Category — In the news

Two articles worth reading, excerpts below:

• How to fix our schools: A manifesto
  by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders, Washington Post
• A Manifesto of Errors: Rhee, Klein and the Gang Strike Out
  by Oakland educator Anthony Cody, Education Week

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How to fix our schools: A manifesto
by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders

As educators, superintendents, chief executives and chancellors responsible for educating nearly 2 1/2 million students in America, we know that the task of reforming the country’s public schools begins with us. It is our obligation to enhance the personal growth and academic achievement of our students, and we must be accountable for how our schools perform….

But the transformative changes needed to truly prepare our kids for the 21st-century global economy simply will not happen unless we first shed some of the entrenched practices that have held back our education system, practices that have long favored adults, not children. These practices are wrong, and they have to end now.   Article continues at WPost

A Manifesto of Errors: Rhee, Klein and the Gang Strike Out
by Oakland educator Anthony Cody, Education Week

This week some of the people our media has anointed the leaders of educational reform, including Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and a baker’s dozen of school superintendents, released a “Manifesto” purporting to tell us how to fix our schools. But this is a manifestation of monumental misconceptions, that begs to be refuted. Let’s take it point by point.

As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income — it is the quality of their teacher.

Unfortunately President Obama is wrong here. Most studies have shown that differences between teachers account for 25% to 40% of the variation in student achievement. The lion’s share is indeed their zip code, parent’s color and level of affluence.   Article continues at  Education Week.

Wangari Maathai is the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement which restores Kenya’s forests and addresses women’s basic needs.  Her latest book is Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (Doubleday Religion), from which this piece is excerpted.

During my more than three decades as an environmentalist and campaigner for democratic rights, people have often asked me whether spirituality, different religious traditions, and the Bible in particular had inspired me, and influenced my activism and the work of the Green Belt Movement GBM. Did I conceive conservation of the environment and empowerment of ordinary people as a kind of religious vocation? Were there spiritual lessons to be learned and applied to their own environmental efforts, or in their lives as a whole?

When I began this work in 1977, I wasn’t motivated by my faith or by religion in general. Instead, I was thinking literally and practically about solving problems on the ground. I wanted to help rural populations, especially women, with the basic needs they described to me during seminars and workshops. They said that they needed clean drinking water, adequate and nutritious food, income, and energy for cooking and heating. So, when I was asked these questions during the early days, I’d answer that I didn’t think digging holes and mobilizing communities to protect or restore the trees, forests, watersheds, soil, or habitats for wildlife that surrounded them was spiritual work.

However, I never differentiated between activities that might be called “spiritual” and those that might be termed “secular.” After a few years I came to recognize that our efforts weren’t only about planting trees, but were also about sowing seeds of a different sort — the ones necessary to give communities the self-confidence and self-knowledge to rediscover their authentic voice and speak out on behalf of their rights human, environmental, civic, and political. Our task also became to expand what we call “democratic space,” in which ordinary citizens could make decisions on their own behalf to benefit themselves, their community, their country, and the environment that sustains them.

Excerpt continues at  Wangari Maathai: Spiritual Environmentalism: Healing Ourselves by Replenishing the Earth.

In the midst of an attempt by Arizona’s legislature and top education official to shut down ethnic-studies courses in the Tucson Unified School District, students here at Tucson High Magnet School are flocking to the courses this school year.

At least one class in two of the courses taught from a Mexican-American perspective at this school have more than 45 students, although the union contract calls for no more than 35 students in a class. School district officials say enrollment in Mexican-American studies in Tucson Unified’s 14 high schools has nearly doubled since last school year, from 781 to 1,400 students.

“Ethnic studies allow me to read and view and analyze different forms of literature and learning from another perspective,” said Krysta Diaz, 17, one of 386 students taking an ethnic-studies course at the school this year. The courses attract primarily students like Ms. Diaz, who are of Mexican-American heritage, but also draw in the occasional African-American, Anglo, or immigrant from a country other than Mexico.

Tucson High School students contest charges that ethnic-studies courses teach minority students that they are victims.
Some students say the controversy over ethnic studies caused them to want to check out the courses for themselves. But others say they signed up to learn more about social justice generally or Mexican-American culture and history specifically.

The political storm engulfing the debate over ethnic studies in Arizona’s high schools seems to be gaining a momentum like that of other recent high-profile debates in the Grand Canyon State, such as the one over its plans for enforcing federal immigration laws.

Story continues at Education week

Women’s Studies Assistant Professor Tanya Bakhru kicked off the Fall 2010 Speaker Series for the new Division of Interdisciplinary Race & Gender Studies (DIRGS) with her talk, “Contesting Globalization and How to Assert Meaningful Reproductive Rigfhts Discourse in an Era of Global Capitalism.”

The following is news coverage by the Spartan Daily.

By Ashley Finden for the Spartan Daily, 9/19/10

Thirteen people came to listen to an SJSU lecturer’s presentation on acknowledging reproduction and its issues as a worldly situation, not just in the United States.

”The main purpose of it is how do we ensure that women have both the power to make the decisions they want to make about their bodies and then the resources to carry out those decisions,” Tanya Bakhru said.
Bakhru is an assistant professor of social science and women’s studies at SJSU.

She held the lecture last Thursday afternoon in the Cultural Heritage Room at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library.

Bakhru said it isn’t just about abortions or contraception, but about if a woman has children, how is she sure she would be able to care for them in the way she would want to. [Read more →]

This is a helpful discussion from Rachel Maddow of the recent surge of anti-choice women candidates.  Includes an also excellent analysis by Princeton prof Melissa Harris-Lacewell

“There were no places like this when we started,” said Margie Struble, of San Jose, who has been a volunteer and guiding force at Sisterspirit for 24 of the 26 years it’s been open. “Many people met their partners here.”

