SOS: A Rising Student Movement
By
Grace Lee Boggs
We're tired of school safety screaming
in our face,
Tired of overcrowded rooms and not
having a seat
Tired of guidance counselors busy so no
time to meet,
Tired of the same books and never
getting others
Tired of books being older than my
mother's mother.
And if I was to tell the press that,
they be shook
'Cause there ain't no such thing as
half-way books! |
This little poem by 17 year old Joman Nunez recalls the
oft-quoted "sick and tired of being sick and tired"
statement by Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi
sharecropper, civil rights activist and co-founder of
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which almost
unseated the regular segregationist delegation at the
1964 Democratic Party convention.
I came across it in "A Rising Movement, " an article in
the spring 2006 National Civic Review by Kivatha
Mediratta, senior project director of the New York
University Institute for Education and Social Policy.
Additional information on this rising movement can be
found on Pipeline, the newsletter of Funders
Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FCYO) which supports
"authentic youth leadership in public life."
These struggles have been triggered by the refusal of
most educators and adults to recognize that youth
violence and dropouts are a sign that today's
schools, structured a hundred years ago at the beginning
of the industrial age, are now obsolete. Instead, like
most administrators of outmoded institutions, they have
resorted to security and punitive measures.
Thus, in the late 1980s, following a rise in juvenile
crime, school districts across the country began
developing zero tolerance policies such as suspensions
and expulsions for tardiness, skipping classes etc.
Then they began replacing elected school boards with
Mayoral control or state-appointed boards. When the
situation didn't improve, they brought in armed police,
metal detectors and surveillance cameras. Currently, in
accordance with Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act, they
are replacing any semblance of education with "teaching
to the test."
Students are responding by protest marches and proposals
for systemic changes.
Last September 1500 New York City students walked out of
Dewitt Clinton High School and marched two miles to
their school district headquarters to protest the use of
metal detectors in their schools.
In Chicago Generation X launched a "Breaking the Chains"
campaign to address punitive policies that have resulted
in thousands of expulsions, many accompanied by police
arrests for offenses as minor as snowball fights.
Milwaukee's Urban Underground succeeded in stopping MPS
from placing armed police officers in every major high
school.
In Portland, Oregon, Sisters in Action for Power
proposes that high stakes testing bereplaced by
alternative methods to assess progress, e.g. portfolios
and work samples.
At the Leadership Institute, a small high school in the
Bronx, Sistas and Brothas United (SBU) suggests that
community research and action programs be part of the
curriculum.
In New York City a youth organization, calling itself
Make the Road by Walking (MRBW), has joined with SBU,
Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, Mothers
on the Move and the Institute for Education and Social
Policy to form the Urban Youth Collaborative (UYC) to
create a city-wide agenda for high school reform.
Most educators, and administrators, Mediratta writes,
find it difficult to comprehend this new "phenomenon" of
youth struggle because they expect young people to
focus on individual rather than collective and systemic
solutions.
On the other hand, everyone concerned with saving our
schools and our young people needs to encourage these
struggles because they have the potential for creating
the kind of Freedom Schooling which, instead of seeking
to train young people to become cogs in the economic
machine, recognizes and nurtures them as change agents
who can respirit and make our neighborhoods safer and
livelier almost overnight.
Recommended reading: Freedom Schooling: Bringing the
neighbor back intothe 'hood. 79 pages, $10+$2 SH,, Boggs
Center, 3061 Field St., Detroit 48214 or boggscenter.org/
Source: Michigan Citizen, May 21-27, 2006
posted 22 May 2006
* * * * *
 |
Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer,
and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass
the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor,
Civil Rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and
Environmental Justice. Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant
parents in l915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in
l935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in l940.
In the l940s and l950s she worked with West
Indian Marxist historian C.L.R.James and in l953 she came
to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American
labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in
grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40
years until James' death in July l993. |
Their
book, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century,
was published by Monthly Review Press in l974. In l992, with James Boggs and others, she
founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multi-cultural, intergenerational
youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the
ground up which completed its ninth season in June 2000.
Currently she is active in the Detroit Agricultural Network, the
Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit, writes for
the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly
commentary on WORT (Madison, Wisconsin).
Her autobiography, Living for Change,
published by the University of Minnesota Press in March
l998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university
classes on social movements and autobiography writing. -- http://www.boggscenter.org/* *
* * *
 |
The Price of Civilization
Reawakening American Virtue and
Prosperity
By
Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Civilization is a
book that is essential reading for every
American. In a forceful, impassioned,
and personal voice, he offers not only a
searing and incisive diagnosis of our
country’s economic ills but also an
urgent call for Americans to restore the
virtues of fairness, honesty, and
foresight as the foundations of national
prosperity. Sachs finds that both
political parties—and many leading
economists—have missed the big picture,
offering shortsighted solutions such as
stimulus spending or tax cuts to address
complex economic problems that require
deeper solutions. Sachs argues that we
have profoundly underestimated
globalization’s long-term effects on our
country, which create deep and largely
unmet challenges with regard to jobs,
incomes, poverty, and the environment.
America’s single biggest economic
failure, Sachs argues, is its inability
to come to grips with the new global
economic realities. Sachs describes a
political system that has lost its
ethical moorings, in which ever-rising
campaign contributions and lobbying
outlays overpower the voice of the
citizenry. . . . Sachs offers a plan to
turn the crisis around. He argues
persuasively that the problem is not
America’s abiding values, which remain
generous and pragmatic, but the ease
with which political spin and
consumerism run circles around those
values. He bids the reader to reclaim
the virtues of good citizenship and
mindfulness toward the economy and one
another.
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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