Comments

1. Anon says:

   July 31, 2011 at 11:12 pm

   A movement that wants to be taken seriously wouldn’t put Kozol up front. Yes, he’s famous for previous work, but he’s too inflammatory and given to hysterical overstatement to do anything but appeal to the ideological hacks in the audience.

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   • Anonisacoward says:

     July 31, 2011 at 11:28 pm

     Anon doth protest too much. One ideological hack knows another. Are you serious about a dialogue? Then leave a substantive comment and sign your name to it.

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     • Anon says:

       August 1, 2011 at 1:14 am

       Kozol reportedly said that Arne Duncan wants to restore Plessy v. Ferguson. He might as well have said that Obama is in favor of slavery. Some of the other speakers were at least able to stoke fear and rouse a crowd without seeming completely crazy.

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2. Videos of some of the speeches at the SOS march & rally « GFBrandenburg's Blog says:

   August 1, 2011 at 7:05 pm

   [...] of Jonathan Kozol’s speech here. Also, on the right-hand side of the page are links to several other videos from the [...]

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3. C. Smith says:

   August 5, 2011 at 1:03 am

   Funny, I just left a meeting with an assistant superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools in which I stated that African American educators and students are suffering new, racial inequities that may have to be addressed via civil litigation. Later in the conversation, the administrator stated that one particular school sanctioned for “low-performance” and placed on the list for closing, will never rise out of the sanction status because “half the students can’t speak English.” Currently, under the NCLB policies supported by Duncan and the Obama administration, a student’s English language abilities, acculturation, race, aptitude, willingness to learn, school attendance, or income status have no bearing on student performance. Educators are the reason students fail or succeed.

   Obama and Duncan’s refusal to embrace reality has proliferated vast inequities (started during Jeb and George Bush’s tenures as governor and president) between Black schools and Anglo schools here in Miami and across the nation. In Florida, “low-performance” on standardized tests results in sanctions for staff and students. All the predominantly Black high schools in Miami-Dade County are under sanction and have been for over ten years. None have ever achieved liberation from sanctioning, even though all state mandated “interventions” are deployed annually. Obama and Duncan embrace placing inequitable sanctions on schools. One has to question whether they are ensuring that “the resulting segregated schools give their minority students a good education” because the sanctioning process has facilitated the unequal and separate schools that were characteristic of an era pre- Brown versus Topeka, Kansas. Obama and Duncan may not have given birth to” de facto segregation,” but they are certainly complicit in keeping it alive.

   Here in Miami, disproportionately, Black educators are working under a Memorandum of Understanding that was negotiated between the United Teachers of Dade and the district school board. The resultant inequitable contractual obligations were done without input from the educators affected. The contract for these schools staffed with mostly Black women

   •prohibits autonomous control of school by administrators and teaching staff
   •mandates specific teaching materials (many came under question and subsequently were abandoned) chosen by the state for sanctioned schools and denies academic freedom or the ability to choose instructional materials appropriate for a given time or situation
   •forces staff to undergo intrusive state school/classroom inspections on a monthly basis
   •forces instruction according to a benchmark calendar, in which penalties occur for deviation (the sequence of the calendar ignores the realities of how long and short term memory banks function)
   •mandates more time for collaboration inside and outside of the regular school day to ensure standardized pacing for instruction is in place
   •mandates professional development that is repetitive, lacks innovation, and focuses on test prep
   •forces educators to issue the following standardized tests: baseline assessment, two interim assessments, monthly assessments, annual summative assessment, and an end of the year assessment
   •requires that they participate in regular data chats from data collected from all the standardized assessments
   •allows for the involuntary transfer of 25% - 50% of the staff at the end of a school year

   The perk is, as of the 2010 – 2011 school year, the teachers receive a $3,000 stipend when they work under these conditions.

   Teachers functioning under the regular contract have autonomy and academic freedom; however, the test prep mentality has permeated even the Anglo schools. They spend time teaching to the test to avoid sanctioning. Though the Anglo students are compromised, they don’t suffer the same punitive sanctions as Black students attending predominately Black schools. For example, the majority of the Black students are forced to take three language arts classes: reading, writing, and language arts and two math classes under a remedial curriculum with mandated teaching materials focused on test prep as opposed to an enriching curriculum that allows for inquiry, problem solving, creative/critical thinking, and analysis/creative writing in response to visual text, written text, or a guiding question. Their elective courses are replaced with test prep classes. Project based learning is prohibited. They are often taken out of their non-testing classes to sit for tutoring sessions. Their social studies instructors are forced to take class time for test prep. Generally, their instructors are novice, frequently not certified in the area in which they are teaching, and often come from the ranks of Teach for America, a new teacher program that is, according to one educator,” tantamount to the Tuskegee Experiment.” In contrast, their white counter-parts never see a Teach for America teacher. Nor are their schools in constant flux with ever changing staff akin to the dismantling of the slave family. Additionally, they do not walk daily with the chronic red lettered “low-performing” stamp that accompanies the” second-class stamp” issued by the strong arm of American racism.

   Segregated, unequal schools, no autonomy- pretty much pre-Brown versus Topeka, Kanas. Kozo, who, by the way, regularly visits these schools, called it right.

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