The Trump Party confederates are still whistling 'Dixie'

Of course, the neo-confederate GOP leadership is opposed to another probe of their 1/6 attempted coup d'etat. To them, the coup wasn't a crime but rather a great success that will enable them to seize back the power they lost in the election in much the same way as their forebearers did it in 1861. D.T. is their Jefferson Davis. Like Trump, Davis never surrendered his white supremacist lost cause.

The final vote was 54-35, but Republicans withheld the votes necessary to bring the bill up for debate. Just six GOP senators joined with the Democrats today, leaving the measure short of the 60 votes needed to proceed.

According to the recent Reuters/Ipos poll, 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party's nominee, is the “true president” now, compared to 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans. The Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 61% of Republicans believe the election was "stolen" from Trump. 

More to the point, the confederates not only believe it, but MAGA politicians are actively working to pass new restrictive voting laws in their states, laws they hope will enable them to limit the voting impact of the new Black/Latinx/immigrant majority and consolidate their ideological hold on millions of their followers while paving their way back into the majority in both houses in 2022 and into the White House in 2024. 

The neo-confederates are also using their power to impose restrictions on what teachers can or cannot teach about the history of slavery and racial discrimination. The've especially targeted the 1619 Curriculum and its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with Critical Race Theory as wedge issues to spread fear and whip up a white backlash. 

The question is, how will Biden and the Democrats respond? How many concessions will Biden, Schumer and Pelosi make in the name of "bipartisanship"? 

Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the Civil War, a fate that should await D.T. and his fellow neo-confederate leaders. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Cal State Northridge students rally to protect cross-cultural courses.

Kathryn Sorrells, CS-N communication studies professor 

“Given the unpredictability, the executive order is experienced as an assault on the struggles, communities, histories and knowledge of students of color.” -- L.A. Times

Rev. Walter "Slim" Coleman

The nation has already reacted to the separation of 2300 children from their parents at the border. It is our task to make the nation see the seven million babies, children and young people who live and suffer under this same attack every day in our neighborhoods. -- This morning's sermon

Bill Ayers reviews Arne Duncan's book, "How Schools Work"

When you say "standards" to a normal person, that sounds like something good. I want high standards. But when you reduce standards to standardization, things come apart. -- Hitting Left with the Klonsky Bros. 

William Saletan

Donald Trump Jr. is right. People really are out to undermine the president—as they should be. -- Slate

Hadley Freeman

So while #MeToo has made some men re-examine their behaviour, plenty of others who thought their behaviour was fine before clearly still think it is fine now. -- Guardian

Beto O'Rourke references The Clash

“We’re not giving away to corporations and special interests. That’s what Senator Cruz would do, thanks to contributions he’s received from those political action committees. He’s working for the clampdown, and the corporations, and the special interests. He’s not working for the people of Texas.” -- Pitchfork

I do not bluff. I deliver. #Basta

— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 23, 2018

The 'Summer Slide' myth

Testing companies continue to perpetuate the myth of the so-called "summer learning gap", where children supposedly forget most of what they learned in the classroom in a matter of a few weeks of vacation. If this were true, it would speak more to an irrelevant school curriculum than anything else. But it's not true.

According to an article by Sarah Shupe in today's Edweek, 

...what students forget over the summer becomes more damaging over time as students make less progress during the school year, according to an ongoing study by NWEA, the Northwest Evaluation Association.

"As kids grow less and less during the school years, they are still seeing the same summer drop—so they are losing proportionately more," said Megan Kuhfeld, a research scientist at NWEA and the author of the study.

According to this theory, kids grow dummer and dummer as they progress through school and therefore can ill-afford to spend more time playing and with their friends and families.

NWEA tracked the reading and math test scores of students grades 3 to 6, and nearly 40,000 students from grades 5 to 8 in an "unnamed southern state" and concluded that the more time they spent with family, fishing, working, at summer camp, hanging out with friends -- or whatever students do on vacation in this southern state -- the less bright they got.

Not only that, but things got worse as the kids grew older.

On average, students lost about 2 points out of a possible 250 each summer in reading, and a little more than 4 points each summer in math. But as the charts below show, students gain less during each school year as they grow. 