But now, after a quarter of a century, Sisterspirit will be closing its doors for good, another victim of online sales and mainstream bookstores.

Founded in 1984 as a collective by four women who dreamed of a more involved women’s community in the South Bay, Sisterspirit quickly developed a core group of supporters and at one time had 40 volunteers. For the first two years, the founding mothers arranged “coffee houses” in other locations. Then, the bookstore became a physical reality when it rented a large space in the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center. Just over a year ago, the center received a grant for a youth group and Sisterspirit was asked to move upstairs to a space barely 200 square feet, a move Struble saw as the beginning of the end.

via Story continues at San Jose Mercury News.

New book forthcoming by Erika Lee and Judy Yung.  Dr. Yung is scheduled to talk about her work on the book October 5 at 6 pm at SJSU King Library. Flyer here:  www.sjsu.edu/faculty/kathryn.blackmerreyes/AngelIsland.pdf

The immigration station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, in use from 1910 to 1940, has often been called the Ellis Island  of the West. But to what extent is the Pacific gateway a junior version of the storied immigration station that sits next to the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor?

If Ellis Island remains the iconic symbol of American immigration, Angel Island represents a more complete history of America’s diverse origins and the government’s diverse policies that welcomed some and excluded others.

That fascinating history is the subject of “Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America,” by historians Erika Lee and Judy Yung, both descendants of Angel Island immigrants, and published on the occasion of the station’s 100th anniversary. Lee and Yung offer a kaleidoscope of immigrant portraits that bring history alive, and, in the process, demolish many myths and stereotypes about Angel Island and American immigration in general.
Readers who already know that Angel Island differed from Ellis Island because the former was built to process Chinese immigrants and the latter for Europeans will be surprised to learn that non-Asians comprised fully one-third of those seeking entry through Angel Island before the 1920s.

According to the authors’ research, about 1 million people passed through the Angel Island station: foreigners and citizens, arrivals and departures, immigrants and deportees. “Angel Island” tells the stories of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and South Asians, as well as Mexicans, Russians, European Jews and Filipinos who were processed through the station. Their stories testify to the great diversity of American immigration.

Story continues at SFGate

As California educators wait anxiously to hear whether the state will be awarded funds from the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition today, the nation’s leading civil rights organizations have attacked the race for funds as undermining the civil rights of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged children.

So far, California has lost out in two contests for education stimulus funds, as I have noted in previous blog posts.

In a highly critical broadside [PDF] issued last month against many aspects of the Obama administration’s education agenda, seven civil rights groups, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, singled out the Race to the Top competition for its fiercest criticism:

If education is a civil right, children in “winning” states should not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn to learn in high quality environments. Such an approach reinstates the antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal support to states that civil rights organizations fought to remove in 1965.

Story continues here

As the proud granddaughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, nothing disheartens me more than the current wave of anti-immigrant hysteria.  I find very heartening, on the other hand, this article by economist Masao Suzuki discussing how current anti-immigrant legislation crosses racial and ethnic lines.

These anti-immigrant forces try to argue that undocumented immigrants today are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. This is the same argument that the anti-Chinese movement used 100 ago years to try to strip Wong Kim Ark of his birthright citizenship, saying that Chinese immigrants, who were banned from naturalizing by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument, pointing out that the only exceptions are children of diplomats (who are immune from U.S. law) and the children of a hostile occupation force in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark extended fundamental civil rights won by African Americans to Asian Americans. Later this case was cited in the 1982 Plyler v. Doe U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas state law that tried to exclude unauthorized Mexican immigrant children from public schools.

This move by anti-immigrant forces to target native-born Americans shows that this movement is not about the legality of immigrants. The anti-immigrant movement is a right-wing movement that is all about stripping away the right to go to public schools and to be citizens. These rights were won by African Americans through struggle – like the Civil War – and later extended to Asian Americans and Latinos.

See full article:  Anti-Immigrant Movement to Target Native Born

From “The Feministing Five: Elaine Villasper” at Feministing blog.

“When I first got involved with GABRIELA, I was in college. I was really shocked by the issue of sex trafficking and how Filipinos are affected by sex trafficking. When I first started college, I didn’t know that Filipino women were affected by so many issues. I had grown up in the US undocumented, so I didn’t have a lot of access to information or even just basic history of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, until I got to college. It was the first time I was learning a lot of these things, that there was a sex trade, and that people were making money off of it, off of the bodies of women. And it really struck me because at the time I was thinking, “that could be me.” These women, they’re me. They’re my age, they could be my cousins, my family. Any of us could easily have fallen into the sex trade or been victimized in the same way, because I lived in the same conditions that these women are living in right now. So when those realizations came to me, that was when I decided that I had to do something.

Elaine Villasper is the Vice Chair of Education for GABRIELA USA, the North American chapter of the Filipino women’s rights organization. …Villasper helps to teach basic organizing skills, trains young leaders and helps to educate the local community about issues that affect Filipino and Filipino-American women. GABRIELA USA runs a number of cultural and artistic programs here in the US, as well as the Back to the Motherland program, which enables Filipino-Americans to travel to the Philippines to gain a better grasp of the pressing political, socioeconomic and human rights issues on the ground there. Here in the US, the organization works on issues like domestic violence, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights and political representation for the Filipino-American population.

Read the interview with Villasper here