Pass or Get Out of the Way: Defining the Future for Our Students

June 30, 2011 Leave a comment

As we awaken to a new dawn in the US, about half of all state schools in England and Wales are being affected by a strike by UK public sector workers.  The right to work will be the single most important issue affecting the public sector — all of us working today.  In the US, as in the UK, the assessment and control methods that are politically sanctioned to evaluate teachers are unprecedented.  And the most Draconian aspect of this almost universal (in the West) re-evaluation and castigation of teachers is that those who will suffer most are the children: their world, particularly if these kids live in socio-economically challenged areas, will fall further into the abyss of the cyclical nature of poverty.

An approach that’s being tactfully admired by the powerful in many US states is the “Impact,” in name and approach more reminiscent of a Terminator movie then a subtle teacher evaluation system.

Sam Dillon, writing for a New York Times that’s more comfortable covering the “accepted” mainstream methodologies of any system of power rather then investigating the reality of things, does a credible job of lining up, for the careful reader, what the challenges this method of evaluation pose for parents, students and teachers.

In his Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired Dillon tells us that, “Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.”

The Impact is “a centerpiece of the tempestuous three-year tenure of Washington’s former schools chancellor, Michele Rhee.”  This detail is enough to raise concern.  But it hasn’t.  Blindly we march on, seduced by Obama’s Race to the Top, rather then careful criticism of what will likely cause a lot of collateral damage.  I warned against this in Education Stimulus Package: In Duncan’s Hands, Hope is on a Tightrope.  But, just as the right to work will be the defining issue of our times, collateral damage will be the defining metaphor. Does anyone care?  Why are we so silent? At least in the UK, teachers are taking to the streets.

The Impact is best described as an efficient sorting system.  Some educators  describe Impact this way — efficient  and sorting.  These are accounting terms, not terms mindful of teaching and learning.  The terms follow a trend in education that moves away from a pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment and  towards a business model.  Impact is a business model, not an education model; it aligns with the current goals of many governors and mayors, particularly in New York and New Jersey, two hostile states to the right to work: privatize education.

What’s the problem?

Educators “note that the system does not consider socioeconomic factors in most cases and that last year 35 percent of the teachers in the city’s [Washington] wealthiest area, Ward 3, were rated highly effective, compared with 5 percent of Ward 8, the poorest,” says Dillon.

Impact relies heavily on classroom observation — a good thing.  It has 9 criteria: explain the content clearly, maximize instruction, check for student understanding are some examples used to rate a lesson.  These are good, solid criteria.

The problem with this methodology — and the problem with most if not all methods for evaluating teachers and, at the college and university level, for advising students and, likewise for evaluating professors — is that it measures the students’ capabilities simply from the shoulders up.  That is to say, the whole student is not being evaluated; only reasoning skills, computation and understanding according to a system that leans favorably to accepted classical methods of teaching and learning — delivery and acquiescence in silence — are privileged.   In essence, what is being evaluated is the teacher’s ability to transmit traditional pedagogical methodologies.  But these methods may be way too abstract for some students, particularly if these students come from poorer communities.

We are in fact assessing how well teachers transmit traditional forms of social mobility, negating the realities of certain students’ lives. Before we begin, then, in the assessment model — Impact — we are already rejecting the student.

The Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, in More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, says,

It is important to remember that one of the effects of living in a racially segregated, poor neighborhood is the exposure to cultural framing habits, styles of behavior, and particular skills that emerged from patterns of social exclusion; these attributes and practices may not be conducive to facilitating social mobility … These patterns of behavior are seen as a hindrance to social mobility in the larger society.

A system such as Impact comes about, as Wilson tells us, this time using the work of Eliot R. Smith, because “most Americans believe that economic outcomes are determined by individuals’ efforts and talents (or their lack) and that in general economic inequality is fair.”    We could argue that Smith’s pronouncement is now the politics of the day — the attack on the right to work, the dismantling of unions, and the Draconian measures of teacher performance.

“Indeed, living in a ghetto neighborhood has both structural and cultural effects,” says Wilson, “that compromise life chances above and beyond personal attributes.”

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, speaking to Dillon for his NYT article, said, “Teacher have to be parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things” in schools in poor and challenged neighborhoods.  ”Impact takes none of those roles into account, so it can penalize you just for teaching in a high-needs school.”  Saunders echoes Wilson.  And I’ve describe this phenomenon quite clearly in Newark’s  South Ward: The Miller Street School and the American Paradox.

The solution to our education problems, as I’ve described it, actually lies in Saunders’ description of what teachers are called to do when working in poorer neighborhoods.  In these communities, as I’ve said in Newark’s South Ward, the school, as is The Miller Street School, are an oasis pushing against the chaos found in the streets.  If teachers are parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things, as Saunders says, then we must create, in each school, a hub of support for all these things.

Right now, parents have to move to multiple locations and work through multiple human services departments, filling out form after form, seeing multiple people, more often then not being shoved to yet another office and more forms, more interviews and never really voicing their concerns and problems. This is costly — and it agitates the notion that it’s their fault, that if they worked harder people would be better off.

What if all social and professional services were under one roof?  What if all aspects needed to enable a more graceful, dignified and cogent approach to social mobility were in one place, a hub or mall for social mobility? Isn’t this efficiency? Wouldn’t this cut costs?

I’d argue that not only is this a cheaper approach, but then it would allow us to pool together resources, including the tracking of a student through this system so as to better get a sense of how the student learns — the obstacle and challenges, the conditions for study at home, and so on.

Of course, this would thwart the interest of many governors and mayors to privatize; it would run against the desire of many corporations to extract the poverty dollar from the most needy; it would, in fact, work against today’s trend towards the newest form of governance, inverted totalitarianism. (There are so many examples of inverted totalitarianism, today, that I’m thinking of changing my blog’s title! I’m getting exhausted constantly having to explain it!)

What we need is less Impact.  We need to realize — and accept — that schools in poor neighborhoods are an oasis of hope.  It is this realization that can lead to a conflation of resources — child care and health care, nutrition, family counseling, on the job training, study skills training, even community colleges — under one roof, held together by technology and carefully trained experts — nurses, social workers, first year general practitioners, counselors and teachers — working together.  From this vantage, we can create teacher assessment vehicles that will include master teachers, parents in the community, student evaluations and outcomes and all read against what today we call social mobility. Anything else is failure. Anything else is a genuflection towards the powerful elite that seek to define our lives for us.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Obama Administration, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the Environment, The Miller Street School, the University Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

The Location of Newark in the New World Order: Privatization and its Discontents

June 25, 2011 Leave a comment

I. Newark and the New World Order

Newark is a microcosm of what’s happening across the United States. The city is being isolated, by privatization efforts, from the rest of America and people are struggling and suffering.  Politicians — Governor Christie and Newark Mayor Corey Booker, his foil — are merely mouthpieces for this effort, though they speak the language of inclusion. But Newark is being disseminated, nevertheless. In this Orwellian nightmare, the children — as they are in war — are the most vulnerable and suffering the most.

The unraveling of civil liberties and social justice is evident in the latest confusion — and fight — about the Facebook donation to Newark’s schools. This is an example of a long history of dissemination in Newark. It’s the same old story, one that Newark — and other cities like Newark — have experienced before. On one side of the equation, we have Booker telling Oprah that he’ll include Newark’s parents in the decision making process; on the other we have parents feeling alienated and concerned with Booker’s appointment of Chris Cerf as the a new acting state commissioner of Education, the top post. Cerf heads a commission to double the Zuckerberg donation (they’ve already raised $43 million). Cerf is also a founding partner of a consulting firm for school districts. This is what we use to call carpetbagging, a derogatory term, suggesting opportunism and exploitation from outsiders. The feeling in Newark is that Cerf’s approach appears to be a for-profit enterprise, particularly if we take a look at Cerf’s peers that include a venture capitalist and hedge fund managers. This follows a general trend, incorporated by Governor Christie, to put private firms in charge of under-performing schools in Camden, NJ.

