Adapted from a comment I just left at Feministe.
You probably can’t make yourself non-racist, but you can make yourself anti-racist. And in the end, being anti-racist is actually more important.
No, you can’t ever rid yourself of privilege completely. But you can go a long way to rid yourself of ignorance of that privilege, and more to the point, you can make yourself into an opponent of privilege as it exists in the world, rather than just as it exists in you.
Jill hit the nail on the head when she said that the struggle to be — and to be seen as — “one of the good ones” can be a distraction from the real work of the activist. If you find stuff that needs doing, you figure out how you can help, and you get to work on doing it, that’s activism. Checking your privilege is best seen as a part (and an
Leo Kanner, who was identifying autistic kids in the 30s, would not have been surprised:
The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders among British adults in a population-based survey was about 1%, researchers said — closely matching rates seen recently among British and U.S. children, but contradicting suggestions that the incidence has risen
So that “I will not rejoice” quote that everyone reposted yesterday wasn’t from Martin Luther King, it turns out. Instead, it looks like it originated with a young woman in Pennsylvania who had no intention of hoaxing anyone. She just posted her own thoughts on Bin Laden’s death to Facebook, and the rest is internet history.
If your Twitter feed and Facebook page look anything like mine, yesterday various versions of the quote were all over both:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
The problem is, though, that King never said that. Or rather, he said the last three sentences, but not the first.
The bulk of the quote comes from a 1957 Christmas sermon of King’s, in the following context: “Let us move now
This morning, I read Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Open Letter to America’s Teachers. There’s a part of me that would like to take his words at face value, and another part that is quite excited over the fact that us teacher-agitators have forced a shift in the conversation about education reform, such that he has at least acknowledged (if not acted upon) many of our
Are we stuck in a higher-ed bubble?
Some college insiders are offering persuasive arguments that we are.
Reminiscent of the recent stock market and real estate bubbles, escalating college prices are continuing to reach new heights. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, average tuition in the past 2 ½ decades has risen by 440 percent, which is more than four times the rate of inflation.
While higher-ed costs remain untethered to economic realities, students with college loans to pay off continue to graduate into abysmal job markets.
Under the circumstances, it's easy to make the case that something has to give.
Here are some of the reasons why higher-ed critics think that colleges and universities will soon be struggling with the type of threats that the steel, car, music, and publishing industries—to name a few—have faced.
1. High prices do not mean high quality. The higher-ed world was rocked earlier this year
In the video below, Secretary Duncan explains that today, May 3, “is a special day to give teachers the appreciation that they deserve every day,” and he asks all of us to join him in thanking a teacher on our own Facebook page.
Click here for an alternate version of the video with an accessible player.
Posting a simple “thank you” and the name of a teacher who has inspired you is just one small way to appreciate such important individuals, but it isn’t limited to only Facebook. If you are a regular on Twitter, give a shout-out to your favorite teacher by using the hashtag #thankateacher, or feel free to thank teachers wherever you frequent online. Some of us may be more comfortable picking up the phone or writing a quick note to a truly influential teacher, yet no matter your method of communication, we can all reach out and provide a heartfelt “thank you.” After all, if you can read this blog post, you have a teacher to thank.
Publicly recognizing great teachers is an easy way to show appreciation, but there are, of course, more enduring ways to elevate the teaching profession to its rightful place in our society. We at the Department of Education know that support for teachers should be continuous, which is why one of ED’s top priorities is to continue strengthening the teaching profession. In an open letter to teachers yesterday, Arne said that he considers teaching “an honorable and important profession, and it is my goal to see that you are treated with the dignity we award to other professionals in society.” It’s about time we recognize teachers for what they truly are: the nation-builders of the 21st century.
Read more about Arne’s favorite teacher Mrs. McCampbell, and more about other ED events during Teacher Appreciation Week.
Dear Readers,
Great news! I'll be in California the third and fourth weeks of May. First, I'm attending the New Schools Summitoutside of San Francisco. Then I'll be reporting for my book on the politics of teaching in America. I'm looking to interview teachers and former teachers who participated in the early years of Teach for America and KIPP; a chapter of my book will be devoted to these organizations' rise to national prominence and their growing voice in education policy-making.
I'm also looking to interview teachers who have been active in local debates around teacher quality, value-added evaluation, student assessment, and other hot-button issues.
Please send reporting tips my way: dana /at/ danagoldstein.net.
