A New Year's Wish for Transcendent Education in 2021 and Beyond

I can't imagine anyone being against what is being proposed here by Sean Slade and Ariel Tichnor-Wagner in their ASCD guest blog. A focus on the whole child is what scholars and practitioners in child development, as well as in the Ethnic Studies Movement have been proposing for a long time.  However, for this to happen, we need a radical redesign in our educational system given the current regime of high-stakes testing and accountability and their undue impact on the quality of instruction, and thusly learning, in our nation's classrooms.  

There are a few immediate policy decisions that we could make In this regard. For example, we could eliminate A through F School accountability ratings, and with this, high-stakes testing altogether–for us in Texas, the STAAR system of testing. Note: it has never been "just a test." It has always been a "system of testing" that impacts everybody's behaviors within it, from the school superintendent, to school leaders and principals, and teachers, poisoning curriculum and classroom dynamics with adverse impacts, in particular, on low-income, linguistically diverse youth of color.

This is separate from what we really need, namely, better assessments–and, as expressed below, meaningful, rich curriculum pertinent to students' lives and that reflects students languages, cultures, and community-based Identities as a matter of course.

As far as assessment is concerned, we need authentic, formative forms of assessments that are perhaps portfolio- or performance-based, tied into topics that are meaningful and policy relevant at all levels of society, e.g.,  local school boards, community boards, city councils, state boards of education, and our states' legislatures. 

We must eschew a decontextualized, chauvinist curriculum, and opt for one that embraces all of the concerns that have been laid out by the massive, indeed global, student movement of today that took place in the wake of the George Floyd killing, including: racial justice, structural racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, civil rights history, white supremacy, colonialism and decolonization, and many other critical topics. 

We have infantilized our youth as a nation for far too long. Our youth are already gaining access to all of this information via social media. What they do not have is an educational experience that is aligned, helping them to intelligently parse out the real news from the fake news, and that turns them into prodigious readers and deep learners, to boot. Bilingual education/dual language education need to be integral to this agenda, as well, since monolingualism for a complex world is not only insufficient, but at its core, assimilationist and white supremacist.

Only this kind of education will arm students with the critical knowledge, tools, dispositions, and frameworks they need to understand the world, and on that basis, to become positive agents of change, addressing social problems and movements that poise children to experience great, personal satisfaction, as well as a bona fide sense of transcendence that makes the whole learning experience worth the while. 

How hard is this? Certainly not any harder than our current, punishing system of high-stakes testing. We should have been doing this all along anyway. Children are sacred, not widgets. 

In Texas, the 87th 2021 legislative session begins in January and there will be proposals for just such changes. Stay tuned and be supportive. Our children's education should be a matter of urgent concern to us all.

In the meantime, may all have a wonderful New Year's Eve. 

And truly, all the best in 2021.

-Angela Valenzuela

Preparing students for an interconnected world

By

 ASCD Guest Blogger

 -

December 21, 2020

By Sean Slade and Ariel Tichnor-Wagner

As schools and educators face one of their greatest challenges in serving and supporting students during the COVID-19 crisis, it’s more important than ever to develop education systems that focus on the needs of the whole child.

The following is the first in series of short essays we will be publishing on this blog from ASCD’s recent report The Learning Compact Renewed: Whole Child for the Whole World (May 2020), which outlines steps that educators, communities, and decisionmakers can take to ensure that our students are knowledgeable, emotionally and physically healthy, civically inspired, engaged in the arts, prepared for work and economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond formal schooling. The essays focus on the need of student to prepared to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world—something current crises make abundantly clear.

The communities in which children live today are increasingly interconnected with the rest of the world. Global economic production and consumption chains, human migration, and the ease of Internet connectivity, and the proliferation of social media have broken down geographic and cultural boundaries. Our local actions—what we purchase or sell, who we vote for, how to get to work—can have ripple effects around the world. Likewise, an action that takes place halfway around the globe can affect our lives. As our world becomes smaller, local communities face challenges such as famine, violent conflicts, climate change, economic inequality, and human rights that threaten the health and safety of children and require complex global solutions. Therefore, an important facet of attending to the health, safety, engagement, and support of a child, and to ensuring that a child is challenged academically, is infusing the mindsets, knowledge, and skills needed to thrive in an interconnected world.

In this second decade of the ASCD Whole Child approach, we understand that teaching students how to engage with the world will help them both in their careers and in life pursuits. It will also help our communities understand that they are part of the broader world and have a role to play in working for the common good.

