Bill Ayers

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/William_Ayers_To_Teach?id=u-QfRynxxvIC

HEADLINE:
As NATO Meets in Chicago, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Condemn “Militarized Arm of the 1 Percent”

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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/16/as_nato_meets_in_chicago_activists

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HEADLINE:
“What Have We Been Doing?”: Decorated Veteran Aaron Hughes to Return War Medals at Anti-NATO Protest

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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/16/what_have_we_been_doing_decorated

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http://youtu.be/CejF2yhP3Oo

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HEADLINE:
FBI Crackdown on Anti-War Groups Targets Chicano, Brown Beret Activist Carlos Montes

DEMOCRACY NOW LINK:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/16/fbi_crackdown_on_anti_war_groups

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By Rick Ayers/ Bill Ayers

Let’s stop the hype and the hypocrisy: a nice note, a flower, a Starbucks card, and a week when we all go smooshy over Miss Brody or Mr. Escalante can’t possibly counter 51 weeks of official disdain and a continuing frontal assault from the powerful. Lots of cynical similes are filling teachers’ in-boxes this week: Teacher Appreciation Week feels a lot  like Turkey Appreciation Week at Thanksgiving, or Deer Appreciation Week during hunting season—and we’re the turkeys!

Teaching involves engaging real students every day, nurturing and challenging the vast range of people who actually appear before us, solving problems, making connections, putting in 70 hour weeks and spending our own money on supplies; and it means listening to every two-bit politician, the bought media, and big money misrepresent what we do, and attack us shamelessly every day.

Want to appreciate teachers?

Don’t allow education to be defined as an endless Social Darwinist competition:  nation against nations, state against state, school against school, classroom against classroom, and child against child. Education, like love, is one of the fundamentals of life—give it away generously and lose nothing—and school is where we can work out the meaning and the texture of democracy—coming together to explore the creation of community, pursuing the hard and challenging questions, and imagining new ways to be in balance with the earth and in harmony with each other.  Good teaching deals with the real—honor teachers for that.

Reframe the debate: We are insistently encouraged to think of education as a product like a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screw driver—something bought and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity. The controlling metaphor for  the schoolhouse is a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads; it’s rather easy to think within this model that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and privatizing a space that was once public is a natural event; that teaching toward a simple standardized metric, and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately-developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the  “outcomes,” is a rational proxy for learning; that centrally controlled “standards” for curriculum and teaching are commonsensical; that “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior as a stand-in for child development or justice is sane; and that “accountability,” that is, a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on law-makers, foundations, corporations, or high officials—is logical and level-headed. This is in fact what a range of wealthy “reformers,” noisy politicians, and their chattering pundits in the bought media call “school reform.”

Oppose the “reform” policies that will add up to the end of education in and for democracy: replacing the public schools with some sort of privately-controlled administration, sorting the winners relentlessly from the losers—test, test, TEST! (and then punish), and destroying teachers’ ability to speak with any sustained and unified voice. The operative image for these moves has by now become quite familiar: education is an individual consumer good, not a public trust or a social good, and certainly not a fundamental human right. Management, inputs and outcomes, efficiency, cost controls, profit and loss—the dominant language of this kind of reform doesn’t leave much room for doubt, or much space to breathe.

Note that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions, and that teachers independent and collective voice is essential in determining these conditions.

Fight for smaller class size, limited standardized tests, enhanced arts programs at all levels and in every area, equitable financing, and a strong teachers contract that protects intellectual freedom, due process of law, benefits (from pensions to health care) negotiated in good faith, and encourages collegiality and collaboration.

Throw in a note or a flower if you like.

****

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s open letter to teachers, his idea of a public appreciation, missed the mark badly even as it regurgitated every silly cliché  rehearsed by opportunist politicians everywhere: my mom wuzza teacher, my sister wuzza teacher, my wife wuzza teacher—all the wuzzas feel our pain. He went on:  

• “I have worked in education for much of my life.” (And some of his best friends are…you know).
• “I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do.” (Thanks, boss).
•  “Many of the teachers I have met object to the imposition of curriculum that reduces teaching to little more than a paint-by-numbers exercise. I agree.” (And your “Race to the Top” program is paint-by-the-numbers on steroids).
• “You have told me you believe that ‘No Child Left Behind’ has prompted some schools—especially low-performing ones—to teach to the test, rather than focus on the educational needs of students…[it] has narrowed the curriculum.” (So now you’re telling us what we’ve been telling you?).
• “You deserve to be respected, valued, and supported.” (Just do it!).

Arne Duncan acts like a junior foundation officer dispensing grants, rather than someone whose responsibility is the education of every child in a democracy.

On the bright side, Duncan recently announced that he supports same-sex marriage—perhaps we should all gay-marry immediately, and hope that at last he’ll show us some love.

Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.

ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the “Stand Your Ground” legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald’s, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy’s, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there’s still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

Groups like Common Cause and colorofchange.org have been putting ALEC’s model legislation online and printing the names of its sponsors. They have also published sharp criticism of ALEC’s ideas. This is hardly intimidation. It’s the democratic process at work. A website called alecexposed.org has published ALEC’s policy agenda. Common Cause posted the agenda for the meeting of ALEC on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has dropped out of ALEC and also withdrawn from the May 11 conference, where it was originally going to be a presenter.

A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.

ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.

Who is on the education task force of ALEC? The members of the task force as of July 2011 are here. Several members represent for-profit online companies, including the co-chair from Connections Academy; many members come from for-profit higher education corporations. There is someone from Jeb Bush’s foundation, as well as right-wing think tank people. There are charter school representatives, as well as Scantron. And the task force includes a long list of state legislators, from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Quite a lineup. Common Cause has asked why ALEC is considered a “charity” by the Internal Revenue Service and holds tax-exempt status, when it devotes so much time to lobbying for changes in state laws. Common Cause has filed a “whistleblower” complaint with the IRS about ALEC’s status.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies. Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military war.

The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.

Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys.

First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive. Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career out of it.

Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth, ambiguity—all the things that actually make for true intelligence. It’s too hard to teach those things and, besides, you need intelligent, experienced people to be able to do it. Stick with the model: Profitable equals simplistic and formulaic. Go with it.

Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. Proliferate franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. So, for the math lesson on the formula of a line, you only need develop it once. But you download it in Power Point on the assigned day so the room monitors, i.e., the “teachers,” know what bullets to read. Now repeat this for every lesson in every course in every school, every day. In biology, chemistry, geometry, history, English, Spanish, indeed, all of a K-12 curriculum. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the supervision. The cost is infinitesimal making the profit potential astronomical.

This is the essential charter school model and the money is all the rationale its promoters need. Think about it. There’s a trillion dollars a year spent on public education in the U.S. and enterprising investors want to get their meat hooks on it. Where else in the world can you find a $1 trillion opportunity that is essentially untouched? Not in automobiles. Not in health care. Not in weapons, computers, banking, telecommunications, agriculture, entertainment, retail, manufacturing, housing. Nowhere.

Oh, to be sure, you have to soften up the public with a decades-long PR campaign bashing teachers, vilifying their unions, trashing schools, and condemning public education in general, all the while promising the sun, moon, and stars for privatization, which is the ultimate charter goal. Voila! You’ve got your chance.

But to really make a killing, you need not just revenues, but profits. That’s why the low cost delivery and “build it once but resell it millions of times” model is so key. It was that very model that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. It is what earned Microsoft 13 TIMES the rate of profit of the average Fortune 500 company in the 1990s and persuaded the Justice Department to declare it a “felony monopolist”. Gates recognizes the model very well, which is why his foundation is pouring tens of millions of dollars into charters. And you thought it was his altruism.

Of course, anybody who actually knows education, indeed, anybody who is simply intelligent, knows that intelligence does not come from rote repetition or parroting Power Point slides at the regimented direction of a room monitor, no matter how perky or well intended. It comes from an agonizingly complex, intricate, sustained set of challenges to the mind that are exquisitely choreographed over the better part of two decades, all intimately tailored to the specific needs of an individual, inquisitive, aspiring student.

That is what real teachers do. And it is precisely what a cookie-cutter, low-content, low-cost, high-turnover, high-profit money mill cannot do. Because it’s not intended to do that. It’s intended to produce profits. Real education, real intelligence, real character are agonizingly slow, dazzlingly complex, maddeningly difficult things to create. You can’t make a profit off of it, unless you destroy it in the process. That is why not one of the nations of the world that surpass the U.S. in education performance operate charter-based or privatized educational systems.

If America wants better education, it needs to fix the greatest force undermining education, which is poverty. The single most powerful predictor of student performance is the average income of the zip code in which they live. But one out of four American students now live in poverty, and the numbers are growing. One out of two will live in poverty sometime during their lives. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. Is it any wonder American school performance is faltering?

But poverty is a hard and expensive problem to fix. We prefer easy, painless fixes, or even better, vapid clichés about the “magic of the market” and such. Why, look what we got from the deregulation of the banking system: the greatest economic collapse of the last 80 years and the greatest plunder of the public treasury in the history of the world.

This is the essential neo-liberal agenda which Obama enthusiastically supports: privatize and deregulate everything, especially public services, so that the money spent on them can be transferred to private hands. This is how Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, earned his bureaucratic bonafides: he converted more than 100 of Chicago’s public schools to charters while the city’s school superintendent. It’s unbelievable how credulous we are but obviously, propaganda works. That’s why the likes of the Gates Foundation keep pouring money into the cause.

