USA

Right-wing academics feel threatened & censored at UK universities, says think tank demanding change

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Europe/United Kingdom/09-08-2020/Author and Source: www.rt.com

Academic freedom in the UK is in peril, with universities increasingly hostile to right-wing views, a new study claims. Complaints about campus bias and ‘cancel culture’ are 10 a penny, but this one carries more weight than most.

“Britain’s universities are world-leading. Yet there is growing concern that academic freedom in these institutions is being undermined.” opens a report

According to the report, one in four social sciences academics would be willing to support a dismissal campaign against a colleague who expresses right-wing views on multiculturalism, imperialism, parenting, or diversity in organizations. Right-leaning professors, outnumbered three to one by their left-wing colleagues, say that the climate in universities is hostile to their views. More than 60 percent of ‘very right’ professors perceive this hostility, compared to only 16 percent of those who identify as ‘very left.’

A third of all right-leaning academics say they’ve refrained from airing their views in teaching and research, compared to 15 percent of left-wingers.

Academics lean further left than the general population. While less than one in ten Britons want increased immigration to the UK, nearly a third of academics support an increased influx. Conversely, while more than half of the population wants immigration lowered, only 16 percent of academics support this policy.

However, the most divisive issue on campus appears to be Brexit. With only 17 percent of academics admitting that they voted leave, these leavers feel that the campus isn’t the place to air their views. In fact, just over half of all respondents said they’d feel comfortable sitting in a meeting or taking lunch with a leave voter. “[I’ve] been told leavers are fascists,” one leave voter who identifies as a “centrist”

Across the board, only three in ten academics think that a leave supporter would be comfortable expressing their views on campus. “I told someone I had voted leave and they called me a racist,” one such supporter said. “I voted leave but was scared to reveal this as my colleagues were so aggressive in their attitude,” another said.

Trans issues are a hot-button topic too, with only 37 percent of respondents saying they’d have lunch with someone who opposes admitting transsexuals to women’s refuge centers.

That a right-leaning think tank would highlight these issues is unsurprising. Opposition to ‘cancel culture’ has grown in recent months, even among prominent leftists. The so-called ‘Harper’s Letter’ is the most high-profile example of this opposition, having been signed by figures like JK Rowling and Noam Chomsky. However, the letter has been criticized for its limp stance, and its vague calls for “open debate.”

The Policy Exchange paper has some more concrete recommendations. It calls for the government to appoint a director for academic freedom to the Office for Students, to investigate violations of freedom of speech, and for violators of this freedom to face civil action. The Office of Students is instructed to fine universities for breaches of academic freedom, and universities are asked to adopt a commitment to freedom, along the lines of the Chicago Principles, signed by 72 universities in the US.

Policy Exchange has succeeded in influencing actual policy before. The government adopted one of its papers on reviving traditional architecture in 2019, and in 2016, the government took on board its advice that military personnel in combat zones be protected from lawsuits for all but the most serious breaches of humanitarian law.

The organization’s latest report has been backed by some prominent public figures. “It does the country no good if our educators, our academics, our scholars and, most importantly, our students feel that they can’t speak or engage without fear of retribution,” former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth wrote in its foreword.

In a statement to the media, Universities Minister Michelle Donelan added: “It is deeply concerning the extent to which students and academics with mainstream views are being silenced and discriminated against in our universities,” promising to “strengthen free speech and academic freedom.”

However, some of the more determined leftists are unlikely to be won over. “The idea that academic freedom is under threat is a myth,” University and College Union Secretary Jo Grady responded in a statement. “The main concern our members express is not with think-tank-inspired bogeymen, but with the current government’s wish to police what can and cannot be taught at university.”

Source and Image: https://www.rt.com/uk/496983-right-wing-professors-censored/

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American university students are coddled, thin-skinned snowflakes, and social media is to blame

Robert Bridge

By: Robert Bridge

The explosion of ‘cancel culture’ and the social justice mindset on college campuses across the US was inspired by social media, where the idea of creating digital ‘safe spaces’ without ‘trolls’ has invaded the real world.

For those born around 1995, this column will likely be filed away under the heading: ‘Aging Generation X-er with No Clue Rails against Evils of Social Media.’ And I suppose there may be some truth to that claim. After all, the greater part of my life – like that of many other people – was spent without access to handheld technologies and the endless apps, add-ons and what-nots. The reason is not because I lived on an island, or was born among the Amish, but because such technologies were not around in my time. In other words, the youth of Generation X was more defined by Alexander Graham Bell than Steve Jobs.

Today, the ‘reality’ for those born after 1995 – the so-called ‘Generation Z’ – is radically different from those born just a decade earlier, since they have had an intimate relationship with the Internet practically since birth. It would be naïve to think this age demographic – many of whom were nurtured on social media – would reach adulthood with the same set of attitudes, values, and worldview as their predecessors. What’s shocking is just how different they really are.

