Lamar W. Hankins : Talking Guns with Wayne

Cartoon by Steve Breen / San Diego Union Tribune. Image from The English Blog.

The liberty to live:
Talking guns with Wayne

Wayne seemed to be growing frustrated with our discussion. 'I don’t want kids killed,' he said, 'but I don’t want anyone taking away my right to own an AR-15 semi-automatic.'

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / May 6, 2013

I had a talk with my old friend Wayne the other day. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, so we had a lot of catching up to do. After we talked about our work and compared how many fish each of us had caught on our last fishing trips, talk turned to politics. Wayne owns several guns, so it was no surprise to me that he had gun control on his mind.

Wayne said that he had been following the new gun legislation being considered by Congress. He said it concerned him even though he didn’t think there was much chance any kind of gun control laws were going to pass this Congress. “Hell,” he said, “both of our Texas senators are completely behind the right to own guns. In fact, Sen. Ted Cruz is completely against unreasonable and burdensome gun restrictions that limit our liberty.”

I asked. “So you think requiring background checks is unreasonable and burdensome?”

“Well,” said Wayne, “Sen. Cruz thinks all of this new regulation won’t do anything to stop violent crime. It’ll just undermine the constitutional rights of all citizens to own whatever guns they want to own. That boy up in Connecticut who killed all those children and teachers was just a criminal using guns inappropriately.”

“Well, how could we have prevented that criminal from getting the guns he used?” I asked.

Wayne responded, “We need to keep the mentally ill from getting access to guns.” I acknowledged that this was a good idea, but I wondered how we could accomplish that.

“As I recall,” I told him, “the mentally ill criminal in Connecticut who killed those kids and their teachers got his semi-automatic weapon and large clips of bullets from his own mother’s stash of weapons, and he even killed her before he left for Sandy Hook Elementary School.”

Wayne replied that every gun purchaser should be checked for mental illness. When I noted that this wouldn’t have prevented the Connecticut shooter from taking his mother’s guns from the home that he shared with her, Wayne suggested that maybe family members of gun purchasers needed to be checked out also. I said, “Ted Cruz is not going to like that idea.”

Wayne agreed. “Maybe we just need to require people to keep their guns locked in a secure gun safe.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” I responded, “but wouldn’t that cost a lot and involve the government even more in my life?” Wayne agreed that maybe this wasn’t such a good plan. “What if we just close the gun show loophole that allows people to purchase guns without a background check?” I suggested.

Wayne agreed, but pointed out that this step would not have prevented the Sandy Hook killings. He had another idea.

“What if we put armed police officers at every school,” Wayne asked. “Wouldn’t that have stopped the Sandy Hook killer?”

“I don’t know,” I responded, “I seem to remember that there was a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the Columbine high school, and he was easily outgunned by the two kids who killed those 12 students and injured 21 more out there in Colorado. And that brings up even more questions. How many officers would we need at every school in America -- over 132,000 schools -- to provide it adequate protection?

"Officers make an average of of over $56,000. Just 10 officers at every school (and that may not be enough) would cost over half a million dollars per school, and more for their benefits. That’s over $6.6 billion per year, plus benefits. Do you think that the taxpayers would go along with even those minimal increases in costs?”

“Well, why don’t we arm all the teachers?” Wayne asked. “One of them should be able to kill or stop a shooter.”

I replied, “Teachers are not trained to use guns and might have difficulty taking on the combined roles of police officer and teacher. Some may not want to carry guns, and others just might not have the right personality or disposition to be good police officers. If firefighters resist cross-training as police officers, which they often do, how much more difficult would it be to cross-train teachers as police officers? It is not currently part of a teacher’s job description to shoot and kill someone.”

Wayne agreed that those points were worth considering. After thinking about it for a minute, he asked, “Why don’t we redesign our schools to be as safe as prisons?” he asked.

I replied, “Wouldn’t that still require a large number of police officers to provide security? How would we pay for all those extra officers, not to mention the costs of making our schools as safe as prisons?”

“That is a lot of money,” Wayne said. “But I’m not a politician. Why can’t they figure out how to keep our schools safe from gun-wielding killers?”

“They keep trying, but every time a bill comes up the NRA defeats it,” I said. “Do you know that the NRA has even prevented government agencies from studying the problem? And they don’t even want to prohibit what are called cop-killer bullets or put tracers in gun powder so that law enforcement agencies can solve crimes after they are committed.”

Wayne agreed that not allowing government agencies to study those ideas didn’t make a lot of sense. He avoided my other points.

Wayne seemed to be growing frustrated with our discussion. “I don’t want kids killed,” he said, “but I don’t want anyone taking away my right to own an AR-15 semi-automatic. I paid over $1,000 for that gun last year. Maybe we need to realize that just because a bad person does something bad doesn’t mean that you get to put some government bureaucrat in charge of my life.

"I’m sorry those children in Sandy Hook were killed, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty to buy any gun I want without a hassle, which would be a greater tragedy than having 20 children killed by some deranged guy.”

“I guess your liberty to buy any gun you want, anytime you want, is more important than the lives of our children,” I said. Wayne agreed.

Author’s note: If you have difficulty accepting Wayne's views about this, check out and/or participate in an initiative of the survivors of Sandy Hook who are interested in finding common sense solutions to senseless violence.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Patrick Youngblood : 'Reform' and Squeezing 'Value' Out of Students

Image from Chicago Now.
The school 'reform' movement:
Squeezing 'value' out of students

By Patrick Youngblood / The Rag Blog / May 18, 2012

As a public high school teacher and a parent I think often about the role of schools in our society and closely follow the current debate over school reform. Recently I read a concise, insightful letter to The New York Times that has stuck in my mind, almost haunted me, since:

To the Editor:

Standardized test scores can provide some evidence of what knowledge and skills students have learned. But lost in the debate is the fact that it’s possible to teach a subject well but to teach students to hate the subject in the process.

If one of the goals of schooling is to create lifelong learners, then high standardized test scores may be a Pyrrhic victory. That’s because long after the subject matter is forgotten, attitudes remain.

Walt Gardner, Los Angeles, April 22, 2012

The letter reminds us that debates over school quality and the so-called reform movement have the power to distract from more fundamental questions about the role of education in our society. Schools that we might consider successful -- producing a lot of university bound students with high test scores -- may fail completely to cultivate the curiosity and engagement that create lifelong learners.

The author of the letter, Walt Gardner, maintains a blog at Education Week called Reality Check. His May 2 post continues the theme with a critique of a recent Wall Street Journal op/ed by former George H. W. Bush Secretary of State George Schultz and economist Erik Hanushek, a prominent proponent of “value-added” measures of teacher performance.

Schultz and Hanushek, both fellows at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, argue that the sluggish growth of the U.S. economy would change dramatically if we embraced school reform. High science and math scores lead to increased economic output, they write.

Schultz and Hanushek both are part of what has come to be known as the education reform movement. I don’t want to over-generalize the reform position, but it’s fair to say that they advocate using standardized testing as a key component for identifying schools that should be defunded and teachers who should be fired, believing that this would result in greater efficiencies at the school level.

To the reformers, a move toward charter schools is positive because they are less constrained by local districts and teachers’ unions.

In his blog post, Gardner questions the causal relationship Schultz and Hanushek make between test scores and economic growth, pointing out that Japan, high scoring yet mired in a slow economic growth since the 1990′s, doesn’t fit their model. He also raises the point that broader economic policies (e.g., spending cuts in a recession) and the realities of international competition cloud the test-score-to-economic-growth relationship even further.

