This is an interesting story (see below). Poor Mark Zuckerman and his 100 mil, so much of which went to consultants for Cami.
We have tracked the Newark story through our contacts there. NEW Caucus puts out updates. NEW is the counterpart to MORE - they came within a few votes of winning the presidency and hold many Exec Bd seats. First here is their report, followed by the Slate piece.
And Slate below the fold
As you all now know, after rallying with NEW Caucus against the One-Newark Plan, a group of students from the Newark Student Union took over Tuesday's Advisory Board Business Meeting and slept overnight in 2 Cedar Street. Although their 4 demands were not entirely met, they did win a meeting with NJ Commissioner of Ed. David Hespe (still to be scheduled). After holding a press conference, they left the building at about 11:30 Wednesday morning.BUT, the students got huge press coverage and drew a spotlight to the dictatorial methods and privatizing motives of the Governor and Superintendent. They were covered Tuesday night by ABC 7 and News12, and on Wednesday morning by all the local news stations. Below are 3 longer videos, one of the protest, another of the takeover itself, and the last of the morning press conference.Again, NEW Caucus stands with the Newark Student Union, OUR students. Their fight is OUR fight.We hope that others, education workers in particular, begin to learn from our students and take inspiration from them! Until we are willing to challenge power, we will not win the war being waged on us!And, to follow up on the student action and BUILD on the momentum that they have helped generate, NEW Caucus joins the Newark Teachers Union in calling ALL education workers, students, parents and concerned community members to attend Tuesday's Advisory Board Meeting. NEW Caucus members will speak.More important, we must continue to publicly demonstrate our opposition to the One-Newark Plan,to state control of Newark Public Schools, and to Cami Anderson.Tuesday, May 27
6pmSpeedway Elementary School701 South Orange Ave.Newark, 07106
Who Gets to Control Newark’s Schools?
A rabble-rousing new mayor wants to undo the reforms that Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg brought to town.
Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
In Newark last week, high school principal and city councilman Ras Baraka was elected mayor. Tuesday Baraka unveiled his agenda
for educational “local control”: a return of the Newark school district
to city management, and a total rejection of the school reform policies
embraced by his predecessor Cory Booker, Gov. Chris Christie, and their
philanthropic patron Mark Zuckerberg, whose $100 million donation has
reshaped the city’s educational landscape in the direction of new
charter schools and teacher evaluation and pay based on student
standardized test scores.
Those closely watched reforms, funded by corporate donors and
supported by centrist politicians with national ambitions, are “taking
away our right to democratically govern our public schools,” Baraka has said.
Instead of shutting down failing schools and turning their buildings
over to national charter chains, he argues that Newark should send even
more money to struggling neighborhood principals for a longer school
day, afterschool programs, bonuses to reward teachers who work in the
most challenging schools, and the hiring of more guidance counselors and
social workers.
On Tuesday evening, student protesters staged a sit-in
at a school advisory board meeting, bringing it to a disruptive close.
The students demanded that superintendent Cami Anderson, a
Booker/Christie/Zuckerberg ally, resign. The protesters were no doubt
inspired by their new mayor—talk of taking back the city’s schools is
the rhetoric that won Baraka the election.
With Baraka’s win, Bill de Blasio’s November victory in New York, and
former Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty’s stinging loss in 2010, due
in large part to school chancellor Michelle Rhee’s unpopularity, the
local control movement is having a moment. It’s not exactly new: Ras
Baraka’s father, Amiri Baraka, led a fiery charge for community control
of Newark’s schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But while Amiri
Baraka was a virulent critic of union teachers, his son’s biggest ally
has been organized labor, including the Newark Teachers’ Union. So,
what’s changed? Why did one Baraka enrage the unions in 1970 by
supporting local control of schools, while, 44 years later, another
Baraka earned Big Labor’s endorsement—and hundreds of thousands of
dollars of their funding—with a local control agenda?
Amiri Baraka died in January. Today he is most often remembered as the controversial former New Jersey poet laureate, who claimed in verse
that Israel had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. But before all
that, he was a beatnik, a black nationalist—and an education reformer.
Born Everett Leroy Jones, Amiri Baraka grew up in Newark and attended
the racially integrated Barringer High School, where he worked on the
school newspaper and eventually earned a scholarship to Howard
University. He later joined the Air Force and landed in Greenwich
Village, where he began his career as a political agitator, poet, and
playwright.
After Malcolm X’s death in 1965, Jones changed his name to Amiri
Baraka, separated from his white, Jewish wife, and returned to Newark,
where he hoped to live out his emerging black separatist ideals. Like
other young black intellectuals who had attended integrated schools,
including Stokely Carmichael (a graduate of the Bronx High School of
Science), Baraka looked back on his own education not as a leg up into
the meritocracy, but as a time of psychological devastation, in which he
and other black children were forced to come face-to-face each day with
white racism. Baraka pinned much of the blame on white, unionized
teachers—60 percent of the teaching force in Newark—whom he said
disdained black culture and believed black students were unintelligent.