Starting in 2014, just as Generation Z was entering college, a strange new phenomenon began surfacing on campuses across the country. Students, who are traditionally the staunchest defenders of free thought and the least likely to be prudes, began tossing around vague concepts carried over from the internet, such as ‘safe spaces,’ ‘microaggressions,’ and ‘getting triggered.’

A 2014 article in The New Republic shed an early light on this encroaching mentality: “What began as a way of moderating internet forums for the vulnerable and mentally ill now threatens to define public discussion both online and off,”wrote Jenny Jarvie. “The trigger … signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and paranoia about giving offense.”

But instead of adjusting their sails for the approaching tsunami of tears, universities broke with a thousand-year-old academic tradition, allowing the feelings and emotions of misguided adolescents to supersede the wisdom and reasoning of the educators. In fact, the world of academia not only failed to stop the flood, but, due to its own extreme liberal bent, helped to aggravate the strife by blaming the perceived ills of the world on some select bogeymen. More often than not these were dead white guys, members of a clan known as ‘the patriarchy’ that thrives today on its so-called ‘white privilege.’ Thus, college campuses are now riddled with angst and activism to the point that even the rules of English grammar and mathematics have become suspect.

Perhaps the greatest casualty from this radical makeover, however, is the trust that had been cultivated over the centuries between student and teacher. Professors today are hypersensitive to the grim fact that they may lose their job for doing or saying something ‘offensive’ that violates the rules of politically correctness. At the same time, many colleges are now extremely hesitant about inviting controversial speakers to their campus for fear of ‘triggering’ their students and inciting protests.

The intellectual bubble that now encapsulates the college campus mirrors the reality on social media, where users have a strong tendency to mingle with only those individuals who share their worldview. Whenever some annoying outsider with a different opinion attempts to ‘troll’ them, canceling that person and their alternative views is as easy as ‘unfriending’ them. Meanwhile, there is a certain status and feeling of moral superiority that comes from ‘canceling’ some heretic that has fallen afoul of political correctness.

In the 2018 book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’, Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, argue that the digital constructs of ‘safe spaces’ have done far more harm than good.

“Social media has channeled partisan passions into the creation of a “callout culture,” Lukianoff and Haidt argue. “New-media platforms and outlets allow citizens to retreat into self-confirmatory bubbles, where their worst fears about the evils of the other side can be … amplified by extremists and cyber trolls intent on sowing discord and division.”

According to Lukianoff and Haidt, Generation Z’s fierce aversion to controversial and even shocking information means that college campuses have become “more ideologically uniform,” thereby hindering the ability of “scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers” as historically has been the case at university.

The problem with allowing cancel culture to take root on social media and the university in the first place is that American society is now confronted with a mammoth weed on its front lawn. And while most people agree it is a problem, at the very least an eyesore, those who propose solutions risk being canceled themselves.

Last month, for example, 150 public figures, including Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie and JK Rowling attracted anger and ridicule after they signed a letter that called out ‘cancel culture.’ In part, the letter warned that the “restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.”

Not only were these left-leaning signatories extremely late to the game, they themselves have been accused of attempting to silence voices, mostly conservative ones, they did not agree with. Others, like Jennifer Finney Boylan, actually apologized to the mob for endorsing the milquetoast proposals put forward in the letter.

The tragic irony is that Western civilization, which was constructed on the free flow of ideas, is no longer capable of even pointing out problems without attracting scorn and derision. Such a repressive atmosphere, endorsed by ideologues that listen only to the voices inside their own heads, is severely threatening future progress. If this dangerous new tendency is not confronted head on and brought under control, it will be Western civilization itself that eventually finds itself ‘canceled’ due to its inability to evolve.

Source and Image: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/496957-us-university-social-media/

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How to Plan and Implement Continuous Improvement In Schools

Katrina Schwartz

USA / May 20, 2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED News

In the classroom, good teachers constantly test small changes to class activities, routines, and workflow. They observe how students interact with the material, identify where they trip up and adjust as they go. This on-the-fly problem solving is so common in classrooms many teachers don’t realize they’re even doing it, and the expertise they are gathering is rarely taken into account when schools or districts try to solve larger, systematic problems.

In  education research, researchers come up with ideas they think will improve teaching and then set up laboratory experiments or classroom trials to test that idea. If the trial goes well enough that idea gets put on a list of research-approved practices. While research-informed practices are important, this process can often mean that the interventions are unrealistic or disconnected from the hectic reality of many classrooms, and are rarely used. But what if teachers themselves were the research engine — the spark of continued improvement?

 

 

 

The Carnegie Foundation is trying to bridge that gap in identifying techniques that work and «create a much more democratic process in which teachers are involved in identifying and solving problems of practice that matter to them,” said Dr. Manuelito Biag, an associate in network improvement science at the foundation. Biag previously worked on developing research-practitioner partnerships for Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.

For the past several years, under the leadership of Dr. Tony Bryk, Carnegie is trying to apply a structured inquiry process to problems in education, building the capacity of teachers, principals and district administrators to continuously improve. This type of improvement science started in manufacturing and has been used to successfully change human-based systems like healthcare.

