Jose Vilson's Blog, page 32
July 16, 2015
And You May Ask Yourself, “Well, How Did I Get Here?”
Thanks for your patience.
I’ve been to Atlanta, Washington D.C., and now San Antonio within the span of a week, spreading the “good word.” You’ve elevated me, so now I get to bring the words that usually come from this page to the adults who often need to hear it the most. Consequently, I haven’t written much. I’ll be back on the grind very soon.
In the meantime, please know that I haven’t wasted a minute making these here dreams come true. As evidence, I present this video from the American Federation of Teachers’ TEACH 2015 conference. I got to speak on my book This Is Not A Test with the homie Dana Goldstein, writer David Kirp, and writer / rock star Wes Moore. Given the odds, I think I represented teacher voice well:
The next morning, Linda Darling-Hammond, after finding out about the panel, said, “Yes, you definitely belong there.” Belonging is a big freaking deal. In the meantime, let me know what you’re up to. Thanks for now and in advance.
Jose
The post And You May Ask Yourself, “Well, How Did I Get Here?” appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
July 9, 2015
Take Me To Church [On TFA, #BlackLivesMatter, and Education]
Whenever conservative pundit Michelle Malkin’s name comes up, you know it’s going to be a bloodbath of lies and obfuscation.
Her latest article, reposted by the diabolical folks at that news rag, poses Teach for America (TFA) as a once-well meaning do-gooder organization who’ve let the inmates run the asylum (yes, I know what I did there). She said:
“Teach For America has transformed itself into a recruiting center for militants bent on occupying themselves with anything other than imparting knowledge and academic excellence to children in the classroom. When a government-funded outfit abandons education as its mission in favor of social agitation, it’s time to cut off the taxpayer pipeline.”
This reflexive libertarian response to the surging resistance within TFA made me look at TFAers (and by extension, TFA) with another, more righteous lens. As someone who was baptized in the church of pro-public school, pro-whole child (i.e. anti-high stakes testing), I often see TFA as a neo-liberal Peace Corps, one that often pals around with the very folk that also support Michelle Malkin. We can’t ignore the years of no-bid contracts in major cities, two-year teaching commitments that drove out hundreds of experienced (and usually Black and Latino) educators, monopolistic relationships with Native American reservations and nations, and the droves of government officials making education policy on limited classroom knowledge as the narrative that TFA wrote for themselves.
Teach for America still gives their candidates pamphlets that suggest they have “alumni” who work in other places, as if teaching is not itself a profession, as if what I do daily is another notch on one’s belt.
Yet, as someone who also came through an alternative certification program (NYC Teaching Fellows), I see the need to support and offer different pathways to folks who came through this program and have the best intentions, especially those who did not fully understand their complicity in TFA’s neoliberal legacy. The folks I’ve gotten to know through the program, including one who was mentioned in the NY Post article, seem to have their proverbial “eyes on the prize,” namely equity for all students, and training others to take on the social justice mantle in a meaningful way. Plenty of other edu-activists who were once alt-cert either have worked within the system to make change or outside of it (you’d be surprised!), and both strategies have made enough waves to inspire a twitch or two from one of neoliberalism’s foremost cheerleaders in Malkin.
With the way folks from “both sides” have scurried to Malkin’s side in defense of her points, gutless and sensationalist in the way only Malkin can make them, I opted out of my religion once again and found myself gravitating towards my friends and colleagues who occupy the TFA space. If that makes me a social justice warrior, so be it. While Netta, DeRay, and co. literally put their lives on the line protesting injustices served daily to oppressed people right within our country, the “reform critic” side of things still hasn’t had the nuance and judgment to steer clear of Tea Party members and anti-federal government folks who don’t think people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community (amongst others) deserve the full spectrum humanity has to offer. Similar to education professors and pundits who write books and essays about the teacher life from outside the school building, these educators-turned-protestors might have felt like their best option to make change now is from the outside and on the streets. [Sidenote: *Of course, I think we should work inside the classroom, too. Teachers are political agents, regardless of how political we pretend we’re not.]