What is happening in Newark around education — again a powerful example of inverted totalitarianism — is the result of a history of neglect. This is a history replete with structural changes, some racist, some not, that have, nevertheless, resulted in the disenfranchisement and isolation of an entire city and its citizens. These structural forces run together with cultural forces that contribute to racial inequality. The latest confusion and battle about the Facebook donation to Newark’s schools is yet another example of how the structural and cultural forces that contribute to racial inequality are exploited for — and by — an elite few. Now, though, tragically so, this too involves black politicians that use race for personal gain. This is not new, but it has now taken on an extraordinarily powerful force — it is subtle and dastardly, it is, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, a “strange enigma.”

II. From Newark’s Riots to the New World Order

People emigrated to Newark to find the Promised Land – Puerto Ricans, Italians, Albanians, Irish, Spaniards, Jamaicans, Haitians, Mexicans, West Africans, Brazilians, Ecuadorians, Trinidadians and Portuguese all came with hope looking for new horizons.

Newark is New Jersey’s largest and second-most diverse city, after neighboring Jersey City.  Just eight miles west of Manhattan and two miles north of Staten Island, Newark was founded in 1666 by Connecticut Puritans; it was a model American city until the end of World War II.

In 1922, the “Four Corners” – meaning the intersection of Market and Broad – was the busiest intersection in the United States.  It served as a regional center of retail commerce, anchored by four flourishing department stores: Hahne & Company, L. Bamberger and Company, L.S. Plaut and Company, and Kresge’s.  New skyscrapers were built every year, the two tallest being the 40-story Art Deco National Newark Building and the Lefcourt-Newark Building.  But then tax laws began rewarding the building of new factories in outlying areas rather than rehabilitating the city’s old factories – the allure of short term profit versus the benefits of long term thinking, a familiar American story.  Newark lost its sources of revenue, and it has not been the same since.

Several forces in America began reshaping the concentration of populations, adversely affecting African Americans by denying the opportunity to move from segregated inner-city neighborhoods, William Julius Wilson, the Harvard sociologist, tells us in More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City:

As separate political jurisdiction, suburbs [also] exercised a great deal of autonomy through covenants and deed restrictions. In the face of mounting pressure for integration in the 1960′s, ‘suburbs chose to diversify by race rather than by class. They retained zoning and other restrictions that allowed only affluent blacks (and in some instances Jews) to enter, thereby intensifying the concentration of the urban poor.’

As the population of blacks grew in the North, as did housing demands, there was more of an emphasis on keeping blacks out of communities. These were structural conditions setting up urban poverty. Adding to the housing problem economic forces were also at work. “In other words,” says Wilson, “the relationship between technology and international competition [has] eroded the basic institutions of the mass production system…These global economic transformations have adversely affected the competitive position of many US Rust Belt cities. For example, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh perform poorly on employment growth, an important traditional measure of economic performance.”

Jobs left Newark for suburban tax breaks. Historically — structurally speaking — racist housing practices, globalization (science and technology and the gravitation towards cheap labor) and the move out of the inner city of qualified workers gutted the infrastructure of Newark. Newark lost its tax base; its revenue flew to the suburbs where blacks were not allowed. This reality is most evident in the abandoned buildings and empty lots of Newark; it’s evident in the lack of infrastructure support — hospitals, competitive schools, playgrounds, the lack of police protection and the dismantling of city (and state) workers and their unions. This is ongoing, case in point is the Facebook conflict. Wilson is also instructive here:

Two of the most visible indicators of neighborhood decline are abandoned buildings and vacant lots. According to one recent report, there are 60,000 abandoned and vacant properties in Philadelphia, 40,000 in Detroit, and 26,000 in Baltimore. These inner-city properties have lost residents in the wake of the out-migration of more economically mobile families, and the relocation of many manufacturing industries.

In the seminal study, The New Geography, by Joel Kotkin, we learn that, “The more technology frees us from the tyranny of place and past affiliation, the greater the need for individual places to make themselves more attractive.” But this is an impossibility when there is no revenue. There is no reason to believe that cities, as we know them, will survive these changes — they may not (see also here).

By 1966, then, Newark had a black majority and was experiencing the fastest turnover than most other northern cities.

Evaluating the riots of 1967, Newark educator Nathan Wright, Jr., Episcopalian minister, scholar and poet, the author of 18 books, and a leading advocate of the black power movement said, “No typical American city has as yet experienced such a precipitous change from a white to a black majority.”

At the height of the civil rights movement, Nathan Wright, Jr., was working in the Department of Urban Work of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark. In his Introduction to Ready to Riot, a sociological analysis of the conditions in black ghettos that led to the 1967 rebellions, Wright described the fear of his wife Barbara, a daycare worker, and their 17-year-old daughter, as they drove into central Newark on the second night of what he called “civic rebellion.”

“There was an air of expectancy but not of anger,” Reverend Wright tells us.  “Barbara and Bunky (his wife and daughter) locked themselves in the car and I stepped onto the sidewalk …Almost immediately there was chaos.  The liquor store was ransacked.  Men ran by with bottles of liquor in their hands and under their arms…With a sound of thunder the large plate-glass window of the bank, just a few feet from our car, was broken.  Mrs. Wright and Bunky were in near terror.”

It was July of 1967 and the disturbances spread quickly to other black urban areas.  The National Conference on Black Power was about to convene in Newark, with Dr. Wright as the organizer and chairperson. One of the first major undertakings of the black power movement, the conference brought 1,100 delegates to Newark from 42 cities and 197 black organizations. It called for blacks to build an economic power base with a “Buy Black” campaign, for the establishment of black national holidays and black universities, and broached the topic of black separatism. The conference marked a change in the civil rights movement from demanding individual rights to group solidarity. Dr. Wright was at the pinnacle of his political influence. (It’s also important to note that prior to 1967, Malcolm X, in the mid to late 50′s, as described in the new biography by Manning Marable, A Life of Reinvention, was already following a separatist agenda, advocating for black run businesses, schools, institutions).

The 1967 Newark riots – between July 12 and July 17, 1967 – were six days of rioting, looting and destruction.   Many African-Americans, especially younger community leaders, felt they had remained largely disenfranchised in Newark despite the fact that Newark became one of the first majority black cities in America alongside Washington, D.C..  “Seen as a society boxed into frustration,” Reverend Wright says in Ready to Riot, “the city as a whole may be said to have an ill-tempered tendency toward repression on the one hand and aggression on the other.”  Local African-American residents felt powerless and disenfranchised and felt they had been largely excluded from meaningful political representation and often suffered police brutality; unemployment, poverty, and concerns about low-quality housing contributed to the tinderbox.

“In the mind of the distraught black community there was a growing sense of frustration, brutality, and repression,” said Wright.  Are we at this point, again?

The riots are often cited as a major factor in the decline of Newark and its neighboring communities; however, the actual factors include decades of racial, economic, and political forces that generated inner city poverty, which helped spark race riots across America in the 1960s. By the 1960s and ’70s, as industry fled Newark, so did the white middle class, leaving behind a poor population.  During this same time, the population of many suburban communities in northern New Jersey expanded rapidly.

The remnants of legalized discrimination that brought about the riots have left their mark on Newark, the poor and the very poor, and the young people among them without a community to sustain them.   For sustainability to be successful, nourishment and the necessities of life are the ground floor – the peace President Obama spoke about in Oslo. “It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security,” said President Obama. “It is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive,” he said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, December 11, 2009. But in Newark the self-destruction that accompanies the psychologically oppressive weight of poverty and hopelessness – unemployment twice as high as in white communities, higher crimes, mortgage defaults that tract higher, and the malaise and pessimism that only benefits liquor stores and drug dealers – holds people from below and drags them down.  This is not the path to freedom. It remains, as it did in 1967, a path to destruction.