Gardner’s criticisms are sound, but in the spirit of his letter to the Times, I’m inclined to point to a more fundamentally distressing aspect of this piece, and the reform movement in general.

Much of the proposed reforms are an attempt to squeeze more “value” out of teachers, as measured by tests that may work to some degree in areas like math and science, but resist easy standardization in almost everything else that is supposed to happen in a school -- from history to literature to art, to even less measurable skills like critical thinking, maturity, and, as Gardner’s letter to the Times reminds us, hanging on to the curiosity and love of learning we all had as children.

When the education economists associated with the reform movement look at a school they see teachers creating measurable “learning gains” in their students. For example, students of a bad teacher might only gain .5 years of learning in a calendar year, while the students of a good teacher gain as much as 1.5 years in the same time span.

Hanushek’s emphasis is on the impact that this “value added” by a teacher will have on the lifetime earnings of students, and ultimately on the nation’s overall economic output. His policy proposal follows logically from there. He argues that by removing the worst 5 to 10 percent of teachers and replacing them with average teachers, the United States will, over time, achieve test scores as high as Finland’s (see graph).

To be fair, Hanushek says the identity of the bottom 5-10 percent of teachers wouldn’t be based on test scores because the “obviousness... would be revealed by virtually any sensible evaluation system.” He identifies teachers’ unions as the biggest obstacle to such a plan.

The issue of unions is a distraction. Many of the worst performing states are right-to-work, where unions are either nonexistent or weak. We strive for the test scores of Finland, a country where teachers are 100% unionized and the societal approach to education is radically different than in the United States.

Hanushek’s proposal is like a doctor prescribing liposuction to an out-of-shape patient when what is obviously needed is a healthy diet and active lifestyle. Why is it that marginal, misguided proposals like these have such traction in the education debate?

The reforms advocated by economists like Hanushek are well received in a political atmosphere where public institutions, and the people who work in them, are viewed with suspicion. It is difficult to imagine a national dialogue about building a public system based on professionalism, trust, and responsibility in today’s political climate.

Just as a prolonged recession and soaring debt have placed long-established social programs on the chopping block, in the hands of Hanushek and Schultz the economic crisis becomes an argument for their version of school reform.

What would successful reform bring to our society? A 40-point increase in math scores for U.S. students over the next 20 years, they claim, “would exceed a present value of $70 trillion. That’s equivalent to an average 20% boost in income for every U.S. worker each year over his or her entire career.”

This, to them, is what schools do.

And that brings me back to Walt Gardner’s wonderful, haunting letter. The economists of the reform movement tempt us into a debate that accepts the premise that schools are a place where teachers add value to students, boost their lifetime earnings, and in the aggregate raise the output of the national economy.

It isn’t enough to disagree with liposuction as the prescription for a troubled school system. We need to be animated by a vision of what we want schools to be like in our society -- a place to develop the habit of learning that will last a lifetime.

Rather than wring our hands over how to remove teachers who shouldn’t be teaching (a problem that is always made out to be more difficult than it actually is), we ought to approach schools as an institution, and teaching as a profession, in a different way.

Schools ought to be rooted in, and accountable to, their own communities. Time in the school year should be provided for teachers to deepen their knowledge of the field they teach, to collaborate with peers in order to share ideas and skills, and to meet the individualized needs of students.

If we as a society understand that the majority of teachers enter the field because they want to be good at teaching, we ought to create institutions where they can thrive.

[Patrick Youngblood is a teacher in the Austin Independent School System and is a director of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, where this article was first posted.]

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Bob Moser : The White-Power Legislature of Texas

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Slash-and-burn:
Texas' white-power legislature

By Bob Moser / The Texas Observer / May 17, 2011

AUSTIN -- Back in February, at a rally protesting anti-immigrant legislation, State Rep. Lon Burnam raised some eyebrows by letting loose with the “R” word. “You are here,” he told the crowd at the Capitol, “to say no to the most racist session of the Texas Legislature in a quarter of a century.”

The Fort Worth Democrat had in mind such bills as Voter ID, which suppresses minority votes, and “Sanctuary City” legislation, which would legalize racial profiling. It had been decades, Burnam argued, since so many laws were aimed at putting non-whites, you know, in their place.

“All of this legislation is really directed that way,” he said. “Everybody knows it.”

I can only pick one bone with Burnam: Sadly, tragically, everybody doesn’t know it. More than out-and-out racism -- more than pure hatred, or a determination to subjugate non-whites -- what afflicts the majority of our conservative lawmakers is a form of willful race-blindness. It’s that stubborn old “unconscious habit” of white supremacy, as W.E.B. DuBois called it.

Rather than hating other races, the great black scholar and activist wrote in 1930, white people more often unconsciously -- and fiercely -- hold onto their privileges because of the psychological and economic benefits they get from them.

“I began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us,” DuBois wrote, “we were facing age-long complexities sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge.”

Eighty years later, those urges and habits take different forms. White supremacy is no longer enforced by legal segregation and red-lining, cross-burnings and attack dogs. It’s now perpetuated by the right-wing mania for tax-cutting and government-shrinking.

This is a subtler, less overt form of discrimination, which makes it harder to recognize and tougher to combat. And there is no purer, or more pernicious, model for this 21st-century white supremacy than the state budgets passed this spring by the Texas House and Senate.

Both chambers have approved radical, no-new-taxes budgets that take billions from public schools, Medicaid, and social programs of every description. The House and Senate still have to reconcile their differences, perhaps in a special session this summer. But even if the Senate’s more “generous” budget wins the day -- it cuts only $4 billion from schools and merely $3 billion from Medicaid -- one thing’s for certain: The budget will perpetuate white privilege in Texas far more effectively than any racial-profiling law, however despicable, could ever do. It will make one of the nation’s most inequitable states the most inequitable. (Eat our dust, Mississippi!)

Am I saying it too strongly? Afraid not. Consider just a few ugly facts. The poverty rate among both African-American and Hispanic Texans is already three times that of Anglos. Drowning public education and health care in Grover Norquist’s bathtub will inevitably widen that obscene gap.

Educational disparities in Texas are already staggering: According to the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, only 13 percent of Hispanic adults in Texas have college degrees, while 40 percent of Anglos do. Does anybody imagine that gap will close, now that funds for public education and higher education are being cut?

I’m not suggesting anything conspiratorial here -- Heaven forbid! -- but it does seem mighty suspicious that school funding is being decimated at a time when Texas schools are “browning” at a rapid pace. In the last decade, Hispanic enrollment in public schools jumped by 50 percent, with 775,000 more students. Meanwhile, 6 percent fewer Anglo students are enrolled, as well-off whites opt for private schools.

Why is public-school funding less of a priority for Anglo legislators nowadays? You do the math.

It’s much the same with Medicaid. Of the 3.5 million non-elderly Texans who rely on Medicaid for their health care, 63 percent are Hispanic; just 18 percent are Anglo. Five times more Anglos have health insurance through their employers than African Americans. Fifty-nine percent of Texans without health insurance are Hispanic; 26 percent are Anglo.

So why are Anglo legislators hell-bent on decimating Medicaid? Here again, you can do the math.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether our lawmakers are motivated by blatant prejudice or “unconscious habit.” The toll that their slash-and-burn budget will take on Hispanics and African Americans is clear. It’s horrifying. It’s unconscionable. And it will, eventually, wreak economic disaster on the entire state, with millions more poorly educated, unhealthy citizens.

