It is hard to put in words how honored I am to have been invited to speak to this group. I can think of no gathering whose work is more important to the future of this nation, or have handled this responsibility more honorably, than public schools principals in the state of New York. You are the last line of defense between public school teachers and a political juggernaut of unprecedented proportions seeking to change the way public education in the United States is organized.

This movement, led almost exclusively by people who come from business and the law rather than education, is responsible for the public demonization of members of a human services profession unprecedented in American history, yet it commands virtually unanimous support of the press and broadcast media, leaders of both political parties, the nation’s wealthiest foundations and some misguided civil rights leaders.

What other cause can you think of that can unite Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich, Al Sharpton, Bill Gates, The Koch Brothers, The Walton Family, Scott Bradley, Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg and Chris Christie? The unlikeliness of this coalition would be amusing were its consequences not so tragic — the closing of schools which have served hard-pressed communities for generations, the development of testing protocols that crowd out science, history and the arts, the development of school and teacher evaluations whose results defy common sense, the erosion of the democratic rights of school professionals and a daily numbing attack on the teachers that destroys the morale of the best people in the profession.

But I don’t have to explain these events to people in this room because you live with their consequences every day. You watch your schools be deluged with unnecessary tests. You watch “value added” systems for rating schools and teachers be developed which use minute variations in test scores as the basis for life-changing decisions about schools and the people who work in them. You watch your teachers collapse in tears as their profession is attacked almost daily in the pages of the New York Times, the the New York Daily News and The New York Post, and as people from the President to New York’s Governor and New York City’s Mayor blame them for everything from poverty, to racial inequality to the inability of American workers to compete in a global economy.

And in the face of all of this, you hold your school communities together. You stand up for your teachers and let them know you have their back, you educate your parents about the craziness of current school evaluation protocols and warn them not to believe what they read in the papers, and you make sure your students in spite of all the testing still have room for imagination and play and community building.

I know this because I have seen it first hand in working with several extraordinary principals at high poverty schools in the Bronx, as well as from someone many of you in this room know — one of the greatest leaders I have ever met in any capacity, in any profession — my wife, Liz Phillips, principal of PS 321

But you have done more than just protect your school community. Many of you have spoken up publicly against the policies coming from Washington, and Albany and The New York City Department of Education which undermine the best practices you have spent your life learning and implementing. The Long Island School Principals’ letter, which some people in this room helped to launch, and some of you have signed, is one of the most important grass roots initiative in the nation challenging the stifling, and ultimately reactionary testing and teacher evaluation features of Race to the Top. You have set a standard of professional integrity for the entire nation, and I feel profoundly honored to be in your presence.

Because of this, I have not come to you today to talk to you about issues you know more about than I do, whether it is how to teach reading and writing, how to identify and nurture good teachers, or even how to distinguish between the useful and the irrelevant on standardized tests, but rather, I am going to try to draw upon some of my own training as a historian to put the current Education Reform juggernaut in historical perspective. But before I do that, I want to explain why someone whose fields of study are African American, urban and labor histor, suddenly became involved in speaking about and writing about education issues.

My emergence as an education blogger flows directly from my experiences doing community history projects in Bronx schools under the auspices of a public history project I launched ten years ago called the Bronx African American History Project. We started this project because the Bronx had almost completely been left out of research and writing on New York City African American history, and from the very beginning it was driven by input from community residents who wanted to tell their stories.

As we started collecting oral histories, we very quickly became exposed to a narrative of Bronx history that departed markedly from the stories of urban decay, violence and white flight that so often appeared in the media portraits of the boroughs recent history. When talking to Black residents of the Bronx who were born or arrived in the borough between the 1930s and the 1950s, we learned about an era when the Bronx was a place of optimism and hope for African American, West Indian and Latino families who moved there from Harlem, resulting in South Bronx neighborhoods, schools and housing projects which were among the most racially integrated in the nation.

More than that, we learned of a thriving musical culture in South Bronx neighborhoods, unparalleled in the nation, than encompassed, jazz, mambo and, doo wop and later funk, salsa and hip hop, that was nurtured in scores of small clubs, along with ballrooms, theaters and the neighborhood’s public schools.

Less than four years after we began the project, social studies coordinators in the Bronx heard about what we are doing and asked us to present our work at workshops and conferences for teachers. The teachers who attended these presentations got so excited about the potential of the material we had uncovered that we found ourselves deluged with invitations so speak at Bronx schools so that students and their parents could begin to feel a new pride in their surroundings

Within a year of my first presentations, I found myself doing walking tours, workshops and lectures for Bronx teachers through Teaching American History Projects, and then was hired by a network leader in what was then Region 2 to come into 13 Bronx schools and help them launch community history projects involving students, teachers, parents, school aides and neighborhood residents.

This proved to be a life-changing experience for me. Each school spent two months on these projects, culminating in day-long community history festivals that involved everything from photo exhibits, to dance, to documentary films, to food festivals to plays. The hundreds of teachers involved in this displayed amazing creativity and enthusiasm and inspired levels of student and parental involvement far beyond what I dreamed were possible

It is in the context of these experiences with Bronx teachers, many of whom were teachers of color, many of whom grew up in the neighborhoods that they were teaching in, that I began to feel a simmering rage at the ever-increasing attacks on public school teachers that were starting to appear in the New York and national media, some of them coming from the Mayor and then New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein.

The argument being made — that incompetent and poorly motivated teachers were the major reason for failing schools in high poverty neighborhoods — was contradicted by what I was seeing every day in Bronx schools, where teachers were stubbornly, creatively, and at times heroically, trying to teach young people living in stress filled environments who often brought those stresses to school with them.

