It Was Never Just: On Student Activism and Racism (A Reader)

November 12, 2015 plthomasedd Leave a comment

It was never just Ferguson, and it is not just the University of Missouri or Yale.

Social inequity/racism and institutional racism are nearly impossible to ignore, although many still try to deflect repeated acts of violence toward blacks by police officers—in the streets and schools’ hallways—as well as the patterns of racist aggressions in the workplace and on college campuses by pointing their fingers at “bad” individuals.

White denial may be at a tipping point in the U.S. since student activism on college campuses appears to be resurfacing in ways associated with the Civil Rights era of the mid-twentieth century.

While demanding that the oppressed and wronged take the lead is problematic—it is of course the moral obligation of those with power to do the right thing—black college students and athletes taking stands against racism and inequity, stands for social justice deserve support and praise, but they deserve even more to be heard and then for all of us to act.

Here, I offer a reader related to student activism and racism spurred by the University of Missouri’s and Yale’s recent controversies:

MU students tell their stories of everyday racism

The Vilification of Student Activists at Yale, Gillian B. White

3 Lessons From University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe’s Resignation, David Zirin

The Missouri Tigers and the Hidden History of Black College Football Activists, David Zirin

READ: Two Personal Statements That Help Explain The Situation At Mizzou (NPR)

Players Strike Back: Howard’s 11 Goes on Strike, Louise Moore

The University of Missouri students who forced their president to resign

Young Black People See the News Media’s Double Standard, Catherine R. Squires

A History of Racism at the University of Missouri, Brent Staples

Does Missouri president ouster offer lessons to universities grappling with a racist past?, A.D. Carson

[Clemson’s Tillman Hall and the Tragedy of Southern Tradition]

Perspective on Mizzou, David Ubben

Alleged racism at Yale, University of Missouri: Are colleges taking it seriously?

A Few Good Reads On The Missouri Protesters And Journalistic Outrage, Tasneem Raja

Student Activism Is Serious Business, Roxane Gay

I’m a black Yale grad, and its racial firestorm doesn’t surprise me: Now it’s time for the administration to act, Courtney McKinney

Our Republic Will Withstand College Students Protesting, John Warner

Three Cheers for Student Protests, John Warner

Students Share What It’s Like To Be Black At Mizzou

At Missouri, ‘right now, we are facing the backlash,’ Cristina Mislán

Missouri activists vs. the press is still a story about race: This is what happens when black students can’t trust the media, Paul Young Lee

Enter the Real Power of College Sports, Thabiti Lewis

4 Things You Might Have Wrong about the Mizzou Story, Ryan Famuliner

Capitalism

Fantasy Sports USA: “Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs”

November 10, 2015 plthomasedd Leave a comment

“Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.” [Bill Gorton]

“We’ll get one on the way back.” [Jake Barnes]

“All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Talking with a senior English major who is certifying to teach high school ELA, I recently reached for my teaching copy of The Sun Also Rises, talking far too excitedly as I usually do when I reminisce about my wonderful high school students from 18 years of teaching in my hometown high school.

I had placed several notes and clippings in the novel, decorated with a number of highlighter colors and marginalia for teaching. One folded piece of notebook paper was a sketch by a student of the key line quoted above about the road to hell; an old Gary Larson Far Side calendar page had a stick-drawing of the novel as well.

I was a Hemingway advocate when teaching U.S. literature, but my students were overwhelmingly Fitzgerald. Yet, in the end, many of my students were just all in with whatever I asked them to do. We loved each other, and we often really just enjoyed having class. I am idealizing some, yes, but those were golden days that I treasure and often get to relive because of the magic of social media and remaining virtual friends with many of those students.

Students then likely didn’t really care as much as I did about our discussions of Hemingway’s insightful portrayal of the emptiness many from the U.S. felt post-WWI, especially the expatriated artists who called themselves the Lost Generation.

As I write this, barely past Halloween 2015, the Christmas season has ramped up as if Thanksgiving doesn’t exist (except for Black Friday), and the seasonal yammering about the war on Christmas has begun.

