Dr. Keith Benson of the Camden (NJ) Education Association. In this essay, he analyzes the rise of Black leaders who represent the privatization movement and compares them to those who continue for a just and equitable public school system.
Whic side are you on?
I think Reverend William Barber is the most powerful voice for justice in the nation today. He wrote this article that was published in the Washington Post. That newspaper yesterday called on Governor Ralph Northam to resign.
Rev. Barber does not agree. He thinks that Gov. Northam can demonstrate repentance by whathe does today. And he calls out the hypocrisy of those who want Northam to resign yet continue to harm Black people by supporting voter suppression, ignoring poverty, and the denying their rights as citizens.
Since the Post is behind a paywall, here it is.
The Rev. William J. Barber II is president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
Following news that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s social life in the mid-1980s included parties where white people dressed in blackface, a stream of offensive photos from fraternity parties in the late 1970s and early 19 80s has emerged, implicating not only a few bad apples but also white elites across social and ideological lines. To African Americans who have survived the status quo of American racism, this is hardly a surprise. But it does raise again in our common life the question of what it means to repent of America’s racist past and pursue a more perfect union.
Like for any African American, this is personal for me. When my father challenged Jim Crow’s inequality in Georgia in the 1950s, a white man put a gun in his mouth and told him what he planned to do to him if he didn’t stop talking. When I was a young man in the 1970s, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in my uncle’s yard because he had married a white woman. My uncle sent me to the back door with a shotgun and told me to shoot anything that moved. When you know in your body the violent backlash that is inevitable whenever white supremacy is challenged, you cannot take its cultural symbols lightly.
But as angry as I can become at those who mock black people and culture to justify their own sense of superiority, I also know that mockery, fear and hatred of black people are the result of a racial caste system, not its causes. White supremacy did not emerge in the United States because of some innate human understanding that black people are inferior to white people. It was an economic choice that Americans of European descent then created an ideology to explain. “I was taught the popular folktale of racism,” American University scholar Ibram Kendi writes, “that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America’s most influentially racist ideas, it became obvious that this folk tale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing in historical evidence….”
If Northam, or any politician who has worn blackface, used the n-word or voted for the agenda of white supremacy, wants to repent, the first question they must ask is “How are the people who have been harmed by my actions asking to change the policies and practices of our society?” In political life, this means committing to expand voting rights, stand with immigrant neighbors, and provide health care and living wages for all people. In Virginia, it means stopping the environmental racism of the pipeline and natural gas compressor station Dominion Energy intends to build in Union Hill, a neighborhood founded by emancipated slaves and other free African Americans.
Scapegoating politicians who are caught in the act of interpersonal racism will not address the fundamental issue of systemic racism. We have to talk about policy. But we also have to talk about trust and power. If white people in political leadership are truly repentant, they will listen to black and other marginalized people in our society. They will confess that they have sinned and demonstrate their willingness to listen and learn by following and supporting the leadership of others. To confess past mistakes while continuing to insist that you are still best suited to lead because of your experience is itself a subtle form of white supremacy.
At the same time, we cannot allow political enemies of Virginia’s governor to call for his resignation over a photo when they continue themselves to vote for the policies of white supremacy. If anyone wants to call for the governor’s resignation, they should also call for the resignation of anyone who has supported racist voter suppression or policies that have a disparate impact on communities of color.
While we must name and resist white supremacy, we can also recall that we are never alone in this work. During the 19th century, there were anti-racist abolitionists — black and white — who worked to subvert and transform a system that considered some people chattel. In the new dawn of Reconstruction, black and white men worked together in statehouses across the South to reimagine democracy. During the 20th century’s movements for labor unions, women’s suffrage, and civil, human and environmental rights, fusion coalitions of black, white, brown, Native and Asian worked together to pursue a more perfect union that both acknowledges our original sin and holds on to the hope that we might yet live up to the better angels of our nature. Whenever we ask what repentance means, we don’t have to start from scratch. We have a long tradition to draw on, full of examples of what true repentance must look like.