“The dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and – above all – economic colonies,” wrote Kenneth Clark back in 1965 in his seminal work, Dark Ghetto.  “Their inhabitants are subject peoples,” he wrote, “victims of greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.” Has anything changed?

III. Newark and the New World Order — Tomorrow’s Promises

The confusing dilemma around the Zuckerberg Facebook 100 million dollars to improve Newark schools is the result of this structural-cultural history. One of the most dastardly cultural results is that Governor Christie and Mayor Booker believe that the citizens of Newark — and the citizens of poor communities in New Jersey — cannot be trusted to re-build their communities. They are completely left out of the equation. If there is going to be rebuilding, it’s going to be outsourced. We see the reality of this already. This perspective and attitude figures largely in a myth about poverty and the inner-city.We must again turn to Wilson for a cogent explanation:

…there is a widespread notion in America that the problems plaguing people in the inner city have little to do with racial discrimination or the effects of living in segregated poverty. For many Americans, the individual and the family bear the main responsibility for their low social and economic achievement in society. If unchallenged, this view may suggest that cultural traits are the root of problems experienced by the ghetto poor.

We have to challenge this perspective. It’s held quite obviously by Christie and Booker — this is why we see the problem with the Facebook money; this is also why we see the complete dismantling of all services in Newark and New Jersey proper, if we look at the poorer communities. Don’t let color fool you, Booker is first a politician — and politicians are always about changing color.

Finally, Homi K. Bhabha, in his by now classic The Location of Culture, gives us a warning shot across the bow:

The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each others, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.

That we are disoriented, is obvious. That we are also divided, this too is quite evident, particularly when black politicians further the alienation we sense. And the fact that the private and the public are one and the same, something that Cornel West has also argued long ago, further confuses our sense of place, our histories.

Who are we?  Who and what do we want to be?  Who decides?

We have us to blame in all this, the malaise we’re in, though we’re quick to blame political figures. We have us to blame because we don’t examine ourselves, locating ourselves in this history of oppression that is quite readily available to us for our critique. As I’ve said before, just the other day in a post, I’m merely one voice — among many, I believe — who see these things like, nevertheless, I relegated to  the shadows, the boundaries of culture, to use Bhabha, again,  marginalized and disenfranchised l, and thus speaking only into silences.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, education, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Newark, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, technology and education Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fresh Examples of Inverted Totalitarianism

June 24, 2011 10 Comments

It’s uncanny, but it’s very difficult to keep up with the numerous examples of inverted totalitarianism appearing daily in our popular media. That these events are routinely covered by the popular media without question and concern should give us pause.

Yesterday, in Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election,  I gave the following example:

The NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.

Today, we learn that the US Supreme Court has given pharmaceuticals twin wins:

In one case, a First Amendment decision, the court, by a 6-to-3 vote, struck down a Vermont law that barred the buying, selling and profiling of doctors’ prescription records — records that pharmaceutical companies use to target doctors for particular pitches. And in a second, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the makers of generic drugs are immune from state lawsuits for failure to warn consumers about possible side effects as long as they copy the warnings on brand-name drugs.

The US Supreme court ruled that the State of Vermont was infringing on the pharmaceutical’s first amendment rights. “The amendment prohibits the making of any law “respecting an establishment of religion“, impeding the free exercise of religion, infringing on the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.”  This is untrue, the State of Vermont is not trying to restrict the first amendment, rather they are trying to restrict pharmaceuticals from getting private information concerning different drug protocols doctors use for specific patients.

“Basically, it’s going to allow the drug companies to have more influence on doctors’ prescribing practices, to manipulate their prescribing practices, and to promote the use of more expensive drugs. Almost certainly, health care costs are going to be driven up,” said Dr. Gregory D. Curfman, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Information privacy experts also criticized Thursday’s ruling. “One of the practical consequences of the court’s decision will be to make it easier for pharmaceutical companies and data-mining firms and marketing firms to get access to this very sensitive information,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The states are going to have to go back to the drawing board.

Ever since the Bush v Gore election, we’ve learned quite a a bit about where the US Supreme Court stands. The Court is aligned with right – wing conservative government and big business, this we know. The appointment of Justice Roberts, adding to the Court’s extreme conservatism, demonstrated a move to activist justices for the right.  The Court thus becomes the legal thread essential for big business to control government.  The  Court is the “bag man,” if you will.

In Eduction a story from the mainstream, Republican Challenges Administration on Plans to Override Education Law.  I’m no fan of Arne Duncan and Obama’s education policy, but what we find when we look under the hood of Representative John Kline’s, the Republican chairman of the House education committee, forceful attack on Duncan policies and maneuvers is an attempt to move closer to the privatization of education.

“He’s not the nation’s superintendent,” Mr. Kline said of Mr. Duncan, who assumed powers greater than any of his predecessors when, in 2009, Congress voted $100 billion in economic stimulus money for the nation’s school systems and allowed the secretary to decide how much of it should be spent.

Kline wants control of outcomes and we know that the outcome sought by the right is privatization. This move, by conservatives, is linked to a greater effort for student vouchers, creationism and an anti-gay agenda.

Imagine if all these efforts are also supported by the US Supreme Court.

And now we can look at the Obama withdrawal from Afghanistan proposal — 10,000 soldiers this year (roughly 7 percent of the occupation force) by the end of the year.  No one in the main stream press is covering what’s likely to happen:

“There’s going to have to be an accompanying increase in private security for all the activities of the new soldiers going in,” says Jake Sherman, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan who is now the associate director for Peacekeeping and Security Sector Reform at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation.  ”It’s ludicrous. It’s completely implausible.”

The mainstream media is stuck wondering why the usually war hungry Republicans — except for McCain — is going along with the withdrawal. The real story is that as we withdraw — and as the French and the British withdraw as well — there will be a void.  Private sector security companies will fill this need — and they’re the darling of the right, a pay for service military force.

Up and down the economy and culture — pharmaceuticals, energy, education and defense — we see the big reach of business; more importantly, though, we can readily see how government is stepping in and doing the bidding for this new world order. That it’s happening right in front of our eyes and that the mainstream media is simply going along suggests that the media is yet another arm of this move.  The media is not, as pundits would argue, a liberal enterprise; it’s just the opposite and simply looking at who owns the media should tell anyone that story.

Filed under arne duncan, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, global health, jonathan kozol, Media, Militarism, Obama Administration, Phamaceuticals, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Public Health, Socio-Economic insecurity, The Constitution of the US Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election

June 23, 2011 13 Comments

Whether Obama retains the White House in 2012 or a Republican wins, nothing much will change. The evidence is overwhelming.

It no longer matters who sits in the Presidential seat or in Congress — unless, of course, the Republican is Newt Gingrich, the extremely nasty former Speaker of the House who wrote a doctoral dissertation excusing the brutal colonization of the Congo, or the absolute dizzy opportunist, Michele Bachmann , who is convinced that CO2 is a natural byproduct of nature.

But even if the intellectually challenged Sarah Palin were to win, all candidates will succumb to the law of the land: the state and the corporation are the main sponsors and coordinators of an “unprecedented combination of powers distinguished by their totalitarian tendencies, powers that not only challenge established boundaries — political, moral, intellectual, and economic — but whose nature it is to challenge those boundaries continually, even to challenge the limits of the earth itself,” says Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. The Kock Brothers’ exertion is a perfect example. Thus, all candidates — in the White House and Congress — must adhere to the demands of this imbalance of power that invents and disseminates “a culture that taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasure while accepting political passivity,” argues Wolin.

We live in less democratic times; we wallow in a “collective identity” that is imperial rather than republican. The consequence is that we interiorize an artificial vision of civilization created by the political coming- of – age of corporate power and its concomitant myth making apparatus.

