SCHOOLS AND SUICIDES | The Merrow Report

SCHOOLS AND SUICIDES | The Merrow Report

SCHOOLS AND SUICIDES

Please allow me to lead with two very disturbing stories, the first about a 9-year-old boy in Denver, the second about a 9-year-old girl in Birmingham, Alabama:

DENVER — Leia Pierce shuffled out the front door on Tuesday. Her son, Jamel Myles, 9, had killed himself last week, and she was still struggling with the basics. Eating. Sleeping. “I took a shower, but I put the same clothes back on,” she said, staring at the ground. “I need him back.”

Jamel, a fourth grader at Joe Shoemaker Elementary School in Denver, hanged himself in his bedroom last Thursday, according to the county coroner, and his death has plunged a mother into despair and a community into disbelief.

Ms. Pierce says her son committed suicide after a year in which he and his older sister were bullied frequently at school. Over the summer, he had told his mother he was gay. Now, she is angry at the school, which she believes should have done more to stop the taunts and insults.

Will Jones, a spokesman for Denver Public Schools, said administrators planned to conduct a thorough review of the case. “We are deeply committed to our students’ well-being,” he said in a statement.

Jamel’s death comes amid a startling rise in youth suicides, part of a larger public health crisis that has unfolded over a generation: Even as access to mental health care has expanded, the suicide rate in the United States has risen 25 percent since 1999. Middle schoolers are now just as likely to die from suicide as they are from traffic accidents. 

BIRMINGHAM:  “The parents of a 9-year-old Alabama girl who hanged herself say a combination of bullying and her ADHD  medications was to blame.  Madison “Maddie” Continue reading: SCHOOLS AND SUICIDES | The Merrow Report

NEW! Chi-Town Educator and Community-Based Activism: Confronting a Legacy of Education Privatization in the Nation’s Windy City | Cloaking Inequity

NEW! Chi-Town Educator and Community-Based Activism: Confronting a Legacy of Education Privatization in the Nation’s Windy City | Cloaking Inequity

NEW! CHI-TOWN EDUCATOR AND COMMUNITY-BASED ACTIVISM: CONFRONTING A LEGACY OF EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION IN THE NATION’S WINDY CITY

I am pleased to announce our brand new article in the Threshold in Education Journal entitled Chi-Town Educator and Community-Based Activism: Confronting a Legacy of Education Privatization in the Nation’s Windy City

Our new piece is included in a special issue entitled “The Illinois Problem.” Here’s what the editors have to say about the new issue in their introduction:

The Illinois Problem as taken up in the pages that follow, conveys theoretical, practical, and pragmatic concerns for today’s socio-political context—concerns that direct us to see, understand, and act in ways that address the problem itself. The theoretical position that the Illinois Problem conveys and utilizes for its analysis is that the current conflated political basis for deciding policy discourages a concern for building and maintaining a healthy public within a democracy. Rather, current socio-political understanding “encourages a morality that is economic; a social perspective that is individualist; a politics that is aesthetically patriotic; and, an economic understanding this is merciless” (Heybach & Sheffield, 2014, p. 71). This theoretical lens, we believe (as depressing as it certainly is), allows us to see actual practical policy intent in the face of both neoliberal and neoconservative forces coalescing toward a similar end—an end which leaves little room for widespread human flourishing. In terms of its practical import, this vision allows us to see the actual intent of specific policies and practices explored in this theme issue.

What I really like about this new piece is that Dr. Jameson Brewer and I wrote it collaboratively with Jitu Brown, a Chicago community organizer, and Michelle Gunderson, a classroom teacher and union activist. So often academics go into spaces to talk about community-based efforts, but fail to collaborate with and empower local voices. Without futhere ado, I give you Chi-Town Educator and Community-Based Activism: Confronting a Legacy of Education Privatization in the Nation’s Windy City

Chi-Town Educator and Community-Based Activism: Confronting a Legacy of Education Privatization in the Nation’s Windy City

T. Jameson Brewer, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Michelle Strater Gunderson, & Jitu Brown

Abstract: The predominance of research and data examining public education privatization in Chicago indicate that there are few financial savings, decreased student achievement, increased racial inequality, increased class size, and increased violence. Considering these outcomes, educators and community-based stakeholders have not remained silent in the face of this apparent injustice. In this paper, we examine teacher and community- based activism in Chicago situated amongst the local and broader reform efforts to which they fight against. We focus on strategies Continue reading: NEW! Chi-Town Educator and Community-Based Activism: Confronting a Legacy of Education Privatization in the Nation’s Windy City | Cloaking Inequity

