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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges

Katrina Schwartz

United States / 26-08-2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED

Amidst the discussions about content standards, curriculum and teaching strategies, it’s easy to lose sight of the big goals behind education, like giving students tools to deepen their quantitative and qualitative understanding of the world. Teaching for understanding has always been a challenge, which is why Harvard’s Project Zero has been trying to figure out how great teachers do it.

Some teachers discuss metacognition with students, but they often simplify the concept by describing only one of its parts — thinking about thinking. Teachers are trying to get students to slow down and take note of how and why they are thinking and to see thinking as an action they are taking. But two other core components of metacognition often get left out of these discussions — monitoring thinking and directing thinking. When a student is reading and stops to realize he’s not really understanding the meaning behind the words, that’s monitoring. And most powerfully, directing thinking happens when students can call upon specific thinking strategies to redirect or challenge their own thinking.

 

 

“When we have a rich meta-strategic base for our thinking, that helps us to be more independent learners,” said Project Zero senior research associate Ron Ritchhart at a Learning and the Brain conference. “If we don’t have those strategies, if we aren’t aware of them, then we’re waiting for someone else to direct our thinking.”

Helping students to “learn how to learn” or in Ritchhart’s terminology, become “meta-strategic thinkers” is crucial for understanding and becoming a life-long learner. To discover how aware students are of their thinking at different ages, Ritchhart has been working with schools to build “cultures of thinking.” His theory is that if educators can make thinking more visible, and help students develop routines around thinking, then their thinking about everything will deepen.

His research shows that when fourth graders are asked to develop a concept map about thinking, most of their brainstorming centers around what they think and where they think it. “When students don’t have strategies about thinking, that’s how they respond – what they think and where they think,” Richhart said. Many fifth graders start to include broad categories of thinking on their concept maps like “problem solving” or “understanding.” Those things are associated with thinking, but fifth graders often haven’t quite hit on the process of thinking.

By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as “concentrate” or “don’t get caught up in things that aren’t relevant.” But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including “making connections,” “comparing” and “breaking things down.”

Ritchhart studied 400 students at a school focusing on cultivating a culture of thinking. The study had no control group, but Ritchhart could chart development of metacognition from 4th-11th grades.

“Students basically made a two-and-a-half year gain from what would be expected just from teachers trying to create that culture of thinking,” Ritchhart said. He admits that the study isn’t definitive, but to him it’s proof that when teachers focus on these ideas they do see improvement.

HOW CAN EDUCATORS HELP?

In a culture of thinking, students recognize that collective and individual thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted as part of the regular day-to-day experience of all group members. This type of culture can exist in any place where learning is part of the experience including school, after school programming or museum programs.

To help make these ideas more concrete, Ritchhart and his colleagues have been working to hone in on a short list of “thinking moves” related to understanding. To test whether these moves were really crucial, researchers asked themselves: could a student say she really understood something if she hadn’t engaged in these activities? They believe the important “thinking moves” that lead to understanding are:

  • Naming: being able to identify the parts and pieces of a thing
  • Inquiry: questioning should drive the process throughout
  • Looking at different perspectives and viewpoints
  • Reasoning with evidence
  • Making connections to prior knowledge, across subject areas, even into personal lives
  • Uncovering complexity
  • Capture the heart and make firm conclusions
  • Building explanations, interpretations and theories.

These thinking moves all point to the conclusion that learning doesn’t happen through the mere delivery of information. “Learning only occurs when the learner does something with that information,” Ritchhart said. “So as teachers we need to think not only about how we will deliver that content, but also what we will have students do with that content.”

One easy way to start asking students to be more metacognitive is to build in reflection time about thinking. Ask students to think about the lesson and identify the kinds of thinking they used throughout. That not only builds vocabulary around thinking, but it often gives kids confidence to name specific thinking strategies they used. Taking this time to reflect also reminds students that they did real work during the lesson.

THINKING ROUTINES

To get at how teachers make thinking visible, Ritchhart studied teachers who were very effective at helping student dive below surface level retention of information into really understanding material as it connects to the rest of their studies and their lives. He noticed none of them taught a lesson on thinking.

“They had routines and structures that scaffolded and supported student thinking,” Ritchhart said. This discovery led him and colleagues at Project Zero to develop “thinking routines” that all teachers can use to help students develop the habits of mind that lead to more understanding.

One way to develop a culture of thinking is to pick one of the thinking routines Project Zero has designed and use it over and over in a variety of contexts. Rather than trying each routine once, applying one routine in multiple ways will help make thinking in that way habitual. It becomes almost an expectation in a classroom, like other class norms.

