Global Finance Needs Our Schools to Fail – Wrench in the Gears

Global Finance Needs Our Schools to Fail – Wrench in the Gears:

Global Finance Needs Our Schools to Fail

Yesterday Peter Greene expanded on an idea I’d put forth a few months back that Competency Based Education (and really all digital curriculum) was a way of gradually turning neighborhood public schools into charters from the inside out. I encourage you to take a few minutes to read his piece “Charterizing From Within.” I’m glad this proposition is making it out into the world and finding a wider audience. However there are still many who doubt CBE / Personalized Learning / Blended Learning etc. will ever take hold. This despite the fact that adaptive “personalized” learning systems are popping up all over the country each passing day.

Doubters say virtual schools and e-learning don’t “work.” So there, it won’t happen. But therein lies the problem. Many assume that a system that “works” is one designed to serve the needs of children and society as a whole. The present system, however, is being increasingly twisted to serve the interests of global capital. When you look at it through that lens, the “failure” of CBE is actually “success” to those wishing to kill the old system and create a new one custom-built for profit-taking.  That is why global capital needs our schools to fail. Comprehensive dismantling of public school districts across the nation will throw the doors wide open to a new age of social impact investing. If you’re not familiar with the the term yet, please set aside time to read “Impact Investing and Venture Philanthropy’s Role in Sowing the Seeds of Financial Opportunity” carefully.

In the aftermath of the failure they have intentionally created, venture capitalists will install learning ecosystems to supplant beloved Global Finance Needs Our Schools to Fail – Wrench in the Gears:

Nevada's Money And Its Mouth Ignore Its Schools For A Stadium | The Huffington Post

Nevada's Money And Its Mouth Ignore Its Schools For A Stadium | The Huffington Post:

Nevada’s Money And Its Mouth Ignore Its Schools For A Stadium

The state now commands the bottom ranking spot for education in the U.S.

So let’s say you’re home to the fifth largest school district in the country. Let’s say your teacher shortages are legendary. Let’s say they’re so bad that you hire recruiters and mount a national ad campaign. Let’s say your state has implemented the loosest, voucher-iest funding system in the country so that your funding is, you’ll pardon the expression, a crapshoot. Let’s say your legislators are in a legal battle with your school board because your legislators want to slap your schools with a “reorganization” plan that might be mighty pricey. Let’s say that your school funding is kind of a nightmare that shells out less than $6K per student and depends on revenue that’s tied to tourist business via a hotel room tax. Let’s say that you have managed to out-Mississippi Mississippi so that you now command the bottom ranking spot for education in the USA.

Let’s say all that. What do you do?

Did you say, “Why, build the world’s most expensive sports stadium”?

If you did, you’re a winner ― probably the only one in this sad tale.

Las Vegas made what is being called “the worst stadium deal” ever to lure the Oakland Raiders to Sin City. The stadium is reportedly projected to cost $1.9 billion. Billion. With a B.

While some of that money is coming from rich people who have presumably run out of ways to waste money and the Bank of America, who have ― well, I can’t figure out what’s in it for them. But the city itself is kicking in $750 million. $750 million. Some or most of that will come from an increased hotel tax applied to a new influx of almost half a million new tourists who will presumably be flocking to Las Vegas to see the Oakland Raiders, a team that people won’t walk across Oakland to watch now. Fans of the deal insist that the combination of the Raiders and Las Vegas will be unstoppable (”Pittsburgh isn’t Las Vegas,” says one article, and thank God they’re correct).

And if the imaginary tourists don’t swell the tax coffers, who else is dipping out of that pool Nevada's Money And Its Mouth Ignore Its Schools For A Stadium | The Huffington Post:

Secretary DeVos Contacts the Department of Justice about Diane Ravitch | The Merrow Report

Secretary DeVos Contacts the Department of Justice about Diane Ravitch | The Merrow Report:

Secretary DeVos Contacts the Department of Justice about Diane Ravitch

Although I have now been retired from journalism for 18 months, I haven’t lost touch completely. Happily, some of my former contacts continue to reach out.  Yesterday I received this alarming memo in the mail in a plain white envelope.  While I have not been able to get a second source to confirm its authenticity, one source swears that it’s genuine.  Its contents are disturbing, to say the least.

