Plans for the future

If you’re here, then you’ve at least decided to dig a little deeper into the future possibilities of the PrESS Network.

As a result of last summer’s retreat, we decided that NCLB would be a focus for our network. To that end, my fall research students did a great deal of background work on NCLB, which they have posted on this site. See some of the more recent archives from the fall for this information. Additionally, Drew has continued his research on the achievement gap, for which I know he would gladly share. All along, my thought has been to hold a couple/series of community conversations with parents related to NCLB. Currently, Gina is checking into two sites for possible conversations: Americana community center, and the KY Alliance headquarters in the West End. I think it may also be appropriate to hold another meeting in the East End, perhaps at some place like Rev. Dean Bucalos’ Douglas Blvd. Christian Church. We’d like to hold these conversations yet this school year.

Next, I would like to hold a couple/series of professional developments this summer for teachers interested in learning more about NCLB and what they can do in their classroom. Indeed, two issues strike me as fundamental for resistance as a result of NCLB: hyper-standardization of curriculum and thinking, and the military’s contact with kids in school who are being (necessarily and consciously) left behind. In these workshops, I would also like to involve JCTA or broader union help, so that we can be clear on what we’re up against and how the union can support us. We might also bring to town folks from Rethinking Schools and the Rouge Forum to assist in these efforts.

Next, we need to take on NCATE, AACTE, and ETS, and be a visible school of education in this struggle.

Finally, we need to work together on curriculum and supporting each other’s efforts in the classroom. Drew has launched some amazing work at Fairdale that we can tap into. I know others of you are doing equally outstanding work and we want to help.

Other ideas?

revisiting the mission

The PrESS Network is a critically-engaged, hopeful, and supportive voice for change. It's members are dedicated to affirming the basic rights of and creating realistic solutions with children and families who are disenfranchised by an unjust socio-economic structure. This empowering partnership seeks to facilitate system-wide change through respect for social difference, humanistic teaching, service to others, transformative dialog, and an ever-evolving journey toward connectedness.

the revolution

In a recent column at pucknation.com (http://www.pucknation.com/index.php?mod=3&id=154&article=1478&indiv=18), I outlined five essential issues/concepts confronting the organic intellectual. Recall, organic intellectuals are those with access to the knowledge/information of the elite who use it to work with and for the masses of dispossessed/marginalized/oppressed. This access might come through education (just 1% of the world’s population ever achieves a bachelor’s degree) or it may come through some privileged status related to race, class, gender to which advantages are often given rather than earned. Recall, also, that these five issues/concepts revolve around love, peace, solidarity, courage, and hope.

In this reflection, which comes more from the gut and heart, and less from theory and my academic training, I want to focus on why the struggle for justice is so necessary, why the role of the organic intellectual is needed, and how these issues/concepts might/should be lived out.

Why the struggle is necessary
Over the last two weekends, I have traveled to New York City and Detroit for academic conferences. The New York City conference was a complete joke and waste of time. I got a much greater education from my travels around NYC with Milton, feeling at home among such a great diversity of humanity. The conference that I traveled to in Detroit, however, with Gina, was quite different—learning a great deal from the radical, intellectual, and courageous group of teachers, students, professors, and cultural workers gathered there.

Over both weekends, I had long periods of time to reflect whether traveling by plane or car. As well, there were also long periods of dialogue over food, beer, and wine with critical colleagues and friends. In my reflections and discussions, I was constantly drawn back to four events over the last 5+ years that demonstrate capitalism’s oppression over most of the world and why we are in such deep shit.

The Iraq War
On September 11, 2001 the United States experienced a phenomenon that many places around the globe were familiar with: terrorism. Many nations, in fact, have been familiar with the US’s own versions of terrorism—whether that be eastern encroachment onto native lands in the US; dropping atomic weapons on civilian sites in Japan to end WWII; military interventions/coups throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and South America during the Cold War; or economic colonialism through our coercive management of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. In any event, terrorism inevitably found its way to the US and resulted in the unfortunate and despicable loss of life of thousands of people. In response, rather than going after the source of the offenders with the full force of our military, we used that to attack Iraq—and sent a much smaller contingency to Afghanistan (where we have yet to be successful in tracking down the architect of 9/11, Osama bin Laden).

