Detroit and Oaxaca Battles Continue, What Can We Do?

fist.gif
From Rich Gibson:

Dear Friends,

The massive social uprising in Oaxaca demonstrates the Rouge Forum thesis that struggles initiated in schools can become uprisings that begin real social change. It proves the centripetal role of schooling in today’s society. That fight is best documented on NarcoNews.

The Detroit school workers, on strike for 12 days, were enjoined from continuing the strike on Friday afternoon, and the union was ordered to hold a mass meeting to tell the teachers to return to work. That meeting will be on Sunday at 4 pm at Cobo Hall, the same place where the spontaneous 1999 vote was taken to start a wildcat strike, opposed by the union, declared illegal by the government, fought by business. The wildcat was a success in proving that workers who create political reality can defy unjust laws.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers is on strike because rank and file educators are in a position similar to the California grocery strikers. They must fight back because they have little choice. Educators have made more than $65 million in concessions in the last five years. Conditions in schools are often deplorable. Respect from top administrators, clearly absent. Shortly after teachers made concessions last year, the administrators took 10% pay raises.

In the wildcat, Detroit educators learned they could strike, violate the law, and do it without their union leaders, a fact the leaders probably heard more clearly than the teachers. Irrelevance is a big fear of union bureaucrats.

Many forces collide in Detroit. The local Detroit ruling classes believe they are completely cornered. If the schools are constantly in crisis, no one is going to gentrify Detroit. So they must fight. The union leaders are trapped between a habit of selling out, concessions, and a rank and file that cannot take more sellouts. The judge is trapped by an electorate which might be sympathetic to the strike, and higher-ups who are certainly not. The Mayor and others argue the strike could demolish what is left of the city.

What settles this is connecting reason to power, the task of every educator every day. Power, for school workers, lies in the ability to build close ties with kids, parents, community people, on a rank and file basis, and to take independent direct action, as the AFL-CIO is going to fight against this strike just as it ruined the grocery strike, and the Detroit Newspaper strike, where union goons attacked rank and filers on picket lines, turning people in to the police, to protect social peace for the Clinton vote.

The DFT leadership did all it could to prevent another mass meeting of teachers, like the one ordered for Sunday. The DFT leadership changed the ratification process for contracts, so teachers would not have a chance to see each other in a mass meeting and vote thumbs up or down in a public vote, but that they would vote back in the schools, or by mail—probably meaning that they would return to work before a vote was finished.

Detroit teachers should tell the judge the same thing that John L. Lewis said about the Taft-Hartley injunction that was handed to his coal miners’ union, “Let Taft mine it, and Hartley haul it.”

A court order cannot teach kids, nor even warehouse them. 9000 teachers are not going to be fired and jailed. Detroit is not Crestwood, where the Michigan Education Association betrayed a militant strike in a tiny district, all the teachers fired and permanently replaced. Detroit educators can defend this strike.

It would have been much easier to defend if the DFT had planned freedom schools for Detroit kids and parents during the strike, schools that taught outside the bounds of scripted curricula, and if the DFT had demanded an end to racist, high-stakes testing which is pivotal in the wreckage of schooling today.

But the DFT cannot do that since the DFT opposes free schooling and the examination of why things are as they are, because the DFT leadership is part of the problem, and, moreover, it was the DFT-AFT that initiated the high stakes tests along with the US Chambers of Commerce, and others. So, the ties in the community that could win this strike are not yet there, but it is not impossible for rank and filers to forge them.

Many possibilities exist. The strike could collapse under the injunction, and a real sellout come out later, but Rouge Forum members say that it may well not. A deal could be cut between this writing and the Sunday meeting, but if it is a concession contract, the educators will be in an uproar. It might be that the DFT leadership would look back to the corrupt legacy of Al Shanker and realize that they themselves could make careers of a judge’s jail sentence for continuing the strike, and in jail they could get some rest.

But the key to the strike is whether or not the rank and file teachers, perhaps walking door to door, can build solidarity with their communities.

In any case, Detroit and Oaxaca school workers have offered working people many invaluable lessons. Their courage and perseverance is to be applauded, right now. An injury to one really does just go before an injury to all. Tell the DPS bosses to give they will lose, that we will never forget.

Why Are The Detroit Teachers Striking?

{For news updates on the Detroit teachers’ strike see The Workplace Blog

From the “Push Back the MEAP, Bring Forward Real Learning” listserv:

Why Are The Teachers Striking? A Letter to Our Parents

Don’t think for a moment that it doesn’t hurt us when we see your children clean and pressed and ready for the first day of school, only to find none of us inside the school building. We want to be in our classrooms ready to begin the new year. But this year, we cannot. We want you to know this strike is about more than raises in teacher salaries and benefits (although that is part of it). It is about standing up for your children’s rights to a free and appropriate education. It is about drawing a line in the sand and telling the district that we won’t stand for substandard school conditions that don’t afford our urban children the same opportunities as children who attend public school in other school districts.

We are standing behind this line because we believe in your children, and we are committed to providing a quality education with the tools they need to grow into successful adults. To do our jobs well, we need certain things that the district is not providing. The district is making poor choices about how to spend the $7,600 per child that the State gives each year. The district has been making poor choices for a long time, and that is why we are in the situation we are in The district should change the way they manage the money, rethink their spending priorities and not ask the teachers or students to make any more sacrifices to cover their negligent spending.

