E Wayne Ross – Page 111 – Critical Theories in Education

What if schools aren’t the answer?

The New York Times new education columnist, Diana Jean Schemo, points out what seems obvious to many, including former “On Education” columnist Richard Rothstein : “reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom.”

Or, as Jean Anyon points out in her book Ghetto Schooling,trying to improve schools without improving the larger social and economic issues is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door.

The New York Times: It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap

WHEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers’ unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs.

But for many educators and policy makers, the findings raised a haunting question: What if the impediments to learning run so deep that they cannot be addressed by any particular kind of school or any set of in-school reforms? What if schools are not the answer?

The question has come up before. In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas.

To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families.

For years, education researchers have argued over his findings. Conservatives used them to say that the quality of schools did not matter, so why bother offering more than the bare necessities? Others, including some educators, used them essentially to write off children who were harder to educate.The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, took a stand on this issue. The law, one instance in which President Bush and Congressional Democrats worked together, rests on the premise that schools make the crucial difference. It holds a school alone responsible if the students — whatever social, economic, physical or intellectual handicaps they bring to their classrooms — fail to make sufficient progress every year.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children’s lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.

At Johns Hopkins University, two sociologists, Doris Entwisle and Karl Alexander, collected a trove of data on Baltimore schoolchildren who began first grade in 1982. They found that contrary to expectations, children in poverty did largely make a year of progress for each year in school.

But poor children started out behind their peers, and the problems compounded when school ended for the summer. Then, middle-class children would read books, attend camp and return to school in September more advanced than when they left. But poorer children tended to stagnate. “The long summer break is especially hard for disadvantaged children,” Professor Alexander said. “Some school is good, and more is better.”

“Family really is important, and it’s very hard for schools to offset or compensate fully for family disadvantage,” he said.

In Chicago, a court order to empty public housing projects, which dispersed families and children into the suburbs, led to a rise in children’s academic achievement.

“The evidence is pretty clear that the better their housing, the better kids do on tests,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan group.

In his 2004 book, “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap,” Richard Rothstein, a former writer of this column, argues that reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom.

A lack of affordable housing makes poorer children more transient, and so more prone to switch schools midyear, losing progress. Higher rates of lead poisoning, asthma and inadequate pediatric care also fuel low achievement, along with something as basic as the lack of eyeglasses. Even the way middle- and lower-class parents read to their children is different, he writes, making learning more fun and creative for wealthier children.

“I would never say public schools can’t do better,” Mr. Rothstein said. “I’d say they can’t do much better,” unless lawmakers address the social ills caused by poverty.

FOR many children in America, public schools are not lacking. A 2001 international reading test put Americans ninth out of students in 35 nations. But only students in Sweden, the Netherlands and England had scores more than marginally higher than the United States average.

More important, the average score of the 58 percent of American students attending schools that were not predominantly poor surpassed that of Sweden, the top-scoring nation.

But for the 42 percent of American students attending the poor schools that are the principal target of No Child Left Behind, the inequities remain. Blacks and Latinos lag more than two years behind white students in math on national assessment tests. In reading, which is more influenced by family background, blacks and Latinos fall three years behind whites.

Yet these gaps have shrunk considerably since 1992, when blacks were 3.5 years behind whites in math. Since 1973, when the federal government began collecting these scores, black 9-year-olds have gained roughly 3.5 grade levels in math, narrowing the achievement gap, even though white scores were also rising at the same time. The cause of these improvements is unclear, although some are most likely related to state efforts, especially in the last 15 years.

A $100 million school voucher bill sponsored by Republicans gives vouchers a prominent place in next year’s debate over renewing No Child Left Behind. But other voices are likely to call for a sense of responsibility for improving children’s academic success that does not begin and end at the schoolhouse door.

“It can’t just be a burden on the schools to do away with social inequality,” said Mr. Jennings, of the education policy center. “It has to be a burden on all of us.”

The cognitive style of PowerPoint

I’ll admit to producing a few PowerPoints presentations in my time, but not that many … really!

In fact, I’ve even broached the idea with a few colleages (and students in my curriculum seminar last term) that powerpoint has a “controlling” if not “silencing” effect on classroom interactions—absolute heresy in an era when it seems powerpoint is de rigueur in the university classroom (at least among folks who think good pedagogy can be had by merely adding technology to the classroom).

But I never really thought about powerpoint as Stalinist pedagogy, until now…

Well, seems I’m not alone as Edward R. Tufte has produced a devasting indictment of powerpoint in his essay “The cognitive style of powerpoint”, where he argues:

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

Here’s another sample from the Tufte’s essay: Powerpoint does rocket science

Teachers and a law that distrusts them

In his last “On Education” column for The New York Times, Michael Winerip, no fan of No Child Left Behind aruges that instead of helping teachers, the law reflects the basic distrust of teachers held by politicians. Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress.

The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy?

To improve classroom teaching and make teachers more enthusiastic about the law, he has three suggestions for when the legislation is expected to come up for reauthorization next year. First, why not add a provision rewarding states and districts that mandate small class size? Second, we need a No Family Left Behind Law. This would measure economic growth of families and punish politicians in charge of states with poor economic growth for minority families. A final concern with the federal law is that it is so driven by state testing that there’s too much time devoted to test prep, too much time spent drilling facts for survey courses, and not enough emphasis on finding something children will fall in love with for a lifetime.