In other words, hardly anything measurable that was being taught in their schools lasted in children's consciousness for more than a few weeks. This generates an obvious call for perpetual schooling and even more standardized testing.

But it should be even more obvious to the evaluators that students continue learning during the summer, the same way that they learned before they were in school, experientially and largely through play. How well they learn depends on what kind of learning and play experiences are available to them in their family and community life. But that's true within school as well.

Authentic learning is deep and enduring. It goes on all the time, all year round, including summer. Perhaps especially in summer. If children lose academic skills over the few weeks of summer, then did they really ever learn those skills?

Then there's the question what's tested, what's not tested, and how real learning is measured. Reading and math scores are but one small indicator.

All this leaves open the question of what happens when these kids graduate, become adults and spend the rest of their lives forgetting how to solve a quadratic equation, the shape of states on the map, or the color of Laura Ingalls dress. Do we call that the life slide? Hopefully, what stays with them are critical thinking and life skills, habits of the mind and body.

I think it was Albert Einstein who first said it: "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school?"

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Happy birthday, Rosa Parks

Actor and activist Cynthia Nixon 

“We have to be more than the anti-Trump party,” she said at the annual Human Rights Campaign Greater New York gala, where she was given the Visibility Award. “In 2018, we don't just need to elect more Democrats, we also need better Democrats.” -- Politico

Eagles tight end Zach Ertz

“If they had overturned that [touchdown], I don’t know what would have happened to the city of Philadelphia." -- MSN

Teaching Tolerance Project

"In the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery," write the authors of a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), "the nation needs an intervention." -- Teaching Hard History: American Slavery 

 Kristiina Volmari, Finnish National Agency for Education 

“We let children be children for as long as possible...We want our teachers to focus on learning, not testing. We do not, at all, believe in ranking students and ranking schools." -- SBS News

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

UIC Prof. Josh Radinsky 

"We're getting the (CReATE) band back together... Vouchers or vouchers by any other name is just onc way of minimizing choices. They call it 'school choice' but it's actually forced choice and lack of choices." -- Hitting Left

UIC Prof. David Stovall

"We're conflating test taking with learning and if you remove thousands of the poorest students who are are struggling, why wouldn't you have an increase (in CPS test scores)? -- Hitting Left

Gloria Ladson-Billings, new president of the National Academy of Education

 "For kids, it's the 'so what' question, and we typically don't have good answers for them. Our answer typically is, 'You're going to need this next year,' and kids figure out by 4th or 5th grade that we're lying." -- EdWeek  

Judge Roy Moore tells Hannity

I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother. -- Real Clear Politics

Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.” -- ShareBlue Media 

Report...

 “Our wealthiest 400 now have more wealth combined than the bottom 64% of the US population, an estimated 80m households or 204 million people,” the report says. “That’s more people than the population of Canada and Mexico combined.” -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are wealthier than poorest half of US

Letter: Say no to vouchers

Not only does it allow individuals to take money meant for public funding and put it in their private little piggy bank, but it will ultimately put a greater burden on the rest of us to come up with more money to fund our school system. -- Wayne Fuller, Concord Monitor 

A new course at CPS. Studying Jon Burge.

Chicago teachers are currently reviewing the curriculum for a new districtwide course on the history of the disgraced former Chicago Police Department commander Jon Burge who systematically abused and tortured suspects on the South Side to force confessions for two decades.

According to a report on Chicago Tonight, the three to five week class – titled “Reparations Won: A Case Study in Police Torture, Racism And the Movement for Justice in Chicago” – was developed through the CPS Department of Social Science and Civic Engagement as part of a professional learning series for eighth and 10th graders beginning next school year.

This comes more than a year after the city passed a $5.5 million reparations package for torture survivors that included, in part, a lesson on the cases to be included in CPS’ existing history curriculum. All told, the city has paid out $100 million in legal fees and settlements related to Burge cases, dating back as far as 1982. Burge was fired in 1993.

“The torture and other abuse committed by Burge and officers under his command are a disgrace to the City and to the hard-working men and women of the Chicago Police Department,” a 10th grade unit overview states. “To remind the City of the injustices that occurred and to ensure that they are not repeated, the City will acknowledge and educate the public about this dark chapter in Chicago’s history.”

