I urge you to read this poem.
I urge you to share it with your students if you are a teacher.
As machines and digital devices come to dominate our lives, let us not forget our humanity.
It is humanity that keeps us human, not a data point.
Archives for category: Justice
Frank Adamson of Stanford University wrote a marvelous article that lays out the issues with enormous clarity and insight. To read the references and links, open the article.
The United Nations has identified “free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education” by 2030 as a goal for sustainable development. This goal reaffirms the right to education guaranteed by countries in multiple U.N. declarations over the last half-century.[i] Although these treaties reflect a general consensus that everyone has a right to education, most countries do not actually deliver on this promise. To address the issue, different countries are organizing their education systems based on contrasting values. Some countries have placed the responsibility for choosing schools on families, while others have delivered the right to education at a system-level, with the latter approach correlating with better national outcomes.
Instead of countries delivering on their U.N. treaty commitments to the right to education, some have proposed that parental choice should drive the education “marketplace.” This approach varies across countries. In countries in the global south such as India and Uganda, families can “choose” to send their children to “low fee” private schools, or else their children will likely not receive an education. In countries in the global north like Sweden and the U.S., school “choice” usually happens when governments give parents the option to leave public schools. However, in both cases, governments place the responsibility on the family to figure out the best option for their child instead of fulfilling their child’s right to a free, equitable, high quality education.
Even more problematic is the reality that school “choice” does not guarantee a better education, for a variety of reasons. One issue is that, when a charter school or low-fee private school does provide a good education, everyone wants to go there and there are not enough spots for every student. And that’s the best-case scenario. The more common problem is that schools of choice do not provide higher quality education. In addition, they often exclude certain types of harder and/or more expensive-to-each students – those with disabilities, discipline histories, lower socio-economic status – as well as racial and ethnic minorities and second-language learners. These students may have lower scores on the tests used to judge schools or they may require extra attention from teachers, incentivizing these schools to choose their students, instead of students being able to choose their schools.[ii]
The results are not surprising because these schools compete with each other instead of providing education to everyone. School choice systems operate under a market-based rationale. In this marketplace, schools depend on competition to get students to enroll. This sounds like a great idea—the companies (schools) that produce the best product (education) have the most customers (students), while those that don’t will go out of business (closing the school). But market-based approaches require schools to seek a competitive advantage that leads to their exclusionary approaches. And when these schools exclude the more “expensive” students, these students end up in overcrowded and underperforming schools that lack basic services, or, even worse, without the opportunity for an education at all.
Countries seeking to provide a free, equitable, quality education aren’t trying to create competitive advantage within their systems. Instead, they fulfill their “education as a human right” imperative at the system level by investing in teachers and infrastructure. Their public investments produce some of the highest outcomes on international assessments, with smaller differences between students, meaning the systems function more equitably. These countries, including Finland, Singapore, Canada, Cuba, and others, have signed at least some of the U.N. treaties that declare the right to education, have opted for investing in their public education systems instead of pursuing market-based approaches that lead to inequity, and continually deliver high quality education to their citizens. Instead of forcing parents to choose schools, or even be chosen by schools, countries employing market-based approaches would do well to shift their focus towards ensuring the educational rights of their citizens on a proven pathway to better outcomes.
Arthur Camins wrote about what he calls “the Passover Principle” and why it has lessons for all of us today.
Passover is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. It is a quintessential story of freedom and empowerment of a subject people. To give a small example, I was at the beauty salon the other day, where everyone is a refugee from Ukraine. Most have been in this country for decades. The manicurist told me that her family was Jewish but they were not allowed to practice their religion. I asked, “How did you know you were Jewish?” She said, “It was stamped on my passport.” I asked, “Did you celebrate Passover?” She said, not really. Most of the rituals had been forgotten, and there were no Haggadahs (prayer books for the occasion). It suddenly occurred to me that any dictatorship must banish Passover because of its explicit subversive message of rebellion and freedom.
Arthur Camins writes:
As a society, we have failed to follow what I’ll call the Passover Principle of identification generating retelling. Virtually everyone in the diverse crazy-quilt fabric that is the US has a justice and freedom story to tell. Some narratives are “they tried to defeat us, but we prevailed” legends with persistent resentment as the result. However, tales can also highlight the commonality of struggles. They can recall the courage of the Underground Railroad supporters aiding escaped slaves, of the French Resistance to fascism, or of civil rights workers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Then stories can unite and rekindle the spirit of personal and collective responsibility.