The basic tenets of the process involve understanding the problem, defining a manageable goal, identifying the drivers that could help reach that goal, and then testing small ideas to change those drivers. When done in a network, this cycle of improvement is expedited as various participants test different change ideas and share their findings with the group. Through a constant interplay of these elements a few change ideas will rise to the top and can be scaled across a system.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

Many of the biggest problems of practice have been around a long time and aren’t easy to solve. Too often when trying to improve something leaders jump to solutions before properly examining the problem. Understanding the problem requires valuing many types of knowledge. It means doing empathy interviews with participants in the system including teachers, staff, parents, and students. It involves bringing the best research literature to bear on the problem. And sometimes representing the processes involved in the problem can illuminate areas that are breaking down.

Biag said this stage is crucial and shouldn’t be rushed. He’s seen improvement projects that require up to a year of study to fully understand the problem, its root causes and the levers of change available to leaders. Often an improvement network will know it’s time to move on when participants feel saturated — they aren’t turning up any new perspectives or information.

“Sometimes it’s good to stop doing the research and try something,” Biag said. Implementing some change ideas often helps inform the problem and may even necessitate that the team revisit and revise the problem statement.

Courtesy of Carnegie Foundation

DEFINE THE GOALS AND FOCUS COLLECTIVE EFFORT

Once the group has a “good enough” understanding of the problem it’s crucial that they write a clear, succinct aim statement. It should be specific, measurable and focus on a challenging problem, but it should be doable.

The crucial question, Biag said, is “What’s within your span of control and what’s not? So when you act on this problem you aren’t wasting your time on the things that aren’t in your control.”

He often sees people define the problem too broadly. If the problem is an achievement gap between student populations, a group might say the root problem is inequality or poverty. Those things may contribute to the problem, but they aren’t within the control of teachers or principals or even districts to solve. A more manageable aim statement might be: “By June 2020 we’re going to increase from 45% to 90% the number of male students enrolling in credit bearing math courses at community colleges.”

“It has to be motivating enough for people to continue working on it for several months,” Biag said about the reach goal. But it must be specific and concrete enough that the group can see if change ideas are helping progress towards the goal.

“While an aim statement can look deceptively simple, you need to build trust and get on the same page with everyone in your network to even agree on where to focus your efforts,” Biag said. The network itself is important because it accelerates the pace of learning about potential solutions.

Once the aim is clear, the group brainstorms three to five primary drivers of the problem. These are the things the group believes provide the most leverage to meet the goal, and that are within the span of control. It’s crucial to only have a few of these, not twenty, because the network must work on all of them in tandem. Staying focused allows for more progress.

After identifying the most important drivers, network participants brainstorm change ideas that might affect those drivers. “The word change is very specific to improvement science,” Biag said. “It means an actual change in how you do work.” In other words, the focus is on the process and results in action. Change ideas are not things like “more money” or “more staff.” “It’s an actual change of a process or the introduction of a new process,” Biag said.

TEST AND BUILD EVIDENCE

Once the group has a good understanding of the problem, its root causes, what drives it and some ideas that will directly affect those drivers, it’s time to start testing them. Carnegie uses a “Plan, Do, Study, Act” (PDSA) cycle for testing ideas. The changes should be fairly small and the tester collects data along the way. It doesn’t have to be complicated data, just something to help analyze and track whether the change is moving the needle.

Courtesy of Carnegie Foundation

“Most schools and districts plan plan plan, then do, and then they never study,” Biag said. He advocates that planning include a prediction because participants are more likely to compare a new strategy with the expected effect. If the change idea didn’t function as expected there’s a lot to learn there.

Many of the best change ideas come from looking at what Carnegie calls “positive deviants” — the bright spots in a network. For example, if a network sets the aim of improving college readiness for English language learner students, when leaders are assembling their knowledge base they should talk to teachers who seem to be achieving better than average results with that population. Those teachers are “positive deviants” and networks should try to learn from the ways their practices differ from colleagues.

For example, High Tech High Charter Network leaders identified that they wanted to increase the number of African American and Latino males applying to four-year colleges. When they looked at drivers, they realized school attendance was lower for this group and hypothesized that the way teachers communicated with parents might be part of the issue. To try to eliminate variation in parent-teacher communication they tested a change theory that involved using a set of protocols for interacting with families.

They went through several iterations of the protocols, but when they hit on one that seemed to work they spread it throughout their network of schools. Now, when teachers meet with parents around achievement or discipline they all try to make it positive, share data about the student, and co-construct an action plan with the parent, among other things.

The key thing about working in a network is that different people can be trying different change ideas and sharing their data. “The idea is that you’re not all working on all the same things at the same time,” Biag said. “So you leverage the network, and the power of the network, to increase change ideas.”

Some ideas won’t work and will be abandoned. Others might seem promising, but more data is needed, so others in the network might try them too. Over time the change ideas that seem to really impact the drivers rise to the top.