One example of this that goes beyond the K-12 classroom comes from Harvard Medical School, where instructors were struggling to train students to listen to patients and make strong diagnoses based on the symptoms they heard. As an experiment, the medical school offered an elective module to students, where once a week they would join a fine arts class using the “See, Think, Wonder” thinking routine to observe art. After 10 weeks, all the medical students were assessed on clinical diagnosing and the students who had done “See, Think, Wonder” had improved much more than those who had not participated.

“One of the reasons we call them thinking routines is that through their use it is the thinking that becomes routine,” Ritchhart said. Project Zero is working with teachers around the country to apply thinking routines in the classroom and many have reported that after doing the routines in a structured way several times students naturally start using the protocols for everything.

Source of Article:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/44227/when-kids-have-structure-for-thinking-better-learning-emerges

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Why Teaching English Through Content Is Critical for ELL Students

Katrina Schwartz

United States / July 1, 2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED

Teaching grade-level content to students who have just arrived in the United States and whose English skills are limited is a difficult task. High school-level content specialists especially have little training on how to integrate language acquisition into their content. Often teachers deal with that by either dumbing down the curriculum to make it linguistically simpler or alternating between lessons focused on language and those about content.

Teachers in San Francisco were looking for better ways to teach their newcomer students the English skills they need, without losing a focus on the complex content all students should be learning. To do that, they looked to adopt some of the strategies of the Writing Is Thinking Through Inquiry(WITsi) work being done in New York City with the general education population.

Based on Judith Hochman’s work, at its core these strategies focus on building up students’ ability to put together sentences piece by piece*. Through an inquiry process, New York teachers discovered that their students’ writing was breaking down at the level of the sentence, making it difficult for them to express more nuanced and complex arguments.

Nell Scharff Panero developed the WITsi strategies and has been working with New York Renewal schools to implement them. As she watched teachers having some success, she realized the same strategies could be powerful for English learners. She has been working with language specialists to adapt the strategies for that population.

“Teachers are so responsive to this work,” said Amy Gottesfeld, a supervisor in San Francisco’s Multilingual Pathways Department. “They’re finding it hugely helpful and successful in terms of giving them concrete ways to integrate language into their content.”

San Francisco Unified School District is starting small, bringing together sheltered pathway teacher cohorts from seven high schools around the district. Together they look closely at student writing, share lesson ideas, and try to deepen their own understanding of the English Language and how to teach it through content.

“Given these strategies that support language, that support writing, without having to sacrifice the focus on content has felt liberating to people,” Gottesfeld said.

The program is intentionally set up around cohorts at each school so that teachers can collaboratively build the WITsi strategies into every class, regardless of content area. One activity asks students to write sentences using “but, because and so” correctly. These small conjunctions are powerful language markers that students often use incorrectly.

But when the science teacher is using “but, because, so” sentence routines to help students understand relationships in an ecosystem, while in the next room the history teacher is using the same structures to help students identify the effects of colonialism, it reinforces writing and thinking for students. And, it means students are getting explicit language development help throughout the school day, not only during their legally required English Language Development time.

“I was like, oh, this is what I’ve been missing,” said Anne Ryan, a history teacher in the sheltered language pathway for newcomers at Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco. She first learned about some of the strategies through an exchange with the Internationals Network for Public Schools in New York, whose teachers have become standouts in developing language alongside content. She was trying to use some tips she picked up at a conference on her own when SFUSD announced the current pilot. She jumped at the chance for more formal training on the strategies.

Teachers in Thurgood Marshall High School's sheltered language pathway collaborate during a professional development training about how to teach thinking through writing.
Teachers in Thurgood Marshall High School’s sheltered language pathway collaborate during a professional development training about how to teach thinking through writing. (Courtesy Amy Gottesfeld/SFUSD)

“I think that non-English Language Development and English teachers, a lot of us still have nervousness around how to really develop English and writing skills in our classroom,” Ryan said. “But it really is our responsibility as well. I think doing the WITsi has made that responsibility feel lighter and feel effective.”

Bringing instruction down to the level of the sentence forces the teacher to carefully identify the most important information she wants her students to learn that day, and build sentence-level activities around the main content goal. This practice often leads to more effective instruction, in addition to helping students build their language skills.

WITsi work in New York City Renewal schools with the general education population has uncovered similar sentence-level misunderstandings in high school student writing. In those cases, it’s often hard for high school teachers to accept that they have to go back and teach the basic building blocks of good sentence writing, then paragraphs, and finally essays. They feel that their students should already have those skills.

But with newcomer students, teachers are hungry for anything that will help them make their curriculum more accessible to students who don’t have language skills yet, but desperately need them. All of these strategies should be used in conjunction with the most important content of the day. The idea is to marry the linguistics with subject mattercontent at every step to make the language relevant, while helping students learn the content.