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation.

Let’s take a look under the hood at the engine that runs the inversion of power in our current ideological state apparatus.

The top 5 contributors to the 2010 campaign committee of Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the US House of Representatives, are:

  • Comcast Corp, who actively lobbied “net neutrality” legislation, FCC programming issues, and general telecommunications issues. In 2010, Comcast focused its lobbying efforts on a getting a merger between Comcast and NBC Universal approved by the federal government. People and political action committees associated with Comcast Corp. together generally favor Democrats when it comes to political campaign contributions. The monopolization of expression.
  • McGuire, Woods, et al –recently represented BVT Institutional Investments in the sale of 10 shopping centers located in Florida, Texas and Georgia. The $130 million transaction was one of the country’s largest retail real estate transactions of 2011 and marks the conclusion of McGuireWoods’ representation of BVT in connection with its U.S. Retail Income Fund VIII portfolio & in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the whistle blower provisions in Section 806 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) do not protect employee leaks to the media. Rather, the statute’s plain language protects only disclosures made to federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies, Congress and employee supervisors. McGuireWoods, defending Boeing, moved for summary judgment on the grounds, among others, that SOX does not protect complaints and disclosures to the media. The District Court agreed and dismissed the case. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
  • Dominion Resources — Electrical Utilities, Gas and Electric
  • Goldman Sachs — we know who they are, all the way to their involvement in the Obama administration and their creation of financial instruments that lead to the recession, the demise of the American economy
  • Blue Cross and Blue Shield, through its 45 local chapters, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association provides health care coverage to more than 80 million people. Blue Cross/Blue Shield also has a contract with the federal government to review and process Medicare claims. The association proved to be particularly active lobbying Congress during the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010. It has also lobbied Congress to make it harder for the government to penalize companies if their employees defraud the Medicare program and process false claims. Local Blue Cross chapters have paid about $340 million to the federal government to settle Medicare fraud charges since 1993.

The next 15 contributors to the Cantor camp follow the same pattern — KKR & Co, which sees itself as the leading global alternative asset manager, Guardian Life Insurance Company, New York Life Insurance, McKesson Corporation, pharmaceuticals and health products, and so on. We get the picture: insurance companies, lawyers, financial firms — banks too big to fail — tobacco (Altria Group, the world’s largest), pharmaceuticals. Representative Eric Cantor has reported a total of 2,849 contributions ($200 or more) totaling $3,057,540 in the current cycle.

Who is Cantor listening to? Cantor is an example of the “tendencies of our system of power that are opposed to the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy. Those tendencies are, I believe, totalizing in the sense that they are obsessed with control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin.

Let’s look at another leading figure, John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, elected to represent the Eight Congressional District of Ohio for an 11th term in November 2010, raised $9,796,947. His five leading contributors are AT&T, Murray Energy, First Energy Corp, American Financial Group and the Boehner for Speaker Committe. The top industries contributing to the Boehner effort are: Retired, Securities & Investment, Insurance, Electrical and Health Professionals.

Boehner’s portfolio is just about identical to Cantor’s. Major international companies have their hold on the two top leading Republican leaders. The tragedy we are currently living is that we seem unaware of the deeper consequences of these relationships. “We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia,” Wolin tells us. “Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today succeeds change. The effect of unending change is to undercut consolidation.” If we take a look out our front doors, take a walk down the block, in our cities and in our villages, we can taste “undercut consolidation.” It’s everywhere — city and state workers, public institutions, the NBA, the NFL; neighbors don’t know who their neighbors are; hope is on a tightrope, the future bleak.

The Democrats don’t fair much better. The top Democratic donors are ActBlue (composite of many, many small, grassroots donations), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Laborers Union, Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union, EMILY’s List (composite of many, many small grassroots donations), Plumbers/Pipefitters Union, National Assn of Letter Carriers, Ironworkers Union, United Auto Workers, United Transportation Union, American Postal Workers Union, UNITE HERE, AmeriPAC: The Fund for a Greater America. This suggests that unions are the primary donors.

But a closer look tells a different story. Let’s take Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of The US Senate. In the 2005-2010 campaign cycle, his re-election committee raised $24,815,104. The top 5 contributors were MGM Resorts International, Weitz & Luxunberg, mesothelioma and asbestos lawyers, Girardi & Keese, trial lawyers, Simmons Cooper LLC, also specializing in mesothelioma and Harrah’s Entertainment, hotels, resorts and casinos.

The top 5 industries contributing to the Reid campaign are lawyers, Securities & Investment, Lobbyists ($1,052,801 total!), Real Estate and Health Professionals. Reid is a carbon copy of Cantor and Boehner — so what, in fact, is the difference,  unions under attack because we need change?

In American’s Future After an Obama Victory, which I wrote in 2008 during the presidential campaign, before turning to Wolin, I was already suggesting that the Obama Administration was going to be challenged forcefully by the extremes in our culture. The last 3 years give us plenty of evidence. Obama has followed, even energized Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan (think drones), education and healthcare (think privatization and insurance lobbyists), energy and, sadly, race.

Obama’s victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fund-raising success. Since the start of 2007, his campaign relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally, pulling in successive donations mostly over the Internet. After becoming his party’s nominee, Obama declined public financing and the spending limits that came with it, making him the first major-party candidate since the system was created to reject taxpayers’ money for the general election.

The top supporters of Barack Obama were the University of California ($1,591,395), Goldman Sachs ($994,795; note the connections to his staff: Summers [World Bank, President of Harvard that nearly bankrupted the endowment], Rubin [spent 26 years at Goldman], and Paulsen [former CEO of Goldman], all of whom influenced Geithner [worked for Kissinger, IMF Director of Policy Development and Review Dept, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York]), Harvard University ($854,747), Microsoft Corp ($833,617), Google Inc ($803,436).

This list of contributors to Obama continues unabated — and all other contenders pale by comparison: Citigroup (who laundered Mexican cartel money), JP Morgan Chase, Time Warner (Patrick Leahy, another top Democrat, was Time Warner’s largest recipient, 2009-10, $61,400). Of the top 20 contributors to the Obama effort, 4 are universities, and the rest fall in step with the ongoing search, by the corporation, for opportunism (which is not to suggest that the new corporate university is not after the same). “Opportunism involved an unceasing search for what is exploitable, and soon (following a trajectory since WW II), that meant virtually anything, from religion, to politics, to human well-being,” says Wolin. “Very little, if anything, was taboo, as before long change became the object of premeditated strategies for maximizing profits.”

This is where we find ourselves today — in the name of change we are unchanging in the face of an uncompromising corporate will. The corporation owns the House and the Senate. These folks, our elected officials, are spokespersons for the corporate elite. If we wonder why CEO’s make so much money, this is why. If we want to know why education is being dismantled and privatized, benefitting the upper classes, this is why. The dissolution of collective action is here, too. The privatization of schools. And the increasing gap between the wealthy few, the middle class and the poor is here. Our forgotten communities, Newark’s South Ward, the South Bronx, Compton, others — it’s all right here in this negotiation between corporations and our officials.

And since we’re now on the verge of a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, private security firms are smiling. Is this the world we want? It’s already just about out of our hands.

Though I’m speaking to deaf ears, knowing full well that I write to no one, as I speak, the NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.  How is that not inverted totalitarianism?  What about us, the people of Vermont?

The tragic story is that this inversion of power is happening while citizens go on with their lives not conscious of the consequences.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, education, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Miller Street School: “Today, an angel came into my life” –Part 4

March 18, 2011 2 Comments

Another challenge Shakirah must face is Marlin Nevens. Mr. Nevens was reading out loud to a class of fifth graders when I observed him. He was having a hard time with the fifth grade level reader. He read slowly and with difficulty. He was tripping over words, having to say them twice, sometimes three times. The class was sleepy and unfocused.

