, a fancy photo sharing thing.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The Crisis in Public Education
Here is the text of a talk I gave at Booklyn College.
April 1, 2008
ISO Brooklyn College
The Crisis in Public Education
In the landmark 1954 case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the Supreme Court declared that states establishing separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9-0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
There is a crisis in education, and you need not look any further than our own backyard. New York City schools are the most segregated in the United States. The crumbling infrastructure, lack of resources, high teacher turnover rate, are only made worse with the recent budget cuts, which will add up to $700 million by next year if not stopped. Imagine the impact these cuts have on schools like mine. My school, like most schools in New York City, is what Jonathan Kozol calls an Apartheid School. A little more than 50 years since the Supreme Court ordered public schools to integrate with all deliberate speed, I find myself in a school that is 90 percent black and Hispanic. The remaining 10 percent is made up mostly of recent immigrants from southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. My school has three self-contained special education classrooms, but a shortage of special ed teachers. New teachers who are totally unprepared to meet the needs of students with emotional and cognitive problems are thrown into these rooms with little or no support. To say my school is in need of repair is an understatement. One of my students recently found delight in the fact that she could see the floor below through a hole in my classroom. But less humorous is the fact that last year, an 11-year-old student in my school received second-degree burns when scalding hot water from a broken pipe dripped on him. These facts shouldn’t be surprising when you consider how severely under funded inner city schools are. My school spends only $10,000 per student. Compare this amount to schools in NYC’s suburbs. Manhasset schools spend over $22,000 per-pupil. That is more than double the per-pupil spending in my school. Schools in Great Neck Long Island spend almost $20,000 per student. And that isn’t the only difference between our schools. These suburban schools are 90 percent white while my school is 90 percent black and Hispanic
This pattern is repeated in city after city. Chicago schools spend a bit more than $8,000 per student while a nearby suburb spends more than double – just over $17,000. Philadelphia students, $9,000, students in that city’s suburbs, $17,000. Almost double. It’s as if inner city black and Hispanic students are only has half as important as their suburban white counterparts.
The problem is rooted in the way schools are funded. Schools receive their funding through property taxes. More affluent communities with higher-valued homes pay more taxes and thus have more money to spend per pupil. Put in racial terms, middle class and affluent white communities invest more on their children’s education than inner city black, Latino, and immigrant ones. And in cities like ours where diverse groups of people live in relatively close proximity to each other, attempts to get black, white, and Latino students under the same roof have failed. My school, for example, which as I said is 90 percent black and Hispanic, sits in the middle of the affluent white neighborhood of Park Slope. Each morning, the neighborhood’s white children stand on the street corners of 7th avenue awaiting yellow school busses to cart them out of the neighborhood to predominantly white schools.
Each morning, more than 50 years after the Brown decision, those children are whisked away, as if they are being rescued, to schools where critical thinking skills, rather than rote memorization, is taught. They enter schools with fresh coats of paint while my students walk through a maze of NYPD school safety agents and metal detectors into a roach and rodent infested school with pealing paint, graffiti-covered walls, and bathrooms with no soap and broken sinks, when not locked because of flooding.
It is a blatant fact that there is an education crisis in inner-city schools. No wonder that so many Civil Rights groups backed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind, which promises to end the racial disparity in education.
NCLB
NCLB was signed into law in January 2002 with bipartisan support. Often thought of as a Bush initiative, the law actually passed with key democratic support, most notably from Senator Ted Kennedy. The premise of the law is that schools have low-expectations for minority students and that a test-based system of accountability will improve their education. Students in grades 3 through 8 are given high-stakes tests in reading and math. Schools must show annual yearly progress (AYP) through increasing test scores, with a goal of reaching 100 percent proficiency by the year 2014. The goals of NCLB are so arbitrary and unrealistic, that each of the 50 U.S. States has introduced legislation rejecting all or part of NCLB. Some schools have refused to play along, however, since the teeth of NCLB are Title I funds, which are federal funds awarded to schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families, schools with low-income students cannot afford to reject the law and instead must cut art, social studies, and other subjects that are not tested in favor of double periods of math and reading where students are taught not the joy of reading or the wonder of numbers, but how best to pass a reading or math test.
And inner city schools, the schools that already suffer from a lack of funds, are at a disadvantage. Schools must not only show AYP as a school, but pre-determined subgroups of students must also show improvement. The ten Subgroups, which are typically found in poorly funded inner city schools rather than affluent suburban schools, are divided into 5 ethic groups (American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, Black, and White) students with limited English skills, Migrant students, and students receiving Free and Reduced Priced Lunch (students living in poverty). In other words, students who face the most difficulties outside of school must show improvement.