Read on for the full column…
Teachers, and a Law That Distrusts Them
By Michael Winerip

12 July 2006
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
8
English
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
THIS is my last education column after four years. What I will miss most is the free ticket it gave me into classrooms all over the country, where I watched and learned from teachers.

I got to be there at 7:15 a.m. on the first day of this school year with Irene Ray, a terrific high school English teacher in Huntington, W. Va. Ms. Ray had intended to leave small-town Appalachia long ago for the big city, but there she was again, for her 23rd first day, sipping a Diet Coke, nibbling an Atkins breakfast bar, more excited and jittery than her students, wanting to know how their summer reading went, whether they’d enjoyed ”The Scarlet Letter” or, like Ms. Ray, preferred ”The Poisonwood Bible.”

Ms. Ray spent a week readying her room for the first day, including adding to the favorite quotations that line her walls. Bored students distracted by iPods and the Internet? ”She’s got new quotes,” whispered a girl, who was reading Ms. Ray’s walls.

I also got to be there at 3:15 p.m. on the final day of school this year, in Dahlonega, Ga., at Lumpkin County Middle School, when Pat New, a science teacher, taught her last lesson, after 29 years. Ms. New, 62, had fought to the end for her right to teach evolution, winning out against a group of parents and students and an administration that preferred not to make waves.

The columns about teachers generated the most mail, but lots of others were fun to write. Chronicling the mess-ups with New York State’s standardized exams — in math, English, English as a second language, physics, reading — was always great sport.

But the people who took me to the heart of education? Laurin MacLeish, kindergarten teacher in Orlando, Fla.; Roger Cline, diesel engine teacher in Canton, Ohio; Jeff Kaufman, G.E.D. teacher at the Rikers jail in New York City; Liza Levine, English teacher in South Central Los Angeles.

Principals? A little bit. Superintendents? Chancellors? State education commissioners? You can probably still name your kindergarten teacher (that would be Miss Goddard, Beechwood Knoll School, 1957). But how about the secretary of education during any of your 13 years in school?

The education press spends so much time writing about people far removed from the classroom that it’s easy to lose sight of those individuals’ real purpose — to help teachers do their jobs well, the best hope for student success.

As readers know, I’m not a fan of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law aimed at raising education quality. Instead of helping teachers, for me it’s a law created by politicians who distrust teachers. Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress.

The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy?

Even No Child’s strongest supporters acknowledge that one of the law’s most important provisions — to guarantee a highly qualified teacher in every classroom — has been the most poorly carried out to date.

So, to improve classroom teaching and make teachers more enthusiastic about the law, I have three departing suggestions for when the legislation is expected to come up for reauthorization next year.

First, why not add a provision rewarding states and districts that mandate small class size? It’s an idea that enjoys great support among parents and teachers and is easily carried out on a national scale.

Why small class size? Deborah Meier, the teacher, principal, author and MacArthur Award winner who has created successful public schools in New York and Boston, says the best chance for educating poor children well is surrounding them with as many talented adults as possible. The same premise drives one of the most hopeful efforts in urban education today, the Gates Foundation’s small schools movement.

Joe Gipson, a black public school parent in California, which has had a mandatory cap of 20 in grades K to three for a decade, told me small class size is the best thing that’s happened to his children’s education, giving them what rich private school pupils have. While small class size is no guarantee that teachers will be good, he said, with just 20, you can tell faster if teachers are performing well, and get rid of them if they’re not.

Gov. Jeb Bush is very popular in Florida, and in 2002, he opposed a constitutional amendment to cap class sizes, including a maximum of 18 for grades K to three. He said it would be too costly. And yet voters in Florida, hardly a tax-and-spend state, voted for it. Every year since, the Republican governor has tried overturning the class size amendment, and every year he has lost, most recently last spring, when the Republican-controlled State Senate defeated his efforts.

”It’s a moral issue,” said Senator J. Alex Villalobos, a Republican whose wife is a public school teacher. ”Class size is the great equalizer. Anybody who has children understands this. We have a moral responsibility to take care of our children.”

In 2003, 115,000 New York City residents signed petitions aimed at setting class size limits, and in 2005, 100,000 did. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the city cannot afford to do more now, and has successfully stalled advocates’ efforts in court, but at a price to children. A recent state audit shows that 26 percent of New York City children in grades K to three are in classes of 25 or more.

The intent of the No Child law could not be more important — to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority children. But what angers public educators is that under the law, schools get all the blame if students fail, when they see many other variables at play, including the crippling effects of poverty on families. Studies show that the economic status of a child’s family has a major impact on a child’s performance on standardized tests. On the SAT, for example, for every $10,000 increase in family income, a child’s SAT scores rise about 10 points.

Which leads to my second proposal. We need a No Family Left Behind Law. This would measure economic growth of families and punish politicians in charge of states with poor economic growth for minority families.