Worse yet, when it came to rating and grading schools, the Department of Education ended up giving low grades to some of the best schools I had visited, places where the entire staff went the extra mile to create to make students feel nurtured and supported and family members welcomed.

This experience, coupled with my daily conversations with my wife Liz about how protocols for rating schools and teachers were based on ridiculous, minute variations in test scores that had some of her best teachers rated lowest, convinced me to use the platform my academic position gave me to speak out in defense of teachers and principals who were now under ferocious attack by people of influence in politics, the media and business.

Very simply, I felt that teachers were being assigned responsibility for patterns of racial and economic inequality which were centuries in the making and had multiple causes. Worse yet, those making these accusations were proposing that schools become the society’s major instrument of eliminating those inequalities through a reform program featuring competition, universal testing, test based teacher evaluations the closing of failing schools, and selective privatization.

To any reputable historian or social scientist, the two pillars of the Educational Reformers argument, that “bad teachers” bore a major responsibility for the persistence of racial and economic inequality, and that transforming schools along a business/competition model would bring immediate results in the form of greater educational equity and economic equality would be so improbable as to defy credulity.

Yet this Crackpot Theory not only commanded the support of the bulk of the nation’s editors and business leaders, it was bought hook line and sinker by the incoming Obama Administration which institutionalized these ideas in its Race to the Top Initiative which has proved even more damaging in its consequences than No Child Left Behind.

How could this happen? How could ideas so flawed and divorced from real-life experience become the basis of the Nation’s Education Policy no matter what party was in power?

I do not pretend I am ready to solve this riddle, at least not yet, but I do want to point out that this is not the first time in our nation’s history that a simple explanation for complex social problems led to a failed attempt at social transformation. Right after World War I, a huge mass movement to ban the production and sale of alcoholic beverages culminated in the passage of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Like education reform, prohibition promised an immediate remedy to class and cultural cleavages in American society and was supported by a cross section of the nation’s political leaders, including some feminists and people on the left.

Supporters claimed that banning alcoholic beverages would reduce domestic violence, undermine organized crime, weaken urban political machines, and promote the assimilation of recent immigrants. It was promulgated with the same fervor educational reform is today, and had the same level of support in the mass media, but unfortunately, none of the results it promised came to pass and thirteen years later, in the heart of the Depression, Prohibition was repealed

It would be comforting to think that it won’t take 13 years for the Education Reform juggernaut to collapse and its policies to be reversed. But I am not sure I can state that with confidence. While some of the supporters of education reform support it because they hope against hope such policies will reverse rampant and growing in equality in the United States, others are involved because they stand to directly or indirectly profit from the measures they are trying to implement.

In the latter category, first and foremost are those who produce the tests that No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top Require as the basis of school and teacher evaluation, or the new software required for their implementation. Figures like Bill Gates, whose involvement in education issues is alleged to be disinterested and humanitarian, or Rupert Murdoch, whose media regularly comment on education issues from what is presumed to be an objective standpoint, both stand to gain financially from the test protocols associated with Race to the Top.

But there are other reasons a cross section of America’s top business leaders support Education Reform as a solution to problems of poverty and inequality, the foremost being that it diverts attention from their own complicity in maximizing those very problems. It is a peculiar species of shamelessness that allows hedge fund directors in Democrats for Education Reform, who have made a fortune speculating while most Americans have lost jobs, income and retirement funds, to make teachers unions and public school teachers responsible for denying poor children education and economic opportunity.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the Koch Brothers and the Walton Family Foundation, both of whose companies have prospered in a union free environment, find it convenient to use the attack on teachers as an opening wedge in a broader attack on public employees unions which has spread through states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana.

After having successfully supported an offensive against industrial unions in the 1980s and 1990s, driving executive compensation up, while driving working class incomes down, they have turned their attention to public school teachers as one of the obstacles to the creation of a compliant, non- union labor force in the United States

There is no better example of the consequences of their efforts than the CEO/Worker gap at Wal Mart, whose CEO makes $16,000 an hour while the entry level worker in the company makes $6.50 an hour. Public education, where teachers salaries almost equal those of school administrators, represents an alternative model of operation which the Walton Family Foundation, through its support of Teach for America and the American Legislative Exchange Council, is doing everything in its power to undermine and discredit

Given the political momentum of the Education Reform juggernaut, and the powerful interests who stand to profit from it, how can teachers, principals and parents prevent it from totally undermining their profession and turning schools into places of Fear and Dread? I have no simple answers to this question, but I do want to point out three important places where the corporate education reform movement is vulnerable, all of which can be exploited by people trying to preserve space for creative teaching and learning

• Testing to the Point of Absurdity. One of the things that generated the Long Island Principals Letter is the insistence of US Department of Education that teachers must be assessed on student test scores to receive RTT funding, thereby requiring that students be tested in every grade and every subject to that teachers can be properly evaluated. Once elementary school parents realize the implications of this — namely that students will be tested in kindergarten and in subjects like music, art and gym- some, possibly many will begin to rise up in revolt against a regime that makes their children hate going to school. We as educators must explain to parents, early and often, that accepting Race to the Top requires universal testing of a sort that will squeeze most of the joy, creativity and play out of early childhood education. Perhaps, they will start to assert political influence before these policies are actually implemented, not after they experience their horrible consequences.

