I am getting really fucking stressed out for my students, most of whom are black and/or latino young men, compounded by the world + working 10 hours at school + a fucked up faculty meeting where I spoke up tho for the kids I work with because I was too tired at that point to give a shit about pissing off white teachers who say derisive things about hip-hop while asking “What does success mean to our students” and then referencing Kim Khardashian who our kids do not give a shit about.

And I don’t want to be a sucker for the old stand by your man shit but I also don’t want to do a politics that abandons men of color and especially young black men. I don’t want to do a feminism that doesn’t get why so much of my energy is spent on worrying about black and latino men in my life who I have this urge to protect while knowing that it’s probably a losing battle.

And white teachers scoff at “rappers” as their only answer to “Who do our students think of as successful?” and after subbing 4 classes, 3 of which involved me being the asshole giving them busywork, I don’t have the energy to go into a character evaluation of Kanye West whose music I am listening to right now and who speaks to me far more than that room of white teachers ever could and same goes for those students who they don’t know how to communicate with but do know how to scoff at behind closed doors.

And then a white lady writes off the smartest kid in the school, the kid who comes to me to borrow books on black history because he isn’t getting it in school and who isn’t afraid to call a pompous white teacher a stupid asshole, and also writes off a kid who has amazing but completely uncontrolled energy who has fucked up things going on that I’m worried will wind him up in the same spot as Trayvon Martin but without a march for him. And another afterschool staff person runs in looking for me to tell me how fucked up it was and I start yelling in the afterschool office and cannot handle all this shit. Just yelling, and someone has to close the door because I’m yelling things like “THEY DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT SHAKESPEARE”

and I cannot handle the erasure and history and am suddenly furious when I’m at school in a bad mood without the kids around. Cause when I’m in a bad mood, the kids who know me recognize it and usually try to help me out on it.

And I’m here reading about violence that young men of color are hunted down by, because what else is there to read about? That’s the news. People are marching for Trayvon Martin, and I am marching for my students and thinking it would be great if I were sure their teachers were too, and hopefully all of us will get somewhere and tht somewhere is JUSTICE and ends with Trayvon and Troy Davis and Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo and Malik Jones and Oscar Grant and all my students who I no longer need to worry about just COLD CHILLIN.

Tomorrow we are doing some basic media literacy by looking at portrayals of black men in the news and talking about youth voices and playing a round of Tell Em Why You’re Mad and I’ll admit to them that I’m PISSED.

readnfight:

Please sign this and pass it on!

Last year, Tonya, a single mother from Bridgeport who was struggling to give five-year-old son a great school was charged by the Norwalk school district for sending her child to one of its schools. Tonya was trying to provide her child with the kind of opportunities you have supported this year through the proposed expansion of high-quality charter schools. But because of residency laws that restrict those choices, Tonya found herself faced with a choice: Send her child to a failing school that wouldn’t meet his needs – and make her child one of many kids damaged by the state’s worst achievement gap – or do what she can to help her child get into a school that would.

As a result of fighting fiercely for the future of her son, as any mother should do, she faced criminal charges– and now she faces an unfair sentence.

Tonya does not deserve this unfair sentence for education theft. So on her behalf, and on behalf of every parent, mother, father, and grandparent faced with a lack of quality opportunities to learn, I ask you to support Tonya’s full pardon for educational theft. With this pardon, you are once again sending the message that Connecticut will put the educational and life needs of children first!

& some recent news in the case:

A Connecticut woman who was homeless has pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her son in the wrong school district.

Tonya McDowell entered her plea Wednesday in Norwalk Superior Court under the Alford Doctrine, meaning she doesn’t admit guilt but concedes the state has enough evidence to convict her.

She also pleaded guilty to selling narcotics. She faces about five years in prison at sentencing.

I’m gonna keep reblogging this because I need people to sign it please. Or at least pass it on.

Please sign this and pass it on!