Stories are powerful, evoking persistent historical loves or hatreds. Whether and how history is recounted and interpreted is not neutral. First, retelling must be truthful. To do so, it must acknowledge multiple perspectives. For example, the scientific and engineering advances from industrialization, computers and information technologies have enhanced human wellbeing as they also brought suffering, exploitation and dislocation. History is too often written from the perspective of the victors, ignoring the plight of its victims. Second, it must surface human agency. What happened in the past was not the result of inevitable forces, but rather moral and strategic choices. What leaders– democrats and dictators alike– accomplished- was the result of either the struggles or acquiescence of ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) people.
The story of winning expanded freedoms and justice in the United States has not been one of continuous progress, but instead of hard-fought, contested battles. At times we have taken two steps forward and one step back. At other times it has been the reverse. Our history has been one in which at times politicians and citizens made both moral and reasoned choices and in other instances, immoral irrational choices. The tale of those choices and taking sides is important to tell and remember, for it defines our values, how we regard ourselves and others, and whether or not freedom and justice will expand or be extinguished.
The Passover Principle is the responsibility of anyone who values freedom and justice for all. If stories are framed intentionally and not just out of unexamined habit, they can be catalysts for change. Retelling may fall to parents, grandparents and caregivers. When young people hear about proposals to restrict Mexicans from entry into the US, are they told of efforts to restrict Asian and Southern Europeans? It also falls to religious leaders who are in a position to exert moral leadership. When congregants hear about efforts to bar entry of Muslims, do clergy give sermons recalling efforts to keep out Catholics and Jews? Similarly, it falls to educators. When students learn about westward expansion of the United States, do they learn about stealing land from and exterminating Native Americans? When they learn about Rosa Parks, do they just hear a story of her individual courage or of her resistance training at the Highlander Folk School?
The point of retelling is not simply memory. How we choose to remember reflects the values we cherish, who we want to be, and the future we want to make.
The National Education Policy Center is inviting high schools to apply for recognition as a “school of opportunity.”
A School of Opportunity is one that works hard to make sure that all children have equal opportunity to succeed.
The deadline for applying is May 1.
Learn more by going to this site: schoolsofopportunity.org
High schools still have three weeks left to apply for recognition for working to close opportunity gaps: schoolsofopportunity.org @NEPCtweet #schoolsofopportunity
Here are the criteria:
At the most basic level, a School of Opportunity must strive to ensure that all students have access to rich, challenging and supported opportunities to learn. This means that the school’s best opportunities cannot be exclusive or rationed. For this reason, we will recognize a school as a “School of Opportunity” only if it declines to restrict or stratify student access to those best opportunities. In addition, we seek to highlight schools with strong and welcoming cultures, therefore we will only recognize schools if they reject “zero tolerance” policies and other discipline policies that unnecessarily exclude students from opportunities to learn.
Accordingly, all applicants need to address the first two practices, Criterion 1 and 2. Then applicants may choose which four of the remaining eight criteria they wish to highlight in their application.
Criterion 1: Broadening and Enriching Learning Opportunities, with Particular Attention to Reducing Disparities in Learning Created by Tracking and Ability Grouping
Criterion 2: Creating and Maintaining a Healthy School Culture, with Attention to Diversity and to Reassessing Student Discipline Policies
Criterion 3: Provide More and Better Learning Time During the School Year and Summer
Criterion 4: Use a Variety of Assessments Designed to Respond to Student Needs
Criterion 5: Support Teachers as Professionals
Criterion 6: Meet the Needs of Students with Disabilities in an Environment that Ensures Challenge and Support
Criterion 7: Provide Students with Additional Needed Services and Supports, Including Mental and Physical Health Services
Criterion 8: Create a Challenging and Supported Culturally Relevant Curriculum
Criterion 9: Build on the Strengths of Language Minority Students and Correctly Identify their Needs
Criterion 10: Sustain Equitable and Meaningful Parent and Community Engagement
Steve Nelson posted an obituary for the great, idealistic and progressive nation we strived to be, with periods of struggle and backsliding. Remember, America the Beautiful, “with liberty and justice for all?”