Black lives do matter, and that includes the classroom.
Malkin also reminds me of what happens when educators of color do exercise their right to protest and bring these ideas into the classroom. They face harsher penalties than their white counterparts for comparable offenses. They get harangued, maligned, and terminated with no foreseeable future in that district. They get doxxed by Malkin and dismissed from their districts repeatedly regardless of how many awards they’ve won. In fact, when teachers begin to collectively demand more and protest in the streets, we can fully expect the school district to enact a mass closings of schools where students of color learn and adults of color teach.
We shouldn’t have to wonder why the Woodrow Wilson Foundation found that by 2020, we could see numbers as little as 5% educators of color. The sociopolitical will to keep us around ain’t there.
Most educational institutions, well-meaning or otherwise, have had a historical complicity with assuring our larger American status quo, including folks I pay dues to. The only way forward isn’t by dismissing racial claims as “separating our side” when the divisions are clearly already baked in. It’s not by telling by putting faces of color in front of your movement, but strip them of their agency. These protests don’t just matter when TFA alumni get involved or when any other education-based organization or individual decides to get selectively righteous about injustice.
Some of us are so busy with educational orthodoxy, we lose the spirit of why we do what we do: the students. The Ferguson protests didn’t start off a whim, but from the awful murder of Mike Brown. The #BlackLivesMatter protests are galvanized not by the abstract ideas of segregation, homelessness, unemployment, and the wayward policing the Broken Windows Theory has allowed. It was sparked by the murder of Trayvon Martin. It continues to matter in the murders of Tamir Rice, Aiyana Jones, and Jessica Hernandez.
In other words, children are the heart of these movements. We all need to catch some of that ghost. Take me to church.
The post Take Me To Church [On TFA, #BlackLivesMatter, and Education] appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
Fred Klonsky: Institutional Racism Is Alive, And We’re It
As a follow-up to my post about the NEA’s new business item on institutional racism, here’s an excerpt from Fred Klonsky’s post:
We white teachers in the AFT and the NEA are not inoculated from the racism that exists in the broader American society.
I went back and reread the institutional racism New Business Item in light of the rest of the meeting that followed its adoption.
I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that the NBI talked about all the institutions in our society except one.
Ours.
Only when we as educators can look into the mirror and realize our complicity in the school-to-prison pipeline can we truly be liberated. Yes, I recognize we’re often hamstrung by mandates from deceptive overlords and wayward mandates from folks who’ve never been in the classroom. Yet, many of my friends have witnessed institutional racism firsthand, and how the institutions we work in and, sometimes, pay dues to, can be a deterrent from breaking the chains.
This work is complicated. If we’re not willing to have that conversation, then why work with students? Face the institution in front of you. Start with the one in the mirror. It helps.
The post Fred Klonsky: Institutional Racism Is Alive, And We’re It appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
July 7, 2015
Not Business As Usual at the NEA (A Peek Into Institutional Racism)
On Friday, the National Education Association’s Representative Assembly heard the names of the nine Charleston victims. They then attended to New Business Item B, which read in part:
We, the members of the National Education Association, acknowledge the existence in our country of institutional racism–the societal patterns and practices that have the net effect of imposing oppressive conditions and denying rights, opportunity, and equality based upon race. This inequity manifests itself in our schools and in the conditions our students face in their communities.
The rest of the NBI reads like a well-intentioned yet vague plan for what the NEA may or may not do to help teachers, schools, and local chapters on the path towards cultural competency. As proud and thankful as some of us were that the item was voted in unanimously, we also knew the history of working with said members on a daily basis. The sorts of comments we get on and offline for just mentioning the word race would shock the inattentive.