Last year, Tonya, a single mother from Bridgeport who was struggling to give five-year-old son a great school was charged by the Norwalk school district for sending her child to one of its schools. Tonya was trying to provide her child with the kind of opportunities you have supported this year through the proposed expansion of high-quality charter schools. But because of residency laws that restrict those choices, Tonya found herself faced with a choice: Send her child to a failing school that wouldn’t meet his needs – and make her child one of many kids damaged by the state’s worst achievement gap – or do what she can to help her child get into a school that would.

As a result of fighting fiercely for the future of her son, as any mother should do, she faced criminal charges– and now she faces an unfair sentence.

Tonya does not deserve this unfair sentence for education theft. So on her behalf, and on behalf of every parent, mother, father, and grandparent faced with a lack of quality opportunities to learn, I ask you to support Tonya’s full pardon for educational theft. With this pardon, you are once again sending the message that Connecticut will put the educational and life needs of children first!

& some recent news in the case:

A Connecticut woman who was homeless has pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her son in the wrong school district.

Tonya McDowell entered her plea Wednesday in Norwalk Superior Court under the Alford Doctrine, meaning she doesn’t admit guilt but concedes the state has enough evidence to convict her.

She also pleaded guilty to selling narcotics. She faces about five years in prison at sentencing.

popca:

so! i suppose they are less exciting for me and more exciting for my sister. my sister is going to try and go back to school. you may be thinking college but, no. my sister was pushed out of high school. yes that’s right she didn’t merely drop out, she was pushed out. i’ve heard of this term…

This is something I’ve been mulling over every day for the past bit. Chelsea posted this the very next day after one of my students dropped out. I really felt this same way, like he was pushed out, or at least didn’t have reason to trust we were trying to do what he needed in his life (which I would say counts as a pushout). Then immediately after that, the local paper ran an article about students being pushed into alternative schools.

Yesterday I drank a bunch of coffee (thanks, Mom!) and started over on planning the next issue of my zine, which I’d been stumped on. I want to let it be halfway personal, something I’m very bad at—I tend to keep anything I’m talking about removed from my own (muted) feelings. So, bringing together these sorts of dynamics of education and my own experiences with my students, plus women of color lit as always, I’m working out a new issue finally. This is gonna be a space to put all those things together in the next couple weeks.

liquornspice:

taylormokes:

soydulcedeleche:

everyones all “write books! teach!” and im all “LOL yeah right, like any one would give a fuck bout a random rantin ravin bitch wif no credentials”. so folks are all “but degreeees!!! getchu some”

but you guise, the thought of gettin me some proper book learnin is just so incredibly unappealing. so unappealing.

do not want. (also, do not have the skrilla)

im ignit. and self-educated. i study on what interests me on any given moment. i generally prefer this to college courses. like, greatly.

therefore, nothing i say or think will ever actually matter (thats what degrees and credentials are for—validation of your voice and worth as a person? or something?).

and i think i may be ok with that.

maybe.

no se.

relevance is apparently something you have to not only buy, but study hella boring irrelevant shit for.

perhaps irrelevance is just all ima have lol perhaps….thats ok.

wait, but that’s my whole debate about higher education too. 

This shit is killing me. This “higher learning” bullshit is stabbing me in my soul. I wish I had some kinda talent or skill or drive so I could figure out a way to do life without this shit.

People assume that all the shit I do around ethnic studies/women of color lit & history, that must be what I studied in school. And that because I’m working with kids now as a teacherish, I must have studied education or have a teaching certificate. Nope! I have a physics degree from a fancy place that I hated and have never taken a teaching course in my life. With all the things that matter to me, I’m almost totally self-taught/community-taught.

That said, I know that self-education is something that comes really easily to me but not to a lot of other people. I think it would be cool if some of us who do those kinds of self-education could try to devise curricula in certain areas, and work on it together to share with everyone. That’s kinda what I work on anyway, in less formal ways, with my reading project and zines and our zine distro. But maybe some day (when I have loads of free time!) I could start formalizing more of a starting point curriculum in women of color studies?