Here’s the memo in its entirety

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20530-0001

“Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur”

Memo Re Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Diane Ravitch

To Anthony B. Susan, Acting Assistant Attorney General for Community Understanding (AAAGCU)

From James B Kelly II, Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Fundamental Understanding and Communication (ADAAGFUC)

As per your directive, I met privately with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, a meeting held at her request.  Her stated goal was to find ways to muffle, counteract and otherwise minimize what she referred to as “the constant drumbeat of negativity” about her agenda to improve educational opportunities for all children.  The meeting lasted 2 hours and 35 minutes.

The Secretary is particularly upset with Diane Ravitch, the historian turned activist blogger who apparently has an audience of 30,000,000.  The Secretary insisted on exploring several strategies for curtailing Ravitch, which I will summarize below.

1. Could Ravitch be turned?  As is well known, she was for many years a traditional Republican but is now a very left-leaning Democrat.  She once was straight but is now gay. She used to hate dogs but now is reputed to be an extreme dog lover who has invested thousands of dollars in psychiatric counseling for her dog. Given that “pillar to post” pattern, the Secretary wondered aloud what it would take to bring Ravitch back into the Republican camp.  She implied that money might do the trick because, she said, in her experience “everyone has a price.”  However, subsequent research reveals that Ravitch often donates her speaking fees, suggesting that she does not need money and therefore might not be able to be bought.
2. I suggested a media campaign to paint Ravitch as a wacko who shouldn’t be listened to, based on her taking her dog for intensive counseling. I mean, who does that? Bad idea, I learned, because apparently the Secretary’s four cats and two parakeets have been in psychiatric counseling for years.  Who knew!
3. The Secretary suggested invoking the Alien and Sedition Acts against Ravitch.  She feels strongly that the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government, applies to Ravitch.  The Secretary expressed pride in her knowledge of history, pointing out that the Sedition Act resulted in the prosecution and conviction of many Jeffersonian newspaper owners who disagreed with the government.  She expressed the view that Attorney General Sessions ought to invoke the Sedition Act against Ravitch, and perhaps other leftist bloggers as well.  It fell to me to tell her that the Sedition Act was allowed to expire in 1800 and has not been law of the land for 117 years.   At that point, she muttered something (which I probably wasn’t supposed to hear) about “going back to the good old days,”
4. I will say this, the Secretary doesn’t give up easily.  She brought up another old law, The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was designed to protect our young country from alien enemies in a time of severe danger. That particular act was never repealed and was codified into US law at the outset of the first World War.  It was used to lock up German-Americans during both World Wars and to justify incarcerating Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.  Why not use that to shut down Ravitch, the Secretary demanded?  Unfortunately for the Secretary, Ravitch is an American citizen, born in Texas in 1938.  Her parents, or perhaps it was her grandparents, were immigrants, but Ravitch herself cannot be touched under the Alien Enemies Act or its successors.
5. What about her audience, the Secretary asked? Surely some of them are aliens and, now that the Trump Administration has relaxed the rules about internet privacy, can’t the Justice Department monitor her readers and threaten them about possible dire consequences?  That’s uncharted territory that might raise First Amendment issues, I told the Secretary. However, I was left with the distinct impression that she hopes to discuss this with POTUS or Steve Bannon at some point in the near future.
6. At that point Secretary DeVos changed gears, asking if Ravitch’s platform for distributing her material could be shut down.  I said that the First Amendment protected Ravitch. The Secretary muttered something (and this I am rock-solid certain I was not supposed to hear) about contacting her brother. Erik Prince is a former Navy Seal and the founder of Blackwater, is a notorious black-ops guy.

