schoolracetalk.org

I am always seeking "gold nugget" quotes.

Here's one I found in John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed (1897)(http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm).

“To prepare [a student] for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities. . .”

It reminded me of a post-Civil War quote I often read to begin courses or workshops, as it's the most stirring definition I’ve ever heard of what education is supposed to be about.

In 1865, black delegates in Charleston, South Carolina petitioned the legislature for basic rights in the post-Emancipation South. In defiance of increasingly common "Black Codes" restricting black people's pursuit of opportunity, the delegates presented a list of human rights demands. For example, they demanded the right to assemble to discuss politics, to amass wealth, to farm and conduct trade, and so forth. And as Vincent Harding writes in his book There is a River (1981, p. 326), “To this, they added a summary human right not normally found in the public documents of the nation:

'the right to develop our whole being, by all the appliances that belong to a civilized society.' "

I find these quotes unusually inspiring descriptions of the purpose of education.

Hard to believe:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/18/arizona-b...

The erasure of facts and narratives from the written record available to young people isn't education.

The phrase "school to prison pipeline" has surged in recent years, to describe how school discipline policies, law enforcement policies, and a context of mass incarceration intersect to "track" disproportionate numbers of young people -- young people of color, in particular -- into prisons.

But repeating the phrase doesn't accomplish much: we need concrete information about how this cycle works. When I worked at the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, I saw various concrete examples: in one school, Latino students wandering the halls were disproportionately referred to the local police department as likely gang members. That meant that a school discipline experience turned into an actual police record.

This interview by author Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is a useful resource for those exploring the "school to prison pipeline." One quote below:

http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michelle-alexander...

"The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they’re in silos. But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces." -Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

We often insinuate in educational debates that people are educationally and professionally successful due to their own individual hard work alone.

This recent quote from Elizabeth Warren succinctly adds an important logic to such debates: in fact, every successful person has benefited in some way from public money. And so, paying it back "for the next kid" (e.g., funding public education) is part of the deal.

http://front.moveon.org/the-elizabeth-warren-quote-every-american-needs-...

These sorts of everyday arguments (and facts) are very useful to have at hand in conversations about inequality in education. Otherwise, we really just rehash opposing opinions.

Students in my last Everyday Antiracism class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Spring 2011) just created this collective "action plan" for schoolwide antiracist effort. It's a set of suggestions from educators, for educators.

By antiracist effort, we mean everyday acts by educators that counteract:

a. Inequality of opportunity, access, and outcome along lines of race/class/ethnicity/national origin/language;

b. False, harmful, and stereotypical ideas about “types of people.”

See what you think.

My Everyday Antiracism class from Harvard's GSE went over to the Boston Science Museum to see the Race exhibit put on by the American Anthropological Association (to which I belong).

I spent half my time learning details about the history of the U.S. Census and the rest of my time at the section on health and race, because I've always found that discussions of disease stymie discussions about how race categories are biologically bogus (but structurally/historically, very real). What about sickle cell? people say. Tay-Sachs?

A good quote: "There is no genetic basis for race. The vast genetic diversity within each so-called race makes race unsuitable as a marker for genetics. A better substitute for genetics is ancestry or family history."

Stated otherwise: race categories aren't useful as containers for our genetic, biological diversity. They are too blobby, too big, and, too human-made.

"Ancestry" (where in the world your ancestors lived) is a much more precise, and valid, way of talking about your background and genetic propensity for diseases.

A good quote: "should race be used in medical research?" "Certain diseases are more common among people with a particular ancestry than among the general population. But racial categories are just too big and imprecise to indicate anything medically meaningful about a person's ancestry. In order to be truly pertinent, the data gathered in medical studies must track ancestry at the level of specific country or region."

E.g.s from the cards I read, of how race categories are too "big and imprecise" and country/region of origin works better to think about disease:

*Sickle cell is more prevalent in West Africa and Southern Europe, and the Middle East and South Asia, but not Southern Africa or Northern Europe.

*Northern Europeans are more at risk for cystic fibrosis than Southern Europeans, even while both are considered "white" on the US Census.

*Eastern Europeans are more at risk for Tay-Sachs than Western Europeans.

*"Asian" lumping overlooks more precise facts: e.g., Filipinos, Koreans, and Southeast Asians have higher risks of lung cancer than do other "Asians."

But, here's an example of lived structural inequality that plays out along "race" group lines: which groups are more likely to work for a type of employer who offers no health insurance. (e.g., Latinos).

In Philadelphia yesterday, I did a day-long workshop on Everyday Antiracism with members of the Delaware Valley Minority Student Achievement Consortium. We role-played a number of situations that participants wanted to practice -- talking to students about banning the use of the n-word in school; talking to colleagues about the importance of ensuring that a history curriculum shows the full breadth of American experience. A lot of people described wanting to engage their colleagues more successfully on issues of equity.

It was a fabulous group, and I promised to follow up with folks here on "try tomorrows" people tried out in their districts and schools or, on conversations people tried to start with colleagues.

Anyone try anything (or thinking about trying something) and want to report/get feedback here, even if anonymously?

I started reading it to my kids and was moved again by how much wisdom is in it, so I thought I'd post it for various folks working on various things.

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Particularly resonant to me today was this quote:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

And, this take on the importance of "tensions":

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

And this take on how injustice plays out in everyday life:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

In Arizona, the Raza Studies program in the Tucson Schools is again being attacked by state officials for its work to support/inspire/retain Latino students in particular. Here's a letter I wrote in June 2009 to the *Arizona Daily Star* after a visit to the classroom of one of the program's teachers:

"I visited a Raza Studies class at Tucson High during a professional visit to the University of Arizona. I was impressed by the caliber of the teacher's instruction and by the level of critical thinking skill that he demanded. In an inspiring discussion of literature, the teacher asked students to take multiple perspectives on social problems and to build their skills in analyzing literary narratives. Why squash excellent instruction? This teacher should be replicated, not removed."

I've described his teaching since. What the teacher did particularly well was engage students in discussion of literary concepts by making connections to issues that students were familiar with. Students stayed attuned throughout to developing their academic skills, and the teacher urged students repeatedly to think carefully about complex issues to which there is no right answer. There were also non-Latino students participating actively in the course.