Of course, the evidence is now clearer than ever that we are in Iraq with such force given its rich oil reserves and our inability to get off the sauce that is this exhaustible natural resource. We were lied to. And, even give the resistance of many here at home and most people around the globe, we went to war. Now, between one hundred thousand and six hundred thousand innocent civilians have been murdered.

While the world was shocked and awed at the hubris of the lone empire in the world to exert itself upon another nation, unprovoked, I continue to be shocked and awed at our apathetic response to one of the most illegitimate wars in history. Indeed, a massive anti-war movement existed in the US prior to the invasion. But for a few groups such as MoveOn.org, the voices are now silent. At best, they are quiet, even in the face of more and more evidence that we were duped.

Do we not want to admit we were duped? Do we value the life of an Iraqi child less than that of some other nation’s child? Do we secretly agree with the over-arching reason for the war, recognizing that we will ultimately benefit from the oil coming our way? Do we devalue life so easily? Do we really see no other option than capitalism? In a system in which Exxon makes record profits from oil, while children die in Iraq, more countries hate us, and the poor, working, and middle classes of our own country struggle to fill up their gas-guzzling American-made automobiles?

Hurricane Katrina: An economic and political nightmare, as well as a harbinger for global warming
In a previous column, I reported on the way Hurricane Katrina challenged an ‘American’ way of life, as it pulled back the covers on racism and poverty in our country. Now, more than a year and a half after this ‘natural’ tragedy, New Orleans remains a shell of what it once was. Many of the poor and people of color are still gone; cushy contracts with private building corporations are signed to bolster profits for shareholders during the reconstruction; most public schools have been disbanded and teachers fired in favor of charter schools, which use public money for private interest and prevent the formation of unions; and the president can’t even mention the city—the site of the worst ‘natural’ disaster in recent US history—in his State of the Union address, given that he promised to rebuild it. (The State of the Union would have been an appropriate time to report on his progress, or lack there of.)

No doubt you’ve noted that I bring attention to ‘natural’ in the paragraph above. Mounting evidence suggests that this disaster may actually have a more human cause, related to global warming as a result of our use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Nearly every scientist, who has done the research, supports the premise that humans are the cause for the current global warming. But, you’d be hard-pressed to know it sometimes given the media’s fascination with wanting to hold a debate on the subject. If 99 people feel one way and 1 person feels the other, can you call it a debate? Also, getting accurate information to our students is also proving complicated. For instance, BP Oil recently paid Albuquerque schools $500,000 to use their curriculum on energy conservation. Also, recently, the Seattle school board denied local teachers the possibility of showing An Inconvenient Truth in their classes because it only provided one perspective on the global warming story. So, they concluded, it would not be appropriate to only give the students one side. And, what is the other side exactly? Does a rogue scientist or two make a side? What about BP Oil’s curriculum? Fair and balanced? Why are we afraid to admit and tell our kids that we are responsible for the glaciers melting, the thinning of the permafrost, the rise in ocean levels, and the damn hot summers (springs, and falls)? What connections can we draw to the Iraq War above? Why do we continue to refuse to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol (that most of the rest of the world is signatory to)? What role does capitalism play in our blinding path toward destruction? Who is profiting from this path? Who loses?

Darfur: Genocide again
Genocide is the spectre haunting Africa, again. In the Darfur region of Sudan, somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 people have been killed, several hundred thousand more are on the run, and the conflict is spilling over into neighboring countries. This time, unlike Rwanda in the 80s, we’re actually calling it genocide. But, our response has been as (a)pathetic. Essentially, we are doing nothing to stop the killing. Indeed, we are working through diplomatic channels with the African Union, but the progress is slow. Criminal indictments have been handed down from the International Criminal Court (an international body we do not belong to for fear our own leaders would be charged with war crimes), but this has not stopped the bloodshed.

