Archives for category: Racism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

My Review of Eve L. Ewing’s “Ghosts in the Schoolyard”

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2018 //
14

The best book about education this year was written by a woman who is a poet, a playwright, a novelist, and soon to be the writer of a Marvel comic about “a black girl genius from Chicago.” Ewing has a doctorate in sociology from Harvard and is now on the faculty of the University of Chicago. In case you don’t know all this, I am referring to Eve L. Ewing and her new book about school closings in Chicago. The title is Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.

Eve Ewing was a teacher in one of the 50 public schools that Rahm Emanuel closed in a single day. Her book will help to memorialize Rahm Emanuel’s stigma as the only person in American history to close 50 public schools in one day.

Because she is a poet, the book is written beautifully. She has managed to overcome the burden of academic language, which can so often sound technical, bureaucratic, and dehumanizing. Her language goes to the heart of the experience of suffering at the hands of bureaucrats and technocrats.

She examines the school closings from the perspective of those who were its victims: students, families, communities.

The question at the heart of the book is this: Why do students and families fight to keep their schools open after the authorities declare they are “failing schools.”

She answers the question by listening to and recording the moving testimony of those who fought for the survival of their schools.

Ewing sketches the history of the Bronzeville community in Chicago, racially segregated by government action. What resulted was a community that was hemmed in but nonetheless developed strong traditions, ties, and communal bonds. One of those bonds was the one between families and schools.

She describes some of the schools that were closed, schools with long histories in the black community. Parents and students came out to testify in opposition to the closings. They spoke about why they loved their school, how their family members had proudly attended the school, only to be confronted by school officials who waved “data” and “facts” in their faces to justify closing their beloved school.

Ewing deftly contrasts the official pronouncements of Barbara Byrd-Bennett (now in prison for accepting kickbacks from vendors), who insisted that it was not “racist” to close the schools of Bronzeville with the emotional responses of the students and families, who saw racism in the decision.

Ewing writes powerfully about a concept she calls “institutional mourning.” Families experienced this mourning process as the city leaders killed the institutions that were part of their lives and their history. The school closings were “part of a broader pattern of disrespect for people of color in Chicago,” they were part of “a formula of destruction” intended to obliterate memory, history, and tradition. The act of closing schools was integral to gentrification. And indeed, Chicago has seen a mass exodus of a significant part of its black population, which may have been (likely was) the purpose of the school closings and the removal of black neighborhoods.

Institutional mourning, she writes, “is the social and emotional experience undergone by individuals and communities facing the loss of a shared institution they are affiliated with—-such as a school, church, residence, neighborhood, or business district–especially when those individuals or communities occupy a socially marginalized status that amplifies their reliance on the institution or its significance in their lives.

Ewing asks:

“What do school closures, and their disproportionate clustering in communities like Bronzeville, tell us about a fundamental devaluation of African American children, their families, and black life in general? Is there room for democracy and real grassroots participation in a school system that has been run like an oligarchy?”

Byrd-Bennett spoke about a “utilization crisis” that required the closure of schools in Bronzeville and the dispersion of their students. Ewing offers a counterpoint, seeing the schools in the black community “as a bastion of community pride” and a long-running war over “the future of a city and who gets to claim it. There is the need to consider that losing the school represents another assault in a long line of racist attacks against a people, part of a history of levying harmful policies against them, blaming them for the aftermath, then having the audacity to pretend none of it really happened. There is the way some of these policy decisions are camouflaged by pseudoscientific analysis that is both ethically and statistically questionable. There is our intensely segregated society to account for, in which those who attend the school experience a fundamentally different reality than those who have the power to steer its future. And finally, there is the intense emotional aftermath that follows school closure, which can have a profound, lasting effect on those who experience the closure even as it is rarely acknowledged with any seriousness by those who made the decision.”

One bright spot in her book is the story of the successful resistance to the closing of the Walter H. Dyett high school in Bronzeville. She explains who Walter H. Dyett was, why the school was important, and why the community fought to keep the school named for him open. Dyett was a musician and a beloved high school music teacher; he taught in Bronzeville for 38 years. The school bearing his name may be the only one ever named for a teacher. A dozen community members, led by Jitu Brown of the Journey for Justice Alliance, conducted a hunger strike that lasted for 32 days. Only by risking their lives were they able to persuade the Chicago Mayor and his hand-picked Board to invest in the school instead of closing it.