SEVEN BASIC WRITING STRATEGIES

1. Sentence boundaries: These activities are designed to help students understand what a sentence is and what it is not.

In the process, teachers can identify the parts of a sentence: noun, verb, object, but more than the grammar, these activities use content to discuss what makes a sentence. How can one tell if something is a fragment, or a run-on? Activities include matching different parts of a sentence to either make a complete sentence or repair a fragment. Or, teachers might ask students to sort sentences into fragments, complete sentences and run-ons.

“But again all the sorting that you’re doing is around the content that you’re studying,” Gottesfeld said. So, if the lesson focus is Alexander Hamilton, all the sorting and matching is related to his historical contributions. The dual approach is the most important part of all these strategies.

2. Recognizing different sentence types like statements, questions, exclamations or commands.

This includes helping students look for clues — does the sentence start with a question word, for example? While it may seem simple to a native speaker, expressing the content using various types of sentences can dramatically change meaning, an important concept for students to understand. Also, focusing explicitly on questioning helps empower English learners as question askers throughout the curriculum and in other learning settings.

3. Working with the coordinating conjunctions “but, because and so” to help students elaborate on their sentences.

Many students, even ones who speak English, don’t have a firm grip on the differences these words signal. “But, because, so” activities might start off with matching sentence stems to sentence ends based on the conjunction, and gradually become more difficult, ending with giving a student the three bases and having them complete the sentence.

This is often a favorite with teachers and students because it begins to open the door to more analytical thinking. Knowing how to use these conjunctions is not only a language rule, it indicates the student’s ability to think comparatively, to explain, to make connections.

4. Subordinating conjunctions

Subordinating conjunctions are an important way English speakers vary sentences structure and express complicated relationships between things. They’re also tricky for non-native English speakers, and deserve explicit introduction. Words that signal time and position are powerful expressions of analytical thinking. When teachers introduce subordinating conjunctions within a content lesson, it gives students more ways to express complex ideas and improves sentence fluency.

5. Sentence combining

Activities in this sequence include giving students two sentences and asking them to use a variety of techniques to combine them into one. Scaffolds might include giving students a word bank or conjunctions to choose from, while the most complex version might ask students to write a sentence with an independent and dependent clause on Alexander Hamilton that uses a conjunction. A core goal of these activities is to use relevant content to help students reduce redundancy in their writing by combining sentences. It’s also an opportunity to work on syntax within the context of content objectives. Students are motivated by the desire to be understood.

6. Appositives

Appositives are a language structure that allows the writer to rename a noun. This is another explicit language structure that makes student writing more interesting, specific and nuanced. But rather than making it a disconnected grammar lesson, teachers can use activities about their content that incorporate appositive practice.

Many English learners also struggle to follow the chain of references in texts with unknown words, so explicitly teaching about appositives can help with reading comprehension as well.

7. Sentence expansion with descriptors

In these activities students ask students to expand on a simple, unelaborated sentence by asking them to answer a series of questions aimed at teasing out details. A typical simple sentence might be, “Alexander Hamilton helped establish it.” The teacher then writes questions to identify the information that would elaborate this sentence: What did he establish? Why did he establish it? How did he do it? Who helped him? Once students have identified all these details, they rewrite or “expand” the unelaborated sentence into a much improved one that includes those details. This guided process helps model the way English sentences are constructed and is a precursor to revision.

“The ‘Writing as thinking’ presents somewhat of a sequence to introducing these strategies and approaches,” Gottesfeld said. “That feels new and clearly makes sense” to many teachers in the sheltered language pathways.

And when students have these clear sentence-level building blocks, practice them regularly, and understand the way they function to express ideas, teachers can use them in the most complex process of all: parallel revision.

“We know that revision is critical for the writing process to support students in developing good writing,” Gottesfeld said. Parallel revision is a more structured way to help students revise their writing. Teachers might write “elaborate” next to a thought in a student’s paragraph and suggest the student think about the “but, because, so” strategy to carry out that elaboration. This practice can also make peer revision more useful, grounding the discussion in specific strategies the kids know well through prior practice.

“It puts the kid in a position where they have to think about language that they know and try to apply it,” said Joanna Yip, a former teacher in the Internationals Network who helped design the materials and activities SFUSD teachers are using. “It is an absolutely necessary component for kids who are learning the language.” Through parallel revision students begin to truly appropriate the language and transfer the piecemeal sentence-level work into paragraphs and even essays.