• Gratuitous School Closings that Destroy Communities. This is what we have going on in New York City right now, with over 60 schools targeted by the Bloomberg administration for closing, some of which were schools the Department of Education created after an early phase of closings. These closings, totally immune to parent and community input, not only traumatize teachers and principals who have worked hard to make these schools work under daunting conditions, they are going to enrage students and parents who have felt invested in school communities and feel their democratic rights are being violated. There are already protest movements being organized against school closings at several schools in the Bronx, as well as at schools in other boroughs, and these movements could pick up considerable momentum when the weather becomes nicer and local Occupy Movements become involved. Which brings up point

• School Policy Is Now on the Radar Screen of the Occupy Movement Which Represents the Most Formidable Ally Teachers Have On the American Political Landscape. Although the Occupy Movement is less than six months old, it has exposed as nothing before it has done since the Depression, the disproportionate power the very wealthy exert over social policy. Nowhere is that influence more prominent than in Education Reform, where a cross section of the American Business elite from Gates and Broad to Koch and Walton, are funding initiatives which take power away from teachers and expand universal testing. Occupy movements around the country are beginning to realize that and are making alliances with teacher activist groups challenging school closings and attacks on teacher unions. These alliances have a huge upside for teachers and have great potential for yielding mass protests on a local scale which will complement what was begun with the Save our Schools March on Washington and which is continuing with the Occupy The DOE protests taking place in late March and early April under the auspices of United Opt Out, a national parents group.

Despite these emerging opportunities, the Corporate Education Reformers still have the initiative. The limitless funds they have at their disposal, which allows them to buy off politicians and neutralize teachers unions, and their virtually complete monopoly on national media, means that school closings, attacks on teacher autonomy, and imposition of more and more standardized tests will continue unabated for some time

But over time, people of courage and integrity, including the people gathered in this room, will turn the tide and begin to restore sanity to educational discourse and develop a powerful alliance of teachers, parents and students, supported first by the Occupy movement, and later by unions, religious organizations and progressive politicians, which will try to make the public schools once again what they were designed to be — a place where curiosity is nurtured, where imagination flourishes and where young people learn the value of intelligent citizenship in a Democratic society.

Mark Naision
With A Brooklyn Accent

During this time, I will reflect on my improbable journey from inner-city public schools to advanced degrees from the best universities in the world. This includes a B.A. (history) and M.A. (urban planning) from UCLA in addition to a Ph.D. (city & regional planning) from UC Berkeley. By shedding light on my own story, I hope to encourage other students from America’s barrios and ghettos to pursue higher education at elite universities.

While I have worked hard and sacrificed much over the years, I question the American notion that only “hard work” and “perseverance” lead to success. Too often, corporate-minded outsiders who never experienced poverty or attended overcrowded public schools preach to inner-city Latinos and African Americans about working hard, making the right choices and being accountable for their actions as the sole means to upward mobility.

While these virtues are necessary for  inner-city students to succeed, policymakers, educators and civic leaders should address the root causes that produce educational inequality in the first place, such as a profit-oriented system that favors the affluent, inadequate public schools, low levels of educational attainment, low financial capital, lack of quality jobs, residential segregation and institutional racism.

As the son of poor Mexican immigrants and a former resident of East Los Angeles’s Ramona Gardens housing project, I, along with my seven siblings, grew up in a bleak environment impacted by these structural constraints.

While I do not pretend to have the answers to address the complex educational needs of America’s disenfranchised youth, I can say that in my case, I benefited from several factors throughout my educational trajectory that helped me overcome tremendous obstacles. This includes the following five factors:

• specialized skills
• luck
• close-knit family
• hard work
• sacrifice

Throughout my early years at Murchison Elementary School, I excelled in mathematics. While many inner-city kids hope to escape the mean streets via their athletic skills, my specialized skills revolved around algebraic equations, polynomials and word problems.

Thanks to my favorite teacher, Ms. Cher, who wore her hair like “I Love Lucy’s” eponymous character, I mastered algebra in the sixth grade. Like my brother Salomon, a critically acclaimed painter who displayed great artistic abilities at an early age, my specialized math skills represented my ticket out of the projects, which were known as the Big Hazard projects for the local gang.

Luck also played a vital role in my academic career. While I bused to a majority-white middle school where I was tracked into wood shop and metal shop classes, I learned of a great college prep program at Lincoln High School. Thanks to my childhood friend Hector, I learned about Upward Bound at Occidental College — a federally funded college prep summer program for historically disenfranchised youth.

Hector, who also yearned to escape the projects, peer-pressured me into applying. Like many teenagers, I feared the unknown and felt overwhelmed by the personal statement, which I quickly disposed of out of frustration. Luckily for me, after Hector retrieved my crumpled, hand-written essay from the trash can and ironed it out, I reluctantly applied and was accepted. If not for Hector and Upward Bound, I don’t think I would have been prepared for or accepted to UCLA as a freshman.

My close-knit family also provided me with unconditional support throughout my university studies. I especially recognize the wise Latinas in my family — my mother, four sisters and wife. Lacking formal education, my mother made my father take my brother and me (at 13 years of age) to work in Malibu as day laborers. This was done to give us a glimpse of life in the U.S. without a good education. Also, my brilliant wife, Antonia, who holds advanced degrees in education and economics, originally encouraged me to pursue my Ph.D. and academia, serving as a concrete example for our gifted son, Joaquin, to both emulate and surpass.

Finally, I acquired the virtues of hard work and sacrifice from my late parents. While my father, Salomon Sr., first toiled as a farm worker under the Bracero Program — the U.S.-Mexico guest-worker program of the mid-20th century — he later worked as a janitor at a rim factory for decades, earning minimum wage.

Meanwhile, my mother, Carmen — who first worked as a domestic worker in San Diego when our family lived in a Tijuana slum prior to migrating to the U.S. — spent 40 years of her life cleaning the homes of the affluent. Thanks to their hard work and sacrifice, along with the support of my wife Antonia, I overcame tremendous obstacles as a poor Chicano kid from the projects to become an urban planning scholar.

Alvaro Huerta

Republished from the Daily Californian with the author’s permission.