FOR example, in Ohio, black families earn only 62 percent of white household income, one of the biggest disparities nationally. So every year, under No Family Left Behind, Ohio would be expected to close that income gap. If it failed to make adequate yearly progress for black families’ wealth, the governor and legislators would be judged failing, and after five years, could be removed from office. This way public schools wouldn’t be the only institutions singled out for failing poor children.

And if states succeeded in closing the economic gap, test scores would be expected to rise, giving politicians and teachers a chance to celebrate together.

A final concern with the federal law is that it is so driven by state testing that there’s too much time devoted to test prep, too much time spent drilling facts for survey courses, and not enough emphasis on finding something children will fall in love with for a lifetime — the Civil War, repairing engines, science research, playing the trumpet.

Fortunately, the remedy can be found on Ms. Ray’s walls in Huntington, W. Va., a quotation from William Butler Yeats: ”Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” I recommend that as the official motto for a new, revitalized No Child Left Behind law.

Document NYTF000020060712e27c0001o

Historians Against the War Statement—The Widening Circle of Violence in the Middle East

The Steering Committee of Historians Against the War has issued a statement on the The Widening Circle of Violence in the Middle East and is soliciting responses.

You can join HAW by visiting their website and signing the statement on the U.S. Occupation of Iraq. The HAW website also has a collection of useful links, teaching resources, and a Virtual Movement Archive.

The Widening Circle of Violence in the Middle East
Historians Against the War
Steering Committee
July, 2006

The Steering Committee of Historians Against the War deplores the role of the U.S. government in widening the circle of violence in the Middle East. We condemn the Bush Administration’s senseless quest for military solutions to the region’s problems exemplified by the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic and material aid for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and threats of military action against Iran. We call upon Congress and the Bush Administration to support an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon/Israel/Gaza, turn away from militarism, and embrace genuine international efforts aimed at resolving underlying political conflicts.

* * * *

In an effort to better reflect the views of the HAW membership, the Steering Committee requests that you respond to this message with a short paragraph or two outlining your thoughts on the latest developments and the appropriate HAW response. In particular, we ask you to consider whether to broaden our mandate to include taking positions on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, U.S. threats to Syria and Iran, the so-called “global war on terror,” and the socio-economic impact of empire on the United States. After the deadline of August 21st, we will compile a sample of responses, send them out as “HAW Notes” to our more than 2000 members, and follow up with appropriate action. For further information on HAW, visit our website.

“What Can Israel Achieve?” by Immanuel Wallerstein

Wallerstein argues that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is a direct parallel of the US invasion of Iraq.

The Israeli generals are already noting that Hezbollah’s military is far more formidable than anticipated, that U.S. allies in the region are already taking wide distance from the United States and Israel (note the Iraqi government’s support of Lebanon and now that of the Saudi government), and soon will discover that the Israeli public’s support is more fragile than expected. Already the Israeli government is reluctant to send land troops into Lebanon, largely because of what it thinks will be the reaction of its own people inside Israel. Israel is heading towards a humiliating truce arrangement.

He also argues “What the Israeli governments do not realize is that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah need Israel. It is Israel that needs them, and needs them desperately … it is only Hamas and Hezbollah that can guarantee the survival of Israel. It is only when Israel is able to come to terms with them, as the deeply-rooted spokespersons of Palestinian and Arab nationalism, that Israel can live in peace.”

“What Can Israel Achieve?” by Immanuel Wallerstein
Commentary No. 190, August 1, 2006
The State of Israel was established in 1948. Ever since, there has been continuous violence between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and between Israel and its neighbors. Sometimes, the violence was low-level and even latent. And every once in a while, the violence escalated into open warfare, as now.

Whenever full- scale violence broke out, there was an immediate debate about what started it, as though that mattered. We are now in the midst of warfare between Israel and Palestine in Gaza and between Israel and Lebanon. And the world is engaged in its usual futile debate about how to reduce the open state of warfare to low-level violence.

Every Israeli government has wished to create a situation in which the world and Israel’s neighbors recognize its existence as a state and intergroup/interstate violence ceases. Israel has never been able to achieve this. When the level of violence is relatively low, the Israeli public is split about what strategy to pursue. But when it escalates into warfare, the Jewish Israelis and world Jewry tend to rally around the government.

In reality, Israel’s basic strategy since 1948 has been to rely on two things in the pursuit of its objectives: a strong military, and strong outside Western support. So far this strategy has worked in one sense: Israel still survives. The question is how much longer this strategy will in fact continue to work.

The source of outside support has shifted over time. We forget completely that in 1948 the crucial military support for Israel came from the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites. When the Soviet Union pulled back, it was France that came to fill the role. France was engaged in a revolution in Algeria, and it saw Israel as a crucial element in defeating the Algerian national liberation movement. But when Algeria became independent in 1962, France dropped Israel because it then sought to maintain ties with a now- independent Algeria.

It is only after that moment that the United States moved into its present total support of Israel. One major element in this turn-around was the Israeli military victory in the Six Days War in 1967. In this war, Israel conquered all the territories of the old British Mandate of Palestine, as well as more. It proved its ability to be a strong military presence in the region. It transformed the attitude of world Jewry from one in which only about 50% really approved of the creation of Israel into one which had the support of the large majority of world Jewry, for whom Israel had now become a source of pride. This is the moment when the Holocaust became a major ideological justification for Israel and its policies.

