E Wayne Ross – Page 120 – Critical Theories in Education

Rouge Forum Update (May 1, 2006)

wilson.JPG.jpg From Rich G.:

Dear Friends,

March on Mayday! Walkout and Shut Down the Schools and Workplaces!

The massive “Immigration Rights Are Workers’ Rights” school and workplace walkouts scheduled for Mayday are under attack, from within and without. Labor bosses like SEIU’s Andy Stern, and Catholic Church prelates like the Bishop of L.A., are attacking the Mayday actions because they fear the power of what they see as “their” rank and file taking action. Radio DJ’s, really the filler between commercials, who helped organize the original actions, are now attacking us, promoting the Bishop’s line, “work is a gift from God,” when work as we know it is nothing but a curse of capitalism.

From the outside, school bosses are using the old carrot and stick maneuvers that typify their rule—threats of school expulsions or lockdowns, and claims that what happens inside school is far more important that what happens out of school on Mayday: fear and prizes. Nonsense. The more people who walkout of schools and workplaces (better than just not showing up, as it requires organization and solidarity), the less discipline will be handed out. Nobody’s “permanent record” will be hurt. Indeed, in ten years, we will all forget whatever silly punishment is delivered, and we will remember we walked out and marched.

The Immigration-worker rights marches are full of weaknesses, contradictions: it’s a movement that waves flags, yet rightly declares that workers’ interests know no borders. But it may be that the most significant thing that comes from this Mayday shutdown is to demonstrate, once again, that workers create everything of value, and that if we act together, we can control what we create. The idea of direct-action walkouts, wildcats, strikes, sit-downs, could spread.

Nothing is going on in schools or at work on Mayday that will match the learning experience that will occur from walkouts and the marches. If possible, set up a study session on Mayday, just to backup the direct action, to reflect on the historic experience of the revolutionary and radical moment. Here’s a link: May Day

Rouge Forum Mayday Report

As we approach what we hope will be the massive Mayday marches on Monday, the school walkouts and work site shutdowns, we want to update you on the Rouge Forum and ask for your ideas.

The Rouge Forum email list has 4,461 members, about the same number for the last four years. The Rouge Forum web pages attract about 22,500 people a month, so many that the page is routinely shut down at the end of each month as we exceed our allotted web traffic—a good problem to have. The list includes university profs, adjuncts, k12 teachers, parents, university, college, and community college students, high school students, industrial workers, retired people, community activists, NEA and AFT staff, UAW staff, and one middle school student (with parental permission). Interestingly, more than half of the RF web page visitors are from outside of the US, mostly from the old United Kingdom.

The list has been active for eight years. As we have taken positions on key issues (like the immigration workers’ rights marches, calls for direct action vs the oil wars, or efforts to shut down the high-stakes tests in schools) people have left the list, and about the same number sign on. To make a leap in logic with only anecdotal evidence, we think the list represents more and more sophisticated people, what marketeers call opinion makers—what we think of as leaders.

What makes the Rouge Forum distinctive is our insistence (without dogmatically adopting a single line) that class struggle is key to social change, and our vision of change toward a democratic, egalitarian world that offers everyone a chance to be reasonably free, creative, caring, and cooperative. In schools, we have consistently linked curricula regimentation, high-stakes testing, racism, and imperialist war, as folds in the same cloth of capitalism, which must be superceded.

The conditions for a just world exist today—in our levels of production, transportation, technology, and communications. What is necessary to social justice is a massive change of mind—a pedagogical issue—and direct action. We also need a shared ethic in order to hold ourselves and our leaders to the values we adopted at the outset. We need organization. No other organized group working directly in schools in the US holds these views–and there is nothing especially remarkable about our outlook, except that we have had the courage to make the sacrifices to say it.

The Rouge Forum has held six conferences since 1998. The largest was in Detroit, the smallest in Syracuse, New York. The style of the conferences varied, from the free flowing three days in Detroit, with few presentations and what amounted to a long chat, to the more structured sessions of later meetings. Perhaps above all, people at the conferences made lifelong friendships with others of similar views.

We are, predictably, broke—no money. But we never had any. We have made three fund-raising appeals over the years, raising less than $2000, but individual donations have made it possible to run the www page. We have had to curtail the hard-copy editions of the Rouge Forum News, but have kept the online editions going–a problem since the online editions get blocked in schools.