IT WASN'T JUST BURGE...I haven't seen the course outline but I'm hoping it will show students the larger context in which the systematic torture of mostly African-American and Latino prisoners took place over a period of decades, I'm thinking here about the culpability of CPD and political higher-ups like former mayor and then-States Attorney Richard M. Daley under whose watch the torture by Burge and his "midnight crew" took place.

Course designers would also do well to include those like Det. Reynaldo Guevara who carried on the Burge tradition in the recently-dismissed murder cases against Roberto Almodovar and William Negron. 

You can read all about disgraced Det. Guevara and how he beat confessions out of Almodovar, Negron and dozens of other Latino ment, in this Chicago Reporter article by today's in-studio guest on Hitting Left, Curtis Black.

Tune in to Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers this morning at 11 (CDT) on Lumpen Radio Chicago. We will also be talking pension theft with Bob Lyons who's about to retire after a dozen years on the board of trustees of the Teacher Retirement System.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Troy LaRaviere

"I don't think Rahm can be elected dog catcher, and I think he knows it... Right now, I want to be president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association. I take that office on July 1 and that's the only office I'm concerned about right now...Who knows what the future holds, but right now that is not on the table." -- Morning Spin

Launa Hall

When policymakers mandate tests and buy endlessly looping practice exams to go with them, their image of education is from 30,000 feet. -- A third-grade teacher on why "data walls" don't work.

 Trumph

"I don't want to have guns in classrooms. Although, in some cases, teachers should have guns in classrooms." -- CBS News

Willie Davis

Bullies are almost never the problem—it’s the people standing next to the bully, laughing at his jokes that hurt. Without them, the guy calling you “dickwad” or “gaywad” (’90s bullies were very wad-centric, I’m belatedly realizing) looks ridiculous. -- Salon.com

Sanders

 “Some 400 of Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates came on board her campaign before anybody else announced. It was anointment. And that is bad for the process.” -- Guardian

No 'Grit' at Lab or Francis Parker

"What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children." -- John Dewey, founder of the Lab School

The latest curriculum for poor kids. 

I checked. No, there's no "Grit" curriculum being taught at the University of Chicago's Lab school or at chichi Francis Parker, the schools where Mayor Rahm Emanuel and schoools CEO Forrest Claypool send their children at upwards of $34,000 a kid.

Professor Duckworth didn't intend it for their kids. Fixing the poor is the burden of the rich, white and powerful.

According to a story in this morning's Tribune, both Rahm and Claypool were "prickly" (ah, that's the word I was looking for) when asked by a reporter about why they, who run CPS, send their children to expensive private schools.

"I've got to be honest, I don't think it's a fair question, and I'll say why," Emanuel said. "My kids go to the same school that President Obama sends his kids to school, and nobody said anything when President Obama was leading the fight for Race to the Top. I don't live in public housing, but I do fight for fairness in housing. I'm not homeless, but I do fight for resources for homelessness. So if it's only about whether I as a parent make a decision, that's not actually, it's not about my kids, it's about the kids of Chicago."

Claypool said the fact his kids attend the exclusive Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park is "a parental choice. It's appropriate, OK?"

I remember N.J. Gov. Christie practically chewing a parent's head off for asking the same question.

Point of fact, I and many others, blogged plenty about Obama/Duncan's so-called Race to the Top and its reproduction and reinforcement of our two-tier school system.

And what a strange analogy Rahm's making between public schools -- created for everyone-- and public housing and homeless shelters, specifically reserved for the poorest and neediest of us. It's clear that the mayor views public education as some sort of poverty agency rather than as the cornerstone of a democratic society. And therein lies his problem and ours.

Nobody I know is challenging the right of the rich and powerful to send their children to private schools. That's not the point. The point is that the corporate reformers now running public ed, including our autocratic mayor and his hand-picked CEO, don't want our kids in public schools to experience the best educational practices, now reserved for their own.

Not banned at Lab or Parker. 

