Fighting tuition hikes and mobilizing for free public higher education

In this edition of Education Radio, we report on world-wide student  resistance to the attacks on public higher education, along with the story of neoliberalism as it threatens the future of public higher education in  the U.S.  Emerging from the Occupy movement, advocates calling for a  student debt strike that includes the vision of free college tuition  will present their case.

The first part of the show, features reports from Puerto Rico, the UK,  and Chile, where sustained, mass mobilizations of youth have sought to  halt enormous tuition hikes.

We next hear from labor activist and UMass academic Max Page, co-author  The Future of Higher Education, who deconstructs the mechanics of a  corporate-governance, privatization mentality that is squeezing the  quality of and access to public higher education.

For the last part of the hour, speakers from Zuccotti Park, including  Anya Kamentz, Pamela Brown, and Andrew Ross, link the Occupy movement to  the crisis of growing student debt in the U.S.  Each outlines the  reasons for a national debt strike for college loan forgiveness and free public education.

A good part of the material for this show is collected from YouTube. Using simple free capture software, in this case MacTubes, short videos  were downloaded.  These video mp4 files were then converted to an audio  file (WAVE) using free audio conversion software called Switch. It's an  amazing resource that allows access to direct information about  resistance movements that we would never see through mainstream  corporate media.

You can download mp3's of this program here:
Program 17: Audioport (podcast) 
Program 17: Internet Archive

Teachers Fight Back with Courage, Solidarity and Organizing

In this weeks show, we bring you interviews with four activists educators who are working within their communities and unions, local and national, to actively speak back to and resist the neoliberal structures and paradigms being imposed on us. Their stories remind us of the necessity and power of organizing and of finding courage in solidarity.

The assault on public education is multi-faceted and strategic. Here on Education Radio we have explored the ways that politicians, corporations and individual financiers manipulate the discourse, bully educators, intensify the disempowerment of low-income communities, and purchase access with the goals of privatizing education and feeding their profits from the public trough. The forces of neoliberalism, which aim to privatize and commodify every aspect of our lives, are powerful and organized.  For those of us who see education as a place for the building of a democratic and just society, for transformation and human freedom, understanding the magnitude of the struggle can be overwhelming. But there are numerous spaces of resistance and groups coming together to speak back to the dominant discourse and claim a new way of knowing ourselves as teachers, educators, union members, students, parents and community members.

We begin by speaking with Shaun Johnson, assistant professor of education at Towson University, blogger at The Chalk Face, and organizer of Opt Out of the State Test, a grassroots organization that encourages and supports parents and teachers to refuse to participate in standardized testing.

Karen Lewis

We then speak with Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union and former classroom teacher, about how she and other Chicago Public School teachers formed the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) to take over union leadership to ensure that the Chicago Teachers Union represented the best interest of teachers, students and low income communities in the fight against corporate education reform.

Yvette Felarca

We also talk with Yvette Felarca, an English and history teacher at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkley, CA. She also a founding member and organizer with BAMN - Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary. We talk with Yvette about her activism within teaching as well as with BAMN.

Simone Harris

We finish by going to Santa Rosa California to speak with Simone Harris, high school English teacher, union organizer and blogger at theedutalk.blogspot.com about her union’s decision to not only endorse but to plan an action with Occupy Santa Rosa. Simone’s activism reminds us that our struggles as educators are shared struggles, against the same forces and for the same hopes, as those of our students, the poor, working people, and the planet.

You can download mp3's of this program here:

Program 16: Audioport (podcast)
Program 16: Internet Archive

Looking Back with Williams, Kozol, Fine, Meiners and Ayers

Patricia Williams

On this week's program we take a step back to reflect on the first six months of Education Radio. During this time, we at Education Radio have had the opportunity to talk with a wide-variety of educators, students, parents and scholars who are engaged in the important work of resisting current neoliberal education reform efforts by actively working to disrupt the dominant narrative of education reform and fighting to create truly accessible and justice-based public schools and classrooms. It has been an inspiring and moving journey thus far. So, in this show we take some time to revisit a selection of the many voices and stories that we have shared thus far.