After 1967, the Israeli governments never felt they had to negotiate anything with the Palestinians or with the Arab world. They offered one-sided settlements but these were always on Israeli terms. Israel wouldn’t negotiate with Nasser. Then it wouldn’t negotiate with Arafat. And now it won’t negotiate with so-called terrorists. Instead, it has relied on successive shows of military strength.

Israel is now engaged in the exact same catastrophic blunder, from its own point of view, as George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Bush thought that a show of military strength would establish U.S. presence unquestionably in Iraq and intimidate the rest of the world. Bush has discovered that Iraqi resistance was far more formidable militarily than anticipated, that American political allies in Iraq were far less reliable than he assumed they would be, and that the U.S. public’s support of the war was far more fragile than he expected. The United States is heading towards a humiliating withdrawal from Iraq.

Israel’s current military campaign is a direct parallel of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The Israeli generals are already noting that Hezbollah’s military is far more formidable than anticipated, that U.S. allies in the region are already taking wide distance from the United States and Israel (note the Iraqi government’s support of Lebanon and now that of the Saudi government), and soon will discover that the Israeli public’s support is more fragile than expected. Already the Israeli government is reluctant to send land troops into Lebanon, largely because of what it thinks will be the reaction of its own people inside Israel. Israel is heading towards a humiliating truce arrangement.

What the Israeli governments do not realize is that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah need Israel. It is Israel that needs them, and needs them desperately. If Israel wants not to become a Crusader state that is in the end extinguished, it is only Hamas and Hezbollah that can guarantee the survival of Israel. It is only when Israel is able to come to terms with them, as the deeply-rooted spokespersons of Palestinian and Arab nationalism, that Israel can live in peace.

Achieving a stable peace settlement will be extremely difficult. But the pillars of Israel’s present strategy – its own military strength and the unconditional support of the United States – constitute a very thin reed. Its military advantage is diminishing and will diminish steadily in the years to come. And in the post-Iraqi years, the United States may well drop Israel in the same way that France did in the 1960s.

Israel’s only real guarantee will be that of the Palestinians. And to get this guarantee, Israel will need to rethink fundamentally its strategy for survival.

[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.

These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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Can the Communists hold their own in the field of agit-prop music?

Here’s a review from the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate of three CD reissues for all you commies out there looking for 70s agit-prop— PLP style!

The Progressive Labor Party Takes the Agit-Prop Challenge
Review of 3 Albums of the Progressive Labor Party:
Power to the Working Class / A World to Win / Songs of the International Working Class

By: Spencer Sunshine

I’ve always been a connoisseur of Leftist agit-prop bands. The thumpier, the better, as long as the political program is in their lyrics, and not just in the music (John Cage) or politics of the individual members (U2’s Bono). Mostly, I have been drawn to punk bands, including the Dead Kennedys, Crass, Chumbawamba, Bikini Kill (and later Le Tigre), D.O.A., the Ex, Gang of Four, D.I.R.T., the Subhumans (both the Canadian and UK bands, and Citizen Fish as well), Zounds, Reagan Youth, Tribe 8, Nausea, and the Dils (and the list could go on and on.). And while there’s occasionally good political rock (Steve Earle, MC5, John Lennon, Stereolab), it’s much easier to find a worthy reggae group (Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mad Professor, Sister Carol and the ‘conscious reggae’ genre – and, of course, Bob himself). I also like the occasional industrial or hip-hop act, in particular Tchkung!, Consolidated, Public Enemy and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (pre-Spearhead), as well as Afrobeat bands like Fela Kuti and Antibalas. I’m aware of the “Red Folk” tradition, as well as the feminist (Roches, Ani Difranco) and environmental (David Rovics, Casey Neill) folkies, but neither ever particularly moved me. Nor did the “alternative rock” of Rage Against the Machine (an ex once quipped: “I lean towards their politics and away from their music”) or their progeny, System of A Down. Since seeing the Infernal Noise Brigade (INB) in Seattle in 1999, I have been an active groupie of the “anarchist” marching bands, especially NYC’s own Hungry March Band (HMB) and Rude Mechanical Orchestra (RMO). You can dance your booty off and, more importantly, refer to them by their acronyms! But their non-linguistic ontology makes them non-agit-prop almost by definition.

Politically, the punk bands almost all leaned towards, or were activists in, the anarchist tradition. Crass are the best example; they even forged their own unique ideological brand of ethical pacifist (but militantly atheist), individualist, feminist, pro-animal rights anarchism. Gerry Hannah, the original bassist of the Canadian Subhumans, was jailed in the early ’80s for his participation in Direct Action, the group that bombed a Canadian company that made weapons components for cruise missiles. The hip-hop and reggae bands tend towards a Lefty Black nationalism or pan-Africanism. The marching bands are “anarchist” in an aesthetic more than a political sense; nonetheless many are active anarchists or sympathisers, and they frequently participate in the contemporary mass protest scene (both the RMO and INB were arrested en masse at Union Square during the protests against the Republican National Convention).

