Announcement: Save Texas Schools Rally

This is an announcement from Save Texas Schools.  Please add your voice at the Capitol!

It's rally time at the Capitol-Saturday, March 25, 10 am-Noon 

Public education in Texas continues to struggle with the challenges of underfunding and over-testing. Texas children deserve better. Join thousands of fellow Texans standing up at the Capitol to say THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW!

We have an amazing set of speakers (including parents, teachers and students) and student performers. We'll also have a large group of legislators attending as our audience. Buses are in the works from DFW, Houston, San Antonio,El Paso, and the Valley. Keep spreading the word!

Texas children cannot be left standing, waiting for long-delayed funding reforms. We need fair funding, testing reform and community-based supports for struggling schools today!

Click here for information about parking, speakers, etc. Get those amazing signs ready, spread the word on social media and be there on Saturday morning, ready to be make some noise for public ed!

Save Texas Schools Twitter: @savetxschools

ACTION NEEDED AGAINST VOUCHER LEGISLATION

For my readers in Texas, Raise Your Hand Texas reminds us that Vouchers Hurt!  Call and write your state senators NOW to let them know you're not fooled by "tax credit scholarship voucher," "Education Savings Accounts," or any other trick label that takes dollars out of our children's classrooms and turns them over to profiteers and private interests.   Tell them: we know theft when we see it.  And we're watching.  Vouchers hurt the public's schools. A vote for vouchers will hurt you in the next election!

UPDATE:  

The Senate Education Committee on voucher legislation has been RESCHEDULEDfor Tuesday, March 21.

Please comment on my post here

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CENTRALIZE!
Or, A Lesson My Teacher Taught Me  

When President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education as a cabinet department in 1979, educators across the country were thrilled.  In the post-US/Vietnam war era, the education of America’s children would have the same official standing as the US treasury, the military (“defense”), agriculture, and foreign affairs. No longer sandwiched in between “Health” and “Welfare,” Education would leave the old HEW department and be an official national priority:  a Cabinet department.  Surely this independent standing would create leverage for research funding, for special programs, for innovation and, most important, for implementing and monitoring and enforcing equity – the rights of all children to an equitable education.   Teachers, parents, and educators at all levels celebrated this affirmation of their work and of the children.

By Spencer Rich Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post (1974-Current file); Sep 28, 1979;
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post pg. A1

But I heard a word of caution.  John Palmer, my doctoral dissertation advisor and Dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Education, is a historian and an astute observer of the uses of power.  He saw the new Cabinet department through a different lens.  I recall his very quiet words of wisdom:  “You know, when you create a new program or a new structure, you have to think very carefully about whether this is what you would want to have in place if the other party were in power.  What might this new department mean if the other party were in control of it?”

For some reason, those words stuck in my mind. Perhaps because John Palmer is one of the wisest people I know and, yes, though I was officially his student all those years ago, he continues to be my teacher.  At the time, I think we thought the worst that could happen would be reduced funding for education research and for attention to such critical issues as special education, bilingual education, and the advocacy and enforcement of equity provisions not always reliably maintained by some of the states.

Never did we (or, at least, I) envision that having “the other party in power” would mean a threat to the very existence of the nation’s public schools.  The public’s schools.  Yet that’s where we are:  a person whose stated goal is to destroy the public’s schools has been appointed to be the United States Secretary of Education.  A person who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to elect politicians willing to de-fund the public’s schools and shift the public’s tax dollars to corporate charter chains: to private companies that will get rich at public expense using our children as the raw materials in their money machines.

Our schools – and our teachers – have survived four recent Secretaries of Education of questionable qualifications, often open antipathy toward teachers, and a deficit view of children and their families.

I personally heard Rod Paige, when he was superintendent of Houston’s public schools, describe Mexican American parents who called his office concerned that in late October their high school-age children still did not have textbooks as “interfering with my [his!] schools.”  Margaret Spellings seemed chosen just to keep the Texas-style accountability system in place under George W. Bush.  Arne Duncan famously bragged about closing schools in Chicago, a red flag that should have been an immediate disqualification, especially when President Obama had other, stellar, choices among talented and dedicated educators to choose from.  Duncan and Obama doubled down on the Bush policies of punishing under-funded schools rather than investing in them and their children, giving the corporatizers (Democrats as well as Republicans) the excuse they needed to justify closing schools in minority neighborhoods, shifting our tax dollars to wealthy charter chains and their money managers, and generally promulgating a rhetoric of “failing schools.” (And of John King, the less said the better.)