There’s a new project I might be starting with some of our students to watch movies and discuss them and have some writing come out of it to make zines (i.e. the school magazine that I’m stumped on), so however that ends up happening I can make our movie list public.

(via strugglingtobeheard)

blowdownthegates:

hermanaresist:

many parents are gearing up for school, preparing for the re/education and erasure of vital lines of histories that their children will likely be endocrined/introduced-lines that deviate from home education. Parents are mentally preparing themselves and their children for the institution that is the public educational system. Parents are re-assuring their children about their unique-ness, embracing their strangeness and setting up measures to avoid the mentality that the govt. school system would like to see in our children-blank stares, blank sponges, but still fit into their stereotypical boxes of brown/black immigrant broken home kids. Good luck.

good luck to you and yours as well, mami. <3

Someone was asking me today about my job, and today being the first day of classes and was I planning on getting a teaching certificate and becoming a for real teacher versus just staying in afterschool work, and in describing typical teacher-student interactions I used the word “animosity”. Turns out the person I was talking to used to be a teacher. Oops. I meant it though.

(via daydreamingaboutassholes)

cooperativecatalyst:

“The public school exists to turn out manageable workers, obedient consumers, manipulable voters, and if need be willing killers” -Jonathan Kozol author of Free Schools

The most notable and recent movement for alternative education occurred in 1960’s to the early 1970’s, and was known as the “free school” movement. The free school movement was an effort to build small alternative schools where students participated equally in governance as well as enjoyed complete control over curriculum. Free school theorist Ron Miller estimates between 400 to 800 such schools opened between 1967 and the late 1970s.The free school movement arose in the midst of an entire cultural, social, and political climate of revolution and change. During this time period, there was what many activists called a “revolution of consciousness.” A spirit of rapid social change with movements such as civil rights, anti-war, women’s liberation, and free speech were in full swing. Most activists who participated in these movements were battling what they called a “technocratic” society.

Technocracy is “a social order that maintains stability and control by fitting human ‘resources’ into appropriate, predefined institutional niches.” Technocracy was considered to be a major contributor to the “social machine.” In many ways, the free school movement was meant to be a black-lash against technocracy. Radical theorists, considered a technocratic society to be a heartless society; a world in which citizens were merely mechanical parts to the overall social machine. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, America was recovering from, and lashing out against  materialism and conformity. Moreover, America was recovering from the age of McCarthyism; a time in which political institutions widely persecuted people and ideas that expressed originality or dissent in any way. All of this led to a massive backlash against consumer culture. The culture of conformity and materialism had also seeped into the education system. The free school movement was a response to an overtly unyielding “factory-like” system of educating American children.

Read More

anomieandthepanacea:

I am only interested in education if it is ‘free’ (meaing democratic, non-hierarchical, and student centred a.k.a. ‘free schools’) or ’popular’ (in this case meaning ‘of the people’ a.k.a. popular education)

Popular Eduacation has 6 key figures.  It is:

1) Rooted in the interests and struggles of ordinary people

2) Overtly political and critical of the status quo

3) Committed to progressive social and political change

4) Based on the concrete experience and material interests of people in communities of resistance and struggle

5) Pedagogically collective, primarily focused on the group 

6) Utilized to forge a direct link between education and social action

That is, as opposed to educational models that:

- perpetuate the status quo

- treat people like blank states where the educator imposes a curriculum based on what they think people should know (or just what’s traditionally been taught)

- don’t value or care about peoples’ personal experiences

 What I’m not yet good enough at

5. Just because doing x raises standardized test scores doesn’t mean x should be done

At the very least, we would need evidence that the test in question is a source of useful information about whether our teaching and learning goals are being met. Many educators have argued that the tests being used in our schools are unsatisfactory for several reasons.