Abraham Maslow, 26 years after introducing his Hierarchy of Needs, added a sixth stage: self-transcendence. As Maslow defined it, “Self-transcendence seeks to further a cause beyond the self… This may involve service to others, devotion to an ideal (e.g., truth, art) or a cause (e.g., social justice, environmentalism, the pursuit of science, a religious faith), and/or a desire to be united with what is perceived as transcendent or divine.”

In Maslow’s hierarchy, youth develop their potential to be the best they can be and to assist others—to serve humanity. Improving oneself is admirable, but improving oneself for the betterment of those around you is desirable. We define this stage as altruism—reaching beyond oneself to take actions that improve one’s own community and communities around the world. We see altruism as a vital output of a whole child education.

In 2007, ASCD declared that that our education system should serve the whole child so that each child, in each community, is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. As we look toward 2020 and beyond, we affirm that a fundamental part of educating the whole child asks education systems and communities to ensure that each child is an active maker and shaper of the world they will inherit. This stage is about helping each and every child recognize that they are part of, and inextricably connected to, the rest of the world.

The communities in which children live today are increasingly more interconnected with the rest of the world. Global economic production and consumption chains, human migration, and the ease of Internet connectivity, and the proliferation of social media have broken down geographic and cultural boundaries. Our local actions—what we purchase or sell, who we vote for, how to get to work—can have ripple effects around the world. Likewise, an action that takes place halfway around the globe can affect our lives. As our world becomes smaller, local communities face challenges, such as famine, violent conflicts, climate change, economic inequality, and human rights that threaten the health and safety of children and require complex global solutions.

Therefore, an important facet of attending to the health, safety, engagement, and support of a child, and to ensuring that a child is challenged academically, is infusing the mindsets, knowledge, and skills needed to thrive in an interconnected world, empowering them to make our world a better place for themselves, one another, and the planet. To do anything less is to shortchange our youth and their futures.

To help plan, start, and grow your school’s whole child journey, join ASCD’s Whole Child Network.

About the authors

Sean Slade is the ASCD’s Senior Director of Global Outreach. Ariel Tichnor-Wagner, a former ASCD fellow of global competence, is a lecturer at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. 

Surveillance in an Era of Pandemic and Protest: Landmark Conversation with Naomi Klein, Shoshana Zuboff & Simone Browne

Friends:

I strongly urge you to listen to this landmark conversation with "Shock Doctrine" author, Naomi Klein, Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," and Simone Browne, author of "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness."

It's chock-full of really good, if startling, information on how our privacy is violated, abetted by our sense of resignation. For instance check out this transcript of much of what Shoshana Zuboff shared:

A novel development now is how with technology, students' homes become the new site for the playing out of the school-to-prison pipeline. Read the write-up below and listen to this very powerful and timely conversation.

-Angela Valenzuela

As this summer of pandemic and racial justice protests draws to a close, Naomi Klein will host a landmark conversation between Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," and Simone Browne, author of "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness." The three authors will discuss how both governments and tech giants are using our moment of overlapping crises to push through discredited surveillance technologies that threaten privacy, democracy, and any hope of equality.
Early in the pandemic, Klein wrote that these forces have aligned to “advance a vision of a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable.” For the privileged, “almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone.”
But, Zuboff warns, “We’re not necessarily locked into this deterministic narrative that too many pundits are hawking and the tech companies are salivating over — that post-Covid-19, we’re going to have comprehensive biosurveillance of all of society. ... People are worried. People are asking questions.”
Racial justice movements are also winning major victories against surveillance technologies like facial recognition. And as Browne reminds us, “surveillance is nothing new to Black folks.” In "Dark Matters," Browne traces modern surveillance practices back to the policing of Black lives under slavery, comparing the branding of slaves to present-day methods of tracking, surveilling, and commodifying people.
In this live conversation, Klein, Zuboff, and Browne will unpack the dangers of surveillance capitalism — and how we can rise to this crisis and create a fair and equitable future.
In partnership with Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
Subscribe to our channel: https://interc.pt/subscribe

#TheMiningOfTheSelf  #DigitalCommons #Unionize

Scant Evidence Of Antifa Shows How Sweeping The Protests For Racial Justice Have Become - #WeAreAllAntifa

Turns out the "antifa" trope is simply propaganda that serves to discredit not just the left, but the masses, who are right to protest fascism.  Nor is this a George Soros conspiracy.  Accordingly, key quote:  

“Trump has turned everybody into antifascists,” Felarca said. “There’s no organization called ‘antifa.’ It was always just people prepared to take action against fascism. It turns out, that’s a lot of people.”