A nice thought, but nearly impossible when the social and economic needs of these students aren’t being met. To give an example, I taught a young girl two years in a row, grade 6 and 7. It was impossible for us to prepare her for the math and reading test. She was bright, but often absent from school. When she did come to school, she often skipped my class or slept through it. She came to school with a ton of anger and often fought with her teachers or fellow classmates. Her problems, in spite of the fact that each and every one of her teachers tried to reach her, went beyond anything we could do. For the first year that I had her (6th grade), she was homeless, living in a homeless shelter. At different times either her mother or father was in jail. The second year I taught her, she had a home, but lived without electricity. She often went to a friend’s house so she didn’t have to sit in the dark before bedtime. She wasn’t failing because teachers had low-expectations for her. She was failing because of in one of the richest nations in the world where millions of dollars are spent each day fighting a war in Iraq, she didn’t have a home. She failed not because her teachers didn’t help her pass the reading test, but because non-violent drug offenders like her parents are locked up rather than being offered treatment. Yes, our black and Latino students are not performing at the levels of their suburban counterparts, but not because teachers aren’t accountable and not because we have low-expectations for minority students. These students are failing because they are being robbed by an uncaring system. They are failing because the politicians who spend $20,000 a year to send their children to pre-school to give them the basic social and learning skills are cutting aid to the same programs for the poor, such as Head Start.
_______________________
Schools with large numbers of students in these racial, ethnic, and economic subgroups have over 200 ways to fail and face a series of punishments. Many education experts, advocates and activists point out that when you look at these sanctions, it is quite obvious that the goal of NCLB isn’t to improve public education, but are part of a larger neo-liberal agenda of cutbacks on social services, privatization of state services, and the introduction of market reform in public education. Just take a look at these sanctions:
Replacement of staff (i.e., get rid of the teachers)
Provide outside tutoring, typically from private companies.
Allow students to transfer to other schools
Appoint “outside experts” to help run the school (private companies)
Hand operations over to the state or an outside agency
Close the school and Reopen as a charter school
The mayor and school chancellor has already instituted this market reform in city schools when they did away with regional superintendents and replaced them with private companies to oversee and advise principals.
Many of these punishments as you can see funnel much needed cash out of the schools and into the hands of private companies, leaving struggling schools even further behind. And that is not by accident. As I said, the goal of NCLB isn’t to reform, but to privatize education.
The widely touted school transfer program has been a complete failure. There are simply not enough places in other schools to meet the demand. In New York City, for example, 185,000 students qualified to transfer during the 2005-206 school year. In spite of the fact that only a small fraction of that amount, only 3,000, decided to take advantage of the school transfer, there was chaos. There simply weren’t enough seats in better schools. Students often found themselves in schools no better, or worse, than the ones they left.
After more than five years of NCLB, over 10,000 schools nationwide are designated as failing and there has been no progress in closing the achievement gap. Schools, especially in the inner cities, have become dreary places where learning has been replaced by “teaching to the test.”
While the schools, the teachers, and most importantly, the students aren’t doing any better under NCLB, there is one group of people that are doing very well – the companies that create the tests. Money for education would be better spent on initiatives that are proven to improve education – reducing class sizes, improving infrastructure, and providing more resources for our students.
Budget Cuts
But in spite of the already inadequate spending on education, thanks to recent budget cuts, even less is being spent.
In late January, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg with literally only hours of notice, reduced every NYC school’s budget by 1.7 percent. This was done mid-year, catching schools off guard and leaving them scrambling to find ways to save money. The cuts totaled $100 million. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said that each of the city's 1,200-plus schools could expect to see an average budge reduction of $100,000. Larger schools would see even larger cuts. And this is only “round one.” The mayor has proposed an additional $324 million in school cuts for 2009. Adding to the budget crisis is the fact that the state is shortchanging schools $200 million in promised funds as part of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity litigation.
Defending the cut, Mayor Bloomberg told New Yorkers that we just needed to “hunker down” and weather the budget cuts. BILLIONAIRE Mike Bloomberg told us we had to hunker down. , "I'm sorry,” he said, “ you can always cut 1.3 percent. In fact, it's healthy to go and say let's cut a little bit and force the principals and the teachers and the administrators to say, 'Is this program worth it?'"
To see how “Healthy” the cuts were, you have to look at where principals were forced to make cuts. Supplies were cut. Textbook orders were denied. But more insidiously considering the pressure teachers are under to raise test scores, cuts were made to after school tutoring, regents prep, counseling, English as a Second Language instruction, and after-school recreational and sports programs. Teachers going on maternity leave are being replaced with lower-paid substitutes, including teachers in content areas with state and city tests. The money cut at the state level was to go to lower class sizes. All of these things essential to the education of our students.