Yet, it still felt odd because institutional racism wasn’t just the edifices and direct policies that affect people of color, but also the actors within that system that perpetuate it. Thus, EduColor came out with its own statement which also made its way around the web. The work done to move the dialogue from “We can’t do this race thing” to “We need to pass this bill for the betterment of our organization” shouldn’t be overlooked, but we have to recognize that many of our colleagues aren’t ready to hear that they may be part of the problem, too.
Blogger and friend of the program Fred Klonsky reads NBI 11, calling for the removal of the Confederate battle flag and all symbols from public schools and spaces. This NBI came out the day after NBI B, and happened an hour after we released our statement. In some ways, it proved EduColor’s point, and after an hour and a half of debate, pushed the bulk of the other NBIs to the next day.
Of course, I tweet this:
This debate on the #NEARA15 floor is the definition of institutional racism. #educolor
— Jose Vilson (@TheJLV) July 4, 2015
It passed, but amended, so only the removal of the battle flag makes it. So the flag stays, but General Lee and the other clandestine KKK members’ names stick on schools, and the “strange fruit” of the past are now the students in those schools. Educators proceed by comparing, not contrasting, what Fred did with what Bree Newsome did in taking down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina state house in words and inappropriate graphics. I was secretly happy that the bill came from someone who also had no risk involved in putting a racial issue on the floor.
As Fred and I both said on Facebook said later on, the NEA RA can’t be business as usual.
NBI 17 calls for more resources to address historical inaccuracies about the Civil War and Reconstruction Period. This passes with about a 10K price tag. Ta-Nehisi Coates seemed to do this at a smaller price tag, but the sort of reconstruction needed to re-teach social studies teachers in developing critical history thinkers might be more than 10k.
NBI 94 calls for a boycott of racist (specifically towards Native Americans) mascots, including but not limited to Redskins. This is defeated. Mascots like a Redskin or Robert E. Lee are symbolic renditions of institutional racism, but it took only two days for voters to forget that.
NBI 122 calls for support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and for examining concepts of justice within classrooms, a presumed corrolary to NBI B. The measure passes, which sounds great except only $2K is dedicated to this effort, and the measure only includes young black men as the victims of police crime. Alicia Garza and Patrice Cullors, two black women, created Black Lives Matter. Obvious disconnect.
In our statement, EduColor intentionally said we wanted to make sure people voted for the NBI on institutional racism with good intentions, and not because they didn’t want to appear racist after mourning / being shamed into recognizing the nine Charleston victims. I’m not of the opinion that all teachers are racist, absurd on its face. I am of the opinion that we all have more work to do before we reduce the effects of the school to prison pipeline, increase achievement for students of color, and create equitable systems for dealing with cultural issues that all of our students deal with on a daily basis.
More importantly, we hope the work can move forward for all of us who truly believe in social justice, not just parrot the cool kids who mobilize around it. People have found ways to profit off our current protest movement, and, with a lens so hot on the issue, it seems worth it lest you lose relevance. The NEA RA managed to introduce and pass some bills in session that I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few months ago, but the struggle to assure that these bills made it across felt strained in ways. If we’re really about moving forward, let’s make this a core value of what we do.
We can’t have business as usual. This I believe.
The post Not Business As Usual at the NEA (A Peek Into Institutional Racism) appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
July 3, 2015
For Us, By Us: 5 Tips for An Authentic Educator Voice
Someone on Twitter asked me what advice I have for blog writing as a teacher. I replied quickly:
Read a ton of blogs first. Whittle down. Write when you want. Things work themselves out from there. https://t.co/e0aM1I0vdT
— Jose Vilson (@TheJLV) June 28, 2015
But there’s more than that. In an age where education overlords explicitly tell corporate- and government-friendly educators to not speak about the conversations you often see here on this blog. Race, class, gender, intersectionality, and other uncomfortable topics sit in the corner while more profitable topics like 1-to-1 laptop classrooms, grit, and whatever new-fangled edu-tool was tossed to them at a tech exhibit. Equally potent is the teacher activist circles where tweets about Common Core, assessment, and Bill Gates. It’s fun to quote [insert favorite edu-pundit here], but after a while, you wonder whether the breadth of educational experiences ever enters their vernacular or if they too are hyped up at the chance of growing a few thousand followers on a social media platform.
