Trying to follow

I  recently re-read the book Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky. This book had originally been a spark in my interest in community organizing over five years ago. Alinsky, according to wikipedia, is consider the father of community organizing. He was fairly notorious from the 1930’s to the 1960’s for his organizing of labor and union groups to civil rights involvement. And his book is full of great and creative stories of his organizing days.

The truth is, Alinsky was way more radical then I could ever hope to be. He seemed to be a man of solid convictions, but also steadfastly committed to getting the job done. Here’s a powerful statement:

…in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s
personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of “personal salvation”; he doesn’t care enough for people to be “corrupted” for them. -p. 25

Wow, that is a challenging statement. He basically argues that any means is acceptable if it reaches your end. He uses Gandhi as an example, arguing that Gandhi was only non-violent because that was the best means to reach the end, and that after they won power from the British, Gandhi then was willing to use force (or at least didn’t argue against it) in maintaining that power.

Alinsky’s creative action and threats have included everything from tying up the bathrooms at O’hare to organizing proxies of stockholders to influence huge corporations. He was notorious for being one step ahead, and I hope I can glean some of his wisdom in future organizing.

Here are his rules for Tactics, which is a major component of the book:

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.
The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Some obviously need some explaining, but for that you’ll have to pick up the book. Enjoy.

“The fact is that it is not man’s “better nature” but his self-interest that demands that he be his brother’s keeper. We now live in a world where no man can have a loaf of bread while his neighbor has none. If he does not share his bread, he dare not sleep, for his neighbor will kill him. To eat and sleep in safety man must do the right thing, if for seemingly the wrong reasons, and be in practice his brother’s keeper.”

My opinion on Standardized testing didn’t come from the Alfie Kohn book I just read, but I think he does an excellent job of addressing many of testings downfalls. Here is a concise list of facts from Standardized Testing and it’s Victims:

1. Our children are tested to an extent that is unprecedented in our history and unparalleled anywhere else in the world.
2. Noninstructional factors explain most of the variance among test scores when schools or districts are compared.
3. Norm-referenced tests were never intended to measure the quality of learning or teaching.
4. Standardized-test scores often measure superficial thinking.
5. Virtually all specialists condemn the practice of giving standardized tests to children younger than 8 or 9 years old.
6. Virtually all relevant experts and organizations condemn the practice of basing important decisions, such as graduation or promotion, on the results of a single test.
7. The time, energy, and money that are being devoted to preparing students for standardized tests have to come from somewhere.
8. Many educators are leaving the field because of what is being done to schools in the name of “accountability” and “tougher standards.”

Basically the main point being made is that standardized testing is not only useless in it’s intended goal of “keeping schools accountable” it’s actually very detrimental to education as a whole (students, teachers, schools, etc). Kohn goes on to discuss some of the implications of this system, but I think this is enough for a discussion to begin. If you have any questions on the Facts above, read the article, there is a paragraph or so on each one and will give you a better understanding of the point being made.

What are your thoughts on standardized testing?

I read a fascinating book by Alfie Kohn last week, which included an essay titled, Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!” and it definitely made me think critically about how and why we praise kids. I’ll include a brief paragraph and then just the bullet point reasons (with some supporting text), but it would be good for you to read the whole article (it’s not very long).

Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely. Here’s why.

1. Manipulating children. Suppose you offer a verbal reward to reinforce the behavior of a two-year-old who eats without spilling, or a five-year-old who cleans up her art supplies. Who benefits from this? Is it possible that telling kids they’ve done a good job may have less to do with their emotional needs than with our convenience?
2. Creating praise junkies. Rather than bolstering a child’s self-esteem, praise may increase kids’ dependence on us. The more we say, “I like the way you….” or “Good ______ing,” the more kids come to rely on our evaluations, our decisions about what’s good and bad, rather than learning to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and dole out some more approval.
3. Stealing a child’s pleasure. Apart from the issue of dependence, a child deserves to take delight in her accomplishments, to feel pride in what she’s learned how to do. She also deserves to decide when to feel that way. Every time we say, “Good job!”, though, we’re telling a child how to feel.
4. Losing interest. “Good painting!” may get children to keep painting for as long as we keep watching and praising. But, warns Lilian Katz, one of the country’s leading authorities on early childhood education, “once attention is withdrawn, many kids won’t touch the activity again.” Indeed, an impressive body of scientific research has shown that the more we reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
5. Reducing achievement. As if it weren’t bad enough that “Good job!” can undermine independence, pleasure, and interest, it can also interfere with how good a job children actually do. Researchers keep finding that kids who are praised for doing well at a creative task tend to stumble at the next task – and they don’t do as well as children who weren’t praised to begin with.

You can read the complete article here.

I find myself agreeing with the majority of his points, though I think he might be taking it to an extreme (my opinion is still definitely out on this one). What are your thoughts?

How to Tell People They Sound Racist

First, if you haven’t heard of the famous 1968 Olympics Salute you should. Here’s a brief informative video about Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

Never heard of Peter Norman? I didn’t even know he had any active involvement in the famous “Salute”, but turns out he agreed to where a Olympians for Human Rights pin. I don’t know if he did anything else, but that simple act got him banned from the Australian Olympic team forever. Here’s a nicely done trailer for a documentary about him:

I’m not quite sure how “hot button” Education actually is in most people’s minds, but it’s an extremely important issue to me and thus one I felt worth to talk about in the political realm. Some of our earlier conversations got us into asking the question of what should be a government run entity. Some would say just military, police, maybe roads and a few other things. Others would say everything from healthcare to the airlines. In a conversation with someone last weekend it was mentioned that some of the skepticism about the benefit or success of government run programs has been what people look at as the “failure or public education.” Whether or not this is true (that it is a failure, or that that is where the skepticism comes from), I think it’s important to talk about as an issue and as it relates to politics.

I believe public education is necessary

The effort to privatize education and to create a voucher system are both things I feel are extremely dangerous for the good of our communities. On the surface they seem like possible solutions, but both in my gut and in the evidence and direction I’ve seen, they appear a dangerous alternative to community based public schools. The capitalist notion of competition can work wonders when your producing a product to sell, but education and a childs learning and developmental growth is not a product to sell or market. Children are our future and it is important that we share the responsibility of providing a solid education for all of them.

I do not believe these initiatives are driven by those valuing the best interest of our students, I think it is driven by corporations and industry greedily interested in expanding their profits. There is plenty of evidence to build conspiracy theories in this direction.

Inequality in public education perpetuates the racial disparities that have existed in our country since slavery

We are barely a generation past the Civil Rights movement that ushered in policy changes like Brown V. Board and the Civil Rights Act. Even with these national changes, inequality in public schools has been slow to change. There is both well documented statistics and reports as well as plenty of anecdotal stories of the poor public school systems in many of the urban communities in our country today.

I feel like the quiet undertone of the education debate is one of race, at least that has been my impression. When people talk about “failing schools” they are primarily pointing to inner city schools full of low-income minority students. And what I hear coming across in their critiques are racial stereotypes, biases and prejudices. Maybe it’s just me but I have a strong feeling it is not.

I just finished a book recently by Alfie Kohn who writes some fascinating insights into the education system. I’m going to quote some of what he’s written and try and create a dialog around in later this week.