Featuring Patricia Williams, Jonathan Kozol, Michelle Fine, Erica Meiners, and Bill Ayers

Jonathan Kozol

You can download mp3's of this program here:

Tim Scott with Erica Meiners

Program 15: Audioport (podcast)
Program 15: Internet Archive

Deborah Polin with Bill Ayers

Stand for Children or Stand for Profit?

On this week’s show we take a look at Stand for Children, an organization that defines its mission as one of grassroots advocacy for public education. According to a recent Rethinking Schools article by Ken Libby and Adam Sanchez: 

“Stand for Children was founded in the late 1990s as a way to advocate for the welfare of children. It grew out of a 1996 march by more than 250,000 people in Washington, D.C. The aim of the march was to highlight child poverty at a time when Congress and the Clinton administration were preparing to “end welfare as we know it.” Jonah Edelman, son of children’s and civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, co-founded the group and continues to serve as CEO. Stand’s first chapter was in Oregon, but the group now operates in eight additional states: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.”

Stand for Children’s claim, that they are a grassroots organization that stands for access to quality education for all students, is appealing to many parents and educators. A closer inspection, however, reveals a very different agenda, one that is driven by vast amounts of corporate money and dangerous, ideology-driven notions of education reform. In this program we take a close look at Stand for Children and their controversial activities.

David Love

We hear stories from two Massachusetts school committee members who were former Stand members, but who left when they saw a significant shift in Stand’s approach: Roger Garberg (Gloucester) and Tracy O’Connell Novick (Worcester). We hear from the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Paul Toner, on a controversial ballot initiative that Stand is pushing in the state. We also share a clip of Jonah Edelman, Stand co-founder and CEO, candidly speaking at the Aspen Institute about Stand’s true agenda to destroy the power of teachers unions. Then, we talked with the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, about her reaction to this clip and to Stand for Children.

Karen Lewis

Finally, we feature Deborah Polin and Tim Scott's interview with David Love, former Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus and current Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, an organization that works with death row exonerees, about the larger social justice implications of Stand for Children’s activities. David is also the Executive Editor of The Black Commentator.   

We'd like to note that Education Radio contacted Stand leadership in Massachusetts to request an interview. Stand is staffed by many people who consider themselves education activists, and we were genuinely interested in their take on what we were finding out about the organization. However, after initially being receptive to our request and scheduling an interview, they then presented some conditions and let us know that one Stand staff member would be speaking with us while another would be on the phone for support, and could stop the interview at any point. We agreed to these conditions, only to have them pull out a few hours before the interview was to take place. We can only surmise this is due to the fact that it would have been a difficult, and controversial, conversation. 

Tracy O'Connell Novick

You can download mp3s of this program here:

Stand for Children or Stand for Profit? on Audioport (podcast)

Stand for Children or Stand for Profit? on Internet Archive

For more information about what you hear on today’s program, please see the following links:
Transcription of Jonah Edelman’s remarks at The Aspen Institute
Stand for Children, A Hometown Perspective on it’s Evolution by Susan Barrett

Profiteering and Union-Busting Repackaged as School Reform by David Love

Billionaire Education Policy by Robin Rogers

Stand for Children Loses Debate, about SFC in Chicago by George Schmidt
More on Stand's Massachusetts ballot initiative

Educational Technology: Tool for Capitalism or Democracy?

This week on education radio, we examine educational technology in the current climate of neoliberal education reform – particularly in regard to socioeconomic inequalities – and explore other possibilities for its use that support more democratic, creative and collaborative constructions of knowledge.

The relationship between education reform, technology, and socioeconomic inequalities is multilayered and complex, and our hope in this first in a series of shows on technology and education is to raise some of the larger political and ideological concepts framing how technology actually gets used. We also examine the current market for educational technology and its impact on educational practices. 