But the question that presents itself is this: can the Communists hold their own in the field of agit-prop music? In the past, the US Communists had extensive cultural engagements, and in many different fields, mostly via the Popular Front in the ’30s. That influence continued to reverberate in American popular culture until McCarthy and HUAC burned it out of the culture industries through their Spanish Inquisition methodologies (unfortunately, not an option on your social science exams). There were also the “Fellow Traveler” (Communist sympathisers) folk bands of the ’50s and ’60s, who followed in the tradition of both Woody Gutherie [sic] and the strong musical tradition of the earlier Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who collected many of their political songs in the Little Red Songbook. The “Red Folk” bands – the best known of which was the Weavers (featuring Pete Seeger) – kept the Lefty folk tradition alive as “protest music,” which was then picked up by Beat Generation musicians in the early ’60s, including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. This was also one of the many traditions that fed into the ’60s countercultural explosion later in that decade.

In the ’70s and ’80s, despite being the main Leftist faction, the various Communist groups were not on the forefront of Left musical culture. A few bands that come to mind, mostly Europeans like Billy Bragg (a founding member of the cultural-political organization Red Wedge, who were aligned with the UK Labour Party), the Redskins (two-tone skinheads affiliated with a Trotskyist party, the UK ISO), and the hardcore band ManLiftingBanner. The Clash were populist Leftists (and named their albums things like Sandinista!) but they were unaligned with any faction and in the end were far more into the rebel pose then serious politics (even while they made smashing records – Joe Strummer RIP). Stateside, several bands have affiliated with the Maoist outfit , the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), including the ’70s rock band Prairie Fire, and hip-hop groups like 2 Black 2 Strong and Ozomatli. But none of them ever moved me. So we ask the question: can the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) do better?The PLP was one of, if not the, largest Communist parties active in the American New Left of the ’60s and ’70s. They split from the Communist Party USA in 1961, and endorsed Maoist China (albeit with reservations), and in doing so received great credibility after domestic radicals (mistakenly) saw the Cultural Revolution as a parallel to the ’60s cultural revolution happening in western industrialized nations. The PLP was active in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest group of the student Left at the time, and the Party’s attempt to take over the SDS was one of the main factors in its demise. The PLP had endorsed nationalist movements by minority ethnic groups as progressive, and when it reversed its stance in 1969, this caused a fall out with the Black Panther Party and other organizations. Nonetheless, the party survives to this day, promoting international revolution. They distinguish themselves from the myriad of other Marxist-Leninist sects (like the Workers World Party, who founded A.N.S.W.E.R. as their front group) by refusing to endorse national liberation movements without criticism. They downplay Stalin’s multi-million murders, and proclaim that a Communist revolution should proceed immediately from capitalism into communism, without an intervening socialist stage, as happened in China and the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the PLP maintain an orientation towards issues affecting people of color and focus on recruiting from that demographic.

The PLP made three albums, all of which have been reissued as a double CD by the Party. By far the best is the first, Power to the Working Class (1970). At the height of their political influence, the musical references are completely contemporary. While many of the songs on all three albums are covers, Power to the Working Class contains several funk and soul songs based on the music of popular songs, but with lyrics inciting “students and workers” to “smash the bosses” and make a Communist revolution. They lie somewhere between parody, detournment and imitation, and I enjoyed singing along with much of it (and I’m pretty sure that I could get away with spinning some of these tracks at a Williamsburg dance party). The other songs are mostly folk tunes, thereby creating the somewhat odd feeling of racial segregation on the album, the best of which is the banjo-driven “Challenge The Communist Paper.” A sickeningly catchy song about selling the party paper, I woke up for three days straight with it in my head. Notably lacking are rock songs (the party line spurned the counterculture), even though bands like the MC5 were creating musically-powerful and politically charged proto-punk at the same time.

1977’s A World to Win, while not bad, is condemned by history. In 1977 (the prophetic year when “Two Sevens Clash”) two rebel musics – punk rock and dub reggae – were in full bloom. But instead of embracing these new aesthetic forms (as the RCP band Prairie Fire at least tried to do by aping the Clash), A World to Win is already looking backwards. The first album had contained versions of both “Bella Ciao” and “The International” (indeed, the two songs appear on all three records), and at least one traditional Left folk song (“Smash the Banks of Marble”). But A World To Win spends even more time looking back to the Left folk traditions of the IWW, including two Joe Hill songs (the IWW member was executed in 1915) as well as Woody Gutherie [sic] and Bob Dylan numbers. “They Shall Rule the Earth” brought me back to being a child sitting in a post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, filled with acoustic guitars for musical accompaniment. And there are two medicore Spanish-language songs in the style of cantonuevo, a Latin American protest folk form. Nonetheless, there are still moments (such as “Kellogg Mine Disaster (Sunshine Mine)” and “Clifford Glover”) which hold up well.

By Songs of the International Working Class (1987), the slow de-evolution continues. There are five Latin American derived numbers in here (sung in Spanish), only one of which moves me, and a couple cutsy socialist-feminist folk songs, originally by Peggy Seeger and Tom Paxton, about how women enjoy working in factories. “March on May Day,” which is a period piece of VH1 acoustic music, causes cognitive dissidence by calling for armed, multi-racial revolution. Even “Bella Ciao” and “The International” are starting to sound flat this time around under Reagan, which is probably how many of the Party members who had joined at the height of the tumult were starting to feel. Still, “South Africa Means Fight Back” and the anti-war “Hymn #9” are catchy and can get a Leftist heart (or fist) pumping.