First, there are numerous limitations with specific tests. Second, most tests share certain problematic features, such as being timed (which places more of a premium on speed than on thoughtfulness), norm-referenced (which means the tests are designed to tell us who’s beating whom, not how well students have learned or teachers have taught), and consisting largely of multiple-choice questions (which don’t permit students to generate or even explain their answers).

The third reason is the problems inherent to all tests that are standardized and created by people far away from the classroom — as opposed to assessing the actual learning taking place there on an on-going basis.

This is not the place to explain in detail why standardized tests measure what matters least. Here, I want only to make the simpler — and, once again, I think, indisputable — point that anyone who regards high or rising test scores as good news has an obligation to show that the tests themselves are good. If a test result can’t be convincingly shown to be both valid and meaningful, then whatever we did to achieve that result — say, a new curriculum or instructional strategy — may well have no merit whatsoever. It may even prove to be destructive when assessed by better criteria. Indeed, a school or district might be getting worse even as its test scores rise.

So how is it that articles in newspapers and education journals, as well as pronouncements by public officials and think tanks, seem to accept on faith that better scores on any test necessarily constitute good news, and that whatever produced those scores can be described as “effective”? Parents should be encouraged to ask, “How much time was sacrificed from real learning just so our kids could get better at taking the [name of test]?”

—Alfie Kohn

Bolding is mine. My kids know I think standardized testing is a bunch of waste of time, racist, pointless mess. And yet, I had to administer a standardized test a few days ago as part of what we have to do to get funding as a charter school. I still feel filthy from doing it.

By Brian Pickett

It was a Thursday afternoon just before 4 p.m. I was sitting with my students around an old wooden table in the library of New York City’s Jamaica High School. We were one day away from the scheduled performance of a play the students had written about school “reform” and specifically the planned phaseout of Jamaica High. From the excited talk amongst the students about costume choices and their nervousness about remembering their lines, it was clear they had no idea what was coming. But I was bracing myself to deliver some bad news. Earlier in the day I had received an email from a colleague informing me that the performance was being barred by the students’ principals, who “had issues with the script and are concerned about implications and negative references to the department of education as well as the chancellor and mayor.”

I just read this article in Rethinking Schools magazine. It sounds like an amazing and empowering experience for the students. I’m trying to read stories like this because I’m bottomlining a student social justice group at my school in the fall, and need to figure out what we’ll work on.

educationpolicy:

By the great Alfie Kohn

Reading this now. He’s preachin it: “5. Just because doing x raises standardized test scores doesn’t mean x should be done”

uatjonc:

“Segregation enabled black folks to maintain oppositional worldviews and standpoints to counter the effects of racism and to nurture resistance. The effectiveness of those survival strategies was made evident by both civil rights movements and the militant resistance that followed in their wake. This resistance to colonialism was so fierce, a new strategy was required to maintain and perpetuate white supremacy. Racial integration was that strategy. It was the setting for the emergence of neo-colonial white supremacy. Placed in positions of authority in educational structures and on the job, white people could oversee and eradicate organized resistance. The new neo-colonial environment gave white folks even greater access and control over the African-American mind. Integrated educational structures were the locations where whites could best colonize the minds and imaginations of black folks.”

—

bell hooks, “Teaching Resistance,” Killing Rage p. 109

One of the pieces I’m working on for my zine is about exactly this, about the anxiety caused by integration and being “accepted” into white communities—but of course still kept at a distance—and the role of school integration in that. So of course I gushed over this passage when I found it.

(via readnfight)

This reminds me so much of one of the ideas Malcolm X shared in many of his speeches: that black folks cannot stop to gain anything by integrating into the white community and that most importantly, we need to open and run our own schools if we want our children to be free of white oppression. 

Yes! Exactly where I’m going with this in my zine, which I will also post on here. I’m splitting the zine half about mental health, half about education, and smooshed in between bridging the gap between those two things is this exact line of thought. Great minds, y’all.