_________________
None of this is coincidental. It isn’t just a mistake that inner city black and Latino schools are under funded. It isn’t just bad luck or the way it is that the rich get excellent pre-school and schools with small class sizes. The simple fact is that there are two different systems because there are two different goals. Some children are being trained to be tomorrow’s managers, factory owners, overseers, military officers, and political leaders while others will be funneled into working class jobs with inadequate health care, no pensions, where they will struggle and toil to put food on the table, a roof over their heads, and somehow come up with extra money to send their children to college. Two different goals. How else can you explain why a school like Phillips Andover has a 5-1 student-teacher ratio, with an average class size of just 13 while many NYC schools cram 30-40 students into a single classroom? These schools are set up to educate the ruling class. Why do you think George W. Bush got into Andover? For his intellect?
Our teachers unions need to be at the forefront of struggling against the racial disparities in education. Unfortunately, the union leadership fails to mobilize the very people who have the power to bring about real and lasting change – the rank and file members. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), for example, is leading a coalition, called the Keep the Promises coalition to urge the state to "Keep the Promises" made in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity court settlement. But the CFE strategy was weakened from the start by the almost exclusive reliance on a legal fight with little mobilization from below. So despite 13 years of litigation, the final settlement was billions below what the first judge originally ruled was necessary to provide a "sound basic education" for New York City's students. The reliance on lobbying and lawsuits has left the union’s leadership totally unprepared to fight the recent reneging by Spitzer and Bloomberg to adequately fund our schools.
But things don’t have to remain the same. There has been increasing public anger and opposition to No Child Left Behind. Reacting to this public pressure, Hillary Clinton who voted for NCLB in 2001 has been denouncing parts of the law, and even told a UFT delegates assembly she would scrap it if elected president. The recent rally against the budget cuts provides another good example. On March 19, 2008, the Keep the Promises coalition rallied at city hall to protest the school budget cuts. The rally received virtually no promotion by the UFT, but still managed to draw a lively crowd of more 10,000 people in the cold and pouring rain. And the chants and homemade signs made important connections that the UFT has thus far refused to make. A group of students from Manhattan chanted “Money for schools, not for war” while a Brooklyn librarian carried a sign proclaiming “Fund schools, not corporate bailouts,” referring to the recent Bear Stearns bailout.
In spite of the rally, the mayor's cuts are an embarrassment to United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Last year Weingarten cancelled the union's participation in a rally that had the slogan "put the public back into public education"--to protest Bloomberg and Klein's school reorganization. It was cancelled, because Weingarten felt she had come to an understanding with the mayor and chancellor, and didn’t want to jeopardize that with a rally. The fact that this agreement, this “era of good feelings,” failed and led to further attacks should not be surprising. When you fail to fight and when you make concessions, management will come back for more each and every time.
But the March 19 citywide rally was a much-needed first step to mobilize teachers, parents and students and turn the tide against years of setbacks. Showing our power in the streets is crucial to rebuilding the left so that we can fight back, but it is not enough. We need an escalating series of actions, on the job, in our schools, and in our neighborhoods. We need to be prepared to organize rallies, pickets and even job actions at both the school and city-wide level to demonstrate the full power of our union and pressure the city to give our schools what they need and deserve.
Conclusion/Wrap Up
In 1968, Mexican American students in five East Los Angeles high schools walked out of their classes to protest, among other things, the substandard quality of education in their schools and the lack of post-secondary education opportunities. Their inspiring struggle led to walkouts in 15 other city schools. This walkout didn’t happen in a vacuum. The students linked their struggle with other struggles of 1968. They drew inspiration and confidence from draft resisters who burned their draft cards. They studied the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. The Brown Berets were the Mexican American equivalent to the Black Panthers. At the rallies, students could be heard not only protesting for better education opportunities, but also for an end to the Vietnam war because of the heavy toll it took on blacks and Latinos. As a result of the walkout, corporal punishment, which was doled out as a punishment for speaking Spanish, was done away with in city schools, and schools began to encourage and prepare its students to attend college rather than steer them toward menial labor. Now imagine hundreds of thousands of teachers, and millions of parents and students taking to the streets to demand that not only the recent budget cuts be rolled back, but that schools finally get the fair funding they deserve. This is possible, but not inevitable. It begins at the grassroots. It begins in our schools. We must rebuild our union at the chapter level. We must push for rallies and protests school and citywide. To understand what this might look like and how we get there, we can look at the wildcat protests city teachers held prior to the 1967 contract negotiations.
After a 1965 contract that few voted for, apathy turned to anger in 1967. The civil rights movement and the urban unrest created what union officials called an “explosive mixture.” Teachers, without the support of their union leadership, submitted resignations, refused to report for work and walked out of schools to protest working conditions. Fearful that the protests would spread, UFT president Al Shankar was forced to take a tough stand with the city during contract negotiations. He was even forced to support a strike. Rank and file members actually forced the UFT leadership back to the bargaining table when they felt like they were getting a bad deal.