That’s why the budget must be recognized, and called out loud and clear, for what it is: white supremacy masquerading as economic conservatism

[Bob Moser is editor of The Texas Observer, where this article was first published. A native North Carolinian, he edited the Independent Weekly before being named a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Bob has been a senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center and a senior editor at The Nation. He's the author of Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority.]

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Rick Ayers : Letter to a Young Teacher

Helping students to learn their own power. Image from Art Smart.
The ritual of the pink slip:
Letter to a young teacher

By Rick Ayers / The Rag Blog / March 22, 2011

So my nephew Malik, a fabulous renaissance man who has taught sixth grade math, science, and Spanish as well as coaching basketball and baseball for the last six years, was given a pink slip. Again.

It’s a March ritual around here. School districts are dealing with slashed budgets and are not certain of enrollment. In response they send out a flurry of layoff notices. I’m pretty sure Malik will be hired back. He’s got some time in, he’s a beloved teacher, and he is extremely successful teaching students in his working class and low-resourced middle school.

But the whole thing is infuriating. I texted him to say I hoped he was doing OK. He texted back, telling me that he would never advise a friend to go into this profession. I was so sad to think about this response, the kind of feeling that so many teachers get at this time of year.

I tried to send him back some words of encouragement. I’m a teacher educator, after all, and it’s my calling to encourage people to become teachers and help them to be successful. I wrote him something about the fact that the pink slip is an insult, only that, but he would certainly still have a job.

But as I thought about it, I realized this is one insult piled on top of the many others that are being offered to teachers. While there is a small problem of some bad and ineffective teachers hanging on to their jobs, as there is with bad, ineffective, lazy lawyers, doctors, nurses, architects, bankers, cops, financial analysts, cooks, firefighters and farmers, there is a huge bleeding gash in the system – the 40% of new teachers, mostly excellent teachers, who quit in the first three years.

They are discouraged, demoralized, scorned, and ridiculed by the media, politicians, and bosses. I want you all to hang in there. So here is my attempt to pull together my thoughts. It is my “letter to a young teacher.

Dear Malik,

We are, sadly, living in the year of hating teachers. Whether it’s Wisconsin governor Scott Walker rewarding the super-rich while complaining about the high compensation of teachers or Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan applauding the mass firing of teachers and endorsing the teacher-bashing rhetoric of the right, we’re having it hard these days.

After decades of "devolution" of federal funding and escalating military budgets, state governments are de-funding education. Policy wonks fantasize about making schools in the U.S. that look like those in Singapore -- with compliant students who study desperately to make the grade -- and the President talks about education designed to compete with China and India -- as if that were the purpose of education in a democracy.

The national discussion of education, driven by right wing media and think tanks, suggests that teacher education, teachers, teacher unions, and just about everything else about schools is worth trashing. Professor William Watkins may be right -- these people may really have in mind closing down public education altogether.

On the teacher profession side we find plenty of despair. Teaching, like the other caring professions, has been regarded as women’s work and therefore worthy of less respect and pay. And now teachers are being forced more and more into mindless scripted curricula, which amount to low-intelligence test-prep exercises.

Teacher education programs are cutting back their offerings and fewer people, particularly with math and science degrees, are willing to go into teaching. Getting that March pink slip is just another turn in the barrage of insults teachers suffer.

As I was thinking about this, and how to respond to you, something dawned on me. I think we pretty much should stop waiting for respect. It’s not going to come, not for a long, long time.

We know we are creative, growing professionals who are engaged in one of the world's most demanding jobs and we know we should be honored for our work with children and adolescents. But perhaps we should simply stop thinking along the lines of that framework of professionals who should be respected.

Here are a few other ways we might frame our job:

First, the miracles. We teachers fight for success in the classroom every day and many days we fail -- like health professionals, it’s part of the job and we try to learn from the losses. But sometimes we work our magic and it comes out right. That’s when you want to leap up and give a fellow teacher or a student a high five.

Yes, we get both emotions, 20 times a day. We have the honor of being with these students more than any other adults -- laughing and crying, seeing transformations before our eyes. And we usually find ourselves in a wonderful community of teachers -- intense, funny, brilliant, and deeply ethical colleagues who help us through.

I remember when I first went into teaching. I had been a restaurant cook for 10 years and I knew the slog of production: bring in raw materials, work on them, push product out the door, charge money, get a little pay. Mostly it was hard, physical work.

I remember how amazed I was when I first started teaching: I could get paid for reading, writing, talking, and listening? What a delight. And it was the most intellectually and ethically challenging job I could imagine -- on the level of course content (we are always scavenging, studying, borrowing, innovating, learning more) and even more on the human interaction dimension (constantly studying the kids, doing close observation, trying to figure out how to be successful at inspiring, encouraging and challenging them).

We get joy, real joy and satisfaction, from our students. Yes, that’s the secret delight of this profession, working with inspiring colleagues, knowing these kids and being with them through the small and large changes in their lives, knowing their families and the heroic struggles of the communities they come from. We have the coolest job ever -- we are privileged to be working with young people every day.

Secondly, as that t-shirt says, “Be an activist, be a teacher.” We might head off to work with more joy and positive feeling if we think of ourselves as organizers. Teaching, after all, is not only community service, it is a project of social change.

We don’t go to work to blithely reproduce the inequities that exist in our society. We want students to learn, not just the ropes of the game and the gatekeepers, but their own power, their own capacity. We want them to have the creativity and imagination to know that another world is possible; we want them to have the skills to make it so.

If you were organizing Mississippi sharecroppers in the 60’s or Flint auto workers in the 30’s, you would not be waiting for someone in power to say you’re great. You would expect to be insulted and vilified. But you do the work because you know it’s right. We teachers do this job because we are change agents.

A lot of people jaw about social change and activism but teachers do the work every day. Like an organizer, you are fighting for broader goals, ones tied to the doors you open for this student, the progress you make on that project.

We go back to work again and again for those goals, not for the ones defined by those who are selling off the public domain and the promise of equality, justice, and the common future, the policy wonks who seem to be in charge today.

My hero and heroine teachers are not the savior types you see in the movies. They are people like Septima Clark teaching in rural South Carolina, Paulo Freire organizing in the mountains of Brazil, Father Lorenzo Milani transforming peasant kids in Tuscany, Sylvia Ashton-Warner empowering Maori children in New Zealand, and so many others. They got no respect. They changed the world.

Like organizers, we learn the hard lessons of social change -- it never comes when we are patronizing and hand out charity; it only succeeds when we respect the people we teach and act in solidarity with them. And, like organizers, we are energized by the knowledge that we just might win together, by the knowledge that we do win small victories every day.

Thirdly... there is no thirdly. Just those two. The joy of working with kids. The commitment to organizing and social justice. The pay is bad but, really, not that bad. One can have a decent, if modest, living doing this. And we may be scorned by idiots but we are revered by parents, communities, and students.

All in all, not such a bad gig. Of course I’m pretty sure you’re going to stick with it, Malik. And I hope you encourage other friends to join our ranks. We need them!

Affectionately,

Tio Rick

[Rick Ayers was co-founder of and lead teacher at the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and is currently Adjunct Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He is author, with his brother William Ayers, of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom, published by Teachers College Press. He can be reached at rayers@berkeley.edu. This article was also published at The Huffington Post.]

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Anne Lewis : Workers' Rights and the Fight Against Poverty

Labor leader John L. Lewis testifies before Congress in 1947. Still image from archival film footage.
Poverty in America and the
attack on public sector unions

I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor?

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / March 10, 2011

The labor movement has rarely won anything without the social movement, and the social movement has rarely won anything without the labor movement. One often cited example is Dr. King’s 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom initiated by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

If you have any doubts about the necessity of a combined effort, watch this archival film of John L. Lewis when he testified before Congress in 1947 about health care and pensions for miners paid by the coal companies.