Why do parents fight to save their schools, a fight they usually lose? She writes, “They fight because losing them [their schools] can mean losing their very world.”

I have underlined and starred entire paragraphs. Certainly, the testimony of students at public hearings, which was very moving. Also Ewing’s commentary, which is insightful.

At the hearing concerning the proposed (and certain) closing of the Mayo elementary school, students talked about the shame they felt.

One student, a third grader, testified:

My whole class started breaking out crying, so did my teacher. We walked through the halls in shame because we didn’t want Mayo to close. When I’m in fourth grade, I was really thinking about going to the fiftieth year anniversary, but how can I when Mayo is closing?

The shame was on Rahm Emanuel and Barbara Byrd-Bennett, but the students somehow felt culpable for what was done to them.

Another student from Mayo said:

Every day I go to school, we sing the Mayo song, and we are proud to hear the song. We are proud to sing the song every…every day. All I want to know is, why close Mayo? This is one of the best schools we ever had.

The book reads like a novel.

Let me add that I have waited for this book for a long time, not knowing if it would ever be written. History told from the point of view of those who were acted on, rather than the point of view of those at the top of the pyramid. Whose story will be told and who will tell it? Eve Ewing has told it.

I found it difficult to put down.

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Emanuel, Rahm, Racism

Wendy Lecker: A Terrific Book about Chicago School Closings: Eve Ewing’s “Ghosts in the Schoolyard”

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2018 //
16

Wendy Lecker is a civil rights lawyer who writes frequently for the Stamford Advocate in Connecticut.

In this article, she reviews Eve L. Ewing’s marvelous book Ghosts in the Schoolyard.

I finished it a few days ago and can testify that it is a very important book. It is a powerful account of the 2013 mass school closings in Chicago.

Lecker writes:

The increase in racist attacks and voter suppression across the country prompts many whites to claim that this ugliness is “not who we are” as Americans. Sadly, these events merely reinforce how pervasive racism is in American society and policy.

A new book, “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side,” describes how African-American communities experience education reform policies, particularly school closures, in the context of the history of racial segregation and discrimination in Chicago. The author, Eve Ewing, is a professor at the University of Chicago, and a graduate of and former teacher in the Chicago public schools.

In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s administration closed 49 schools, on the pretext that the schools had low test scores and were “under-utilized.” The closures disproportionately affected African-American students in the intensely segregated district.

The questionable standard used to determine “under-utilization” was large class size — 30 children per class. When predominately white Chicago neighborhoods suffered large population declines, CPS never considered school closures there. CPS claimed it would send students to “better” schools, but the receiving schools had test scores just a few points above those slated for closure. From 2000 to 2015, CPS closed 125 neighborhood schools in communities of color, while opening 149 charter schools and selective admission public schools.

“I feel like I’m at a slave auction … Because I’m like, begging you to keep my family together. Don’t take them and separate them.”

This plea was uttered by a Chicago public school principal at one of the public hearings in 2013. Professor Ewing reviewed the testimony of the throngs of community members who came out to oppose gutting their schools. The schools, which had educated generations of the same families, were community institutions. Parents, teachers and students described them as families that provided continuity and stability for the entire neighborhood.

The analogy to a slave auction was not far-fetched. As Ewing notes, “the intentional disruption of the African-American family has been a primary tool of white supremacy.” In Chicago, this is not the first time African-American communities were torn apart by government policy. Wooed to the north by labor recruiters during the great migration, African-Americans were confined to one neighborhood, eventually dubbed Bronzeville, by violence, restrictive covenants and, later, housing policy. The community turned this forcibly segregated neighborhood into a vibrant place — a hub for music and the arts. Public housing policies favored families. Consequently, Bronzeville had a dense concentration of children. Local officials refused to integrate schools, so these children attended predominately African-American neighborhood public schools. Moreover, CPS consistently failed to invest in these segregated schools. Despite local activism and federal intervention over the years, Chicago has done little to address school or residential segregation.

In the late 1990s, Chicago demolished much of Bronzeville’s public housing, ousting many of its residents. Parents who were able sent children to live with relatives who remained in Bronzeville in order to preserve vital school relationships. As Ewing observes, the loss of student population in Bronzeville was the result of overt government policy.

To Bronzeville residents, the 2013 round of school closures was the continuation of a pattern of segregation, displacement and underfunding by Chicago officials. One resident described CPS’s attitude as “I poured gasoline on your house and then it’s your fault it’s on fire.”

