Bill Ayers

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.

New York Times Crossword Puzzle today (2/25/2021):
22 Across, 5 letters, last letter S, clue: “Bill___,noted Vietnam War-era activist”…Hmmmmmm?
Last time this word appeared in the NYT puzzle the clue was “Bill__of the Weather Underground.” I guessed GATES!

https://rick-ayers.medium.com/everyone-shouts-black-lives-matter-but-heaven-forbid-we-change-anything-42dfafc9a09a

22) What history do you stand on? What future do you stand for?

Life can only be lived leaning forward, of course, even as its shifting and dynamic meanings can only be sorted out looking backward. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, in effect, that you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you—and so it is with history. With no impulse toward nostalgia, we struggle to understand this moment more clearly by glancing back: First, Malik Alim brings us up-to-date on a victory for justice that we mentioned earlier, the unprecedented and many-sided struggle against money bail; we’re then joined by Flint Taylor, a human rights lawyer whose dogged pursuit of justice  takes us from the 1969 state murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark, through the widespread use of torture by the Chicago Police Department against young Black men over decades, on to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois and to obtain reparations for torture survivors. His book The Torture Machine Racism and Police Violence in Chicago was recently published by Haymarket Books in Chicago.

Just as you can’t get the Republican mobs to admit that the election was lost, you can’t get liberal American intellectuals to recognize that the United States is a leading terrorist state,
~~Noam Chomsky

Clearance

Dissenters Anti-Militarist Organizing 101

Saturday March 13th, 2 PM – 6 PM ET // 1 PM – 5 PM CT // 11 AM – 3 PM PT

bit.ly/dissenterstraining 

FINAL GRAPHICS 

Event Description

Learn About Our Plan to Win: Join Dissenters Anti-Militarist Organizing 101 Training 

We need to #DefundThePolice and #DefundTheMilitary, but what does that look like and what will it take to get there?

Join Dissenters’ Anti-Militarist Organizing 101 Training on March 13 to get trained up in what we’re fighting for and our plan to win a just and life-affirming future. You’ll learn:

All about militarism, war, policing and abolition

How to organize direct action campaigns against militarized institutions on your campus & community

How to build resilient & healing movement culture

  About our role in the fight for collective liberation

… and more!

SIGN UP: bit.ly/dissenterstraining

More details: 

➡️  Saturday, March 13 from 2 PM – 6 PM ET // 11 AM – 3 PM PT

➡️  Open to students based in the U.S. or Puerto Rico. BIPOC, Queer and/or Trans folks are strongly encouraged to sign up!

➡️   We are prioritizing young people ages 18-24 who are already members of Dissenters crews or who attend schools where there are Dissenters students, but all young people are encouraged to sign up. 

➡️  Accessibility: We will have follow along notes and automated closed captioning.

SIGN UP: bit.ly/dissenterstraining

Dissenters is a new, national anti-militarist youth organization fighting to divest from war & policing and invest in life-giving institutions. Join us.