This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
AFT’s Weingarten on Chaotic First Day of School in Puerto Rico
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Statement by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on the opening day of school in Puerto Rico:
“Today was the first day of school for teachers and children in Puerto Rico. Most school openings are happy times when children return to school eager to learn and reconnect with their friends. But this year in Puerto Rico it’s different; the opening of school is rife with chaos and lack of planning. To add insult to injury, the Puerto Rico Department of Education is spending millions on temporary classrooms to house children after closing hundreds of schools, despite protest from parents and teachers, confirming what we’ve said for months about this closed and secretive process.
“Throughout the day, we received reports from teachers about missing chairs and desks. A school in Guayama is without power. Dozen of schools are missing teachers; as the day has progressed, we’ve gotten reports of schools without their special education teachers, English teachers, social studies teachers. A school in Trujillo Alto has no schedule ready for students. Another school is missing a dozen teachers, and three cafeteria workers are serving 1,100 kids.
“Despite these foreseeable problems, teachers have dug in and persevered, becoming the main source of stability for kids in Puerto Rico.
“Puerto Rico deserves much better from the governor and education secretary than what we’re witnessing this week. That’s why we’re supporting the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico’s launch ofcaosescolar.com, a website dedicated to crowdsourcing and documentation of problems parents, teachers and students are seeing across the island because of the chaotic school closing process. It’s the only way to force the secretary of education and governor to fix problems that they’ve helped create.”
TheAmerican Federation of Teachersis a union of 1.7 million professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities. We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do.
Randi Weingarten Lorretta Johnson Mary Cathryn Ricker PRESIDENT SECRETARY-TREASURER EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT
American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO Communications Department • 555 New Jersey Ave. N.W. • Washington, DC 20001 • T: 202-879-4458 • F: 202-879-4580 • www.aft.org
AFT Teachers • AFT PSRP • AFT Higher Education • AFT Public Employees • AFT Nurses and Health Professionals
This in-depth piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is on current struggles at the University of Puerto Rico. What a daunting task. The people themselves are doing the work of restoring the university and the island despite this daunting task. All so sad and tragic. The people's resolve is humbling and something to be admired. Thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing.
The U. of Puerto Rico’s Humacao campus suffered major damage in the September storm.
You
can still hear the salsa music, the car horns on crowded roads, the
silent Ds that breeze through the Puerto Rican dialect. But you have to
listen closely.
For months, the sounds of the Caribbean have been engulfed by the rattling roar of generators.
Almost four months after Hurricane Maria pummeled the island, about half of
its residents do not have electricity, and most of the rest get power
via boxy electric generators on wheels. Alone, one sounds like a giant
lawnmower. A city full of them is a postapocalyptic whir. And as long as
you can hear them, you can smell the diesel they burn.
At Vidy’s
Cafe, about three blocks from the University of Puerto Rico’s flagship
campus here, you hear the hum. You hear it at a greasy spoon a block
away where three men named Fernando fry eggs and tostadas. And as you
try to fall asleep, you hear it, too.
For nearly four months Lida
Orta-Anés didn’t have a generator. Electricity still has not returned
to her house in the mountains outside San Juan. Ms. Orta-Anés is a
professor of environmental health at the Medical Sciences campus. She’s
read research telling her that diesel-burning generators are carcinogens;
she doesn’t think it’s a good idea to have so many of them running. The
choice to live without one was her act of resistance against Puerto
Rico’s new normal, where the cries of tree frogs are obliterated by
humming machines. This isn’t how her island should sound.
Maria followed what many on the island now call its "first hurricane": the fiscal crisis. Puerto
Rico is still in the throes of a nearly 12-year economic recession.
Faulty bonds, tangled bureaucracy, and the end of federal tax breaks led
the island’s economy to its breaking point.
The university has
been struck by both hurricanes. Some of its campuses are practically in
ruins, and it’s staring down a bleak mandate — to plan for a
$300-million reduction in appropriations from the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico over the next 10 years. And following the hurricane, Gov. Ricardo
A. Rosselló Nevares of Puerto Rico received an extension to submit a fiscal plan for, among other things, the university system, to the territory’s fiscal control board.
But
if Puerto Rico as a whole is to recover from its state of crisis, it
will do so on the back of the institution. On the island, as on the
mainland, a college education is the only way to move up the
socioeconomic ladder, and the only way to train the people who will
create an economy that is based on more than service and tourism. For
many Puerto Ricans, a college education translates to one thing: a
degree from the University of Puerto Rico.
The institution is the
practical and symbolic touchstone for an island seeking hope. But it’s
ailing. The depth of Puerto Rico’s broader crisis — and the lack of aid
from the mainland United States — have left the university waiting for
support. So it has fallen to a loose network of volunteers within the
university community to lift up both an institution and an island.