There is extensive evidence showing that the 2013 Chicago school closings diminished educational opportunities for the children whose schools closed. Ewing demonstrates that the accompanying loss of relationships, identity and sense of history was just as devastating. The community mourned lost connections with teachers, staff, students, and something larger. Ewing details some of the personalities behind the names of the closed schools — notable African-American professionals from the same community. As one student noted, “That’s how you get black history to go away. Closing schools (especially those named for prominent African-Americans).” In the rare instance where a school slated for closure, Dyett High School, was saved after a community-wide hunger strike, a student declared that “(w)e value our education more because of what people sacrificed.”

“Ghosts in the Schoolyard” illustrates how supposedly objective metrics officials use to judge a school’s quality and fate are far from neutral and fail to account for a host of considerations critical to the community affected. As Ewing concludes, if we fail to consider history, community, race, power and identity when framing and investigating the problems facing our public schools, we will fail to find solutions that serve the best interests of children and communities.

Wendy Lecker is a columnist for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and is senior attorney at the Education Law Center.

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Emanuel, Rahm, Race, Racism

Jim Sleeper on Republican Derangement Syndrome

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2018 //
51

Journalist Jim Sleeper recalls the moderate brand of Republicanism that he grew up with in Massachusetts.

He is shocked to see how the national party has been captured by fringe extremists who are no longer on the fringe, nor are they “extreme” in the context of a Trump-captured party.

It’s not enough to observe, however rightly, that Republicans have been deranged by the much-ballyhooed sins of what a concerted conservative campaign derides as “Social Justice Warriors,” what Rush Limbaugh calls “feminazis,” what Trump and his minions call invading Mexican rapists and terrorists, and other such bogeymen. Only a few of those are carriers or casualties of what’s generating Trumpism itself: the disease of turbo-marketing that’s reducing American education, entertainment, social media, politics and the dignity of work itself to levels determined by a mania to maximize profits and shareholder dividends, no matter the social costs.

The few conservatives who still hope to advance the ordered, principled republican liberty that my Massachusetts exemplars upheld can no longer convincingly reconcile that hope with their movement’s and the Republican Party’s obeisance to every whim and riptide of corporate, global capitalism that’s destroying the liberty they claim to cherish and that’s generating a lot of what’s wrong in the bogeymen they vow to defeat.

The Republican party of Eisenhower and Rockefeller is dead. It has been replaced by the ideology of Donald Trump, an ideology that does not hesitate to play with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and every other intolerant idea in the lexicon. Just in the past few days, Trump has made a point of belittling black female members of the press, as part of his war on the press. The Republican leadership doesn’t care.

Categories Education Reform, Racism, Republicans

Peter Greene: Society Is Failing Our Children and Their Schools

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2018 //
12

Recently, a commenter on this blog wrote that he finally understood why some schools are succeeding and others are failing. He said he realized that children in affluent communities have well-resourced and successful schools, while children in impoverished communities have terrible schools. I tried for the umpteenth time to explain to him that he was reaching the wrong conclusion. The only measure he was using was test scores, which reflect family income. I suggested he consider that the schools in poor communities did not get the same resources as those in affluent communities. The schools he called “failing” very likely have dedicated teachers who are working hard despite large classes and inadequate support. The problem is not the schools, but society’s refusal to pay the cost of making every school a good school.

Peter Greene explains the point in more detail in this post about the Journey for Justice Alliance.

He begins:

“If you’re not regularly exposed to the problem, you might think that finding the ways in which non-white non-wealthy students are shortchanged would require deep and nuanced research. As it turns out, finding the ways in which education fails to serve those students requires no more careful research than finding the nose on the front of your face.

“The Journey For Justice Alliance is based in Chicago, but it’s an alliance of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in 24 cities across the country. They are working and organizing for community-driven alternatives to the privatization of and dismantling of public school systems. They’re the folks behind the #WeChoose movement (as in “we choose education equity, not the illusion of school choice.” Look at their member groups and you’ll find honest-to-goodness community grass roots organizations, not just one more astroturf group funded by Gates, Walton, et al. Their director, Jitu Brown, is one of the most powerful speakers for education and equity it has ever been my pleasure to hear.

“Last spring they issued a report– “Failing Brown v. Board”– that looks at the gap between the schools that serve primarily wealthy white families and those that serve non-wealthy families of color. Their findings are not encouraging.