To suggest that those opposing fascism are members of an organized, deep-state conspiracy is inflammatory and should get called out by our leadership and the press.  In the meantime, let's also remain vigilant about Russian trolls that seek to divide us even further.

I applaud the Washington Post team that wrote this report as follows: Keith Alexander, Alice Crites, Meryl Kornfield, Jenn Abelson, Nicold Dungca, Austin Ramsey, Jacob Wallace, Veronica del Valle, and Christopher Casey.

Finally, if you're not anti-fascist, what are you?

-Angela Valenzuela

#IAmAntifa #WeAreAntifa #WeAreAllAntifa #GeorgeFloyd #AmericanFascism #fascism #protests2020 #Antifa

Scant evidence of antifa shows how sweeping the protests for racial justice have become

Protesters seeking justice for the death of George Floyd walk down Lakeside Avenue in Cleveland on May 30. (John Kuntz/The Plain Dealer/AP)

By 

Isaac Stanley-Becker 

June 13, 2020 at 4:25 p.m. CDT

In the two weeks that saw an uprising against racial injustice and police brutality spread from the streets of Minneapolis to cities across America, the specter of violent, left-wing militants invoked by President Trump and a chorus of conservative voices has yet to materialize.

Instead, multiracial crowds have appeared in every corner of the United States, as the president sent more than a dozen tweets blaming clashes with police on antifa, the label associated with anti-fascist protesters who infamously sparred with far-right figures after his election in 2016. He went so far as to say he would designate antifa as a “terrorist organization,” though he does not have the legal authority to apply that label to a domestic group.

The nation’s top law enforcement officials joined the president’s attacks. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray directed blame for violence tinging the protests over the killing of George Floyd at “anarchists like antifa and other agitators.” Attorney General William P. Barr claimed, but did not offer, “evidence that antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity.”

But the group the Trump administration has labeled a menace has mostly been nonexistent, experts and law enforcement officials say, and certainly has not been orchestrating what have been largely peaceful protests. Despite warnings of antifa incursions in scores of cities, there is no evidence linking outbursts of violence to an organized left-wing effort. And those associated with the autonomous groups that went up against far-right figureheads four years ago — and whose roots go back to earlier left-wing causes — say there is no such centralized organization.

Federal and local arrest records in dozens of cities make virtually no mention of antifa. Law enforcement officials who had braced for the purported invasion of antifa militants in cities large and small now mostly acknowledge the threat has not appeared.

Go to website to view

The reason, according to local leaders familiar with antifa as well as activists who became its public face, is that the demonstrations in recent weeks bear little resemblance to earlier battles between right-wing extremists and left-wing militants. Those skirmishes reached a fever pitch with the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, and also rattled cities from Washington to Berkeley, Calif.

Now, something bigger is underway, they say.

In the crowd of thousands recently filling the streets of Berkeley, many might align themselves against fascism, observed the city’s mayor, Jesse Arreguín. Meaning: They distrust centralized control in the hands of leaders who vilify outsiders and crush opposition.

As for antifa, the Democratic mayor has seen few traces of the black-clad militants he once condemned as a gang. “I don’t see them,” Arreguín said.

The absence of antifa from protests roiling Berkeley — a crucible of left-wing activism — is a sign, Arreguín said, of the scale and possible significance of the protests. They are not driven by left-wing zealots, he said, but by multiracial and multigenerational crowds seeking a reckoning with systemic problems of racism and policing.

“Anti-fascist protesters thought that because of the threat that white supremacists and fascists brought to their communities, particularly after the deadly events in Charlottesville in 2017, that they had to defend themselves,” Arreguín said. “This is very different. This is about something bigger.”

The difference was expressed another way by Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley middle school teacher charged in 2017 with felony assault for allegedly punching a man with a neo-Nazi flag. (The assault charge was later dropped.)

“Trump has turned everybody into antifascists,” Felarca said. “There’s no organization called ‘antifa.’ It was always just people prepared to take action against fascism. It turns out, that’s a lot of people.”

Some of those people have taken extreme measures in recent weeks, leading to arrests.

But no meaningful link to antifa has yet been established, law enforcement officials said, while cautioning that investigations were ongoing and there were possible signs of participation by extremists of various types.

