Back to School 2016 - Part 2 Pleas e join Internet radio host Dr. James Avington Miller Jr. for part 2 of our special Back To School 2016 War Report. Dr. Miller will be taking a close look at what our college students are facing in 2016. They have been told that college and career is their ultimate goal, but they find themselves facing a life time of debt. Is college the modern-day indentured ser
Two Americas: Racial inequality has persisted since '60s - NonDoc : Two Americas: Racial inequality has persisted since '60s Gold medalist Tommie Smith (podium), silver medalist Peter Norman (left) and bronze medalist John Carlos (rear) infamously protested racial inequality during a ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. (WikiCommons) M any years after the protests of the Civil Rights Mov
California Students and Teachers Win Major Ethnic Studies Fight | News | teleSUR English : California Students and Teachers Win Major Ethnic Studies Fight The new bill marks a huge achievement for educators across the country fighting for the inclusion of Latino, Black, Native and Asian communities. The state of California approved on Thursday an Ethnic Studies Bill that mandates the creation of
Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » The price black students pay… : The price black students pay… Right before school started, edublogger Jersey Jazzman, posted a video of a lesson being taught from Success Academy meant to be used for teacher training. The response from his readers was scathing, as it involved a couple of typical methods of teaching favored by no-excuses charters (but loath
The Purpose of Education - The Crucial Voice of the PeopleThe Crucial Voice of the People : The Purpose of Education In their annual poll of the public’s attitude toward public education, what prompted the well-respected PDK (Phi Delta Kappa) association’s new question about the purpose of education ? And how is it the question asks about the main goal of a public school education while the websi
MY TWO CENTS – My thoughts on public education and other things : MY TWO CENTS – My thoughts on public education and other things Mary Holden: A Teacher Begins Her Blog | Diane Ravitch's blog - http://wp.me/p2odLa-ffF I had planned to start this blog in April of 2015. Having recently attended the 2nd annual Network for Public Education ( NPE ) conference in Chicago, I was really motivated to star
CURMUDGUCATION : Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION John King's Evidence-Based Revisionist History 30 by Peter Greene / 2h The US Department of Education and Secretary of Education John King are out with a one-two punch of silly bureaucratic blather and revisionist history. Friday's PR release carries the pithy title " U.S. Department of Education Releases New Guidance on Using Evidence to Strengt
The Privatized Beaded Necklace “School of the Future” : The Privatized Beaded Necklace “School of the Future” The PBS NOVA “School of the Future” was interesting in that many corporate messages were strung together like an expensive necklace made of plastic beads. Grit, mindset, brain studies, social-emotional learning…you name it…it was there. Showcased individuals gave shout-outs to others in t
Schools Matter: Today's Communique to the Ravitch Forces : Today's Communique to the Ravitch Forces After what seems to me to have been a pretty effective skirmish , the Ravitch forces have climbed out of their tent at their permanent Basecamp, stomping the ground and waving their, um, whatevers. For those Ravitch acolytes who are not too drunk on revenge to read, here's something to ponder, as I
With A Brooklyn Accent: The Middle Class Revolutionaries of Edgecombe Avenue: Presentation at "When Sugar Hill Was Sweet" Conference : The Middle Class Revolutionaries of Edgecombe Avenue: Presentation at "When Sugar Hill Was Sweet" Conference It is an honor to be on this panel with such distinguished scholars and public intellectuals. We are here to celebrate a great history
Did That Edtech Tool Really Cause That Growth? (Mary Jo Madda) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice : Did That Edtech Tool Really Cause That Growth? (Mary Jo Madda) The quality of research on technology use in schools and classrooms leaves much to be desired. Yet academics and vendors crank out studies monthly. And they are often cited to justify using particular programs. How pr
Racism Never Ended – It Just Keeps Evolving | gadflyonthewallblog : Racism Never Ended – It Just Keeps Evolving “One of our founding principles as a nation [is] that Black lives and Black bodies don’t matter; you see that in all our headlines today. This original sin lingers on, that’s why we got to call it sin… Slavery never ended, it just evolved. Mass incarceration is the current evolution of