Remember back in 2013 when Rahm's felonious schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett banned the book Persepolis from CPS libraries? I made a quick call to the Lab School librarian only to find out that Persepolis was part of the middle school curriculum and readily available to all middle school students in the Rowley Library. In fact, the middle school library has 7 different editions of Marjane Satrapi's book, both in English and in French.

In 2011, the mayor forced a longer school day and school year on resistant Chicago schools even though he had no plan for what to do with the added seat time or how to pay for it. Again, I checked with Lab only to find out that their day and year was shorter than Chicago's.

Common Core? Nothing common about Lab or Parker.

Over and improper use of standardized tests? You won't find it in Lab or Parker.

In conclusion -- the best way to learn grit is by standing up to the bullies and pretenders who think they know what's best for other people's children.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Michele Bollinger, teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C.

“Why should Lynne Cheney get to tell me what I teach in my classroom?” -- N.Y. Times

Michelle Strater Gunderson, first-grade teacher

 I teach first grade in a neighborhood school for the Chicago Public Schools. The PARCC exam begins in the third grade, but even though my students did not take the test, their schedules and learning were still disrupted and negatively affected by the tests. -- Living in Dialogue

Kate Grossman

In a high-school universe defined by choice, these schools and students are the clear losers. Chicago’s neediest students are clustered at the bottom of the pecking order of the district, in the most under-resourced and embattled schools. -- Atlantic

North Carolina NAACP Pres. William Barber

 “We cannot be silent in the face of this race-based, class-based, homophobic and transphobic attack on wage earners, civil rights, and the LGBTQ community, Together with our many allies, we will coordinate a campaign of nonviolent direct action along with other forms of nonviolent protest that will instruct our legislators with respect to the rights of all people.” -- The State

Springsteen guitarist, Steven Van Zandt won't play in N.C.

  "This sort of thing is spreading like an evil virus around the country. We felt we better stop this, we should try and stop this early, and hopefully other people will rise up and join us." -- London Telegraph

Andy Richter remembers Hastert's chair

“I went to Yorkville HS ’80-’84 & I remember this chair. Purportedly ‘to keep boys from fighting,’” -- Sun-Times

CIA Director John Brennan on waterboarding

 "I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure," -- NBC News

Revised AP history curriculum is racist to the core

According to the revisions, "there was a debate among European leaders about how non-Europeans should be treated." Wow! What an interesting debate. I wonder who won?

I just finished reading the "revised" AP U.S. History framework which is supposed to offer top high school students a more "evenhanded" understanding of our nation's past. But the revisions amount to little more than a cover-up and an excuse for slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, colonialism and the white supremacist ideology that justified it.

Here are two examples of the latest revisions from EdWeek:

Slavery and the European Settlements 

2014 Version:

“Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.”

2015 Version:

 There was debate among European leaders “about how non-Europeans should be treated, as well as evolving religious, cultural, and racial justifications for the subjugation of Africans and Native Americans.”

Manifest Destiny meant "looking for natural and mineral resources".

Manifest Destiny

2014 Version:

“The idea of Manifest Destiny, which asserted U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere and supported US expansion westward, was built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority, and helped to shape the era’s political debates.”

2015 Version:

The movement west was due to “the desire for access to natural and mineral resources and the hope of many settlers for economic opportunities or religious refuge.” Advocates of annexing lands “argued that Manifest Destiny and the superiority of American institutions compelled the United States to expand its borders westward to the Pacific Ocean.”

The heart of the problem lies in the way we teach history to high schoolers. Instead of engaging them in real research of literature and artifacts, whole periods of history like the World War I or Vietnam are neatly packaged in a few paragraphs inside a textbook page. There's a right answer on the A.P. test which is a gate keeper to college credit and entrance.

It seems that the powerful College Board has bent to right-wing political pressure and has become little more than a propaganda machine for right-wing pols, think tanks and conservative academic departments. One can only imagine what the "right" answers are on the revised U.S. History exam.

I feel sorry for the teachers that are forced to teach this crap.

What we can learn from Escuela Nueva

Decades ago, John Dewey, America’s foremost education philosopher, asserted that students learned best through experience and that democracy “cannot go forward unless the intelligence of the mass of people is educated to understand the social realities of their own time.” 

I'm not a big educational "models" guy. But it's hard to argue with this one.