Yip said this systematic approach to language construction that WITsi offers is fairly new to many English language teachers, especially ones who see themselves foremost as content specialists and secondarily as teachers of English. Rather than chunking out the steps of writing a paragraph and asking students to follow instructions, parallel revision requires students themselves to do the thinking about which strategy responds to the teacher’s feedback.

Yip said a lot of English language teachers are well versed in using language frames, sentence starters, vocabulary work and scaffolding larger pieces of writing. They regularly use the cycle Pauline Gibbons champions, in which teachersbuild up background knowledge jointly as a class before asking students to do it on their own. “That’s all good and necessary,” Yip said, “but the one missing piece to those approaches tends to be there isn’t explicit instruction on how to build sentences.”

And keeping these strategies tightly tied to the content makes the language lessons useful to students. Too often when teachers try to focus on the nuts and bolts of language, they end up delivering a disconnected lesson on grammar that students don’t transfer to the writing they do in each content area.

“If they have opportunities to do this kind of work that is appropriate for their phase of language development, then over time they will gain that momentum as students,” Yip said. “When they feel supported in doing it, it’s a rigorous task, but a task they can manage.” She said it’s unreasonable to ask a student who has been in the country for three months to write an essay. And without carefully scaffolding writing strategies, that student may never get to the essay writing level.

A TEAM EFFORT

Evelyn Sulem is just finishing up her second year of teaching high school history. She said teaching in the sheltered language pathway isn’t a highly coveted position, so it often falls to newer teachers. But she enjoys watching the incredible progress her students make and plans to continue teaching newcomer students, especially now that she feels she has a few more tools and a supportive group of colleagues.

“I have definitely seen a massive progress in the level of English and in the level of content knowledge,” Sulem said about using the WITsi strategies. She meets with colleagues from other content specialties who also teach newcomers once a week. They share strategies and try to sync up their curriculum to reinforce vocabulary, concepts and language structures.

“We try to bring forth the vocabulary in all the disciplines,” Sulem said. Through this intensive WITsi work, she has also become more aware of the different English levels in her classroom. She is now carefully building more scaffolds into her lessons, using WITsi strategy variants to support her students to understand the history content. For example, students might complete the activities in their home language, or discuss the content with a partner in their home language before trying to use their English to write down thoughts..

“We teach history in a workshop style,” Sulem said. The social studies department at Lincoln wants to build students into critical thinkers who can analyze history. They try not to lecture from the front of the room, and have de=emphasized memorization. That’s even more important when students don’t understand the lecture anyway. “We don’t give any lectures, but we engage students with simple text which has history content,” Sulem said.

Sulem is grateful the WITsi work has given her more tools to reach her newcomer English learners, but she admits the work is very difficult. Many of her students arrived in the U.S. with interrupted educations, and their writing skills in a home language aren’t strong either.

“It makes me think about my own teaching practice in a different way,” Sulem said. “Students need visuals and need to be informed about the same theme in three different ways: speaking, writing and visually.”

And because she teaches a few sections of general education students, Sulem is applying tactics that work with her newcomers to all her classes. She thinks teaching English learners has made her a more creative teacher, helping her to guide kids to an analytical understanding of history using multimodal forms of learning. And when she can see a student is struggling to express a complex idea in their writing, she’s got more linguistic supports to help them get there.

*This piece has been edited to reflect that the WITsi strategies build on ideas originally developed by Judith Hochman.

Source of Article:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51268/why-teaching-english-through-content-is-critical-for-ell-students

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Think Tank: States Aren’t Teaching Consent in Sex Ed

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By: usnews.com/16-05-2018

Not all require teachers to mention ‘healthy relationships,’ ‘sexual assault’ or ‘consent’ in class.

The Center for American Progress recently released an analysis of what it called «the current state of sex education standards» across the U.S., focusing on discussions of consent and healthy relationships in those teaching standards. Analysts at the think tank considered state laws in 24 states and Washington, D.C., that require sex education in public schools and found that not all states address those topics in their sex education standards.

According to the review, just 10 states and Washington, D.C., reference «healthy relationships,» «sexual assault» or «consent» in their sex education programs.

Rhode Island, West Virginia and Washington, D.C., mandate detailed state standards that «address aspects of sexual health and clearly categorize topic areas» by age, according to the analysis. Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, North Carolina and Vermont don’t spell out these requirements, but they have revamped state standards to address consent or health relationships.

Moreover, the review found that California, New Jersey and Oregon have comprehensive sex education standards, requiring teachers to discuss healthy relationships as part of sex education. Each state, CAP says, requires educators to use medically correct materials, as well as incorporate lessons on healthy relationships or consent. California, New Jersey and Oregon also boast teen pregnancy rates 3, 4 and 11 percent lower than the national average, respectively. 

