Bill Ayers

EPISODE # 25: To Be Truly Free!

We dive once more into the wreckage, and swim as hard as we can toward a distant and hazy horizon—a place of hope and possibility. To begin Malik Alim offers another installment in his growing Freedom Chronicle, and lifts up a remarkable Chicago moment when activist organizers built Freedom Square, a brave space brought to life in the spirit of love and abundance. We are then delighted to invite Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law to join us Under the Tree. Abolitionists and freedom fighters, co-authors of a remarkable and essential text, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, Maya and Vickie take us on a complex and jagged journey to the far edges of the carceral state, and offer abolitionist alternatives that are within our reach right now.

When somebody comes into the pharmacy to buy medicines…they’re looking for some kind of order, since every complaint is chaotic. In a pharmacy numbers and arithmetic take on once again the no-nonsense neatness they had on blackboard at school.

How many capsules each dose? How many doses per day? During a meal?…During how many days? The answers are remunerated several times and written…on the packet…I ear people repeating figures to themselves as they go out: two on waking, three during the midday meal, two before bed, repeating them as if they were a telephone number, for like this…the silence of the unpredictable is kept at bay.

From A to X, John Berger, p 81, London, 2008 Verso

On March 8 people around the world celebrate the cultural, political, and socioeconomic achievements of women, and recommit to the struggles for gender equality, reproductive rights, and an end to violence against women.
International Women’s Day leapt from the labor movements in the early 20th century—the earliest version was organized by the Socialist Party in New York City in 1909. After women gained the vote in the Soviet Union in 1917, International Women’s Day was made a national holiday, and March 8 was celebrated as Women’s Day by the socialist movements and communist countries from then on. The holiday was adopted by the United Nations in 197

24) What Counts?

What counts? And who’s counting? For what purpose, and toward what social end? Some years ago the Business Roundtable and their Education and Workforce Taskforce issued an influential challenge: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” it instructed. “No executive can run a business without accurate, granular data that explains what’s working and what’s not. Our school system should be no different.” And yet, any third grade teacher will tell you that each child is unique—the one of one. Mention that to the Business Roundtable and they’ll tell you that teachers can’t be trusted because they’re just spouting “anecdotal evidence” when what’s demanded is granular data. We’re joined today by  Dr. Rochelle Gutiérrez, a professor of mathematics education and Latino and Latina studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who will lead us on a journey into the contested question: What counts?

A day for remembering our lost Loved Ones.
Fifty-one years ago today, on March 6, 1970, three dear comrades died in an accidental explosion in Greenwich Village, NY. Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins Ted Gold—we love you all, we miss you so, we celebrate your lives, and we mourn our loss.
Each was committed to standing up and fighting against imperialism and the US invasion and occupation of Vietnam, to stopping the genocidal assault; committed, as well, to standing arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Black Freedom Movement, and committed to a future fit for all.
Diana, Terry, Teddy—Live Like Them!

March 5th 2021 marks the 150th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s birth. A Polish-born Jewish revolutionary, she was one of the greatest minds of the socialist movement.

SAVE THE AMERICAN ECONOMY! KEEP THE TESTS!!

John Merrow writes:

Many on the left are raising a stink about the US Department of Education’s insistence on having states give their annual tests. Critics say it’s unfair because most students haven’t been in physical schools for about a year. These critics maintain that it’s unnecessarily stressful to test students now. However, their hysterical objections only serve to demonstrate that they fail to understand that standardized testing is one of the main drivers of the US economy.

Please consider these economic consequences of canceling machine-scored tests. (I am certain that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen could enumerate others.)

Canceling standardized tests will endanger the health of students and teachers. Both test-prep and testing are natural environments for social distancing; students who are required to stay at their desks all day long are not at risk of either passing on or catching COVID. That’s a win-win that would be a loss if tests were cancelled.

Not testing will unsettle students, endangering their already shaky mental health. The rhythm of test-prep and testing is well-known and familiar to students. What could be better for students who have been trapped on Zoom for months than to have the familiar Zen-like peace-and-quiet of test prep and testing?

The companies that create, administer and process these tests are a vital cog in our national economy, employing thousands of men and women, who then spend their earnings in their communities, thus seeding local economies. Suppose our 13,000+ school districts were to cancel the (often) multi-million dollar contracts? That would devastate those companies and the lives of their employees.

Vital educational research will be jeopardized. The 400+ full-bore studies of “Learning Loss” would be useless without the results of this year’s mandated standardized tests. Although it’s a foregone conclusion that these studies will demonstrate the reality of “The Achievement Gap,” those headlines will enable us to continue the practice of not having to capitalize either opportunity and expectations gaps, meaning that we can continue to pretend they are not real.

Canceling testing will overturn lives. Somewhere between 175 and 3500 doctoral students are close to finishing their dissertations on “Learning Loss.” Without data from this spring’s state tests, they will be unable to complete their theses, unable to sit for their oral exams, and unable to qualify for their doctoral degrees. This will mean an additional year of graduate school tuition and hardship for the struggling families of the graduate students, who may also have to postpone child-bearing for another year. Heartbreak and even divorce loom on the horizon for many of these families….if state testing is cancelled.

Canceling testing will endanger the health of universities. Pre-COVID, the focus on test prep and testing guaranteed that every year at least 100,000 teachers would get fed up and leave the profession for some other line of work. This created a perpetual ‘teacher shortage’ that university schools of education could rely on as they prepared their budgets. That is, they knew that school districts would have jobs for their graduates, and so they could aggressively recruit students and train them for classroom work.

Canceling testing will mean that teachers will actually be able to do what drew them into the field–help students learn and grow. This means that fewer teachers will give up on teaching, districts won’t have teacher shortages, university education programs will shrink, education faculty will lose their jobs, and lives will wither. All because we cancelled state standardized testing.

I will admit that some students (perhaps even all of them) would benefit from returning to a pressure-free school environment so they can get reacquainted with their peers. And I also acknowledge that some teachers (perhaps even all of them) should not have their worth determined by unreliable test scores. However, those are necessary sacrifices and small prices for students and teachers to pay because canceling testing will endanger our national economy.

SAVE THE AMERICAN ECONOMY! KEEP THE TESTS!!

Schools need to reopen, but the process is complicated by problems created by years of underfunding, not by teachers unions.

~~New York Magazine

23)  Free. Free Palestine!

Fifty years ago, Americans who understood and acted upon their responsibility to rise up in solidarity with the oppressed people of the world, stood with the Vietnamese against the US invasion, occupation, and genocidal assault. Through the years internationalist consciousness and activism here has focused on defending the Cuban revolution against the US boot, and supporting anti-imperialist struggles around the globe from South Africa and Mozambique and Angola to Chile and Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Today anyone who stands in solidarity with the oppressed against imperialism recognizes the urgency of fighting for the liberation of Palestine. We’re joined today by a long-time friend and comrade, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of seven books about the Middle East, including the acclaimed Palestinian Identity, and most recently, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. 

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.

To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to.

To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Beware:

All too often,

We say

What we hear others say.

We think

What we’re told that we think.

We see

What we’re permitted to see.

Worse!

We see what we’re told that we see.

Repetition and pride are the keys to this.

To hear and to see

Even an obvious lie

Again

And again and again

May be to say it,

Almost by reflex

And then to defend it

Because we’ve said it

And at last to embrace it

Because we’ve defended it

And because we cannot admit

That we’ve embraced and defended

An obvious lie.

Thus, without thought,

Without intent,

We make

Mere echoes

Of ourselves — 

And we say

What we hear other say.