Hunting down 'social-justice' teachers

For me, the ideal of teaching social-justice goes back some 45 years to the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Schools created by great educators like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Myles Horton. Their tradition of educating to empower the disenfranchised, to teach students to think critically, to participate in a democratic society, and challenge an unjust, racially segregated school system, has been carried on in recent times by educators like Deborah Meier, Bob Moses, Asa Hilliard, Pedro Noguera, William Ayers, Jonathan Kozol and Gloria Ladson-Billings, to name but a few. Furthermore, dozens of small and charter schools are now using social-justice teaching as a focus, to engage otherwise disinterested students and connect them with literature, mathematics and science curriculum.

But Education Week’s Kathleen Kennedy Manzo (“Election Renews Controversy Over Social-Justice Teaching”) reports moves afoot by right-wing think tankers like Sol Stern, to discredit and even ban social-justice teaching. Stern, Berkeley new-leftist turned professional ultra-rightist, has piled on to the McCain/Palin guilt-by-association bandwagon to link Ayers and Obama. In a City Journal piece, Stern even equates S-J teacher Ayers with Joseph Stalin.

Ayers, says Stern, “is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer.” Stern, whose job at the Institute includes hunting down and “exposing” teachers like those who attended this N.Y. mathematics conference, never specifies exactly which schools S-J teachers have "destroyed." Instead he accuses these math teachers with “trashing the American system.”

Stern is not alone in the war on social justice. Recently-appointed asst. sec. of education, Williamson Evers, rode into Bush’s D.O.E. on his anti-S-J credentials.

Manzo writes:

Social-justice lessons are rarely taken from textbooks. They generally reflect multiple perspectives, particularly those of disadvantaged groups; question government policies and actions; and incorporate content and activities that encourage students to share their own experiences and participate actively.

I’ll leave it to folks like Stern and Evers to explain how this is “Stalinism” or the “trashing America.” It just sounds like great teaching to me.