| Living For Change Newsletter |
August 22 - August 28
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Don't Miss "A Breath Of Hope," Stories from Detroit, FLYPmedia, no. 23 and Immanuel Wallerstein and Grace Lee Boggs in conversation at the U.S. Social Forum
Boggs Center to nurture community leadership
"Radical action requires hope and the knowledge of alternatives, not merely
desperation." - Alfred E. Young: Beyond the American Revolution.
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LIVING FOR CHANGE
If Not Now, When?
By Grace Lee Boggs
I won’t be marching with Jesse Jackson in the March called by the UAW and the NAACP
to commemorate the August 28, 1963 March on Washington.
That’s not only because at 95 my marching days are over.
As early as 1963, Malcolm X called the “I have a Dream” March a “Farce on Washington” because John Lewis had been forced to delete from his speech any references to Revolution and Power by the MOW’s “Big 6” organizers: A. Philip Randolph, Dr. King/SCLC, Roy Wilkins/ NAACP, James Farmer/CORE, Whitney Young/Urban League, John Lewis/SNCC.
Marchers were also instructed to carry only official signs and allowed to sing only one song ‘We shall overcome,’ (see p. 127, Living for Change).
Malcolm never put lipstick on a pig. Malcolm thought outside the box. If he were alive NOW, he would be telling us that we should no longer be marching. We should no longer be protesting. We should no longer be dreaming. We should no longer be encouraging democratic illusions.
• WHEN millions of Americans do not have meaningful work,
• WHEN as a result of our obsession with economic growth, wildfires in Russia burn dangerously close to nuclear plants and millions drown from floods and mudslides in Pakistan, China and Iowa,
• WHEN Congress decides to cut back food stamps for the poor and hungry in order to provide paychecks for public employees because trillions are being thrown away on unwinnable wars in the Middle East and military bases around the world,
• WHEN our cities are dying because corporations are exporting jobs oversea to make bigger profits,
• WHEN our prison population is the highest in the world because our schools structured in the factory age have become pipelines to prison,
IT IS TIME TO STOP DREAMING AND PROTESTING.
Instead in every community and city we should be discussing how to make the “Radical Revolution of Values” not only against Racism but against Materialism and Militarism that Dr. King called for in his 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech.
King’s call for this “Radical Revolution” came only four years after his 1963 “I have a Dream” speech. But in those few years, youth in Watts, California and other cities had risen in Rebellion. In Chicago King and anti-racist marchers had experienced the raw ugliness of Northern racism. The genocidal war in Vietnam had exposed our country as the world’s worst purveyor of violence and on the wrong side of the world revolution.
That is why in 1967 King decided that the time had come to warn the American people that unless we make a Radical Revolution in Values, we face spiritual death.
In 2010, 42 years later, we are experiencing massive physical and spiritual death.
Why are we STILL marching and dreaming?
Why are we not making a “radical revolution in values”?
Why are we STILL obsessed with economic growth?
Why are we STILL allowing corporations to deprive us of jobs by replacing human beings on the line with robots and by exporting jobs overseas to make greater profits?
Why are we STILL accepting the dictatorship of technology and of corporations?
THE TIME HAS COME to
• slow down global warming by building sustainable local economies and by living more simply.
• reject the dictatorship of technology so that it is no longer normal and natural to replace human beings with robots.
• stop corporations from exporting jobs overseas.
• end factory-type schooling and start engaging schoolchildren in local community rebuilding.
LET’S START THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX!
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
THINKING FOR OURSELVES
Education Foundations
By Shea Howell
In all the debates over the fate of public education one reality emerges incontrovertibly. Our children and the schools crisis have become a means for a few individuals and corporations to make a lot of money. The Obama administration is pouring billions into efforts to transform our schools, encouraging experimentation and change. The current level of funding, $3.5 billion is about 28 times as much as what was spent in 2007.
As a result, the New York Times reported, people are lining up to get a piece of the education pie. In a recent article the Times reported on a husband and wife team offering new curriculum, corporations with records of failure refashioning themselves, and text book and technology companies marketing whole reform packages.
Jack Jennings, the president of the non-profit Center on Education Policy, said, “Many of these companies just smell the money.” Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling strategies to improve schools, “This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans.”
In no other area of public responsibility would we, the people, allow such uncontrolled, unthoughtful and untested experimentation to be performed on our communities, let alone our children.. It is unimaginable that the disparities in health care, for example, would be addressed by simply putting billions of dollars up for grabs to anyone who claimed they knew how to provide better services. Yet our communities have been reeling from a series of experimentations in education foisted on us and our children.
One reason why education has been thrown into such turmoil is the extraordinary amount of money offered by powerful foundations who push the often-uninformed visions of private individuals into the public world.
It is almost impossible to understand how these foundations, who demand accountability from the first grader sitting in an urban classroom, have no publicly shared system to evaluate, control, assess or weed out the crackpots in their list of approved school consultants and “transformation” experts. Nor are we aware of any accountability system used by federal, state or local governments.
Diane Ravitch, the New Your University education historian and former intellectual architect of No Child Left Behind, places much of the blame for this on large foundations such as Gates, Walton and Broad. She argues that the track record of mega foundations in education has not been good. In her recent best seller The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How testing and Choice are Undermining Education, she points out that Ford Foundation efforts to push community schools in New York City created more turmoil than learning. The Annenberg Foundation’s $500 million reform effort that began in 1993 created a lot of excitement but few results, and the nearly decade-long $2 billion effort of the Gates Foundation to push small high schools produced disappointing results.
She comments that, while foundations are very concerned about teacher accountability, they themselves are accountable to neither voters nor stockholders. Moreover, because they weld so much economic power, few people are willing to criticize them.
Ravitch says, “There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people.”
These same mega-foundations are messing with Detroit Public Schools, as are our own middleweight and minor ones, from Kresge to Skillman. For more than 30 years, their various schemes have undermined the stability, innovation and experimentation at the grass roots level that have been the most successful means of creating education for active citizenship.
Place-based education, service learning, small class size, community engagement, Freedom Schooling and expanding the creative talents of our youth to foster social change are all efforts that have grown out of the work of community activists, teachers, youth and students. These efforts, based on vision and compassion, are the real source for transforming our schools and our country. They are the foundation of a new education and a new country.
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