While I don’t think this meeting’s outcomes warrant the attention of the AG at this point, I strongly suggest that we step up our monitoring of Secretary DeVos and Diane Ravitch, but particularly of the former.

April 1, 2017 Secretary DeVos Contacts the Department of Justice about Diane Ravitch | The Merrow Report:

 BREAKING NEWS! (or Not!): John Merrow Reports that DeVos Contacts Justice Department about Suppressing Ravitch | Diane Ravitch's blog - http://wp.me/p2odLa-gVX via @dianeravitch


John Merrow’s Post Was FAKE NEWS! | Diane Ravitch's blog - http://wp.me/p2odLa-gVZ via @dianeravitch

NYC Public School Parents: Governor Cuomo, don't Devos-state our Schools!

NYC Public School Parents: Governor Cuomo, don't Devos-state our Schools! And how the charter lobby uses DOE charter collaboration in their push to raise the cap:

Governor Cuomo, don't Devos-state our Schools! 

And how the charter lobby uses DOE charter collaboration in their push to raise the cap

Tomorrow Wed. April 5 at 4:30 PM we will rally outside Governor Cuomo's office at 633 3rd Ave. (40th/41st), to protest his refusal to adequately fund our public schools and his insistence on expanding charters and raising their funding.  Please join us; come with your kids and bring signs!

The NY state budget is deadlocked with one of the main sticking points related to whether the cap on charters will be lifted statewide, as the GOP-dominated State Senate have proposed, lifted only in NYC as Gov. Cuomo wants, or not at all as the Democratic majority in the Assembly insists. 

There are already 264 charter schools in the state, and 212 of them are in NYC, according to the NY Charter Center.  131 more charter schools are allowable outside NYC – and 30 more here in NYC.  For some reason, the hedge fund/charter lobby is most intent on expanding charters inside the city, even though we already have the lion's share.

At the same time, the Governor is also pushing proposals to boost charter funding while cutting state reimbursement that will cost the city up to $220 million more, while losing $52 million in state reimbursement. At the same time, he refuses to provide our public schools with the nearly $2 billion owed them according to the Foundation formula.  Instead he wants to totally ditch the formula, developed as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision which ruled that more state education funding should go to high-needs districts, rather than be based on political deal-making by three men in a room, as it was in the past and would be in the future if Cuomo gets his way.

Why is there such an obsession on the part of the Republican leaders in the State Senate and the Governor to favor charter schools? Not because of pressure from constituents or any alleged charter school waiting lists which no one ever audits, but because of the vast sums of money the Governor and the NY State Republican party receives in campaign money from the NYC hedgefund/charter lobby.

As reported by Politico, the pro-charter group New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, managed by StudentsFirstNY. spent $5.2 million on Republican candidates running for the State Senate, more than a third of the total spent by super PACs as a whole.  Gov. Cuomo has also NYC Public School Parents: Governor Cuomo, don't Devos-state our Schools! And how the charter lobby uses DOE charter collaboration in their push to raise the cap:

If you're fed up because of too much testing, here's what you can do about it

If you're fed up because of too much testing, here's what you can do about it:

From time to test to time to learn

It’s April, so there’s a deadline coming up that we’re all familiar with, and I’m not talking about Tax Day (Tuesday, April 18, by the way).  If you’re an educator, you know April is memorable for another reason: It is testing season, the time of year when we spend a lot of our time proctoring tests instead of teaching critical thinking skills and fostering creativity.

There’s been lots of activity in recent years by educators and parents to restore balance when it comes to standardized testing. NEA’s Time to Learn campaign focuses on over-testing, redundant testing, and any testing that takes valuable time away from teaching and learning.

Our campaign has renewed energy and focus this year because of the Every Student Succeeds Act, also known as ESSA, the new federal education law. ESSA gives us an opportunity for audits of all the standardized tests mandated not only by federal and state governments, but also by school districts. That way, we can pinpoint the tests that are duplicative, unnecessary, or not particularly useful.

