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

We are the 99%: Fighting for the "Public" in Education

In this week’s program, we feature the Occupy Together movement; also referred to as the 99% movement. We share testimony of educators, parents, students, and teacher union organizers who are participating, and we reflect on the time we spent at Occupy locations in New York, Boston and Amherst, Massachusetts. We also explore the deep connections between this movement and the fight for equity in public education.

We are living in a time when banks and corporations responsible for the most recent economic collapse received massive government bailouts, many of which are now thriving more than ever, and corporate profits on a whole are at an all time high. Military spending is higher now than at any point since World War II as a means to build and maintain a much-despised empire abroad, and despite a major recession, the wealthiest Americans have grown even richer. 

Consequently, massive and extensive unemployment is making a bad situation worse for many, especially African Americans and Latinos who are experiencing further declines in employment rates, rising poverty rates, falling homeownership rates, and decreasing health insurance and retirement coverage. Additionally, the overall number of people living in poverty has reached the largest number in the 51 years for which poverty estimates are available; and the income gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent has reached a level higher than any other since 1917, which includes the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. 

Set against this context, we at Education Radio have been inspired by the 99% movement – and see ourselves not as outside of it as neutral bystanders, but as deeply connected to it, with a responsibility to use the platform we have to continue to disrupt the dominant narrative. So a group of us spent a few days down at Occupy Wall Street, observing, participating, and documenting the range of participant voices, specifically those who are invested in public education.

You can download mp3s of this program via the following links:
Program #10 We are the 99% on Internet Archive
Program #10 We are the 99% on Audioport (Podcast)

Also, find out more about the 99% Movement and the Teacher Activist Groups you heard about in this program here:
Occupy Wall Street
New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE)
New Jersey Teacher Activist Group
Occupy the Hood 
People of Color Working Group at OWS
Cornel West on Democracy Now
Ira Shor

Unconditional Positive Regard: Can Radical Love Survive Strict Accountability Structures? (Part Two of Two)

The Peck Full Service Community School – which is part of a district under threat of corrective action by the state -- is attempting to create aschool community where engagement, voice, shared decision making, and caringare understood to be central to student achievement. In this second part of a two-part episode, we return toPeck Full Service Community School to examine the complexities of how itadheres to its two core values -- ‘student achievement’ and ‘unconditional positive regard’ -- within thecurrent climate of high-stakes testing and strict accountability structures. As Education Radio has come to know the people and practices of Peck, wefind ourselves raising questions about not only how, but if, school communitiescan be remade to be more human and democratic under the narrowing andoppressive pressures of our current accountability systems.

In this episode we again hear from Paul Hyry-Dermith, Principal of the Peck Full Service Community School, as well as two teachers at Peck, Katie Silva and Justin Cotton. We also spoke with Alan Bloomgarden, a community partner and Peck Access Coordinator.

Use the following links to download this show as an mp3:
Program #9 on Audioport
Program #9 on Internet Archive