In his 20s and 30s, Democrat Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia was a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, serving as the exalted cyclops of his local chapter. He continued to support the Klan into the 1940s, but Byrd later said joining the Klan was his greatest mistake. He demonstrated what repentance can look like by working with colleagues in Congress to extend the Voting Rights Act in 2006 and backing Barack Obama as his party’s candidate for president in 2008. “Senator Byrd and I stood together on many issues,” wrote Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who nearly died fighting for voting rights in Selma, Ala. In our present moral crisis, we must remember that real repentance is possible — and it looks like working together to build the multiethnic democracy we’ve never yet been.
John Blake, a CNN writer, has a different take on the controversy surrounding Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and the recently discovered photographs from his medical school yearbook of one student in blackface, the other wearing a Klan outfit.
He writes:
Jan Resseger spent her professional life as a social justice crusader in Ohio, fighting for equitable treatment of all children, especially the most vulnerable. Since her retirement, she has written powerful and significant posts about children, education, and equity. Ohio and the nation needs to hear her clear voice.
She attended a session at the Cleveland City Club to hear Linda Darling-Hammond speak. The Cleveland City Club is one of the most prestigious speaking platforms in the country. The civic and political elite gather to listen.
Jan expected to hear LDH speak about equity, racism, about policies that harm children of color and punish them for being poor. For someone like Jan, LDH is an icon, a clarion voice for the children left behind.
Jan expected that LDH would talk about equity, racism, and the policies needed to create a fairer education policy for all children.
What she heard instead was a lecture on social-emotional learning.
LDH expressed her confidence that the harsh accountability measures of NCLB were fading away, replaced by ESSA.
But Ohio, writes Jan, is still locked in the NCLB era.
She wrote:
“Despite that Darling-Hammond told us she believes the kind of punitive high-stakes school accountability prescribed by No Child Left Behind is fading, state-imposed sanctions based on aggregate standardized test scores remain the drivers of Ohio public school policy. Here are some of our greatest challenges:
“Forty-two minutes into the video of last Friday’s City Club address by Darling-Hammond, when a member of the Ohio State Board of Education, Meryl Johnson [a member of the State Board of Education] asked the speaker to comment on Ohio’s state takeovers of so called “failing” school districts, Darling-Hammond briefly addressed the tragedy of the kind of punitive systems that now dominate Ohio’s public school policy: “We have been criminalizing poverty in a lot of different ways, and that is one of them… There’s about a .9 correlation between the level of poverty and test scores. So, if the only thing you measure is the absolute test score, then you’re always going to have the high poverty communities at the bottom and then they can be taken over.” But rather than address Ohio’s situation directly, Darling-Hammond continued by describing value-added ratings of schools which she implied could instead be used to measure what the particular school contributes to learning, and then she described the educational practices in other countries she has studied.”
This is a story about a photograph taken at a small Ku Klux Klan rally in Georgia in 1992.
The photo shows a child in KKK regalia looking at his reflection in a shield held by a police officer, who is African-American. The officer is there to prevent violence. He is protecting the peace and protecting even the members of the KKK.
The photo has been adopted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a pre-eminent CIvil Rights Organization.
Over the years, as you will read, people have debated what the photo says to them.
It reminded me of the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific.” The title “You’ve Got to Be Taught to Hate.” The little boy dressed up as a Klansman didn’t hate the man holding the shield. But he will be taught to hate by those who dressed him.
Racism and segregation are our nation’s greatest sin, written into our founding and our history. We live with their consequences every day in the misery and blighted lives that stand in sharp contrast to the ideals of our founding documents. We think of ourselves as a just people, but we tolerate injustice. We think of our nation as one that is dedicated to equality, yet we live with inequality and ignore it. Now, as Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, writes in the Washington Post.
Two newly released reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian interference in the 2016 election have been nothing short of revelatory. Both studies — one produced by researchers at Oxford University, the other by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge — describe in granular detail how the Russian government tried to sow discord and confusion among American voters. And both conclude that Russia’s campaign included a massive effort to deceive and co-opt African Americans. We now have unassailable confirmation that a foreign power sought to exploit racial tensions in the United States for its own gain.
