WEEKEND QUOTABLES

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." -- Emma Lazarus

Eve Ewing

Language is everything. Since the origin of public schooling in this country there’s never been anything that’s an objective measure of school quality, because communities have always had divergent definitions of what they want their schools to do. -- Chalkbeat interview

Natalie Wexler 

[Arne] Duncan—like many education reformers—resolved to put his faith in “data.” Data may not always give the whole picture, he concluded, but it can “be counted on not to lie.” Or can it? -- Forbes 

Roberta Jacobson, former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico

Left the Trump administration in May, and writes in the new op-ed that she felt “glad to escape the disorder”..."Believing deeply in the United States-Mexico relationship, I cannot pretend anything less than relief at no longer having to defend the indefensible."-- The Hill

Kina Collins, founder of the Chicago Neighborhood Alliance

“Several of the incumbents … have voted against the self-interest of the people in vulnerable communities. That has got to stop. The next target that we hope to hit is City Council.” -- Laura Washington's column.

John Prine

But your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war Now Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reason’s for And your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore -- New York Times

'Urban' as pathology

Students in my Urban School Policy class have been unpacking the word, urban. I had them make a list of descriptors for "urban schools" and let me just say, there was not much positive on that list. At first thought, urban schools are generally considered failing, poorly staffed and taught, under-resourced, low-scoring, violent... and the list goes on.

After some discussion, it becomes obvious to the students that these terms are mainly used as racial and class signifiers. Code language for predominantly poor, black and Latino schools. Because obviously there are lots of great urban schools as well as not-so-great, however you define great. In U.S. News annual rankings of high schools in IL, based largely on test scores and number of students taking AP courses, nine out of the top 10 are Chicago (Urban) schools.

My friend and colleague, Bill Ayers once asked a group of urban school principals,

“What is it, particularly, about the presence of poor, African-American, city kids in your school that makes the place wonderful?”

I asked my students to consider the same question when we visit a neighborhood high school next week.

On the topic of urban... Yesterday's Sun-Times story about the trial of Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald, blared this headline.

Will Chicago riot? Hoping to move trial, Van Dyke’s lawyer raises possibility

By "Chicago", who do you suppose the paper is referring to? Could it be the CPD? After all, they were the last group to riot in Chicago and that was 50 years ago at the 1968 Democratic Convention protests.

The Sun-Times is obviously just doubling-down on the racist fear mongering tossed out there by Van Dyke's lawyers. The want the trial moved from Chicago because, as we all know, the city is a dark and dangerous place, filled with the other, sitting in wait for a chance to burn the city down. 

If it was indeed true that black people riot whenever a white cop is acquitted after killing a black man, there would be continuous rioting, 24/7. 

It's pretty clear also, that by "riot" they mean protest. 

Definitions

Jane Addams, American radical

From Merriam Webster

adjective rad·i·cal \ˈra-di-kəl\

of, relating to, or proceeding from a root: as
a (1) : of or growing from the root of a plant <radical tubers> (2) : growing from the base of a stem, from a rootlike stem, or from a stem that does not rise above the ground <radical leaves>
b : of, relating to, or constituting a linguistic root
c : of or relating to a mathematical root
d : designed to remove the root of a disease or all diseased and potentially diseased tissue <radical surgery> <radical mastectomy>

From the Guardian... "FBI and Obama confirm Omar Mateen was radicalized on the internet."

I still don't see anything radical about a homophobic psychopath with an AR-15. Seems pretty retrograde to me. It's certainly not in the tradition of American radicalism, ie. Radical Republicans who opposed slavery and the Confederacy, socialists like Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, labor organizers like I.W.W. and civil rights heroes in S.N.C.C.

Rendition 

From Merriam Webster

noun ren·di·tion \ren-ˈdi-shən\
: a performance of something

From the Daily Mail..."Under the rendition program, terror suspects were kidnapped on foreign soil and transferred to centers also outside the U.S., where they were interrogated and tortured." 

In CIA-speak, using U.S. embassies abroad to kidnap and torture people is now called "extraordinary rendition".

From CPS website:
Wanted: Executive Director of Personalized Learning 
Another example of how they've taken the language of progressive education and turned it into its opposite. One can only imagine what Personalized Learning means in an organization centered on standardization and testing madness. Possibly plopping more kids down in front of a computer screen for test prep while class size balloons to 40 in a class.

In 1916, John Dewey published “Democracy and Education,” which advocated for placing the child, as opposed to the curriculum, at the center of the classroom. Dewey saw education as a social interaction between children and adults, and believed that knowledge couldn’t simply be given to a child, but that a student must experience something and engage with it to learn.

Have Rahm Emanuel and Forrest Claypool suddenly become Deweyists? Answer: Only for their own kids who attend chi-chi progressive private schools. Not for other people's children.

Power of Language -- Banning 'Code of Silence'

Banned.

When a pair of Chicago Police officers try to make the case that they were ostracized for reporting wrongdoing by fellow cops, city lawyers don’t want jurors to hear the words “code of silence” uttered in the courtroom. -- Sun-Times

They also want Judge Gary Feinerman to bar: "Thin blue line", "Blue veil", and "rats."