He rules the death a homicide.
He includes a list of seven organizations to which contributions may be sent in lieu of flowers.
I add: the Network for Public Education.
Arthur Camins, scientist and science educator, posted this message on his Facebook page:
There have always been two Americas. One is shameful and the other is admirable. Now, every citizen needs to decide: In which America do you want to live? For which will you take a stand?
We have been the America that stole land from and exterminated Native Americans.
We have been the America that limited the right to vote.
We have been the America that shackled and enslaved Africans, granted them freedom and then took those freedoms away.
We have been the America that has denigrated and excluded eastern and southern Europeans and Asians.
We have been the America that imprisoned innocent Japanese Americans.
We have been the America that turned its back on Jews who fled Nazi extermination, sending them back to their slaughter.
We have been the America that deported and detained dissenters.
We have been the America that has left people homeless and destitute.
We have been the America that threw off tyranny to establish freedom of the press, speech, and assembly.
We have been the America the expanded the right to vote.
We have been the America that was founded on the principles that prohibited the establishment of or interference with free exercise of religion.
We have been the America that took in refugees from around the world and welcomed dissent.
We have been the America that along with our allies liberated Hitler’s concentration camps.
We have been the America that takes care of one another.
Whatever, they say and whatever lies they may tell the disempowered, Trump and his empowered supporters are determined to bring back the former. People fought and died for the latter. The former brings us selfishness and hate. The latter brings us mutual responsibility and love.
Now, we are engaged is a fierce battle between two visions of America. You cannot be neutral. You have to take sides.
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
—
I was never fortunate enough to meet Dr. King, but I was a member of the vast crowd that stood on the Mall when he spoke to the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. I became a good friend of his close aide Bayard Rustin, who like Dr. King, was eloquent and passionate about justice.
Dr. King was frequently criticized by friends and foes. The foes thought he was a dangerous agitator who was encouraging rebellion against the social order, which he was. Moderates said he was pushing too hard, too fast, for too much, at the wrong time and the wrong place. Some who should have been his friends said he wasn’t sufficiently radical; they said he was too cerebral, too willing to compromise, out of touch with the masses that were ready to engage in violence. Dr. King believed in nonviolence as a principle, not as a strategy. He believed in justice and equality as principles, not as temporary goals. Some of his erstwhile allies turned to Malcolm X, who did not share Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence.
On this day set aside to remember Dr. King, read or watch one of his speeches. Think about the courage it required to stand up for the oppressed, to face death every day, and to do so in a spirit of love.
The March on Washington speech
His speech against the war in Vietnam, which caused some of his allies to turn against him.
I have been to the mountaintop speech, his last speech, delivered the day before he was assassinated. At the time, he was in Memphis, where he had come to help sanitation workers who were trying to form a union to advocate for better wages. This speech was prophetic. Whenever someone from the .001% claims that they are engaged in the struggle for civil rights and simultaneously attacking unions, I remember why Dr. King was in Memphis.
And here are more, from a CNN piece that asks whether you can identify any of Dr. King’s speeches other than “I have a dream,” or his “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail,” both of which are taught in school.
Paul Thomas had a terrible biking accident on Christmas Eve and has endured great pain while he recovers from a broken hip. He is a serious cyclist, not just a guy out for a bike ride. He and his friends were mowed down by a careless driver.
During his recreation, he has been thinking more than ever about the world and the mess we are all in.
Let him tell you about a novel that he read and the thoughts it provoked.
So as I recover in the weeks leading to my 56th birthday—a new year, a new age, and this new existence forced onto me—I am deeply moved by “you could get used to anything.”
Anything?
What an ugly thing to be human and having the capacity to get used to anything.
But there was a time in the U.S. when slavery was perfectly normal. There was a time in the world when the Holocaust was perfectly normal.
Because normal, like history, is the province of those with power, a way to render some Others “deliberately silenced,…preferably unheard.”
And today the U.S. is eagerly normalizing a person and ideologies that would have seemed illegitimate just months ago.
Make a promise: You will not get used to “anything.” You will never forget what a democracy and a decent society are supposed to be. You will not accept the cruel policies that we are about to experience as normal. They are not normal. Keep your sense of values. There will be another election is less than two years. And another presidential election in less than four years. Hold on to your integrity.