This is what things could look like, but the push must come from below, and it must be tied to a broader struggle. The fight for education begins with ending the poverty that hinders students’ learning. Therefore, the fight for education must be tied to a civil rights struggle to end housing and job discrimination. The fight for education must be tied to a fight for single-payer health care and amnesty for undocumented immigrants. We need to look at past struggles, like the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s when people took to the streets and fought for and won social change. When the fight on the street forced the politicians to act. Change is possible, but it has to come from below.
AFTER WRAP UP: Kozol Quote
"The great equivocators will not win in the long run. There is a surge of rising indignation among tens of thousands of young people in this nation, including those many idealistic and determined teachers who come into inner-city schools and don't pretend that educational apartheid is simply a piece of distant history but know it is alive and well right now, because they see it every day before their eyes. They will rise up one day before too long to resurrect the spirit of risk-taking action that their parents' generation has abandoned. When they do, they will shake the very foundations of an unjust social order that condemns the children of the black and brown to a subordinate existence. No nation can get away with crimes against its own children forever.”
April 1, 2008
ISO Brooklyn College
The Crisis in Public Education
In the landmark 1954 case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the Supreme Court declared that states establishing separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9-0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
There is a crisis in education, and you need not look any further than our own backyard. New York City schools are the most segregated in the United States. The crumbling infrastructure, lack of resources, high teacher turnover rate, are only made worse with the recent budget cuts, which will add up to $700 million by next year if not stopped. Imagine the impact these cuts have on schools like mine. My school, like most schools in New York City, is what Jonathan Kozol calls an Apartheid School. A little more than 50 years since the Supreme Court ordered public schools to integrate with all deliberate speed, I find myself in a school that is 90 percent black and Hispanic. The remaining 10 percent is made up mostly of recent immigrants from southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. My school has three self-contained special education classrooms, but a shortage of special ed teachers. New teachers who are totally unprepared to meet the needs of students with emotional and cognitive problems are thrown into these rooms with little or no support. To say my school is in need of repair is an understatement. One of my students recently found delight in the fact that she could see the floor below through a hole in my classroom. But less humorous is the fact that last year, an 11-year-old student in my school received second-degree burns when scalding hot water from a broken pipe dripped on him. These facts shouldn’t be surprising when you consider how severely under funded inner city schools are. My school spends only $10,000 per student. Compare this amount to schools in NYC’s suburbs. Manhasset schools spend over $22,000 per-pupil. That is more than double the per-pupil spending in my school. Schools in Great Neck Long Island spend almost $20,000 per student. And that isn’t the only difference between our schools. These suburban schools are 90 percent white while my school is 90 percent black and Hispanic
This pattern is repeated in city after city. Chicago schools spend a bit more than $8,000 per student while a nearby suburb spends more than double – just over $17,000. Philadelphia students, $9,000, students in that city’s suburbs, $17,000. Almost double. It’s as if inner city black and Hispanic students are only has half as important as their suburban white counterparts.
The problem is rooted in the way schools are funded. Schools receive their funding through property taxes. More affluent communities with higher-valued homes pay more taxes and thus have more money to spend per pupil. Put in racial terms, middle class and affluent white communities invest more on their children’s education than inner city black, Latino, and immigrant ones. And in cities like ours where diverse groups of people live in relatively close proximity to each other, attempts to get black, white, and Latino students under the same roof have failed. My school, for example, which as I said is 90 percent black and Hispanic, sits in the middle of the affluent white neighborhood of Park Slope. Each morning, the neighborhood’s white children stand on the street corners of 7th avenue awaiting yellow school busses to cart them out of the neighborhood to predominantly white schools.
Each morning, more than 50 years after the Brown decision, those children are whisked away, as if they are being rescued, to schools where critical thinking skills, rather than rote memorization, is taught. They enter schools with fresh coats of paint while my students walk through a maze of NYPD school safety agents and metal detectors into a roach and rodent infested school with pealing paint, graffiti-covered walls, and bathrooms with no soap and broken sinks, when not locked because of flooding.
It is a blatant fact that there is an education crisis in inner-city schools. No wonder that so many Civil Rights groups backed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind, which promises to end the racial disparity in education.
NCLB
NCLB was signed into law in January 2002 with bipartisan support. Often thought of as a Bush initiative, the law actually passed with key democratic support, most notably from Senator Ted Kennedy. The premise of the law is that schools have low-expectations for minority students and that a test-based system of accountability will improve their education. Students in grades 3 through 8 are given high-stakes tests in reading and math. Schools must show annual yearly progress (AYP) through increasing test scores, with a goal of reaching 100 percent proficiency by the year 2014. The goals of NCLB are so arbitrary and unrealistic, that each of the 50 U.S. States has introduced legislation rejecting all or part of NCLB. Some schools have refused to play along, however, since the teeth of NCLB are Title I funds, which are federal funds awarded to schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families, schools with low-income students cannot afford to reject the law and instead must cut art, social studies, and other subjects that are not tested in favor of double periods of math and reading where students are taught not the joy of reading or the wonder of numbers, but how best to pass a reading or math test.