“As you’re testing and building evidence you’re going to find ideas that work and then you can talk about spreading those ideas,” Biag said.

Courtesy of Carnegie Foundation

SPREAD AND SCALE

Even with the best ideas implementation can be hard. Biag said leaders need to weigh several factors when thinking about how to spread an idea that seems to work. How costly will it be to implement? What are the consequences of failure? How reluctant are the people involved? How confident is the leader in the change idea?

For example, if the change is a parent meeting protocol and the leader doesn’t think it’s a great idea and that the cost of failure will be high, perhaps she only tests it on her sister first. But, if teachers are ready for the change and there’s nothing to lose, then maybe the idea can scale up more quickly. This is where knowing one’s own system and culture becomes important.

It’s also worth thinking about who within the system needs to be on board for the plan to go well. Those folks can be powerful advocates if convinced that the change idea is a good one. “The best people are those who were pretty skeptical in the beginning and you were able to change them,” Biag said.

Another strategy is to roll out the idea with those eager to try it and then demonstrate success to those who are more fearful. It’s also necessary to be humble and willing to go back and test new ideas if the ones that seemed to work in the smaller group don’t work when scaled. Perhaps the aim statement needs to change, or maybe the drivers aren’t actually the most impactful.

“Our theory is possibly wrong and definitely incomplete; that’s kind of a Carnegie saying,” Biag said. He doesn’t want anyone to think this process is linear, rather it’s a cycle. And when people get comfortable with the cycle they build it into everything they do naturally. The biggest strength of continuous improvement is that it offers a path for systemic change, a way to build the capacity within the system, rather than building whole new systems.

“What we’re trying to do is implement these tools and ways of thinking to empower people to engage in this work,” Biag said. And that means having a bias towards action.

“You have to start before you feel ready. Your understanding of the problem will change over time and when you act on that problem the problem will change and so your understanding of that problem will change,” Biag said.

People learn how to think about continuous improvement through the process of doing it. They get better at narrowing in on motivating, but achievable aim statements. They learn to include more voices in the information gathering stage. The “Plan, Do, Study, Act” cycles become second nature, and analyzing data gets less scary.

Perhaps one of the best parts of continuous improvement is that it helps empower those within a system to see themselves as the drivers of change. The ideas come from practice as does the data. And while data is often associated with accountability requirements, this improvement process offers practitioners the opportunity to think about and evaluate data that are important to their practice.

In this process, the data is only worthwhile if it shines light on whether the change is working. And when data is used this way, it’s easier for educators to be transparent about what they’re seeing. Improvement is not about judgement, it’s a constant, normal aspect of professional life.

“You have to have a lot of humility to come to the realization that you don’t have the answers, and that you’re going to learn your way into this,” Biag said. “You’ve got to think about this as a learning journey. If you really had the answers to this problem we wouldn’t be talking about it.”

To see measurable progress on some of the most intransigent problems in education requires a systematic focus on improving in every aspect of the system. It’s not enough for one teacher to be amazing, or one school to outshine the others around it. All kids deserve an incredible education; and that can only happen by building on the strengths already found in the system.

Source:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51115/how-to-plan-and-implement-continuous-improvement-in-schools

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Meet the 2018 Teacher of the Year Honored by Trump the White House Doesn’t Want You to Hear (Audio)

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USA / May 13, 2018 / Democracy Now

When Mandy Manning received her 2018 Teacher of the Year award at the White House Wednesday, the press was barred from her speech, and President Trump did not mention who she teaches: immigrant and refugee children. While she was at the White House, Manning handed President Donald Trump a stack of letters from her refugee and immigrant students, while billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos looked on. She also wore six politically themed buttons as she accepted her award from Trump, featuring artwork from the 2017 Women’s March, a rainbow flag and the slogan “Trans Equality Now!” Mandy Manning joins us from Spokane, Washington, where she is an English and math teacher at the Joel E. Ferris High School. She was named 2018 National Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief School State Officers.

 

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we turn now to the 2018 Teacher of the Year. When Mandy Manning received her award at the White House on Wednesday, the press was barred from her speech, and President Trump did not mention who she teaches: immigrant and refugee children.

MANDY MANNING: Over the next year, I want students to know I am here for refugee and immigrant students, for the kids in the Gay Straight Alliance and for all the girls I’ve coached over the years, to send them the message that they are wanted, they are loved, they are enough, and they matter.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s 2018 Teacher of the Year Mandy Manning. While she was at the White House, Manning handed President Donald Trump a stack of letters from her refugee and immigrant students. Manning also wore six politically themed buttons as she accepted her award from President Trump, while billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos looked on. Manning’s buttons featured artwork from the 2017 Women’s March, a rainbow flag and the slogan “Trans Equality Now!” This is President Trump presenting her her award.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: To Mandy and all of the amazing educators here today, your tireless dedication doesn’t just inspire your students, it inspires all of us. And I can tell you, it very much inspires me. We honor you and every citizen called to the noble vocation of teaching. Now it is my privilege to present Mandy with the National Teacher of the Year award.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Mandy Manning, who has returned from Washington, D.C., to Washington state, to her home in Spokane. There, she teaches English and math to refugee and immigrant students at the Joel E. Ferris High School. She was named 2018 National Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief School State Officers.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mandy, and congratulations.