“The report says: The fact is, public schools in Black and Latino communities are not “failing.” They have been failed. More accurately, these schools have been sabotaged for years by policy-makers who fail to fully fund them, by ideologues who choose to experiment with them, by “entrepreneurs” who choose to extract public taxpayer dollars from education systems for their own pockets.

“The report also rejects the notion that money doesn’t matter, or that somehow the children and their families are responsible. And they know what successful, fully-resourced schools look like

They offer a culturally relevant, engaging and challenging curriculum, smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, wrap-around emotional and academic supports, a student-centered school climate and meaningful parent and community engagement. These are the hallmarks of what Journey for Justice calls sustainable community schools.

“J4J performed a fairly simple piece of research– looking at course offerings in various schools across twelve cities. They acknowledge that such a comparison isn’t perfect, that schools may offer courses that are never actually taught, that the course offering list doesn’t tell you about the quality of those courses. But the findings are still pretty stark.”

In every pairing of black and white schools, “majority white schools offered both more academic subjects and more “enrichment” subjects in the arts than majority Black and/or Brown schools. Majority white schools offered more foreign languages, more high-level math options, more AP courses. The range of offerings in arts, music, dance and theater was far greater in majority white schools…

“Charter fans are going to say, “See? That’s why we need to build more charters, so we can get some of those children of color out of there,” but why should those children have to sacrifice the other big benefit that majority white schools enjoy– a school in their own community that they can attend with their neighbors? And why do we need a complicated web of privatized schools to fix the problem. We know how to fix the problem, as witnessed by the fact that politicians and leaders have fixed the problem for each of the affluent majority white schools.

“It’s like you have twenty kids in a cafeteria, and ten sit down with a steak dinner and the other ten get bowls of cold oatmeal, and when someone complains about it, a bunch of folks pop up to propose some complex system by which one of the oatmeal kids will be sent out to a restaurant across town. No! Just get back out in the kitchen and use the same tools and supplies that you demonstrably already have to make steak dinners for the rest of the kids.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Inequality, Injustice, Racism

Max Boot: Vote Against Republicans. Every Single One.

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2018 //
19

Max Boot, who recently renounced his ties to the Republican Party, urges you to vote for Democrats. He begins by quoting Joe Biden. He is sickened by the Trump dominance of his former party.

“


I am sick and tired of this administration.

“I’m sick and tired of what’s going on.

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.” 
— Joe Biden 


[Boot writes ]

I’m sick and tired, too.


I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)




Donald Trump has irreversibly changed the Republican Party. The upheaval might seem unusual, but as Opinion writer Robert Gebelhoff explains, political transformations crop up throughout U.S. history.

I’m sick and tired of a president who misuses his office to demagogue on immigration — by unnecessarily sending 5,200 troops [editor’s note: now upped to 15,000] to the border and by threatening to rescind by executive order the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.


I’m sick and tired of a president who is so self-absorbed that he thinks he is the real victim of mail-bomb attacks on his political opponents — and who, after visiting Pittsburgh despite being asked by local leaders to stay away, tweeted about how he was treated, not about the victims of the synagogue massacre.


I’m sick and tired of a president who cheers a congressman for his physical assault of a reporter, calls the press the “enemy of the people ” and won’t stop or apologize even after bombs were sent to CNN in the mail.


I’m sick and tired of a president who employs the language of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financier George Soros and “globalists,” and won’t apologize or retract even after what is believed to be the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history.




I’m sick and tired of a president who won’t stop engaging in crazed partisanship, denouncing Democrats as “evil,” “un-American” and “treasonous” subversives who are in league with criminals.


I’m sick and tired of a president who cares so little about right-wing terrorism that, on the very day of the synagogue shooting, he proceeded with a campaign rally, telling his supporters, “Let’s have a good time.”


I’m sick and tired of a president who presides over one of the most unethical administrations in U.S. history — with three Cabinet members resigning for reported ethical infractions and the secretary of the interior the subject of at least 18 federal investigations.


I’m sick and tired of a president who flouts norms of accountability by refusing to release his tax returns or place his business holdings in a blind trust.


I’m sick and tired of a president who lies outrageously and incessantly — an average of eight times a day — claiming recently that there are riots in California and that a bill that passed the Senate 98 to 1 had “very little Democrat support.”