And inner city schools, the schools that already suffer from a lack of funds, are at a disadvantage. Schools must not only show AYP as a school, but pre-determined subgroups of students must also show improvement. The ten Subgroups, which are typically found in poorly funded inner city schools rather than affluent suburban schools, are divided into 5 ethic groups (American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, Black, and White) students with limited English skills, Migrant students, and students receiving Free and Reduced Priced Lunch (students living in poverty). In other words, students who face the most difficulties outside of school must show improvement.
A nice thought, but nearly impossible when the social and economic needs of these students aren’t being met. To give an example, I taught a young girl two years in a row, grade 6 and 7. It was impossible for us to prepare her for the math and reading test. She was bright, but often absent from school. When she did come to school, she often skipped my class or slept through it. She came to school with a ton of anger and often fought with her teachers or fellow classmates. Her problems, in spite of the fact that each and every one of her teachers tried to reach her, went beyond anything we could do. For the first year that I had her (6th grade), she was homeless, living in a homeless shelter. At different times either her mother or father was in jail. The second year I taught her, she had a home, but lived without electricity. She often went to a friend’s house so she didn’t have to sit in the dark before bedtime. She wasn’t failing because teachers had low-expectations for her. She was failing because of in one of the richest nations in the world where millions of dollars are spent each day fighting a war in Iraq, she didn’t have a home. She failed not because her teachers didn’t help her pass the reading test, but because non-violent drug offenders like her parents are locked up rather than being offered treatment. Yes, our black and Latino students are not performing at the levels of their suburban counterparts, but not because teachers aren’t accountable and not because we have low-expectations for minority students. These students are failing because they are being robbed by an uncaring system. They are failing because the politicians who spend $20,000 a year to send their children to pre-school to give them the basic social and learning skills are cutting aid to the same programs for the poor, such as Head Start.
_______________________
Schools with large numbers of students in these racial, ethnic, and economic subgroups have over 200 ways to fail and face a series of punishments. Many education experts, advocates and activists point out that when you look at these sanctions, it is quite obvious that the goal of NCLB isn’t to improve public education, but are part of a larger neo-liberal agenda of cutbacks on social services, privatization of state services, and the introduction of market reform in public education. Just take a look at these sanctions:
Replacement of staff (i.e., get rid of the teachers)
Provide outside tutoring, typically from private companies.
Allow students to transfer to other schools
Appoint “outside experts” to help run the school (private companies)
Hand operations over to the state or an outside agency
Close the school and Reopen as a charter school
The mayor and school chancellor has already instituted this market reform in city schools when they did away with regional superintendents and replaced them with private companies to oversee and advise principals.
Many of these punishments as you can see funnel much needed cash out of the schools and into the hands of private companies, leaving struggling schools even further behind. And that is not by accident. As I said, the goal of NCLB isn’t to reform, but to privatize education.
The widely touted school transfer program has been a complete failure. There are simply not enough places in other schools to meet the demand. In New York City, for example, 185,000 students qualified to transfer during the 2005-206 school year. In spite of the fact that only a small fraction of that amount, only 3,000, decided to take advantage of the school transfer, there was chaos. There simply weren’t enough seats in better schools. Students often found themselves in schools no better, or worse, than the ones they left.
After more than five years of NCLB, over 10,000 schools nationwide are designated as failing and there has been no progress in closing the achievement gap. Schools, especially in the inner cities, have become dreary places where learning has been replaced by “teaching to the test.”
While the schools, the teachers, and most importantly, the students aren’t doing any better under NCLB, there is one group of people that are doing very well – the companies that create the tests. Money for education would be better spent on initiatives that are proven to improve education – reducing class sizes, improving infrastructure, and providing more resources for our students.
Budget Cuts
But in spite of the already inadequate spending on education, thanks to recent budget cuts, even less is being spent.
In late January, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg with literally only hours of notice, reduced every NYC school’s budget by 1.7 percent. This was done mid-year, catching schools off guard and leaving them scrambling to find ways to save money. The cuts totaled $100 million. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said that each of the city's 1,200-plus schools could expect to see an average budge reduction of $100,000. Larger schools would see even larger cuts. And this is only “round one.” The mayor has proposed an additional $324 million in school cuts for 2009. Adding to the budget crisis is the fact that the state is shortchanging schools $200 million in promised funds as part of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity litigation.