Escuela Nueva is an educational model designed in Colombia in the mid 1970’s by Vicky Colbert, Beryl Levinger, and Óscar Mogollón to improve the quality, relevance and effectiveness of the schools in the country. With simple, concrete strategies, Escuela Nueva promotes a classroom environment where students actively learn, participate, and collaborate; and strengthens the relationship between the school and the community. It is a flexible educational model tailored to meet the needs of each individual child, allowing students to complete units and advance to higher grade levels at their own pace.

A 1992 World Bank evaluation of Colombia’s schools concluded that poor youngsters educated this way — learning by doing, rather than being endlessly drilled for national exams — generally outperformed their better-off peers in traditional schools. A 2000 Unesco study found that, next to Cuba, Colombia did the best job in Latin America of educating children in rural areas, where most of the schools operate with this model.

This reminds me of the kind of research that was done in Ralph Tyler's renown "Eight-Year Study" (1933–1941) which compared the academic success rates of students in traditional and progressive alternative schools. In his widely read and used, post-study book, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (1949), Tyler popularized the lessons from the study and described learning as taking place through the action of the student. "It is what he does that he learns, not what the teacher does."

According to U.C. Berkeley Prof David Kirp, writing in the N.Y. Times:

Escuela Nueva turns the schoolhouse into a laboratory for democracy. Rather than being run as a mini-dictatorship, with the principal as its unquestioned leader, the school operates as a self-governing community, where teachers, parents and students have a real say in how it is run. When teachers unfamiliar with this approach are assigned to these schools, it’s often the students themselves who teach them how to apply the method. “In these schools, citizenship isn’t abstract theory, It’s daily practice.”

Rachel Lotan, a professor emeritus at Stanford, is quoted the Times story:

“Doing well on the high-stakes test scores is what drives the public schools, and administrators fear that giving students more control of their own education will bring down those scores.” Officials, and those who set the policies they follow, would do well to visit Colombia, where Escuela Nueva has much to teach us about how best to educate our children.

The question is, can a model of democratic education take root in a country like this one where testing, sorting and tracking students is the name of the game?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES -- R.I.P. JOHN GOODLAD

John Goodlad (1920-2014)

John Goodlad on social justice

“It is my expectation that Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice will become a rich resource for continuing this multi-layered conversation-from democratic belief to democratic action-that is the hallmark of educational renewal.” -- Forward to Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice,

...On more schooling

However, a need to expand the length and breadth of schooling does not necessarily follow from well-founded arguments regarding the critical importance of education. As I have said repeatedly, schooling and education are not synonymous. -- A Place Called School 

...On test & punish

In our system, we receive test scores without having the faintest idea under what conditions students worked. For instance, we heard a lot about how the U.S. ranked so poorly in international tests. Why didn't we go study British Columbia, which is so much like us, and find out what students did to score better than we did? But we just blame the teachers and the schools; we have always used the villain theory. -- Ed Leadership

...On curriculum

 “The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge.  Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.” -- A Place Called School (Marian Brady in WaPo)

Prof. Roger Soder 

"John always argued strenuously against test scores as a serious measure of whether we had good schooling. He said what we really needed to talk about was the relationship between schooling and what it takes to maintain a free society." -- L.A. Times

Valerie Strauss, WaPo education writer

Dr. Goodlad’s research and teaching focused in part on curriculum and the “hows” of school teaching and management. But there was always a deeper issue. Teaching is an ethical act, Dr. Goodlad argued, and a critical part of being ethical is having a good sense of who you are. -- "The Passing of a Giant in Education

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

President Robert Kelly of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 announces the organization's endorsement of Jesus "Chuy" Garcia for mayor of Chicago. | Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times

ATU Local 308 Pres. Robert Kelly 

“I’m a citizen of the city of Chicago. I’m tired of reading the papers and hearing about murders and school closings and transit issues,” said Robert Kelly, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, which represents CTA train operators. “It just makes me sick to my stomach. I’m tired of it, and so is everybody else. 