So in walks Betsy DeVos.   It doesn’t matter that Donald Trump knows nothing about public education, its central role in our democracy, its anchoring of our communities and their local economies and civic life.  If he knew that the public’s schools are pillars of our democracy, are a true public good, he wouldn’t agree or even be interested.  But he didn’t have to know. We  learn now that Betsy DeVos has been pursuing a “long game,” for years funding politicians to do her bidding to destroy the public’s schools, to weaken the teaching profession for its voice in education policy and its previous fairly reliable votes for Democrats and their pro-public education policies.  Her “long game” is to divorce the education of children from the control of their parents and the people their parents elect.

So now we look at all those functions (and budgets) under the centralized control of a Secretary of Education and recall those cautionary words of my great teacher, John Palmer: is this the structure you’d want to have in place if the other party were in power?

Professor Palmer’s close colleague and another professor of mine, Herb Kliebard, expressed the caution differently.  He always told us that as chaotic as the American system of public education is, with so many local, county, state and federal jurisdictions overlapping and often contradicting each other, that chaos was in fact the strength of the system: federal policies mitigated the racist exclusions in George Wallace’s Alabama, federal and state funding brought special education to poor or reluctant school districts, and local school boards had to answer to parents.   The potential for crazy still lurked at all levels, but all these intersecting policy venues assured that no one bad policy was controlling the whole system.

The chaos a Betsy DeVos will wreak is not what Herb Kliebard had in mind.  He saw openings for dialogue, for invention, for questioning, for local quirkiness, for experiment on the one hand and for holding on to good traditions on the other.     Conservatives need to remember their mantra against “big government.”  Progressives need not to feel we have to apologize for invoking democracy. We will have to build new coalitions of resistance to fight privatization of education, to protect our treasured public good, and to assert positive solutions at every jurisdictional level, leveraging the chaos where we find it.

Our children deserve no less. Our democracy depends on the education of its people.

Guns, Kids and School, Part 9

“Campus Carry” and (Un)Intended Consequences?                     

 Scene 1:  Lecture hall in a public university in Texas

            White student enters, takes his seat and opens his backpack to take out his laptop.

When he reaches into the side pocket, he has to push a handgun aside to find the charger for his computer.

            The white girl on his left sees the gun and breathes a sigh of relief:  “I feel so much safer now…”

The African American girl on his right catches a glimpse of the gun and quietly scoots her chair a few inches farther away.  She doesn’t say much in class and tries not to be noticed.

Scene 2:   Crowded parking lot on the campus of a public university in Texas

African American student eases his car in to a narrow slot as students compete for scarce places in the rush to get to class.  As he lifts his backpack out of the car, a broken zipper leaves open to view his iPad and his handgun.

“911—black guy with gun.  I can’t tell what he’s going to do with it. This parking lot is crowded! He’s armed – he’s walking this way! Please – hurry!”

Welcome to “Campus Carry,” brought to you by the misguided Texas legislature and the gun lobby they report to.   White guy with gun a guardian of the peace? A patriot? A “real Texan”? Black kid with gun a danger to others? Black guy with a gun a "perceived threat"?

The law permitting guns on all public universities and colleges in Texas took effect on the anniversary of the saddest day in the history of higher education in Texas:  August 1, 2016, the 50^th anniversary of the “Tower Shooting,” the day an army veteran stepped out on the tower of the University of Texas at Austin and shot at anyone walking within his line of sight, killing 13 and wounding 30 others.  The cynical timing of the campus carry law was noted at UT and around the nation as another example of Texas craziness.

But this law is beyond crazy.  “Campus carry” is timed to intersect with two racially charged developments:  the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of affirmation action in university admissions in the Fisher case and the alarming increase in claims of the “stand your ground” defense used to justify violence – including shooting to kill – if the shooter perceives his or her victim to be a threat.

Let’s think about this convergence:  Just when the US Supreme Court has ruled definitively in support of increased racial and cultural diversity in ourpublic universities and their admissions policies,  our nation is plagued with shootings of unarmed African American boys and men.  And as we saw in the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Treyvon Martin, his “I felt threatened, he seemed dangerous” defense succeeded in acquitting him of murder.  That Zimmerman defied instructions to stay in his vehicle and not follow or confront the boy in the hoodie – and thus choose to stay out of harm’s way – was not enough to override his claim of feeling endangered.