Ever since U.S. intelligence agencies reported that the Russian government worked to sway the 2016 election, foreign election meddling has been one of our nation’s top national security concerns. But our discussions about Russian interference rarely touch on the other major threat to our elections: the resurgence of state-sponsored voter suppression in the United States. In light of these disturbing new reports, it is clear we can no longer think of foreign election meddling as a phenomenon separate from attempts to disenfranchise Americans of color. Racial injustice remains a real vulnerability in our democracy, one that foreign powers are only too willing to attack.
How should we respond? First, we have to make it easier, not harder, for Americans to vote. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, which severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, we’ve seen a resurgence of voter-suppression efforts across the nation. Congress has the power to fix the Voting Rights Act, but so far it has declined to do so. The revelations of Russia’s racial targeting should serve as a wake-up call that domestic voter suppression, in addition to being unconstitutional, effectively aids foreign attacks on our democracy. Indeed, we should take seriously the danger that domestic and foreign groups may coordinate to suppress turnout in future elections, a possibility we can begin to forestall, first and foremost, by protecting the franchise here at home. Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.) has already introduced a comprehensive new voting rights bill, and Congress should swiftly act upon it in the new year.
Second, these revelations only deepen the urgency of demanding more accountability from technology companies. The New Knowledge report criticizes social media companies such as Facebook for misleading Congress about the nature of Russian interference, noting that one even denied that specific groups were targeted. This is just more evidence that Silicon Valley has yet to come to grips with the enormous influence it wields in our democracy, and the ways that foreign powers can use that influence to manipulate Americans. Congress should require greater transparency and responsibility from these corporations before the 2020 elections.
Finally, we have to accept that foreign powers seize upon these divisions because they are real — because racism remains the United States’ Achilles’ heel. Indeed, it is, and always has been, a national security vulnerability — a fundamental and easily exploitable reality of American life that belies the image and narrative of equality and justice we project and export around the world. It may be especially difficult in our era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” but we must recognize that our failure to acknowledge hard truths, especially when it comes to race, makes it easier for foreign powers to turn us against one another. Russia did not conjure out of thin air the black community’s legitimate grievances about racist policing. Nor did it invent racist and hateful conspiracy theories. Rather, Russian trolls seized upon these real problems as ready-made sources of discord. Moving forward, we need to recognize that our failure to honestly address issues of civil rights and racial justice makes all of us more susceptible to foreign interference.
This is hardly the first time our adversaries have identified race and racism as America’s great vulnerability. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union frequently pointed to segregation and civil unrest as proof of American hypocrisy. This propaganda was sufficiently widespread, and contained enough truth, that leaders of both parties began arguing that segregation undermined the United States’ position in the Cold War, helping to ease the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today, we need a similar understanding that our failure to ensure equal justice for all has grave implications for U.S. national security. The upcoming House oversight committee hearings on Russian interference and voter suppression will be critical opportunities to educate the public on the threats to our democracy, and they deserve our close attention.
But we must be careful not to reduce the struggle for racial equality into a bloodless question of national interest. Civil rights are essential to our national security, but national security cannot be the chief rationale for pursuing civil rights. After all, racial injustice is not just another chink in our armor. It is the great flaw in our character. Our adversaries know that race makes us our own worst enemy. It is past time we learn this hard truth ourselves.
Eve Ewing has a fabulous bio, as author, academic, playwright, poet, and comic book hero.
She is also the author of the recent book about Rahm Emanuel’s historic closing of 50 schools in a single day, called “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.” I reviewed it here. It was the first book to my knowledge that tells the story of school closings from the perspective of the students, families, teachers, and communities.
Here she appears on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
Speaking of ghosts, she will haunt Rahm Emanuel forever. Her book will be remembered long after he is forgotten.
Mercedes Schneider wrote a history of vouchers and school choice called School Choice: The End of Public Education? She is aware that libertarians like to credit the origins of vouchers to Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. But, their ideas never took root in American soil.
Schneider writes:
The history of school vouchers in American K12 education is rooted in racism.