But instead of critically examining how these trends reflected 20 years of regressive taxation, a futile “war on drugs,” the deregulation of the financial industry, the breaking of unions and the movement of American companies abroad, America’s leaders decided the primary source of economic inequality could be found in failing schools, bad teachers, and powerful teachers unions.

No serious scholar, looking at the economic and social trends of the previous 20 years, or the major innovations in social policy that unleashed the power of big capital, would have given to slightest credence to this analysis of the sources of inequality, but the idea that educational failure was the prime source of all other social deficits took hold with the force of a religious conversion. Corporate leaders, heads of major foundations, civil rights leaders, politicians in both major parties, bought this explanation hook line and sinker and so began one of the strangest social movements in modern American history- the demonization of America’s teachers and the development of strategies to radically transform education by taking power away from them

The consequence of this leap of faith, supported by no serious research, was the idea that there has to be a centralized effort to monitor educational progress though quantifiable measures, coupled with accountability strategies which called for the removal of teachers and the closing of schools, if they didn’t meet those criteria. Through policies developed at the federal level but implemented locally so that they effected every school district in the nation, scrutinizing teacher effectiveness became a national mission introduced with as much fanfare as was America’s efforts to put a rocket in space during the 1950’s and 60’s.

The centerpiece of this mission was that teachers had to be judged on student performance of standardized tests, as there were no other “objective” criteria that could generate meaningful statistical information on a national scale. But America’s states and municipalities did not have consistent testing policies, so federal policies called for universal testing related to a nationally developed set of Common Core Standards, with the loss of federal funding being presented as the consequence of failure to comply.

This all sounds very rational until you look at it from the individual school level. To evaluate teachers via standardized tests, and do it across the board, you have to have tests in every grade and every subject. This not only means tests in English, Math, Science and Social Studies, it means tests in Art, Music and Gym.

No school in any country, at any time in history, ever tried doing something like this, and for good reason. It means that all that goes on in school is preparation for tests. There is no spontaneity, no creativity, no possibility of responding to new opportunities for learning that relate to events that occur locally, nationally, or globally. It also means play and pleasure are erased from the school experience, and that students are put under constant stress, maximized by teachers who know that their own job security depends on student performance.

What you have here, in short, is a prescription for making the nation’s schools a place of Fear and Dread, ruled by test protocols that deaden minds and stifle creative thinking. Make no mistake about it, there are people who stand to benefit handsomely from this insanity, especially the companies who make the tests and the consultants who administer them, but anyone who thinks this level of testing will make America’s schools more effective or reduce social inequality has a capacity for self-delusion that staggers the imagination. Only people with no options would choose to send their children to schools run that way. The wealthy will send their children to private schools which eschew testing, the well organized will withdraw from the system and create their own cooperative schools or engage in home schooling.

The sad part about all of this is that the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, continues to push this program, with the support of both major parties and a cross section of America’s corporate leadership.

There are not too many other examples in American history where such a crackpot theory guided social policy this way. The last example I can think of was the passage of the Prohibition Amendment to the US constitution, based on the conviction that the banning of alcoholic beverages would somehow create greater social stability and save America from corruption.

Someday, Test Based Education Reform will go the way of Prohibition. But not before incalculable damage is done to the nations children

Mark Naison
With a Brooklyn Accent 

Tucson school board audience reacts to end of Mexican-American studies program. (Samuel Nemir Olivares/NYT Institute)

Teresa Wiltz in America’s Wire writes that despite claims of increased educational opportunities for minorities that the performance of black and Latino teenagers remains the same or lower than 30 years ago. In fact, the math and reading performance of black and Latino high school seniors equal that of 13-year-old white students – so much for the post racial society.

Educators and liberal politicos point the finger at low expectations, inequality of resources, less qualified teachers, the income inequality, teacher bias, and inexperienced teachers. They throw in the tracking of black and brown students into remedial class while whites are put into university bound classes.

Further, minority students are more likely to be given “A’s” for work that would receive a “C” in a rich school giving the illusion that they are being educated. Society would not tolerate this record in a football team at any level, or for that matter if we had fewer weapons of mass destruction than 30 years ago.

However, in my view, the major reason for the lack of progress of Mexican American and other minorities is society’s historical amnesia or more aptly its Alzheimer disorder that erases the memory of previous efforts or commitments to bridge the gap between black, brown and white – rich and poor.

The truth be told, educators pay less attention today to Mexican Americans than they did 50 years ago. In the sixties educators and reporters at least talked about it. The late Los Angeles Times’ columnist Ruben Salazar attacked the dropout problem and the failure of the schools to devise a relevant curriculum, as well as the failure to recruit and train effective Mexican American teachers.

In February 1963, Salazar began a series on Mexican American education. He titled his first article, “What Causes Jose’s Trouble in School?: Mexican-Americans Problems Analyzed.” Salazar begins,

Kicked out of school, Jose Mendez at 16 has been trapped in a peculiar twilight zone of American life. They tested him, graded him and pigeonholed him…say some educators, the fault may lie in the tests and the teachers – not in Jose. Educational policy and curriculum are oriented towards the education of the middle-class, monolingual, monocultural English-speaking student … [Jose] is at a great disadvantage…[he] is a hyphenated American, a Mexican-American … he is culturally confused.

Salazar interviewed educators, Drs. George I. Sánchez, Paul Sheldon, Julian Samora and high school teacher Marcos de Leon on why José was dropping out of school. They attributed the dropout problem to the Mexican American’s inferiority complex, which has intensified his marginalization.