Kelly’s remarks came as the local he presides over endorsed Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, one of Emanuel’s most prominent challengers in the upcoming February election. -- Early & Often

George Will

Bush’s support of Common Core is much less nuanced and persuasive, and there seems to be condescension in his impatience with the burden he bears of taking seriously the most important reason for rejecting Common Core. It is not about the content of the standards, which would be objectionable even if written by Aristotle and refined by Shakespeare. Rather, the point is that, unless stopped now, the federal government will not stop short of finding in Common Core a pretext for becoming a national school board.

Bush says “standards are different than curriculum” and: “I would be concerned if we had a national curriculum influenced by the federal government. My God, I’d break out in a rash.”  -- Washington Post

"Public school bashers"

David Sirota

Taken together with the new Department of Education numbers, we see that for all the elite media’s slobbering profiles of public school bashers like Mayors Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg, for all of the media’s hagiographic worship of scandal-plagued activist-profiteers like Michelle Rhee, and for all the “reform” movement’s claims that the traditional public school system and teachers unions are to blame for America’s education problems, poverty and economic inequality are the root of the problem.  -- Salon

 Palm Beach Cty. Board member Debra Robinson

"We're not going to approve these charters that just fill out the paperwork properly and don't have anything special to offer our children. This is an act of civil disobedience, because some of this stuff we're told to do is crazy." -- Sun-Sentinel

Author Anne Farrow

Slavery in America was not a footnote, not "the sad chapter" of our history but the cornerstone of our making. -- Philly.Com, Shrouded History of Slavery

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Author Mike Rose

If we determine success primarily by a test score, we miss those considerable intellectual achievements that aren’t easily quantifiable. If we think about education largely in relation to economic competitiveness, then we ignore the social, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning.  -- The American Scholar

Mayoral Candidate Bob Fioretti

“We’re the only one in the whole state that’s not an elected school board? Aren’t we shaking our head and saying: 'what’s going on here?' I think the school board needs it. It would reflect the diversity of our city.” -- Sun-Times

Mayoral Candidate Jesus "Chuy" Garcia 

“This is the board that closed our schools and cut the education budget, following Mayor Emanuel’s orders. Would this have happened with an elected board, responsible to the citizens?” -- Sun-Times 

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The Police Aren’t Under Attack. Institutionalized Racism Is. Those who are trying to connect the murders of the officers with the thousands of articulate and peaceful protestors across America are being deliberately misleading in a cynical and selfish effort to turn public sentiment against the protestors. -- TIME

Belafonte and Williams

Jesse Williams (Grey's Anatomy)

“Police have been beating the hell out of black people for a very, very, very long time, before the advent of the video camera. And despite the advent of the video camera, there’s still an incredible trend of police brutality and killing in the street.” -- Washington Post

Adam Green

“There are a lot of unchecked boxes with Hillary Clinton when it comes to economic populism and corporate accountability,” said Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “There are definitely red flags.” -- Boston Globe

The Nation

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

St. Louis Rams protest Ferguson before Sunday's game with Oakland

Cook County Clerk, David Orr

“The mayor, with millions, has a hard time getting signatures on his petitions. Chuy Garcia in three weeks time, spending no money — all volunteers — got 60-some thousand. In another week, they probably would have gotten 90,000.”  -- Early & Often

Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University. Started #FergusonSyllabus

 Every school isn’t the same.  Every school doesn’t want to delve into this issue in the same way.  And so for younger kids, I think we really needed to focus on feelings, what is it like when people are anxious or afraid or scared, and a lot of resources on children’s books that talk about emotions during times that are overwhelming.

For slightly older kids, I think that the paradigm of fairness, what happens when people feel like something is unfair, what happens when people feel like their rights aren’t being respected, you can engage in that conversation.  And for older kids, I think that this is an amazing civic lesson about the various responsibilities people have in a community and what happens when that trust is broken.  -- PBS News Hour

Rich Lowry, National Review

"The lessons of Ferguson are quite basic. Don't rob a convenience store..." -- NBC Meet the Press

Hillary: The sounds of silence

Hillary Clinton on Ferguson

"                         " -- New York Observer

Deval Patrick

"When democrats do stand for something, or as I have said in the past, grow a backbone ... we win." -- MSNBC

"Nor shall any state deprive any person of life . . . without due process of law." US Constitution, 14th Amendment
— Lisa Bloom (@LisaBloom) November 29, 2014

'The language of the unheard'

I contend that the cry of "black power" is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. -- Dr. Martin Luther King 

Obama: "Stay calm and accept..."