Reverend William Barber of Raleigh, North Carolina, is one of the great moral forces of our age. He launched the Moral Mondays movement in his state, which brings citizens to the state capitol throughout the legislative session to voice their protests against injustice. Rev. Barber is leader of the state NAACP and a powerful national voice.
Please read his historical analysis of what he calls the Third Reconstruction, which he believes is emerging in response to the rise of the angry Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump.
He begins:
“On election night I felt a great sadness for America — not a Democratic or Republican sadness, but a sadness for the heart and soul of the nation. It is impossible to react to the election of Donald Trump with anything less than moral outrage. Trump is, as David Remnick wrote for The New Yorker, “vulgarity unbounded,” and his election has not only struck fear in the hearts of the vulnerable but also given rise to hundreds of documented cases of harassment and intimidation….
“When Obama broke through in North Carolina in 2008, we witnessed firsthand the whitelash that America is reeling from right now. Some folks are saying we’ll have to wait and see what a Trump administration decides to do. But we’ve already seen it in North Carolina. The blueprint for what it looks like to “take back America” in the 21st century was laid out in the extremist makeover of North Carolina’s government during the 2013 legislative session. What’s the policy agenda of Make America Great Again? I can tell you because we’ve seen it:
Give tax breaks to corporations and to the wealthy, attack public education, deny people access to health care, attack immigrants, attack the LGBTQ community in the name of “religious liberty,” strip environmental protections, and, finally, make it easier to get a gun than it is to vote….
“What have we learned?
“First, we must recognize the need for indigenously led, state-based, state-government focused, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor, and transformative movement building. There’s no shortcut around this. We must build a movement from the bottom up. We must build relationships at the state level because that’s where most of the extremism of the current-day deconstructionists are happening. They see the possibility of a Third Reconstruction, which is why they’re working so hard this time to strangle it in its cradle — and we must know that. We have to recognize that helicopter leadership by so-called national leaders will not sustain a moral movement. What you need are local movements. The nation never changes from Washington, D.C. down. History teaches that it changes from Selma up, from Birmingham up, from Greensboro up.
“Secondly, we need to use moral language, like the devotees of the First and Second Reconstructions. Moral language can re-frame and critique public policy regardless of who’s in power. A moral movement claims higher ground than merely a partisan debate, something that’s bigger than left versus right, conservative versus liberal. We have to begin to re-frame the conversation not to talk about left policies and right policies, but let’s talk about violence. And as people who run for office, are you on the side of violence?
“Why did we allow extremists to say “welfare” is a bad word when welfare is found in the Constitution? It’s right there: “promoting the general welfare.” Why do we still use language like “left” and “right” when it comes from the 17th Century, the French Revolution, when the Right wanted the Monarchy and the Left didn’t. Why do we allow them to put us in boxes? And why, for God’s sake, do we call people “Right” who we think are so wrong?
“Moral language gives you new metaphors. You can say, I’m against this policy not because it’s a conservative policy or a liberal policy, I’m against this policy because it’s constitutionally inconsistent, it’s morally indefensible, and it’s economically insane.
“And then we have to challenge the moral hypocrisy of the so-called Religious Right, which we should not even say because they are so wrong. They are engaging in a form of theological heresy. The greatest sin in the Bible is the sin of idolatry. The second greatest sin that has ever existed whenever people worshiped themselves was injustice toward other people. There are more than 2,000 scriptures in the Bible that deal with the issue of injustice toward women, the stranger, the poor, the sick, the hurting, and the unacceptable. You might have three about homosexuality, and not one of them trumps this scripture: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
“We can’t succumb to those who bought Christianity. Nor can we yield the moral high ground because we’re angry with them. Deep religious and moral values have been the backbone of every great progressive movement; prophetic imagination must come before we see political implementation. When the social gospel looked at children dying from child labor and people dying without labor rights and people in slums and poverty and not having a minimum wage and they asked, “What would Jesus do?”
“There would have been no labor movement without a social gospel underpinning. There would have been no abolition movement without William Lloyd Garrison and other people of deep faith. Without strong voices from the social gospel movement, there may have never been a New Deal. There would have been no Civil Rights Movement without the moral framework underneath the Civil Rights Movement. There would not have been a critique on poverty and unchecked capitalism, labor rights, healthcare, criminal justice reform, climate change, and raising the minimum wage, without a moral premise underneath it. Moral framing allows us to change the language.