Salazar blamed the schools for the Mexican Americans failure. Schools nurtured a negative self-image, which was reinforced by the movies and literature, and failed to correct the stereotyping of poor Mexicans. It was a vicious cycle: the schools did think Mexicans could not learn, students developed a low esteem, they failed and dropped out.

The experts advocated bilingual-bicultural education, and initially there was a consensus for these programs, from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Republican St. Ronald Reagan. Yet, the Greek Chorus gained traction and labeled the programs separatist, un-American and racist. This nativist movement allied itself with right wing thinks tanks and foundations, and by the beginning of the 21st century, bilingual ed died a violent death.

By and large educators were mute as bilingual programs were wiped out and university based teacher training programs specializing on Mexican Americans were eliminated. At teacher training institutions grade point average was favored over knowledge of the child’s background. Although Latinos comprised 75 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, student teachers were given minimal preparation on how to teach Latino students.

The dropout was one of the major reasons for the development of Chicano Studies in 1969. A solution was sought for the high dropout problem that was overexposing Latino students to a life of poverty and, not incidentally, to the Vietnam draft. One of my first books Cultures in Conflict: Case Studies of the Mexican American was written for fifth graders. The purpose was to build a positive image in order to facilitate the acquisition of skills. These skills would prepare students to enter which ever field they wanted.

The importance of self-image is common sense. I remember looking for engineering computer lab with my future wife at UCLA in the 1980s. We asked several students if they knew where the computer lab was. They all gave us blank looks. Finally, we asked a Latino student who told us to ask an Asian. We did and she told us where it was. Talking to Asian fiends they told me that they exceled in math because the teachers expected them to.

Looking back at my own life, I was fortunate that I ended up in a Jesuit high school where I had to take four years of Latin. My relatives would notice my Latin book on the table, would ask my mother who it belonged to, and they would remark that Rudy must be smart. In contrast, in the first grade, before I knew English, I was pushed out of public school as mentally retarded.

When I became smart, that is adhered to their rules, anytime a Mexican student would act up, other teachers would ask me why? When I told them, they generally did not like the answer. They thought I was flip when I said that my solution for the marginalization of Mexicans was to rewrite the bible and substitute the word Mexican for Israeli. In a couple of decades, Mexicans would start looking at themselves as the “chosen people.”

This identity has helped Jews survive and endure over 2,000 years of persecution. In my view it comes down to self-image.

This was the premise of the Tucson Unified School District’s program. It was the repairing the damage done by marginalization – of being written out of history. The thinking was that learning history, literature and the arts though their viewpoint would repair the image of the greaser, the loser and the numerous other stereotypes.

From the beginning, the xenophobes tried to send the Mexican American Studies program down the same path as bilingual education. It was unpatriotic to learn any language other than English, it was un-American to learn history other than the American way.

The reasoning ignored the past; it was as if the debates of the sixties and seventies never occurred. They disregarded pedagogical principles that even St. Ronald accepted.

One of the books banned in Tucson was Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It was based on a highly successful literacy campaign conducted in Brazil. The xenophobes’ main argument is that Freire was a Marxist, which is ridiculous since the pedagogy goes back to Socrates. With that aside, would we cast aside a cure for cancer because the researcher was a Marxist?

The Cambium Learning Corp’s Curriculum Audit of the Tucson Mexican American Studies Department which was commissioned by Arizona Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal and cost the $177,000 concluded,

No observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment towards a race or class of people. The auditors observed the opposite, as students are taught to be accepting of multiple ethnicities of people. MASD teachers are teaching Cesar Chavez alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, all as peaceful protesters who sacrificed for people and ideas they believed in. Additionally, all ethnicities are welcomed into the program and these very students of multiple backgrounds are being inspired and taught in the same manner as Mexican American students. All evidence points to peace as the essence for program teachings. Resentment does not exist in the context of these courses observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment towards a race or class of people … No evidence as seen by the auditors exists to indicate that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department program classes advocates ethnic solidarity; rather it has been proven to treat student as individuals

There has not been any credible proof to refute claims that the program has improved chances of graduation, improved the students’ self-images, and motivated them to pursue a higher education.

A society that has historical dementia or Alzheimers cannot correct the defects of the present just like it cannot correct racism, sexism or homophobia.

Stupidity and fanaticism led to the destruction of the most transformative movements in Latin American, Liberation Theology. The forces of reaction in order to protect the large landowners redbaited Liberation Theology and substituted a reactionary evangelical Christian movement that promised that their reward would come in the next world. So it is in Arizona.

With the destruction of Mexican American Studies and the banning of the books, Mexican Americans are being put in their place. Vicariously, they are burning the infidels. The difference is that students are fighting back! They are reading books and will remember that anybody can learn. It is their right.

Rodolfo F. Acuña

Barack Obama, Arne Duncan

Educators Letter to President Obama Now Online and Ready For Signatures

Here is the link to the Educators Letter to President Obama that asks him to withdraw his support of policies which mandate high stakes testing, to include teachers and parents in all educational policy discussions in his administration and replace Sec of Ed Arne Duncan with an educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers. Please sign and circulate widely!

Dear President Obama,

We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s teachers and their supporters, wish to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although many of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, it is unlikely that you will receive continued support unless the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives are changed:

• The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership.
• The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on “bad teachers” rather than poverty and neighborhood distress.
• The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools.

Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation’s educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”

We therefore submit the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort:

• The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
• The incorporation of parents, teachers, and school administrators in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
• An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers, preferring charter schools to existing public schools, and requiring closure of low performing schools.
• Create a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of America’s schools.

We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing could ever hope to do.

Mark Naison
With a Brooklyn Accent 

Having been an academic most of my life, I have had several experiences that bear upon Mr.Biden’s “button”.

