Road Runner...

I had a great time at Moorhead St. Spoke to local Fargo/Moorhead teachers, pre-service teachers and faculty on "Schools for Sale: Reform, Charter Schools and the Future of Public Education" along with great profs Isabel Nunez (Concordia) and Joe Ferrare (Univ. of Kentucky).

Moorhead has some talented ed faculty, including old friend Steve Grineski (who recently retired), Sheila Marquardt, David Tack and more. Thanks especially to Sheila, Emily O'Meara, Renee Fast and the rest of the EMSP leadership for hosting the event.

Left Minnesota, the birthplace of charters, before getting the news that the state's legendary cultural icon, Prince had died. Sad day. Would have been a great place to celebrate his life and music.

Next stop, New Haven for an event at Yale, "The Inner City School: Inequality and Urban Education." I'm speaking on a panel there along with one of my favorite social-justice educator/researchers, Michelle Fine. Can't wait.

Among other greats on the agenda: Conference host Elijah Anderson ("Code of the Streets"); UIC's own John Hagedorn, (Gangs and Institutional Change); former Chicagoan and now Great Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, ("The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions"); Gloria Ladson-Billings, ("Dream Keepers"), Charles Payne, ("I've Got the Light of Freedom") and many more. This leaves me with great feeling of inadequacy. But excited to see them all.

Reproducing inequality

Back to the Caucasus

My summer session Philosophy of Ed class just finished reading Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow and discussing the role schools often play in reproducing the social order. The framing question my students are asking is: How can I be an ethical, socially conscious teacher in an unjust, inequitable system? Can't wait to read final papers.

The new Jim Crow

Over the weekend, we were handed a gift in the form of a New York Times piece, Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning? by Times economic reporter Shaila Dewan. 

The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”

Language is an expression of power relationships. Who has the ability and power to define themselves and others and to privilege one language and culture over the other, or declare one "official" and the other not?

Jewish/Israeli charter school franchises. Really?

A charter school operator running a lucrative chain of Jewish charter schools is able to redefine Judiaism as a non-religion to avoid separation of church-and-state issues, even while using his schools to teach from religious texts and celebrate Israeli Independence Day.

For Deutsch, the whole point of Ben Gamla, which opened its first school in Hollywood, Fla., in 2007, is to draw Jewish children who otherwise would attend regular public schools into an environment where their Jewish identity can flourish. -- JTA

Jewish charter schools, run with public tax dollars, explicitly set up to draw kids away from public schools? It sets my mind awhirl with thoughts of the white Christian academies in the 1950s and '60s, created as alternatives to newly-integrated (at least by law) public schools in the south.

Racist attack on Arab language school in N.Y.

I'm also thinking back to 2007 and the anti-Arab uproar in N.Y., led by Bloomberg/Klein and racist N.Y. Post columnist Daniel Pipes, over the opening of the Arab language and culture school, the  Khalil Gibran International Academy. A manufactured crisis over the word “intifada” on a T-shirt made by a local Arab-American organization led to the defaming of the school's  founding principal Debbie Almontaser and ultimately to the school's demise.

In 2009, there was a move to ban all Arabic speech in the Dearborn, Michigan public schools and in Nashville, Tennessee.  And in 2010 there was the banning of a Mexican-American Studies curriculum in Arizona, supported by a court decision a year later.

In Chicago, the closing of public schools, mostly in the black south and west-side communities, while at the same time, opening dozens of new, privately-managed charter schools, is another expression of these racial power relationships, enforced by law.

In the field of sociology, there's a polite name for all of this. It's called social reproduction, emphasizing the structures and policies leading to the transmitting of social inequality from one generation to the next. The schools continue to be arenas in which the battles over social reproduction are continually being played out. 

What the new year will bring

Sociologists are worried about the Republican takeover of the House. They damn well ought to be. 

The new majority in the House believes that the election provided a mandate to change the course of policy from extending the Bush-era tax cuts, repealing health care reform, and cutting federal spending. Another concern is the capacity of the new majority to attack science it doesn’t like from climate change to social and behavioral research. 

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Can someone please explain why it will "take months" for the Pentagon to implement the end of DADT?

Under the bill approved by a Senate vote of 65-31, the president and Pentagon must first certify that lifting the ban won't hurt troops' ability to fight. After that, the military will undergo a 60-day wait period before any changes are made.

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Teacherken is well worth following at the Daily Kos. Check out his latest on "The Cost of War." 

We're spending $100 billion a year on a country that had a gross domestic product of a little more than $2 billion when we invaded in 2001. By 2014, this administration will have spent more than $700 billion on Afghanistan directly. Those are direct costs, the 2nd figure being what we are not getting because of the extension of the Bush tax cuts to the rich.