Defending the cut, Mayor Bloomberg told New Yorkers that we just needed to “hunker down” and weather the budget cuts. BILLIONAIRE Mike Bloomberg told us we had to hunker down. , "I'm sorry,” he said, “ you can always cut 1.3 percent. In fact, it's healthy to go and say let's cut a little bit and force the principals and the teachers and the administrators to say, 'Is this program worth it?'"
To see how “Healthy” the cuts were, you have to look at where principals were forced to make cuts. Supplies were cut. Textbook orders were denied. But more insidiously considering the pressure teachers are under to raise test scores, cuts were made to after school tutoring, regents prep, counseling, English as a Second Language instruction, and after-school recreational and sports programs. Teachers going on maternity leave are being replaced with lower-paid substitutes, including teachers in content areas with state and city tests. The money cut at the state level was to go to lower class sizes. All of these things essential to the education of our students.
_________________
None of this is coincidental. It isn’t just a mistake that inner city black and Latino schools are under funded. It isn’t just bad luck or the way it is that the rich get excellent pre-school and schools with small class sizes. The simple fact is that there are two different systems because there are two different goals. Some children are being trained to be tomorrow’s managers, factory owners, overseers, military officers, and political leaders while others will be funneled into working class jobs with inadequate health care, no pensions, where they will struggle and toil to put food on the table, a roof over their heads, and somehow come up with extra money to send their children to college. Two different goals. How else can you explain why a school like Phillips Andover has a 5-1 student-teacher ratio, with an average class size of just 13 while many NYC schools cram 30-40 students into a single classroom? These schools are set up to educate the ruling class. Why do you think George W. Bush got into Andover? For his intellect?
Our teachers unions need to be at the forefront of struggling against the racial disparities in education. Unfortunately, the union leadership fails to mobilize the very people who have the power to bring about real and lasting change – the rank and file members. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), for example, is leading a coalition, called the Keep the Promises coalition to urge the state to "Keep the Promises" made in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity court settlement. But the CFE strategy was weakened from the start by the almost exclusive reliance on a legal fight with little mobilization from below. So despite 13 years of litigation, the final settlement was billions below what the first judge originally ruled was necessary to provide a "sound basic education" for New York City's students. The reliance on lobbying and lawsuits has left the union’s leadership totally unprepared to fight the recent reneging by Spitzer and Bloomberg to adequately fund our schools.
But things don’t have to remain the same. There has been increasing public anger and opposition to No Child Left Behind. Reacting to this public pressure, Hillary Clinton who voted for NCLB in 2001 has been denouncing parts of the law, and even told a UFT delegates assembly she would scrap it if elected president. The recent rally against the budget cuts provides another good example. On March 19, 2008, the Keep the Promises coalition rallied at city hall to protest the school budget cuts. The rally received virtually no promotion by the UFT, but still managed to draw a lively crowd of more 10,000 people in the cold and pouring rain. And the chants and homemade signs made important connections that the UFT has thus far refused to make. A group of students from Manhattan chanted “Money for schools, not for war” while a Brooklyn librarian carried a sign proclaiming “Fund schools, not corporate bailouts,” referring to the recent Bear Stearns bailout.
In spite of the rally, the mayor's cuts are an embarrassment to United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Last year Weingarten cancelled the union's participation in a rally that had the slogan "put the public back into public education"--to protest Bloomberg and Klein's school reorganization. It was cancelled, because Weingarten felt she had come to an understanding with the mayor and chancellor, and didn’t want to jeopardize that with a rally. The fact that this agreement, this “era of good feelings,” failed and led to further attacks should not be surprising. When you fail to fight and when you make concessions, management will come back for more each and every time.
But the March 19 citywide rally was a much-needed first step to mobilize teachers, parents and students and turn the tide against years of setbacks. Showing our power in the streets is crucial to rebuilding the left so that we can fight back, but it is not enough. We need an escalating series of actions, on the job, in our schools, and in our neighborhoods. We need to be prepared to organize rallies, pickets and even job actions at both the school and city-wide level to demonstrate the full power of our union and pressure the city to give our schools what they need and deserve.
Conclusion/Wrap Up
In 1968, Mexican American students in five East Los Angeles high schools walked out of their classes to protest, among other things, the substandard quality of education in their schools and the lack of post-secondary education opportunities. Their inspiring struggle led to walkouts in 15 other city schools. This walkout didn’t happen in a vacuum. The students linked their struggle with other struggles of 1968. They drew inspiration and confidence from draft resisters who burned their draft cards. They studied the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. The Brown Berets were the Mexican American equivalent to the Black Panthers. At the rallies, students could be heard not only protesting for better education opportunities, but also for an end to the Vietnam war because of the heavy toll it took on blacks and Latinos. As a result of the walkout, corporal punishment, which was doled out as a punishment for speaking Spanish, was done away with in city schools, and schools began to encourage and prepare its students to attend college rather than steer them toward menial labor. Now imagine hundreds of thousands of teachers, and millions of parents and students taking to the streets to demand that not only the recent budget cuts be rolled back, but that schools finally get the fair funding they deserve. This is possible, but not inevitable. It begins at the grassroots. It begins in our schools. We must rebuild our union at the chapter level. We must push for rallies and protests school and citywide. To understand what this might look like and how we get there, we can look at the wildcat protests city teachers held prior to the 1967 contract negotiations.