I’m sick and tired of a president who can’t be bothered to work hard and instead prefers to spend his time watching Fox News and acting like a Twitter troll.


And I’m sick and tired of Republicans who go along with Trump — defending, abetting and imitating his egregious excesses.
I’m sick and tired of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) acting like a caddie for the man he once denounced as a “kook” — just this week, Graham endorsed Trump’s call for rescinding “birthright citizenship,” a kooky idea if ever there was one.




I’m sick and tired of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who got his start in politics as a protege of the “bleeding-heart conservative” Jack Kemp, refusing to call out Trump’s race-baiting.


I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once complained about the federal debt adding $113 billion to the debt just in fiscal year 2018.


I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once championed free trade refusing to stop Trump as he launches trade wars with all of our major trade partners.


I’m sick and tired of Republicans who not only refuse to investigate Trump’s alleged ethical violations but who also help him to obstruct justice by maligning the FBI, the special counsel and the Justice Department.


Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same — with Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya.


If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do.

Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection.

If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one.

Categories Bigotry, Citizenship, Lies, Racism, Republicans

A Letter to Trump from Leaders of the Jewish Community in Pittsburgh, and Their Allies

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2018 //
33

Please consider signing this letter.

Add your name to the demands from Pittsburgh Jewish leaders to Trump

President Trump, your words, your policies, and your Party have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement. The violence against Jews in Pittsburgh is the direct culmination of your influence.

We demand you and the Republican Party:

Fully denounce white nationalism,

Stop targeting and endangering all minorities,

Cease your assault on immigrants and refugees, and

Commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.

—leaders of Bend the Arc: Pittsburgh

(To add your organization, synagogue, or group to this letter, please go here.)

The massacre of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue comes at a time when the Trump administration, the Republican Party and their enablers — at all levels — have fomented hate, fear, and white nationalism in our country.

They have targeted the Muslim community, immigrants and refugees, people of color, and LGBTQ people, and in recent weeks we have seen a marked escalation in their use of antisemitic images, rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

The Trump administration, the Republican Party and their enablers have provoked violence against our communities. Our blood is on their hands.

It is time to rise up together to demand our safety. We refuse to be divided. We refuse to be isolated from each other. We will outlive their hatred.

Now, we’re asking Jews and allies across the country to add your names to the demands of Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh who are rising up to demand the White House renounce white nationalism so we can all be safe.

Read the full open letter to Trump from Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh here.

Categories Bigotry, Racism, Trump

America’s Crooked Landlord

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2018 //
11

Did you know that Fred Trump was Woody Guthrie’s landlord? Did you know that Woody wrote a song about Old Man Trump and his racism? I didn’t. Read this and you will know.

John Whitlow wrote this opinion piece for the New York Times. He is a lawyer who represents tenants who have been ripped off by unscrupulous landlords. He teaches law at City University of New York.

The folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote a song about life in an apartment owned by a particularly odious landlord whose business practices consisted of a brew of dodgy bookkeeping, race-baiting and corporate welfare: “Beach Haven ain’t my home!/No, I just can’t pay this rent!/My money’s down the drain, And my soul is badly bent!”

Beach Haven, of course, is the apartment complex built by Fred Trump, a place that Guthrie called “Trump’s Tower.” Fred Trump’s management of Beach Haven is also one example among many of the shady dealings and outright deceptions documented in the recent exposé about the Trump family’s real estate empire.

The story proved what anyone familiar with New York real estate has long known. Donald Trump is a homegrown creature, a species well known and justifiably loathed by most New Yorkers — the unscrupulous landlord. The rest of the country may be in a constant state of shock when confronted with the tornado of news that whirls around the Trump administration. But tenant advocates know what he is doing. More than a stooge for Vladimir Putin or the embodiment of a disgruntled — and mythical — white working class, Mr. Trump is at his core a landlord, turning a handsome profit while the rest of us live in increasingly precarious conditions.

As a tenant attorney, I regularly interact with landlords in the city’s housing courts. They make a killing by taking advantage of a rigged system. They extract as much wealth as possible from hardworking people trying to hang on to the places they call home, with little regard for the common good or the social fabric of our city. They take advantage of tax subsidies to renovate old buildings and construct new ones, and they engage in a range of practices, lawful and unlawful, to raise rents above the threshold beyond which tenants lose the protections of rent stabilization. And they regularly discriminate against tenants on the basis of race, language, national origin and immigration status.