The majority of the states analyzed – Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota,Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Utah – reportedly provide teachers with little guidance on which subjects should be covered in sex education curriculums. Those teachings cover pregnancy prevention and preventing sexually transmitted diseases, but don’t address the development of healthy relationships and don’t divide standards by age, according to the review.

Still, the think tank reports that a number of reforms are building momentum in state legislatures across the country.

*Fuente: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-05-15/cap-states-arent-teaching-consent-healthy-relationships-in-sex-education

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United States: DeVos gets cold shoulder from White House after interviews

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United States / March 18, 2018 / Author: MARIA DANILOVA / Source: WFTV

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos got a less than ringing endorsement from the White House on Monday after a pair of uncomfortable television interviews raised questions about her commitment to help underperforming schools and support for President Donald Trump’s proposal to curb school violence.

Less than a day after DeVos was appointed to chair a federal commission on school safety, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders downplayed DeVos’ role in the process. Asked whether DeVos would be the face of the commission, Sanders said, «I think that the president is going to be the lead on school safety when it comes to this administration.»

Sanders also said that the focus is «not one or two interviews, but on actual policy.»

In an interview with CBS’ «60 Minutes» that aired Sunday night, DeVos said years of federal investment in public education had produced «zero results» and that American schools were stagnating and failing many students. But asked by CBS’ Lesley Stahl whether she had visited low-performing schools to understand their needs, DeVos, an ardent proponent of school choice, admitted to having visited none.

«I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming,» DeVos said.

«Maybe you should,» Stahl said.

«Maybe I should,» DeVos said.

DeVos’ spokeswoman Liz Hill said that the secretary’s focus was on promoting successful innovation, including in traditional public schools.

«The secretary has been very intentional about visiting and highlighting high performing, innovative schools across the country,» Hill told The Associated Press in a statement. «Many of these high performing schools are traditional public schools that have challenged the status quo and dared to do something different on behalf of their students – many where teachers are empowered in the classroom to find what works best for students.

DeVos took to Twitter on Monday to defend her comments.

«I’m fighting every day for every student, in every school – public and private – to have a world-class education. We owe that to our children,» she wrote. She also suggested that some of her remarks were unfairly left out of the show.

This wasn’t the first time DeVos faced criticism following an uneven performance at a public forum. She was ridiculed last year after suggesting at her confirmation hearing in the Senate that some schools needed guns to protect students from grizzly bears.

Elizabeth Mann, an education expert with the Brookings Institution, said that DeVos’ failure to tour struggling schools undermines her credibility as an advocate for the children that they serve.

«It’s difficult for her to establish credibility in speaking about those issues when she hasn’t visited an underperforming school as secretary,» Mann said.

But Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said the criticism was unfair and that the questions and the tone of the interview were tough. He added that he is not sure that DeVos’ predecessors in the Obama administration would have done a better job in a similar interview.

«She is facing the glare of the spotlight much more than they did and the press is much less friendly to her,» Petrilli said.

Source of the News:

http://www.wftv.com/news/devos-gets-cold-shoulder-from-white-house-after-interviews/714942234

Source of the Image:

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/default/news/2017/01/23/296947/the-devos-dynasty-a-family-of-extremists/

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EEUU: Education: A Last Chance

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EEUU/ Author: Andrew Sunghyun Yoon / Source: Carnegie Council

Andrew Sunghyun Yoon, Third Prize High School Category, Essay Contest 2017

«I am a 15-year-old sophomore attending Seoul International School in South Korea. Born in the United States and raised in Asia, I feel my diverse experiences around the world have shaped and concretized my beliefs. I am extremely passionate about public speaking, international relations, and the humanities as a whole. I hope to use my voice and the power of the pen to advocate social causes particularly pertaining to the disenfranchised.»–Andrew Yoon

ESSAY TOPIC: In your opinion, what is the greatest ethical challenge facing the world today?

There is a girl in the rural areas of Western China, wiping crystal beads of sweat off her forehead as she cooks whatever’s left in the house for her siblings. She is cradled within the silence created by her parent’s absence, counting how many days remain until they return from their minimum-wage jobs in Beijing. Amidst the endless financial troubles and the fragmentation of her family, school simply was not an option. If destiny really did exist, hers didn’t include an education. There are hundreds of thousands more like her. A few hundred miles away in the sun-scorched outskirts of Kabul, a girl is reprimanded for resisting when she is told that she cannot go to school like her brother. There are hundreds of thousands more like her. Halfway across the globe in Baltimore, a city entangled in poverty and violence, there is a boy whose family’s survival hinges on food stamps and is forced to relinquish his dream of being the first in his family to attend college. There are, once again, hundreds of thousands more like him. These are all characters within the same story: a story about individuals who are stripped of the chance at a bigger and better future through education.