Overall, I’d give Progressive Labor a B for their attempt at agit-prop cultural intervention. The first album by itself would get a B+, while the last merely a C. The PLP clearly never found their own contemporary aesthetic form to express their politics, and after the first album they were reduced to simple photocopying of the past, or creating uninspired political chants. But maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on them, though: Communists, at least in America, have rarely even made the attempt to engage in the cultural realm in the post-60s era. For that I give the Party an A.

3 Albums of the Progressive Labor Party is $11ppd from : PLP Cultural Committee, GPO 808, Brooklyn NY 11202.

Concentrated Poverty in New Orleans and Other American Cities

In the The Chronicle of Higher Education issue dated August 4, 2006, Bruce Katz, who directs the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, reports on the concentration of poverty and effects of “employment decentralization” in New Orleans and other American cities (many with booming economies).

The legacies of racism, segregation, and intergenerational poverty are clear:

On the very day the levees broke, the Census Bureau released a report on poverty in the nation, finding that Orleans Parish had a poverty rate of 23.2 percent, seventh highest among 290 large U.S. counties.

Yet the economic hardships were shared unequally. Although African-American residents made up 67 percent of the city’s total population, they made up 84 percent of its population below the poverty line. And those poor African-American households were highly concentrated in 47 neighborhoods of extreme poverty — that is, neighborhoods where the poverty rate topped 40 percent.

Of the 131,000 poor people in the city in 2000, nearly 50,000 (38 percent) lived in those neighborhoods of extreme poverty. That put New Orleans second among large American cities in 2000 and far above the national average in its concentration of poverty. For African-Americans, the “concentrated poverty rate” was even higher, at 43 percent. On nearly every social and economic indicator, New Orleans’s neighborhoods of high poverty lagged far behind the rest of the city and the region as a whole: Four in five children were raised in single-parent families; just 60 percent of working-age residents were part of the labor market; and only one in 12 adults held a college degree.

That isolation of poverty occurred in a region that was rapidly decentralizing. As poverty hardened over the years in the city, middle-class families (including African-American households) and jobs moved out, mostly to the surrounding parishes. Between 1970 and 2000, the city population shrank by 18 percent, while neighboring St. Tammany Parish doubled in population. Jobs followed people: New Orleans was home to two-thirds of the region’s jobs in 1970; by 2000 that share had dropped to 42 percent.

THE MATERIAL WORLD
Concentrated Poverty in New Orleans and Other American Cities

By BRUCE KATZ

It has been close to a year since Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, crippling one of the world’s most distinctive cities. As the metropolis struggles to recover, national attention has naturally focused on the significant environmental challenges bedeviling the rebuilding effort. Can the region become a paragon of high-quality, sustainable development given its vulnerable location?

But equal attention needs to be paid to the social challenges. Katrina laid bare the disparities that continue to separate Americans by race and class. Analysis by the Brookings Institution and other research centers has revealed the disparate effect that the city’s flooding had on poor, minority households and the distressed neighborhoods in which they disproportionately lived. Thus, a second overriding question: Can the city transform its poor neighborhoods into healthy ones that will attract and accommodate families with a broad range of incomes?

The challenges facing New Orleans are complicated by the sluggish nature of the rebuilding effort. According to the most recent estimate, the population of the city is 181,000, well below the pre-storm level of 463,000. Tens of thousands of evacuees have been living in the Houston area, with large additional clusters in Dallas, Atlanta, and elsewhere. So, a third question: How can we ensure that families in the Katrina diaspora have access to communities of economic vitality and educational opportunity?

To aid the recovery effort and to place New Orleans’s plight in a national context, the Brookings Institution released two reports in October 2005: “New Orleans After the Storm: Lessons From the Past, a Plan for the Future” and “Katrina’s Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America.” We are also publishing a monthly compilation of economic and social indicators that measure the pace of rebuilding efforts in the New Orleans metropolis (see Katrina Index: Tracking Variables of Post-Katrina Reconstruction). All of these publications can be found on the institution’s Web site (http://www.brookings.edu/metro).

The data paint a sobering picture. Before Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans was a city at once unique and typical. Its architecture; its mix of French, African, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures; its rich artistic history; and its location amid lake, river, and delta were all one of a kind. But New Orleans also provided an example of patterns of segregation by race and by income that pervade most struggling American cities.

On the very day the levees broke, the Census Bureau released a report on poverty in the nation, finding that Orleans Parish had a poverty rate of 23.2 percent, seventh highest among 290 large U.S. counties.

Yet the economic hardships were shared unequally. Although African-American residents made up 67 percent of the city’s total population, they made up 84 percent of its population below the poverty line. And those poor African-American households were highly concentrated in 47 neighborhoods of extreme poverty — that is, neighborhoods where the poverty rate topped 40 percent.