Nationwide, officials have arrested more than 13,000 people in 39 U.S. cities since May 27, according to a Washington Post tally of data provided by police departments and included in media reports. In several cities that released the addresses of arrested individuals, the vast majority lived in the cities and towns closest to the protests. Thousands of protesters were arrested for curfew violations and other minor charges, such as obstructing a roadway or carrying an open container.

More serious federal charges, brought against individuals for offenses such as throwing molotov cocktails at police vehicles, reveal no evidence of a plot by antifa to create discord.

A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas accuses three men with alleged ties to the far-right “Boogaloo” movement, whose members anticipate civil war and civilizational collapse, of plotting to provoke violence at recent protests.

In the nation’s capital, police arrested 430 people connected to protests during the past two weeks. Charges ranged from burglary to rioting. But prosecutors have not seen “any indication” of involvement by “an extremist, left-wing group like antifa,” said Karl A. Racine, the District’s attorney general.

The same is true in other places where the unrest has been most acute. Antifa has not been identified as a meaningful player in Minneapolis, where the protests began last month, according to a federal law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing intelligence gathering.

Antifa has similarly not been tied to events in Seattle, where protesters marched on city hall and occupied the streets adjacent to a police precinct.

Late Wednesday, Trump threatened to take over Seattle after some of the Internet’s most prominent right-wing personalities spent the day blaming antifa for the upheaval.

Their claims were contradicted by local law enforcement.

“We have no evidence that antifa are in any way involved in the ongoing protests,” said Patrick Michaud, a Seattle police spokesman.

Instead, the purported peril of antifa rests on what the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab characterized this week as a “disinformation campaign, in which far-right activists have spread fears of antifa ‘terrorism’ by way of largely spurious, decontextualized or provably false claims.”

From Evansville, Ind., to Snohomish, Wash., rumors and disinformation about the impending antifa push into small-town America — in some cases warning of busloads of outsiders ready to storm tranquil communities — have not just duped unsuspecting residents, but forced local law enforcement to mobilize in response.

Billy Bolin, the Evansville police chief, wrote on his personal Facebook page in response to rumors of outside infiltration that his department was “planning for numerous scenarios,” adding, “My philosophy is plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

Keith Rogers, the chief of police in Snohomish, a city of 10,000 residents near Seattle, was reassigned this week over his handling of an armed counterprotest fueled by false online warnings about antifa. He initiated an “emergency response operation” involving the fire department, county sheriff’s office, the mayor and the city administrator, as he told a recent meeting of the city council.

“The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security formally classifies antifa as a violent domestic terrorist group,” he falsely told the body. A Republican state lawmaker, Robert Sutherland, boasted on Facebook of “defending my little town of Snohomish from rioting and looting by antifa thugs.” It never occurred.

Among the only charges explicitly mentioning antifa emerged from protests in Austin, where authorities in Travis County say three people, all in their 20s, who looted a Target have ties to a now-defunct activist collective called the Austin Red Guards.

Arrest warrants filed this week describe the organization as a “self-identified communist/socialist antifa group” but include few additional details. There was no response to a message sent to the Red Guards over Facebook, where a post in December 2018 announced, “This project has reached its conclusion, we are no more.”

In San Antonio, a 43-year-old man was recently arrested on charges of terrorist threats and public fear for promising on Twitter to “personally kill” any “antifa soldiers” preparing to join a local protest.

In Columbus, Ohio, a school bus operated by circus performers was stopped by police, who said there was “a suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters” in a tweet that reached Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has warned repeatedly about signs of antifa. A spokesman for the senator did not respond to requests for comment about what these signs were.

“I don’t think there is an antifa,” said Todd Shanker, a federal defender involved in one of the most recent cases in which federal prosecutors accused a defendant of having ties to antifa. His client pleaded guilty last year to a misdemeanor for spray-painting crude language about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a Detroit office building, following what the government called an “antifa protest.”

That police and local leaders are ensnared by the online rumors of antifa’s presence — which ricochet around social media but unravel on closer investigation — helps buttress the president’s efforts to point to far-left instigators.

Trump’s suggestion on Tuesday that a 75-year-old peace activist knocked to the ground by police in Buffalo was an “antifa provocateur” marked the latest escalation in an apparent attempt to discredit all dissent, said Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and the author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

“If you were to play it out, if there were this conspiratorial outfit that burned down much of the country, it would be a huge issue, requiring a major response,” Bray said. “But we haven’t seen that, other than some tweets, and that’s because it’s political theater.”