MANDY MANNING: Thank you. Thanks very much.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about your message at the White House, what took place on Monday? You were with the secretary of labor, the secretary of education. You were with the president of the United States.

MANDY MANNING: Mm-hmm. So, it actually was on Wednesday afternoon. And the White House really did a good job of honoring us. We had a reception, and we had an opportunity to be on a panel with Secretary DeVos and Secretary of Labor Acosta. The four finalists sat there, and we got to speak about some very, very important issues facing education, like school safety and the opioid crisis. And, of course, I spoke about my students, my immigrant and refugee students at the Newcomer Center here. We had a reception, and then the presentation of the award was next. And I spoke to the audience and gave my remarks, and then we had a short intermission, which is where I had my opportunity to hand the letters to the president from my students. And I also asked him if he would be willing to come to Spokane and meet my students, my immigrant and refugee students, to see how amazing, dedicated, focused and what productive members of our community they are as future citizens of our United States.

AMY GOODMAN: The press was barred from recording your speech?

MANDY MANNING: I didn’t know that until after, after the ceremony, when I spoke with a reporter afterwards. That’s when I found out that my remarks were not witnessed by the press.

AMY GOODMAN: That they were prevented from being in the room. Well, I didn’t think it would be particularly subversive to play a clip of your speech at the White House, but apparently it is, so we’re going to play it from a recording made by a friend of yours on their cellphone. This is a clip.

MANDY MANNING: I am honored and humbled to be the vehicle through which my students may tell their stories. I am here for David, a future IT specialist who hopes to one day be able to attend university. I am here for Tamara, who is currently studying pre-med at Eastern Washington University. I am here for Safa and Tara, both future elementary school teachers. I am here for Safa—I mean, for Solomon and Gafishi, who believe that the United States is the place where they have found the center of their lives, where they can have dreams and hopes to be someone. You see, my students are immigrants and refugees brand new to our nation. I teach in the Newcomer Center at Ferris High School in Spokane, Washington. And all of the students who come through my classroom have three things in common: They are just learning English. They have escaped trauma to find new lives in our nation, and they are focused and determined to be productive citizens of our United States. And most importantly, they succeed.

AMY GOODMAN: The speech no one saw but those in the room, like, oh, the education secretary, DeVos, the labor secretary, Acosta. President Trump, I don’t believe was there at that point. But again, the press barred from being in the room and recording that speech. Mandy Manning, you were talking there about your students. Talk about the countries they come from, as you teach at the—what’s known as the Newcomer Center. President Trump did not mention, in his awarding you the Teacher of the Year award, that you teach refugee and immigrant students.

MANDY MANNING: Yes. So, I teach in the Newcomer Center, which is a specialized English-language development program for brand-new immigrant and refugee students. So these are the students who just came to the country, like one to three months prior to starting school here in the United States. And they also know very little English. So, my students come from all over the world. They come from Iraq, Afghanistan, several countries in Africa, such as Uganda, Sudan, Eritrea, Rwanda, Tanzania—all over. I have Syrian students. I also have current students from Burma-Myanmar. I’ve had students from Micronesia, Malaysia, Chuuk island in Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, students from El Salvador—all over.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Mandy, can you talk about the pins you wore as President Trump recognized you as the Teacher of the Year?

MANDY MANNING: Sure. So, I teach—I not only teach immigrant and refugee students, but I also have worked closely with the Gay Straight Alliance. I was a co-adviser before becoming the Washington state Teacher of the Year. And I also coach girls’ basketball. And on my girls’ basketball team, I have had a trans boy, who had to, you know, be on the girls’ basketball team. But these pins represent my students. And I wanted them to know 100 percent that as I stood there in this White House, that I am there for them. I am there to be the vehicle through which they can tell their stories, and I want to represent them. And so, that’s what my pins represented. And the one from the Women’s March is the one that represents the DREAMers and the DACA immigrants.

AMY GOODMAN: And you were also speaking—this past Wednesday is in the midst of the teacher walkouts and strikes around the country. Can you comment on these?

MANDY MANNING: Well, at the heart of every teacher is their students. And in many states and in many areas, we are underserving many of our students. And sometimes it takes that collective voice, where teachers come together, to ensure that they have the supplies that they need and the equipment and also the compensation to be the very best that they can be for their students. And so, sometimes we don’t have a choice. When we want what’s best for our students, we have to come together with that collective voice, because that’s when we can make change.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you endorse these strikes and walkouts, oh, from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Arizona?

MANDY MANNING: I believe that, yes, anything that we can do to ensure that our students have what they need, because that’s—you know, that’s what teachers want. We want what’s best for the students.