On the board behind Mr. Nevens were sentences he’d written. One caught my eye because it was a prompt meant to show students how to respond on a standardized test, which, in turn, becomes synonymous with essay writing. The directions said, “For every open ended response the first sentence should be: To begin with, Johanna Hurwitz, short story, ‘The Hot and Cold Summer,’ there are several values such as…” Several other sentences contained misspelled words and poor syntax. Mr. Nevens had been warned, given an unsatisfactory review and was receiving coaching from Maria Ortiz. But I wondered how he could overcome his own educational deficits. Mr. Nevens came into the Newark educational system through what is called the “alternative method”: he didn’t attend a graduate school of education; rather, after receiving his bachelor’s degree, he agreed to take courses towards his degree, receive coaching and mentoring, and after a trial period become licensed. In the meantime, he could teach.

After his reading lesson (there was no point to the lesson, he just read to the class), Mr. Nevens sat down with Maria Ortiz to discuss it.

“I want to work on skills,” Mr. Nevens said right away. “I need some material to work with.” He was nervous, perhaps because of my presence.

Ms. Ortiz asked, “What do you mean, material? This is your material, the kids. Come up with something.” Ortiz was visibly agitated.

“Oh,” he said leaning back in a chair usually occupied by a much smaller student. All three of us, Ms. Ortiz, Mr. Nevens and me, looked out of place, our bodies bulging over a small desk meant for 11 and 12 year olds.

“You’re asking me what am I going to be teaching? Oh.”

“Teach me something now,” said Ms. Ortiz leaning towards Mr. Nevens.

“I don’t know what you’re asking,” he said.

“What’s your forte, your strength – show it to me.”

“I don’t have one.”

Ms. Ortiz changed her tack. “What do you feel the most comfortable teaching?” she asked and paused.

“Anything,” Mr. Nevens said quickly, shrugged his shoulders and darted his eyes towards me, then grinned nervously trying to get the message across.

“Fine. Teach me one of those things. Tell me one lesson you’ve done that you were successful with.”
Mr. Nevens thought for a minute, then said, “I enjoy when we work on projects together.” And he smiled towards me again – he could teach anything.

“Okay. That’s extrapolating material from a text. Dr. Vila is going to show you how this is done,” said Maria looking at me and nodding, granting me access to the classroom. “He’s going to teach a lesson in your classroom tomorrow.” (In public schools and in colleges in NYC and New Jersey where I’ve taught, I’m usually a “doctor”; at Middlebury, where I teach now, I’m simply Professor, but students who know me for a bit simply call me by my first name.  Either option is open them.)

That was it, without warning I was going “in,” called off the bench to teach Mr. Nevens’ 5th graders and hopefully instruct him as well.

This was Maria Ortiz’s counterinsurgency plan. Maybe this is an answer: teachers from elite institutions contractually obligated to work in schools such as Miller Street, perhaps bringing along our students, too, committed to a national service for education – a pre-Teach for America program where elite and urban institutions collaborate. It’s never been done.

Maria Ortiz gleaned this from her studies: the progressive and populist counterinsurgency manuals of John Dewey and Paulo Freire’s notion that the oppressed can regain their humanity and overcome their condition as long as they are creative participants in their own growth and development. I went with Maria’s idea.

The next day, I gave students copies of Shel Silverstein’s poem, Where the Sidewalk Ends.

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows back
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

I read the poem slowly, carefully, as I moved about the room, in-between tables, each with four to six children. They followed my voice with intent eyes on the poem. When I was done, I kept walking about for a few seconds and allowed silence to take over. Then I asked the students to circle words in the poem that popped out for them: “Sidewalk” and “ends,” “moon-bird” and “dark” and “winds and bends,” and of course “peppermint.” They also circled “children” and “they know” and “place.” I asked students to define one of these words for themselves, in writing, which they did without a problem. One student wrote that a “moon-bird is a bat,” and everyone laughed – and I let them chatter and joke a bit. Another student said a “moon-bird is a star flickering in the night.” After sharing definitions, I asked for three volunteers, and we re-read the poem, each student taking a stanza. They read fine, not missing a beat. I asked each table of students to talk among themselves and come up with one idea that came from the poem. In no time, five to seven minutes, kids were eager to share: “It’s about us,” said one group. “The streets are bad and your life can end,” said another. “No one listens to us.” “We have to be careful how we walk the streets.” “We know things.” “Things end so we have to do the right thing.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Nevens never got it. He was more interested in the steps I took, rather than how I may have known that the children would understand the poem, quite easily, though I was warned by Ms. Ortiz that it might prove difficult for them. He was insistent that I relate the time I allowed for each piece of the lesson, which took approximately 45 minutes in all, rather than ask me to explain the relationship between reading and writing and learning. Beginning in the fall of 2009, Mr. Nevens was moved down a couple of grades. He began the year in Tier 1. There’s little hope he’ll make it, though he has a big heart, great rapport with the kids, and they like him because he’s warm, and he always has an ear for whatever a student may need. But even with support, he has not been able to progress. The deficits in his education may be too much.

At the end of the class, Ana, the little girl with long black hair that had been smiling at me all week and that had asked whether I was going to be with them, handed me a piece of paper folded in half. She was all smiles looking up at me with big brown eyes as I opened the paper. She had drawn an angel with big wings and written, “Today, an angel came into my life. Thank you.” Tears came to my eyes, and I fought to hold them back. I placed a hand on her head and said, “Gracias, Ana. Muchisimas gracias.” She grinned and said, “You gonna be here all year? Are we going to do this some more?” I couldn’t move, the weight of the separation between our worlds was paralyzing because it seemed to me so simple to overcome.

“No, Ana,” I said softly. “Not all year. But I’ll be back, here and there, I hope.”

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, composition and rhetoric, cultural studies, education, philosophy, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, The Miller Street School

The Miller Street Struggle: Part 3

March 16, 2011 4 Comments

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“You have to see what we do here,” Maria Ortiz, the literacy coach at Miller Street, said to me.  “Only by experiencing their frustrations can you possibly understand. You have to get involved.  It doesn’t take much to care.”

I was there to chronicle the Miller Street struggle and lend a hand.  Maybe she was right, and this is what it will take – more of us, PhDs at schools like Miller Street.  Nothing else is working – not high stakes testing, not the approximately $84 billion in Education Recovery Act grants, not Obama’s Race to the Top, which unfortunately links “race” with “learning.”

Learning takes quite a bit of time, especially when we consider the developmental stages of children – it’s not a race.  And learning is not about getting to “the top,” but rather, about understanding one’s place in the world, about finding an emotionally and spiritually satisfying place to work so as to give the imagination full use.  Race to the Top is the antithesis.

I wasn’t sure how to begin to unravel the disorder I was experiencing.  On my first visit to Miller Street in March of last year, 10 out of the 39 teachers were absent, and most hadn’t bothered to make sure a substitute covered for them, a contractual requirement.  If an absent teacher doesn’t replace herself, then an automated “subfinder system” is supposed to kick in.  But the system was broken – and it remains broken.  Office personnel had to go to the phones to find last minute subs, and Principal Shakirah Miller had to orchestrate new class configurations, pairing two grades into one, for instance.