Which brings us to this list. Here’s a set of 5 tips I keep in my back pocket that have helped me get to where I am as a full-time classroom teacher / advocate. Hope it helps you find your educator voice:
1. Read All Of The Blogs
This might seem impossible because it damn near is. Some folks are quick to point out that everybody writes blogs but nobody reads. I contend that people do read blogs, but folks like me have become discerning about what we read. If you’re just starting though, you want to read a thick set of blogs that span the dialogues. You’ll want Chris Lehmann’s, Rafranz Davis’, Renee Moore’s, and Christina Torres’ blogs on your list since they have educator perspectives. I’ll also add in Audrey Watters, Melinda Anderson, NYC Educator, EduShyster, Curmudgucation, and Dan Meyer because they can actually write.
(I have a lot more, but these are just ten that come to mind. Do add a few more in the comments, please.)
2. Hone Your Style
Feel free to emulate styles until you find your own. This goes along the lines of Austin Kleon’s rendition of stealing like an artist. [You’ll want to read that blog post and the book, too. See? All of the things.] Akin to a rookie teacher visiting every teacher in their department and incorporating the moves they saw into their repertoire, writers read a lot so they can eventually hone their style. It’s going to take a few months (check #3), but eventually when you find that voice, everyone will be able to tell who you are without even reading the title. That’s a voice.
3. Write A Ton
The more you write intentionally, the better. If you only write once a week, it’s harder to find your voice. If you write three or four times a week, then you can experiment as much as you like until you find your audience. That’s critical. If you write on a consistent basis for about six months, you can find your educator voice. Writing a lot doesn’t mean writing the same thing, either. Oftentimes, people equate writing in volume with writing with purpose. If you’re not moved to write something down, don’t, unless you’re not going to publish it. If you are going to write something on a blog, then respect the reader by holding it until it’s ready. The idea usually comes to the fore the next day. Writing just to write doesn’t help in the way that just throwing up basketballs to the hoop doesn’t help you become a better player. Aim and precision matter, too.
4. Find Your Boundaries
Believe it or not, I have boundaries for what I write. I don’t write about my own administrators and I rarely talk about any one student or colleague specifically (except in my book). Before you can go deep into a topic, you have to consider the items that might be off-limits. Unfortunately, in many school districts, this does include intersectional topics, but if it is this, then …
5. Go. In.
Once you find your boundaries, you’ll be able to go more in depth with the things you’re most passionate about. Don’t be shallow about analyses, either. If you find yourself inclined for any reason to stop short of saying something for any other reason besides #4, then say it. Writing like this tests your mettle. If you need to name names, go for it. As one of the founders of Black Lives Matter told me, this is a perfect time to go for the jugular because politeness has only gotten social justice so far.
The idea isn’t to write for the sake of shaming or hurting, but to elicit truth in the midst of niceties. What plagues too much of education discourse isn’t the need for “better” conversation. It’s that soundbites and jargon masquerade as substance too frequently. The greatest writers I’ve seen don’t skirt the issue. They swirl around it and come to a finite, central point, spanning the breadth of the topic at hand. Educators deserve a bigger voice, and those of us who can do it ought to exercise those voices.
Oh, and keep students in mind when you write. That’s what differentiates educator voices from other voices who are just kinda into education.
Hope this was helpful. Do you have an educator voice? What questions do you have about educator voice?