People like Lida Orta-Anés. When she
was growing up in San Juan in the 1960s, Ms. Orta-Anés’s parents
emphasized to her and her four siblings that going to college was
"nonnegotiable." UPR was always her choice.
In fact, she watched
both of her parents receive their degrees from the university. The year
after Ms. Orta-Anés got her bachelor’s degree, her mother graduated with
a teaching degree, the only one of her siblings to go to college. The
rest of Ms. Orta-Anés’s aunts and uncles worked trade professions. They
were TV technicians, plumbers — work her parents would probably have
done if the university hadn’t offered them a different path. And many of
her cousins were first-generation college students.
“Certain things that weren't there before are turning into the
new normal. ... People are starting to get used to this.”
Since its founding in 1903, the university has been imbued with the
mission of producing working professionals like Ms. Orta-Anés’ parents,
cousins, and herself. That focus took on renewed importance by the
middle of the 20th century, when Puerto Rico’s economy had evolved from
agrarian to industrialized, and needed a college-educated work force to
feed companies like General Electric, the medical-supply company
Electro-Biology Inc., and the pharmaceutical manufacturer Upjohn. Today the island still depends on this mission of social mobility. More than two-thirds of university students receive Pell Grants.
Ask them what they would be doing if not for the university, and most
will say they’d be working in service-industry jobs or trying to extend
the part-time jobs they already have.
After Ms. Orta-Anés earned
her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in planning, she had dreams that
extended beyond the island. She wanted to be an ergonomist, and she
needed to study industrial and organizational psychology, and the
management of industrial engineering. But no graduate programs on the
island met her specific need. So in 1984, she and her husband moved
north — far north — to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There
she was an active member of a Puerto Rican student group that called
themselves Los Exilados, the exiles.
Their plan was always to
spend two years in Michigan, taking the required courses, and then move
back to the island to finish their dissertations. But the couple
couldn’t immediately find jobs in Puerto Rico.
They stayed in
Michigan. Ms. Orta-Anés wrote safety language for federal policy,
designed training to prevent musculoskeletal problems, like
carpal-tunnel syndrome, and worked on trade advisory committees for the
United Automobile Workers. She had two daughters. She bought a home. But
every year, Ms. Orta-Anés and her husband looked for positions on the
island.
To alleviate her homesickness, she made a biannual
pilgrimage to the island every Christmas and summer break. Her mother
sent recordings of Puerto Rican TV shows. Ms. Orta-Anés dreamed during
the dark Michigan winters of her return.
Every summer, her
daughters went to summer camps on the island. The family had a goal: to
assimilate easily when their return came. "We emotionally have been
working for that for the past 17 years," Ms. Orta-Anés said.
In
2000, her husband took a one-year sabbatical in Puerto Rico, where he
later found a tenure-track position. The relocation was finally a
reality.
Ms. Orta-Anés returned to an island undergoing an exodus. Between 2005 and 2015, the territory had a net loss of 446,000 residents
to the mainland United States. Just a few years before, companies based
there lost a key subsidy from the U.S. government, which immediately
chilled the economy. Meanwhile the island relied more on bonds it issued
to investors, even as it took on more and more debt.
By 2016,
Puerto Rico was on the verge of a financial meltdown. The U.S.
government stepped in to help restructure its debt. A university-system audit
in 2015 raised flags about UPR’s heavy reliance on state funds, given
the island’s financial troubles. With that came proposed cutbacks —
including to the university system, which gets two-thirds of its revenue
from the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. It seemed tuition and fee
increases were the only option to make up the difference. Ms. Orta-Anés
was on the front lines of the opposition to that. In 2001, she’d scored a
tenure-track position of her own at UPR. Two years later she joined the
Puerto Rican Association of University Professors, an advocacy group akin to the American Association of University Professors.
Today
she helps lead it, and her activism in the face of financial crises has
made her a thorn in the administration’s side. In 2012, the National
Science Foundation froze funds earmarked for the university’s central
administration office and Mayagüez campus, citing mismanagement and
missed deadlines. Ms. Orta-Anés went on the attack, saying the problems
were caused by "terrible administration," and her association approved a
resolution asking for the president’s resignation.
In February she and colleagues held a news conference to oppose the
Puerto Rico governor’s proposed cuts to the university’s 11-campus
system, and affirming support for a student strike that had been
protesting the cuts for nearly two months.
And though students
get most of the attention when they spar with the powers that be — mass
strikes are a mainstay of student protests — Ms. Orta-Anés is there,
with plans for campus and island outreach, gathering more instructors to
help the cause, and connecting activists.
"I just think that
it’s unfair," Ms. Orta-Anés said of the budget cuts. "We’re here, and
those responsible for the situation we are in right now should pay for
it, not the students, not the faculty members."
The student
strike finally exhausted itself in June, when the Humacao campus voted
to end it. The financial outlook was still bleak, but the immediate
crisis had passed.