With this as background, it is well past time to call for your views at this critical juncture, when a rising social movement is about to meet a ruthless opposition dedicated to perpetual war.

Below are several questions we have posed to ourselves, and now to you:

What do you think will be the most critical issues the Rouge Forum should address in the next five years? Why? What should we do?

How do you think we can improve our communications? Would you be willing to urge others to join the weekly email list?

Would you attend an upcoming Rouge Forum Conference? Where should it be? Why? When? What should be the focal issues of the conference? What form should the conference take (semi-formal presentations, just a long conversation, etc.)?

Do you think some assertive fund-raising would defeat the spirit of the Rouge Forum? Do you have ideas on how we might raise money (say, for the RF News hard-copy editions) without becoming dedicated to raising money?

Would you be willing to help establish a Rouge Forum publishing venture (not for profit) to publish books and pocket sized pamphlets?

Please respond to Rich Gibson at rgibson@pipeline.com

I am the egg head, I’m the Commander, I’m the Decider

Click to hear: I’m the Decider

I am me and Rummy’s he, Iraq is free and we are all together
See the world run when Dick shoots his gun, see how I lie
I’m Lying…

Sitting on my own brain, waiting for the end of days
Corporation profits, Bloody oil money
I’m above the law and I’ll decide what’s right or wrong

I am the egg head, I’m the Commander, I’m the Decider
Koo-Koo-Kachoo

Baghdad city policeman sitting pretty little targets in a row
See how they die when the shrapnel flies see mothers cry
I’m Lying…I’m Ly-ing…I’m Lying…I’m Ly-ing

Yellow cake uranium, imaginary WMD’s
Declassifying facts, exposing secret agents
Tax cuts for the wealthy leaving all the poor behind

CHORUS

Sitting in the White house garden talking to the Lord
My thoughts would be busy busy hatching If I only had a brain

CHORUS

Thanks to PMM for sending along this tune.

Rouge Forum Update (April 22, 2006)

Dear Friends,

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

We focus, this week, on the mass actions, walkouts, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, set for Mayday, the international workers’ holiday.

Our old colleague and friend, Jim Lafferty of the LA Lawyers’ Guild, has been busy defending those students who participated in the most recent mass school walkouts and boycotts.

But it has been the mass direct action of millions of people, marching collectively in the streets, that has demonstrated, if nothing else, the incredible potential power of working people whose interests know no borders. Despite the many clear weaknesses (nationalism in particular)of the immigration rights movement, the possibilities that rise from people taking charge of their own lives, in concert with others, reach far beyond the soldiering that makes up much of daily work and school life.

While leaders of the Catholic Church and labor bosses, like Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union, attack the coming mass demonstrations and walkouts, it remains that the Mayday actions will happen without their approval—because they had little or nothing to do with organizing them in the first place. The mass actions could easily take on a life of their own, organizing from the ground up.

March on Mayday!

WHO WE ARE:

The Rouge Forum is a group of educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are concerned about questions like these: How can we teach against racism, national chauvinism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society? How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals and still teach–or learn? Whose interests shall school serve in a society that is ever more unequal? We are both research and action oriented. We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring into practice our present understanding of what that is. We seek to build a caring inclusive community which understands that an injury to one is an injury to all. At the same time, our caring community is going to need to deal decisively with an opposition that is sometimes ruthless.

Computer-less Georgia family sued by record industry for file-sharing

The RIAA continues it’s attack on music lovers, this time suing a family in Georgia for file-sharing, even though they don’t own a computer. Hmmm…