Amalia Dejeno, one of the absent teachers, was scheduled for observation that day.  Ms. Dejeno, a stout Puerto Rican woman in her early 50s, told me that she was “legally sick,” meaning that “illness” – flu, a sudden cold, fever – is an acceptable excuse. Amalia Dejeno is “Tier 1,” a final stage after all other reviews – Tiers 2 and 3 – had already been exhausted for her and she was consistently found “unsatisfactory.”  Tier 1 is where teachers are about to lose their license.  It can take anywhere from 3 to 5 years to dismiss a teacher, if documented properly.  In Amalia Dejeno’s case, it’s taken over 20 years, which is more along the lines of how this really works.  Some unsatisfactory teachers are never dismissed, but rather, moved from one school to another and never given an unsatisfactory rating.  Critics of education blame the teacher’s union for the collusion, a “blue flu” – an internal, never discussed protectionism.  For twenty-nine years Amalia has received “satisfactory” ratings – until she came to the Miller Street School.  She’s been marred by a system that’s refused to qualify her “unsatisfactory” early on when she might have been able to turn her performance around; she’s never been given guidance either, she told me.  Instead, she’s just been moved on.  Ms. Dejeno is harsh on the kids, always short and angry, scolding them at the slightest infraction, like speaking while walking in line to lunch.  She knows very little about teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), her presumed area of expertise.  In personality and knowledge of her stated field, she is unqualified to be in a classroom.

“She’s trying to get rid of me,” said Ms. Dejeno, in a halting English, referring to Miller Street’s principal.  “I’m fighting it.”

When I first looked into Shakirah’s office, prominently displayed on her desk was a long wooden plaque that read: John 3:16: For God so Loved the World that He gave His one and only Son.  Shakirah lost her father to a drunk driver when she was thirteen, which in part has made her who she is – strong, driven, intense, physical.  (She plays basketball, volleyball, runs track, and goes to the gym several times a week.)  Her mother became a drug addict soon after her husband died, relinquishing all responsibility for her 13-year-old daughter.  A car hit her mentally handicapped younger brother at the age of ten.  In four months, Shakirah lost five members of her family – a father, an aunt, her brother and two male cousins, 19 and 22, shot dead in the streets.  Yet her fondest memories are of Newark, growing up in the 17th Avenue projects and attending the 18th Avenue School.  Although life in Newark was not easy for her, she did well in school.

“I guess you could say that my mother was in the house,” Shakirah said.  “Some of my aunts helped me then.”

Now Christian Love Baptist Church in Irvington, New Jersey, is her respite; prayer gives her clarity, a sanctuary that gives her peace.

“The job is emotionally draining,” she told me.  “I take on everyone’s energy.”

She spends endless hours documenting poor performance — probation, withholding pay, no advancement—and creates teams for each grade, pairing weaker teachers with stronger ones and moving weaker teachers to lower grades from the higher ones where higher order thinking is required.  It’s like a military operation.  She estimates that 10-15% of the school’s teachers are incompetent. Maria Ortiz, Miller Street’s literacy coach, estimates much higher, more like 30-40%.

“Dejeno isn’t going to make it,” Shakirah informed me.  “We have all the documentation we need.  Now I can turn to others. “

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Socio-Economic insecurity, The Miller Street School

Newark’s South Ward: ‘Racism Lite’ and the Milller Street School — Part 2

March 14, 2011 5 Comments

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The Miller Street School is a racially segregated school in a racially segregated community in a racially segregated city – post Brown v the Board of Education.  All evidence – high stakes testing that can change the fiscal nature of a school, as well as its teaching methods, including the elimination of teachers and administrators, standardized testing, an increase in charter schools and home schooling, privileged students attending private schools (all this occurring while illiteracy rises) – suggests that, in practice, Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling of “separate but equal” – meaning, the acceptance of a dual system of education – is more appealing to the dominant class.

A “separate but equal” education system restricts access to social mobility; it strengthens a hierarchical socio-economic system controlled by few. The gains of the Civil Rights Movement are long forgotten in education.  Privileged African Americans along with white Americans have given up the struggle for integration, receiving undeniable benefits from private academies.  “Separate but equal” has become a rationale for a dual system in American society – the privileged succeed and the underprivileged must find what works, though always one step behind.  We then call attention to the infrequent victories coming out of challenged communities, but we never  bring up the obvious: the lack of adherence to Brown v the Board of Education. The truth is that the Miller Street School is the result of “separate but equal.”  I represented a potential voice that could speak of the despair caused by indifference.  But I sensed the parents also wanted me to address its cause – and my role in it.   This is beyond what I had planned – research was all I was after, as we in academia like to say.  But I was being pulled into something larger, the dynamics of which I didn’t understand.  I was being led into a reimagining of myself as an educator.

I was deep in thought, reflecting on my predicament, when I spotted Juan Ramos across the street. He nodded hello from a distance and gave me a smile of recognition.  Juan and I immediately took a liking to each other.  He was a lanky, long-limbed, fifty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican born in the United States, who walks with a cane because his knees are arthritic and weak.  Yet he takes his grandchildren to school on foot every day because their mother Sara—his stepdaughter—works long hours.  There isn’t a father around.  Juan sees to the children’s homework, gives them dinner, puts them to bed.  He is a diabetic on Medicare and looks much older than he is, beaten down.  He can’t work, so he lives on social security.  (Juan went through a period without insurance that landed him in the emergency room because he couldn’t afford the prescribed medicine, and his blood glucose level rose to 800.)  He is nearly blind in one eye, having sustained an injury when he was hanging a billboard; the vinyl edge of it snapped his eye in a strong gust of wind.  As vulnerable as he is, Juan is the backbone of this small American family.

“Anything happens, you know, I try to be involved.  I give something to everyone,” said Juan in accented English.  “Kids need watching.  There is no village to raise a child here.  I take my kids to school feeling desperate, you know.  I don’t know what’s there for them tomorrow.  Maybe nothing.  Gotta keep’m safe.  Is all I can do, you know man.  All I can do.”

He lowered his head and shook it back and forth.  Then he pulled out a letter from his jacket pocket and handed the tightly folded square to me while leaning hard on his cane.  It was from the Newark Board of Education.

“Look,” he said.  “What’s it mean, man?  I don’t understand what they’re saying.  Whata they saying about my kid?”

We went into the school nurse’s waiting room, a quiet, private place, and sat side-by-side in gray plastic chairs. I read the document, which said that one of his kids, the oldest, Julio, needed special education because of his problems with reading.  The Board of Education was informing Juan that they were going to provide his son with a special class to work on reading skills.  The Board was willing to test Julio for “learning disabilities”.  I reached for Juan’s shoulder and leaned in and told him that this was a good thing because the Board was acting on teacher recommendations that his grandson needed extra help.  I looked him straight in the eye, my forearms resting on my thighs as if I were an athlete sitting on the bench waiting to be called into the game.  Julio had been identified and would likely receive a modified education plan that would include additional reading classes.  But I realized, having deconstructed the letter for Juan, that I was cast unexpectedly in the role of ad-man and apologist for the education system, explaining the best-case scenario, the ideal, in an environment that couldn’t possibly meet all the special needs cases it has.  Julio would be added to a list of names and may or may not receive any adequate help at all.  Or he might end up in a dull classroom with an unqualified “specialist” and spin his wheels.  He might even be worse off – but I insisted on a better picture, doing the system’s bidding, erring on the side of hope not logic.  I couldn’t locate the truth.  I felt inadequate, something we may all feel when confronted by such despair.  I was an “institution man,” not a teacher.

“I can’t get the kids away from watching TV,” he said, as if somehow Julio’s learning challenges were his doing.  “They like to stay up late.  Man, I know it’s no good.  I don’t know what to do.”

Many parents blame themselves for their children’s lot in life, a mystifying narrative that is leveled by those who seem to think that simply pulling hard on the bootstraps will do the trick.  Work harder is the mantra of a new racism in America that is subtle and profound.  We did it, says this narrative, why can’t you? It must be that you’re not working hard enough, that’s what it is.  Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke University, in his book Racism Without Racists, calls this “racism lite”:  “Instead of relying on name-calling (niggers, spics, chinks), color-blind racism otherizes softly (‘these people are human, too’); instead of proclaiming that God placed minorities in the world in a servile position, it suggests that minorities are behind because they do not work hard enough; instead of viewing prejudice against interracial marriage as wrong on a racial basis, it regards interracial marriage as ‘problematic’ because of concerns over the children, location, or the extra burden it places on couples.”  This is the latest reasoning for man-made poverty and segregation.