Jose
The post For Us, By Us: 5 Tips for An Authentic Educator Voice appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
The Students at the Center of Your Education Movement
I recently had the pleasure of having brunch with a set of folks whose social justice work I love and respect, one of whom was eventually fired for teaching social justice. I normally start by just listening to folks before I turn up my volume. This time, since pancakes and eggs were on the menu, I figured I’d start by talking us into a comfortable space. At some point, the conversation turned to racism in education, and the case that brought us together. As they took turns talking about what happened on the ground, I sat there wanting to ask the questions that burned at me for months about her, about the board, about the police, about everything.
Then she broke out a video of her kids and I shut it all up.
I usually have a handful of hints I look for when anyone calls themselves activists / thought leaders / experts in education, but the one that always sticks out revolves the kids. How they speak of the children matters more than any other factor. It’s not the awards, the qualifications, the degrees, the conference keynotes, the years spent in the classroom (to a certain extent), or even political leanings. It’s about how they speak of the young people they serve.
Do they talk only about a couple of students or do they speak about all of their students warmly? Do they not speak of students at all or speak about them in absolute hypotheticals? Are they interested in how their children live or is the allotted time period enough? Are they ever hard on themselves, or at least reflective about the faults they embody as teachers? Do the students reflect love to these adults back?
What’s that energy like?
The short video of the kids yelling, excited that she’d come back for the brief moment she went to pick up her stuff, moved me in ways I didn’t admit at the time. Around the table, the educators had stories upon gruesome stories to share of the racial inequity our students, parents and conscious educators face from unconscious administrators, police officers, colleagues, parents, all of whom refuse to know better. Even though we each had our different elements to share, the root was racism, inescapable, ubiquitous, palpable in the work we do.
That’s why it’s so telling when people start an initiative and don’t mention students ever in their works, or they work with kids and never actually talk about them in a loving way. This is a sort of exclusion I can endorse: if students aren’t truly at the center of the work, then what exactly are these folks here for?
The post The Students at the Center of Your Education Movement appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
June 25, 2015
Silence Is Violence [EduColor]
For those of you who’ve been following, EduColor has built up quite a bit of steam in the last few months. With hundreds of followers on Twitter, Facebook, and our newsletter, we’re providing a voice that’s been so necessary out there. As founder, I’m fortunate to lead our bi-weekly newsletters with a few words.
Latoya Peterson of Fusion recently said that the silence of our friends is violence, and nowhere is that truer than the field of K-12 education. Educators can’t refuse the tide of the national zeitgeist. In this issue, we’ve chosen to flip the idea that we only talk about standards, content, and iPad apps. With the recent hate crime (terrorist attack) on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, the suicide of Kalief Browder, First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech honoring Hadiya Pendleton at what was supposed to be her graduation, and the silencing and mocking of Black women through the lie that is Rachel Dolezal, it’s important for educators to create safe spaces for their students to share their opinions, not simply impose ours.
Read the rest here and let me know what you think. Share with all your friends, too. The movement is here.
Jose
The post Silence Is Violence [EduColor] appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
June 20, 2015
Despite All My Rage
I normally talk to young adults about math and other academics, but recently, because we’re winding up the school year, subjects have expanded to Fetty Wap and flicking wrists. The currency for “young and cool” changes over time, almost as quickly as we age.
Yet, on this day, the subject turned to teachers. They went on to gossip about their favorite and least favorite teachers in the building. For a moment, I told them, “Please don’t talk about me” because, despite what my readers believe, I really don’t like talking about myself in person. They shared their views on how difficult teaching must be like, but also that teaching needs to be done by people who care. One in particular almost went into tears sharing her frustrations about one particular educator. Of course, because it was in confidence, I wasn’t going to mention it to him, but suffice it to say, it humbled me somewhat.
Was I that teacher to someone else? Have I done enough reflection so, should other conversations like this happen, I can be on the right side of these young people’s litmus test?
Just then, a teacher said, “I suggested we get rid of him but [the administrators] weren’t trying to hear it, but at least you’re set. Teaching has good job security and the kids respect you here.”