After a 1965 contract that few voted for, apathy turned to anger in 1967. The civil rights movement and the urban unrest created what union officials called an “explosive mixture.” Teachers, without the support of their union leadership, submitted resignations, refused to report for work and walked out of schools to protest working conditions. Fearful that the protests would spread, UFT president Al Shankar was forced to take a tough stand with the city during contract negotiations. He was even forced to support a strike. Rank and file members actually forced the UFT leadership back to the bargaining table when they felt like they were getting a bad deal.
This is what things could look like, but the push must come from below, and it must be tied to a broader struggle. The fight for education begins with ending the poverty that hinders students’ learning. Therefore, the fight for education must be tied to a civil rights struggle to end housing and job discrimination. The fight for education must be tied to a fight for single-payer health care and amnesty for undocumented immigrants. We need to look at past struggles, like the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s when people took to the streets and fought for and won social change. When the fight on the street forced the politicians to act. Change is possible, but it has to come from below.
AFTER WRAP UP: Kozol Quote
"The great equivocators will not win in the long run. There is a surge of rising indignation among tens of thousands of young people in this nation, including those many idealistic and determined teachers who come into inner-city schools and don't pretend that educational apartheid is simply a piece of distant history but know it is alive and well right now, because they see it every day before their eyes. They will rise up one day before too long to resurrect the spirit of risk-taking action that their parents' generation has abandoned. When they do, they will shake the very foundations of an unjust social order that condemns the children of the black and brown to a subordinate existence. No nation can get away with crimes against its own children forever.”
Teachers Start Year Without Job!
This appeared in Socialist Worker in September, 2007
http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-2/645/645_11_LaborInBrief.shtml
New York City teachers
By John Yanno
NEW YORK--Hundreds of teachers started the new school year without a teaching assignment after the latest round of “reorganization” by the New York City Department of Education.
The teachers, many with years of experience and advanced degrees, worked in District 79, the city’s special district for at-risk students. They worked with pregnant students, those preparing to take the GED exam and students with behavioral problems.
Although the Department of Education promised the District 79 teachers would be interviewed for new jobs, 280 teachers were without a position as the school year began. Instead, the city hired lower-paid new teachers, forcing District 79 teachers to accept positions as full-time subs, known as ATRs (absent teacher reserves).
“It’s an affront to teachers who served these students, who are very bright and very needy,” said one of the excessed teachers, Carolyn Mollica, an Outstanding Teacher of the Year winner.
Mollica and others believe the Department of Education is targeting veteran teachers and trying to force them to retire. “They can get two for the price of one,” the 63-year-old Mollica said. “But I’m not ready to retire. If I’m enthusiastic and I love my job, why should I leave?”
A recent change to how the city funds schools makes it a liability for administrators to hire or retain higher-paid veteran teachers. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the union representing New York City’s 100,000 teachers, failed to launch a fight against this attack on veteran teachers, suggesting instead that they launch individual appeals if they feel they were discriminated against.
This latest attack comes on the heels of the 2005 contract in which the UFT relinquished important seniority rights for teachers who were excessed from their schools, giving principals full control over hiring. Also in the last contract, the UFT agreed to a “voluntary buyout” provision for ATRs who are unable to find jobs, paving the way for teachers to be forced out of the school system altogether.
This latest attack on District 79 teachers is further proof of the need to organize a rank-and-file alternative within our union that can fight to protect the rights of all teachers.
http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-2/645/645_11_LaborInBrief.shtml
New York City teachers
By John Yanno
NEW YORK--Hundreds of teachers started the new school year without a teaching assignment after the latest round of “reorganization” by the New York City Department of Education.
The teachers, many with years of experience and advanced degrees, worked in District 79, the city’s special district for at-risk students. They worked with pregnant students, those preparing to take the GED exam and students with behavioral problems.
Although the Department of Education promised the District 79 teachers would be interviewed for new jobs, 280 teachers were without a position as the school year began. Instead, the city hired lower-paid new teachers, forcing District 79 teachers to accept positions as full-time subs, known as ATRs (absent teacher reserves).
“It’s an affront to teachers who served these students, who are very bright and very needy,” said one of the excessed teachers, Carolyn Mollica, an Outstanding Teacher of the Year winner.