It is very much a U.S. thing for the majority, those with the upper-hand, to play the role of the oppressed—while simultaneously shaming those actually oppressed for daring to speak against inequity.

As I write this, the Christian horror of the moment is a coffee chain’s choice for cups during the holidays.

I cannot help noting that Christmas is the largest consumerism orgy imaginable—during the season born out of the coming of Jesus to this planet, a religious figure and religion that reject the material world. Lay down your worldly possessions and follow me, and all that.

For a people who beat a false drum about being a Christian nation, founded by Christian principles, we are a soulless lot—never raising much of a finger for the impoverished or the disadvantaged.

Suck it up, that’s our mantra.

And although I do not still teach Hemingway each academic year, I am convinced that the essential message of how our empty consumerism defines us—”‘Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs'”—has now reached its logical conclusion: fantasy sports.

Our precious NFL—violent, sanctimonious, and superficially repentant—does not hold that spot, but now the cash promise of fantasy football (bannered across NFL games and ESPN) does, and does so perfectly.

We are not a people playing and watching thinly masked gladiator sport (as fake as that is, as soulless as that is); we are a people playing a game about a game in hopes of making money—a chance about as likely as the lottery.

Yes, the road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs. We have walked it. We are there.

Education

The Politics of Teaching Grammar

November 5, 2015 plthomasedd 9 Comments

The pronoun/antecedent debate about “they” has continued at the NCTE Connected Community’s Teaching and Learning forum—mostly by advocates of prescriptive grammar.

That many English teachers continue to beat the drum for prescriptive rules is troubling—as I noted earlier when calling for descriptive grammar and conventional awareness. Troubling on one level since prescriptive grammar is solidly refuted by linguistics and the history of the English language [1]; troubling on another level since one staunch defense of the rules posted at the forum by an English teacher included a dangling modifier—highlighting that prescriptive grammarians often by necessity are themselves picking and choosing which “rules” to emphasize (an ironic type of descriptive grammar).

Another post called for ELA teachers to “hold the line with pronoun – antecedent agreement” because “[w]hile I think that grammar is a reflection of society, this is really about singular vs. plural. It is not a political platform.”

And that last claim, I think, is an important place to consider further why a rules-based approach to language is failing both the language and our students.

First, critical pedagogy and critical literacy begin with the recognition that all human interaction, including language and teaching, is political. As Joe Kincheloe explains about teaching:

[P]roponents of critical pedagogy understand that every dimension of schooling and every form of educational practice are politically contested spaces. Shaped by history and challenged by a wide range of interest groups, educational practice is a fuzzy concept as it takes place in numerous settings, is shaped by a plethora of often-invisible forces, and can operate even in the name of democracy and justice to be totalitarian and oppressive. (p. 2)

And thus, making the claim that students must conform to prescriptive rules of language usage because those rules are not political is both a political act itself and a false claim that language can somehow be politically neutral. Endorsing prescriptive grammar instruction cannot be divorced from the historical fact that standard grammar has been used to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism

As well, the literature we teachers of ELA often assign—from George Orwell’s 1984 and essays to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—illustrates that who controls language controls people; these works also highlight how that imbalance of power is unfair.

As linguists show, all identifiable types of language usage (standard English, AAVE, etc.) are simply somewhat cohesive versions, none any superior to the other except that some group in power creates that status of standard or “correct.”

Therefore, again, all language usage and the teaching of language are inevitably about power, always political.

With that context, then, the teaching of ELA should prefer an authoritative stance instead of an authoritarian one (see the writings of Paulo Freire).

Authoritative teaching of language generates teacher authority based on that teacher’s knowledge and experience with language (in terms of grammar, I would argue that includes essentially linguistics and the history of the English language). Authoritative teaching seeks to foster the student’s authority through that students’ understanding conventional usages as well as the biases associated with those usages.

Authoritarian teaching of language is the rules approach, in which teacher authority is grounded in the status of being the teacher, and the authoritarian stance necessarily asserts the authority’s (teacher’s) politics and mutes the politics of the subservient (student). Authoritarian teaching simply demands compliance—applying rules because they are rules.