Let me begin with a twist on an old saying, “no one ever won a horse race without a good horse.” A small twist on that saying applies to global economic races: no one ever wins economic races without a well-educated workforce. And with this country’s students ranking only 16th among industrialized nations, it’s clear that we as a country have to work on more hot-button issues than just Mr. Biden’s “cost”.

To become competitive, we need smarter students. Neither more affordable diplomas nor inflated grades, inflated student egos, or inflated parental expectations will do. Furthermore, we can’t measure progress merely by counting how many “hoops” (whether substantive or procedural) we can help our students learn how to jump through. What counts in higher education is student’s learning how to jump through ever higher hoops.

And not just the hoops that we tell them to jump through, either. We need to help them learn how to question the “givens” that we ourselves and our leaders have learned how to take for granted, whether awaredly [sic] or tacitly. That takes courage and persistence, as well as living with little money and less security, the common measures of success in this world as people who have most of the power have made it.

I know personally of what I speak. In 1971, I earned a Bachelor’s in engineering from Case Western Reserve University, with a 3.19 accumulative Grade Point Average (GPA). I wondered whether my GPA meant I had done well, average, or poorly in my studies. Back in the mid-1980s, I had opportunity to find out. I asked an esteemed senior professor of engineering—he was named in “Who’s Who?” in his engineering field, and he taugtht for 30 years at a large Mid-Western, public university not located in the Eastern Time Zone. He told me, “In 1956 when I first taught here, the average GPA was 2.50. By 1971, the average GPA had risen to 2.85. And by [the mid-80’s], it had risen to 3.50…”, to which he quickly added, ” and today’s students aren’t nearly as good.”

To my great relief, he said, “You did well.” But he left me worrying about grade inflation, even back then. And that was 25+ years ago!

In the mid-1990s, after earning the PhD from Cornell University, I was teaching graduate-level public administration courses at a public university located in the Mid-West. I began the first session of every class by announcing that I was a hard grader and that students should be happy to earn a B-plus from me. I recounted earning an “A” from a Cornell professor who told me that it was the first full-A he had given in four years! Inevitably, fewer students would attend a second session.

Other examples… I gave a rare “F” on a mid-term paper, and the student drove home to bring her Mother to argue her case for her (600 miles roundtrip!). At first, the Mother solidly supported her daughter; but, one of my questions won her over. She turned to her Daughter and asked, incredulously: “You wrote that?!” Another student, whom I later discovered had plagiarized a large portion of her final paper, took exception to my grade for her mid-term paper, saying: “I’ve got a 3.75 GPA… What’s this B-minus doing on my paper?” I told her that I couldn’t be responsible for other professor’s grades.

For these and other reasons, if we want to be more competitive in the globalized economy, we need to push Mr. Biden to push the “smarter students” hot-button, too. We no longer have the wherewithal to dictate to the rest of the world that in this high-stakes game of “[Economic] King of the Hill” which “Hill” we must compete on.

Robert Letcher

Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder spent his first year in office trading in the welfare of thousands of vulterable Michiganders in order to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Hoping to refocus priorities in 2012, Michigan’s Senate Democrats have released a new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Michigan currently pays out roughly $34 billion in tax credits. Under the Michigan 2020 Plan recently unveiled, $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes would be eliminated. Democrats put the tuition proposal’s cost at least at $1.8 billion. [...]

Under the plan, graduates who spent their entire K-12 years in Michigan schools would be eligible for the full award, which equates to the median tuition level of all public universities — currently $9,575 per year. Those who attended school for awhile outside the state would get a percentage of that amount.

College tuition has tripled in the last 30 years and is only trending upwards. Indeed, college price tags could get as high as $422,000 come 2034. And with student loans increasingly hard to find in a restricted credit market, families could certainly use the help in sending their children to a college close by.

What’s more, Michigan Senate Democrats note that the elimination of $3.5 billion in tax loopholes is only a 10 percent reduction in the tax credits the state already doles out. In fact, the program costs almost exactly as much as the $1.7 billion tax cut Snyder implemented for corporations.

The plan should appeal to Republicans as “it can be done without raising taxes one cent,” said Whitmer. “It’s not about whether Michigan can afford to do this, it’s whether we can afford not to.”

Scene from Occupy LAUSD

In preparation for my course, The Worker in American Life, I am reading about the broad-based assault on industrial labor that took place during the 80’s and 90’s in a broad swath of the United States from New England through the Pacific Northwest.

Plant closings, transfer of family businesses to international conglomerates, union busting, and finally, the destruction of a wage scale and union rules that allowed factory workers to live in comfort and security and have dignity on the job hit the nation with the force of a juggernaut. In industrial cities, and in small towns which depended on industrial production, the results were devastating. These communities where then beset by a host of social ills –  drug epidemics, domestic violence and gang activity, foreclosures, evictions, arson and the erosion of once proud business districts.

The scores of communities where this drama played out eventually achieved a precarious stability, but the prosperity of the post war years never returned, as wage levels lowered to the point where a person had to work two, possibly three jobs, to achieve the income a unionized factory worker once made, or turn to illegal activity to supplement legal income.

Now, an equally comprehensive effort to undermine the bargaining rights of workers dignity and standard of living is underway in the country. On a state and local level, it is being led by Republican politicians who are systematically trying to strip away collective bargaining rights of government workers and to pass “right to work” laws which make the union shop illegal.

Initiatives of the first kind have succeeded in states which were sites of landmark labor conflicts and strong unions, Wisconsin and Ohio, and the second initiative is on the verge of being voted into law in Indiana.

It would be comforting to think that this attack on public workers is coming only from the Republican Party and the political right, but one of the most powerful, and insidious efforts to undermine public worker unionism – the attack on teachers unions – has been driven by foundations and funding sources traditionally associated with the Democratic Party and has been enthusiastically endorsed by the Obama Administration.