From the Rockmart [GA] Journal
Local family sued by record companies

04/22/06
By LOWELL VICKERS

A Rockmart family is being sued for illegal music file sharing, despite the fact that they don’t even own a computer. A federal lawsuit filed this week in Rome by the Recording Industry Association of America alleges that Carma Walls, of 117 Morgan St., Rockmart, has infringed on copyrights for recorded music by sharing files over the Internet. The lawsuit seeks an injunction and requests unspecified monetary damages. The lawsuit states, “Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendant, without the permission or consent of Plaintiffs, has used, and continues to use, an online media distribution system to download the copyrighted recordings, to distribute the copyrighted recordings to the public, and/or to make the copyrighted recordings available for distribution to others.” This came as shocking news to the Walls family, who were notified of the lawsuit Friday afternoon by a newspaper reporter. James Walls, speaking on behalf of his wife and family, said they have not been served with legal papers and were unaware of the lawsuit. After being shown a copy of the court filing, Walls said he found the whole thing bewildering. “I don’t understand this,” Walls said. “How can they sue us when we don’t even have a computer?” Walls also noted that his family has only resided at their current address “for less than a year.” He wondered if a prior tenant of the home had Internet access, then moved, leaving his family to be targeted instead. However, the RIAA’s lawsuit maintains that Carma Walls, through the use of a file-sharing program, has infringed on the copyrights for the following songs: “Who Will Save Your Soul,” Jewel; “Far Behind,” Candlebox; “Still the Same,” Bob Seger; “I Won’t Forget You,” Poison; “Open Arms,” Journey; “Unpretty,” TLC; No Scrubs,” TLC; and “Saving All My Love for You,” Whitney Houston. The lawsuit follows similar wording as in some 3,500 other lawsuits filed by the RIAA in the United States since June 2003. Typically, the lawsuits have targeted users of Kazaa, Grokster and other peer-to-peer Internet services – most of which have since been shut down by RIAA lawsuits. With these services, users typically have an open folder on the computer that allows other users of the service access to any songs that have been saved in a digital format, such as MP3 files. The RIAA lawsuits have come under fire, with critics calling the effort a “scare tactic” meant to intimidate the public from file sharing activities. However, in a public statement defending the litigation, the RIAA says its efforts have been effective in dissuading illegal activity. “The industry’s anti-piracy efforts have deterred a sizeable number of would-be illegal downloaders,” the RIAA statement reads. “Although a significant online problem undoubtedly persists, particularly with hard-core, frequent peer-to-peer users, absent action by the industry, the illegal down-loading world would be exponentially worse.”

www.rockrap.com

Teacher tests miss the mark

SKILLS TESTS FOR TEACHERS MISS MARK, STUDIES FIND

The skills tests that most public school teachers must pass to get a job are poor predictors of whether they’ll actually be good teachers — and in some cases may even keep good ones from entering the classroom, new research suggests.

A pair of long-term studies challenge longstanding policies in 48 states that require teachers to pass standardized exams to get jobs, reports Greg Toppo. In one, Marc Claude-Charles Colitti of Michigan State University examined data going back to 1960 and found teachers’ scores had almost no correlation to principals’ evaluations of their classroom performance. “How smart a teacher is doesn’t necessarily tell us that they’re a good teacher,” he says. Teachers’ SAT or ACT college entrance exam scores, or even their own scores on fifth-grade skills tests when they were children, would be as accurate at telling whether they’ll be good teachers, he says.

Before 1983, only three states required teachers to pass general-knowledge tests. By 1999, 39 states had such requirements. By the time President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, with its requirements for “highly qualified teachers,” passed in 2002, 48 states required the tests.

Teachers, schools and states now spend an estimated $50 million to $100 million on such exams. But University of Washington researcher Dan Goldhaber warns that passing a general-knowledge or even a specific-subject-matter test isn’t a silver bullet. “This is by no means a guarantee that you’re getting the right people in and keeping the right people out.”

Feds snag student dressed as ninja

I’m not making this up!

BATF agents run amok at UGa

Running through the University of Georgia campus as a ninja can elicit a prompt response from authorities, a UGA sophomore learned.

Federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm agents, on campus for a community training project, detained Jeremiah Ransom of Macon Tuesday as a “suspicious individual” when they spotted a masked figure darting near the Georgia Center.

Ransom told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was snared by agents with guns drawn.

“It was surreal,” Ransom said. “I was jogging from Wesley to Snelling (cafeteria) when I heard someone yell `freeze.'” At first, he thought a friend was playing a joke.

University Police Chief Jimmy Williamson said Ransom was released as soon as he was found to have violated no laws.

Vanessa McLemore, the ATF special agent in charge, said agents thought something was amiss when they “noticed someone wearing a bandanna across the face and acting in a somewhat suspicious manner, peeping around the corner” then breaking into a run.

Williamson said Ransom was wearing black sweat pants and an athletic T-shirt with one red bandanna covering the bottom half of his face and another covering the top of his head.

Washington Post: For Iraqi Students, Hussein’s Arrival Is End of History

In Iraqi schools history officially ends in 1968…

For Iraqi Students, Hussein’s Arrival Is End of History

By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 15, 2006; Page A01

BAGHDAD — The two-year-old modern history textbook used at Baghdad’s Mansour High School for Boys doesn’t mention the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq in 2003.