The resulting welfare fund, hard fought at the grassroots level by miners and their families, was the most comprehensive health care that I can think of. I know because I was covered under it from the mid seventies to the eighties when it was lost under Reagan.

We frequently marginalize each other -- social movement folks saying unions don’t matter anymore and condemning labor “bureaucrats” and union folks saying that social movement people don’t care about workers and have grandiose ideas of their own power. Some of us get downright schizophrenic dividing our lives into two segments. It’s time we stop this nonsense. We need to speak a common language.

I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor? Please think about how you might respond.

That same question was posed to a wide segment of people, rich and poor, in 2001. The NPR survey provides an analysis of public response to welfare reform (many of us called it deform) during the Clinton administration.

Here’s a table that asks whether it’s circumstances that create poverty or poor people themselves not doing enough. The percentages describe poverty level -- we know it’s set way too low. In 2001 200% of poverty for a family of four was $34,000.


Then NPR asked folks to name the most important cause of poverty in the United States.


Number one is “the poor quality of public schools.”

At about the same time, the Heritage Foundation decided to prove poverty in the United States wasn’t a problem after all. The Heritage Foundation survey is titled, “Understanding Poverty in America.” Here’s the starting point.

The next bar graph compares the living space of poor people in the United States favorably to that of the average European.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

Here are two more rational definitions of poverty:

Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. -- United Nations

To meet nutritional requirements, to escape avoidable disease, to be sheltered, to be clothed, to be able to travel, and to be educated. -- Amartya Sen

Better, right? We’re at least getting to the idea of living well and a more humane definition. Notably lacking is the mention of labor unions and collective action, although you could make the argument that the United Nations definition pushes us in that direction with language about effective participation, dignity, and jobs. The lack of worker organization isn’t mentioned in the NPR study. Neither is discrimination, race, ethnicity, or gender or environment or workers’ rights.

Would you have named lack of unionization or lousy labor law or something like that as an important reason why poverty exists in this country?

In July 2002, union members overall had a 20% higher hourly wage ($20.65 vs. $16.42). In blue-collar industry it was $18.88 vs. $12.95; in service occupations, $16.22 vs. $8.98. That’s not counting benefits. Those ratios have remained constant.

Currently nearly one in three public workers are union members compared with 6.9 percent of the workers in private-sector industries. These organized workers are under siege in Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Indiana, Ohio, and here in Texas. Many work in public schools and universities. The occupation of the Wisconsin capitol started with 2,000 graduate teaching assistants and union members from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Feb. 14. The attack on these workers and on the work that they do is tightly connected -- and they are fighting back.

First, education is not, in and of itself, a cure for poverty. NPR poll aside, “Poor quality of public schools” is not the most important cause of poverty. We could go on and on about how good or bad our schools are, but lack of education is not the leading indicator of poverty.

As much as we’d like it to be so, there isn’t any substantial difference in the average wage of a high school graduate and a high school drop out. It’s considerably less than the boost from unionization. Remember unionization gave a worker at least a 20% boost in wages. A high school diploma gives a less than 15% boost.

The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency.

Unfortunately, the way we’ve been looking at education both at primary and secondary level is supply-side economics: improve the quality of workers through education and grow the quantity of quality workers-- all for the rich employers -- and they won’t be poor no more because the rich will take care of them. Well it doesn’t work that way any more than tax breaks for the rich have created an economy that benefits all of us.

All this talk about creating a competitive workforce for the global economy and endless debates about whether our public schools and universities do or don’t meet the demands of the marketplace is a bunch of hooey. But most folks believe this nonsense. Me too. When I think about our teen-age son’s future, I immediately think: will he finish high school; will his grades and SAT scores be high enough to get into a good college; what’s a high ranked college we can afford... and so on.

Even though I know darn well that there would be much better ways to go about making sure that our child has a good future -- make sure that his nutrition is good, introduce him to cultural expression, work to strengthen our community with public transportation, public space, libraries, and museums, fight for the rights of public school workers and quality public schools, and fight for the rights of all workers, especially their right to organize.

The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency. I also believe there are large elements of sexism involved here. 70% of public school teachers are women overall. In Texas about 82% of elementary and middle school teachers are female. At UT, about 80% of full professors are male and about 60% of lecturers are female.

Working conditions for teachers are really lousy. Think about being the only adult in front of a class of 20 eight-year-olds and having to pee. Forced overtime -- hours worked without pay are unbelievable -- and pay isn’t so great. Wisconsin teachers average about $40,000 a year. Lecturers in my department, which is unusually well paid, start at $6,500 a class and are only allowed two classes a semester and two semesters a year. That’s $26,000 a year for what works out to be full time work with an unpaid leave over the summer.

Still image from archival film of John Lewis testifying before Congress in 1947.
In 2002, No Child Left Behind began a new attack in the name of school reform by devaluing teachers in the name of accountability. It was really insidious. It told teachers what to say in their classrooms (teachers in low performance schools are scripted like actors these days); used corporate standardized tests to tell teachers what to teach; it bought curriculum prescribed by corporations (yes folks like Pearson Education, Houghlin Mifflin, and The Pet Goat publisher McGraw Hill use the language of illness as though kids are sick and they’re doctors); and emphasized charter schools and privatization as salvation. And it’s not just the Republicans. Think of Arne Duncan and the Race to the Top.

Now I would agree that our public schools have failed Latino and African American and working class children. That’s one of the reasons that so many parents fought for integration. We know that separate is not equal. Now we have further segregation of the schools in a system based on and currently exhibiting apartheid.

I don’t think the language is too extreme. A very interesting study explores the role of the Koch brothers of Wisconsin fame in defeating the Wake County, North Carolina, socio-economic integration plan. That plan was a model of quality education for all children for the country. The Kochs poured money into the school board race, cast the plan as communistic, and put in a new school board. They won and the children and teachers of Wake County lost big.

Then we have “Waiting for Superman,” which I watched at the Alamo Drafthouse South with a “progressive” Austin audience who giggled at those lazy teachers, cried and then rejoiced with the poor little black child who won a school lottery, and really dug the idea that the problem with the public school system was teacher tenure and their union. I resorted to drink.

Here’s a cartoon from Saving Our Schools from Superman that sums up the movie.



Saving our schools from Superman

At UT, our buildings are plastered with plaques that reveal the connections between the corporate world and higher education. We have the Accenture Endowed Excellence Fund; the Arthur Anderson and Co. Centennial Professorship; Austin Smiles Endowed Fellowship in Speech Pathology; Bank of America Centennial Professorship in Petroleum Engineering; Enstar Chair for Free Enterprise; La Quinta Motor Inns, Inc. Centennial Professorship in Nursing; the BP Exploration Classroom Endowment; Conoco Phillips Faculty Fellowship in Law; and so on.

We have a University President whose three legislative priorities are:

• no disproportionate cuts (I guess it’s okay to cut education as long as we also let folks die on the streets);
• support for the Texas Competitive Knowledge Fund (dollar match for external research support);
• and a new engineering building.

We have a legislature and a state governor that doen't believe in public services at all -- not education, not health care -- not for children, not for the disabled, not for the elderly. They’re cutting off college scholarships and denying the rights of immigrants as well as working class students an education.

That’s the external world. The internal one at the University of Texas, Austin is that the budget crunch is used as an excuse to do what the higher-ups have wanted to do all along. Raise tuitions and cut programs that serve students and lay off lecturers, graduate students, and staff (we’re down to once a month office cleanings). Do away with the Identity Studies Centers that we fought to bring to the University -- African American, Asian, Mexican American, women, and gender. Forget undergraduate education and turn us into an elite research institution.