Without a doubt, countless other stories deserve to be heard as well: the one about devastated refugees fleeing decimated homes, the one about the unspeakable horrors of religious and ethnic persecution, the one about families subsisting on one meal a day as they cope with the dire truth of poverty, and just about a million more. Yet the issue of education resonates especially clearly as the most pressing ethical challenge of today’s generation because time and time again, governments and citizens alike are failing to address education systems that leave millions in the dark. Although education is perhaps the most substantial step toward addressing and eventually tackling the aforementioned global issues, it is perhaps one of the most overshadowed challenges of the century, burrowed beneath more immediate concerns stemming from political turmoil or economic advancements.

Today, governments have become complacent with flawed education systems, and citizens have subconsciously learned to coexist with a reality in which millions of children and young adults across the globe are forced to give up the chance to go to school. We continue to fail to recognize that education is not a privilege. It is a right. And it is an unforgettable ethical failure on our part for allowing this issue to be perpetuated.

The cause, details, and experiences of individuals barred from equal education may all be vastly different, but there exists a common thread intertwined among all who are a part of this narrative of injustice: education is and has always been the key to escaping a vicious cycle of inequality or poverty. On the racial and socioeconomic front, conspicuous gaps in access to education exist among the urban and rural, rich and poor, and along the spectrum of race or ethnicity. In the United States, despite institutional initiatives such as Affirmative Action, which aims to promote college admission among underprivileged minorities, many of these underprivileged individuals do not end up escaping the chains of racial and wealth inequality. Due to the intertwined nature of race and poverty in the United States, poverty is often concentrated in areas with higher percentages of racial minorities, which inevitably leads directly to a dead end. As part of a public education system dependent on local funding and support, such communities will consistently lack the teachers or resources that can sufficiently piece together a high-quality education for its children. Countries with a vast urban-rural divide, including China and India, experience this issue to an even greater extent because rural regions themselves are not equipped with the necessary human capital, technology, facilities, or apparatus.

On the gender front, the chasm is just as substantial. A single glance at relevant statistics is enough to illustrate the disproportionate number of women whose window to higher education is perpetually closed. According to the United Nations, 16 million girls—significantly higher than the number of boys—will never attend school in their lifetime, and girls comprise two-thirds of the 750 million adults who lack basic literacy skills. The root cause of gender discrimination in an educational context varies from country to country. In some, it has emerged out of deeply-rooted religious or cultural ideology, whereby it may be deemed unorthodox or unfitting for women to pursue high levels of education. In others, it is the inevitable result of issues such as early pregnancy or other social pressures that put girls at a disadvantage. In either scenario, however, the numerous barriers obstructing women’s access to education have created a stigmatized perception of women that feeds into gender inequality as a whole. Women’s rights movements that have emerged in developed nations indicate an increasingly progressive social atmosphere, but many of such movements have been unable to translate into direct and practical results in terms of access to education.

The reality of this pressing issue is ubiquitous; it’s plastered across news headlines, emphasized and re-emphasized by international organizations. Yet, the question at the crux of this issue is: Who should be accountable?

The first response should be the government. In 2006, in response to the alarming number of children without access to schools, the Chinese government revised its education law to especially accommodate the needs of children from rural areas. This reform included abolished tuition and other fees—e.g. textbooks or room and board—that rural students usually cannot afford. This legislation reform was an evident attempt to increase access to educational resources, especially in poor or rural regions, where such resources are often nonexistent to begin with. China’s leadership actively addressed the nation’s vast wealth and gender gaps, and took accountability for the situation of its citizens. But not all governments have made similar efforts, even in the presence of abundant resources. In order to address this ethical challenge, the most influential source of change stems from the government, who should work—through new legislation or reforms to the old—to ensure that children are bolstered by an educational system that is open and fair.

The other answer as to who should be accountable for ensuring education is a little less clear. There is no doubt that in the status quo, there are a number of countries whose first priority cannot be equal education. But if the government is too unstable at the present moment to secure an effective and fair education system due to more immediate concerns, who is accountable? It could be the United Nations, similar international organizations, smaller nongovernmental organizations, citizens, or a combination of all of the above. In any case, those outside of the government are also ethically responsible to respond to the government’s inability to install reforms or work among themselves through grassroots projects on local or national levels in order to initiate a change.

When individuals are barred from attending school due to social and economic pressure, they are closing perhaps the one and only door out of their current situation; they are being forced to let go of a fundamental right. Education is not a privilege. It is a right, and for many more individuals, it is a last chance at change and progress.