Campus carry + greater racial and ethnic  student diversity + “perceived threat” = Peril.  And a special peril for non-white students. 

Which leads me to a larger question:  Is this just about satisfying the gun industry and its lobbyists? Is this an aggressive action to get out ahead of any attempts at gun control?  Or is “campus carry” an instrument of social control, an assault on the learning spaces we have created for our youth?

We have already seen the resignation of a highly celebrated dean from the UT-Austin school of architecture – a dean who said he would never have considered an offer from another university if it had not been for campus carry: “I felt that I was going to be responsible for managing a law I didn’t believe in.”  Professors report that recruiting faculty to a campus with guns is becoming more difficult. And I imagine that African American and Latino parents may be re-thinking their child’s aspirations to attend the state’s flagship universities – despite reputations for high academic quality and relatively affordable tuition – if their college years will always be clouded with the possibility that someone – a campus police officer, a fellow student, a visitor walking through campus – might “perceive” that the cell phone, the paperback, the bag of Skittles their child is carrying is a gun.  

Such perceptions are heightened by fear – fear that permission to have a gun on campus means that that person you see walking toward you or getting out of his car or heatedly debating a point in class or in a late night dorm room might be dangerous.  Maybe you’d better shoot first just to be sure.

If the professors and deans and people who staff the college offices leave to find jobs in gun-free work places, if the parents of minority students re-think taking advantage of Fisher and encourage their children to apply where guns won’t be an issue – has the gun lobby had a double victory?   Acceptance of guns on campus made commonplace, and critics who could potentially organize to oppose and reverse this legislation gone? 

Is “campus carry” meant not just to permit some kids to bring guns to our campuses and to normalize a culture of weapons in public spaces, but to create a subtle transformation in who feels at home in our public universities, who feels free to speak, and who feels safe?  Will “campus carry” cause the exit of those who question and, in the process, create a comfortable venue for those who – out of real or imagined fears or a profit motive or political expediency – won’t be satisfied until guns are everywhere in America?

What could possibly be the intent behind the votes for “campus carry”?  What are the intended outcomes? And which of the consequences might have been unintended?  How does “campus carry” compute with the growing cultural and ethnic diversity in our colleges?  Much has been made of the perils of mixing of guns and alcohol, guns and partying, guns and sexual violence, guns and the still-forming “executive functions” of the young adult brain, guns and depression, guns and social conflicts when guns go to college.

There is also the peril of silencing lively discussion, intellectual inquiry, free debate, and challenging ideas – not just because someone in the room might have a gun, but because “campus carry” has kept some of the most lively minds, inquiring intellects, provocative questioners from teaching at – or enrolling in – a college where the same legislature that cut the academic budgets increased the presence of guns.




To share your thoughts, click on the word “comments” below.

GUNS, SCHOOLS AND KIDS, Part 8

“CAMPUS CARRY”

Ah, the good old days when “campus carry” evoked quaint images of the awkward boy shyly asking the cool girl, the cute girl with the sweet face, if he can carry her books to class.  (Cue the sock hop tunes of the 1950’s!)

Now the women on campus carry not only their own books but – if they so choose – a loaded weapon:  a gun.

In the “what were they thinking” department (more like “why weren’t they thinking?”), the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 1, the so-called “Campus Carry” law, authorizing “a license holder to carry a concealed handgun on or about the license holder’s person while the license holder is on the campus of an institution of higher education or private or independent institution of higher education in this state.”

(The only sentence of sanity is the one that follows:  “Open carrying of handguns is still prohibited at these locations.”)

The law authorizes universities, through their presidents, to designate campus locations where guns will not be permitted, laboratories, for example, but they may not opt their university out of “campus carry.”   Private universities may opt out, but only after an elaborate process of decision making informed by the opinions of faculty, administration, students, trustees and staff.

Guns on campus in the hands of anyone but trained law enforcement officers is a dumb idea:  so dumb it belies the very educational purpose of the university.  All the major private and independent universities in the state declined to allow guns on campus.  The universities and colleges our taxes pay for had no such sensible choice.