We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.

Before I summarize this rant, I wanted you to see a scene from an interview I did with the Director of Public Affairs, Martin Fox, at the National Right to Work Committee. That’s one of the main organizations that the Koch brothers fund and hang out with.

The clip is from a documentary I made in the context of the Pittston coal strike, which was about health care for retired and disabled miners and widows. “Justice in the Coalfields” is about the contradictions between individual and collective rights and what justice means.

The clip begins with a map of right to work states -- you’ll be hearing a lot about that in the next few months. It ends with Bradley McKenzie who led a student walkout in support of the miners. He became a non-union coal miner because there were no union jobs, but his ideas express solidarity at its core. In between is Martin Fox who handled press communications for the Committee at the time.

Martin Fox was a proud member of the National Rifle Association. I know this because I watched him get in his car, with a customized license plate that read “GETAGUN.” Martin Fox is now President of the National Pro Life Alliance and a priest. He holds forth on unions on his blog.

Who has the power to challenge these obscene thugs who have taken over our country? Who wants to challenge them?

Well we do. The “we” is organized labor -- public worker unions. Really, we’re not providing state “services.” We’re providing public necessities. We’re helping the social movement create a vision of a more decent world that includes the working class. And when we collectively fight for ourselves to have decent pay and decent working conditions and democratic control in the work place, we’re not in contradiction with the public good. We’re supporting it.

There are a lot of us. The Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA local 1686 has 12,000 members in Texas. We have large numbers of women and African Americans and Latinos. Discrimination has been slightly less in the public sector and these workers are more likely to join a union because of a history of struggle. AFT has 57,000 members in Texas and TSTA has 65,000 members. And there are state workers organized by AFSCME and other unions.

Those of us in the labor movement and those of us in the social movement have got to get to know each other. We need to practice democracy together and work together. We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.

There’s a great line at the end of a Committees of Correspondence statement on Wisconsin:

And to the workers of Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio: our heartfelt thanks -- may your occupation of the statehouses foretell the day when you become the governors.

[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop, senior lecturer at UT-Austin, and member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA. She is the associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]

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David Bacon : California's Perfect Storm

Students and teachers march in Oakland, California,
to protest the termination of adult education programs. Photo by David Bacon.
Fighting to save public education:
California's perfect storm

Across California, new alliances of teachers, students, state workers, communities of color, and working-class communities in general took on the challenge.

By David Bacon / The Rag Blog / October 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO, California -- The United States today faces an economic crisis worse than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nowhere is it sharper than in the nation's schools. It's no wonder that last year saw strikes, student walkouts, and uprisings in states across the country, aimed at priorities that put banks and stockbrokers ahead of children.

California was no exception. In fact, other states looked on in horror simply at the size of its budget deficit -- at one point more than $34 billion. The quality of the public schools plummeted as class sizes ballooned and resources disappeared in blizzards of pink slips. Fee increases drove tens of thousands from community colleges and university campuses.

But California wasn't just a victim. Last year it saw a perfect storm of protest in virtually every part of its education system. K-12 teachers built coalitions with parents and students to fight for their jobs and their schools. Students poured out of community colleges and traveled to huge demonstrations at the capitol. Building occupations and strikes rocked the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU) campuses.

Together, they challenged the way the cost of the state's economic crisis is being shifted onto education, with a particularly bitter impact on communities of color. Activists questioned everything from the structural barriers to raising new taxes to the skewed budget priorities favoring prisons over schools.


Rise and fall of the Master Plan

When the current recession hit, California had already fallen from one of the country's leaders in per-pupil education funding in the 1950's to 49th among the 50 states in the last decade. That fall was more than just a decline in dollars. It was the end of a commitment to its young people that started in 1960, when a wave of populist enthusiasm put liberals in control of the California Legislature and governor's mansion.

Together, they issued a Master Plan for Higher Education that promised every student access to some degree of post-secondary schooling. Community colleges were free, omnipresent, and accepted everyone. UCs had no tuition and charged only nominal "fees" for university services. Strikes led by Third World students and civil rights demonstrations opened the doors wider to people of color and youth of working-class families generally. The state's reputation as an economic and technological powerhouse owed much to the students who passed through the system in the decades that followed.

By last year, that era wasn't even a memory for students who have grown up in an age of shrinking expectations. Yet on paper, at least, the promise remained. In urging students and teachers on UC campuses to fight instead of giving up, noted radical sociologist Mike Davis called it an epic challenge. "Equity and justice are endangered at every level of the Master Plan for Education," he argued.

Davis called on his fellow faculty members to look out of their office windows. "Obscene wealth still sprawls across the coastal hills, but flatland inner cities and blue-collar interior valleys face the death of the California dream. Their children -- let's not beat around the bush -- are being pushed out of higher education. Their future is being cut off at its knees."

Strike! he urged them. "A strike," he said, "by matching actions to words, is the highest form of teach-in. The 24th [the date last September for the first walkout] is the beginning of learning how to shout in unison."


Strike!

Davis' letter came just as the perfect storm began to build. Lightning struck first at the universities, scenes of the sharpest confrontations in California last year. California's university system includes 10 UC and 23 CSU campuses. Organizing started even before students were back in their fall classes.

"I was involved in previous campaigns against budget cuts when they were more modest," recalls Ricardo Gomez, a UC Berkeley student leader. "We knew the state's $34 billion budget shortfall would be used to slash money for education, and that the regents would put a big fee increase on the table. This time around we resolved to do something different, to move out of the channels of student government."

Students and university workers created a joint strike committee that from the beginning sought to build an alliance with faculty on every campus. "The structure on each campus was open to everyone," Gomez says. "From the first day of classes, people who'd never been involved before were turned on. . . We wanted a mass organization to plan demonstrations. At the same time we formed committees to set up websites, make posters and flyers, and put together the marches."

In late August, the strike committee set a date for the first demonstrations -- the walkout planned for Sept. 24.

One reason for what became an unprecedented level of faculty involvement was the move away from tenured positions to the widespread employment of contingent instructors, with much lower pay and little security. UC has about 19,400 faculty members, but only about 9,000 today have tenure.

Highlighting the impact at UC Santa Cruz was the dismissal of Susanne Jonas and Guillermo Delgado, instructors in Latin American and Latino Studies with more than two decades of seniority each, and the end of the celebrated Community Studies program. Lecturers were the first faculty victims of the cuts on every campus.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and UC administrators ensured the involvement of another constituency with their war on campus unions. Blue-collar UC members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) had just won a good contract after years of fighting. They saw their gains evaporate in furloughs and layoffs. The University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) still didn't have a contract, and voted to strike Sept. 24.

Stoking the anger further, a series of media exposés documented high salary increases for top UC executives. At the Sept. 15-17 regents meeting, some received increases of up to 30 percent (up to $52,000 per year) on salaries in the $200,000 to $400,000 range.

UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies professor Bettina Aptheker called the Sept. 24 strike "the largest unified action, perhaps, in the history of the UCs. It is first and foremost in defense of public education, and then in support of shared governance, in which faculty and students, but especially faculty, are allowed to actually influence policy and decisions. Third, it is in support of all union demands for negotiations and contracts."

Nevertheless, UC President Mark Yudof proposed a 32 percent fee increase spread over the following two years. That proposal virtually guaranteed that the November regents meeting, scheduled to vote on it, would be greeted by further walkouts. As the regents met, students occupied buildings in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Davis. Demonstrations shook the other five campuses.

