With A Brooklyn Accent:
With A Brooklyn Accent Go BATs All Week
Why Scripted Learning Sucks!
Scripted learning SUCKS. It totally inhibits teachers from displaying the creativity they need to best reach their students. Let me give an example. I was part of a panel on Race and Activism in the 1960's at the University of Maryland. I spent six hours working on what I thought it was a great speech. I was really proud of it. However, I was the third speaker on the panel and the two young presen
MAR 27
Where is The Human Touch?
To me, one of the most powerful experiences in education is when a student comes back to the school they attended to visit with a teacher who had a large impact on them. This happens to me on a regular basis and it is one of the best parts of my job. But current education policies emanating from Washington are making this impossible. Not only are some of the best teachers quitting in protest again
MAR 25
My Long and Convoluted Parth To Anti-Racist Scholarship and Activism
Speech at the University of MarylandDr Mark Naison The subject of my talk today is my own evolution as an anti-racist activist, which led from cautious participation in the Northern Civil Rights movement, to involvement in the Columbia Strike and NY and National SDS as a theoretician on race and Black nationalism, to the founder of an anti-racist and anti-war organizing group in the Bronx, to my b
What's Most Damaging in Schools Today:
In looking back at my own public school experience in Brooklyn in the 1950's, I get an interesting reading on what is going wrong in Education Policy today. It's not just the scripted curriculum. We had that then. There was a whole lot of memorization and rote learning in pubic school classrooms I was in. We also had a bunch of testing and drilling, most but not all of it created by our teachers.B
MAR 23
Is High Stakes Testing the Best Way to Improve Educational Performance Among Students of Color and Students Living in Poverty?
Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, there has been a concerted effort to reduce gaps in educational performance by race and class by promoting regular testing in all grades and subjects and rating schools and teachers on the basis those tests. As a consequence of such policies, thousands of public schools in low income neighborhoods and communities of color have been closed, tens o
Time to Close the GATES on an Ugly Chapter in American Education History.
When historians review the last 20 years, the rise of Bill Gates to the position of education power broker supreme and the most important single person shaping public education policy in the US will be one of the most curious phenomena they study. Here is a man who never taught a day in his life and never attended public school who presumes to know how to reshape public education in the United Sta
MAR 22
Hip Hop Commentary on the Prison System: An Unrecognized Antecedent to" The New Jim Crow
You ain't gotta be locked up to be in prisonLook how we livin, thirty thousand niggas a dayUp in the bing, standard routineThey put us in a box just like our life on the blockDead Prez “Behind Enemy Lines” When Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow several years ago, many people were shocked to discover the devastating impact that the drug war and mass incarceration had on Black commun
MAR 20
How Hip Hop Crosses Cultural Boundaries: An Afternoon and Evening with the Bronx Berlin Connection
What an afternoon and evening yesterday with the young people from the Bronx-Berlin Connection and the great program organizers Olad Aden andFabian Farbeon Saucedo! It reminded me of the power of hip hop culture- and the arts, generally- to cross boundaries of language and national origin and unite young people across the globe. The day began with me giving a talk on the role of the Bronx as an in
MAR 18
The Other Wave of School Closings: How the Shutting of Catholic Schools in the Inner City Paved the Way for Charters
Many people have praised charter schools as providing a safe alternative for inner city families to public schools, implying they are creating something that never existed before. However, that is not exactly true. During the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, when inner city communities were hit by a wave of factory closings, drug epidemics, housing abandonment and middle class flight, families looking
MAR 14
When It Comes to Education Policy- It's All About the Benjamins
One question we have to ask ourselves is how many of the policies we are fighting, from Common Core, to test based teacher evaluation, to school closings and charter school preferences, would have gotten any traction were it not from the support they have gotten from a small group of people whose wealth has reached unprecedented proportions because of changes in tax laws, deregulation of the finan
Why Charters Can't Always Be Trusted to Serve Inner City Communities
Henry Louis Taylor · Buffalo, NY · This is about Betrayal The struggle to regenerate the East Side is a protracted fight, which requires tireless dedication. In the late 1980s, a group of Buffalo residents and concerned citizens saved the St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church from being turned down and transformed it into a community center, early learning school, and neighborhood anchor institution
MAR 13
Destroying Public Education: A Fourth Inner City Catastrophe?
One of the great ironies in contemporary American History is that top leaders of the Democratic Party are supporting the elimination of public education in Urban America - even though the public schools are the one institution in inner city neighborhoods that survived de-industrialization, the crack epidemic, and the war on drugs.Instead of treating schools in those communities, which certainly ha
MAR 11
Letter from a Los Angeles English Teacher to his Students:
A letter to my students of Los Angeles Unified: You have been failed. You have been failed not by the school or your teachers (or their boogeyman union), but by people far removed from the world you inhabit. These people in plush houses and all the creature comforts of life have tried to label the school you are now attending a failure, but the people who know only “of” you--who have never come d
A First Year Bronx Teacher Who Loves Her Kids Says "Enough"
There comes a point when you've been shoved around by your job so much that you stop caring. It's scary when that day is a Tuesday in March and you're a teacher. I've been bullied. I've been ignored. My kids IEPs are a catastrophe (I don't do them, we have a "team" for that). I've been told I can't do my EdTPA for my certification with my students because I can't record them when my sch
The Perils of "Grit"
Many proponents of Data Driven education reforms, including Arne Duncan,and NY Education Commissioner John King have spoken of the need to toughen up children to prepare them for the Global Marketplace- especially children growing up in poverty-and have claimed their policies were designed to impart characteristics like "Grit" and ability to perform under pressure.There is a certain crue