Did You Know That Charter Schools “Bury Their Dead”? | deutsch29 : Did You Know That Charter Schools “Bury Their Dead”? On September 14, 2016, The New York City Coalition of Community Charter Schools (C3S) posted a piece by co-director, Steve Zimmerman, entitled, “The Summer of Our Discontent.” The piece is a charter school lament; in it Zimmerman states that he is particularly concerned about “c
What Are Chicago Teachers Actually Paid? Crunching The Numbers - Edison Park - DNAinfo Chicago : What Are Chicago Teachers Actually Paid? Crunching The Numbers CHICAGO — Chicago teachers are expected to vote to authorize a strike next week after months of negotiations over teacher pay — and how much teachers will contribute to their pensions — have faltered. The $5.4 billion Chicago Public School
Federal case on charter schools - Editorials - Ohio : Federal case on charter schools The federal Department of Education invited cackling when it awarded Ohio $71 million last fall to expand high-performing charter schools. The grant announcement followed word that a state education official doctored data to make poorly performing charter schools look better. His pencil work coincided with repor
Lawsuit accuses Arizona charter schools of teaching history with religious slant : Lawsuit accuses Arizona charter schools of teaching history with religious slant A lawsuit filed this month against a prominent Valley charter school and the state charter schools board challenges how it incorporates religion in its teaching of history. The lawsuit against Mesa-based Heritage Academy, a publicly fu
Richmond County Daily Journal | Richmond County Schools Superintendent weighs in on charter schools : Richmond County Schools Superintendent weighs in on charter schools HAMLET — Richmond County Schools Superintendent Dr. Cindy Goodman, responding to news of charter school selecting sites in Wadesboro and Monroe, said while some charter schools are successful most of them are failing, yet continu
Children are more than test scores: Who decides : Who decides? Who decides? I hear some educational activists want to be the deciders? Who is authentic? Who is a sell out? Who is weak? Who is pure? Who is a real activist? Who decides?
Pleas e join Internet radio host Dr. James Avington Miller Jr. for part 2 of our special Back To School 2016 War Report.
Dr. Miller will be taking a close look at what our college students are facing in 2016. They have been told that college and career is their ultimate goal, but they find themselves facing a life time of debt. Is college the modern-day indentured servitude?
Dr. Miller will also be introducing a series on digital learning and how it is being used to destroy public education, our teachers, and authentic teaching and learning. Digital learning aka Computer Based Education is the end game for the educrats. It will lead to the privatization of all students now and in the future.
Please tune in and call in and learn and be an agent of disruption in the Machievellian agenda.
Knowledge is power !
RESISTANCE MATTERS RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE RESISTANCE IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF EXPRESSION OF DEMOCRACY RESISTANCE IS SURVIVAL
Please click on the website below to listen live: http://bbsradio.com/thewarreport 2:00 PM PDT 4:00 PM CDT 5:00 PM EDT or A direct listen-in line only Station 1 - 716-748-0150 To call-in and interact live Station 1 888-627-6008 toll free
Two Americas: Racial inequality has persisted since '60s
Gold medalist Tommie Smith (podium), silver medalist Peter Norman (left) and bronze medalist John Carlos (rear) infamously protested racial inequality during a ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. (WikiCommons)
Many years after the protests of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, we still regularly see instances of racism and prejudice alive in America.
The horrific images and stories of young African-American males dying from mistreatment within the justice system are all over newspapers, television and the internet. Social media has increased the masses’ ability to view and analyze these events within their networks of friends and family, and it has brought the conversation of race in America back to the forefront of social awareness.
Likewise, a key difference between now and the 1960s is that most anyone can use social media as a platform to discuss racial issues, and a wide diversity of people can comment on those issues.