Yudof dismissed the protests in a snide commentary in The New York Times. Schwarzenegger did too. "They're all screaming," he said. "Everyone has to tighten their belts." But on the campuses, the chancellors were forced to react. First they punished the students who occupied buildings. A second building occupation in Berkeley in December led to the arrests of 65 students. By then, occupations had spread into the state university system as well, over similar tuition increases and budget cuts. In both Berkeley and San Francisco, police stormed the occupied buildings rather than negotiate the exit of students, as they'd done previously.

Yet some cutbacks were reversed. Library hours that had been cut in Berkeley and Santa Cruz, for instance, were restored. In Los Angeles, protests won the chancellor's support for more aid to undocumented students. And under the pressure of strikes and protests, UPTE finally won a contract.


Crisis hides restructuring plans

Schwarzenegger and the regents were using the state's budget crisis to move forward a much broader agenda -- a shift in the way education in California is funded, what the money is used for, and who can afford higher education.

"The 32 percent fee increase not only undermines the access of students to the system, especially students of color from working families, but it's also part of the privatization program," explains Liz Hall, director of the UC Student Association and a UC Berkeley alumna. "Unlike the money from the state, which is restricted in the way the university can use it, the money from fees can be used any way the administration wants."

She points out that a proposal to build a UC supercomputer by Yudof's predecessor, Robert Dynes, failed because the Legislature wouldn't fund it. "With fee money, UC administrators can launch whatever research and pet projects they like, and grant high salaries to their cronies. The growth of those unrestricted funds is one reason we have an executive pay scandal every few years. The regents run UC like a for-profit corporation."

(In California higher ed, "fees" actually means tuition. The 1960 Master Plan outlawed tuition for higher education. A critical aspect of the disintegration of the plan has been raising "student fees," originally meant to cover minor expenses, to amounts that can only be seen as billing for tuition.)

Shifting the funding of California's higher education system from the state, through taxes, onto students themselves, isn't just a program for the UC system. The state's community college system is many times larger and the impact even more severe.

For the first time, student fee increases are now used to directly fund community colleges, which are experiencing the same trend toward tuition increases. Cesar Cota, a student at Los Angeles City College, was the first in his family to attend college. "Now it's hard to achieve my dream," he says, "because the state put higher fees on us, and cut services and classes."

Monica Mejia, a single mom, wants to get out of the low-wage trap. "Without community college," she says, "I'll end up getting paid minimum wage. I can't afford the fee hikes. I can barely make ends meet now."

According to Marty Hittelman, president of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and a former community college instructor, the system turned away more than 250,000 students in 2009-10 alone. "Where can they go?" he asks.

UC? CSU? The workforce? California has a 12.6 percent unemployment rate, one of the nation's highest. The state universities dropped 40,000 students this year. UC fees have gone up 215 percent since 2000, and CSU fees 280 percent. Community college fees, once nonexistent, rose 30 percent just last year.

Hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in California community colleges are unable to get the classes they need and thousands of temporary faculty are without classes to teach. So, as in the universities, the student returns for paying higher fees are increased class size and fewer available classes.

Those cuts have an extra impact on students of color. The Los Angeles Community College District educates almost three times as many Latino students and nearly four times as many African American students as all of the UC campuses combined.


Rallies, protests, and sit-ins

Police confront students during the occupation of Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Photo by David Bacon.
In protest, students, teachers, parents, union members, and community activists staged rallies at the end of November throughout California (as well as in other parts of the United States). There were large rallies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.

At CSU Fullerton, students took control of the humanities building, saying they were "putting ourselves in direct solidarity with the 'occupations' that have been occurring the world over from universities to factories to foreclosed homes; from Asia to Europe to Africa to Central and South America and, now, here in the United States."

The Fullerton students chose the humanities building to protest the corporatization scheme envisioned by the campus strategic planner, Michael Parker, who called humanities "socially irrelevant" and favored courses useful for preparing student for corporate employment. Humanities, the students said, has become "politically dangerous to the established economic order... We are not surprised because we are dangerous."

"The L.A. rally was spectacular," enthuses Jim Miller, who teaches at San Diego City College. "The church holds a thousand, and there were hundreds more trying to get in." He counted 565 people who came from San Diego to the Los Angeles event, including three buses of students from San Diego City College.

The protests continued into the spring. More than 8,000 students from Los Angeles and other community college districts rallied at the state capitol in Sacramento on March 22. State university campuses also sent hundreds of marchers.


'We can't fit on the rug anymore'

The most dramatic demonstrations were at the university level, but the crux of California's education crisis lies in the K-12 public school system, especially in poor urban communities, and neighborhoods of immigrants and people of color. Some 22,000 pink slips were given out to public school teachers across the state in the 2009-10 academic year.

"In Watsonville they're overcrowding classes," charges Manny Ballesteros, a youth organizer. "They're building more prisons in California than schools, and there are more blacks and Mexicans inside those prisons. For young people like me, instead of being able to get a job, and achieving our goals, that tells you, 'You're not going to make it.'"

Watsonville now only has seven school nurses for 19,000 students, and has cut school psychologists and counselors, music, and art. "Sports have become pay to play," says Jenn Laskin, a humanities and English teacher at Watsonville's Renaissance Continuation High School. "That means students who are talented and don't have the money lose the opportunity. That cuts off yet another pathway to college."

The state's limit of 20 students for K-3 classes was modified in the Legislature's recent budget deals, so next year K-2 classes will have 28 students. "We're loading to the max. Kindergarten classes are super crowded, and one student told me, 'We can't even fit on the rug anymore.'

"Combined with the emphasis on test scores, it all affects children's ability to learn," she laments. "We have 2nd-grade students who don't even know how to use scissors, because they've been taught to the test. They can bubble in letters and numbers, but they can't cut a circle in a piece of paper."

In Los Angeles, one of the world's largest school districts, more than 6,300 teachers were originally set to lose their jobs before the beginning of the fall 2010 term. After unsuccessful attempts to get the Los Angeles Unified School District administration to reduce the number, teachers mounted a wave of successively more militant demonstrations.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ruled that a planned one-day strike was illegal because it would "endanger student health and safety," and threatened educators with $1,000 fines and the loss of their teaching credential if they struck. So hundreds of teachers picketed their own schools before classes started, and parents and students walked with them.

One mother, Maria Gutierrez, said the one-day strike was a good idea. "What does it matter if children lose one day of class? If we lose our teachers, they're going to lose a lot more." And while the district claimed poverty was forcing layoffs, it found the money to hire more than 3,000 substitute teachers to take classes in case the teachers stuck.

At the beginning of May, thousands of teachers filled the street in front of the district's offices, and 40 were arrested for blocking it in an act of civil disobedience.

Like so many other schools districts across the country, Los Angeles has used the crisis to escalate its plans to turn public schools over to charter groups. By the end of May, a total of 20 existing schools and 27 new campuses had been put up for bid. So teachers and communities organized around that, too. After months of planning and packed meetings, many of those bids went to groups led by teachers.


Education or incarceration?

With headlines focused on Los Angeles and the Bay Area, it's easy to forget that California is an agricultural state. But it may be in poor agricultural communities, especially those in the San Joaquin Valley, where the state's twisted priorities are the clearest. In the middle of a budget crisis, what will the state fund -- schools or prisons?

Unemployment in California's rural counties is often twice as high as on the coast. The economic crisis in small valley towns like Delano and McFarland was a fact of life long before California's current budget woes.

