Students who identify with Trump’s hate rhetoric are using it to justify bullying behaviour, persecution of certain students and threats … while immigrant and ethnic minority students across the country are voicing fear, expressing thoughts of suicide and having meltdowns in class.
Edited to add: I just learned that the assault victim is a girl who was recently orphaned.
Where did we go wrong, my friends and neighbors? I want to ask, to scream, to demand answers. How did we get to the point where we not only allow armed law enforcement officers into our children’s schools to serve as para-security guards … but beyond that point, to where we are today: where the same men who shoot pudgy grown men in the back because they failed to pay child support and band together to choke the life right out of a New Yorker for selling loose cigarettes, are let loose in our babies’ classrooms to brutalize, terrorize and humiliate them and after they do haul them off, no doubt, to lock them up in jails or detention schools or juvenile halls – to make them look the wrongdoers.
Unhappy facts about the school to prison pipeline, which Brave New Films describes as “..another way the United States incarcerates more people than any other country on earth.*”
* From NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet: Combining the number of people in prison and jail with those under parole or probation supervision, 1 in every 31 adults, or 3.2% of the (USA) population is under some form of correctional control.
The Amistad Act became law in New Jersey half a generation ago, which I learned today is long enough ago for young equal education activists to have never heard of it. “What’s that?” a young friend asked on Facebook when I suggested that we pressure state government to fund the Amistad Commission’s mandate to bring historically accurate curricula and books that teach the true roles African Americans and other ethnic minorities have played in the evolution of society both at home and abroad, to all K-12 classrooms. This knowledge is not currently being taught to our children but in New Jersey it ought to be, because state law calls for it.
Young people around the world are speaking up about education and careers. We need to listen to them because – this is their age. The age of information. And they know, much more than we give them credit for.
No dejaré que el resultado de un examen decida mi destino (subtitulado en Español)
Right now, there is a kid finishing parents evening in a heated discussion with his mother,
Saying why does he have subject subjects he will never ever use in his life…
And she will look at him blank eyed, stifle a sigh, think for a second,
And then lie.
She will say something along the lines of,
“You to get a good job you need a good degree and these subjects help you get a degree.
We never had this opportunity when I was younger”
And he will reply, “but you were young a long time ago weren’t you mum?”
These days, every important cause needs a hashtag to be visible in the world of social media, and with the Christie administration announcing its intention to close 15 more schools in Newark as the next step in its attack on public education in urban communities, cause visibility is greatly needed.
A hashtag is the # symbol when it’s used in tweets or Facebook posts. Short hashtags are great because Twitter gives you only 140 characters to express whatever you want to say. #saveNPS is not actively being used for any other campaign, so how grabbing it for the Save Newark Public Schools Campaign?
What’s known today as the Charter School Movement is not new. The concepts that drives it were born prior to 1954, when students of color won the right to equal education through the historic lawsuit, Brown v. Education, which ushering in the desegregation of schools throughout the country. What we are seeing today is simply a big step forward being taken by racists with money and power to re-segregate schools and make sure that Brown and Black students receive inferior educations.
These 1%ers want to make certain that public schools will never produce another brilliant Barack Obama. And, they want to make sure they get hold of the money public schools’ budget and buildings represent.