As teachers of ELA, we are serving our students and the language well if we see language usage as something to be investigated and interrogated—not as a mechanism for imposing our authority on the student.

Those students can and should be guided in investigating and interrogating why we have standard English—who it benefits and why so that their own awareness about the power of language serves them and not those who use it to deny other people their political voices.

—

[1] Both in the false notion that some language use is inherently superior to others (as opposed to the arbitrary nature of standard forms based on who has political power), and against the reality that all language usage evolves, changes (and thus, trying to stop that change is misunderstanding the basic nature of language).

A Tale of Two Teachers: The Politics of Personal Teaching, Nat Hentoff

CCSS, Charter schools, Testing

The Very Persistent Delusions of Billionaire-Edureformers

November 3, 2015 plthomasedd 4 Comments

Billionaire-Edureformer extraordinaire Bill Gates “sat in a gray easy chair” at Clemson University’s Tillman Hall (yes, that Tillman Hall) to pontificate once more on education reform.

Gates soothed the crowd by explaining “that if they get frustrated at the lack of change in American education policy, they should ‘go into a charter school’ to see quality change,” reported Nathaniel Cary.

And, on que, “Gates defended the Common Core,” and of course, “innovation,” before tossing out his old standby: “Improving the quality of teachers across the country is the only way to close the gap for all students, an initiative his foundation supports [read: ‘purchases’], he said.”

Delusion 1: Gates has financed and perpetuated the same accountability policies started in the early 1980s. If there is a “lack of change” in education (and there is), it is very much at Gates’s feet (or enormous wallet).

Delusion 2: School choice, including charter schools and public school choice, has resulted in outcomes that are indistinguishable from traditional public schools, as I detailed in 2010, and as the Center for Public Education concludes in this October 2015 analysis:

In general, we find that school choices work for some students sometimes, are worse for some students sometimes, and are usually no better or worse than traditional public schools. We hope that this report will inform the ongoing conversation about the efficacy of school choice in the nation’s efforts to assure every child is prepared for college, careers and citizenship.

Delusion 3: After thirty-plus years of education accountability driven by ever-new standards and ever-new high-stakes testing, what does the research reveal?:

There is, for example, no evidence that states within the U.S. score higher or lower on the NAEP based on the rigor of their state standards. Similarly, international test data show no pronounced test score advantage on the basis of the presence or absence of national standards. Further, the wave of high-stakes testing associated with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has resulted in the “dumbing down” and narrowing of the curriculum….

As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself.

Delusion 4: What do we know about teacher quality and its impact on student achievement—or, is teacher quality the “only way” to close the gap? Teacher quality, in fact, is less significant than “unexplained”:

But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998;Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

With apologies to George Saunders, Gates lounging comfortably in a state university building named for a murderous racist while spouting what at best are misrepresentations and at worst out-and-out lies about education reform is just another example of the very persistent delusions of billionaire-edureformers.

race, zero tolerance

Resisting Good/Bad Teacher/Police Frame and Confronting Systemic Flaws in Education, Law Enforcement

November 1, 2015 plthomasedd 4 Comments

[Expanded and revised at Alternet: A Few Bad Actors? A Former Teacher on Classroom Cops]

The Spring Valley High controversy created by the excessive force used by a police officer on campus represents the intersection of the wider and growing public debates about so-called bad teachers and bad police.

Let me clarify first that I was a public school teacher for 18 years, and I have family members and good friends who are or were police officers. Speaking about the fields of teaching and law enforcement, I would typically be supportive of the individual people who choose these professions that are primarily about serving the public good. Of course, I have dear friends and family members I also consider to be wonderful people, good people who are also outstanding in their professions as teachers and police officers.

I have also heard these good people say and watched them do things that are detrimental to children and adults, things steeped in racism, homophobia, sexism, and classism.