Um what?
“So let me ask you a question. Do you think that’s what teaching is about?”
“I really don’t know, and I’m probably not a good representative to talk about teachers, but that’s kinda what I see.”
For a minute, I’m reminded of the already herculean task of accommodating dozens of minds at a time around a subject that works in multiple brainwaves, some concrete, some abstract. With all the levels we already work in, we also have to partner with our peers, our administrations, and our students’ parents to make sure we’re meeting our students’ needs. An already hefty task, if not for the multiple mandates set upon us from folks in larger grey offices with big titles, a few more set upon us by general society, and the secret codes some of us live by to keep us in the classroom.
I’m not interested in busting cages. I’m more interested in why we create cages for teachers to begin with, even some of the ones we’ve created ourselves.
“What you might have found out about teachers like me is that job security isn’t amongst one of my concerns. I couldn’t care less. I want to teach you, and you have to know this …”
I blew a gasp, but not before the student knew what I was getting at. My intention wasn’t to play defense. With summer school fast approaching, I had enough parents and students wondering why I failed them, even as I begged them for their works all year. But of course it’s my fault because that’s the cage I created for myself. The woulda / shoulda / couldas never let my didn’ts let loose of me. I already reflect on the tension between me as teacher and me as activist. I already listen too much, too early, too often and think I’m listening too little, too late, too insignificantly, and / or don’t express it well enough.
The rage on my face isn’t simply systemic. It’s knowing that, without a handful of us speaking up about what we do, our jobs can be boiled down to a few talking points that sell books for everyone but us.
I listened to the students for a few more minutes before making my way out, hoping to bottle up the magic and raw wisdom these young adults had to share with me. I walked down the hallway thinking about how I might write this piece to you, but not before I noticed him follow me down the hall. When I noticed him follow, he scurried away.
Maybe he knows more about me and the rest of us than we do.
The post Despite All My Rage appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
June 16, 2015
Take Me To Church [On TFA, #BlackLivesMatter, and Education]
Whenever conservative pundit Michelle Malkin’s name comes up, you know it’s going to be a bloodbath of lies and obfuscation.
Her latest article, reposted by the diabolical folks at that news rag, poses Teach for America (TFA) as a once-well meaning do-gooder organization who’ve let the inmates run the asylum (yes, I know what I did there). She said:
“Teach For America has transformed itself into a recruiting center for militants bent on occupying themselves with anything other than imparting knowledge and academic excellence to children in the classroom. When a government-funded outfit abandons education as its mission in favor of social agitation, it’s time to cut off the taxpayer pipeline.”
This reflexive libertarian response to the surging resistance within TFA made me look at TFAers (and by extension, TFA) with another, more righteous lens. As someone who was baptized in the church of pro-public school, pro-whole child (i.e. anti-high stakes testing), I often see TFA as a neo-liberal Peace Corps, one that often pals around with the very folk that also support Michelle Malkin. We can’t ignore the years of no-bid contracts in major cities, two-year teaching commitments that drove out hundreds of experienced (and usually Black and Latino) educators, monopolistic relationships with Native American reservations and nations, and the droves of government officials making education policy on limited classroom knowledge as the narrative that TFA wrote for themselves.
Teach for America still gives their candidates pamphlets that suggest they have “alumni” who work in other places, as if teaching is not itself a profession, as if what I do daily is another notch on one’s belt.
Yet, as someone who also came through an alternative certification program (NYC Teaching Fellows), I see the need to support and offer different pathways to folks who came through this program and have the best intentions, especially those who did not fully understand their complicity in TFA’s neoliberal legacy. The folks I’ve gotten to know through the program, including one who was mentioned in the NY Post article, seem to have their proverbial “eyes on the prize,” namely equity for all students, and training others to take on the social justice mantle in a meaningful way. Plenty of other edu-activists who were once alt-cert either have worked within the system to make change or outside of it (you’d be surprised!), and both strategies have made enough waves to inspire a twitch or two from one of neoliberalism’s foremost cheerleaders in Malkin.