Not only did the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan,  and the President praise the firing of union teachers in Central Falls Rhode Island who refused to accept the unilateral revision of union rules by the local Superintendent, they have provided huge financial incentives to states and municipalities to create privately managed, non union charter schools and to adopt procedures for rating teachers based on student test scores which will allow for the mass firing of teachers judged “incompetent” by these criteria.

Make no mistake about it, the sum effect of these initiatives, if successful,will be strikingly similar to the offensive against industrial unions in the 80’s and 90’s — it will drive down wage levels substantially and erode dignity on the job for those subject to new managerial prerogatives. How this will help the communities in which this large group of workers lose income, self-respect, and in some cases, employment, is hard to imagine.

It will hurt families, businesses, the housing market, and in all probability, lower wage levels in the private sector as a new source of surplus labor is created. What benefits accrue in lower taxes will hardly compensate for the losses.

If you don’t believe me, just visit Buffalo New York, Youngstown Ohio, or Johnstown Pennsylvania (I have spent time in all three) and other once thriving cities where high worker incomes and job security produced thriving neighborhoods of working class homeowners. Now they have huge stretches of the city where every other lot is vacant, where business districts feature groceries, liquor stores, and storefront churches, and where the drug business is the major source of income for a significant group of young men and growing number of young women.

Let me put the matter bluntly. The last wave of union busting left physical and moral damage that we have not fully recovered from. The new wave about to descend on us will add to the destruction and, perhaps push the social fabric to the breaking point.

There is a phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Unfortunately, the reverse is true as well. If we stand by and let teachers and other government workers have their unions broken, their dignity undermined, and their wage levels shattered by powerful interests who profit from their distress, we will accelerate the transformation of the United States into a plutocracy where the majority of people are living on the edge of poverty while a small elite controls all levels of government and parlays that into unimaginable benefits for themselves.

This is the future that awaits us. Which side are you on?

Mark Naison
With a Brooklyn Accent 

One of the things I’ve discovered in recent years is that when it comes to education policy, the last people asked for input are America’s teachers. We have a President who holds an” education summit” that includes the nation’s top business leaders and foundation heads, but no teachers; we have billionaires lobbying to privatize education and break teachers unions; we have an organization that purports to work for educational equity that encourages its recruits to leave teaching after two years because they can influence policy more by moving into other, more prestigious careers, rather than spending a lifetime as a “mere teacher.”

The results are plain to see. After ten years of No Child Left Behind, three years of Race to the Top, and twenty years of Teach for America, we have seen no change in the global standing of America’s schools and no reduction in the test score gap between racially and economically disadvantaged groups and the rest of the population.

But we lose something more than an opportunity to improve our schools by excluding teacher’s voice — we lose a chance to understand the human impact of poverty and economic distress, not only those locked in inner generational poverty, but those made newly poor by the economic crisis. Students bring the wounds of poverty into their classrooms every day, in ways that break teachers hearts, keep them up at nights, and make the accountability protocols based on test scores that “education reformers” are now imposing seem totally divorced from reality.

As someone who is married to an elementary school principal, and talks to teachers almost daily because of my work in Bronx schools and my contact with former students who have chosen to teach, I have, even second hand, been haunted by the portrait of what this Recession is doing to young people and their families

One thing that leaps out at me from the teacher’ss stories I hear, is how many students in poor and working class neighborhoods have no secure place to stay. Students move from apartment to apartment or house to house when their parents or /grandparents can’t pay rent; experience bouts of homelessness where they sleep in shelters, temporary residences, and occasionally subways or cars; and move in an out of foster care. Sometimes students disappear for days or weeks at a time, sometimes they disappear altogether.

But even those who come in somewhat regularly often fall asleep in class because the places they are staying are so crowded or noisy that it is difficult to sleep. I have heard these stories from teachers in inner city schools in New York, Buffalo and Philadelphia, but I have also heard them from teachers in suburban communities where people are sinking into poverty. Those who think the housing and foreclosure crisis in America has no impact on education need to talk to teachers – but we won’t do that if we believe that low attention spans in school are largely the result of “ bad teachers” protected by evil unions

That’s one portion of the stories teachers tell The other relates to the lack of food and medical care students in poor communities get and how it affects their concentration levels and general well being. I will never forget how a principal and two teachers at a school located in the most decayed and dangerous housing project in the Bronx closed the door on my Sudanese colleague and I after taking us on an upbeat tour of several classes and said “ Let us tell you what is really going on here”

“Every Friday,” the principal said, “students in the school start crying because they afraid they may have little or nothing to eat all weekend The only time they know they are going to are going to have three meals a day is on schools days. And because they closed down the health clinic in the project, students bring their whole families to see the school nurse. This is place that God forgot.”

My Sudanese colleague, by the time he had finished, started crying and said “This is like a refugee camp in Africa.” You think that this is the only place in the country where this kind of story could be told, think again. Hunger and lack of medical care is a huge and growing problem among America’s school children and has a tremendous affect on their academic performance

Then there is the growing level of violence and stress that young people experience in homes and communities where people are losing jobs, losing homes, and losing hope, violence that they bring into the school environment. I have been hearing more and more stories from teachers of kids exploding in rage at school, at one another and at teachers, sometimes individually, sometimes in large groups.

Bedlam in hallways and classrooms is increasingly common, often set off by the minutest provocation. Some of this disorder can be attributed to chaotic school environments, but some of it stems from the extraordinary stress which students are under out of school, rooted in a toxic mixture of food insecurity, unstable living situations, and violence inflicted on them by people in their own households or by neighborhood gangs and crews.