As a teacher (coach and parents, also), I often made mistakes, ones that were detrimental to students and teens. I also came home from teaching on more than one instance with students’ blood splattered on my clothes after breaking up fights. Once, I stood face-to-face with a student of mine who had come on campus with a shotgun planning to shoot a female with whom he had developed an unhealthy fascination.

I am not under the delusion that teachers and police officers must be perfect, and I am well aware that both professions are sometimes (teaching) and often (law enforcement) extremely dangerous for the professionals who are not financially compensated in ways that match their responsibility or the dangers they encounter.

As well, I have almost no tolerance for the political and public demonizing of bad teachers and bad police officers—the finger-pointing at manufactured scapegoats similar to the Reagan era “welfare queen,” which we know was an ugly, racist tactic that misrepresented welfare recipients; the finger-pointing at black-on-black crime that willfully ignores that white-on-white crime is essentially at the same rate (virtually all crime is within race, that is).

Therefore, we are in a difficult position as a society, one that requires all of us to consider the black girl being slammed to the classroom floor against the shooting and killing of Tamir Rice.

To step back from “she should have just done as she was told,” to refrain from blaming the victim.

In fact, we need to refrain from pointing fingers at individuals because many teacher and police officer errors in judgment and tragic behaviors are the result of the larger systemic flaws in our society and the institutions of formal education and criminal justice.

Responding to the incident at Spring Valley High, Camika Royal, a professor of urban education at Loyola University in Maryland, explained:

“Instead of making her cell phone and/or her behavior the focus of his class, he could have told her he would deal with her after class,” Royal wrote in an email to TakePart. “Because of his choice not to let it go, to contact the administrator instead, he kept students from learning, and he disrupted the learning environment.”

In the classroom, wrote Royal, “power struggles with students rarely end well.”

It appears the student put away her phone, but didn’t want to hand it over. This was a situation escalated by the adults in authority. The infraction could easily have been addressed after class.

While far more tragic, Tamir Rice’s life also was extinguished because the officer with authority escalated the situation, over-reacted.

I want to stress that such over-reactions must not be discounted or trivialized as individual behaviors, but must be recognized as the result of normalized expectations, cultural tolerance of how some people, including children, can and should be treated.

As I have examined before, why were public discussions about domestic abuse of women prompted by NFL high-profile incidences absent support for hitting women, but the concurrent debates about hitting children all included pro-spanking arguments?

Because of a lingering normalized acceptance of hitting children that is entirely refuted by research and the medical profession.

Teachers and police officers (including black teachers and police officers) are themselves agents of pervasive systemic biases that continue to disproportionately and negatively impact people and children of color: black children are perceived as being older than their biological ages, black children are punished in school while white children are prescribed medications or provided counseling, black communities are targeted more often by law enforcement, blacks are charged and convicted at higher rates than whites for the same infractions, and blacks and whites use recreational drugs at the same rates but blacks are significantly more likely to be punished for that use.

Just as there is no safe or positive amount of corporal punishment for children—and just as the evidence shows that corporal punishment makes children aggressive and violent adults—the research is powerful that police in the hallways and zero tolerance policies in schools both disproportionately target majority-minority schools and criminalize students.

Yes, we must take care to address individual cases such as the one at Spring Valley High, but if we focus all of our energy on who to blame and if or how we should punish the police officer, we are likely to allow the larger forces to exist that will insure we will continue to face these avoidable situations again and again.

The best day in my teaching career was when I learned to de-escalate tension between me and a student. That day I began creating a classroom in which we all could avoid conflict and disruptions. Most of that change was mine to recognize and to manage—not the teens who were in my care.

The teen at Spring Valley High should never have been slammed to the floor, and Tamir Rice should be alive. Just as teachers and police officers need not be perfect, neither of these young people should have to be perfect to avoid violence and death at the hands of people charged to protect and serve them.

The first step to a solution is admitting the problem: Education and law enforcement in the U.S. are both poisoned by the facts of racism remaining in our culture. Denying that fact is embracing that racism.

Teachers and police officers need not be perfect, but teaching and law enforcement must be better, and we must make that happen immediately.

All the White Responses (and the Game Is Rigged)