AMY GOODMAN: And, you know, the last time we saw a televised event that involved teachers and students at the White House was after the Valentine’s Day massacre in Parkland, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, February 14th, where both students and staff, teachers, were gunned down. There, they told President Trump directly—some of them said—one, the husband of a teacher, said, “No, we don’t want teachers to be armed.” President Trump and Vice President Pence went to the NRA convention on Friday, right after giving you that award on Wednesday. There, people were not allowed to bring in guns to the NRA meeting, the National Rifle Association meeting. Your thoughts on guns in the schools?

MANDY MANNING: Well, of course, I can only speak for myself, but I will never and do not ever want to carry a gun in the classroom. The most important thing in my classroom is the relationships that I build. And I strongly feel that if we had guns in our schools, and particularly if I carried a gun, it would dramatically impact the feeling in my classroom and my ability to connect with my students. And I just—I think that it’s an idea that is a temporary Band-Aid to make people feel like that might be—make us feel more safe. But in reality, if we bring more guns into the school, I personally would feel less safe. Plus, you know, the relationships that we build and the connections in the community would be so deeply impacted. So, I would never, ever carry a gun in my classroom.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you get a chance to discuss this with Secretary of Education DeVos or Secretary of Labor Acosta—guns in the schools, the strikes, the walkouts?

MANDY MANNING: We did have an opportunity to speak about guns and school safety. But we really focused on the fact that in order to have safe schools, we need to have connected schools, which means students need to feel connected to their peers, they need to feel connected to their teachers, and they need to feel like their school represents them and is a safe place for them. And so that was the focus of our discussion, that the key to school safety is ensuring that teachers can do the things that they need, and have the latitude in their classrooms to meet the needs of the students within their individual classrooms—

AMY GOODMAN: Mandy—

MANDY MANNING: —and that schools need to be places—go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead. “And schools need to be places…”

MANDY MANNING: That meet the needs of the community within which they reside.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you end by sharing a letter from one of your students? You asked them to write letters to President Trump?

MANDY MANNING: Yes. And they wrote just beautiful letters. So I did—I chose one from a student, and I will leave his name off, but from a student from Iraq. So, he says, “Dear President Trump.” Oh, he put his name in here, so I’ll say it. “Dear President Trump, My name is Yusif, and I am from Iraq. In January 2017, you won the presidency. I should have arrived in the U.S.A.; however, because you signed the immigration ban, I had to wait until March. My mother was already here in Spokane, Washington, and I had not seen her in four years. When I graduate from college, I will be a DJ. And if you want to learn more about me and my mom’s story, you can watch our video on YouTube. Search ‘Maha Al’Majidi’ and click on the video called ‘Iraqi refugee reunites with her son.’ Sincerely, Yusif.”

So, the letters are just beautiful. And some are very supportive of the president. Most of them say “thank you” and how much they appreciate being here the United States. And, of course, some—I was just listening to the show, your show, a little bit earlier, and some do speak about his language about people from Africa and how that hurts, and it encourages other people to use that same kind of language. And it does not make for positive connections within our community. So, the students were great. They had great insights into our nation. And they were very respectful and kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Mandy Manning, when President Trump called country—called Africa, which he called a country, Africa, Haiti, other countries “s—hole countries”—I mean, you’re an English teacher. You teach refugees and immigrants. What did you tell your students that day?

MANDY MANNING: I told them that we love them, that we know their value and that we can see that this is a place for them to come to have hope and dreams and be someone, and that we want them here and that they are lovely, beautiful human beings who make the United States a richer, more beautiful country.

AMY GOODMAN: Mandy Manning, we want to thank you for being with us, English and math teacher who teaches refugee and immigrant students from everywhere, from Iraq to Syria to Burma, at the Joel E. Ferris High School in Spokane, Washington. She was just named the 2018 National Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief School State Officers. Last Wednesday, President Trump presented her with the award during a ceremony at the White House. This is Democracy Now!Stay with us.

Source:

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/7/meet_the_teacher_who_staged_a

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USA: Corey Robin: Striking Teachers Are “Real Resistance” to “Incoherent” Republicans and “Gutted” Dems (Audio)

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USA / April 22, 2018 / Democracy Now

 

 

In the continuing teachers’ rebellion sweeping the U.S., dozens of Oklahoma teachers have completed a 7-day, 110-mile march from Tulsa to the state capital Oklahoma City. Public schools across Tulsa and Oklahoma City remain closed as thousands of teachers continue their strike for education funding into a ninth day. The strike comes as the Supreme Court is considering Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could deal a massive blow to public unions nationwide—and as President Trump is successfully appointing right-wing judges to federal courts, reshaping the judiciary for decades to come. We continue our conversation with Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Robin calls the conservative movement “weak and incoherent” and the Democratic Party “a gutted machine,” and says labor organizing like the teachers’ revolt are the “real resistance” in the U.S. today.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue with our guest, from Paul Ryan to what’s happening around the country in the conservative movement and those that are challenging it. Nermeen?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, in Oklahoma, dozens of teachers have completed a 7-day, 110-mile march from Tulsa to the state capital Oklahoma City, where they will now meet with lawmakers to demand they pass legislation to fund education in Oklahoma. Public schools across Tulsa and Oklahoma City remain closed as thousands of teachers continue their strike into its ninth day.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest Corey Robin recently wrote on Facebook, “In West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona, we’re seeing the real resistance, the most profound and deepest attack on the basic assumptions of the contemporary governing order. These are the real midterms to be watching, the places where all the rules and expectations we’ve come to live under, not just since Trump’s election but since forever, are being completely scrambled and overturned.”