In Delano, historic home of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, 30 percent of the residents live below the poverty line. Desperate for employment, many were sold the idea that prisons would provide a source of jobs beyond low-wage farm labor. As a result, the area has become home to giant institutions whose budgets dwarf those of local school districts. Valley teenagers today see those prisons in their future, whether as guards or inmates, rather than college.

Every day in Delano 3,176 people go to work in the Kern Valley State Prison and North Kern State Prison. Almost as many of the town's families now depend on prison jobs as those supported by year-round field labor. Thousands of former farmworkers now guard other Latinos and blacks -- inmates just as poor, but mostly from the urban centers of Los Angeles or San Jose rather than the rural communities of the Central Valley. The two prisons have a combined annual budget of $294 million. By comparison, the town's 2010 general fund was a tenth of that, and the budget of its public schools a twentieth.

Following the March 4 Day to Save Education, a group of teachers and home care workers began a march from Bakersfield to Sacramento to mobilize opposition to the cuts. One marcher, retired teacher Gavin Riley, describes the social cost as he saw it walking through the valley:

We've seen boarded-up homes everywhere. Coming into Fresno we walked through a skid row area where people were living in cardboard and wood shacks underneath a freeway, sleeping on the sidewalks. We've seen farms where the land is fallow and the trees have been allowed to die.

About the only thing we've seen great growth in is prisons... I look at that and say, what a waste, not only of land but also of people. I can't help but think that California, a state that's now down near the bottom in what it spends on education, is far and away the biggest spender on prisons. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to connect the dots.

Long-term strategies

K-12 teachers, students, home care workers, and community activists on a 260-mile, 48-day march from Bakersfield to Sacramento to protest cuts to education and social services. Photo by David Bacon.

The Central Valley march arrived in Sacramento on April 21, when more than 7,000 CFT and AFSCME members marched down to the capitol building to confront the Legislature and Schwarzenegger in a huge rally. They focused on one of the main demands that emerged in the sit-ins and demonstrations throughout the school year -- a change in the way the state budget is adopted.

The state has a requirement that two-thirds of the Legislature approve any budget. Even more important, any tax increase takes a two-thirds vote as well. So even though Democrats have had a majority for years in both chambers, a solid Republican block can keep the state in a total economic crisis every year until Democrats agree to slash spending.

Teachers' unions, students, other labor organizations, and community groups got an initiative (Proposition 25) onto the November ballot that would remove the two-thirds requirement, so that budgets and tax increases can be adopted by simple majority.

The state also needs new sources of revenue. Assemblyman Alberto Torrico authored a bill to charge oil companies a royalty for the petroleum they pull from under California's soil. California is the only oil-producing state that doesn't charge the oil giants for what they take.

As the school year drew to a close, students and teachers won some partial victories. Assembly Speaker John Perez introduced the California Jobs Budget, an alternative budget proposal that would reinstate much of the education money cut over the last year. He also promised to roll back the UC and CSU student fee increases by 50 percent.

Meanwhile, Gov. Schwarzenegger's revised budget reinstated Cal Grants program funding, although it cut money for the poorest recipients of state aid at the same time. (By press time in September, the state legislature had still not passed a budget for the current fiscal year.)

"I don't feel good that we saved Cal Grants at the expense of single mothers and children," says Claudia Magaña, a student leader at UC Santa Cruz. "It's great to know that students had some power this year, but not that we won at the expense of the neediest people. We have to look at who has power in this system and how to get it."

Coming out of the year's actions, Magaña voices the conclusion of many student leaders and teachers -- that education activists need a strategy for the long haul. "We need [a strategy] to win long-term reinvestment in the system," says Liz Hall.

We need a power analysis that will help us to build our movement. Preserving the public nature of education will take large-scale changes. This was a year of crisis for us, spurred by fee increases and furloughs. Now our bigger problem is how to get mobilization and commitment for much larger goals. To begin with, we have to get our students to turn out in November.

But giving more power to Democrats, and a better system for arriving at a budget deal, won't automatically reverse the state's priorities. Democrats vote for prisons, too.

Jim Miller says the demonstrations, and especially the Central Valley march, show that "we can fight for an economy and a government that work for everybody. We're not saying save education by throwing old people out of their home care, by getting rid of health care for poor kids, by closing down state parks, or privatizing prisons. This is about the future of the state of California."

Without unity, he says, "we'll see a scarcity model, where people say take someone else's piece of the pie, not mine. That's a race to the bottom."

Perhaps fighting itself was the year's biggest achievement. Across California, new alliances of teachers, students, state workers, communities of color, and working-class communities in general took on the challenge. Their strategic ideas ranged from student strikes and walkouts to alliances between communities and unions, a sophisticated agenda of legislative solutions, and mass mobilizations in rallies and marches.

Although there was a broad variety of activity, a common thread highlighted the special impact education cuts have on communities of color and working-class families. A social movement is growing across the country to defend public education. California's perfect storm was at its leading edge, and contributed a new repertoire of strategy and tactics for building it.

San Diego students protest racist attacks

At UC San Diego, the storm took on a particular character due to a series of racist events on campus. The string of incidents began in February, Black History Month, when white fraternity students organized a "ghetto-themed" party called a "Compton Cookout." It was followed by a campus television show that mocked Black History Month. A few days later, a student hung a noose in the UCSD school library. Anti-hate rallies were organized at other campuses in response, and students sat in at Yudof's Sacramento office.

As students geared up for March 4, a KKK-style hood was found with a hand-drawn circle and cross on the statue of Dr. Seuss outside the UCSD library. At a rally organized at UCLA in protest, student Corey Matthews asked: "What kind of campus promotes an environment that allows people to think it's acceptable to target people for their ethnicity, gender, or sexuality? It's something about the tone of the environment that allows this."

A month later, UCSD administrators took action against Ricardo Dominguez, an art professor who developed a project to help migrants crossing the desert between Mexico and the United States use their cell phones to orient themselves, and find help in an emergency. Hundreds of migrants die in the U.S. desert each year because they cannot locate water or find shelter from the heat.

Conservative Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray objected to university administrators, who placed Dominguez's tenure under review.

According to Graceland West, a San Diego student leader: "We need more resources for immigrants and people of color on this campus. Instead, a professor with a long history of support for us is being punished for taking a pro-immigrant position. When we have cuts to enrollment and student services, and a lack of financial aid, students of color are the hardest hit. Many now see UCSD as a racist campus. At the same time, higher fees hit high school students thinking about coming here. All this basically deters students of color from applying."

-- David Bacon

This article was first published in the Fall, 2010 issue of Rethinking Public Schools.

[David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service, and writes for Truthout, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. His documentary photography has been exhibited widely. His latest book is Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants.]

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's September 7 interview with David Bacon on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin, here. To listen to other shows on Rag Radio, go here.

• For more articles and images, go to David Bacon, Photographs and Stories.

Also see:

• David Bacon: Life in an Immigrant Labor Camp / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2010.
• Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008).
• The photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the U.S., Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006).
• The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004).

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FILM / Rick Ayers : An Inconvenient Superman

An Inconvenient Superman:
Davis Guggenheim’s new film
hijacks school reform

By Rick Ayers / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2010

Davis Guggenheim’s 2010 film Waiting for Superman is a slick marketing piece full of half-truths and distortions. The film suggests the problems in education are the fault of teachers and teacher unions alone, and it asserts that the solution to those problems is a greater focus on top-down instruction driven by test scores.

It rejects the inconvenient truth that our schools are being starved of funds and other necessary resources, and instead opts for an era of privatization and market-driven school change.