None of what I am describing is new. You could have heard similar stories from teachers in poor and working class neighborhoods in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

What is new is the extent of the suffering as more and more families whose lives were once stable get pushed into poverty.

All through out the nation, in small towns and suburbs, in once middle class communities as well as inner city neighborhoods, teachers are ready to tell these stories.

Will we listen, or will we continue to put our head in the sand and blame the messenger for the message.

Mark Naison
With a Brooklyn Accent 

Occupy LA (Photo: Michael Dussault)

After decades of losing ground and feeling helpless, working people are beginning to fight back. This development has emerged in part because the Occupy Wall Street movement has thrown a national spotlight on the growing inequalities in wealth and the mainstream politicians who have enabled this trend to continue for decades. The Occupy Wall Street movement drew the obvious conclusion: meaningful change will happen, not by endless waiting for the politicians to act, but by working people relying on themselves and acting collectively.

The ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) in the Longview, Washington area, for example, has announced that it will put up a fight to resist the union-busting maneuvers of EGT Development, which is reneging on a previous agreement to use ILWU workers. The union has put out a “Call to Action,” appealing to all working people to come to their aid in order to stop EGT Development from loading grain without the ILWU workers. The union leaders rightfully argue that the EGT effort to shift the work away from the ILWU workers is an attack on all working people, because the ILWU is one of the strongest unions in the country, it has engaged in job actions in support of working people throughout the country and the world, and there was a previous agreement that these were ILWU jobs.

Meanwhile in California the battle lines are forming around a different issue: competing ballot measures that would increase the state’s revenue by raising taxes.

After public education suffered debilitating cuts during the past 5 years, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) has valiantly stood up and proposed a measure that would raise taxes on people making more than $1 million by 3 percent and those making more than $2 million by 5 percent. The money raised would be earmarked for public education and vital social services, and there would be no expiration date on this tax increase, if it passes.

Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal stands on the other side of the class divide. He is supporting a measure that would increase taxes on people who make more than $250,000 by 1 percent and those making over $500,000 by 2 percent. But he has also included an increase in the sales tax by one-half cent, and the entire tax package includes an expiration date of 2016. The money has not been earmarked for public education or vital social services.

While Brown’s proposal might seem to have a progressive component by raising taxes on the wealthy, he in fact is doing everything he can to protect the rich. The California Democratic Party, of which Jerry Brown is a leading member, has gone on record favoring raising taxes on everyone but the richest 1 percent (San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 2010). But Brown is also well aware of strong public sentiment (over 60 percent) in favor of raising taxes on the rich and equally strong public opposition to additional cuts to education. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Brown conceded that an increase in the sales tax was not popular, but he included it because “I thought we ought to have a balanced program.” (December 16, 2011).

With a stubborn budget deficit and polls wildly favoring increased taxes on the rich, Brown was compelled to propose increasing their taxes. But his tax proposal represents the most minimal concession to popular sentiment. If it passes, the wealthy would suffer a miniscule increase in their taxes, but only temporarily because of the expiration date packed into the proposal. The increase in the sales tax — the most insidious part of Brown’s proposal — is fundamentally regressive, meaning that it would constitute a heavier burden on the poorest members of society and the lightest burden on the wealthiest.

Brown’s description of his tax measure as “a balanced program” is surely disingenuous. Between 1978 and 2008 the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent of Californians grew 81 percent while the income of the bottom 20 percent dropped by 11.5 percent (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2011). A “balanced program” would have raised taxes on the wealthiest by 81 percent and lowered taxes on the bottom 20 percent by 11.5 percent. But Brown’s sentiments clearly lie with the top 1 percent, not the bottom 99 percent, let alone the bottom 20 percent.

These competing tax measures, in the most rudimentary respect, represent the emergence of class struggle politics, and the people of California will be forced to take sides. In fact, some have already taken a stand. Because of the unpopularity of the sales tax and the mild increase in taxes on the wealthy, Jerry Brown has hoped to draw in the support of working people by putting pressure on top state union officials to reject the CFT initiative and support Brown’s counter proposal. The statewide Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials have bowed to the pressure. Whether some of the SEIU locals might rebel and refuse to follow has yet to be seen. After all, the rank and file are the ones who lose their jobs when there are budget deficits and cuts are made, and it is not clear that Brown’s proposal will protect any of them.

Meanwhile students and teachers in California are organizing massive actions in the spring to demand full funding for public education and social services by taxing the rich. On March 1 they are planning actions on campuses across the state, where each campus will define its own event. Then on March 5 all will converge on Sacramento to occupy the State Capitol. They are rejecting the long-discredited approach of hoping that politicians will throw them a few crumbs, since this policy has seemed to produce just the opposite of its intended effect: year after year public education and social service budgets have been slashed.

Teachers have been laid off, class size has risen, university tuition has skyrocketed, state workers have been laid off and social services have been gutted. The San Francisco Labor Council and UPTE (University Professional and Technical Employees) have already endorsed these events with a strong resolution, and various union locals are in the process of doing the same. The San Francisco Labor Council and those organizing for March 1 and 5 have also endorsed CFT’s tax on millionaires.

The sides are being drawn: the 1 percent with its opulent reservoir of wealth is on one side, and the 99 percent — the vast majority of the population — is on the other. Whereas the 1 percent derives its power from money, the 99 percent will derive power from their overwhelming numbers. In organizing massive demonstrations to insist on the implementation of a different set of priorities, the 99 percent will be exercising independent political action, they will be relying on themselves and acting collectively, and they will be taking a first step in the direction of shifting the balance of power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. And in the process they will be insisting that society function as a true democracy: in the interests of the majority.

Bill Leumer and Ann Robertson