Professor Corey Robin, can you talk more about these teacher rebellions? I mean, you had the stoppage in Kentucky. You had West Virginia, and they won. You have now—you have now Oklahoma and then Arizona. We’re talking about Trump land here.

COREY ROBIN: I think it’s really important for a couple of reasons. Beyond the specific issues of teacher pay and classrooms and quality of public education, which is in such a parlous state, what these teachers are really doing is raising the question about the low-taxes, low-public-services politics that we have been living with in this country for a very long time.

I just want to bring this back for an historical analogy. If we went back to 1978—and this is why the midterm question is important—if you had looked at the midterm elections in 1978, you would have seen that the Democrats were still firmly in control of the House of Representatives, in the House, and the Senate, and in control of many state legislatures across the country. You would had very little inkling, just looking at the midterms, of the very profound right-wing counterrevolution that was coming in two years, in the election 1980. If, however, you had looked at what happened in California with Proposition 13, which was a public ballot initiative that basically made it very difficult to raise taxes anymore, there you would have have seen the future of American politics for the next half-century.

Likewise today, I think if you’re looking at what’s happening in Oklahoma, really, as you said, in the heart of Trump country, these teachers are saying—are saying something that is such a challenge to the Republican Party about taxes and spending, but also to the Democratic Party. I think it’s very important. Democrats have been terrified of being tagged as the tax-and-spend party, really since Walter Mondale. And what are these—and the only times Democrats are willing to raise taxes is to deal with the deficit or the debt. What are these teachers saying? They’re saying raise the capital gains tax, not to cut the debt or the deficit, not to be good government people, but instead to deliver vital public services that the public needs and wants. And I think that’s the real challenge that they’re posing.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is such an astounding story that’s happening in Oklahoma. You have schools that are only operating four days a week, because they don’t have enough money for the fifth day, and the teachers don’t have enough money to teach for the fifth day, because they need second and third jobs. We had a teacher who taught—what—for 20 years, and so had her husband, and her husband, on his day off, he sells his own blood products.

COREY ROBIN: I mean, it’s horrible. But in a way, it’s just a very extreme version, I think, of what happens in a lot of states. I mean, I teach at the City University of New York. It used to be one of the crown jewels of the city and of the state. It has also been—systematically been underfunded and defunded, by both Republicans and Democrats alike. This is a national problem. What’s so amazing is that it’s being confronted in the place where you would think there would be the most support for it. And not only are they doing this—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about Governor Cuomo, Democratic Governor Cuomo, here in New York.

COREY ROBIN: Yes, Democratic governor. And going way back to his father, as well, defunded CUNY, but—Mario Cuomo. But in Oklahoma, you know, these teachers are doing this, and they’ve got—it’s amazing to me, is that they’ve got overwhelming public support with what they’re doing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, has there been any precedent, is there any precedent, for this number of teachers’ strikes, or even public sector workers, in general, in the U.S.?

COREY ROBIN: I think, oh, there definitely have—I mean, public sector workers have really been in the forefront for the last 50 years—

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Right.

COREY ROBIN: —of leading strikes. In the 1970s, particularly women and people of color were in the vanguard of a lot of these efforts, in organizing public sector workers. And, in fact, one of the reasons you could say that the Republican right has been so—pushing so hard on this Janus decision, which would basically make it very hard for public sector unions, the Supreme Court decision, is precisely because they feel like that’s the last bastion of unionized workers, and they are workers that tend to be, compared to the rest of the workforce, overwhelmingly women and people of color.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is why judges are so important right now, and as you have Mitch McConnell saying, “The fight should be in the Senate. We’re going to lose the House,” he said—

COREY ROBIN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —apparently this weekend, according to The Washington Post, that the fight is around the judiciary. And they are packing these courts.

COREY ROBIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, they do take this extremely seriously, for anyone who thinks that President Trump isn’t getting anything accomplished.