Much of the outrage generated by the reporting on the Trump family’s finances has focused on tax evasion, which is immense and possibly criminal, and on the myth that Mr. Trump is a self-made man. But it is no small thing that the Trump empire is built on the same kinds of predatory practices that tenants and tenant advocates deal with every day: inflated costs for repairs, which are passed on to tenants in the form of rent increases; lax government oversight over building conditions and rent levels; and racial divisiveness.

Just as the Trump family built its wealth through price-gouging and discrimination against tenants in the complex and easily manipulated regulatory environment of New York City, the Trump administration is now engaged in a scaled-up version of the same project: tax cuts for the already wealthy, the gutting of the administrative state and a white-nationalist-inspired immigration policy.

I once represented a group of tenants in Bushwick, Brooklyn, who came home one day to find that major sections of their rent-stabilized building had been gutted. Their landlord cared little about the health and safety of his tenants — he wanted to force them out and convert the building to high-end apartments. When the residents didn’t accept the paltry buyouts he offered, he took them to court. But the tenants decided to stay and fight. They made connections with neighbors whom they barely knew. They joined a community-based organization that worked for tenants. After months of organizing, litigation and news conferences, we won, and the tenants were able to stay in their apartments, with rent abatements to compensate for the conditions they endured.

There is a long history of New York City tenants coming together to organize against landlords like the Trump family. These efforts have been most effective when tenants have constructed multiracial coalitions and have relied on tactics from rent strikes to eviction blockades to cooperative housing to strategic litigation. As we confront America’s landlord, the lesson we can draw from this history is that we must organize creatively and fight to save the place we call home.

Who knew that Fred Trump was Woody Guthrie’s landlord?

An earlier article in the New York Times attributed the discovery to Will Kaufman, a British professor of American literature:


Mr. Guthrie, in writings uncovered by a scholar working on a book, invoked “Old Man Trump” while suggesting that blacks were unwelcome as tenants in the Trump apartment complex, near Coney Island.

“He thought that Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it,” the scholar, Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain, said in an interview.

Mr. Kaufman said he came across Mr. Guthrie’s writings about Fred Trump while he was doing research at the Woody Guthrie Center’s archives in Oklahoma. He wrote about his findings last week for The Conversation, a news website.

In December 1950, Mr. Guthrie signed a lease at the Beach Haven apartment complex, Mr. Kaufman wrote in his piece. Soon, Mr. Guthrie was “lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood,” he wrote, with words like these:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project

Mr. Guthrie even reworked his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a critique of Fred Trump, according to Mr. Kaufman:

Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!

Categories Accountability, Racism, Trump

Iowa: Mollie Tibbett’s Father Calls on Politicians to Leave Her Family Alone and Stop Using Her as a Pawn

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2018 //
7

We all remember the beautiful young woman, Mollie Tibbetts, who was brutally murdered while jogging in her hometown in Iowa. Various politicians seized upon her death at the hands of an immigrant to reinforce their political arguments for a ban on immigration or a wall.

Mollie’s father wrote this article for the Des Moines Register.

He wrote, in part:

Make no mistake, Mollie was my daughter and my best friend. At her eulogy, I said Mollie was nobody’s victim. Nor is she a pawn in others’ debate. She may not be able to speak for herself, but I can and will. Please leave us out of your debate. Allow us to grieve in privacy and with dignity. At long last, show some decency. On behalf of my family and Mollie’s memory, I’m imploring you to stop.

Throughout this ordeal I’ve asked myself, “What would Mollie do?” As I write this, I am watching Sen. John McCain lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda and know that evil will succeed only if good people do nothing. Both Mollie and Senator McCain were good people. I know that both would stand up now and do something.

The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind. This person will receive a fair trial, as it should be. If convicted, he will face the consequences society has set. Beyond that, he deserves no more attention.

To the Hispanic community, my family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you’ve been beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody. And yes, we love your food.

My stepdaughter, whom Mollie loved so dearly, is Latina. Her sons — Mollie’s cherished nephews and my grandchildren — are Latino. That means I am Hispanic. I am African. I am Asian. I am European. My blood runs from every corner of the Earth because I am American. As an American, I have one tenet: to respect every citizen of the world and actively engage in the ongoing pursuit to form a more perfect union.