“Our children in most of these so called schools are not being taught
anything,” he wrote in a 1967 essay. “And when they are taught something
it is usually to hate themselves.” (Baraka once wrote that “a teacher
sends a pupil home from Central”—the school his son Ras Baraka would
later lead as principal—by telling him, “Catholics is the best religion
and Stokely Carmichael, Adam Powell, and 'Cassius Clay' ain't no good!”)
The solution, Baraka wrote, was to hire only black teachers and
principals to work in black children’s schools. “Let us get our own!” he
declared. In another essay, he wrote, “Who controls your children's
minds controls your life even after the death of your body. We must make
sure our children are Black ... not only by Race, and Culture, but
through Consciousness. Education is the development of consciousness.”
Baraka served on an advisory school board tasked with directing money
from Title I, the federal education program, to Newark’s poorest public
school students. But he and his second wife, Amina Baraka, withdrew
their own kids from the public system, enrolling them in a private
school with a Black Nationalist curriculum. As activists, the Barakas
hoped to enact a similar Afrocentric curriculum in the public schools.
The Barakas disdained the Newark Teachers’ Union, which in 1970
negotiated a contract freeing teachers from “non-professional chores,”
such as supervising children as they ate lunch or walked home from
school. The union believed it was securing teachers’ status as
white-collar professionals. But the Barakas and other black community
activists saw it as white teachers disrespecting black children,
refusing to care for or mentor them outside the strict confines of the
classroom. Their anger was fueled by an emerging body of social science
research showing that white teachers tended to judge non-white children
as less academically motivated and less well behaved, regardless of
their actual achievement or behavior. (Sadly, not much has changed in
that regard, with a recent federal report showing national evidence of continued lowered academic expectations and harsher disciplinary practices for students of color.)
These tensions exploded on Nov. 17, 1970, when a black third grader,
Matilda Gouacide, was struck by a car as she left Newark’s South Eighth
Street School. The accident released all the pent up frustration in the
black community—if not for the new teachers’ contract, an adult might
have been on hand to supervise Matilda’s walk home. Black parents, led
by Baraka and other activists, demanded that the city renege on the
teachers’ contract. When Newark’s new black mayor, Ken Gibson, attempted
to do so, the 2,500-member Newark Teachers’ Union went on strike
for 14 weeks, the longest teacher strike in American history. Both
union teachers and anti-union activists armed themselves; there were
shootings, knife fights, beatings, and vandalism. One teacher died and
185 more were sent to jail. In the end, the teachers’ union retained a
fairly tight hold over education policy in Newark, even after the state
took over the failing district in 1995.
Now, more than 50 years after Amiri Baraka lost the battle for
Newark’s schools, his son is trying again. Ras Baraka is passionate
about putting Newark natives back in control of Newark’s schools, where
95 percent of the nearly 40,000 students are black or Latino. But times
have changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, community control meant black
activists, parents, and politicians wresting power from a strong,
white-dominated teachers’ union. In 2014, community control means black
politicians allying with the much-weakened union to oppose a set of
policies—charter schools, teacher merit pay, and school closings—that
often seem (or are) imposed by wealthy, often white outsiders.
In her excellent recent New Yorker feature
on school reform in Newark, Dale Russakoff reported the shocking fact
that the going rate for educational consultants in the city is $1,000
per day, even as schools go without basic repairs and supplies. In a
followup New Yorker podcast,
Russakoff explained that the teams of imported consultants that
descended on the city after the Zuckerberg donation “really haven’t
spent much time at all in public schools in the communities. They’re
really about management reforms, from the top down, that they believe
will make a huge difference in the delivery of education to children.
But it does leave out the most important story in education, which is
what’s going on with the kids and the families in the neighborhoods.”
Indeed, when I reported from Newark in 2011, I heard parents say that teen pregnancy—not low test scores—was the city’s biggest educational challenge.
Today’s national school reformers are learning a lesson teacher
unionists learned, painfully, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s:
They can’t assume they know what parents or local neighborhoods want
from their kids’ schools. If they do, they run the risk of offending the
communities they are trying to help. Those communities might turn
toward politicians who seem to pay them greater heed.
The question now is how Ras Baraka will govern. His education agenda
is unremarkable, a re-articulation of broadly accepted ideas such as
affordable pre-K and social supports for kids and families. Yet some of
Baraka’s statements hearken back to his father’s writings, and his
family’s history: “While poverty and racial isolation are highly
correlated with low academic achievement, this correlation should not
suggest that Newark children have low cognitive abilities or deficits,”
Ras Baraka wrote in his campaign literature. “Our children are not the
problem; the environment we create for them is largely responsible for
their academic performance.”
If Mayor Baraka succeeds in wresting control of Newark’s schools from
Gov. Christie, he’ll have to do something his father never did: prove
that community control of education can actually help an entire city’s
children learn. If he doesn’t, community control will return to the
historical dustbin as yet another failed idea to transform urban
education.
Dana Goldstein is a staff writer at the Marshall Project and author of The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession to be published in September 2014.
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