Howard Fuller’s growing movement to expand black-controlled schools

Howard Fuller’s growing movement to expand black-controlled schools

Segregated schools are still the norm. Howard Fuller is fine with that
A longtime advocate for black-controlled schools in Milwaukee found an unlikely home among conservatives pushing school choice

MILWAUKEE, Wis. — At age 77, Howard Fuller strides along Center Street with the loping gait of a former standout basketball player while recalling the vibrant community of black homeowners and entrepreneurs that used to define this once-bustling stretch of Milwaukee’s North Side. “We had businesses and nice homes all around this area,” says Fuller, who grew up here.

A block dominated by houses with peeling paint and patched shingles gives way to the massive dull-brick facade of North Division High School, Fuller’s alma mater. The former Milwaukee schools superintendent and longtime school choice advocate pauses. “It’s hurtful to see what’s not happening here with these kids,” he says.

The school used to be a source of pride for the city’s black community, a stepping stone to middle-class achievement as its graduates went on to become doctors, businesspeople and win election to Congress. In 2016 not a single child at “North,” as locals call it, tested proficient in math according to the state’s education department.

Enrollment has declined from roughly 1,400 students in 1996 to about 350 students today, says the school’s principal, Keith Carrington. In a state that sends one out of every eight black men to prison, the highest rate in the country, this neighborhood bears a disproportionate brunt of the mass incarceration policy, with more African-American men from here locked up than from any other zip code in Milwaukee County.

“Where North is now is part of a conscious effort to sabotage black education,” Fuller says. He acknowledges that there are “well-meaning people in the building … teachers and administrators who have the kids’ best interests at heart.” But he also sees in the school’s decline a long history of white leaders, conservative and liberal, repeatedly asking black families to accept failure for their children.

As racial separation in U.S. schools becomes more pronounced in many places, and as hate crimes against minorities increase in Continue reading: Howard Fuller’s growing movement to expand black-controlled schools

NPE Conference 2018: Is the Corporate Reform Goliath Truly Dead? - Living in Dialogue

NPE Conference 2018: Is the Corporate Reform Goliath Truly Dead? - Living in Dialogue

NPE Conference 2018: Is the Corporate Reform Goliath Truly Dead? -

By John Thompson.

Part One of Two.

The theme of the Network for Public Education’s fifth annual conference was that corporate reformers have lost the “David versus Goliath” battle over public education. We public school supporters have defeated the privatization campaign known as corporate school reform. Goliath must know that his mega-bucks haven’t improved student performance but he keeps dumping backpacks full of cash into chosen schools. Hubris can explain some, but not all, of the continued subsidies that keep corporate school reform from collapsing.

As Diane Ravitch explains, Goliath claimed to be “the savior of poor black and brown children ‘trapped in failing schools.’” And for years, Goliath had used that propaganda meme while winning political battle after political battle. A mighty coalition, which had been built on the infrastructure laid by ALEC, the Koch brothers, and other anti-government interest groups, was able to unite neoliberals, edu-philanthropists, and the Obama administration in an effort to blow up neighborhood public schools.

Even as the political Goliath was defeating enemies, he failed completely in terms of real world education practice. Goliath tried charters, vouchers, testing, union-busting, and “value-added” evaluations to undermine the professional autonomy of teachers, and more. In my experience, however, their expensive mandates took low-performing inner city schools and made them much worse, as they also damaged schools that had previously been successful. Although I continually communicate with all types of people, it’s been years since I have talked with someone in the classroom who denies that corporate school reform, at best, created a mess.

Ravitch explains how “Goliath has run out of promises. He is now revealed as the ugly face of a lot of billionaires who don’t want to pay to educate children.” The only goal he met was to cut spending on education and lower taxes, and the public “eventually realized that Goliath pulled a trick on him.” So, “there is no ‘reform movement.’” The Billionaires Boys Club continues to fight for unchallengable power.

Goliath’s promises have been discredited. But his minions continue on, “like zombies, because the money is good.” Often, their followers don’t see any choice but to stick with Goliath’s army; after all, the traditional education system (and sometimes education journalism) has been bulldozed, meaning that the only Continue reading: NPE Conference 2018: Is the Corporate Reform Goliath Truly Dead? - Living in Dialogue