Given that, to knowingly foment discord among races is a disgrace to our flag. It incites fear in innocent communities and lends legitimacy to the darkest, most hate-filled corners of the American soul. It is the opposite of leadership. It is the opposite of humanity. It is heartless. It is despicable. It is shameful.

We have the opportunity now to take heed of the lessons that Mollie, John McCain and Aretha Franklin taught — humanity, fairness and courage. For most of the summer, the search for Mollie brought this nation together like no other pursuit. There was a common national will that did transcend opinion, race, gender and geography. Let’s not lose sight of that miracle. Let’s not lose sight of Mollie.

Instead, let’s turn against racism in all its ugly manifestations both subtle and overt. Let’s turn toward each other with all the compassion we gave Mollie. Let’s listen, not shout. Let’s build bridges, not walls. Let’s celebrate our diversity rather than argue over our differences. I can tell you, when you’ve lost your best friend, differences are petty and meaningless.

Categories Justice, Racism

Domingo Morel: The Racism Behind State Takeovers

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2018 //
9

Ever notice how many times Reformers push for a state takeover of majority black and brown districts? Ever notice that the state takeover is the prelude to privatizing the public schools, on the presumption that people of color can’t be trusted to run the schools in their district? Better bring in the smart white entrepreneurs who run charter chains and think they know what kind of discipline children of color need.

Domingo Morel, a political scientist at Rutgers University, has written a book about Takeovers and examined the racial dynamics behind them.

The article and interview are by Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum.

“In a new book, “Takeover,” Rutgers political scientist Domingo Morel concludes that the prevailing logic for takeovers is indeed tainted with racism. That’s based on an examination of data from every school district taken over by a state over a 30-plus year period, and case studies of the takeovers of Newark, New Jersey and Central Falls, Rhode Island.

“Predominantly black school districts are more likely to be taken over, Morel documents, and those takeovers are more likely to fully remove the elected school board. He also finds that cities with a greater share of black city council members are more likely to face takeovers, with state leaders arguing they must wrest control of chaotic local politics.”

A chart from Morel’s work shows that in the rare event that a majority white district is taken over by the state, 70% keep their elected school board.

In a majority Latin district, 46% keep their elected board.

But when a majority black district is taken over, only 24% retain their elected school board.

I think people don’t pay enough attention to how political education is — that education in the country is a political project. I think that’s the most important thing that I think we need to understand. And so if education is a political project, when we think about reforms, we need to think about them as political objectives as well. And so if we’re going to take over a school district, it just doesn’t seem consistent with what the literature says about improving schools that you just remove a community from the entire decision-making process. Because what the literature tells us in education is — and it’s just very intuitive — if you look at school districts across the country who are doing well, everybody has a stake in the school district.

Source: Takeover, by Domingo Morel. Graphic: Sam Park
But then we get still the expansion of takeovers. It suggests that there’s something else there. And this is where I come in and say that we need to understand historically role that education has played in communities and what type of power it gives a community.

If we look at education as a political problem and we see how important the schools are to communities’ political empowerment, then we can start to see how how takeovers make sense for two major reasons: Conservatives had consolidated within the Republican Party by the 1970s and blacks became an important part of the Democratic coalition by the 1970s. Moreover, the schools served as the political foundation for black political empowerment. This provided the context for increasing political tension between increasingly conservative state governments and cities. The schools were a major part of this political struggle.

Second, cities began to win court cases to secure more school funding from state governments, which led to further tensions.

[Barnum asks]: Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder, charter school advocate, and education reform funder, has said that “the school board model works reasonably well in suburban districts” but that the politically ambitious “use the school board as a stepping stone to run for higher office” in cities. And I take your argument to be, yes it’s true that the school board can be a stepping stone, but that has proven crucial for the political empowerment of communities of color. Can you speak to that?

“Let’s think about that comment and put it in perspective. So what he’s saying is democracy works for certain communities but it can’t work for others. Yes, you have ambitious people, but you also have people who are just interested being school board members. But even if you have ambitious people who want to be city council people, mayors, and so forth, why is that a justification for saying that school boards are not important?

“And so the message that sends is that democracy is worth fighting for and worth having in certain places and not in others because it may seem like it’s more messy in big cities and urban areas. And I say it “may seem” like that because I don’t think there’s any evidence that you find more corruption or people are not as prepared to be school board members in urban localities compared to suburban or rural — there’s just no research to support that…”

[Barnum asks:] Let’s talk about the research on academic gains from state takeovers. I know that’s not the focus of your book, but advocates for state takeovers could point to studies of New Orleans and in Newark, after three years, to say look, it has been successful in boosting test scores in some contexts.