Three months later, Hurricane Maria slammed into the island.
Ricardo Arduengo for The Chronicle
Lida Orta-Anés, a professor of environmental health at
the U. of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences campus, still doesn’t have
power at her house outside San Juan. She spends her weekends handing
out health supplies in harder-hit areas of the island.
Such a beautiful and profound, if bone-chilling, reflection by Sonny Boy Arias on the Mexico earthquake titled, A View Through the Sociological Lens: When the Mind of the Crowd Takes Over the Mind of the Individual, the Human Spirit Shines.
First responders to southern Mexico earthquake, September 2017
Chicano Confidential
A View Through the Sociological Lens:
When the Mind of the Crowd
Takes Over the Mind of the Individual,
the Human Spirit Shines
By Sonny Boy Arias
Given today's cascade of catastrophes, I ponder on how disasters can change the course of history.
Southern Mexico just had an 8.1 earthquake two days ago. We know that the economic and political landscape of any country is permanently disrupted when hit by a serious hurricane, earthquake, flood, fire, or war event. It’s September 9, 2017, in the early morning on the West Coast, and Hurricane Irma with the strength of a Category 5 level threat is upon Florida, and a large part of the United States.
I am reminded of the time I was "on the ground" in Mexico City during my days as the Founding Project Director of the Binational English & SpanishTelecommunications Network (BESTNET). The apparent danger I was in didn’t occur to me from the view I had on the 11th floor of Hotel Crystal. I said to the maid, “Are you okay, are you afraid of another earthquake?” And she turned to me and said, “If you look around you will see that all the buildings that fell down were made by the government, yet Hotel Crystal still stands,” and then it struck me: all of our BESTNET staff were safe inside the hotel.
We witnessed trained First Responders from the Mexican Army dig frantically through the pancaked remains of the National Maternity and Pediatric Hospitals in Mexico City. Further on, we saw volunteers, mostly young boys between 12 and 20 years old, working to save doctors-in-training who were trapped in what had been the high rise dormitory of UNAM's medical school. There were very few survivors. A whole generation of Mexico's new doctors was gone.
First responders to Mexico earthquake,
September 2017 (CNN)
Following the 8.1 earthquake the next night, in spite of a magnitude 7.4 aftershock that sent us scrambling to get out of our hotel, we were able to meet with the Medical Director of that nine-hospital and medical school complex which had been completely destroyed by the quake.
Owing to our presence, the Director had quickly organized the first damage assessment of medical facilities and, within two days presented us with the first needs lists that enabled an effective response from the U.S through BESTNET. Although the Internet had not yet been popularized, we utilized BESTNET as a social network to communicate through DECNET, an early encapsulated privatized telecommunications network—a precursor of the Internet known as ARPANET, to communicate binationally. When all other forms of telecommunications were not working, BESTNET was up and running.
With our partners, they enlisted the personal jets of regional petroleum corporations to deliver the specifically requested medicines and supplies to Naucalpan's Red Cross Hospital. Ambulances began delivering victims immediately. There were hundreds of them.
Direct Relief donations began to arrive that same day. Volunteers received, sorted and dispersed the medicines, supplies and equipment to the hospital, while I worked on site to coordinate the response. Within just a few days, several emergency field hospitals were flown in, and set up nearby to supplement the hospital's capabilities. BESTNET’s consortia of over 20 binational partners were integrated into the over-all medical response social network.
I can’t help but think of the accounts and reflections we will hear about as Hurricane Irma looms forward in the next few hours. Living through earthquakes in California, the most recent massive fires and cliff slides in Big Sur, and hurricanes in Texas, I have some experience but don’t really know what it is like to be at the center of a major natural catastrophe.
Hurricane Irma, September 2017 (CNN)
Nature's forces can be very terrifying and even the strongest weep or feel impotent, yet what I do know is it brings out the best of the human spirit as well. I saw this in the many disaster volunteers and professionals we encountered in Mexico, California and Texas. The mind of the crowd (humanity) takes over the mind of the individual and it seems that everyone tries to help under these conditions.
Some people arise and become leaders in emergency situations, quickly mobilizing the best they know how, with steady head and purpose, while trying to figure out how to gain access to resources hundreds of miles away from human calamity, and observing them is all-inspiring and a demonstration of great human spirit! Leaders who rise up like this are amongst those many heroes who made a lasting contribution to saving the lives of those that had been spared death but needed medical care and attention, many doing so at the risk of their own lives.
Again, I can only imagine what our fellow humans in the Caribbean Islands have experienced and what Floridians will soon be going through because of Hurricane Irma. The destruction of all they have – can you imagine having to endure that? – will be the least of their lasting worries and fears as the hurricane closes ground on them.
We are all linked forever to the social network of humanity and to those who are asked without choice to face nature's unforgiving destructive forces and calamities, a choice which we, too, may one day have to face.
