A Strategy to Restore Hope to the City’s Public Schools

From Centers of Obedience to Centers of Resistance:

A Strategy to Restore Hope to the City’s Public Schools

by Professor Mark Naison | Fordham University

A tragic series of events is unfolding in working class New York. The lingering effects of the Recession, irresponsible private investments, and federal and state budget cuts, coupled with a failure to raise taxes on the wealthy, have created a toxic brew which is eroding the already fragile living standards of the city’s poor and bringing with it higher levels of homelessness, hunger and violence.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the housing market where a combination of foreclosures on private homes, failed investments by private equity companies, the phasing out of federal rent subsidies, the proposed end of Work Advantage Program in New York State, and rising rents in public housing have taken thousands of units of affordable housing out of commission and forced tens of thousands of people to “double” and “triple up” with friends and relatives or move into shelters.

The effects of this are visible throughout the city’s public schools where more and more children are arriving at school stressed, hungry, and frightened as their families are displaced and their ability to assure their children of adequate sleep, food and study space is undermined. Once, such wounded children could find safe, protected space in libraries and after school programs, but with upcoming budget cuts to libraries (which will cut public library hours from 40 to 28 a week) and to after school and recreational programs, these youngsters will be increasingly on their own, forced to spend time in public places--streets, subways and shelters--where danger lurks for young people without adult supervision and protection.

In the face of this unfolding tragedy, what are teachers, principals, and school guidance counselors to do?

The official policy of the NYC Department of Education is to pretend this isn’t happening. Their response is more assessments, more tests, more ratings, more pressure on students and everyone who is working with them.

And the result is predictable. The misery of the students is spreading to the teachers whose spirit is being broken, not only by the violent incidents occurring in schools with increasing frequency, but by the evident pain their students are in, visible not only in their inability to concentrate in class, but their harrowing stories of hunger and homelessness and family catastrophe.

All of this is taking place, I must add, amidst fierce pressure from the Department of Education (DOE) to raise test scores and graduation rates, with the fear of school closings and loss of employment as potential penalties.

It’s time to flip the script. Schools must become places, not only where students in trouble are protected and nurtured, but where the adults working there fight for them as if they were their own children.

Every New York City public school should become a center of resistance to budget cuts, not only in schools, but in libraries, after school centers, and programs that provide or protect affordable housing.The culture of compliance and obedience, which has left teachers and students alike demoralized and terrorized, must be replaced by a culture of resistance.

The school must become a place where political education and political organizing takes place uniting teachers, parents and students in strategies which will put pressure on elected officials that haven’t been seen since the 1960’s. Pressure to restore housing subsidies, expand funding for after school programs, restore library budgets to their 2008 levels, bring more arts and sports programs into the public schools, create more school health centers, end all teacher layoffs and and tax the wealthy to pay for these reforms.

Not only will such actions restore a sense of agency to teachers, who regularly vilified in the press and by public officials, asthe cause of their students “failures,” it will give hope and inspiration to tens of thousands of young people, and members of their families, who are losing hope that their lives will involve anything other than hardship and pain.

It’s time to transform New York City public schools from centers of fear and intimidation to “liberated zones” where teachers, students and parents can talk freely how to make their schools and neighborhoods places where people who are not wealthy can lead decent lives and provide hope and opportunity to their children.

And if that leads them directly to the steps of City Hall, the State Legislature, and the US Congress, or to the headquarters of Wall Street banks so be it.

On a small scale, this is starting to happen. A group of insurgent teachers and parents have started a program called “Fight Back Fridays” with actions taking place at public schools around the city on May 20.

But this should only be the beginning of a mighty wave of protest that will transform the New York City public schools from centers of obedience into center of resistance to the budget cuts and to government by the rich, for the rich, which seems to be the trend, not only in New York, but around the country.

The Sleeping Giant is starting to awake. Student, teachers and parents, joined together, can be a mighty force for Justice and Democracy.

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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Bakari Kitwana on "New Muslim Cool"

New Muslim Cool Forges Path for New America
by Bakari Kitwana

New Muslim Cool comes at a time when daily we observe in our national culture old-guard gatekeepers (can you say Dick Cheney?) who work tirelessly to impose on the younger generation a shared American identity that is dated, simple, and in white and black. The magic of Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's important new film, which recently aired on PBS, is found in its ability to provide a bird's eye view of a freshly minted generation of Americans. Fighting against being defined by America's bygone eras, New Muslim Cool points us toward a more complicated future.

It's a journey full of collisions -- mainly because the very act of shining a spotlight on the ways race, politics, religion and generational rifts have evolved, something that Taylor does quite well, is a process that slowly gleans viewers from the self-identity America has for decades projected as status quo to the world. Welcome to a nation at the crossroads between old and new.

Thank goodness, this is the story of the new America that is unfolding -- the one that young Americans across traditional divides are claiming every day as their own.

Enter Hamza Perez. The film traces the ups and downs in the life of this northeastern seaboard urban native who is transplanted to post-industrial Pittsburgh for a new start, just as the US is on the verge of the most significant economic decline since the Great Depression. Perez, a Puerto Rican American hip-hop artist, is also Muslim. His conversion from Catholicism brings him face-to-face with what freedom of religion looks like in the throes of the war on terror. (One of the film's high points is an unprovoked and unjustified FBI raid on Perez's mosque.)

Absent of his other identities, Perez's story is incomplete: A street hustler turned anti-drug counselor; a father embarking on a second marriage; a young man struggling to find a workable definition of masculinity; an unsigned hip-hop artist for whom hip-hop culture provides both the foundation for his anti-drug advocacy and a medium through which he projects his new faith.

The film is most powerful when it meets all of these varying and sometimes overlapping identities head-on. It does this best when embracing the complexities of the three-part axis on which New Muslim Cool turns.

Read the Full Essay @ THE HUFFINGTON POST

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Bakari Kitwana is a journalist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on major media outlets including CNN, FOX News and NPR. Kitwana is co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the author of several books including, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture.

Would the Huxtables Survive the Economic Crisis?

Stop the Next American Nightmare
by Seth Freed Wessler

This weekend the New York Times reported that middle class families of color have been most hurt by the subprime crisis in New York City. The article confirms previous findings that show middle and upper income borrowers of color across the country are more likely to receive predatory, high cost loans than whites--even low-income whites. As a result Black, Latino, Asian and American Indian families are burdened with the heaviest weight of foreclosures.

I met many such families earlier this year while traveling the country to conduct research for "Race and Recession," a report released today by the Applied Research Center. In Detroit, I talked with 55-year-old Sandra Hines, who fell irreparably behind on her ballooning subprime refinancing payments (at the peak of the subprime frenzy, the majority of high cost loans were for refinancing). Through foreclosure, Hines lost the house where she and her two sisters grew up. It was the house that held 40 years of her family's wealth and memories.

The losses didn't end there.

A few months later, Hines and her family were renting a home that also went into foreclosure (its owner was also Black). Hines was evicted again.

Hines's story illustrates the fundamental way in which racism works today - through rules and policies rather than through blatant individual discrimination. This new form of discrimination didn't come from an individual banker who hated Black people. Rather, it resulted from financial deregulation that didn't explicitly target people of color, but that nevertheless produced a racialized impact because it was blindly laid on top of decades of blatant housing segregation.

Read the Full Essay @ The Huffington Post