“Why don’t they teach us how to help our children?” pleaded Juan in frustration. “This stuff is hard, man, you know.  I don’t get the math.  If they helped us, we can help them.  I can help him read.  I can.  I just need some help.  What can I do, man?  Tell me.  Give me something.”

“Well, one thing you can do is turn off the TV,” I said, unsure of how to begin to answer him. “We did this a long time ago in my house, and you’d be surprised how things change.”

“Oh man, that’s hard, you know.  They ain’t going to like it.  I sit with them and try to help them with the homework, but some stuff I don’t get.  That’s what I need, help with understanding what it is they’re doing.”

I didn’t know how to help Juan, except to translate Board of Education letters.  Education has changed; it’s more complex, subjects more sophisticated.   But Juan has remained the same.  The Math his kids take in school, the books they read are beyond Juan.  No one helped him when he was younger so he doesn’t have the ability to help his family.  It’s an endless, destructive cycle. Public schools such as Miller Street are barely able to provide for students, what can they do for the families of the kids, for Juan?  The challenge is that schools in neglected communities, by default, become community centers, a hub.  Families come to the school for answers.  They see education as a place with answers, a place where knowledge is center stage.  Families come to Miller Street to demystify the challenges they face.  In our current zeal for education reform, we fail to understand that, in some places, community reform is needed if education reform is the goal.  One can’t happen without the other.  The insurgency from the mean streets is too strong.

Juan Ramos is in Miller Street every day – as are other parents – lending a hand where they can.  They go on field trips, ask questions, and want to know how best to help.  A sense of powerlessness comes from having to deal with confusing bureaucracies – education, health care, welfare, human resources.  It also comes from having to walk the hazardous streets of the South Ward.  In this complex square plot of earth, parents have limitations, as we all do, but the greatest of all is lacking the language of social mobility – a missing professional class that communicates about opportunities and has the means to fund them.  Education is not providing the means for social mobility to the people of the South Ward.  The problem in school begins and ends with the teachers.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, Drugs and Violence, education, education stimulus package, global health, Inverted Totalitarianism, philosophy, politics, Public Health, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the Environment Tagged with ,

Newark’s South Ward: The Miller Street School and the American Paradox — Part 1

March 12, 2011 6 Comments

  • Part 5: The Politics of Newark

    In the early morning Newark’s South Ward streets are full of speeding cars with blaring drum machines walloping hip-hop on their radios as sanitation trucks pull out of the Frelinghuysen Avenue facility.  Men in shabby blue uniforms hang out in groups and puff on cigarettes by the cavernous doors of the facility’s garage.  The group gets larger as the weather warms.  One of the trucks parks right in front of the Miller Street School – a gray-brown, government building — partially blocking its drop-off zone, and the workers empty hydraulic fluid into a gutter.  The smell of diesel and transmission fluid overwhelms the atmosphere, even in the March chill.  Shakirah Miller, the third year principal, has had to confront these men who rudely ogle the young mothers bringing their kids to school. A six-foot-one, extremely sharp, and witty thirty-five-year-old woman who owns a pit bull named Lady, Shakirah has two Masters degrees and is writing her dissertation for a doctorate in education at Teachers College.  She was raised in Newark, and she’s remained in Newark.

    “It’s what I must do,” she said.

    On any given day, 497 students make their way to Miller Street, a K-8 school, from disparate points, such as Wright or Emmet Streets, near Broad Street and Route 21, across the Conrail from Newark Liberty International Airport, on the very busy Pennsylvania Avenue.  Newark is divided into five wards – north, south, east, west and central. The South Ward is 5.2 square miles of abandoned buildings, empty lots enclosed by chain-linked fences, boarded up homes next to liquor stores and bodegas and strip joints, and on some street corners barely conscious prostitutes high on drugs leaning over and calling out a foggy sexuality to passersby.  It’s not an easy walk to school.

    I stood on the Vandeerpool and Frelinghuysen corner in the early morning next to L&C Tire Services, where the loud sounds of air guns removing lug nuts from truck tires punctured the air. Juan Ramos and his grandchildren, Julio and Elvir, waited for the traffic to pass.  I’d met with Juan, along with other parents eager to tell me their stories, a few days earlier.  Lowanda Pots, the head of the parents organization, said to me then, “You have to tell our story.  No one cares about us.”

    That my role in the school was to be that of storyteller became abundantly clear and repeated by other parents, teachers, and students.

    “You gonna write about us?” a young, wide eyed little girl, Ana, with long black hair – tiny for a fifth grader – asked me one day after seeing me around, always catching my eye and smiling.  I was taken by the question, unsure what to say to this knowing child.  Hesitantly, I said, “I’m going to try.”

    But then she raised another question, as if she knew something more.  “You gonna be with us?” she asked.  The word had gotten around that I was at Miller Street to study the school; that this would take some time and that I would therefore be a new member of this community.  But be with us had another meaning, I thought.  The way Ana looked at me, her big round eyes told me that she wanted me to be someone vital to her community.

    The implication was, could I do something?  It’s what my students at Middlebury College, hundreds of miles away, literally and figuratively,  always ask: how can one person do anything about a dysfunctional society when it’s been going on for so long?

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, Drugs and Violence, education, global health, Inverted Totalitarianism, jonathan kozol, philosophy, politics, Public Health, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the Environment

An Education Revolution = A Revolution in Our Communities

March 7, 2011 Leave a comment

In February of 2010, Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at TED, said that, “Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don’t find doing very easy… It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense.” Sir Robinson then goes on to say that, “Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. At the heart of our challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence…Human flourishing,” he says, “is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process and you cannot predict the outcome of human development…It’s not about scaling a new solution, it’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.” Sir Ken Robinson is not calling for change, rather he’s calling for revolution — an Education Revolution.

All evidence in the US suggests that, in practice, Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling of “separate but equal” – meaning, the acceptance of a dual system of education – is more appealing to the dominant class.

A “separate but equal” education system restricts access to social mobility; it strengthens a hierarchical socioeconomic system controlled by few. The gains of the Civil Rights Movement are long forgotten in education.  Privileged African Americans along with white Americans have given up the struggle for integration, receiving undeniable benefits from private academies.  “Separate but equal” has become a rationale for a dual system in American society – the privileged succeed and the underprivileged must find what works, though always one step behind.  We then call attention to the infrequent victories coming out of challenged communities, but we never  bring up the obvious: the lack of adherence to Brown v the Board of Education.

Our schools mirror our communities. Without changes to our communities, without emphasis on the family, however we define family, there can be no change in Education. Thus, we need an Education Revolution that begins with a revolution in our communities, particularly in the most impoverished.

In our tendency to sacrifice a large  swatch of our population primarily along racial lines — and class lines, too, especially when we speak of environmental racism — recent scientific research in genetics point to factors contributing to disease and behavioral disorders among minorities, especially African Americans.

Christopher W. Kuzawa and Elizabeth Sweet, from the Department of Anthropology, Northwester Univeristy, Evanston, Illinois, in their article “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race: Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Health,” suggest that, “There is extensive evidence for a social origin to prematurity and low birth weight in African Americans, reflecting pathways such as the effects of discrimination on maternal stress physiology … [T] here is now a strong rationale to consider developmental and epigenetic mechanisms as links between early life environmental factors like maternal stress during pregnancy and adult race-based health disparities in diseases like hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and coronary heart disease.”

Knowing what we now know, are we slowly killing certain populations in the US, namely African Americans and poor communities because we fail to see the benefits of integration? And when we realize that close to 1 in 3 Black men are in US prisons, does this not beg us to conclude that this approach to community destruction is systematic?  How do we narrow the achievement gap?