This fact is indisputable.
Libertarian economist Milton Friedman wrote his famous proposal for vouchers in 1955. Southern governors loved the idea of using public money to escape federal court orders.
She writes:
When it comes to racial integration, school vouchers have yet to “show promise.” Moreover, even though over 60 years has passed since vouchers were first used in K12 education to stymie the federal desegregation mandate, school voucher usage has yet to redeem its reputation as a catalyst for racial resegregation.
In the face of this reality, crediting Paine, or Mill, or Friedman with “the” idea for school vouchers matters little, for it is an idea that only fares well on paper.
Vouchers have also fared poorly in studies of academic achievement.
They seem to be best at reinforcing Inequity.
Teachers in Oakland, California, are preparing to strike. The following press release explains why.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACTS:
The Wildcat Underground, Oakland High School Educators United
Twitter: @WildcatUndrgrnd
IG: wildcat_underground
FB: Wildcat Underground
Miles Murray, English Teacher, Oakland High OEA Rep: (510) 684-2956
Suzi LeBaron, Science Teacher and Department Head/Pathway Director: (707) 695-6873 Cole Margen,
History Teacher and Oakland High OEA Rep: (925) 300-8634
Alex Webster Guiney, Special Education Teacher: (415) 722-7668
Oakland Unified does not remember the past and is condemning its teachers and students to repeat it.
The teachers of Oakland Unified School District have been working without a contract since 2017.
Oakland Education Association (OEA, AFL-CIO) bargaining with the district reached an impasse last spring. Like a glacier calving in global warming, the rumbling and cracking is escalating in Oakland public schools.
Teachers at Oakland High School are some of the most vocal in the district and are organizing for the inevitable fight.
In the coming weeks, there will be a series of actions, including an Educators Day Out, which will include a march and rally at Oakland City Hall by 70 Oakland High educators, plus students, families, and supporters, on a scheduled school day before winter break.
“You can call it a walk-out or a work stoppage if you want. It is not an official OEA action. Our union has been following the rules in negotiations for almost two years and the district continues to stall, except when moving in the wrong direction. Teachers at Oakland High have had enough. We need to take action to be heard, and the actions will only escalate from here, and hopefully spread to other sites before the School Board does more damage. We must make our city government realize that that the health of our city depends on strong, equitable, public schools,” said Miles Murray, English teacher and Oakland High OEA representative, who said that a strike is not off the table. “In fact, it’s looming and hopefully this and, other ‘Wildcat Underground’ actions will show the district, city officials, and our fellow teachers the high level of solidarity, organization, and fortitude we have. If the district finally offers a raise to match inflation, sane class sizes, and all the rest of our demands that will truly benefit our students, we won’t have to strike.”
In 1996, Oakland teachers went on strike in January and didn’t return until spring. Unfortunately, many of the issues teachers face in Oakland have not changed substantially since 1996. In fact, they look eerily similar. Oakland continues to lead state school districts in the percentage of its budget paid to consultants and top-salaried district-level administrators.
“Systemically, nothing has changed in 22 years, since our last strike. It’s scary that OUSD has not figured out how to evolve and improve in more than two decades,” said Alex Webster Guiney, a Special Education teacher and school site OEA rep. “OUSD administration still does not recognize the inherent value of teacher satisfaction and longevity,” she added.
1996 STRIKE HISTORY HERE:
https://libcom.org/library/oakland-teachers-strike-1996-iww?fbclid=IwAR1BscKe60H-EQSnkJ63Ag3VCJrhjMid PiWhdFuqk4RGkqyxd9RlcNtoIIY)
Oakland teachers make considerably less than teachers in surrounding districts in the Bay Area where the cost of living is similar, or even less than in Oakland. The cost of living in Oakland has risen astronomically as San Francisco has tapped it for commuter tech housing, and as the city has experienced a renaissance in restaurants, bars, and shopping. With all of this, rents have skyrocketed as Oakland educators continue to fall behind.