The problem with charter schools is that they simply don’t work, at least not for delivering high quality education. Of course, given their formula, how could they? The most thorough research on charter schools, by Stanford University, shows that while charters do better than public schools in 17% of cases, they actually do worse in 37%, a more than 2-to-1 bad-to-good ratio!

If your doctor injured two patients for every one he cured, would you go to him? If your mechanic wrecked two cars for every one he fixed, would you go to him? Yet that is literally the proposition that charter school operators are peddling. And that 2-to-1 failure rate is after charters have skimmed off the better students and run what can only be called ethnically cleansed schools, counseling out poor performers, special needs cases, and “undesirable” minorities, leaving them for the public schools to deal with. For the data show they do that as well.

The irony of all this, indeed, the hypocrisy, is that America is at least nominally a capitalist county. You would think it would be ok to be honest about your intentions to make money by pillaging children’s futures while looting the public purse. God knows the weapons makers, the banks, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness and others aren’t bashful about it. But that doesn’t seem to be true here, in education.

Here, it’s all about “the children,” about “streamlining” education, boosting scores, uplifting minorities, making America competitive, and just about every other infantile fairy tale they can invoke to convince the country to hand over the loot. For that’s what it’s really about. The trillion dollars a year to be made by turning “the children” into intellectually impotent dullards but profit producing zombies? Well, that’s just a lavishly fortunate coincidence. Right?

Remember, you can’t save something by destroying it. Which isn’t to say that swashbuckling entrepreneurs aren’t willing to try. All they need is the liberating impetus of that essential American ethic: “I’m getting mine, screw you.” But the cost of this plunder will be incalculable, for it will ripple through the economy for decades. And the damage will be irreversible for, while public education is the most powerful democratizing institution in the world, it only works when the schools work. When they cease to work, it’s over.

So watch out. A destroyed educational system, a desiccated economy, and a debauched democracy are coming soon to a school district near you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/04/protest-race

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

May 4, 2012

Again and again we learn that war and empire abroad will find a way home.

On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced the US invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nation
the US had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving
120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each. But in the common
doublespeak of war, the president claimed: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia… once enemy
forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will
withdraw…”

Nixon’s aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside the
US opposing the war: “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he intoned. The
next day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: “you see these bums…blowing up the
campuses…burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue…you name it, get rid
of the war, there’ll be another one.”

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued to
press against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of Black students
formed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of Black Student Unions, even
at Kent State. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the war-mongers, and
themselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 national guardsmen amassed on the Kent
State campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmed
students—four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official Presidential Commission on
Campus Unrest later found, “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth.”

The outright murder of (white) college students engaged in peaceful protest at Kent State
University, and the lesser-recognized but equally tragic murder of (Black) unarmed college
students at Jackson State University that same week, were shocking although forewarned.
Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their
resistance to the pervasive US war crimes in Viet Nam, to the secret wars against Laos and
Cambodia, to the flagrant arming and supporting of tyrants throughout Latin America, and to the
lavish funding of apartheid and colonialism in Africa. Invasion, lawlessness, military occupation

and counter-insurgency, displacement, and systematic violence visited on others necessarily
created its domestic corollary: a militarized national security state promoting heightened cruelty
and callousness at home, the shredding of Constitutional liberty and rights, and the unleashing
of armed violence on its own citizens. The ten year war against Viet Nam and the murderous
(secret) assault on the Black Freedom Movement were blood cousins, Kent and Jackson State its
offspring.

Today the permanent wars carried out by the US military and its NATO spawn bring home
their own violence and tragedy. Witness the mass killings at Fort Hood, astronomical suicide
rates for returning veterans, widespread rape and assault on women in the military by their
fellow soldiers, attempted assassinations of politicians, and the galloping arms race among
ordinary citizens and residents who are increasingly arming up and carrying concealed
weapons to work and play. Add to that the quiet violence of a 20%, child poverty rate in
the richest nation in history, a prison gulag of mass incarceration sweeping up 2 ½ million
people, harsh economic “austerity” resulting in severe slashing and degradation of education,
health care, housing, public transportation and jobs at home—all of it hitting people of color
disproportionally. Empire and constant military wars not only squander the public wealth and
directly destroy the lives of millions, they inevitably bring about a Panopticon-like national
security state and a militarized domestic life at home.

At Kent State, students met with state violence and terror previously directed almost exclusively
at the Black and Latino Freedom Movements. In response, 80% of US colleges and universities
called for some form of strike. Four million students were involved in protests, willing to face
being beaten, gassed, or even shot. The National Guard was called out at 21 colleges and
universities, five hundred campuses cancelled classes, and 51 did not re-open until the fall. In
Washington, D.C., 130,000 students mobilized against war and repression.

It was all merely prelude: greater repression and disintegration at home will accompany the
long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain and Pakistan; Occupy, Madison, Trayvon and
inevitable resistance will surely follow.