Source of the News:

https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/articles_papers_reports/education-a-last-chance

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EEUU: How We Fight Against Police Terror

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América del Norte / Estados Unidos / 14 de agosto de 2016 / Por: Julia Wallace

They will kill you—armed or unarmed. They will kill you with your pants pulled up or sagged. They will kill you whether you have a job or you’re unemployed. They will kill you if you have the utmost respect or if you talk back. They will kill you if you are trans, cis or straight. They will kill you with a four-year-old in the backseat. If US history shows anything, it is that the police kill Black people.

 

The fury against the murder of Black people has become international, and with it, the question of how to fight police terror. We are already in the streets, protesting and shutting down highways and bridges in the face of the police and politicians. Protesting is critical, but what about strategy? What can be done in the face of injustice? The solution is not having more Black faces in positions of power. We have elected Black mayors, governors and a Black president, yet anti-Black racism, state-sanctioned brutality and mass incarceration have only increased over the last 30 years.

In frustration, some individuals have called for Black people to arm ourselves against the police. Black people have a right to defend ourselves against police terror and bigotry. But how? No single individual can hit the system where it matters. No lone shooter can end or even stymie the continuation of police brutality.

When one police officer is removed, many more crop up to replace him. Five police were killed in Dallas: they, too, will be replaced. Politicians attempted to use the deaths of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge to break apart and intimidate the Black Lives Matter movement. Instead, the movement experienced a renewed wave of resistance. But the question persists: How do we stop these racist, killer cops?

Social inequality and class divisions under capitalism reinforce and perpetuate racism, which will never end without attacking its structural basis. We must organize as workers and fight together against capitalists, cops and the state. This is the only way to move forward.

Revolutionary socialists are not pacifists, but martyrdom and individual vengeance have no place in our strategy. Individual armed Blacks cannot defend the community against racist policing. Armed organizations alone have defended themselves for a time but as soon as they posed a threat to American capitalism and its institutions, they were smashed by state repression.

Defend the Black Community

The examples of the Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army and other armed organizations in the 60’s and 70’s grew out of popular frustration with pacifism. However, guns alone could not halt the police attacks. The Panthers were able to hold off the newly formed LAPD SWAT team during a raid on their L.A. headquarters in 1969. This was because of community mobilization to defend the Panthers due to in part their projects like clinics and free breakfast program. However, the police and FBI used the Panthers’ arms as a pretext to carry out a brutal attack on the organization and its members. The Panthers regarding members and arms were not prepared to engage the State in an armed struggle.

But no single individual can hit the system where it matters. No lone shooter can end or even stymie the continuation of police brutality.

The police targeted and busted the Panthers. They blunted their revolutionary potential through fire and the heavy weight of the judiciary system: prosecutions, costly fines and bails, frame-up cases, solitary confinement.

Today, if a similar phenomenon led by Blacks, oppressed people, or revolutionary groups were to arise, it would be violently decimated unless it were thousands, millions strong. A couple weeks ago, we watched as Dallas police unflinchingly detonated a bomb, executing Micah Johnson with no trial, no evidence presented in a court.

Community organization is one way of building resistance. The Panthers secured the support of the community through health services and breakfast programs for kids. People called on their assistance, rather than the police, to resolve conflicts within the Black community.

Community defense means solidarity. Solidarity actions in the streets against police killings turn into protests that can shut down the city. We can and must take the streets. With greater organization, mobilizations can target commercial districts and block highways. Yet, there is a power that is at our disposal that we cannot afford to do without: workers’ class-power.

Civilian Boards: Can the Community Control the Police?

The perspective of “Community Control Over the Police” argues that there be civilian oversight around the police. Some community organizations and groups in the left are putting forward this slogan. This was also proposed in the past by Black Panther Bobby Seale, who argued that having civilian boards with authority over the police and hiring/firing power are opposed by the police in every city it’s proposed. Currently, Los Angeles Police Commission is used for community members to voice concerns about the police. Members are appointed by the mayor. The Police Commission also has no power over LAPD to discipline, hire or fire. Even when the Police Commission has disagreed with LAPD, there is no power over the police department.The police continue to kill with impunity.

In the face of this sham commission, other organizations have proposed a civilian police board. But would these boards be a mechanism for the community to control the police?Unión del Barrio, a Los Angeles-based Mexicano Revolutionary Nationalist & Raza Internationalist organization, has recently proposed this civilian police board to be implemented in LA, comparing it to the already-existing Los Angeles School Board (LAUSD). It should be noted, though, that the police are not teachers—they are enforcers and class enemies. The purpose of their profession is to safeguard the capitalist order and repress dissent.