Officers Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the department in 2012. This was well before Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged the existence of a “code of silence” in the department in a speech to the City Council in December 2015, after protests erupted across the city following the release of the video of Laquan McDonald being fatally shot by a Chicago police officer.

When Spalding and Echeverria reported fellow officers who were stealing cash from drug dealers, their supervisor told them:

“I’d hate to one of these days have to be the one to knock on your door and tell your daughter you’re coming home in a box.”

Apparently the phrase, "Coming home in a box" has not yet been banned.

Rumor has it...City lawyers also want Judge Feinerman to bar: Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence," the movie, "Silence of the Lambs,"the horse-in-the-bed scene from "The Godfather," and any references to the words, "thin," "blue," or "line." Also to consider: Elvis's "Blue Hawaii," "Blue Suede Shoes," or any mention of B.B. King.

War metaphors

Forrest Claypool, "wartime consigliere".

Some friends are critical of my use of war and military metaphors to describe the post-election atmosphere hanging over public employee unions, over city schools and over City Hall. But I'm sticking to my guns slingshot. It's war out here, folks. OK, it's one-sided class war to be sure, being waged by Gen. Arne Duncan, Gov. Private Equity and Mayor 1%, but war nevertheless.

Need more evidence? Look no further than Rahm's newly-appointed Chief of Staff Forrest Claypool, brought over from the CTA (like former schools CEO Ron Huberman --remember him?) to manage pension theft, negotiate a teachers contract, find a replacement for Byrd-Bennett (she's gone AWOL) and to cool out the feds investigation of the $20 million, no-bid SUPES deal.

S-T's Fran Spielman writes:

To do all of that without losing momentum on the mayor’s second-term agenda will require a wartime consigliere, to borrow a term made famous in the movie classic, “The Godfather.” Claypool fits the bill.

See!

POWs I couldn't help comparing the long prison sentences handed down to black educators involved in the Atlanta cheating scandal (convicted of "racketeering") with...No jail time for former CIA Director Gen. David "Betray Us" Petraeus who leaked military secrets to his bed-mate Paula Broadwell. Petraeus currently is with private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Jon Stewart compared the “eerie” similarities between the Atlanta teacher cheating scandal with fraud on Wall Street, and discovered that the only difference between the two seems to be who was actually punished.

Want more? How about all the fuss over Spike Lee's naming of planned new film, "Chiraq"? Why not? Chicago streets have been turned into a war zone as a result of current policies of neglect, youth joblessness, school closings, easy access to guns, poor community policing strategies, etc...

It's war.

'REVOLUTION' IN THE AIR

YOU SAY YOU WANT A R-R-REVOLUTION... Reading my campus email this evening. The list is topped off with this subject line: Revolutionary Case Takes The iPad To A Whole New Level. I feel certain that the masters of information-age metaphors who sent out this piece of "disruptive" drivel must have come out of the Kennedy School at Harvard.

And they say there's not jobs out there for these grads. Nonsense!

“Teacher turnover really destabilizes a learning environment,” said Hannah Nguyen, a University of Southern California junior who aspires to be a teacher but has helped organize protests against Teach for America. “So having a model that perpetuates that inequity in and of itself was also very confusing for me.”

But as ever, there's a real youth revolt brewing and it's impact is being felt right in the belly of the beast. Yesterday's NYT reports that lots of the best-and-brightest, who were flocking to TFA a decade ago, as our generation flocked to the Peace Corps or VISTA, are now opting out.

For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.

The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.

My take on all this is that, given the ongoing exposés of TFA's horrific 5-week-wonder training regimen, its connection with privatization of public schools, the teacher attrition rates of its graduates, not to mention the organization's odious collection of reactionary, billionaire funders, it's become an embarrassment for many socially-conscious students to say they're joining TFA. 

According to the Times' Mokoto Rich, 

...as Teach for America grew, it became a magnet for criticism from teachers unions, education schools and some policy makers, who argued that sending enthusiastic but untested graduates to classrooms in some of the nation’s poorest communities with just five weeks of training would not produce great teachers. They also said the program’s two-year teaching stints brought instability.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Bob Marley. He would have turned 70 today.

Chicago schools no longer on 'probation'. Language of criminality.

Dante's 9 Circles of Hell

Finally, Chicago schools will no longer be placed on "probation", says Byrd-Bennett. 

A school’s rating determines how much support — or punishment — it receives and is now based on a several weighted factors including growth on test scores, attendance and results from the My Voice, My School 5Essentials Survey from the 2013-14 school year. College enrollment and dropout rates also factor into a high school’s rating.

According to the Sun-Times:

Gone, too, is the term “probation,” which Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis had long complained had a criminal connotation. About 200 schools used to be on academic probation.

“I had lots of conversations with the CTU very specifically with Karen, and we both agreed that that language that I inherited here in Chicago and she had lived with — ‘probationary’ is not a good term, not a good descriptor about what we think about our children and think about our schools,” CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in a conference call.

Instead they will just be called, Level 1-5 schools. You know, like Dante's Limbo, Purgatory, Upper Hell, etc...