Its focus effectively suppresses a more complex and nuanced discussion of what it might actually take to leave no child behind, such as a living wage, a full-employment economy, the demilitarization of our schools, and an education based on the democratic ideal that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. The film is positioned to become a leading voice in framing the debate on school reform, much like Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth did for the discussion of global warming, and that’s heartbreaking.

I’m not categorically opposed to charter schools; they can and often do allow a group of creative and innovative teachers, parents, and communities to build schools that work for their kids and are free of the deadening bureaucracy of most districts. These schools can be catalysts for even larger changes.

But there are really two main opposing positions in the “charter movement” (it’s not really a movement, by the way, but rather a diverse range of different projects). On one side are those who hope to use the charter option to operate effective small schools that are autonomous from districts. On the other side are the corporate powerhouses and the ideological opponents of all things public who see this as a chance to break the teacher’s unions and to privatize education.

Superman is a shill for the latter. Caring, thoughtful teachers are working hard in both types of schools. But their efforts are being framed and defined, even undermined, by powerful forces who have seized the mantle of “reform.”

The film dismisses with a side comment the inconvenient truth that our schools are criminally underfunded. Money’s not the answer, it glibly declares. Nor does it suggest that students would have better outcomes if their communities had jobs, health care, decent housing, and a living wage.

Particularly dishonest is the fact that Guggenheim never mentions the tens of millions of dollars of private money that has poured into the Harlem Children’s Zone, the model and the superman we are relentlessly instructed to aspire to. Those funds create full family services and a state of the art school.

In a sleight of hand, the film magically shifts focus, turning to “bad teaching” as the problem in the poor schools while ignoring these millions of dollars that make people clamor to get into the Promise Academy. As a friend of mine said, “Well, at least now we know what it costs.”

It is so sad to see hundreds of families lined up at these essentially private schools with a public charter cover, praying to get in. Who wouldn’t want to get in? Families are paraded in front of the cameras as they wait for an admission lottery in an auditorium where the winners’ names are pulled from a hat and read aloud, while the losing families trudge out in tears with cameras looming in their faces. Guggenheim gleefully films it all, indulging in what amounts to family and child abuse.

After dismissing funding as a factor, Superman rolls out the drumbeat of attacks on teachers as the first and really the only problem. Except for a few patronizing pats on the head for educators, the film describes school failure as boiling down to bad teachers.

Relying on old clichés that single out the handful of loser teachers anyone could dig up, Waiting for Superman asserts that the unions are the boogeyman. In his perfect world, there would be no unions -- we could drive teacher wages even lower, run schools like little corporations, and race to the bottom just as we have in the manufacturing sector.

Imagining that the profit motive works best, the privatizers propose merit pay for teachers whose students test well. Such a scheme would only lead to adult cheating (which has already started), to well-connected teachers packing their classes with privileged kids, and to an undermining of the very essence of effective schools -- collaboration between teachers, generous community building with students.

It is interesting to note that Arne Duncan’s kids, as well as the Obama kids, attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools -- where teachers had small classes, good pay, and, yes, a union. Students did not concentrate on rote learning and mindless drill and skill or test prep. They were offered in part an exploratory, questioning curriculum. The school for the Obama kids in D.C., Sidwell Friends, also has a unionized faculty. But apparently the masses need to have sweatshop schools.

Waiting for Superman sets up AFT president Randi Weingarten as its Darth Vader -- accompanying her appearance on the screen with dire background music. They tell us that the teachers unions have put $50 million into election campaigns over the last 10 years, essentially buying politicians. Actually, this number is a pittance compared to what corporations and the rich throw in. It is less than Meg Whitman spent of her own money in one run for governor of California.

But the film carefully avoids interviewing Diane Ravitch, the lead organizer of the Education Trust and No Child Left Behind efforts who has been lately writing and speaking about her realization that these reforms have had a disastrous effect on schools and teaching and learning.

When African American and Chicano Latino families in the 1960’s were demanding quality education and access to the resources of the best schools, they were also rejecting the myths about blackness meaning culturally deprived. Today that social revolution has been effectively set back. Schools are more segregated today than before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; nothing is said about that. Black and Brown students are being suspended and expelled, searched and criminalized; not a word.

In place of a movement for transforming power relationships in our society, privatizers and corporate managers step up to define the problem -- proposing a revolution that is anything but revolutionary.

A strong project of education transformation would recognize the funds of knowledge urban students come to school with; it would honor the literacy and language practices of the community. It would support a curriculum of questioning, as students examine their world and imagine ways to make it better.

It would put front and center the need to build learning communities, to motivate students to want to learn and believe there is something worth learning. It would create an engaged learning experience for all students, not just the handful who learn to endure boredom and insult in hopes of high income later.

In the hands of these so-called reformers, though, the only goal is to train urban students to be obedient followers; they never propose a project that transforms and empowers communities, only holding out the promise for a few exceptional students to escape the ghetto. Y

ou can see white middle class audience members sighing, comforted to know that everyone really wants to be like us; that everyone who is not like us is tragic. The film bubbles over with terms like escape and rescue, promoting a liberal charity mentality that is never in solidarity with the local community, only regards it as something dysfunctional that needs to be controlled.

In addition, Waiting for Superman promotes the idea that we are in a dire war for U.S. dominance in the world. The poster advertising the film shows a nightmarish battlefield in stark grey, then a little white girl sitting at a desk is dropped in the midst of it. The text: “The fate of our country won’t be decided on a battlefield. It will be determined in a classroom.”

This is a common theme of the so-called reformers: we are at war with India and China and we have to out-math them and crush them so that we can remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops. But really, who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up as an officer in this war? And when did that fourth grade girl become a soldier in it?

I have nothing against the Chinese, the Indians, or anyone else in the world -- I wish them well. Instead of this Global Social Darwinist fantasy, perhaps we should be helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation, sustainable economies, and equity

Waiting for Superman accepts a theory of learning that is embarrassing in its stupidity. In one of its many little cartoon segments, it purports to show how kids learn. The top of a child’s head is cut open and a jumble of factoids is poured in. Ouch! Oh, and then the evil teacher union and regulations stop this productive pouring project.

The filmmakers betray no understanding of how people actually learn, the active and agentive participation of students in the learning process. They ignore the social construction of knowledge, the difference between deep learning and rote memorization. The film unquestioningly bows down to standardized tests as the measure of student knowledge, school success. Such a testing regime bullies aside deeper learning, authentic assessment, portfolio and project based learning.

Yes, deeper learning like this is difficult to measure with simple numbers -- but we can’t let the desire for simple numbers simplify the educational project. Extensive research has demonstrated definitively that standardized testing reproduces inequities, marginalizes English Language Learners and those who do not grow up speaking a middle class vernacular, dumbs down the curriculum, and misinforms policy. It is the wisdom of the misinformed, accepted against educational evidence and research. Never mind, they declare: we will define the future of education anyway.

Sadly, the narrow and blinkered reasoning in Waiting for Superman is behind the No Child Left Behind disaster rebranded as Race to the Top. Don’t believe the hype. We can and we must do education, and educational change, much differently. We could develop an economy that supported communities which are well-resourced and democratic. We can right now create pathways in which all kids have a reasonable prospect of an honorable, interesting job in their future. And if democracy and the future society concern us at all, we can and we must create schools which unleash students’ creativity, imagination, and initiative.

[Rick Ayers is a former high school teacher, founder of Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and currently Adjunct Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He is author, with his brother William Ayers, of the soon-to-be-released Teaching the Taboo from Teachers College Press. He can be reached at rayers@berkeley.edu .]

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