Prominent athletes are also using their platforms to make statements and protests about America’s systems of racial inequality. At the 2016 ESPYs, Lebron James and friends emphasized that more needs to be done for social equality. More recently, Colin Kaepernick has protested by refusing to stand for the national anthem. Athletes using their positions in the public eye to draw attention to social injustice is not unprecedented. Furthermore, the dissent hurled at athletes about their activism is not new, either.
How far have we really come?
Let’s flash back to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City where American athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith — with support from Australian Peter Norman — staged a silent protest by raising their fists in the air.
Much like Kaepernick, Carlos, Smith and Norman received a multitude of dissent. Booing and racial slurs were hurled at them while on the podium. After the silent protest, both Americans were forced to leave the Olympic village and kicked out of the Olympics. The two were accused of making a sort of Nazi salute and even called an embarrassment to the country. Norman, meanwhile, was held off the next Australian Olympic team, and he wasn’t even invited to participate in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Kaepernick hasn’t lost his job like Smith and Carlos did, but unconfirmed rumors about him converting to Islam have been used to question Kaepernick’s patriotism and to suggest that his religious beliefs would alter his feelings toward the United States. In protesting, the quarterback has become a lightning rod much like the sprinters generations earlier.
Two events nearly 50 years apart, and yet they are greeted with similar hostility. Could it be that racial equality hasn’t progressed much since the 1960s?
California Students and Teachers Win Major Ethnic Studies Fight
The new bill marks a huge achievement for educators across the country fighting for the inclusion of Latino, Black, Native and Asian communities.
The state of California approved on Thursday an Ethnic Studies Bill that mandates the creation of an ethnic studies course in every school, and local educators expect it to expand nationwide, a major victory for activists and a blow to right-wing racists.
The courses will focus on the historic contributions and struggles of Latinos, Blacks and Asians, as well as other minorities in the U.S., as well as literature, history and social justice. Topic could include everything from social movements to labor struggles involving the state's historic reliance on agricultural laborers drawn from Asia and Mexico, the racist past of large California communities, ethnic portrayals in Hollywood films and Native American literature.
In California, some of the key figures likely to be studied under the new curriculum could include labor organizers such as Luisa Morena, Cesar Chavez, Larry Itliong, and others, and their collective struggle for economic equality for oppressed groups within the U.S.
Other subjects could include the genocide of Indigenous nations such as the Chumash and Shasta tribes, Los Angeles' long-forgotten 1871 massacre of 17-20 Chinese immigrants by a white mob, segregation in large cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, the internment of Japanese-Americans in such infamous concentration camps as Manzanar, the simmering tensions in police-community relations that led to the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and the 1992 L.A. Riots, the Ku Klux Klan's historic reign in Anaheim, the 1970 Chicano Moratorium anti-war march, student-led walkouts against anti-immigrant legislation in 1994, and myriad other watershed moments in the state's highly-racialized history.
Various books on the tumultuous history of oppressed nationalities in the U.S. could land on students' desks under the new program | Photo: teleSUR
Sean Arce, former head of the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona, said that to date the study of minorities' contributions has been lacking in U.S. schools.
Arce moved to California after speaking out against Arizona's law banning Mexican-American studies at schools passed in 2010. Prior to leaving Arizona, Arce took part in forums and discussions across the California, inspiring students and educators to organize and launch a similar struggle.
“For too long schools have marginalized these communities,” Arce told teleSUR. “Schools served as reproduction sites of inequalities.”
The PBS documentary "Precious Knowledge" (2012) featured a similar student-led fight for ethnic representation in Arizona's schools.
Right before school started, edublogger Jersey Jazzman, posted a video of a lesson being taught from Success Academy meant to be used for teacher training.
The response from his readers was scathing, as it involved a couple of typical methods of teaching favored by no-excuses charters (but loathed by child-centered educators). The video is no longer public (SURPRISE!) so you can’t see it, but I’m going to talk about something that struck me as I was watching it.