With the way folks from “both sides” have scurried to Malkin’s side in defense of her points, gutless and sensationalist in the way only Malkin can make them, I opted out of my religion once again and found myself gravitating towards my friends and colleagues who occupy the TFA space. If that makes me a social justice warrior, so be it. While Netta, DeRay, and co. literally put their lives on the line protesting injustices served daily to oppressed people right within our country, the “reform critic” side of things still hasn’t had the nuance and judgment to steer clear of Tea Party members and anti-federal government folks who don’t think people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community (amongst others) deserve the full spectrum humanity has to offer. Similar to education professors and pundits who write books and essays about the teacher life from outside the school building, these educators-turned-protestors might have felt like their best option to make change now is from the outside and on the streets. [Sidenote: *Of course, I think we should work inside the classroom, too. Teachers are political agents, regardless of how political we pretend we’re not.]
Black lives do matter, and that includes the classroom.
Malkin also reminds me of what happens when educators of color do exercise their right to protest and bring these ideas into the classroom. They face harsher penalties than their white counterparts for comparable offenses. They get harangued, maligned, and terminated with no foreseeable future in that district. They get doxxed by Malkin and dismissed from their districts repeatedly regardless of how many awards they’ve won. In fact, when teachers begin to collectively demand more and protest in the streets, we can fully expect the school district to enact a mass closings of schools where students of color learn and adults of color teach.
We shouldn’t have to wonder why the Woodrow Wilson Foundation found that by 2020, we could see numbers as little as 5% educators of color. The sociopolitical will to keep us around ain’t there.
Most educational institutions, well-meaning or otherwise, have had a historical complicity with assuring our larger American status quo, including folks I pay dues to. The only way forward isn’t by dismissing racial claims as “separating our side” when the divisions are clearly already baked in. It’s not by telling by putting faces of color in front of your movement, but strip them of their agency. These protests don’t just matter when TFA alumni get involved or when any other education-based organization or individual decides to get selectively righteous about injustice.
Some of us are so busy with educational orthodoxy, we lose the spirit of why we do what we do: the students. The Ferguson protests didn’t start off a whim, but from the awful murder of Mike Brown. The #BlackLivesMatter protests are galvanized not by the abstract ideas of segregation, homelessness, unemployment, and the wayward policing the Broken Windows Theory has allowed. It was sparked by the murder of Trayvon Martin. It continues to matter in the murders of Tamir Rice, Aiyana Jones, and Jessica Hernandez.
In other words, children are the heart of these movements. We all need to catch some of that ghost. Take me to church.
The post Take Me To Church [On TFA, #BlackLivesMatter, and Education] appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
June 14, 2015
The Karen Fitzgibbons In Us [Scenarios USA]
Rebecca Carroll invited me to speak on elementary school teacher Karen Fitzgibbons and her comments about the incidents in McKinney, TX. Here’s an excerpt:
But, as a teacher who’s not only taught for 10 years, but who has done educational activism work for about seven of those years, I’ve observed the vitriolic responses of even using the word “race” except when I dissent on Race To The Top, President Obama’s educational mandate that included lifting charter school caps across states, increasing stakes for standardized testing, and using wayward data to evaluate and eliminate teachers. Yet, the other race, the one that implicates reform advocates and critics alike, touches a centuries-old nerve. We have yet to create school systems that genuinely assert agency for children of color (and this includes AAPI, Native American, and Latino students), and develops learning spaces for these stakeholders. While everyone struggles to catch a piece of the #BlackLivesMatter action, folks in the education space often lack the reflection and integrity to look in the mirror and say, “We’ve done wrong by them.”
Read more here and let me know what you think.
The post The Karen Fitzgibbons In Us [Scenarios USA] appeared first on The Jose Vilson.