Mollica and others believe the Department of Education is targeting veteran teachers and trying to force them to retire. “They can get two for the price of one,” the 63-year-old Mollica said. “But I’m not ready to retire. If I’m enthusiastic and I love my job, why should I leave?”
A recent change to how the city funds schools makes it a liability for administrators to hire or retain higher-paid veteran teachers. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the union representing New York City’s 100,000 teachers, failed to launch a fight against this attack on veteran teachers, suggesting instead that they launch individual appeals if they feel they were discriminated against.
This latest attack comes on the heels of the 2005 contract in which the UFT relinquished important seniority rights for teachers who were excessed from their schools, giving principals full control over hiring. Also in the last contract, the UFT agreed to a “voluntary buyout” provision for ATRs who are unable to find jobs, paving the way for teachers to be forced out of the school system altogether.
This latest attack on District 79 teachers is further proof of the need to organize a rank-and-file alternative within our union that can fight to protect the rights of all teachers.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Will the UFT fight NYC school cuts?
This is an article I wrote published in the Socialist Worker (http://www.socialistworker.org/). You can find it online here:http://www.socialistworker.org/2008-1/666/666_11_NYCTeachers.shtml
Will the UFT fight NYC school cuts?
March 21, 2008 Page 11
March 21, 2008 Page 11
JOHN YANNO of the United Federation of Teachers reports on a battle shaping up over education cuts in New York.
NEW YORK--Schoolchildren are among the latest victims of the nation's spiraling economic crisis as the budget ax has come down on public schools.
In late January, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg notified school principals of cuts the night before they were to take effect. Teachers and students woke to find budgets reduced by 1.7 percent. These mid-year cuts, totaling $100 million, are part of a 4.3 percent cut in spending citywide. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein indicated that each of the city's 1,200-plus schools could expect to see an average budge reduction of $100,000.
But this is only round one in Bloomberg's attacks. The mayor has proposed an additional $324 million in school cuts for 2009. Adding to the budget crisis is the fact that the state is shortchanging schools $200 million in promised funds.
Defending the cut, Mayor Bloomberg said, "I'm sorry, you can always cut 1.3 percent. In fact, it's healthy to go and say let's cut a little bit and force the principals and the teachers and the administrators to say, 'Is this program worth it?'"
Healthy? Tell that to the more than 1 million city children who will lose tutoring, counseling, English as a Second Language instruction, and after-school recreational and sports programs.
Schools are searching for ways to find money in their budget. Teachers going on maternity leave are being replaced with lower-paid substitutes. Textbook orders go unfilled while dwindling supplies aren't replaced.
Schools are searching for ways to find money in their budget. Teachers going on maternity leave are being replaced with lower-paid substitutes. Textbook orders go unfilled while dwindling supplies aren't replaced.
All the while, teachers are under increasing pressure to raise standardized test scores to meet the unrealistic demands of the No Child Left Behind law. The cuts make the goals even harder to reach.
Concerned about already scarce resources in public schools, one parent, Eva Lewandowski, protested, "It's the cost of one or two teachers; it's the cost of a classroom; and we're fighting hard to keep the class sizes small."
The mayor's cuts are an embarrassment to United Federation of Teachers (UFT) President Randi Weingarten, who last year cancelled the union's participation in a rally--with the slogan of "put the public back into public education"--to protest Bloomberg and Klein's school reorganization.
Now, the UFT has initiated a "Keep the Promises" coalition that's called for a rally on March 19 to protest the cuts. The coalition is made up of education advocacy groups, community, parent and civil rights organizations, clergy, labor unions and elected officials.
While the rally is a positive step, what's also needed is the rebuilding of rank-and-file militancy in the UFT--to fight for full funding of education and to win back the gains that city teachers lost in past union contracts.
While the rally is a positive step, what's also needed is the rebuilding of rank-and-file militancy in the UFT--to fight for full funding of education and to win back the gains that city teachers lost in past union contracts.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Guatemala Video
Guatemala 2007I visited Guatemala during the summer of 2007. I had never been to Central America before and I have been wanting to go ever since watching Salvador 20 years ago. I wasn't disappointed. I spent my time in the Western Highlands, which is an area populated by the indigenous Mayan. I was based out of Xela (Quetzaltenango), where I took Spanish classes, learned how to salsa (sort of), hopped "chicken busses" to various destinations, etc. I fell in love with the ar
ea (the city of Xela, as well as the general rural Western Highland area). It is one of the very few places I visited that when I left, I vowed to return. And that is my plan. I will be returning this summer for about seven weeks. In addition to taking Spanish classes (and traveling), I wil also be teaching English to street children. I will write about my experiences here.I made this video (a compilation of pictures) to document my trip. Enjoy the video and please share your comments!
John
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