From this week's New Yorker. Thanks to MP. #parenting #privateschools
Four McGill students, including the co-presidents of the university’s New Democratic Party Club, were elected to serve in Canada’s national parliament last night.
The National Democratic Party, long a marginal player in Canadian politics, made stunning gains last night, nearly doubling its previous best-ever vote percentage and almost tripling the number of seats it holds in parliament. With the Conservative Party winning a governing majority, the NDP now stands as Canada’s official opposition for the first time.
These gains came largely at the expense of the Quebec nationalist party Bloc Québécois, whose support collapsed to less than one fourth of voters in its home province. The NDP took 45 of its 68 new seats nationally from the BC, and the wave of voter support that carried it to that result often brought victory to candidates who had entered the race with no expectation of winning.
The most notorious example of this is Ruth Ellen Brousseau, an NDP candidate who lives a three-hour drive away from her district, works full-time in a bar, and left the country for a Las Vegas family vacation in the middle of the campaign. Despite not giving any interviews or campaigning in her district — and despite rumors that in a
This has been quite a year for me (and for a number of fellow teachers and other co-workers) and for the Far Northeast Community in Denver where I work. Sometimes things happen in our lives that cause profound ripples of change within. I have been through a painful metamorphosis of my own over the past year and on this end of it I can honestly say that I will not ever take, or silently remain in a job where I am expected to drill and kill kids on mere skills in the name of improving scores or improving things for kids in low SES schools. I refuse to play along. As a nation, we have spent the years since 1997 doing just that and my unease about and resistance to skills based, teacher directed approaches as a new teacher have solidified with my own experience, education and the steady (yet insistently ignored) data that demonstrate that w
Dear Deborah,
It is way past time to get mad. Each week, it is hard to know which of the latest outrages against American public education is the worst.
Perhaps it was the agreement between the Gates Foundation and the Pearson Foundation to write the nation's curriculum. When did we vote to hand over American education to them? Why would we outsource the nation's curriculum to a for-profit publishing and test-making corporation based in London? Does Bill Gates get to write the national curriculum because he is the richest man in America? We know that his foundation is investing heavily in promoting the Common Core standards. Now his foundation will write a K-12 curriculum that will promote online learning and video gaming. That's good for the tech sector, but is it good for our nation's schools? Oh, and one more outrage: The Gates Foundation and the Eli Broad Foundation, both of which maintain the pretense of being Democrats and/or liberals, have given millions to former Florida governor Jeb Bush's foundation, which is promoting vouchers, charters, online learning, test-based accountability, and the whole panoply of corporate reform strategies intended to weaken public education and remove teachers' job protections.
Yes, indeed, the education reform business is booming. A recent article in Idaho details the campaign
by Frederick M. Hess • May 3, 2011 at 8:01 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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Last week, while I was away, Brookings released another of its occasional "consensus" documents; this one's titled, "Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems." The effort was once again led by Brookings' savvy Russ Whitehurst. The aim, more or less, is to tell state and federal officials how to "achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to school districts for the recognition of exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system."
The report offers an impressive seven-step model to help policymakers figure out how many teachers will be misidentified by different evaluation strategies under different sets of assumptions. "Misidentification" is meant conceptually, but, practically speaking, is discussed in terms of how the teachers in question fare on value-added calculations. The report also features new jargon like "tolerance" and "exceptionality" to characterize "how willing policymakers are to risk an error of over-inclusion" or "the cutoff in a teacher rank distribution that is used for decision-making." The paper is clever, and fine as far as it goes, but leaves me concerned about the direction of teacher evaluation policy.
The exercise aims to inform efforts to evaluate teachers for whom districts can't do value-added analysis, but the underlying thread seems to be the casual, implicit assumption that reading and math value-added are the "true" measure of teacher quality. This is hardly a unique take; it's become the norm. The same stance
A teacher from Wisconsin was wearing a button that read: National Kick a Teacher Day.
I don’t know her. But I know what she’s saying.
For political reasons, it seems to me, some high profile politicians have decided to make public school teachers the scapegoat for a bad economy (caused by Wall Street tycoons that got to keep their bonus billions for causing a global financial meltdown, by the way).
But it doesn’t end there. One group concerned about low voter turnout blamed teachers for not instilling the importance of voting. People aren’t recycling enough because teachers didn’t stress it enough. I was in a group of earnest doctors concerned about childhood obesity that we should hold public school
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