Of the 131,000 poor people in the city in 2000, nearly 50,000 (38 percent) lived in those neighborhoods of extreme poverty. That put New Orleans second among large American cities in 2000 and far above the national average in its concentration of poverty. For African-Americans, the “concentrated poverty rate” was even higher, at 43 percent. On nearly every social and economic indicator, New Orleans’s neighborhoods of high poverty lagged far behind the rest of the city and the region as a whole: Four in five children were raised in single-parent families; just 60 percent of working-age residents were part of the labor market; and only one in 12 adults held a college degree.

That isolation of poverty occurred in a region that was rapidly decentralizing. As poverty hardened over the years in the city, middle-class families (including African-American households) and jobs moved out, mostly to the surrounding parishes. Between 1970 and 2000, the city population shrank by 18 percent, while neighboring St. Tammany Parish doubled in population. Jobs followed people: New Orleans was home to two-thirds of the region’s jobs in 1970; by 2000 that share had dropped to 42 percent.

Hurricane Katrina unveiled these disparities in stark terms. African-American and poor people bore the brunt of the devastation because, for the most part, they lived in the lower-lying, more flood-prone sections of the city, such as Mid-City or the Lower Ninth Ward. Incredibly, 38 of the city’s 47 extreme-poverty census tracts were flooded. Many people in flooded areas lacked access to a car, a fact that became critical during the evacuation period.

Unfortunately, the pattern of urban concentrated poverty on the one hand and employment decentralization on the other is not unique to New Orleans. While New Orleans clearly ranked among the cities with the most geographically concentrated poor populations, many others were not far behind. Some of the cities — like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Milwaukee — are former industrial giants whose populations have suffered from severe economic restructuring over the past several decades. Others — like Fresno, Los Angeles, and Miami — have faced challenges in integrating new immigrant populations who often arrive in gateway neighborhoods with low levels of education and labor-market skills. Still others — Atlanta, Memphis, and Washington — lie at the heart of growing regions but continue to grapple with legacies of racism, segregation, and intergenerational poverty holding back their most distressed neighborhoods.

So, what to do?

Over the past several decades, scholars and policy makers have learned a lot about the negative effects of concentrated poverty and the benefits of policies designed to give low-income families greater access to housing in lower poverty neighborhoods, closer to employment and educational opportunities.

Many of those lessons have been compiled in a recent anthology, The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings Institution Press, 2005). The volume, edited by Xavier de Souza Briggs, a professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focuses on four main questions: What limits housing choice, leading to an uneven “geography of opportunity” by race and class? What are the social and economic consequences of this geography? What special barriers to housing opportunity confront low-income families? And what political and policy lessons might we learn from efforts to increase housing choice?

Briggs and his authors find that the residents of poor, isolated communities face failing schools, unsafe streets, run-down housing, and few local jobs or employment networks. Other studies have revealed that residents of poor neighborhoods often pay higher prices for basic goods and services since their neighborhoods are dominated by parasitic firms like check cashers and payday lenders rather than mainstream businesses. (See, for instance, the Brookings report “The Price Is Wrong: Getting the Market Right for Working Families in Philadelphia.”) Together, these factors combine to limit opportunities and quality of life.

Yet entire cities, their suburbs, and the nation as a whole also pay a heavy price for concentration of poverty, according to research by Janet Rothenberg Pack, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Cities are forced to pay for the higher cost of delivering health, education, police, fire, judicial, and other services in high-poverty environments, often amounting to hundreds of dollars per city resident. With higher expenses come higher taxes, harming cities in their competition for middle-class families, which are the backbone of resilient economies.

Suburbs with weak central cities also see less appreciation in housing prices and incomes, given the interdependence of economies. One study, for example, found that a 1-percent increase in city employment raises home values by $6,000 in nearby suburbs.

And the concentration of neighborhood poverty leads inexorably to the concentration of school poverty, undermining almost every other effort by the public, private, and volunteer sectors to educate the children of low-income families.

Briggs and his authors analyze the accomplishments and occasional failures of policies designed to give low-income families more housing choices. One chapter distills the lessons from the federal Moving to Opportunity demonstration, which enabled recipients of housing vouchers to move to areas of lower poverty, growing employment, and high-quality schools. Another reviews the benefits of city- and county-wide “inclusionary zoning” regimes that require builders to include a certain amount of housing for low- and moderate-income households when they build market-rate multifamily developments or town-home communities. The book also examines the promise of replacing failed public-housing enclaves with well-designed, economically integrated developments.

The bottom line is that America knows how to promote housing choice and build mixed-income communities that work economically and socially. The only question is whether we have the political will to apply the best lessons and innovations not only to the rebuilding of New Orleans but to the housing of Katrina-displaced and other low-income families throughout the country.

Bruce Katz directs the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

More on the Faith Nights at Turner Field

On June 2, I posted an entry about the Atlanta Braves plan to have “Faith Nights” at Turner Field this summer.

Faith Nights (and Days) is a promotion that aims to turn the ballpark into an evangelical Christian testimony service. In a piece for The Nation titled ““You Can Keep the Faith,” Dave Zirin exposes the Braves promotion as a surreptitious collaboration with the James Dobson’s anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-sex education Focus on the Family organization.