Therefore, the community having some decisions over the police mistakes the role of cops. We want to end the police, not hire nicer or friendlier ones. We do not seek greater representation of oppressed peoples among cops. For decades, there has been a poverty recruitment of Black and Brown youth: highly-funded marketing campaigns and recruitment specifically targeting young men and women of color straight out of high school.

A rainbow-colored police force does not change the racist nature of the institution and its function. The police as an institution will always repress regardless of the race of the police officer (Los Angeles the LAPD is the most murderous police department around the country and has a majority Black and Brown police force). With no real sway over the law enforcement force as a whole, a civilian police board that takes on part of the hiring process will only lend a “democratic” cover to police and the State.

We must organize as workers and fight together against capitalist, cops and the state. This is the only way to move forward.

Organizing as a class

The exploitation of the working class ensures the continued concentration and accumulation of capital and power in the ruling class. This money and power is bothguaranteed by and invested in the State, its repressive forces (police, national guard, etc.) and «soft» capitalist institutions (segregated education, corporate media). We go to work every day and make the bosses richer. As long as we remain passive, the wellspring of the police—and the racism they systematically exercise—will never dry up. Without workers to produce wealth, cities would come to a standstill. Without our labor, the bosses are nothing. Without our labor, the nation is nothing. Our immediate task is to unite as a class to fight against the bosses’ thugs, the police.

As much as this white supremacist society hates Black people, as much as we insist and fight to ensure that Black Lives do Matter in a society where they don’t, Black people cannot combat police violence alone. The capitalist system thrives on division. It is in the interest of the ruling class and white supremacists to maintain the systemic oppression of people of color and to sucker working-class whites into defending reactionary, ultimately anti-worker policies and the rich, rather than aligning with the oppressed. Trump epitomizes this false consciousness among white workers, tapping into the disunity within the working class. We need to organize together and form a cohesive and combative organization that brings the experiences of oppressed people of the working class together.

Organizing under the slogan, “Strike Against Police Terror” has the potential to build activesolidarity toward an effective fightback against police.

Unions are supposed to stand up for workers and the community. We must put up the fight to make our unions take a stand against racist cops. This means holding work stoppages when the cops kill one of us, marching against police brutality, organize against police terror and expel cops from working-class organizations and unions.

Workers’ organizations must come together in a united front against racist police killings under the slogans, “No Cops in Our Unions” and “Strike Against Police Terror.” This has the potential to build active solidarity toward an effective fightback against police. We should bring these proposals to our workplaces, union meetings and other working class organizations. The campaign Left Voice is apart of Strike Against Police Terror (StrAPT) seeks to organize and mobilize union, non union, under employed and unemployed people of all genders, ethnicities and disabilities as a force to strike against police terror. We will use our power as a class and as oppressed people to fight capitalism and its armed forces: the police.

The Graveyard of Social Movements

Both the Democrats and Republicans have presided over the torture and killing of Black people and mass incarceration. Police chiefs, mayors, governors and presidents: from top to bottom, they uphold the racist system.

On May 19, 2015, a month after Freddie Gray was killed from spinal trauma caused by Baltimore police, President Obama signed the «Blue Alert” law to protect police by creating a national system that would alert them to threats. On May 28, 2016, Louisiana Governor John Edwards signed the “Blue Lives Matter” bill into law to include the police as a “protected group” in hate crime statutes. In doing so, Governor Edwards equated the armed forces of the state to the very oppressed people and communities they are hired, trained, and strapped to harass, lock up, and kill.

These laws are being crafted to secure safety for cops as they murder us in cold blood.

After the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and after the Dallas shooting, the Democratic Black Congressional Caucus and other Capitol Hill politicians lined up to demand a a “gun control debate.” No measures to address the murder of Black people by the police were discussed. No sit-in for the lives of over 130 Black men, women, and children killed this year by cops was proposed. These laws are being crafted to secure safety for cops as they murder us in cold blood.

The overtures by Democratic Party leaders are meant to dampen the movement of resistance proliferating throughout the country. Any political organization that has capitalists as its financiers will only be controlled by them. We must break from the politicians and parties of the capitalist class.

The question of police is not a moral one; the police are the armed force of the state, the same state that secures profits for capitalists and offers misery to most workers and the people. Police are the guardians of this system. That racism is rampant among police officers and woven into the institution of police is beyond question. The power to hire and fire police does not change their social role. As long as there is capitalism, there will be cops enforcing it. Oppressed communities will not control the police until they abolish it. That is, until capitalism receives its death blow and there’s no longer need for a special force that protects the rich and keeps the oppressed in check.

We must organize and unite as a class to end racist police brutality, for the dissolution of cops only made possible through the abolition of the class system and unequal social relations the police were created to maintain.

Source: http://www.leftvoice.org/How-We-Fight-Against-Police-Terror

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