The teachers’ issues are:

  • Money being spent on high-priced leased office buildings with high-priced, fancy furniture and computers for administrators.
  • Spending thousands per student on five standardized tests. If one could be eliminated, much money and time could be spent more wisely to help our neighborhood school have the basics.
  • A drinking fountain that works on each floor, repaired ceilings, clean and painted walls, lights that work in each classroom and hallways, clean bathrooms with doors, toilets and sinks working. Floors that are not buckled from water, a school library for the students and staff, classrooms wired for the internet, a computer that works in each classroom, a computer lab, a safe and clean playground, safe sidewalks with curbs—not cracks and holes, and adequate cleaning staff to meet the demands of the overcrowded classrooms.
  • Forty students in a classroom is unacceptable. Uncertified substitutes being placed in classrooms to fill teacher vacancies is inexcusable. Our classroom aides and noon hour aides are being cut. They are greatly needed to support the staff and students.

We are standing for your children and hope that you will stand with us too. Other cities are looking at how this will turn out, and we are standing for those children and those teachers, too. We think there is enough money to teach our children well, if it is spent wisely in the school and not in the administration building. When we say no contract; no work we are asking for conditions that are equitable for children and teachers alike. If you have ANY QUESTIONS, please don’t hesitate to ask. We want you to understand the reasons we are standing outside the school, away from our classrooms because of the problems we are faced with and we hope you will stand with us for the children because NO CHILD SHOULD BE LEFT BEHIND.

Respectfully yours,

The teachers at Neinas Elementary School, September 5, 2006

Strippers raise money for Vegas public schools

AOL News: Strippers raise money for Vegas public schools

The Clark County School District kicked off the first day of school with scant resources. But it got a major donation from the scantily clad, reports Ryan Nakashima. The same day the nation’s fifth largest school district began the year with some 400 teaching vacancies, the school foundation that supports it, the Public Education Foundation, accepted a $2,500 donation from a strip club.

Scores Las Vegas raised the funds at an Aug. 23 back-to-school event called “Detention” that featured strippers dressed as teachers, schoolgirls and librarians. “It’s back to school time and you know what that means. Detention for everyone who has been bad!” one advertisement read. Patrons left more than $1,000 donations in a jar that the club said would go to the Clark County School District. Scores matched the donations roughly dollar for dollar, he said. “In this town, money is money, regardless,” Scores marketing director Shai Cohen said. “We’re a respectable business. We pay taxes like everybody else. We have a business license. It’s for a good cause.”

The money was earmarked for the foundation’s exchange program, which provides new or gently used materials, supplies and computers to Clark County teachers for free or little cost.

Utimate Frisbee rankings more accurate than SATs in predicting level of academic success at universities

A study of all private universities in the US, released by a psychiatrist at Washington State University, shows that their ranking in Ultimate Frisbee edges out both SATs and grades as a predictor of academic performance!

Those ranked in the top half for Ultimate have a graduation rate of over 85%, while those in the bottom half just 60%. The top seven have nearly as many Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholars as all others combined.

The son of the study’s author, who helped with research, is on a U.S. national Ultimate Frisbee team.

ABC/Disney, 9-11 Propaganda film, & Scholastic

Here’s some background:

Right wing uses ABC docudrama to push debunked claim blaming Clinton administration for 9-11

Here’s Clinton’s reaction to the film.

New York Post: BUBBA GOES BALLISTIC ON ABC ABOUT ITS DAMNING 9/11 MOVIE

Here’s the education twist to it:

Scholastic pulls Path to 9/11 “Discussion Guide,” saying, “[T]he materials did not meet our high standards””

Thanks to David Gabbard for passing along the above links.

Also see Open Letter to ABC: Don’t Airbrush 9/11, which includes a letter from leading historians calling for ABC to cancel it’s planned broadcast of “The Path to 9/11,” scheduled to be show on the network next month, the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Zinn: War Is Not A Solution For Terrorism

Znet Commentary: War Is Not A Solution For Terrorism By Howard Zinn

THERE IS SOMETHING important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

I remember John Hersey’s novel, “The War Lover,” in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations — the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan — and were forced to withdraw.
Even the “victories” of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence — the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a “war on terrorism” is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a “suspected terrorist” is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is “inevitable.”

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in “accidental” events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.

For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by “accident.” Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.

If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.

Howard Zinn is a professor emeritus at Boston University and the author of the forthcoming book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress to be published by City Lights Books (www.citylights.com) this winter.

TESTING THE FAITH: Evangelist drowns trying to walk on water

jesus-water-31.jpg
WorldNetDaily reports:
Evangelist drowns trying to walk on water
Pastor reportedly told congregation he could repeat miracle of Jesus

An evangelist who tried replicating Jesus’ miracle of walking on water has reportedly drowned off the western coast of Africa.

Pastor Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle, and he attempted it from a beach in Gabon’s capital of Libreville.

“He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus,” an eyewitness told the Glasgow Daily Record.

“He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat. He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”

The New Testament records the story of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee as he approached his disciples in a boat.

“And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.” (Matthew 14:25)

As WND reported in April, a researcher at Florida State University believes he has a natural explanation for the account of Jesus’ miraculous walk on the surface of water – ice.

Professor of Oceanography Doron Nof and the co-authors of his study theorize that a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions resulted in a unique, localized freezing phenomenon called “springs ice,” according to Physorg.com, which specializes in news about science, technology, physics and space.