The students participated, but I noticed a lot of them stuttering over their words. The teacher is constantly talking over and interrupting them when they are incorrect. The young white teachers are in a class full of black students. A really excellent example of a “Becky”moment.
I wanted to share a story that it reminded me of when I first saw it, but before that, some background… My husband is black and grew up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s. His parents spoke AAVE/Black English/Ebonics reflecting their Southern background. My husband speaks standard English, and always has, but he once shared a story of another boy in his neighborhood, who struggled Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » The price black students pay…:
In their annual poll of the public’s attitude toward public education, what prompted the well-respected PDK (Phi Delta Kappa) association’s new question about the purpose of education?
And how is it the question asks about the main goal of a public school education while the website, and discussion that followed, shifts the conversation to the purpose of education?
Just semantics? Maybe. But, did you know that one definition of semantics is “a deliberate distortion or twisting of meaning, as in advertising, propaganda, etc.”?
Purpose is the reason for which something is done.
The words of reform sold us a perceived need to reform a whole system. The realityis that we needed to only reform the schools in our country that needed re-forming — high-poverty, low-performing schools. We had already identified them before the 1980’s.
The truth?Test-based accountability methods changed nothing. And school choice only reshuffled the deck.
I had planned to start this blog in April of 2015. Having recently attended the 2nd annual Network for Public Education (NPE) conference in Chicago, I was really motivated to start writing. But… you know… the daily things that occur regularly in life just kept happening, darn it! and I never found time to actually do it. I may have also been a bit nervous about actually hitting the Publish button. Now that I’ve quit teaching – you can read all about it here, here, here, and here! – I have some time to think.
So now, I present my original first blog post. At the time, my 14th year in the classroom as a high school English teacher was winding down. Here it is:
APRIL 27, 2015
I have been tossing around the idea of blogging for quite some time now. There are several reasons why I haven’t started this blog earlier. One reason is time. Or lack of time, to be exact. But when I say that out loud, it really just sounds like a lame excuse. Another reason is anxiety. I’m a little nervous about putting my thoughts onto paper (or screen) for all the world to see. Even if only three people end up reading this, it’s still anxiety-inducing. The fear of being judged isn’t so easy to shake off, it turns out. But I’m over 40 now, so I’m trying not to give a damn. The final reason I haven’t blogged until now is that up until this weekend, I didn’t really think I had anything original to say.
I mean, I’m just a teacher. I’m just one of thousands of teachers who do their best and work hard to reach their students. But I’m fed up and tired of wanting to bang my head against the wall every time I read another article about the current state of public education.
A few years ago, I started getting upset about what was happening in education. I started teaching in 1998, so I’ve see the pendulum swing from no standards to state standards to Common Core standards and the testing frenzy we have now. And around 2008, I was starting to get frustrated. Maybe it began before that, but by 2011 I was downright angry. And that’s when I started researching educational issues online and realized there were many others who were feeling the exact same way.
Only I didn’t personally know many of those teachers. I seemed to be the only one I knew who was angry and aware of what was happening in education on a national level. I found like-minded people online, in the Badass Teachers Association (BATs) on Facebook and in the comments section of Diane Ravitch’sblog. But where I worked, I wasn’t encountering many who felt the same way I did at that time.
Even now, there are still so many teachers around me who have no idea of the struggle we are engaged in for the future of public education. They are content to close their classroom doors and shut it all out. Maybe they know but don’t want to face it. Maybe they are quietly seeking a way out of the profession so they won’t have to get involved or be here when it really gets bad. Or maybe they know but don’t know what to do. Many don’t speak out because of fear, and still others just have no idea what is happening outside of their own school or district. But MY TWO CENTS – My thoughts on public education and other things:
Just semantics? Maybe. But, did you know that one definition of semantics is “a deliberate distortion or twisting of meaning, as in advertising, propaganda, etc.”?
Just semantics? Maybe. But, did you know that one definition of semantics is “a deliberate distortion or twisting of meaning, as in advertising, propaganda, etc.”?