“It is ridiculous that the majority of educators in Oakland can barely afford to live in the community in which we teach,” said Oakland High OEA rep Cole Margen, a history teacher in Oakland High’s RISE Academy, which serves a population of recent immigrants and students learning English as a second language. “Our salary caps out at 80 thousand after 20 years in the district and that is nowhere near enough to live on, or retire on, if we want to support ourselves and our families -– especially with the housing bubble that has so lovingly accommodated the tech exodus from San Francisco.”
By comparison teachers in surrounding districts rise to higher salaries earlier in their careers, and finish much higher with more secure retirements for their time spent teaching.
“The primary difference between Oakland and many of these districts is the percentage of black and brown students we educate,” said Suzi LeBaron, a science teacher, department head, and pathway director at Oakland High. “You can look at the demographics and the comparative salaries and see a clear trend. This is institutional racism at work and no one is talking about it. Vultures in the form of consultants and top-salaried administrators continue to circle and pick our district apart, because that is OUSD’s history.”
A newly credentialed teacher with a BA starts in Oakland at $46,570. Our median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is $2,330/month. (Oakland demographics, 25.3% Hispanic/Latinx, and 28% African American).
In Fremont, where the median rent is $2,086, a teacher starts at $66,398, nearly $20,000 more. (Fremont demographics, 14.8% Hispanic/Latinx, and 3.3% African American).
In Mountain View-Los Altos district, where the median rent is about $450 higher than Oakland, the starting salary is $82,819. (Mountain View demographics, 21.7% Hispanic/Latinx, and 2.2% African American).
In fact, even though Mountain View teachers don’t get a raise in the first five years, at the end of those five years they have earned $170,611 MORE than a 5-year teacher in Oakland. That’s the difference between home stability and no home stability. Oakland teachers cannot continue to work to better the lives of our students while their own livelihood is at risk. They can no longer tolerate a system of attrition.
Another point of contention is the education of children with special needs: “These children are disproportionately assigned to our public schools because their applications can be rejected by charter schools,” Guiney said. Charter schools are NOT obligated to provide services to children with special needs, but public schools are. As a result, OUSD wants to raise the cap on Special Ed class sizes in order to balance out overcrowding in general ed classrooms. “Adding more high-need children to a Special Ed classroom in order to reduce the number of children in general ed classrooms is an inefficient way of handling overcrowding, and will only end up reducing the quality of education for all students,” Guiney added.
Unfortunately, OUSD’s continued financial woes are the result of continuing sloppy mismanagement due to the historic attitude that students in Oakland didn’t, and still don’t, matter as much as students in surrounding communities.
OUSD supports a larger percentage of consultants, upper-level managers, and administrators than other state school districts, and a smaller percentage is spent on direct services to students (include the salaries and retention of their teachers). This is a classic example of educational redlining.
Instead, the district is increasingly relying on additional sources of revenue (parcel taxes and state support for career and technical education, as two examples) to keep programs robust for students. The actual work of teachers, however, continues to be minimized.
Additionally, the growth of private and public charter schools in Oakland (staffed with non-unionized teachers) has resulted in a well-documented “white flight” from Oakland’s public schools, further emphasizing inequities.
While OUSD talks about the possibility of closing 24 public schools, the district has approved a large number of largely-unregulated charter schools that continue to drain resources and students from public schools, with no proven outcomes. In fact, OUSD has recently hired another top-level (highly paid) administrator to oversee the Office of Charter Schools, all the while refusing to bargain with its nearly 3.000 public school educators represented by OEA.
The Jackson Free-Press (Mississippi) reported that Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith attended an all-white segregation academy in her high school years.
The story was picked up by Huffington Post.
It’s important to remember that segregation academies were created as the first statewide examples of school choice. Their purpose was to allow white students to avoid being forced by federal courts to go to school with black students after the Brown vs, Board of Education decision in 1954.
Senator Hyde-Smith’s alma mater, Lawrence County Academy, “was established in 1970, one year after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Mississippi to desegregate its schools. For 15 years after desegregation became law of the land, Mississippi dragged its feet on integrating black and white students.”
It was part of the school choice movement across the South whose purpose was to avoid and defeat desegregation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 