There’s not a word about Iraq’s annexation of — and subsequent expulsion from — Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, or its grinding eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s that took the lives of a generation of young men.

Perhaps most conspicuously absent from the book, earlier versions of which were packed with florid praise for Hussein, is any reference tothe former dictator. For the purposes of instruction at Mansour High, and most schools across Iraq, history ends in 1968, before the bloodless coup that swept the Baath Party to power.

U.S.-sponsored reconstruction efforts have renovated or rebuilt nearly 3,000 Iraqi schools, retrained 55,000 teachers and administrators and — under the supervision of the government’s de-Baathification commission — revised or redacted millions of textbooks that glorified 35 years of tyrannical rule. Dozens of schools named for Hussein were reflagged, and once-mandatory courses in nationalism and Baathist ideology were scrapped.

But Iraq’s updated history books now contain no information on the pivotal events of the past three decades and more, a fact some teachers and politicians say will handicap students and delay Iraqi society in coming to terms with a long period of uninterrupted trauma.

Education officials said they decided soon after Hussein fell from power that the wounds of his rule were so fresh — and the potential for retaliatory violence so great — that the subject was best omitted from school texts, at least for now. This year, a committee of experts selected by the Education Ministry will launch an ambitious overhaul of school curricula. The goal is to produce the first broadly accepted history of Iraq’s troubled recent past, a formidable challenge in a country split along ethnic and sectarian lines.

“It will be very, very, very hard to represent all the viewpoints. It cannot be viewed as something imposed by the strongest,” said an Education Ministry official who will head the new curricular development committee and is already reviewing nominations for roughly 40 other positions. He agreed to be interviewed on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitivity of the job.

“The former regime used the curriculum as a mouthpiece for its own political interests,” he continued. “We have to be careful. We have to be tactful. We need to make books that are acceptable for a Kurd from the north, a child from Ramadi and a girl in Basra.”

The committee will begin more or less from scratch. Hussein’s ongoing trial — which is being broadcast in its entirety on local satellite channels — has helped educate a public starved for accurate information about the former government. A private foundation is planning a museum to document the atrocities committed during his rule, but it may not open for years. In the absence of a comprehensive effort to educate young Iraqis, few educators feel such advances are enough.

“This is a part of Iraq that we are denying. Saddam Hussein is in the people’s minds, even if he is removed from the book,” said Yahia Abbas, 53, a history teacher at Mansour High, one of Baghdad’s most respected schools. “You can’t just make 35 years disappear.”

On a recent weekday in a shabby, stone classroom, Abbas lectured to about 35 students on the British invasion of Iraq in the 1940s. Eager pupils strained from their seats, arms extended to draw his attention.

“Why did the British attack Baghdad?” Abbas asked, and hands shot up before the words were out of his mouth.

“Sir, sir, sir, sir,” begged a hefty 15-year-old. “Because the revolution was demanding independence and because it was supported by Germany and Italy, sir,” the boy continued, without pausing for break.

“And remember where the spark for independence came from?” Abbas asked. “Woodrow Wilson, after World War I,” three voices seemed to say at once.

On this day, the discussion never strayed into the modern period. When it does and students ask about Hussein, such as during a class this year in which someone compared him to Adolf Hitler, “I dance around the question,” Abbas said. “It could be trouble for me.”

Jamal Khalid Amin, principal of Mansour High, where about half of the 1,000 students are Sunni Muslims and half are Shiite Muslims, said educators have been intimidated into silence, and not just by government bureaucrats. “This is Iraqi society now — if you say anything good about Saddam, you will be killed. If you say anything bad, you will be killed by someone else,” he said. “We used to be only afraid of Saddam. Now there are many people to fear.”

Some additions to the curriculum have already been made. The Shiite politicians who surged to power after Hussein fell insisted that books on Islamic history be infused with more information about figures revered by Shiites, such as Imam Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. They also removed all references to the “Persian enemy,” the once-mandatory description of Iran, a Shiite theocracy.

But the silence of the history texts on the subject of Hussein’s rule remains a particular concern, educators say. So far, it has meant different lessons taught in different regions, cementing already pronounced fissures.

In the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, where Hussein’s army carried out a brutal campaign of killings and forced relocations in 1988, teachers lecture freely on the atrocities committed against their relatives.

But in Tikrit, the hub of the area north of Baghdad where Hussein was born, history teachers take a starkly different approach. “We clarify for them that some of the information they get is incorrect and not precise,” said Khaldoon Yunis, who teaches history at a local boys’ school. “We tell them the reality of how the Persians are the enemy and hate the Arabs. And of how Saddam is a historical leader for the entire Arab nation.”

Mohammed Abdul Rahman, a provincial education official in Anbar province, a restive, Sunni Arab-majority swath of western Iraq, said the different teachings were “the start of separation among the people, especially the youth.”

“You have the Sunni teacher telling his students that the war with Iran was honest and that Iran is the enemy,” he said. “On the other hand, the Shiite teacher tells his students that the war was caused by the Saddam regime against a friendly country and that Iraq lost.”

In mixed areas such as Baghdad, teachers say they mostly follow the letter of the text, sometimes confounding students.

“I have so many questions,” said Ali Muhammad Dawoud, 14, a student at Mansour who will take his history exams in two months. “Right now the only answers I get are from my friends, my parents or on television.”

Special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Naseer Nouri contributed to this report.

Almost the best job in North America

Well, I’m back to the grind of blogging after taking some time off to attend the American Educational Research Association meeting in San Francisco (and then visit friends in California wine country). It’s a tough job, but I guess someone has to do it.

After whining about all the stress of preparing a few presenations for AERA I was stunned to see that Money Magazine says I have almost the best job in America.

My buddy Ken, who obviously has lot’s of time on his hands to read superfluous publications like Money, tipped me off to my supposed good fortune.

Well, best get back to the excruciating work of professing…

Duke University Equestrian Team Hoping To Avoid Investigation Into Their Sex Scandal

TopStory-Duke-Equestrian.article.jpg The Onion: Duke University Equestrian Team Hoping To Avoid Investigation Into Their Sex Scandal

April 6, 2006 | Issue 42•14

DURHAM, NC—Mere weeks after members of their university’s lacrosse team were accused of sexually assaulting exotic dancers, ranking Duke polo and equestrian team members are downplaying rumors that they repeatedly engaged in acts of exotic sexual misconduct during the infamously out-of-control parties held at the team’s off-campus barn.

“We’ve done nothing wrong, veterinarians will find no evidence—DNA or otherwise—showing that horses have been assaulted, and of course no charges have been filed,” said senior Nat Hennerty, captain of Duke’s equestrian squad and a two-time Most Valuable Rider, in a prepared statement to the press Tuesday. “I urge the media, the alumni, and the people of the community to remember that we at Duke are an elite university and disregard any obvious hearsay.”

“Especially anything regarding suspicious bruises or abrasions suffered by the men of the team, allegations that certain horses have not been cantering normally as of late, or photos supposedly showing Duke student-athletes wearing nothing but English riding boots and engaged in sexual congress with tranquilized horses while whipping them with riding crops,” Hennerty added.

While no formal accusations have been made, students claim the outrageous behavior of Duke’s elite equestrian squad has become campus legend.

“I’ve never been to one of their parties, but everyone at Duke has heard the rumors,” said a sophomore who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying she wished to protect herself from possible retaliation by the “privileged elites” who make up Duke’s top-tier riding clubs. “Everyone’s drinking, the lights in the stable go down, someone gets some saddle soap and a curry-comb…. pretty soon everyone’s bareback, they’re playing ‘strip dressage,’ strange lathered-up fillies are prancing around… It’s only a matter of time before someone becomes Catherine the Great.”

Although no Duke equestrian sports team has ever come under official scrutiny, an informal examination of team medical records shows that Duke riders are four times more likely to suffer unusual injuries, such as broken bones from startled horses stepping back onto riders’ feet, deep horse bites in or around the groin area, or massive internal trauma along with explosive perforation of the colon. Duke teams also lead the nation, and organized horsemanship in general, in the sudden destruction of large livestock for unrecorded or sketchily documented reasons.

Despite the rumors and mounting evidence of mount abuse, few in the university believe that the team will be subjected to the possible disgrace of a joint university/SPCA investigation.

“These guys were brought up to believe that they can have any horse or woman they want, and that’s unconscionable—but a formal investigation would tear this campus apart,” history professor Woodrow Peterson said. “After all, the Duke University community barely tolerated the systematic sexual abuse of two black women at the hands of its students. If word got out that valuable horses had been treated that way, this place would explode.”