“Finally, we must insist on connecting economic issues with our racial history. Too many people are too easily blaming the rise of Trump on Democrats forgetting the “white working class.” Yes, Trump appealed to real economic fears among working people. But he lost every income bracket below $48,000 and won every group above it, blowing the dog whistles of race to divide poor and working people. Any resistance to Trump that doesn’t address his divide-and-conquer tactics from Wisconsin to Ohio to North Carolina and Alabama cannot offer a real political alternative.
“We need a moral movement to revive the heart of American democracy and build a Third Reconstruction for our time. This work is not easy, and it will not be completed quickly. But we know what is required to move forward together.
“I’ve traveled to 22 states this year to train local leadership in moral fusion organizing and conduct Moral Revival services. This network of state-based moral coalitions will host a National Watch Night Service on December 31st, with the event in Washington, D.C., livestreamed to local gatherings across the nation. As formerly enslaved people were invited to enlist in a struggle for freedom on January 1st, 1863, we will invite all people of conscience to enlist in a Moral Revival Poor People’s Campaign throughout 2017 and 2018.
“We face some difficult days ahead, but don’t let anybody tell you America hasn’t seen worse. Our foremothers and fathers faced far greater odds with far fewer resources. It’s our time now. Arm in arm, we’re moving forward together, not one step back.”
Leila Morsy and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute have written a new report on how mass incarceration affects children’s outcomes in school. Here is a summary that they wrote. Please read the full report.
They write here:
Black parents, especially black fathers, are incarcerated at a rate that is unmatched by any other country in the modern world. Largely to blame for such unjustified rates are our racially discriminatory “war on drugs” policies that began in the 1970s. While crime, especially violent crime, has declined since the 1990s, arrests and incarceration have continued to rise.
This should be of urgent concern to anyone interested in education policy. The mass incarceration of African American men has important damaging consequences for children in school. The number of children affected by mass incarceration is now so great that we can reasonably infer that it contributes significantly to lowered achievement of African American children and thus to the gap in cognitive and non-cognitive achievement between black and white children.
In a new report, Mass Incarceration and Children’s Outcomes, we review research across the fields of criminal justice, health, sociology, epidemiology, and economics. We describe the growth in incarceration of the past few years, and how an African American child is much more likely to have an incarcerated parent than a white child, a circumstance not justified by differences by race in criminal activity. We then review the extensive research demonstrating that when parents are incarcerated, children do worse across cognitive and non-cognitive outcome measures. We review convincing research that shows, for example, that children of incarcerated parents are at increased risk of dropping out of school. They are more likely to develop learning disabilities, including ADHD. Their behavior in school deteriorates. They are at heightened risk of worse physical and mental health, including migraines, asthma, high cholesterol, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The statistical sophistication of the studies we reviewed reasonably eliminates the possibility that the shortcomings we describe in student outcomes may be attributable to socioeconomic or demographic characteristics of the children, rather than to their parents’ present or previous incarceration. Our report concludes with criminal justice policy recommendations to raise the achievement of children with incarcerated parents.
President Obama has responded to this discriminatory sentencing with a stepped-up rate of pardons and commutations. But such presidential action is not enough: Most prisoners are in state facilities, not federal ones. In 2014, over 700,000 prisoners nationwide were serving sentences of a year or longer for non-violent crimes. Over 600,000 of these were in state, not federal prisons.
“Stop and frisk” practices by local police, advocated by President-elect Trump, is not a federal policy. Once in office, Mr. Trump will have little influence over it. Reform of local and state government policies and practices that result in excessive and discriminatory incarceration is no less realistic or urgent now than it was before the presidential election.
State policymakers have great reach to change criminal justice policies that will positively impact how children do in school. Educators should embrace reform as a priority for advocacy. Children’s cognitive and behavioral problems caused by mass incarceration are difficult for teachers to overcome. Decreasing the number of black children affected by mass incarceration is likely to have a greater positive effect on student achievement than many school-based reforms currently advocated by education policymakers. Criminal justice policy is education policy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 