Randy L. Jirtle, Department of Radiology Oncology, Duke University Medical Center, Durnham, North Carolina, and Michael K. Skinner, Center for Reproductive Biology, School of Molecular Biosciences, Washington State University, Pullman, in “Environmental Epigenomics and Disease Susceptibility” say that, “Epidemiological evidence increasingly suggests that environmental exposures early in development have a role in susceptibility to disease in later life. In addition, some of these environmental effects seem to be passed on through subsequent generations.”

We exist in two Americas divided by access to opportunity. These harsh divisions eliminate the benefits of diversity. Scott E. Page, in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, says that, “Diversity and ability complement one another: the better the individual fruits, the better the fruit basket, and the better the other fruit, the better the apple … We should encourage people to think differently … These differences can provide the seeds of innovation, progress, and understanding.” ( see Scott E. Page’s lecture)

If the answer is diversity, why are our communities segregated, our schools separate and unequal? The answer is simple: education focused on enlightenment is dangerous. An enlightened citizen questions, challenges the status quo, and seeks alternatives. Education, today, is not about change, rather it’s about ensuring that we maintain the systems of production — supply and demand; power is thus balanced, meaning that a vertical society is maintained — some succeed and live well, others sustain those lives, and hopelessly aspire to something better through state lotteries and get rich quick schemes, such as those that lead to the mortgage crisis that affected mostly people of color and helped bring our economy to its knees. But we’ve not learned and the distance between the haves and the have nots is increasing.

As bell hooks says, in Teaching to Transgress, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” To educate — and to be educated — is the “practice of freedom.” Since this is so, then closing down some classrooms, eliminating teachers , and destroying unions that support and protect them, ensure that we live in a divided country. And if we look at who benefits from this division, we see that only those on the top of the socioeconomic ladder benefit. In poor communities, families are destroyed, first and foremost, because this keeps the prison industrial complex healthy and an informed citizenry poor. We’ve not moved far from the psychology of racism that comes from slavery.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, global health, philosophy, politics, Public Health, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the Environment, the University Tagged with , , ,

Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian and the Dismantling of American Schooling

March 4, 2011 1 Comment

Five Irvington New Jersey teens are charged with dragging an eighth grade math teacher, Muideen Oladoja, from his classroom and beating him. A month ago, the Crips gang marched on to the campus of the Rafael Hernandez Elementary School, in Newark, New Jersey, and beat up a student who had allegedly said some words to a child of the Crip leader.

In Providence, Rhode Island, 2000 teachers serving mostly African American and Hispanic students — approximately 90% — are about to lose their jobs. In Wisconsin, the same. In Indiana and Ohio and New Jersey, here too, the dismantling of education is taking shape. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg, taking control of the Department of Education, began the break up — and break down — of education some time ago, moving towards charters and privatization.

And yet, it’s uncanny that as violence in our schools is a daily occurrence — mostly unreported by mainstream media — and our infrastructure deteriorates and our schools are carefully and forcefully being dismantled, American eyes — one million last count — are on Charlie Sheen, and Kim Kardashian’s, arguably the most popular reality TV star, release of her debut single, Jam.

What’s wrong with this picture?

According to the Economic Policy Institute, one in five American children lives in poverty and nearly 35 percent of African-American children are living in poverty.   And the figures are getting worse: In 2008, 39.8 million people were in poverty, up from 37.3 million in 2007 — the second consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty.  In 2008, the poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic Whites (8.6 percent in 2008 — up from 8.2 percent in 2007), Asians (11.8 percent in 2008 — up from 10.2 percent in 2007) and Hispanics (23.2 percent in 2008 — up from 21.5 percent in 2007). Poverty rates in 2008 were statistically unchanged for Blacks (24.7 percent).   The poverty rate increased for children under 18 years old (19.0 percent in 2008 — up from 18.0 percent in 2007).

When we venture into politics, we find that no political figure of color comes from any social movement. These political figures have usually joined their party of choice during college; they have moved quickly up through the ranks, and they are not race rebels, as we witnessed about 40 years ago. This is Obama; it’s also Corey Booker of Newark, Michael Steele, Alan Keyes, Deval Patrick and others. None of these politicians represents a threat to the power structure of America. These politicians, as are all, black and white, male and female, are beholding to a new paradigm: a corporate – government alliance.

What am I suggesting?

I am following the notion of “racism lite,” found in Racism Without Racists, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Instead of relying on name calling (niggers, Spicks, Chinks), and lynching and black/white bathrooms, color-blind racism “otherizes” softly (“these people are human, too”).  It suggests that blacks and minorities in general have fallen behind because they’ve not worked hard enough.   This form of racism, a new ideology, which is in compliance with inverted totalitarianism — the corporate – government alliance — aids in the maintenance of white privilege without fanfare, without naming those it subjects and those who it rewards.   In this world, whites can even claim, “reverse racism.”   The Tea Party Movement, small as it is, is replete with this kind of language.

Where are we?

Kenneth Clark, back in 1965 – that’s 45 years ago – in his seminal work, Dark Ghetto said the following:  “The dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and – above all – economic colonies.  Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.”

This is the world we’re still creating, not realizing that the resulting tragedy of this always-ongoing story is that fellow citizens – fellow Americans and in some cases immigrants, legal and not, lured by the promise of prosperity – are disenfranchised and relegated to a life where hope is indeed on a tightrope.  What’s more, children, by the thousands, have no cultural armor to protect them while navigating the terrors and traumas of daily life.

Even an extreme conservative doesn’t seem able to understand how fiscally costly this is, never mind the human cost. In fact, it’s cheaper to send a student to an elite liberal arts college, costing over 45K a year, then it is to send this same person, usually Black or Latino (but mostly Black), to prison.

President Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo, December 11, 2009 said the following: “It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive.  It does not exist where children cannot aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.”   He was speaking to the world about the world outside the United States.  He was speaking as the Commander-in-Chief.

Yet closer to home, in the communities in which I work and learn – Newark’s South Ward and Washington Heights, Providence, R.I., Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio, Compton – families and their kids live in “despair,” which is a word that parents and teachers share with me to describe their condition.   Young people need a community to sustain them, and these days, we’re in deep trouble because we’re dismantling education, ensuring deep divides in our society based on access to the language of social mobility — some can still find hope, while other are relegated to a bleak and dark future.

In the beginning of his powerful work on American Education, The Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol sits and talks to an elementary student, Pineapple. In this exchange, Kozol is drawn to Pineapple’s use of “over there” when she points to the Manhattan island:

“What’s it like,” she asked me, peering through the strands of her cornrows that cam down over her eyes, “over there where you live?

“Over where?” I asked.

“Over — you know …,” she said with another bit of awkwardness and hesitation in her eyes.

I asked her, “Do you mean Massachusetts?”

She looked at me with more determination and a bit impatiently, I thought, but maybe also recognized that I was feeling slightly awkward too.

“You know …,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Over there — where other people are, ” she finally said.The moral of the story is that Pineapple has little contact with white people, Kozol explains, except for her principal and teachers. Racially, kids like Pineapple are totally cut off; they have “little knowledge of the ordinary reference points that are familiar to most children in the world Pineapple describes as ‘over there,’” says Kozol.

The violence in Irvington New Jersey and the Rafael Hernandez Elementary School is, in part, a consequence of this lacking in reference points — desperate acts always follow.

The dismantling of education by proxies of corporations, as are the governors of Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and New Jersey, is the dramatic sign that the way business has been done in the past is over and that a new world order, beginning here in the United States, is taking shape.  The dominant class — those closely aligned with the corporate state — marginalizes class and race , breaks up collective bargaining, and dismantles education because the last thing inverted totalitarianism needs is an educated class, so our focus is kept on Charlie Sheen and Kim Kardashian. What a world.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, Gangbangers, Inverted Totalitarianism, jonathan kozol, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with ,

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