The audits are sure to back up what our experience tells us.  Let me put it this way: If we had a dime for every test we administered, there’d by a worldwide shortage of copper. (Yep, copper. That’s what dimes are mostly made of.)

When NEA surveyed 1,500 pre-K-12 teachers a couple of years ago, more than 40 percent said the emphasis on improving standardized test scores had a negative impact on their classroom.

“I would much rather help students learn how to conduct research and how to discuss and how to explore controversies and how to complete multi-task projects than teach them how to recall this or that fact for an exam,” one teacher said.

As 2013 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Megan Olivia Hall and I wrote in an op-ed last year: Teachers aren’t afraid of tests—we invented them. We appreciate tests when they yield useful information that informs and improves instruction. We don’t like them when they take away time for the one-on-one attention that can spark students’ curiosity and desire to learn. After all, that’s why we became educators in the first place.

ESSA encourages test audits by your school districts to uncover how much time and how many resources are dedicated to standardized testing. This involves a request by you, or members of the community, to your local school board. You can get much more information about the process and find out how other districts have If you're fed up because of too much testing, here's what you can do about it:

John Thompson: With courage and time, OKCPS could follow Tulsa Union - NonDoc

With courage and time, OKCPS could follow Tulsa Union - NonDoc:

With courage and time, OKCPS could follow Tulsa Union

Over the weekend, The New York Times featured David Kirp’s op-ed (Who Needs Charters With Public Schools Like These?) about what is working in the Tulsa Union Public School System. In the article, Kirp and Tulsa Union explain what it will take for our state and our schools to flourish in the 21st century.

Kirp, a professor at UC Berkeley and senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, starts with a description of an elite high school student writing an algorithm for an iPad video game.

Just kidding! Actually, Kirp is watching a 7-year-old at a high-poverty Tulsa school with a large percentage of English language learners. The second-graders use multimedia technology to learn how an “algorithm is like a recipe.” They will eventually design the recipes that we will need to prosper in the global marketplace.

A couple of fifth-graders guided Kirp around their community school. He suggested Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos should take the same tour. Kirp writes that DeVos “dismisses public schools as too slow-moving and difficult to reform,” but Tulsa demonstrates the nimbleness (and I’d say common sense) necessary to reject instruction-driven, test-driven, competition-driven shortcuts that require schools to build an academic edifice before laying the prerequisite foundation that enables meaningfulWith courage and time, OKCPS could follow Tulsa Union - NonDoc: 

Public-School Students Learn About the Alt-Right - The Atlantic

Public-School Students Learn About the Alt-Right - The Atlantic:

The Alt-Right Curriculum

Teachers are facilitating conversations with students about white nationalism.

Dropping a handout with a photo on each student’s desk, the teacher Kathryn Leslie asked the teens to study the picture of Richard Spencer, the leader of the “alt-right” movement who advocates for a homeland just for whites. There was Spencer, the image of confidence, smiling in a suit coat and open-collared shirt as he leaned against a brick wall.

Does Spencer, Leslie asked her Brookline High School students, fit the stereotype of a white nationalist? Spencer had no visible tattoos advertising white pride or hate against non-whites or non-Christians. He also had graduated from college.

“Sometimes, our stereotype of a white nationalist can be different than a young, articulate, clean-cut guy who espouses lots of racist views,” said Leslie.   

The high-school sophomores and their pair of teachers at the suburban Boston high school were tackling a subject that many adults have struggled to understand—the so-called alt-right movement and how it and its main figurehead, Spencer, managed to surface in the mainstream in the 2016 election and afterward. It’s a topic many teachers would prefer to avoid, given how polarized America has become over the election of President Donald Trump and anything remotely related.