Obama in Chicago yesterday
He tells us again to stay calm and accept the grand jury's decision:

"Don't take the short-term easy route and just engage in destructive behavior. Take the long-term hard but lasting route of working with me, governors, officials to bring about some real change."

But who is the president talking to?

This hasn't been an "easy route," and we haven't engaged in "destructive behavior." Yes, there are lots of disaffected youth--many without jobs, education or hope for their future--rioting in anger over the events in Ferguson, speaking the language of the unheard. But Obama's scold means nothing to them. Speaking at the Copernicus Community Center on the north side of Chicago, the President is a hundred times removed from them and their experiences.

Here in Chicago, we had thousands of mostly young people in the streets demanding justice for Mike Brown and calling for respect for black lives. There were over a million people in the streets nationally yesterday, engaging in mainly peaceful protests. 

What "real change" is the president talking about? Who are these governors and officials we are supposed to be working with? What exactly have he and these officials done over the past 6 years to push this "real change"? And where is Holder and the Justice Department?

Six plus years and still waiting to hear, Mr. Obama.
 

And if you want to talk about 'destructive behavior'... 
Along with the decline in the standard of living for millions and the widening U.S. wealth gap, has come the militarization of local police forces in preparation for an anticipated rise in civil unrest.

According to yesterday's Washington Post, several federal programs are helping local law enforcement to acquire heavy weapons, either by making funds available or by providing the equipment directly. One program at the Pentagon transferred surplus military equipment worth nearly half a billion dollars to local police departments last year. Grants provided by the Department of Homeland Security total another $1 billion, and Holder's department provides hundreds of millions more.

"We do not condition that money on requiring real change in policing," said Sherrilynn Ifill of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a press conference on Tuesday. "Taxpayer money to local police departments should come with the condition that the police take responsibility for improving."

The education piece
We need to replace Ownership Society education, testing madness and Racing to the Top with democratic education. Preparing children to think critically and act powerfully to shape the world they are entering and become agents of change.

For example, check out this curriculum piece from Rethinking Schools.

The events in and around Ferguson are a good place to start. Why? Because our students are interested. They are watching.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Bruce Rauner

 "I've worked with Rahm Emanuel and (former Mayor) Rich Daley because they control the schools," Rauner told the Tribune earlier this year. "And we've talked about school reform fairly extensively. We disagree on many things ... but on school reform we see things the same way. He believes in charter schools and competition and choice. He's starting to come around and be supportive of vouchers, which I am a definite believer in." -- Chicago Tribune

 Melissa Harris-Perry 

So, see, Ed? There’s no need for your teachers to change the subject. Because what we do as teachers is to offer guideposts, context, and space for disagreement. We can teach our students not to be afraid of the unknown and the complicated, by confronting the hard topics as well as the easy. Now is the time to teach, not to hide. -- Open Letter: How to teach students about Ferguson

 Chicago Tribune Editorial from Feb. 4, 2007

"Terrence Carter represents a new breed of principals who entered the profession from business through an excellent principal training program called New Leaders for New Schools. The program, which operates in Chicago and five other cities and is about to add two more, imposes higher expectations on principals." -- The Courant

Univ. of Illinois faculty members

 “With this vote of no confidence, the faculty of UIUC’s American Indian studies program also joins the thousands of scholars and organizations in the United States and across the world in seeing the chancellor’s action as a violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech.” -- New York Times

It's silly to pretend Common Core is not a curriculum

"The Common Core has become a rallying cry for fringe groups that claim it is a scheme for the federal government to usurp state and local control of what students learn. An op-ed in the New York Times called the Common Core "a radical curriculum." It is neither radical nor a curriculum." -- Arne Duncan

Well, Arne Duncan got it half-right. It's certainly not radical.

I half expect Duncan himself to slam me (call me "silly," a "suburban mom" or a "fringe group"?)  for writing this, but here goes.

Disinformation about the Common Core, coming straight from the D.O.E. and spread across a compliant media, includes the myths that standards are home-grown and that they are simply standards and NOT curriculum.