Zirin calls for Faith Days and Nights at ballparks in the major and minor leagues to be “exposed, picketed and, most of all, shunned. Let the emissaries of Dobson preach in peace outside the park. Inside is sacred space.”

You can send a letter of protest to the Atlanta Braves via their web site.

Here’s my latest letter to the Braves:

I have been a long time Braves fan (since before the team moved to Atlanta) and as an Atlanta resident in the 1970s and 1980s I attended many games.

I wanted to let you know that I am deeply offended by the Braves “Faith Night” promotion. This promotion is blatantly exclusive of religious faiths outside of evangelical Christianity and it links the Atlanta Braves with an organization that is anti-gay and anti-Semitic.

Ostensibly a collaboration with Third Coast Sports, this promotion is apparently (according to the Third Coast Sports website) a partnership between the Atlanta Braves and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family an evangelical Christian group that is anti-choice, anti-gay, against sex education, and the leading proponent of the bogus notion of “reparative therapy” for homosexuality.

I find the very notion of “Faith Nights” at the ball park disheartening as baseball has (and should remain) a game that brings diverse people together, however, this crass marketing campaign to bring bus loads of church goers to the park actually works to build barriers between people. Personally, as die-hard Braves fan all my life, your collaboration with religious hate-mongers deeply saddens me.

E. Wayne Ross

Rouge Forum Update: The Unspeakable Spoken (August 1, 2006)

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page is updated.

The site includes important analytical offerings from Robert Fisk, Stratfor, West Point Grads Against the War, Historians Against War, and many others.

The dvd of “Sir! No Sir”, the story of the GI anti-war movement that paralyzed the military in Vietnam, is on sale now, great for classroom use.

This week we would like to say some things we hear no one else saying.

The current world wide debacle of perpetual war is the result the logical and necessary processes of capitalism which pit those few who own against the many who must sell our labor, work, to live. The few will not rule the many forever. Things change.

What is happening, at many levels, is an international war of the rich on the poor. This includes attacks on all kinds of worker organizations and the rise of racist inequality, everywhere. The term that best describes this is class war.

As a sub-set of class war, we witness intense inter-imperialist rivalry, for example in Iraq but also proxy war, as is a significant part of the case with Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Syria.

In this mix, as people’s lives become ever more desperate and hard to understand, religious irrationalism steps in to fill the void. Religion can offer us an ethic for the future, but It is not possible to resolve truly religious disputes, as all sides invariably test for truth within their own minds, rather in the material, real world. Religion, always married to intellectual and practical exploitation, is a mid-wife of racism and war.

Very few disputes, however, are solely religious disputes. Usually, somebody is coveting someone else’s nickel.

Class struggle goes on wherever people must work. In Lebanon, about 20 percent of the people are out of work, around 2/3 of the remainder work in service industries (tourism, etc., as banking was demolished in the earlier wars) about 20 % work in industry, and around 10% in agriculture. Every one of those workers is exploited by a series of bosses. Despite support for the Party of God, or the Christians, or others, this class struggle is the key underlying fact of life in Lebanon.

In Israel, about 10% of the people are unemployed. 21% of the people live beneath the poverty line, despite the US subsidized militarization of the Israeli economy. 20% of the workforce is in industry, another 30% in services, and the remainder work in transport, communication, etc. All those Israeli workers, despite what is initially mass support for the Zionist government, are exploited by a series of bosses as well.

The Israel/Lebanon wars today are, in part, also about oil. So is the growing sentiment about US action in Cuba, and Iran. Oil is key to every military in the world, which makes oil a pivotal resource for every imperialist nation which must have oil for home-capitalists to survive.

There is no easy way out of this, no peaceful way either. The only way out is to transcend capitalism. Of course, to only see the transformation of capitalism, or to only see the rise of religious fanaticism, would be to look down the barrel of a gun and only see one sight. Big transformations are built by small reforms, and the close personal ties, trust and wisdom, that struggles create. However, there is no disconnecting short term goals from long term necessity.

The key thing that determines likeness and difference in the world is social class. Every school worker in the US has more in common with school workers in Israel and Lebanon that any of us have in common with our own national leaders.

Organization, education, and action must address these connected realities of capitalism, imperialism, war, and the various forms of irrationalism that capitalism requires: racism, sexism, mysticism. It is past time for action.

We need to begin to discuss, at the very least, conducting the educational work that can fill the jails with direct action protests. Direct action can overcome apathy and fear. In schools, action can address the racist Big Tests (walk out), imperialist military recruiters, nationalist Homeland Security ICE cops, and regular cops as well (throw them out), class size (wildcats backed up by freedom schooling).

Most of us are educators, school workers, though there are quite a few military personnel on the RF list now, and many others. Our task is to connect reason with power, and act. And we need the audacity to say, “This is all wrong.” Someone must go first.

There is no litmus test on all the issues above for participation in the Rouge Forum. But the issues need to be discussed.

We are in the process of establishing regional and state coordinators for the Rouge Forum. Interested?

Sources: Israel and Lebanon: CIA World Fact Book

Oil , Lebanon and Iraq: Michel Chossudovsky The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil

Review of Sir! No Sir

Religion, Racism, War, and Schooling