The subject, though, was a natural for Leslie and Malcolm Cawthorne, who co-teach a course about race and identity in America and how it plays out in students’ lives, school, town, and nation. Cawthorne, who is black, recruited Leslie, who is white, to co-teach the elective because he wanted students to realize that many whites care about confronting racism. He and Leslie teach in a school that has gone from 71 percent white two decades ago to 55 percent now. They are helping their students, many of whom identify with more than one race, sort out their own racial and ethnic identities in two sections of the course.

Spencer, who’s credited with coining the term alt-right nearly a decade ago, made national news last November after The Atlantic published a clip of him addressing an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C. He got his group of white male followers to echo his “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory” rallying cry. Many in the room flashed a “Heil Hitler” type of salute.

Spencer’s and the alt-right (short for alternative right) movement’s stances conflict with common mores in American society, the Brookline teachers said.

“When it feels more partisan, we walk more of a tightrope. For the ‘alt-right,’ I didn’t feel we had to walk a tightrope,” said Leslie, who viewed teaching about Public-School Students Learn About the Alt-Right - The Atlantic:

CURMUDGUCATION: Scott Walker's Next Move To Crush Teachers

CURMUDGUCATION: Scott Walker's Next Move To Crush Teachers:

Scott Walker's Next Move To Crush Teachers

When it comes to a full frontal assault on public education and the people who provide it, no governor takes a back seat to Wisconsin's Scott Walker.

Walker's most famous for his 2011 move to strip public unions of their power to negotiate much of anything, a move that he made one of the foundations of his failed run for President. Act 10 gave school districts the directive to unilaterally shift p4ension and health insurance costs to teachers who, under Act 10, are now allowed to negotiate only wages-- and increases in wages are limited by a cost-of-living cap. That means even if a school district could afford to feel generous at the negotiating table, their generosity was limited by law-- and whatever piddling raise they gave teachers could all be taken back with insurance and pension hits on the teacher paycheck. Teacher pay under Act 10 is headed down. 

In addition, contracts should now last one year, and the union must be recertified every year. (Also, no tenure for University professors, either.)

It turns out that Walker is not done. His current budget proposal offers additional funding to schools-- but only if they can prove that they used Act 10 to cut teacher pay and shut down long-term contracts. So any districts that had previously harbored thoughts like "We ought to treat our teachers decently" or "We would rather not drive all of our professional staff away" are now stuck between a financial rock and a staffing hard place. They can get back some of the badly-needed funding that was precipitously cut in 2012, but only if they agree to screw their teaching staff.

Does this seem guaranteed to drive even more teachers out of Wisconsin? Walker has another clever idea up his sleeve: no minimum required hours for school.

"If our students are succeeding, honestly I don't care how many hours they are in, if they're seeing CURMUDGUCATION: Scott Walker's Next Move To Crush Teachers:

Put more gender studies in schools’ sex ed courses - The Hechinger Report

Put more gender studies in schools’ sex ed courses - The Hechinger Report:

Put more gender studies in schools’ sex ed courses

We can’t teach safe sex if kids don’t understand their own and others’ gender identities

Demonstrators protest for transgender rights with a rally, march through the Loop and a candlelight vigil to remember transgender friends lost to murder and suicide on March 3, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

he National Interest: Once a month, this column is tackling broader questions about what the country should do about gaps in achievement and opportunity, especially for boys of color, in a partnership with The Root.

We can’t teach safe sex if kids don’t understand their own and others’ gender identities.

Women across the gender spectrum are being killed and raped every day, but our policy debates about gender are hung up on bathroom use in schools, a GOP-fueled witch hunt intended to demonize transgender women.

If we really care about keeping women safe, we need to reform sex education—as well as bathroom signs—to help young people better understand and navigate gender identity: the self-defined and, too often, societal-prescribed state of being a man, woman or other identity on the gender spectrum.

If a good understanding of bodily functions were all teens needed to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, schools would be just fine offering a good biology course. But kids need to learn about gender, along with the skills that promote safe sex, if they’re going to have positive relationships and respect one another.