We hear from Dan Schiller, Communication scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and author of the book Digital Capitalism; Martha Fuentes-Bautista, Commuication and Public Policy scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Patricia Burch, Associate Professor at the USC Rossier School of Education/author of Hidden Markets, The New Education Privatization; and Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the USC Rossier School of Education.

Program #13 on Internet Archive

Program #13 on AudioPort (podcast)

Multicultural and Anti-Oppressive Education: In theory and practice

In this week's show we speak with James Banks and Kevin Kumashiro, two prominent figures in the field of multicultural and anti-oppressive education.

James Banks

James Banks is often referred to as the founder of multicultural education in the United States. He is a professor of education at the University of Washington. Over the past four decades, Banks has constructed a body of knowledge designed to disrupt curriculum based in dominant group norms by including perspectives from marginalized groups as a way to enable students to develop knowledge, attitudes, and skills to become active citizens in a multicultural nation and a diverse world.

A son of black farmers who grew up in Jim Crow south, James Banks became the first black professor in the College of Education at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle where he is also founding director of UW’s Center for Multicultural Education. In addition to writing over 20 books, Banks has served as a consultant to school districts, professional organizations, and universities throughout the United States and around the globe.

Kevin Kumashiro

Kevin Kumashiro is professor of Asian American Studies and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and president-elect of the National Association for Multicultural Education. His research and teaching span the field of anti-oppressive education, and include issues in teacher education, the “common sense” of schooling and the praxis of social justice education. 

Kumashiro has taught in both elementary and secondary schools as well worked with student teachers, and has written numerous books and articles. He is simultaneously a researcher, teacher, and activist in the field of anti-oppressive education. In our interview, we hear from Kumashiro about what has led him to the work that he does. He talks about the purpose and function of schooling, as well as the “common sense” of education and education reform.

You can download mp3s of this program via the following links:
Program #12: Multicultural and Anti-Oppressive Education: In theory and practice
Program #12: Multicultural and Anti-Oppressive Education: In theory and practice (podcast)

On the road with Patricia Williams and Bill Ayers

In this weeks program we speak with legal scholar and critical race theorist Patricia Williams and education scholar and activist Bill Ayers. We caught up with both of them in Chicago in November 2011, at the National Association for Multicultural Education's annual conference, for which they were both keynote speakers.

Patricia Williams is a legal scholar and was a pioneer in critical race theory.
Critical Race Theory developed in the 1980 s as a result of the desire of many black legal scholars in the U.S. to develop a critique of liberal civil rights discourse, which embodied ideals of assimilation and integration. Critical Race Theory analyzes the way that white supremacy and racial power is reproduced over time and the role that law plays in this process. Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University and writes a column for The Nation magazine called Diary of a Mad Law Professor. In this program, she shares her perspective on race and inequity in the U.S. education system.

Bill Ayers is a distinguished professor of Education and Senior University Scholar in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago where his work has focused on teaching for social justice and issues in urban education. His involvement in education reaches back decades, and includes primary school teaching and work in early innovative urban education reform efforts. Bill is well-known for his leadership in militant resistance groups during the Vietnam War, within Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen and Weather Underground. We spoke with Bill about resistance and hope in the movement to transform our society and our schools.

Music by Lupe Fiasco - Words I Never Said

You can download mp3s of this program via the following links:
Program #11 On the road with Patricia Williams and Bill Ayers on Internet Archive
Program #11 On the road with Patricia Williams and Bill Ayers on Audioport (podcast)

Learn more about National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME)

Patricia Williams
http://madlawprofessor.wordpress.com/

Educations Radio's Deborah Polin with Bill Ayers at the NAME conference
http://billayers.org/

Educations Radio's Tim Scott getting fresh with Bill Ayers at the NAME conference