In an unusually long Huffington blog piece, ed  writer Joy Resmovitz reports:

Each state sets its own learning standards, and those get translated through thousands of districts and schools and teachers. The Core is supposed to unify this patchwork of efforts not only across states, but across the country. And contrary to popular belief, it's not a curriculum: School systems and teachers can choose their own instructional materials, as long as students know what the Core says they should know by year's end.

But curriculum is all about determining and deciding what's most worthwhile to teach and learn and how that teaching and learning takes place. What is most worthwhile to know and how and why it is to be taught? What literature will students be assigned? What textbooks, if any, will be purchased? Standards and assessment (testing) are certainly important parts of this complex and politicized curriculum landscape.

As we know, there are (and in a democratic society should be) divergent answers to these most fundamental curricular questions and hopefully, divergent voices, especially those of classroom teachers, providing those answers. But to pretend that there's this Great Wall separating standards from curriculum is absurd as every teacher and school administrator is finding out -- if they don't already know.

Resmovitz goes on in the very next paragraph, to contradict her and Duncan's "not curriculum" pronouncements.

Students will learn less content, but more in-depth, coherent and demanding content. In other words, students should know fewer things, but they should know them better. The Core encourages teachers to move away from memorization and to ask students to show their work. In math, it means emphasizing such things as learning fractions and fluency in arithmetic. In reading, it means more nonfiction texts -- recommendations range from historical speeches from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Winston Churchill to more instructional reads such as the Environmental Protection Agency's "Recommended Levels of Insulation" and FedViews, by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. 

Leaving aside for the moment, whether reading nonfictional texts is "more demanding" and "more in-depth" than reading Melville or Morrison, there's no denying that less fiction/more nonfiction texts is a curricular decision. And there's also little doubt that the massive testing regimen attached to CCCS drives curriculum decisions at the school level. And those tests, along with their aligned (possibly) textbooks, all come from the same tiny but powerful group of publishers, ie. Pearson and McGraw.

To imply, as Resmovitz does, that these decisions emerge locally, with no pressure to conform to corporate or D.O.E. political interests, is really silly. State supes may be able to change its name or even drop out of Common Core altogether (at great risk of losing federal funding), but Pearson's tests will still drive the curriculum.

Hip-Hop High

Sam Seidel

There are lots of kids who can't or won't connect with the traditional high school setting. Many brilliant and talented among them drop out and wind up on the street. That's one of the reasons why we created the Small Schools Workshop 20 years ago, to help educators develop small, public, personalized, alternative models focused on areas of student interests, talents and passions. While many of the ideas of the early small schools movement were captured and distorted by the regressive currents of privately-managed charter schools, there are still lots of good small, alternative schools fighting to survive and flourish.

One of them is the High School of Recording Arts in St. Paul (MN), also known as Hip-Hop High. In the preface to Sam Seidel's new book, Hip-Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education, veteran alternative schools educator Herb Kohl writes:

The High School of Recording Arts (HSRA) in St. Paul is a bold and exciting attempt to build a high school rooted in this culture and based on performance, music and video production, community-based learning, the study of urban African-American youth culture, and the development of performer and community-controlled businesses. It also attempts to integrate more traditional academic knowledge into its hip-hop focus. 

Last night I went over to the Elastic Arts Foundation in Chicago to hear Seidel read from Hip-Hop Genius . He brought with him school director Tony Simmons and  a couple of HSRA students, Lil C and Federal, who performed some of their own high-energy poetry. Joining them on stage were a couple of local young poets from Kuumba Lynx and Young Chicago Authors.

Seidel's book is the culmination of several years of active documentation and engagement with Hip-Hop High, its students and teachers.  It's a fascinating account of the creation of a learning community tailored to the needs and interests of students and filled with caring teachers and a professional quality recording studio equipped with the latest in digital technology.

Here is just one more example of the power of the arts and other extracurriculars in teaching and learning. Hip-Hop High is trying and seems to have managed to make the extracurricular curricular.

Lots of lessons and questions embedded here for alternative and traditional educators alike, including how this unusual high school wrestles with such issues as testing, standards, and discipline.