Does anyone seriously believe that if we really valued the lives of the innocent people who are being mutilated, we wouldn’t do more to stop it? The US has shown it will attack another nation unprovoked. What makes Sudan any different? Is it racially motivated—because African lives matter less than American or European lives (remember what we did about genocide in the Balkans)? Perhaps. Is it because there is nothing there we want? No. In fact, Sudan has quite a bit of oil that we would be very interested in. However, the Sudanese have close contact with the Chinese, as the Chinese find themselves needing more and more oil (based on their new capitalist agenda). My guess is, we don’t want to cross a country of 1.3 billion people and a government that holds the purse strings on quite a bit of American debt—a debt we really can’t afford to pay back. So, we are challenged militarily and economically (and selfishly) by the genocide in Sudan.

Have we lost our moral compass? Have we put some lives ahead of others? Have we put profits above human life? After this genocide is over and claims, perhaps, a million lives, will we once again chant, “Never again,” and watch while another genocide ensues in some other poor corner of the world (coming up with all sorts of new excuses)?

NCLB: Killing our own kids
The killing is happening here at home. Day after day we kill our children intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally through educational policies like No Child Left Behind. Indeed NCLB has, in essence, been an unprovoked war on our nation’s poor children and children of color as the achievement gap continues to worsen. Additionally, we subjugate poor children and children of color (who are increasingly becoming more and more segregated in schools) to new types of classroom management strategies that are akin to ones used in drug rehabilitation and the prison system. Moreover, we subject all our kids to a more corporatized curriculum that prepares their minds for markets, breeds consumptive desire, and limits critical thinking.

This hyper-standardization focuses nearly entirely on the economic purposes of getting an education, rather than the more aesthetic purposes of becoming a more complete human being or critical purposes for how to live in a democracy. Moreover, the rigidified testing mechanisms employed go to great lengths to divide rich and poor, pre-stratifying a future workforce, ensuring the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. And, we have places for the poor and working class, as we have created a profit-driven prison industry that is looking for residents and a war that needs more soldiers.

Unfortunately, this is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue, since both parties support policies like NCLB. This is a corporate-driven, privatizing issue that seeks to undermine the foundation of a democratic society: public schooling. Do we like kids this little that we would subject them to such un-researched, unrelenting, and unconscionable policy? Should capitalism play any role in education? Should children be viewed as investments (objects) or humans (subjects)? What should be the purpose of education? Whether it is 2nd grade or graduate school?

Why the role of the organic intellectual is so necessary
This is a question for the organic intellectual and reveals why their role is so necessary. Teachers, professors, students, cultural workers, and community activists (those who can fulfill this role) must seek to answer these questions and recognize the disturbing trends occurring all around us. No longer can we accept blissful ignorance, nor pretend we do not see it. We must endeavor to make sense of the present, however complicated or imperfect, through the lens of the past in order to begin considering the future. If those with the potential access to this information do not do it, who will?

The oppressed/marginalized/disenfranchised bring a lived experience that is necessary to the revolution. It is their experience and oppression that must provide the moral momentum. The organic intellectual, though, provides the ethical direction: connecting the historical dots, solidaristically affirming the need for monumental change, and using the knowledge of the elite to suggest something better, something that benefits all, something more profoundly human.

We will not do this without struggle. We will not do it without feeling alone at times. So, we will need courage.

Being, living, and becoming
This courage will necessitate us merging our economic, political, social, and spiritual lives toward a more ethical and moral existence. We will need to find these contradictions in our own lives and attempt to reconcile them toward a more purposeful and powerful direction of social change. We cannot allow history to continue to slip by, not noting its similarities to the present, however imprecise. We cannot observe the confluence of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, Darfur, and NCLB and ignore the role of capital in exploiting the lives of those put at the margins. Something healthier, more beautiful, and more human must be possible.

Thankfully, we have models we can look to for our direction. We can look to the recent Detroit teacher’s strike, for which hundreds of urban public school teachers stood together with parents on behalf of their kids (until the union sold them short and the suburban teachers and others would not stand with them). Globally, we might look to the continued struggle of the Oaxacan teachers in Mexico, constantly fighting for the educative rights of their kids. But, we don’t even have to look that far. We can look at the struggle being taken up everyday by resistant and revolutionary teachers, professors, cultural workers, and community activists. While they have been socialized in the same individualistic and consumeristic culture we have, they have somehow managed to shed its seductiveness toward something better, more authentic, and just. This is my dispatch that applauds and enjoins their struggle. Our kids and our future can’t wait much longer.