COREY ROBIN: I mean, this has been very clear from the early part of the Trump administration. They were—they bungled so many other things. But the one thing that, from the get-go, they knew how to do was to get the courts, the judges appointed. In fact, he’s been appointing judges at a faster rate than Barack Obama did, I think faster than George W. Bush did. But that tells you something, though, I think, not about the strength of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, but about its weakness. McConnell is very clear about this: “If we can just hold on to the Senate, we can have a lock on the courts, not just the Supreme Court, but the courts, for 30 to 40 years.” And remember, the judges they appoint, these are people who are, you know, in their fifties, in their forties, who will be with us for a very, very long time.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have this judicial nominee, Vitter, Wendy Vitter—

COREY ROBIN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —who worked for the archdiocese in Louisiana, who, when confronted by Senator Blumenthal yesterday about whether she supports this landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, challenging desegregation, she demurred. She said she wouldn’t say.

COREY ROBIN: Yes. Well, this is their—this is the big strategy all the conservative justices and nominees have been pioneering, really going back to Judge Bork in the 1980s, which is: Say nothing, make no statements whatsoever about your points of view. And you can present yourself as if you’re—you know, remember, Clarence Thomas said he had no opinion whatsoever on Roe v. Wade. He had never—he claimed he had never even had a conversation about Roe v. Wade, even though he was in law school when Roe v. Wade was decided. So this is a long-standing strategy, to say nothing about what your opinions are, and to get you in that way.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have Stephen Reinhardt now, who has just died, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a huge deal, was the last of President Jimmy Carter’s federal judicial appointees. Trump can now remake the 9th Circuit.

COREY ROBIN: Yeah. I mean, and this is—and this is really the goal. I mean, it’s been really astonishing, again, given the dysfunction and the disorganization that we’ve seen throughout this administration, their inability to pursue things on so many fronts, but when it comes to this, this is something that they’ve been very focused on, you know, almost maniacally so.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, can you talk about, Corey, the rise of someone like Bernie Sanders and all the movements—the Occupy Wall Street movement, Black Lives Matter—in the context of what you were saying earlier, that these strikes are geared towards not just Republicans, or opposed not just Republican policies, but also Democrat policies?

COREY ROBIN: Yeah. So, you know, the—as I’ve said, the conservative party—the conservative movement in the Republican Party is quite weak, I think, and in part the reason why it’s so weak is because conservatism, you know, as a historical project, really was overwhelmingly successful. The fundamental target of conservatism, number one, was the labor movement, and, compared to what—the heyday of American labor, completely succeeded in destroying it. And the second target was the black freedom struggle, and they were very successful in destroying that struggle, as well. So, conservatism, I think we have to realize, has been very successful.

And what you’re seeing now, I think, on the left, in both Occupy, Bernie Sanders, the teacher strikes, Black Lives Matter, is a growing confrontation, within the left, a growing reckoning of how successful, in fact, conservatism has been, and how feckless and ineffective the Democratic Party and traditional liberalism has been in opposing this. And I think, frankly, the real story in American politics right now is not so much what’s happening with the Republican Party and the conservative movement, which, as I’ve said, is, by any historical measure, quite weak and incoherent, precisely because it was so victorious over the last several decades. I think the real story, the real question is: Is there going to be a force on the left, not just movements in the street, but an organized force that’s able to tip this house of cards over?

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about that further, what exactly you mean, where you feel the Democratic Party is failing right now.

COREY ROBIN: Well, I mean, first of all, you can just look at the numbers. I mean, Bernie Sanders pointed this out in Mississippi the other day and got actually attacked for it. But the fact of the matter is, over the last 10 years the Democrats have lost nearly a thousand legislative seats. That’s, I think, the highest proportion of seats lost under a Democratic—a two-term Democratic president since at least maybe Dwight David Eisenhower. I mean, it’s—you oftentimes lose seats, but the proportions were just tremendous. And the Democratic Party as a whole is really a kind of gutted machine. I mean, the mere fact, I might say, that Bernie Sanders was able to get as far as he did in those primaries tells you how weak and sort of structureless and rudderless the Democratic Party is.

But I think the real question is, on the left: Do you have an ideology, a theory, a kind of set of accounts, similar, frankly, to what Ronald Reagan did in 1980 or FDR did in 1932? These are these two great realignment presidents—”great” not in the sense that I support Reagan, but, you know, powerful. And what they did was articulate a really profound, completely countervailing set of ideas and institutions, and were able to shatter the existing dispensation. I think that’s the question that’s on the table and that Bernie is sort of slowly pushing towards.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Corey Robin, we thank you for this very interesting discussion, one we will continue, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.

A very happy birthday to—a landmark birthday to Anna Özbek!

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/12/corey_robin_striking_teachers_are_real

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Lærere demonstrerer for høyere lønn i flere delstater i USA

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USA / 8. april 2018 / Forfatter: Redaksjonell stab / Kilde: utdanningsnytt

Mange skoler er stengt for andre dag på rad i delstaten Oklahoma i USA tirsdag. I Kentucky har lærere protestert i delstatsforsamlingens bygning.

https://www.utdanningsnytt.no/nyheter/2018/mars/larere-demonstrerer-for-hoyere-lonn-i-flere-delstater-i-usa/

Kilde til bildet:

https://www.sopitas.com/856155-oakland-protestas-maestros-recursos-educacion/

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