“My response to this is multi-level. The first is that it’s contested to what degree these academic scores actually improved. But I spend very little time on this because as a political scientist, I’m interested in the politics of this mostly. What I will say is, OK, so let’s just agree that test scores have improved. What has been the cost of test scores’ improvement in New Orleans for example?

“In New Orleans, 25 percent of the black teachers lose their jobs. Seven thousand people lose their jobs. The school board was removed from the political process. The school governance was based on a two-tier level: one is the state-created board made up of people that are not from New Orleans and the second is actual charter school governing bodies, 60 percent of which have white members although 67 percent of the community is African-American. And so all of that is the price that the city of New Orleans — that black New Orleans — has to pay for contested improved test scores.”

This is an important article and book.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Jersey, New Orleans, Privatization, Racism

“School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice”

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2018 //
56

The editorial pages of the New York Times have been an echo chamber for school choice for years. The editorials regularly applaud charter schools as escape hatches from public schools and repeat the talking points of the billionaires and hedge fund managers who have gleefully replaced public schools with privately managed schools. I can’t recall an editorial that acknowledged the importance of rebuilding, revitalizing, and strengthening public education as a major responsibility of our society. I can’t recall one that criticized the onslaught of privatization against public education in our nation’s urban schools, where parents of color have lost not only their public schools, but their voice as citizens in creating public schools that serve the entire community. The editorial board has steadfastly ignored the coordinated and bipartisan assault on democratic governance of public schools in cities and states across the nation. The op-ed page, which was created to provide a space for views different from the editorial page has seldom challenged school choice orthodoxy. Almost every regular opinion writer has lauded the “miracle” of charter schools, including David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and David Leonhardt. The op-ed page recently included an article urging liberals not to give up on charters even though Betsy DeVos likes them too, even though they are segregated and non-union.

But now comes a new and welcome voice.

Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes that school choice is the enemy of justice. She has been selected as a regular opinion writer, which is more good news. She writes about her personal experience as a child in California, a state that is controlled by Democrats but purchased by the billionaires who sneer at public schools and want to replace them with charter schools. She reminds us that school choice was the battle cry of segregationists. In many states and cities, it still is.

Her article poses an essential question: Is public education, democratically controlled, still part of the social contract? And she writes that many white liberals, including Jerry Brown (and in New York, Andrew Cuomo) have said no.

She writes:

“LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.

“In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.

“Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.

“I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.

“This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.

“But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.

“Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.

“It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost our appetite for that engagement, and the rise of charters is an expression of that loss.

“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.

“This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.

“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in 2010, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found, in a study of 40 states and several dozen municipalities, that black students in charters are much more likely than their counterparts in traditional public schools to be educated in an intensely segregated setting. The report says that while charters had more potential to integrate because they are not bound by school district lines, “charter schools make up a separate, segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”

“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.

“This has not stemmed the popular appeal of charters. School board races in California that were once sleepy are now face-offs between well-funded charter advocates and less well-funded teachers’ unions. Progressive politicians are expected to support charters, and they do. Gov. Jerry Brown, who opened a couple of charters during his stint as mayor of Oakland, vetoed legislation two years ago that would have made charter schools more accountable. Antonio Villaraigosa built a reputation as a community organizer who supported unions, but as mayor of Los Angeles, he started a charter-like endeavor called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.

“This year, charter advocates got their pick for school superintendent, Austin Beutner. And billionaires like Eli Broad have made charters a primary cause: In 2015, an initiative backed in part by Mr. Broad’s foundation outlined a $490 million plan to place half of the students in the Los Angeles district into charters by 2023.

“I live in Inglewood, a chiefly black and brown city in Los Angeles County that’s facing gentrification and the usual displacement of people of color. Traditional public schools are struggling to stay open as they lose students to charters. But those who support the gentrifying, which includes a new billion-dollar N.F.L. stadium in the heart of town, see charters as part of the improvements. They see them as progress.

“Despite all this, I continue to believe in the social contract that in my mind is synonymous with public schools and public good. I continue to believe that California will at some point fulfill that contract. I believe this most consciously when I go back to Westchester and reflect on my formative two years in school there. In the good life there is such a thing as a good fight, and it is not over.“

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, Justice, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »