Perhaps this might help with surviving the school apocalypse.
Two of the keys to victory in this amorphous war over public education are being religiously practiced by the progressive Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.
The first key to victory lies in their website. Every paragraph is festooned with reformy language. Their aims seem to be indistinguishable from those of Students First or any other privatizer-friendly “research council”. By speaking in glittering generalities in order to hide their agendas, the reformy crowd has thrown out the rope by which they will eventually hang.
Everyone is for “improved outcomes” and “bridging the achievement gap”. The incessant need for reformers to assure us of their genuine desire to accomplish these things have made these terms tropes with no real meaning. Any group, organization or movement can slip snugly under the covers of this rhetoric to hide their own respective agendas.
The public has become so accustomed to these terms that no organization who hopes to truly affect education policy can afford to not use them. “Closing the achievement gap”, for example, is an idea that a deft rhetorician can use to mean equalizing resources among all schools around the country, just like the reformers usually use it to mean boosting test scores.
In the end, all it really takes is for us to repeat and aver the purity of our intentions using these terms as frequently as the reformy crowd.
Of course, this rhetorical approach should be coupled by truly progressive action. Annenberg recently kicked off an initiative called A+ NYC aimed at lobbying the mayoral candidates in the name of what parents want for public schools. They recently sent a battered school bus around the city to reach parents who wanted to share their voices.
Not surprisingly, the biggest concerns turned out to be the disappearance of extracurricular activities and over-reliance on testing. This is a far cry from the manufactured clamoring of parents for more charter schools. It goes a long way towards explaining why Eva Moskowitz and her ilk have to get signatures of out-of-district parents to petition for charter schools.
What really needs to be done, and what Annenberg seems on the verge of suggesting, is the creation of the idea of parents as voting blocs. Parents are used to having their names invoked whenever one group or another wants to push some sort of privatization or censorship. Yet, they have never truly been framed as a voting bloc.
A voting bloc needs to be united behind at least one common idea. For parents, “great schools” are not enough, since that is a trope and not an idea. This is where the reformers fail and from whence the next great school movement has to start. Parents as a voting bloc must be connected to the idea of a “better school day”. An idea like this, on which the Chicago teachers put their fingers during their strike, is general enough to unite a wide swath of parents while having enough specific connotations to mean something.
And these specific connotations would be decidedly at odds with the reformy agenda. Instead of equalizing “outcomes”, the focus needs to shift towards equalizing resources. What will be important is what we as a society put into the schools, not what we can get out of the schools in terms of trained labor, higher test scores and no-bid contracts.
Who would be able to argue against an idea that wants great schools for all children?
Discarding the vapid terminology utilized by the reformies is a mistake. Instead, true public school advocates have to flay the reformer beast and walk around wearing its skin.
Lyndon Johnson, the last truly homespun president.
It was announced over the weekend that Robert Caro has won yet another literary award, this time for the fourth and latest volume in his majestic biography of Lyndon Johnson entitled The Passage of Power. It covers Johnson’s non-campaign in the 1960 Democratic primaries through those first heady months of his presidency. Even though I bought the book the day it came out, I did not start reading it until last week. I have had a fascination with Lyndon Johnson before I started devouring Caro’s volumes. Caro’s work has served to deepen my fascination and understanding of one of the nation’s most controversial presidents.
Being born in the post-Vietnam era, I never inherited the knee-jerk hatred that many Americans from the previous generation seem to have for him. It is a shame that the Vietnam War will follow Johnson’s legacy throughout history, even though it is a shame that Johnson brought upon himself. Scared to death of looking weak in the face of what he perceived as communist aggression, Johnson was the president most responsible for leading the nation into the war for which the term “quagmire” seemed to be coined.
Looking at Johnson’s pre-presidential career, it seemed unlikely that a war for independence halfway around the globe would be the thing that ended up destroying him. Born in the Texas Hill Country in 1908, Lyndon’s focus had always been local. Whether local meant rural Texas, Capitol Hill or the United States of America, matters of foreign policy rarely ever drew his attention. Maybe this was the problem. He was so domestically focused that he was ill-prepared to deal with Cold War geopolitics when forced to do so as president.
His father was once an important man who had fallen from grace and died penniless. Word got around the Hill Country that Old Man Johnson was a failure. Lyndon, by all accounts, very much resembled his father physically. For his entire life, he strove to ensure that he did not end up resembling his father in any other way. He was going to be somebody. He was going to be the President of the United States, not a failure. Ambition would be the driving force of his entire life, but it was by no means the only driving force.
The Hill Country was not only cruel to his father. It was a large pocket of rural poverty and backwardness where most people lived as they had since the 19th century. It was one of the last places in the United States to have electricity. Johnson had seen how poverty affected his neighbors. During his brief stint as a teacher of children of Mexican migrant workers, he had seen up close how poverty affected people of other races as well. He would take these experiences with him throughout the rest of his life. If he ever got the chance he was going to do something to help people in need, no matter their race.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he idolized Franklin Roosevelt. He came of age when FDR just started implementing his New Deal, the first real effort by the federal government to help people who had fallen on hard times. When the opportunity to be part of the New Deal presented itself, Johnson jumped at the chance. It was his involvement with the federal programs of the New Deal that helped him cut his political teeth. Few politicians in American History have cut their teeth so well and so successfully.
It was not only the New Deal that drew Johnson to FDR. Roosevelt was a consummate politician. More than any other president, he was able to be all things to all people. Running in his first presidential campaign in 1932, FDR promised a “New Deal for the American people”. History now shows that FDR did not really have much of an idea of what this would mean. However, to a country wracked by the worst economic crisis it had ever experienced, a “New Deal” sounded pretty good. Roosevelt was convincing because he knew what people wanted to hear. Johnson would take these lessons with him too, much like he took with him the lessons of the Texas Hill Country. It was Roosevelt after whom Johnson tried to pattern himself by using his initials LBJ. While tuning up for his abortive presidential campaign in 1960, he would tell his aides “it’s important the people start thinking of me in terms of initials: LBJ, FDR, LBJ, FDR, get it?”
It is little wonder then that FDR took a shine to LBJ. If they were peas in a pod it was because Johnson was making the effort to be so. His relationship with Franklin Roosevelt helped propel him into national elective office. He spent several years in the House of Representatives where he forged an alliance with Speaker Sam Rayburn. Rayburn would be one of the most powerful men in the United States, certainly the most powerful southern politician and the most important ally in Lyndon Johnson’s career.
LBJ spent 12 years in the House of Representatives but it was in the Senate where he forged his reputation as one of the shrewdest politicians in the United States. Shortly after he was elected, LBJ strolled into the Senate chamber after hours to look over his new work place. He muttered the words “it’s the perfect size”. As a Representative, Johnson was one of a crowd. As a Senator, he was part of an elite club. More importantly, the Senate was small enough for him to work his powers of persuasion. He could hit Senators one-on-one with the “Johnson Treatment” until he got the votes he needed.
Johnson was a tall, lanky fellow. He would always be impeccably dressed: tailored suits, hair slicked back, “LBJ” cuff links glistening in the light. That is why when he cornered a Senator, leaned his face into theirs and threatened, promised, flattered or cajoled, the Senator would usually give him what he wanted. This was the “Johnson Treatment”. Thanks in part to this tactic, Johnson would go on to be the most powerful Senator in the United States.
In a very short time he would be the Senate Majority Leader, gathering into that job powers that it had never seen before. LBJ would say “power is where power goes” and he certainly knew which people held the power. To the men of the Beltway who could do him harm (or favors), he was sickeningly obsequious. To men and women who he did not need or who needed him, he was sickeningly rude. Stories of LBJ treating his staffers, and even his wife, with cruelty have become legendary.
Like when his wife, Lady Bird, would host parties for the Washington elite. Johnson would have no problem ordering his wife around like a maid, yelling out “Biiirrrrddd” in a high-pitched voice very much resembling a “Suey” call on a hog farm. It caused Bird a great deal of embarrassment and indignity to the point where many Washington wives pitied her.
Then there are the times when he would require staffers to take dictation while he was sitting on the toilet. He would open the door to the bathroom, lean his face out so a staffer could see him and then motion the staffer over with a “come here” motion of his index finger. All the while his face would be stone cold, letting the staffer know he was indeed serious. It was a way to test their loyalty, as well as test how far he could push his subordinates before they would push back.
Even around men of power he could be incredibly crude. At state dinners, where foreign dignitaries would dine, he would scarf down his food, let out a loud belch and leave the table all in the course of 10 minutes without saying a word. As majority leader, when his seat was in the front of the Senate chamber so that everyone could see him, he would turn to them and administer his eye drops in the most histrionic fashion possible. Or, with his back to them, he would dig out his wedgies and scratch his butt in the same dramatic way. When swapping tales of womanizing with his fellow Senators (LBJ had several extra-marital affairs), he would often brag about the size of his penis, saying things like “Old Jumbo sure got a workout last night.” He was caricature of himself on the Hill.
It is amazing that a man like this ever became president. Of course, it almost never happened thanks to his ill-conceived run at the Democratic nomination in 1960. He ended up accepting the Vice Presidential nomination when it was offered by John Kennedy, even though he disliked Jack and absolutely hated his brother Robert. However, in LBJ’s calculations, the Vice Presidency was the best road to the White House. Without it, he would have to wait another 8 years and probably run against men who had been in the national spotlight more than him. With it, he would be in the national spotlight himself and be a heartbeat away from the presidency, although nobody expected the young Jack Kennedy to die in office.
His 3 years as Vice President were probably the most miserable of his career. JFK surrounded himself with Harvard-educated men who had no use for the homespun LBJ. They gave him the unflattering nickname of “Rufus Cornpone”, made fun of him behind his back and isolated him from most of the important decisions. For his part, LBJ had no use for them. Before the election, he said that JFK was not a man’s man, which was one of the worst insults LBJ could throw at someone. He saw JFK’s inner circle in general as a bunch of spoiled brats who had everything in life handed to them.
And then the impossible happened. The young president was shot dead in Dallas. All of the sudden, Lyndon had the job he had always wanted, the job that meant he was a somebody. He had beaten the odds by becoming the first truly southern president since Zachary Taylor, and the first from the state of Texas.
The rest is history. He deftly attached himself to the dead president’s legacy by using his ample parliamentary skills to get JFK’s programs pushed through Congress. Part of this program was enacting the first substantial civil rights law in 100 years, a law that went on to become one of the crowning achievements of the entire Civil Rights movement. The biggest irony of all was that it was done by a southerner, one who never had a good reputation in liberal circles. His actions led to the biggest political realignment of the 20th century. Southerners bolted the Democratic Party for good. Minorities, liberals and other northeasterners would forever hitch their wagon to the star of the Democratic Party. Much of what we take for granted in the political world today is a direct legacy of President Lyndon Johnson.
Then, when running for election in his own right, he trounced Barry Goldwater. Sure, Goldwater was seen as a reactionary and ran one of the worst campaigns of any presidential candidate ever. But Johnson deserves credit for running a great campaign, one that included a television ad that set the standard for all future presidential campaigns:
Johnson went on to win in a landslide, the first elected president from Texas, the first elected president from the south since Zachary Taylor in 1848.
With Johnson reaching the height of his ambition, and with new elections another 4 years away, he was able to give reign to his sense of justice. He declared a War on Poverty and promised America that he would help lead them to a Great Society. Medicare and Medicaid are direct descendants of this promise. LBJ expanded the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (what would be known as “welfare”) through expanding the rights of poor people. He hired a Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, to head up a War on Poverty. Federal funds started flooding the poorest areas of the nation. The idea of community control allowed these areas to spend the money as they saw fit. Not since the New Deal had the federal government gone to such lengths to help the most downtrodden people in America.
If Johnson’s life taught him that the federal government had the ability and the duty to help the poor, it also taught him that he needed to keep the rich and powerful on his side. Johnson was a friend of big business and big business had been lobbying the government for years to institute meaningful immigration reform. They wanted to rewrite many of the laws that had closed off the borders since the 1920s. Johnson gave them the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened America to an extent not seen since the late 1800s. Unions had been fighting this type of immigration policy for decades out of fear that it would lower wages. Business had been fighting for this policy for the same reason. The law would end up being the Rosetta Stone for the New Democratic Party, one less reliant on labor unions, more compliant with the whims of big business and anxious to brandish its liberal credits by fighting for “diversity”.
All of these things would be overshadowed by Vietnam. Johnson had lived through McCarthyism and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had seen how being “weak” on communism both destroyed political careers and led to international embarrassment for the United States. When the forces of Ho Chi Minh seemed poised to take control of Vietnam, both north and south, LBJ was determined to prevent it from happening. Using his skill at getting Congress to bend to his whim, he got them to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) which gave him full control over the U.S. response to the Vietnam conflict. When asked by his advisors if America was able to fight a war on poverty at home on top of a war against Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, LBJ responded “we’re America, we can do it all.”
This quote, more than anything else, represents the type of optimism permeating the United States since after World War II. LBJ was expressing the common assumption at the time, one that put stock in both the righteousness and omnipotence of America’s role in the world.
And it is a shame that this quote, more than anything, signaled America’s pride before the fall. Johnson started his presidency like a house of fire, making progress on civil rights, poverty and immigration. He would end his presidency in disgrace with the country mired in Vietnam, riots in every major city and a youth culture thoroughly alienated from authority. Johnson’s presidency is the hinge between America’s golden age and America’s downfall. The quote that “we’re America, we can do it all” would be unrealistic today. Our leaders would never say this now. We are living in an age of limits.
America had been able to interfere in Korea, Berlin, Cuba and a million other places without embarrassment or losing a tremendous amount of face. Vietnam put a black eye on all of this. It made the U.S. afraid of getting involved in any large-scale conflict in the future, lest the government lose credibility and another generation be bled white. Instead, the U.S. would relegate itself to small-scale conflicts with limited aims. Or, in the case of Iraq, the U.S. would expand its aims without giving away too much to the media lest they stir up opposition at home.
This is LBJ’s legacy.
Americans were still poor after the War on Poverty. Civil rights leaders were still dissatisfied after LBJ’s laws. Riots broke out in every major city during the 1960s. “Black Power” became the watchword of black leaders. Native Americans at Wounded Knee were gearing up to defend their way of life and battle centuries of mistreatment. The government was doing more than ever to help people and yet people were still unhappy. LBJ, watching the riots on TV in the Oval Office, mouthed the words “what more do these people want?” It was a question that many people would ask. A backlash started brewing which contended that poverty and racism could not be solved by the government. The next generation of leaders, represented by California Governor Ronald Reagan, gained popularity on the idea that people would have to solve their own problems through rugged individualism and the market. The nanny state that took care of its people would be dismantled after the supposed failure of the 1960s.
This is LBJ’s legacy.
Before becoming president, Johnson was always sure to keep his distance from the oilmen who ran Texas. He knew that he would never get elected to the White House if voters thought the oilmen had purchased him. Yet, Johnson was a fan and a friend of big business. Moreover, he never had a good relationship with labor. Labor leaders threatened to bolt the Democratic Party when JFK chose LBJ for his ticket. Johnson would slowly lead the party away from labor and towards big business. The Immigration Act was a taste of what the Democratic Party would become in the future, what the Democratic Party is today, which is a pro-business, luke-warm-to-hostile towards labor party.
This is LBJ’s legacy.
Finally, Johnson’s personal hatred for Bobby Kennedy would split the Democrats. The two men had hated each other since the day they met in the 1950s and that hatred had grown since that time. When Kennedy ran for the Democratic nomination in 1968, LBJ from behind the scenes was determined to prevent it from happening. He threw his full support behind his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, who would go on to be seen as the “establishment” candidate (even though he had a track record just as, if not more, liberal than RFK). Kennedy, through his compassion for the poor and opposition to Vietnam, was the choice of the younger generation. The Humphrey(LBJ)/RFK split would tear the Democrats apart in 1968. RFK was killed before he could officially get the party nomination. The candidate who claimed his mantle, Eugene McCarthy, was no RFK . When Humphrey was chosen at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, it led to a full-scale riot that became the symbol of the excesses of the youth movement and counterculture. Never again would young people be as involved in, or as successful at, shaping the political landscape.
This is LBJ’s legacy.
There is no telling what the world would have been like if Johnson had stayed out of Vietnam. Few presidents have possessed ambition, compassion and effectiveness as completely as LBJ. His ambition was his guide. It would be what led to his undoing, not to mention his party’s and the nation’s undoing. At the same time, if he did not have this ambition, it is doubtful he would have ever become president so he could be in a position to help right some of America’s wrongs. Maybe the U.S. would have still progressed without Johnson, although probably not as fast.
Too much, too fast, too soon, these could be the things that define Johnson’s legacy. For all of his faults, the United States has not seen a president as compassionate as him ever since. Nobody says anymore what America can do, what the government can do. Nobody says anymore “we’re America, we can do it all.” Instead, our leaders tell us what America cannot do, what the government cannot do. The Neoliberal Revolution that defined the post-LBJ era has been all about “can’t”, all about limits. Obama’s and Congress’ solution to our problems has been austerity, which is one large policy of “can’t”.
It is not at all clear that America has been better off by rejecting the policies for which LBJ stood. LBJ is a scary reminder of all that we have lost over the past 50 years.
So far, this is the only seat at the table that our union leadership has.
We saw that the New York City teacher strike of 1968 revolved around the conflict between union protections for teachers and community control of public schools. The United Federation of Teachers, in its quest to break the community control experiment, allied itself with the establishment. Since that time, the establishment has proven less and less willing to have us as house guests. It is now at the point where the establishment is throwing our clothes out of the bedroom window while we look up helplessly, begging to be let back in.
In order for our union to be viable in the future, we must repair that link to the communities we serve which was severed in 1968. It is clear that this is not the tactic of our current Unity leadership. If left up to them, we will be standing out in the cold in our underwear watching the establishment burn all of our clothes. We will continue to beg impotently to be allowed back into the house right up until the end.
Instead, repairing those ties to the community falls on the shoulders of the MORE caucus. If they can successfully do this, they have a chance of both winning some measure of leadership in the union and saving public education. How to do this is the million-dollar question.
The equation is simple. Education “reform” has gotten so much traction over the past 10 years because it is funded by the wealthiest people in the country. These wealthy people donate to political campaigns. Usually, the politician who is the best funded wins the election. Therefore, politicians bend over backwards to satisfy the reformy crowd so they can be ensured of continued campaign contributions, which ensures them of continued power.
Our union can never hope to match the campaign contributions of the reformy crowd in this age of Citizens United. What the union lacks in money it must make up for in votes. It must be able to punish reformy politicians by taking them out of power. It must be able to reward its supporters by keeping them in power. The only way the union and public education will survive is through the power of votes.
As far as NYC is concerned, this requires a grassroots strategy to engage the communities we serve. Unfortunately, those communities are being divided between those who get the “good schools” (charters) and those “left behind” in the public schools. It is certainly not the reality that charters are good schools, but it is the perception. Instead of advocating for teacher evaluation schemes and bar exams, the union should push for legislation that gives parents a measure of control over their schools. This should be a hallmark of social justice unionism.
One of the reasons why the community control experiment in Ocean Hill Brownsville failed was because the parents in the neighborhood did not vote. The politicians in Albany disregarded them without any fear of reprisal. By extension, the UFT disregarded them for the same reason.
Of course, this strategy is much easier said than done. Many of the communities in which we serve are disengaged from the political process totally. Making them engaged again would require a massive effort.
At the same time, there are communities in NYC who are somewhat more engaged. These are the communities that should be targeted first. Imagine the union pushing for legislation that would give parents oversight of the charter schools in their communities. Imagine the union pushing for legislation that would end mayoral control and empower parents to have a major say over education policy for public schools. Imagine the union being associated with measures that would give parents a true voice in the education of their students. Even if these laws fail to pass, which they are sure to do, they will at least call the bluffs of all the reformers who claim to put “Children First”.
As of now, our union has been going in the completely opposite direction. Through support of mayoral control, Common Core and Race to the Top, the union has been complicit in the progressive centralization of education policy. It has done this in the naive (and mistaken) impression that they will be allowed to have a seat at the table. And yet, despite the fact that the union has supported every measure of centralization over the past 10 years, they find themselves standing on the lawn in their jammies begging to be let in. There is no seat for us at the table after all.
Therefore, it is time for the union to hitch their wagon to the star of decentralization. Legislation is just the start. We have to knock on doors, be at community board meetings, have a presence at the Panel for Educational Policy hearings, sponsor community events, register people to vote and inform parents of their rights through both social media and printed literature. There has to be a sense that the union is on their side.
Of course, this takes a core of dedicated teachers. It requires first that the teaching force be activated. This is the stage in which MORE finds itself now. Much like our communities have been disengaged, the rank and file of our union has been disengaged as well. Unity has never had an interest in activating the rank and file. I myself never even knew that we could vote for our leadership until I became a chapter leader. An activated rank and file is anathema to Unity.
In short, MORE is going to have to compensate for decades of Unity inaction. After this, they are going to have to activate communities that have been disenfranchised while getting the enfranchised ones on their side. This requires patience. Above all, it requires pragmatism. Ideology will be MORE’s worst enemy. An irrational marriage to outdated or quaint beliefs will strangle a very promising movement in its cradle. Community means exactly that: community. The communities we serve are diverse and our thinking needs to be diverse if we wish to reach them.
In my mind, MORE has the potential to be greater than Chicago. They have the potential to bloody the nose of the reformer movement far beyond what the Chicago teachers are capable of. This is not due to any particular flaw in what the CTU is doing. This is due to the sheer fact that the NYC public school system is the largest in the country. Our thinking needs to be large as well.
Anything less will end up with us stomping out the embers of our profession while those who truly have seats at the table laugh at us.
What can we learn from the UFT Strike of 1968? How does it point the way to our future? I don’t know but I pretend to in this piece.
PART I (BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE ’68 STRIKE)
New York City was undergoing major demographic changes in the 1960s. For the previous 20 years, the manufacturing sector that had formed the bedrock of the city’s economy was being hollowed out. Jobs that employed most of the unskilled white workers of the city were moving to other states, then to other countries. At the same time, blacks from the south and Hispanics from the Caribbean were entering the city in search for those very same factory jobs. The city’s people, both white and minority, would be doing battle in a new type of economy: the service economy.
Unlike the manufacturing economy, making a living in the service sector required having an education. The city’s post-war mayors put programs in place to help people get their educations. A steadily booming economy, combined with federal programs like the GI Bill, allowed the city to invest in such programs. In a sense, this could be seen as a continuation of the old Tammany Hall tradition of providing social welfare services to otherwise underserved people. Tammany helped provide these services to immigrants, provided the immigrants voted Democrat on election day. The post-war mayors, serving in a post-Tammany New York, provided services to the children of immigrants.
These second-generation Americans were divided into different ethnic and religious camps, the two main camps being Jewish and Catholic. The education programs put in place after the war were designed with these groups in mind. They appealed to the values and sensibilities of these groups, requiring good marks on standardized exams and proof of dedication to college work. Looking back now, the city was successful in helping the children of immigrants move up into the middle class in the new service-sector economy.
On the other hand, New York’s newest minority residents were largely left out of these helping hand programs. That is not to say there were no programs in place for them. Red lining, urban “renewal” schemes and bad old fashioned racism helped isolate black and Hispanic residents in ever-expanding ghettos. While the children of European immigrants moved up into the middle class, the city’s minority population was trapped in what seemed like hopeless poverty.
By the 1960s, then, New York City was a place of upwardly mobile whites and oppressed minorities. Nowhere did these two groups converge more directly than in the city’s public schools.
Teaching had become a popular path to the middle class for these whites, especially Jews. Many of them had been educated in the CUNY system that supplied teachers to the public schools. As the years wore on, the students they served were increasingly drawn from the expanding minority population. These students, in need of an education so that they too could hope to find their way in the service sector economy, had high rates of failure, dropping out and illiteracy. Naturally, many observers blamed the teachers.
There was a sense that the teachers did not respect or understand their minority students. A clash of cultures provoked many daily tensions in schools around the city, especially schools located in the most blighted inner city areas. These tensions finally came to a head in 1968.
One of the plans for improving the performance of minority students was called “community control”. It was thought that turning over control of the public schools to local school boards would lead to an education more tailored to the experience and sensibilities of minority students. Community control was a key part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. During the last year of his presidency in 1968, the mostly minority Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville tried their hand at community control of the public schools.
Right from the start of the community control experiment, the Ocean Hill school district sent letters to a several dozen teachers informing them that their services were no longer needed. The teachers that got these letters were mostly opposed to the idea of community control. They also happened to be very active in the new teachers’ union, the UFT. While Ocean Hill might not have had a need for these teachers, they were told to report to 110 Livingston Street for a new assignment. This shows that the teachers were not fired, just involuntarily transferred. It sort of sounds like a 1960s version of an ATR.
What happened next would rock the school system, the union and the city for decades to come. UFT President Albert Shanker called for a strike. In his mind, or at least his rhetoric, Ocean Hill had violated the contract. He essentially was willing to shut down the entire school system to protest a violation of the contract in one small part of the city. Shanker believed that allowing Ocean Hill to hand out involuntary transfers would set a bad precedent. The community control experiment came to an abrupt and ignominious end. Jews and blacks, groups that had been allies throughout the Civil Rights Movement, had a wedge driven in between them in NYC. According to Jerald Podair’s brilliant book about the strike, Jews would increasingly cast in their lot with the Catholics of the city, identifying themselves as “white”. Racial polarity in NYC was complete.
Shanker had flexed his muscle. The strike alienated the UFT from many of the communities they served. Instead of relying on legitimacy from community partnerships, the UFT would from now on rely on the city, the Board of Education or, quite simply, “the “establishment”. Over the course of the next few years, Shanker would win many rights for his rank-and-file. The destinies of the UFT and “the establishment” became linked as never before. In return for “the establishment’s” largesse, Shanker would have to keep quiet about many economic and social justice issues for which he had fought early in his career as a socialist.
In the years following the strike, the city was brought to the brink of financial ruin. All of the programs put into place after WWII had cost the city money that they just did not have anymore. A shrinking tax base and the unwillingness of banks to continue lending to New York City unless it paid its debts would lead to an era of budgetary belt-tightening. Indeed, New York City would practice austerity a few years before the rest of the nation. What would become a fundamental part of the Neoliberal coup of the late 1970s-early 1980s got its start in NYC.
And while everyone’s belts were tightening, Shanker’s UFT reached its zenith. Teachers would get better protections, pay and benefits while most of the rest of the city was left to fight it out in the Neoliberal world that lived by survival of the fittest. The group hurt most by this would be the city’s poor minorities. During a time when they were most in need of a helping hand, the same type of helping hand that previous groups had received, they got little more than the cold shoulder. Neighborhoods like Ocean Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx would become national symbols for urban blight, reinforcing in the nation’s mind the belief that the people who lived in these places were beyond hope and undeserving of any type of government help.
There is certainly much more to this story. However, from this we can start to pull out the lessons of the 1968 strike and its implications for the current education system in NYC.
PART II (RECKONING WITH THE GHOSTS OF ’68)
Shanker’s willingness to ally his union with management served him well in the short term. In return for being a good Neoliberal soldier, he was able to win for his union many of the benefits NYC teachers continue to enjoy. Indeed, part of the vitriol directed against teachers by the public today is the result of jealousy. You can hear it in many of the comments that are made, erroneously, about teachers: “Why do teachers get to have tenure?”,”Why are teachers not held accountable?” “Why are they entitled to a pension?” These are the words of a labor force ground down by a ruthless Neoliberal work environment, one hostile to unions and the public sector in general. Instead of asking themselves “how can I get that at my own job?” or “what’s wrong with the non-unionized workplace?”, they gain more delight in seeing others suffer just as much as they are. This is proof of victory for Neoliberal propaganda that seeks to get working people to believe that what is good for the billionaire is good for themselves or, more frequently, the billionaire’s suffering is the suffering of all of us. Americans today have been trained to “Pity the Billionaire”, in the words of Thomas Frank.
Unfortunately, the long-term implications of Shanker’s decisions have been disastrous. What the establishment giveth the establishment can also taketh away. NYC teachers would enjoy their protections as long as mayors and governors adopted a sufficiently friendly posture to the UFT, a posture born out of the union’s ability to make substantial campaign contributions. However, as time has gone on, union contributions have increasingly been drowned out by corporate contributions. Since Shanker, political leaders have seen less and less of a reason to fear upsetting the UFT. This becomes much worse if, within this environment, we get a mayor who is independently wealthy enough to not need anyone’s contribution. We have had this in NYC with Michael Bloomberg. He has shown us how easy it is for the establishment to cut off its life support for public school teachers. The uneasy alliance that nurtured the rise of the protected, decently-paid teacher has broken down.
One would think that the UFT or, more specifically, the Unity Caucus that controls it, would adapt their strategy to this changing environment. Instead, they have blindly carried on in the path that Shanker delineated 45 years ago. They continue to hitch their wagon (as well as ours) to the establishment’s star. Their justification is “well, if we don’t bend then we will be broken.” It is why the UFT supports mayoral control, charter schools, testing and other hallmark programs of Neoliberal education reform. The only problem with this is, whereas before the Neoliberals had a use for the UFT as a campaign contributor and even legitimizer of Neoliberal policies, the establishment now has absolutely no use for the UFT. That is why charters and online learning have gotten such a push. The goal is our complete destruction. The fact that our leadership continues to ally themselves with the establishment boggles the mind. They are helping guide the knife towards their own throat.
Therefore, the only other alternative is one that also might have been available to Shanker 45 years ago. The UFT has to unhitch the wagon from the establishment and start hitching it to the communities we serve. Unlike in Shanker’s day, the communities we serve today are almost entirely poor minority. Unity, not to mention every other teachers’ union with the exception of Chicago’s, have allowed the Neoliberals to beat them to the punch in dressing up their aims in the language of civil rights. The privatizers want to close the “achievement gap”, provide better “outcomes” and ensure that teachers “add value” to their students. As we know, this is merely doublespeak to mask an ongoing quest to destroy public education for good. It is the same type of doublespeak that has gotten the American worker to Pity the Billionaire.
However, the million-dollar question is how to hitch our wagons to the communities we serve. In 1968, the answer could have been to accept community control of school districts. Indeed, this seems to form part of the MORE platform. Giving parents and community members autonomy over, or at least a say in, the education of their children is a sensible approach to truly improving “outcomes” for our neediest students. At least, that is what it seems like on the surface.
Upon further reflection, community control may not be the answer. It may be part of an answer or it might not be part of it at all. Community control failed for more reasons than the UFT Strike of ’68. It failed because its justification rested on a group-oriented, tribalistic outlook about race that alienated many of its white supporters. This is the part of MORE’s platform that will cause them the most trouble. We have already seen it with the criticisms of UFTers like Chaz who fear that their social justice causes are eclipsing their teacher protection causes. Despite the righteousness of many of MORE’s stances, they will not get off of square one without the support of the UFT rank-and-file first, a rank-and-file that is still overwhelmingly white.
Furthermore, race in the 1960s is not the same as race in 2013. It is not just poor blacks and Hispanics who have been hurt by the Neoliberal school agenda. NYC schools have seen an increasing influx of Asian, Eastern European and African students, all of whom stand to lose out if public education disappears. To a large extent, these “new immigrant” groups also face tremendous poverty. With the exception of maybe Eastern Europeans, their skin colors do not allow them to benefit from the white supremacist assumptions that still undergird many of our institutions. On issues that relate directly to these students, students who represent groups that do not fit into the neat black/white dichotomy that we like to take for granted in the United States, both Unity and MORE are silent.
Community control in 2013 just might mean allowing each ethnic enclave in the city to control its own public education destiny. There can be schools for African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Filipinos, West Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshi, Indian and so on until we are atomized into numerous cultural groups. The question is, however, do we really want to do this? This leads to another, more important question: should our union advocate for African-American causes, causes that might nobly seek to right many of the wrongs of a past with which we still live, to the exclusion of every other ethnic group?
Of course, most people would answer “no” to this question. This, then, brings up the next important question: should our union, no matter which caucus is in control, combine the interests of all of these groups into a vague “minority” platform, or do we advocate for the interests of each of these groups as their own groups? The former will cause resentment by subsuming everyone’s unique ethnic identity under an amorphous “minority” idea that might have no legs to begin with. If it is the latter, how do you balance these claims without making any one of these groups feel marginalized?
Another of the justifications for community control was that schools controlled by poor minorities would reward student behavior that the wider community valued. The values of hard-work and factual knowledge served the middle class whites of the 1960s well because society rewarded them for those traits. On the other hand, values in the minority community like peer loyalty and collaboration are not rewarded in the wider (and whiter) society. Community control would allow minority students be rewarded for the “currencies” they already brought to the table, rather than trying to force them to adopt middle class values.
Quite simply, whatever answer the UFT comes up with on how best to engage the communities we serve will have to be a “post-racial” strategy that breaks out of the simplistic black/white paradigm. This is not because racism no longer exists, since it obviously does and in even more insidious forms. This is because our understanding of race is undergoing a major shift. With the continued increase of interracial families, the lines between all of the groups mentioned above will continue to blur. Unity does not speak on race at all and MORE’s racial speech is caught in the quaint 20th century. Tribalism is and should be much less prominent now than it was in the 60s.
How to achieve a post-racial strategy without submerging all of these unique groups under amorphous rhetoric is difficult. Trying to retain that streak of ethnic tribalism without atomizing and alienating each other is also difficult.
For now, I would be happy to see my union leadership engage their communities using the language of class until a true post-racial strategy can be conceived. We live in an era when the Great Recession seems to be on a permanent low hum in the background. Poverty will continue to worsen as the economy stagnates under the weight of the low-wage jobs that the media tells us herald our “recovery”. Failing to address issues of class continues the Albert Shanker path of acquiescence in the Neoliberal agenda.
One thing is for certain: we are still wrestling with the Ghosts of ’68. Many of the chickens from that time are now coming home to roost. Our union and our school system are unprepared for what will follow, since what will follow will be new and different. The quaint handles we use now, handles that were devised in the days of Albert Shanker, are just not going to cut it anymore.
Examining the ’68 strike shows us why so much has gone wrong over the past 20-30 years. Learning its lessons will show us what strategies and handles are useless for us now in 2013. Although it will not give us solid answers as to what needs to be done, it will perhaps point the way towards where an answer might start to be built.
If you have ever taught in New York City then you know who the School Safety Agents are. They are the men and women dressed in police-like outfits who patrol the hallways, oversee dismissal and are generally there to protect the safety of students and staff. I used to work alongside many SSAs during my days as a dean and I still have an appreciation for what they do on a daily basis.
The SSAs are part of the New York City Police Department. Because of this, they have wider latitude than teachers or deans to physically restrain students who are acting violent or threatening. However, they have much less latitude than police officers and must take extra care to respect the civil rights of students. They are in a tough position. On one hand, they need to maintain the aura of authority figures. On the other hand, they must earn the respect of the students in order to do so. This latter imperative usually causes some teachers to criticize SSAs for being too chummy with the students. It is a rare occasion when an SSA has a reputation for being too strict, although it does happen from time to time.
There was one particular SSA at a school in which I worked who was kind of strict on yours truly. I would even go so far as to say that his behavior towards me was downright rude and unprofessional. As far as his reputation with the students or other teachers was concerned, I haven’t the foggiest idea. All I know is that this man tested the limits of my patience.
One of my many nasty habits is cigarette smoking. All schools have a de facto smoker’s corner somewhere outside where teachers congregate to indulge their two favorite habits: nicotine and complaining. While it is unhealthy to blow cigarette smoke, it is pretty healthy to blow off some steam. I justify it by thinking the two balance each other out. The teachers at the school were vigilant about going to an inconspicuous place where they wouldn’t be seen by students. During those times when there were no students around, I went around the corner to catch up on my text messages and emails while inhaling yet another cancer stick; menthol 100s of course. This had been a thing of mine for as long as I could remember and I couldn’t imagine who I might have been harming aside from myself.
Yet, somehow, a new SSA at the school informed me that this was not the place to smoke. He approached me while I was indulging in the filthy habit and said he was at a “training” recently which taught him there should be no smoking anywhere near the school. Whether this applied to just staff or any random person I did not know. Rather than make a thing out of it, I dutifully took my business elsewhere without giving it another thought. In fact, I followed his directive for several days thereafter even when he was not around to enforce it.
That all changed one day while going out to grab a late lunch. My path took me right by my old smoking spot, the one the SSA said was not a smoking spot. I saw him standing there chatting it up with the head custodian, who just happened to be smoking at the time. Whatever the topic of their conversation was, it certainly was not about how the spot in which they were both standing was off-limits to smoking. I could tell this by the hearty laughter that punctuated their conversation. They were doing everything short of slapping each other’s backs. I thought to myself, ok, maybe the smoking ban was lifted just for the moment they were standing there. Or maybe the smoking ban was in effect for the time of day I happened to be caught. Or maybe the smoking ban was in effect just for me. Whatever it was, the parameters of this smoking ban were bizarre indeed and riddled with loopholes. The next day, I decided to reclaim my spot.
About a week or two after the smoking ban, I once again happened upon my favorite SSA. This time, I was heading out to grab a fast lunch that I could bring back to the building to eat while catching up on piles of grading. Teachers have this weird tendency to plan out every minute of their prep time. I used to have to schedule bathroom trips lest I forget and be stuck in a classroom for the next three periods. The relative productivity of my day usually depends upon getting the annoying stuff out of the way (eating, bathroom, correspondence [w/smoking], etc.) so I could focus on planning and/or grading.
To that end, I decided to avoid the crowds of students, who were meandering out to lunch through the front exit, by slipping out through the side doors which were usually free of traffic. Despite the relative ease of getting to this exit, I rarely used it because the doors opened out into a very narrow street. Any bystander walking along outside could get a face full of steel unless I slowly inched the door open to let them know I was coming.
As I was walking down the stairs, I saw our SSA standing on the landing between the second floor and the exit which was my destination. I said hello as I passed him (to which I received his usual non-response), reached the bottom of the stairwell and, just as I pushed on the iron bar to make my exit, he says “nobody is supposed to go out through that exit.” I thought to myself, gee, it would have been nice if you told me that before I reached the bottom of the staircase. Maybe you could have worked that into the conversation after my “hello” to you. I said to him “I thought you were standing there to make sure the kids didn’t cut out of school through this exit”, to which he shook his head “no”.
Now, after the earlier smoking controversy, I saw this man’s directives as mere suggestions. I certainly was not about to run back up the stairs so I could exit through the crowded lobby and fail in my mission to get back in time to get some serious grading done. Furthermore, I never knew it to be school policy for the exit in question to be off-limits to staff. So, I inched the door open and made my escape.
I started thinking about that last “no” he said to me. If he was not standing there to ensure that students did not cut out of school, does that mean he was stationed there to stop staff from exiting? Was he standing there to make sure people from the outside did not sneak their way in? The latter was sort of an impossibility, since the door could not be opened from the outside due to the fact that it automatically locked, had no handles and weighed around half a ton. As a former dean, I am sensitive to the need for a school to have secure exits locked to the outside world. That is why I was always sure to fully close the door behind me on the few occasions I used that exit. I would lean my entire body weight on it, listen for the thud that told me it was locked and did some quality control by trying to open it up again, to no avail.
Whatever his reason for being stationed on that landing, he obviously took it quite seriously. At the next staff meeting, the administration told us that we should avoid using that exit. Our SSA had obviously saw my exiting as a transgression serious enough to inform my superiors. Whether or not he mentioned me by name to them is still unclear. Perhaps his total lack of interest in me as a human being was my saving grace in this instance, since he most likely didn’t know my name.
Sure, both of these run-ins with this SSA were pretty petty. Despite the fact that he committed one of the cardinal sins of the schoolhouse by snitching on me, I still had the ability to swallow my pride and try to smooth things over with him. However, a few weeks later, we took one step further away from doing that.
I have a very strict bathroom policy in my class. Each student receives a certain number of bathroom passes each semester. They know not to burn them unless they have an actual emergency. Of course, allowances are made for students with medical conditions. All told, between the months of September and June for all 150 of my students, there are no more than 20 instances of students leaving my classroom for any reason. In short, it is a rare occasion that you will catch any of my students in the hallway.
Yet, it is simply unavoidable in some cases. One day, one of my bright freshmen was not her chipper, participatory self. She had a sullen, ashen look on her face. Around 15 minutes into the period she asked to go to the bathroom. I could tell this was an emergency, so I told her to just go without worrying about looking for and filling out the bathroom pass. This was the only time this student ever left my room.
No more than 5 minutes later, our favorite SSA returned her to class and said to me that she was “walking the halls” with her friend. I had never known this girl to be a hallwalker. If she was in fact walking the halls with her friend, then I was inclined to believe it was pure coincidence. Perhaps she just bumped into someone she knew on her way back from the bathroom. In order to verify this, I asked the student if she had made it to the bathroom. She said she did. At this point, the SSA told me that I needed to give her a pass if she was to leave the room. This is the type of dressing down that adults are just not supposed to do to other adults in front of students. It does not matter if it is an SSA, teacher or administrator, it is unprofessional to admonish a colleague in front of students. Besides, hadn’t I earned the benefit of a doubt after years of not ever producing any hallwalkers from my room? Surely if someone from my class was “walking the halls”, there is a reasonable explanation. The most likely explanation is that the hallways are the only path from classroom to bathroom. There is no other way to reach the bathroom except through the halls. Case closed.
I really never found out what this SSAs shtick was. He was transferred to another school shortly thereafter. Whenever I think of him, I think of the Stanford Prison Experiment. In short, you give someone a role, especially a role with a little power, and they will likely use it in all types of creative, malicious ways.
The other thing I think about is the movie Idiocracy. In a future where the world is as dumbed down as humanly possible, the police know nothing more than how to bark out simplistic orders and blast people with pepper spray. It can be argued that Idiocracy is already here. During my time at Occupy, I saw first hand many officers who had no affect and seemed to know nothing more than how to bark out the same order over and over again.
However, these seemingly trivial run-ins with a seemingly trivial person had me reflect on some serious lessons. Every year I take a class period to tell my students that my goal as their teacher is to develop their sense of humanity through the study of history. The school system would like me to play the role of a transmitter. It not only places me in a position to transmit the knowledge it wants me to pass down, it places me in a position to transmit a certain set of values.
It wants me to tell children that the harder they work, the more rewards they receive. It wants me to transmit the value that success means making money. It wants me to transmit the value that the goal of education is so they can go on to be the type of workers our corporations want to hire. Through these values, students will learn that hard work will eventually get them much success, which means money. The further implication of this is that those who have money now must have worked hard for it. The wealthy earned their keep and are entitled to every last dime they have.
In short, the school system is designed so that I as the teacher pass on the idea that the system that exists in the world today is not only good, but natural. No other system can be imagined. No other system is desirable. Work, work, work, work with the nebulous carrot of “success” dangling in front of you. Most of us are destined to be the hamster in the wheel: working furiously but never getting any closer to the carrot called “success”. It is really ingenuous, this school system of ours. In the end, it functions as little more than a 13-year exercise in brainwashing. It makes us all complicit in our own subjugation.
The more robotic, thoughtless people exist in the world today, all the better for the system. As the great Jewish philosopher Hanna Arendt described, the Nazi state was built on thoughtless, robotic individuals. Most Germans were complicit in a murderous system, yet nobody felt any responsibility since everyone was just doing their “job”.
If I want students to get one thing out of my class, it is that a combination of critical thinking and empathy helps ward off the banality of evil of which we all seem to be capable.
Sure, the banality of evil can be a Nazi official from the 1930s. Much more often, it comes in the form of that SSA watching out for smokers and hallwalkers. He is a relatively harmless example of the banality of evil. As a matter of fact, most people are relatively harmless examples of it. Their biggest crime is the fact that they are incapable of going off the script. In the aggregate, however, so many people committing small acts of thoughtless evil amounts to one gigantic, evil system.
The best type of revolution against this sytem is not violence. The best type of revolution is the slow but steady awakening of peoples’ humanity. It is the one-at-a-time awakening that shows people that life doesn’t have to follow a script. It is the type of revolution designed to reprogram the very DNA of the system by reaching its most atomic, and most necessary, constituents: our children.
This is my most important lesson for both my students and myself. I do not want to be a teacher, not in the sense that the system defines that term. Instead, I want to be an anti-teacher.
Obama takes the Oath of Office for the second time. Upholding the Constitution hasn’t been the only thing to which he has sworn.
Glen Ford nailed the devil out of Obama’s Second Inaugural Address. Credits to Susan Nunes for turning me on to this article from the Black Agenda Report:
Much of what passes for the Left, and for traditional African American leadership, agreed with the New York Times’ assessment that Barack Obama’s second inaugural address represented a firm embrace of “a progressive agenda centered on equality and opportunity.” Significantly, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell echoed the sentiment: ”The era of liberalism is back…the speech certainly brings back memories of the Democratic Party inages past.”
It is in the mutual interest of corporate media and rightwing Republicans tomove the bar of “progressive” politics ever rightward. However, for African Americans and white progressives, it amounts to erasing their own political legacies from history.
If we look at the last two Democratic presidents (you know, the ones who have held office since the start of the Reagan Revolution) we essentially see two mid-20th century conservatives. The “bar of ‘progressive’ politics” has indeed moved “ever rightward.”
Can we imagine Lyndon Johnson, on the eve of the 1964 election, ending “welfare as we know it” like Clinton did in 1996? Instead, LBJ laid the full Johnson Treatment on Congress to get them to pass the first meaningful civil rights law since the Reconstruction Era. Clinton tacked to the right because he knew that was where the votes were. LBJ tacked to the left even though he knew it would cost him the “solid south” that helped deliver the White House to every Democratic president since Andrew Jackson, which is to say every Democratic president ever.
In contrast, how have black Americans fared under the first Obama Administration?
“An economic recovery has begun,” said Obama. Not for Blacks, whose official 14 percent unemployment rate is more than twice that of whites (6.9 percent), and whose median household wealth has fallen to one-twentieth that of white families – a catastrophe of historical proportions.
It took the Old Democratic policies of LBJ to help foster the growth of a black middle class. It took the New Democrat policies of Barack Obama to destroy it.
Yet Obama does have something in common with LBJ: the ability to skirt Congressional oversight to pursue long, bloody wars:
According to his unique doctrine, the U.S. cannot be in a state of war, or even “hostilities” with another people or country, unless Americans are killed in the process. Thus, Obama refused to report to the U.S. Congress under the War Powers Act following eight months of bombardment of Libya, claiming no state of war had existed since no Americans had died. By this logic, the U.S. is empowered to bomb anyone, anywhere on the planet at will, without the constraints of national or international law, as long as care is taken to protect the lives of U.S. personnel.
We are still fighting Vietnam. The only difference is that the modern-day version of Vietnam is diffused across the globe in a bunch of limited wars rather than being concentrated in one massive conflict.
Ford goes on to describe a litany of regressive Obama policies. In Obama’s defense, he did promise “change” back in 2008 and delivered in spades. Obama served the same purpose as Clinton in that they both solidified and extended the gains of the Reagan Revolution. No Republican could have ever destroyed welfare and get rewarded for it the way Clinton did. No Republican could have ever seriously put Medicaid or Social Security on the bargaining table the way Obama did and still save face.
The New Democrats are handmaidens of the Reagan Revolution.
Obama has earned one truly progressive stripe according to Ford:
It is true: Obama is the most gay-friendly president to date. I don’t think U.S. imperialism and Wall Street hegemons have a fundamental problem with that, either
Apparently, being gay-friendly is all it takes to be considered a champion of a “progressive agenda” in 2013.
I am all for the rights of gay people to get married, to be free from employment discrimination, to be protected from hate crime (and from Mitt Romney), to join the military and to generally have access to the same opportunities and respect as anyone else. However, as Ford points out here, it seems as if that is all one has to do in this day and age to earn the “progressive” label. This is dangerous because, as Ford again points out, it merely tinkers around the edges of progress without addressing the fundamental problems within our society that make all types of inequality possible.
The political climate of 2013 is conservative at its core with a progressive husk. The core has names like Reagan, Bush, Gingrich and Buchanan. The husk has names like Clinton, Obama, Schumer and Cuomo.
One thing that Ford did not mention in his otherwise brilliant analysis is Obama’s education policy. It is ironic (or is it tragic?) that our first black president gave his inaugural speech on Martin Luther King Day 50 years after that great man stood on the very same spot and exclaimed I Have A Dream and yet did not once mention education in any meaningful way nor address the resegregation of our school system at all.
Resegregation predates the first Obama Administration. It is one of the many vicious outgrowths of the Reagan Revolution. Yet, Obama has faithfully played his New Democrat role by solidifying and exacerbating this regression. He has done this by pushing the very same education policies that originated in right-wing think tanks. He has pushed them further than any other president before him.
The most recent nationwide study on the issue of resegregation was done by the Civil Rights Project whose findings were a scathing indictment of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative:
In spite of declining residential segregation for black families and large-scale movement to the suburbs in most parts of the country, school segregation remains very high for black students. It is also double segregation by both race and poverty. Nationwide, the typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every three classmates (64%) are low-income, nearly double the level in schools of the typical white or Asian student (37% and 39%, respectively). New York, Illinois, and Michigan consistently top the list of the most segregated states for black students. Among the states with significant black enrollments, blacks are least likely to attend intensely segregated schools in Washington, Nebraska, and Kansas…..
The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, has taken no significant action to increase school integration or to help stabilize diverse schools as racial change occurs in urban and suburban housing markets and schools. Small positive steps in civil rights enforcement have been undermined by the Obama Administration’s strong pressure on states to expand charter schools – the most segregated sector of schools for black students. Though segregation is powerfully related to many dimensions of unequal education, neither candidate has discussed it in the current presidential race.
These findings should be alarming to anyone who considers themselves a friend of justice and democracy. Yet Obama has never acknowledged these disturbing trends. Not even standing on the spot where Dr. King articulated his vision for a truly inclusive society 50 years ago inspired our president to at least grant it a passing mention. It is safe to say then that Obama has no intention of ever mentioning it.
The type of school segregation that exists now is more insidious, more dangerous, more sinister than the type of segregation that defined the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow segregation was implemented and supported by traditional snarling racists who firmly believed the black race was inferior and should be treated as such. Today people like Orval Faubus, George Wallace and Bull Connor are seen as almost pitiable creatures because they ignorantly and hatefully clung to Jim Crow when it was clear the rest of the country would stand for it no longer. Those segregationists of yesteryear made no bones about who they were and what they believed. It was easy to spot them and fight them head-on.
The segregationists of today perversely wrap themselves in the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement to push for policies that have turned back the civil rights clock five decades. They smile, they bite their lower lip, they bemoan the “achievement gap” and speak of expanding opportunity. They are not the easily identifiable snarling white racists of the 20th century. Not only are they not snarling, many of them are not even white. President Obama and Al Sharpton (who would like to claim Martin Luther King’s mantle) lend their legitimacy, influence and skin color to education “reform” programs that have led to the hyper-segregation of today. As the Civil Rights Project study points out, it is a segregation of both race and class. It is a double-betrayal of everything for which Martin Luther King stood.
It is hard to accuse reformers of racism when the most prominent black leaders in the country have signed on to their programs. It is hard to make people believe that reformers who only wish to “close the achievement gap” are elitists of a very similar stripe to Orval Faubus, probably even sharing some of his condescending racial views. It is hard to accuse people who brandish their “liberal” credentials at every turn of being some of the most retrograde entities in the nation today.
And yet the damage done by both the snarling racists of the 20th century and the darling racists of the 21st century is essentially the same. Segregation has been making its comeback with a vengeance. Minorities are mired in poverty now to a degree not seen since the pre-Reagan era. The type of education provided by the charter schools so highly esteemed by today’s darling racists betray a white paternalism that reminds one of slavery.
For charter schools only seem to be necessary in poor and/or minority neighborhoods. Much like the segregated black schools in the south during Jim Crow, teachers at these charters get paid a fraction of what other teachers pull in. These teachers have been trained to believe that they are doing charity work. Their job seems not so much to educate or enlighten or challenge as it is to civilize. The most important lessons for their students seem to involve sitting quietly, walking in straight lines and deferring to the enlightened wisdom of their elders. Instead of requiring their students to take stock of the world around them, charters prepare their children to be taken stock of by a ruling class that demands unquestioning obedience. One can’t help but be reminded of some of the more clever justifications for slavery in the antebellum era. Back then it was argued that the African race benefited from slavery since it “taught” them habits of industriousness, obedience, honesty and, of course, Christianity. Much like charter schools, slave owners believed a little corporal punishment was necessary from time to time to instill these good morals.
At the head of it all is the nation’s first black president. A brilliant man to be sure but a man whose moral compass points due opposite of Martin Luther King’s. The fact that he stood on the same spot 50 years after King’s I Have A Dream speech, the one speech in American history that repudiated the worst injustices this nation has ever visited on its most vulnerable people, is one of the most sinister ironies I have ever witnessed.
Rather than a tribute to what the great Reverend stood for Obama’s Second Inaugural Speech, a speech which failed to even acknowledge the erosion of many gains of the Civil Rights Movement, let alone the president’s role in it, was a mockery.
The fact that Obama couched his rhetoric in progressive platitudes was tantamount to whistling through the graveyard, a graveyard that expands with the help of the president himself. As the graveyard continues to expand over the next four years, we should expect the whistling to get progressively louder.
Far from being the right-wing, gun-toting, fundamentalist Christian libertarian he is made out to be by the Glenn Becks of this country, Thomas Jefferson was the spiritual fountainhead of American education.
Thomas Jefferson’s gravestone reads:
Here Was Buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the
Declaration
of
American Independence
of the
Statute of Virginia
for
Religious Freedom
and Father of the
University of Virginia
These words were chosen by Jefferson himself. They reveal what Jefferson was most proud of. Nowhere does it say Minister to France, Secretary of State, Vice President, President, Humbler of the Barbary Coast, Purchaser of Louisiana or Founder of the Republican (later Democratic) Party, even though these are some of the things for which our textbooks celebrate him.
“Father of the University of Virginia” has a place underneath “Author of the Declaration of American Independence.” Jefferson’s work in the field of education is eclipsed by his other mammoth accomplishments not to mention his affair with Sally Hemings, the woman he held in bondage for so long. Yet the University of Virginia was never eclipsed in his own mind.
It is instructive that the man himself was so proud of the University of Virginia. According to the university’s website:
Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in 1819. He wished the publicly-supported school to have a national character and stature. Jefferson envisioned a new kind of university, one dedicated to educating leaders in practical affairs and public service rather than for professions in the classroom and pulpit exclusively. It was the first nonsectarian university in the United States and the first to use the elective course system.
Jefferson wished to draw the brightest youth to Virginia so they could be educated to serve the fledgling republican (small “r”) nation. In 1800, Jefferson wrote of his vision for such a university:
“We wish to establish in the upper country of Virginia, and more centrally for the State, a University on a plan so broad and liberal and modern, as to be worth patronizing with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other States to come and drink of the cup of knowledge and fraternize with us.”
Therefore, it would be a public university funded by public money to serve a public purpose.
The foregoing should act as a caution to all of the so-called education reformers. Jefferson was proud of creating a publicly-funded university to serve the public interest. The current wave of creating privately-run charter schools would have probably struck him as counterproductive to the public good. The notion that the function of school is to produce workers to benefit private capital he would have probably found anathema.
It is true that Jefferson’s vision was what some might call “elitist” today. The University of Virginia was not for everyone, just the “brightest” youth (not to mention male and white). These “brightest” most likely would come from well-off families whose children could afford the time for idle study rather than the backbreaking work of farming that was the occupation of most Americans at the time. By our standards the University of Virginia’s mission as conceived by Jefferson was elitist and narrow.
But by the standards of his time Jefferson’s vision exemplified republican egalitarianism. Rather than birth determining how far one could rise, like it did in Europe, Jefferson saw a country where people rose according to their abilities. The University of Virginia reflected the Jeffersonian ideal of a meritocratic republican society.
By the time Jefferson founded his university in 1819 he was already an American icon. He had served two terms as president between 1801 and 1809 in which his greatest accomplishment, the Louisiana Purchase, ended up doubling the size of the United States. Today’s school children learn that the Louisiana Purchase was born out of America’s desire for the port of New Orleans, Napoleon’s need for cash and Jefferson’s willingness to push presidential powers to the limit to further the young nation’s interests. All of this is true but it certainly is not the whole story.
The title of Gordon Wood’s most recent book Empire of Liberty, which covers the early days of the American republic, is lifted from Thomas Jefferson. One of Jefferson’s goals for the Louisiana Purchase was to divide the territory bought from Napoleon into individual plots to be sold to American homesteaders at cheap prices. He hoped it would draw the growing American population out west and ensure that every American would own a certain minimal piece of land. This type of economic equality was necessary for political equality in Jefferson’s view. Enormous concentrations of wealth, which he saw as a tendency of the proto-capitalist system emerging in the north at the time, was anathema to a Jeffersonian republic of equal citizens.
Along with these homesteads, Jefferson hoped to reserve land in the new territory for public schools. He dreamed of a school system accessible to all (white male landowners) where people would be educated in republican virtues and Enlightenment thinking. These schools would instill a set of republican core values within the population and ensure the continued survival of republican government. Jefferson dreamed of a public school system that was a civic institution. This, along with cheap land, would be tremendous steps towards making all people equal, thereby fulfilling the promise of his Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson hoped that after a generation of homesteading and public schooling the population would be firm believers in equality. A continent of free and freedom-loving Americans united by common values, language and customs was Jefferson’s dream of an “Empire of Liberty”. Such an empire would have no use for a central government. Jefferson hoped that the state would no longer be necessary after the people were sufficiently “equal” and republican. At the very least he envisioned an American continent of 4 or 5 smallish countries living in peace due to a common belief in republican equality. Schools were to be an integral part of Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty.
While Jefferson certainly is not the first American to articulate a vision of public schooling he was probably the most important. The Pilgrims who landed in Massachusetts made public education a centerpiece of their “city upon a hill”. Under British rule, the Anglican Church established schools throughout the colonies to ensure loyalty to British institutions. Jefferson is important because his was a vision of schooling uniquely American, embodying American values as he saw them. We can never totally ignore nor totally escape the Jeffersonian influence upon our education system.
But that has not been from a lack of trying. Self-styled school reformers of our age prey upon public assumptions of what schooling is: a way for Americans to learn skills so they can “get a job” thereby keeping America “competitive” in a “globalized economy”. Essentially, schools are seen as the handmaiden of capital producing cheap labor for those who own the capital. This is why the reformer program of privately-run charters and results-based education (as measured by standardized testing) have resonated for so long.
This is because the school system as we know it today was largely the brainchild of capital. It was the Carnegies and Rockefellers of the world, the first generation of capitalists, who lobbied for the creation of a public school system. It was seen as a way to save the capitalists the trouble of training the workforce themselves. They found ready allies in nativist Americans who were put off by the strange new immigrants entering the country around the turn of the 20th century. For them, schools were a way to train the children of immigrants in American values. The nativists were closer to the Jeffersonian ideal of schooling than the capitalists.
In 2013 it is safe to say that the capitalist influence has won. The biggest engines for reform are modern-day tycoon families with names like Gates, Broad and Walton. The language they use to describe schools reflects the jargon of an economics classroom, as do the charts they use to measure the learning process. Education reform as we know it today can be seen as an effort on behalf of the capitalist class to press their claims regarding the school system to its ultimate conclusion.
If the corporatists win the battle for our public schools then Jefferson’s vision of schooling dies. Jefferson was a champion of publicly-funded schools serving the public good for an egalitarian republican nation. The reformers see the public good in terms of what is good for the corporate class. The nation, republican values, egalitarianism are anathema to them.
And why shouldn’t they be? Modern-day corporatists know no nation. They move money and jobs around the globe with ease no matter what impact that might have on the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. Republican values are seen as a threat to the corporatists since it might stir up the citizenry enough to demand the government curb the abuses of capital. Egalitarianism might as well mean pure “socialism” to the corporatists who wield their influence over the state to create a wholly stratified nation.
Jefferson is the biggest enemy of corporate school reform.
Those of us who oppose the corporatist takeover of our schools should draw from the deep Jeffersonian reservoir. He reminds us that schooling does not have to be about myopic policies to foster “achievement” and “competitiveness”. He reminds us that schools were a way to put all people on an equal footing, With the moral progress we have made since the time of Jefferson, equality has come to take on a much broader meaning. His equality was one between white males. We know now that we have the tools as well as the duty to broaden the meaning of equality, taking it places that Jefferson himself dared not dream.
Public schooling should be a civic institution that helps bring that most perfect of Jeffersonian documents to fruition. Public schools should be part of a grand project to fulfill the Declaration of Independence, the accomplishment Jefferson himself was most proud.
These are the ideological foundations for the backlash against corporate school reform. Look to Thomas Jefferson and then go beyond the limitations of his era.
Remember when Christine Quinn flipped out on the guy who called Bloomberg “pharaoh”? We should always remember that.
Christine Quinn is still the front-runner for the second toughest job in the United States according to a recent poll. Leading in the polls among the other Democratic candidates pretty much means leading in the polls overall here in NYC. The Republican Party will unlikely be a serious challenge for whomever the Democrats nominate and there are no Independents in the field with the type of name recognition Bloomberg had when he ran as one.
Make no mistake about it: Christine Quinn knows the game of politics. As City Council Speaker she paved the way for Pharaoh Bloomberg’s (illegal) third term. Her reward thus far has been a free hand in running her campaign from City Hall without interference from the Bloomberg smear machine, a machine still working on railroading John Liu.
Completely cognizant of the unpopularity of mayoral control of the school system and Bloomberg-style education reform, Quinn recently shared a vision for NYC schools which seemed to distance herself from the Bloomberg approach. For example:
“Instead of treating school closing like a goal in and of itself, we should see it as an ultimate last resort when all else has failed,” Ms. Quinn said, referring to Mr. Bloomberg’s policy of closing low-performing schools and replacing them with new ones. “And we should make fixing schools not just the responsibility of the principal and the teacher, but of all of city government and the entire community.”
Sounds good, especially if you’re one of those New Yorkers associated with a school Bloomberg has closed or is threatening to close.
Even better is Quinn’s promise to reduce the “emphasis on testing”, although this does not mean the same thing as reducing the amount of exams our students currently take. She would not have the power to do much in this area anyway.
In her peroration Quinn described how she would use the resources of municipal government to make up for some of the disadvantages of our neediest students:
Saying that students need more than just a good teacher to be in a position to learn, Ms. Quinn proposed that New York City imitate a Cincinnati program that has used Medicaid funds to establish medical clinics and even an eye clinic in schools, so that students can be treated for various ailments or get glasses without leaving the building.
Adopting that model, she said, would require better communication among city agencies. To coordinate programs across agencies that work with children — running after-school programs, providing health care and food stamps — Ms. Quinn proposed appointing a deputy mayor who would be responsible for both education and children.
This is an interesting idea, one reminiscent of the free breakfast programs the Black Panther Party funded during the 1960s. Politically speaking, this might end up backfiring on Quinn. She will get hammered as a “liberal” or even a “socialist” from the white, blue-collar part of the electorate. From the other side, it does not speak to any of the criticisms the United Federation of Teachers has had of Bloomberg’s school reform program. This just seems like a reallocation of Medicaid funds into a program where poor parents will physically see the benefits for their children.
Then there is her financially dubious proposal to save money by replacing textbooks with tablets. I smell a Bloomberg-esque no-bid contract in there somewhere.
Speaking of no-bid contracts:
The Council speaker also suggested finding savings in the $1.2 billion the department spends each year on consulting and contracts. (Her spokesman, Jamie McShane, pointed to computer services contracts, which he said in fiscal year 2013 will cost roughly $40 million, and contracts for infrastructure maintenance, which he said will cost nearly $60 million, as examples of areas where Ms. Quinn saw bloat.)
Any teacher will tell you that this is where the bulk of education funds end up going. However, the numbers her office cited barely make a dent in the overall education budget. These seem like symbolic gestures designed to placate critics of the increasing waste of Bloomberg-era education contracts.
Her stance on charter schools is that they are on a “good level” now, meaning that Bloomberg has opened a sufficient number over the past 10 years. Does this mean she promises a containment policy of sorts for charters?
So, when we take stock of what Christine Quinn is actually promising we see it is not a major divergence from Bloomberg at all. The tone of her words are certainly designed to put some distance between her and the unpopular mayor, not to mention to woo Mulgrew and the UFT, but the substance of it all is limited to say the least.
Today Quinn distanced herself even more from Bloomberg in a press conference where she touched upon the failure of the mayor and UFT to work out a new teacher evaluation deal:
“I don’t have a problem with the idea of a sunset. Most pieces of significant legislation have a sunset in them.”
The sunset clause was what sunk negotiations with the UFT last week. Michael Mulgrew was willing to agree to the longest-term evaluation deal in the entire state. This wasn’t enough for Bloomberg who said any type of sunset clause would make the evaluations “a sham”.
Smartly, Christine Quinn is verbally distancing herself from Bloomberg. However, there is little evidence that she would do much other than solidify most of Bloomberg’s failed education programs.
Although critical of school closures she never promised to end them. Although aware of the need to support schools with better resources, no plan to do so was outlined other than a reallocation of Medicaid funds. Although aware of the waste and corruption of no-bid contracts, her changes in this regard would be largely cosmetic. Claiming that charter schools were at a “good level” right now is a start but allows her the loophole that charters might need to be increased in the future.
Not to mention that she accepts the assumptions of the wider movement of education reform and the quest to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. She has continuously said that the new evaluations are “too important” for our students (they are not) and the loss of funds will hurt our schools (which they shouldn’t).
While obviously trying to pander, tepidly, to the UFT she is also attempting to pander to other elements by promising to keep Ray Kelly on as police commissioner. Kelly’s NYPD “stop-and-frisk” policy has alienated minority communities, although it plays well to the white blue-collar bloc of New York City’s electorate. Maybe Quinn is hoping to snatch the liberal bloc with education policy and the conservative bloc with law enforcement policy?
Candidates angling for public office should only be half-believed. By that equation, the half-measures she has proposed for the school system at this stage means an actual “change factor” of absolute zero if she gets elected.
Nobody can blame Quinn for playing the game. She wants power. She reads the polls. What she says and does over the next few months will be determined by these two factors.
A candidate we can believe in? Hardly.
A cookie-cutter political opportunist who embodies politics-as-usual in NYC? Absolutely.
2013 is a round-number anniversary for many things. It is the 50th anniversary of both Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech and the Kennedy assassination. We are 4o years removed from the start of the Watergate Hearings. In the month of January specifically, we are 150 years removed from the Emancipation Proclamation. For as much we would like to think that slavery is ancient history, 150 years is practically yesterday in terms of historical time.
As someone who teaches history to 11th graders, many of my students have been told conflicting stories about Abraham Lincoln and his views on slavery by the time they have me. One teacher might have told them that Lincoln freed the slaves. Another teacher said that he didn’t give a damn about the slaves. Somewhere along the line kids seem to learn that Lincoln owned slaves, was part black himself or both.
Lincoln is one my favorite historical figures and no I have not seen the Lincoln movie yet, although anything with Daniel Day Lewis is worth watching. He was an extraordinarily complex man (Lincoln was) which helps account for our confusion on what he stood for. As president, few men have combined the characteristics of both politician and leader as completely as Lincoln.
A politician does things that are expedient with an eye to enhancing his own power or that of his party’s. A leader believes in a certain just, but largely unpopular, course of action and tries to shepherd the country towards the same point of view. Bill Clinton (about whom I have written) was a great politician but not a great leader. My favorite American, John Quincy Adams, was a great leader but a poor politician. Lincoln combined the best of both worlds. Only the Roosevelts come close to touching him in presidents possessing both political and leadership skills.
If Lincoln’s views on slavery confound many school teachers and students today, imagine how maddening it was for people of his era. The mark of a good politician is that we are still unclear on what his course was 150 years later. This can be attributed to a simple human fact that we overlook about Lincoln: he, like most humans, changed his mind. His views on slavery evolved throughout the war, as did his policies.
Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley a year into the Civil War in August 1862:
As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing,” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
This is why many people say that Lincoln didn’t care about the slaves. For the first part of the war Lincoln had a singular objective of preserving the Union. His views on slavery had always been ambivalent. A part of him felt it was morally repugnant and a barrier to free enterprise. Another part of him felt it was not his place to interfere in the business of other white men. And yet another part of him viewed blacks in general as a problem, which is why he was a major supporter of African-American colonization of Africa before the war. Naturally, he held the common assumption of the time that whites were superior to blacks.
Yet, as the war dragged on, Lincoln started to believe there might be practical reasons to abolish slavery. During the time Lincoln wrote this letter, general Ulysses S. Grant was working on conquering the Mississippi River, a major part of the Union war strategy. Grant observed that slaves in the area believed that the Union Army meant freedom and would walk off the plantations into the protective arms of union blue. Many generals sent them back, sometimes at gunpoint, but Grant saw a practical use for taking in the enslaved people who yearned for freedom. By doing the grunt work of an army, all of the cleaning, cooking, trench-digging and other back-breaking tasks it entails, the freedmen would free up Union soldiers to do actual fighting. At the same time it drained the labor power of the south and gave the Union the moral high-ground in the eyes of Britain, who was debating on whether or not to help the Confederacy.
While he was composing his letter to Greeley, Lincoln was also drafting an Emancipation Proclamation. It would be an executive order and a tight legal document freeing all slaves held in rebel territories. It did not free slaves in Confederate areas captured by the Union army, nor did it free slaves in the border states (slave states who were loyal to the Union). For Lincoln, it was mostly a matter of military strategy. He would co-opt the labor force of the south to the benefit of the Union Army. In so doing, Lincoln was taking the third option he outlined to Horace Greeley by “freeingsome (slaves) and leaving others alone.”
Yet, neither Greeley nor the rest of the country knew what Lincoln had in store. Lincoln needed to announce his Emancipation Proclamation at the right time. The war had been going badly so far. The Union general, George McClellan, was not the fighting general Lincoln needed. Instead of fighting, McClellan was mired in endless preparations for his very large and well provisioned army. And he was getting his ass handed to him by Robert E. Lee at every turn. Lincoln could not have announced the Proclamation at such a time lest it look like a desperation move on the part of the north. Lincoln needed to wait until after a Union victory to proclaim his new policy on slavery.
That victory came a month after the Greeley letter at a Maryland creek known as Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history. Even though McClellan failed to destroy Lee’s army when he had him on the ropes, McClellan scored a costly but technical victory. Lincoln then announced that an Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves in rebel territory would take effect on New Years’ Day, 1863.
And so it did, probably the most important and hallowed executive order in American history. For all of the talk of Lincoln’s practicality and indifference towards slavery there was something inherently symbolic about the Emancipation Proclamation. It was written in strict legalese with none of the rhetorical flourishes and soaring perorations for which Lincoln is known. Lincoln wanted it to be so legally airtight that there was no mistaking that slavery will never exist in Confederate-held territory again, providing the north won the war. The finality of it was striking.
Furthermore, it hinted at the future of both slavery and Lincoln’s views on slavery. Once slavery is gone in most of the south, how will it ever survive in the rest of the country? It was just a matter of time before the institution of slavery completely folded everywhere. This also presaged Lincoln’s turn. As he saw blacks willing to join the army to fight and die for the Union he began to respect the black race more and more. First he let them join the army but collect less pay than white soldiers. Then he lobbied to equalize pay for black soldiers. He refused to exchange prisoners with the south because they refused to release black prisoners, who they considered “contraband”. Because of this, Lincoln was blamed by northerners for the suffering of Union POWs at Andersonville. He began to take unpopular stances because he was starting to see blacks as true equals to whites.
A year after he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln would give the Gettysburg Address. It would be there, on the battleground that ended up deciding the war, where Lincoln infused the war with new purpose. Not only was this war to save the Union and therefore democracy as a viable form of government, but democracy must be infused with a “new birth of freedom” if it is to survive. In other words, the war would be about bringing an end to slavery as much as it was to preserve the union, since both would be required to save democracy around the world. Most of the western world had established monarchies who believed democracy was a weak form of government that would eventually implode in the United States. To many, the Civil War was the implosion of democracy proving to the world the folly of the American experiment. Lincoln was determined not to have this happen.
This announcement cost Lincoln dearly politically, sealing his fate as a one-term president. The interminable bloodshed of civil war had soured the country on Lincoln’s leadership. Quite simply, white people in the north did not want to support a war to free slaves. Lincoln took a dangerous political stand for the sake of being a leader.
The election of 1864 would pit Lincoln against his old general George McClellan who considered Lincoln his inferior. McClellan was a war hero and a victim ever since Lincoln fired him. McClellan’s promise of a negotiated peace with Lee sounded good to a country bled white by mechanized war. Lincoln knew he was going to lose badly.
However, the Union Army captured the Mississippi when Vicksburg surrendered to Grant. His protege William Tecumseh Sherman was making his way to the south’s most populous city: Atlanta. A few weeks before the election Sherman took Atlanta. The end of the war was in sight and Lincoln ended up winning at the polls because of it. It turned out northerners would prefer to extend the war just a little longer if it meant freeing all slaves,
This is where Lincoln confuses us. The same presidency that started with a policy of indifference towards slavery gambled everything on ending it. Lincoln simply changed his mind, first by seeing how slaves helped the Union Army after they left the plantations, then after seeing blacks fighting for the cause of the Union. It is a poetic change of mind. Thanks to Lincoln’s confidence in the Union Army, it is a gamble that paid off politically.
By the time of his second inaugural speech Lincoln was a changed man. The conciliatory tone he adopted towards the south in his first inaugural address was gone as far as slavery was concerned. He now claimed that the Civil War was God’s punishment for the evil of slavery, giving a context to all of the death of the previous 4 years. When the 13th Amendment was finally ratified ending slavery once and for all, Lincoln signed his name to it even though the president’s signature was not required for passage. This is a far cry from the equivocal Lincoln of the Greeley letter.
It is important to teach the whole Lincoln for many reasons. First, it answers the question of how people can say that Lincoln both freed and didn’t free the slaves. Second, it shows that people we idolize can change their minds when confronted by new evidence. It teaches the lesson that we don’t need to be wedded to an idea. Finally, it shows that taking a stand can pay off and being out of step with your contemporaries just means you’re ahead of the moral curve.
Obama has been fond of symbolic comparisons to Lincoln. His biggest challenge within the party was a seasoned Senator from New York who was thought a shoe-in for the nomination. And just like Lincoln did for Seward, Obama appointed Hilary as Secretary of State. Just like Lincoln, Obama was an upstart from Illinois. He appointed a “team of rivals” who all had more experience than him and believed they could probably do the job of president better.
Unfortunately, I fear symbolism is the only thing Obama has in common with Lincoln. Obama has not taken many risky stands. The ones he has taken, like a public option for healthcare, he quickly shied away from when the political heat became too much. He is more Clinton, less Quincy Adams and even less an FDR or Lincoln.
Maybe his second term will be different. We never got to find out what Lincoln’s second term would have looked like thanks to John Wilkes Booth. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been such a hero if he was allowed to handle Reconstruction after the war.
Maybe he wouldn’t have been but Lincoln is still a worthy person to take as a role model for Obama and the rest of us.
Today’s ceremonial inauguration (the real one took place in private yesterday) takes on an added layer of meaning because the nation’s first black president will give his speech on Martin Luther King Day. I’m sure the networks will point this out if they haven’t already.
Last year I wrote a piece pointing out that MLK Day is the nation’s annual exercise in self-deception. We pat ourselves on the backs in this country for having come so far in race relations, thereby fulfilling MLK’s “dream”.
The man taking the Oath of Office today will certainly occupy a special place in American history. However, when his term is up in four years prompting journalists (and later, historians) to perform the post-mortem on the two Obama Administrations it will be a mixed legacy at best.
On the one hand you have the man who brought us universal healthcare and killed Bin Laden all while working with an intractable (and not just a little racist) opposition. On the other hand you have a man who has reinforced a system of inequality that serves to oppress the very people for which MLK fought, especially towards the end of his life.
I’m thinking mainly of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative that has wreaked havoc in the states that have adopted it, including here in NY. Not only has RTTT helped along the proliferation of charter schools that benefit private interests and shut out the neediest children, but it has been a boon to the billion-dollar edu industry. Now, thanks to the failure of RTTT in NYC, New York State threatens to withhold millions in Title I money which are funds reserved for the poorest children.
Martin Luther King fought for a totally inclusive society, one where the most powerless would have fair access to opportunity. But the programs that Obama has supported have left the most powerless behind. On Diane Ravitch’s blog is a quote in defense of charter schools that essentially concedes what charter school critics have said all along: charters in fact do not serve the neediest students. This after years of charter school defenders telling us that charters don’t get to “cherry pick” students and are subject to the same laws as all other schools.
And when we look at the rest of the national scene with its rising inequality, proliferation of low-wage jobs (the so-called economic “recovery”) and increase in food stamp applications, there would be very little for Martin Luther King to celebrate.
King once said something along the lines of “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice”.
Naivete of the Day: Daily Verse by M. Lewis Redford
you don’t talk to me
you talk at me
rhetorically
interrogatively
which makes it feel like you
are talking to me but
you don’t want my response
and you won’t respond
to what I say
you don’t talk to me at all
through all the slogans
through all the targets
through all the development
through all the achievement you
don’t talk to me
