers.

Good English teachers do a fine job of teaching novels and personal and creative writing, but it is a Common Core mistake to expect them to teach the History in which they have little or no academic background. Treating History as contextless “text” is not a solution to this problem.

The ignorance of History among our high school graduates is a standing joke to those who think it is funny, and NAEP has found that only about 18% know enough to pass the U.S. citizenship exam.

In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch writes that: “In a 1785 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors in History: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon [Anabasis], Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin.”

We may no longer imagine that many of our high school students will read their History in Latin, but we should expect that somehow they may be liberated from the deeply irresponsible Common Core curriculum that, in restricting the study of the past to the literary analysis of “texts,” essentially removes as much actual History from our schools as it possibly can.

Categories Common Core, History
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