“Campus carry” has been opposed by

• university administrators as an unwanted responsibility, as dangerous, and as expensive to implement (the legislature did not fund implementation), including arranging for storage, signage, informational materials and information sessions, training of staff and faculty in the parameters of the law and their authority regarding guns in instructional spaces)
• university police for the expense of implementing and their responsibility in face of added dangers to campus safety
• parents, all too aware of the potentially volatile mix of guns and alcohol, guns and partying, guns and youthful carelessness
• women students, already at risk for sexual assault and the unlikelihood that sexual violence will be prosecuted,
• faculty as a threat to the free and open flow of ideas OR who value their role as teachers, as mentors, as nurturers of ideas and inspirers of risk and exploration. 
• A dean!  My hero is the dean of architecture at UT, who resigned just before the law took effect, explaining to his colleagues and the university administration:  "I felt that I was going to be responsible for managing a law I didn't believe in."

I have the privilege of teaching at a private university that is gun-free.  It was gun-free before the law.  The many committees and convenings required to let the state know we’re staying gun free showed just how unified the faculty, students, staff, administration and trustees are in keeping it that way.   But being “inside the hedges” as we say at Rice, gives us more responsibility – not less – to oppose this law and speak up on behalf of our colleagues at state universities, community colleges, and medical schools who may not feel as free to speak up.

We may find it difficult as teachers to teach our legislature much when the gun lobby is so powerful and the legislators apparently so insecure.   But if we value our colleges and universities as places for the free flow of ideas and for encouraging our students to take the risks inherent in learning, then we have no choice but to try. 

To share your thoughts, click on the word “comments” below.

GUNS, SCHOOLS AND KIDS, Part 7

ORGANIZING FOR A GUN-FREE CHILDHOOD

Whether your passion is recruiting and supporting candidates who will support gun control laws, or building common cause in local communities for gun-free zones, or raising money for educational efforts to create informed publics on behalf of reducing gun violence and its causes, I hope you’ll look into these organizations and find one to support – with participation even before dollars.  Or that you’ll start the conversation among your neighbors and colleagues and children about what needs to be done in your own community – or school – or home. And then do it.

Americans for Responsible Solutions

http://americansforresponsiblesolutions.org/about/

 Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, a celebrated astronaut, founded Americans for Responsible Solutions to the rampant and senseless gun violence in our country. ARS raises funds for candidates for political office who are committed to regulating guns.

                 

This one is personal for me:  My daughter and I have shopped at the boutique linen store across the Tucson street from the Safeway where Rep. Giffords was gunned down at a “meet and greet” with her constituents. A friend had at the last minute canceled an appointment for that Saturday at the nail spa down the street.  Just a regular street, with regular stores, on a sunny Arizona day.  One of  Giffords’ staffers and 16 other people were shot, six of whom, including a judge, died that day. Giffords herself suffered brain injuries requiring long years of therapy and giving up her seat in Congress.   The press made much of the shooter’s history of mental illness and threatening demeanor; Arizona’s underfunding of mental health services briefly made the news.    Calls for even tighter background checks and gun access were deemed to be “politicizing the tragedy.” 

Gabby Giffords’ “district” is even bigger today as she and her husband Mark Kelly, the astronaut who logged the most days on the space station, transformed their loss into a new national organization to counter the NRA, call out a gun culture that rejects all legislative limits, and take on the NRA’s influence over Congress and state houses.  ARS raises money to recruit and promote candidates who will advocate what they term “responsible solutions” to the gun culture.  Check out their website to see whom they are backing in your state and how you can get involved to hold public officials’ feet to the fire once they’re elected.

Alliance for Gun Responsibility

http://gunresponsibility.org/

Vision: A community safe from the devastating consequences of gun violence.

The Alliance for Gun Responsibility "works to end the gun violence crisis in our community and to promote a culture of gun ownership that balances rights with responsibilities. Through collaboration with experts, civic leaders, and citizens, we work to find evidenced-based solutions to the crisis of gun violence in our community. We create innovative policy, advocate for changes in laws, and promote community education to reduce gun violence."

Everytown for Gun Safety Action

https://everytownresearch.org/

"Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund seeks to improve our understanding of the causes of gun violence and the means to reduce it – by conducting groundbreaking original research, developing evidence-based policies, and communicating this knowledge in the courts and the court of public opinion."                  

Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America have joined to create Everytown for Gun Safety Action:

As mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg invited the mayors of America’s cities to join him in organizing to answer the National Rifle Association’s “report card” rating legislators on their stance (and votes) for or against gun control by creating a “report card” to inform voters which of their elected officials are working for gun control and gun safety.  (My letter urging our mayor at the time to not only join with Bloomberg, but take a lead in this organization given Houston’s extraordinarily high incidence of gun violence, was answered with a form letter saying essentially “thank you for sharing your opinion, but I’m a gun owner……”  After leaving office, the same mayor in an interview about the shootings at the Orlando night club said to the reporter that we have to do something about access to guns.  Can that sensible position be said out loud only when a politician is safely out of office?

Mayors Against Illegal Guns asked candidates for House and Senate seats to fill out a 10-part questionnaire “clarifying their positions on issues like background checks and [ammunition] magazine limits.”  Those already in office are  rated for their past statements and legislative votes on gun-related issues.  Their responses, according to the organization, are “used to rally voters for or against them accordingly.”  We should follow their example in quizzing candidates about their stands on gun control and let them know their answers will affect our votes.

Sandy Hook Promise

http://www.sandyhookpromise.org/

Mission:  Prevent gun-related deaths due to crime, suicide and accidental discharge so that no other parent experiences the senseless, horrific loss of their child.

The parents of the children murdered by a man armed with his own personal arsenal are the bravest people we could know.  The nation was sure that the killing of these little children would move Congress to act immediately on gun control legislation that had for decades been stopped by the NRA.  The NRA was so sure the deaths of these little children would prompt quick Congressional action that they immediately went on the assault, claiming in truly twisted press conferences  that we needed more guns, not fewer, and in the hands of more people:  If the teachers had been armed, their logic went, the children could have been saved.  For once, the NRA seemed to lose its cool, to show fear – fear of losing control of the politicians it had courted and cultivated, intimidated and bankrolled.

                

In the end, the NRA won the legislative battles. But the parents of Sandy Hook rose above that tyranny to persist in their legislative efforts, in their advocacy for those “special provisions” we need to protect our kids.  Just as they teach with such grace and strength what it means to grieve the loss of a child, they teach through Sandy Hook Promise, raising awareness, raising funds, raising voices.  Their first actions were to create safe play spaces in honor of every child who died. On their children’s birthdays, on the anniversary of the shooting, on normal days when children should feel safe at school, the Sandy Hook parents remind the nation the work of making childhood free of gun violence is not finished.

Moms Rising

http://www.momsrising.org/issues_and_resources/inspiring-gun-safety

"Moms as a collective voice on behalf of children’s well-being – health, safety, education for children; and policies supportive of families:  family leave, etc.  Sharing information on legislation, products, current issues; inviting collective advocacy through digital communications."

And I'm issuing an open request for readers to suggest others.  Please comment and distribute widely!

To share your thoughts, click on the word “comments” below.

GUNS, SCHOOLS, AND KIDS   
Part 2
“I have the right to be a child!”

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/rights-child-pictures

Eight words, eight one-syllable words, shout the child’s version of Provision 2 of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child.  The official version is no less direct, no less compelling:

"Principle 2 The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration."

Every time a child is harmed, our credibility as grown-ups is challenged, the strength of our society diminished.  How much more so if that child is harmed not by a careless, evil or neglectful act, but by a set of policies.  By the “normal” way the society works?

The killing of children and their principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School by a single shooter who owned what can only be called an arsenal of weapons designed for killing shocked the world and set in motion a determination to finally – finally – bring gun control to the US.  It didn’t happen.

In the nearly four years since the Sandy Hook shooting, our children have not “enjoyed special protection” from gun violence.   In fact, according to Everytown for Gun Safety Research, there have been 191 school shootings in the U.S. since 2013, including occasions when a gun was fired but no one was hurt.

Less headline-grabbing but even more troubling is the news that in the US, again since the Sandy Hook deaths, an American child under 12 (under 12!  not inclusive of teenagers!) has died by intentional and accidental gunfire every other day.

If we take the best interests of the child seriously, then we cannot reconcile the ready availability of guns with the loss of life at Sandy Hook.  Our sympathies have not translated into the “enactment of laws” to make the world safer for our children.




To share your thoughts, click on the word “comments” below.