Antifa no longer exists, at least not in the form in which it has featured on the president’s Twitter feed or propaganda outlets, including the state-backed Russian channel RT, said Adam Klein, a professor of communication studies at Pace University who has analyzed antifa’s confrontation with white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017.

“I’m sure there are people on the streets today who see themselves as anti-fascist,” Klein said. “But any kind of broader organization has been pretty dormant.”

On the most active antifa accounts on social media, Klein said, there is commentary about recent protests and occasional attempts to unmask far-right actors, but there have been “no calls for destruction or fighting police.”

According to the Atlantic Council’s analysis, the first noteworthy Twitter mention seeking to tie antifa to recent protests was from a popular account devoted to the QAnon conspiracy theory. It asserted on May 27 that the demonstrations were being engineered by financier George Soros, who looms large in anti-Semitic theorizing about a “Deep State” cabal.

Assertions about antifa have been issued from the depths of Twitter but also from the heights of U.S. law enforcement. Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said Barr’s remarks pointing to antifa were based on “information given to us by federal, state and local authorities,” but she declined to say more about the information.

“We have some investigations underway and very focused investigations on certain individuals that relate to antifa,” the attorney general said in a Fox News interview this week.

The refusal to offer evidence drew a rebuke this week from Senate Democrats, who sent a letter on Tuesday to Wray and to John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. A spokeswoman for the FBI acknowledged receipt of the letter but declined to comment beyond pointing to Wray’s earlier remarks.

“These claims are highly inflammatory,” wrote Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), along with the top Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sens. Mark R. Warner of Virginia and Dianne Feinstein of California. “They also appear intended to frame the legitimate peaceful protests taking place around the country as terrorist threats in order to justify unnecessary federal, even military, intervention and the excessive use of force.”

“These actions are not sustainable in a democracy,” the lawmakers wrote.

Keith L. Alexander, Alice Crites, Meryl Kornfield, Jenn Abelson, Nicole Dungca, Austin R. Ramsey, Jacob Wallace, Verónica Del Valle and Christopher Casey contributed to this report.

Is This the American Spring? Is America on the Brink of Transformative Social Change? by Umair Haque

With this article title, Umair Haque asks this important question that everybody's asking. As usual, his critique is cutting and insightful. For example, he astutely notes how our country has "invested in the stuff you’d expect of a society of people which hated one another. Guns. Bombs. Policing. Men in body armor carrying grenades." It's so true that our priorities have been so twisted.  Hence, the expressed desire and mobilization efforts to get our city councils to defund police departments across the country.

Yesterday, on Twitter, historian @TomSugrue, author of author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton University Press, 2010), commented on Twitter as follows:

"As a historian of social movements in the U.S., I am hard pressed to think of any time in the past when we have had two straight weeks of large-scale protests in hundreds of places, from suburbs to big cities. The breadth and scale of #Floyd protests is staggering."

By this metric, this IS our American Spring, but it still all has to play out.

I feel pretty confident that we'll be better than before after all is said and done.

We can only hope.

-Angela Valenzuela

#AmericanSpring #GeorgeFloyd #Protests2020

Is This the American Spring?

Is America on the Brink of Transformative Social Change?

umair haque

Jun 7, 2020

People pouring into the streets, in city after city. White, black, brown. All united. Determined to make their voices heard. Undeterred in the face of authoritarianism. Despite the cruelty and indifference of America’s governing classes. Despite the tear gas and police brutality. Despite the demagogue threatening martial law.

All of that leads me to ask a tiny question. Is this the American Spring?

Surely you remember the Arab Spring. When Arabs poured into the streets, too, to try and reclaim their freedom, from a generation of autocrats. At this juncture, by the way, grad-school nitpickers will warn — “but the Arab Spring backfired!” Indeed. I’ll come to that. Maybe the more sensible see the simple parallel I’m trying to draw: a mass movement for social transformation, in a deeply broken, divided, fractured society, where life is simply falling apart.

Is such a thing being born in America, at precisely this moment?

If there were to be such a thing as the American Spring — a movement for social transformation, long overdue — I think that it would need to meet three criteria.

First, Americans would need to wake up to the fact that they now enjoy some of the lowest living standards in the rich world — and uniquely low living standards, period. America now has more in common with a nation like Russia than say Canada, France, or Germany. Autocracy. What I call the trifecta of ruin: falling incomes, savings, and happiness. Life seems to have come apart at the seams. 80% of Americans live right at the edge of perpetual ruin, and that number’s rising.