Like forbidden conversations about race in education, gender is also a taboo subject, causing more than philosophical disagreements and policy conflicts. People are dying at the intersections of ignorance, gender, race and sex.

Eight transgender people have died this year, and 22 transgender people died last year in the United States because of violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign. It was the most ever recorded, according to the advocacy group.

Related: Foundations aren’t helping anyone if they’re not serious about social justice

Looking more closely at this year’s deaths, all eight transgender people killed so far in 2017 were transgender women of color, Put more gender studies in schools’ sex ed courses - The Hechinger Report:

Trump: DeVos is ‘highly respected’; U.S. education is ‘so sad’; Common Core must ‘end’; and much more - The Washington Post

Trump: DeVos is ‘highly respected’; U.S. education is ‘so sad’; Common Core must ‘end’; and much more - The Washington Post:

Trump: DeVos is ‘highly respected’; U.S. education is ‘so sad’; Common Core must ‘end’; and much more

President Trump was asked Tuesday about his education priorities and how he would address “the disconnect” between skills that companies are looking for and what young people entering the workforce are able to offer. This is what he said:

• “If you look at so many elements of education, and it is so sad to see what is coming, happening in the country.”
• He really likes charter schools and doesn’t think they are “an experiment” anymore.
• The Common Core State Standards has “to end” because “we have to bring education local.”
• Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is “doing a terrific job,” is “highly respected” and has “a tremendous track record.”

At the town hall event in Washington, Catherine Engelbert, chief executive of Deloitte, asked him about his priorities “around education” and around “the work of the future.”

She noted that the New York City public high school graduation rate is 70 percent, but the readiness of students for college and career is assessed at 37 percent, and she asked him to explain his education priorities given the extraordinary pace of change in the workplace and the “disconnect between what employers need and what are our students coming into the workforce are prepared to deliver.”

[At Fort Bragg, DeVos talks up school vouchers for military families. Not everybody is thrilled.]

He responded: “Why are the numbers so horrific in terms of education and what happens when somebody goes through school and then they can’t read?”

She then noted that New York has made “enormous progress” with education in the past decade, but said “we have a lot of work to do” and suggested looking anew at funding projects and program consolidation and public-private partnerships.

Trump said he knows New York City has made progress, but noted that public education in cities is “rough.” He didn’t directly address any of the issues she mentioned but went into a somewhat rambling  explanation of his education priorities.

Here is the bulk of his response:

“Charter schools are another thing people are talking about, a lot, and some of the charter schools in New York have been amazing. They’ve done incredibly well. People can’t get in, you can’t get in. It’s been, I don’t call it an experiment any more. It’s far beyond an experiment. If you look at so many elements of education and it is so sad to see what is coming, what’s happening in the country. … The cities. It’s a very rough situation.”

“Common Core. I mean, we have to bring education more local. We can’t be managing education from Washington. When I go out to Iowa, when I go out to the different states and I talk, they want to run their school programs locally. And they’ll do a much better job than somebody, and, look, these are some very good people in Washington. But you also have bureaucrats that make a lot of money and don’t really care that much about what they are doing or about the community that they have never seen and they’ll never meet and they never will see…. You know Common Core to me is, we have to end it. We have to bring 

Trump: DeVos is ‘highly respected’; U.S. education is ‘so sad’; Common Core must ‘end’; and much more - The Washington Post:

NEW RELEASE NOW AVAILABLE: United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance | radical eyes for equity

NEW RELEASE NOW AVAILABLE: United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance | radical eyes for equity:

NEW RELEASE NOW AVAILABLE: United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance

United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance

Full List of Contributing Authors

FULL LIST OF CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS – United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance

United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance includes essays of protest against and resistance to Trump’s presidency, to his billionaire cabinet, to the privileging in the White House of white supremacists, the promulgation of “alternate facts”, the denigration of media sources, the purges of State Department personnel, the gag orders at the EPA and scientists placed on “watch lists”, the travel bans on people from wide swaths of U.S. society and on refugees … the list is long.

They are also essays that tackle the question of what we can do to stop Trump from becoming a fast moving catastrophe. When the hands of the Doomsday Clock were moved closer to midnight, President Trump was named specifically as an existential risk to humanity. There is no doubt that we must all act. The writers of conscience who have written this collection of essays are all actively engaged in opposing President Trump and their writings encourage us to participate in the resistance movement.  Read with a pencil in hand. Make notes on what you can do to join aspects of the movement that reflects the needs and concerns of your community. Through social media you can go global while acting locally. 

Keep in mind as your read and write in the margins of the book that you are actively engaged in responding to the very particular ways in which the writers and those they write about see the world. As James Baldwin said in his debate with William Buckley at the University of Cambridge in 1965, our response to questions that are “hideously loaded” depend in effect on “where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is, what your system of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions, which we hold so deeply so as to be scarcely aware of them.”

Stepping into this arena to engage the public in ways that might, quite possibly, shine a light on assumptions that have been hidden or camouflaged for many years are the scientists, scholars and teachers who have contributed to United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance.

Full List of Contributing Authors

Yohuru Williams: Yohuru R. Williams is Professor of History and Author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven

Denny Taylor: Denny Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Literacy Studies, Novelist, Children’s Author, and Founder of Garn Press

Jonathan Foley: Jonathan Foley is a World-Leading Environmental Scientist and Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences

Charlene Smith: Charlene Smith is a Journalist, Documentary Film Maker, Author and Biographer of President Nelson Mandela

David Joseph Kolb: David Joseph Kolb is a Prize Winning Reporter, Editor and Columnist, and Author of Devil Knows: Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century (Garn Press)

P.L. Thomas: P.L. Thomas is a Recipient of the NCTE George Orwell Award and Author of Beware the Roadbuilders and Trumplandia (Garn Press)

Jennifer C. Berkshire: Jennifer Berkshire is a Writer, Editor, and Author of the Have You Heard Blog and Co-Host of its Weekly Podcast on Education in the Time of Trump

Morna McDermott: Morna McDermott is Professor of Education and Co-Editor of Testing Our Courage: United Opt Out and the Testing Resistance Movement

Steven Singer: Steven Singer is a Public School Teacher, Education Advocate and Author of the Gadfly on the Wall Blog

Russ Walsh: Russ Walsh is a Public School Teacher, Literacy Specialist, Curriculum Supervisor and College Instructor, and Author of A Parent’s Guide to Public Education (Garn Press) and the Russ on Reading Blog

Katie Lapham: Katie Lapham is a NYC Public School Teacher and Author of the Critical Classrooms, Critical Kids Blog

Anne Haas Dyson: Anne Haas Dyson is Professor of Education, a Recipient of the NCTE Outstanding Educator of the Year Award, and Author of Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum (Garn Press)

Esther Sokolov Fine: Esther Sokolov Fine is Professor Emerita of Education, Former Elementary School Teacher in Downtown Public Housing Communities and Alternative Programs, and Author of Raising Peacemakers (Garn Press)

Vanessa Barnett: Vanessa Barnett is School District Arts Program Coordinator, University Arts Instructor, and Museum Arts Consultant

Carolyn Walker: Carolyn Walker is a journalist, memoirist, essayist, poet, and creative writing instructor nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Author of Every Least Sparrow (Garn Press)

Steve Nelson: Steve Nelson, Head of Calhoun School 1998-2017 in NYC, one of America’s most notable progressive schools, and Author of First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk (Garn Press)

George Lakoff: George Lakoff, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, is a World Renowned Linguist Integrating Studies of Social Issues and Politics from a Neural Linguistics Perspective

FULL LIST OF CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS - United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda –... - Linkis.com:

 NEW RELEASE NOW AVAILABLE: United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance | radical eyes for equity: