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No Education No Life: How the Algebra Project Is Educating for Insurgency

By Paul Lauter
AlterNet

June 6, 2015 – Much of the debate going on in educational circles today concerns differing ideas about how students can accomplish certain agreed-upon goals. Mainly these consist of the 3 R’s—reading, riting and rithmatic—with a touch perhaps of American history. Some wish to provide teachers with greater scope, better resources, and fewer students in the classroom. Others, the multimillion dollar “reformers,” promote a regime of ceaseless testing, managerial authority, privatization, and “teacher-proof” curricula.

But suppose you conclude, based on observing the thousands of segregated Ferguson’s and Baltimore’s throughout the USA, that the huge number of students in schools of poverty are ill-served by these very goals, that poor, often black and Latino, students, even if they pass every test and climb into community colleges, will never—a few tokens aside—get an even break in 21st-century America. What then?

Can the goals of schooling themselves be transformed? Can schools become sites not of failure and exclusion, but of insurgency and transformation? Can the young people now marginalized, enraged, and trapped in disastrous institutions become agents of creativity and growth—and real learning?

Jay Gillen’s essential book, Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty shifts focus from the adults fighting about schooling to the students themselves as the key actors in their own education. The question Gillen addresses is how might we think about the ways students can, indeed must, organize themselves, those close to them, and the many others with whom they contend for a future.

At the center of Gillen’s treatise is his and his students’ experience with one of the three r’s, rithmatic, in the form of the Algebra Project. The Algebra Project was first devised by Bob Moses, a key figure in the efforts of the young organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to challenge and eliminate racial segregation in its most intransigent bastion, Mississippi, in the 1950s and 1960s. The Baltimore version of the Project has been highly successful in providing what Gillen calls a “crawl space” in which students begin to learn how to mobilize the organizational resources necessary to confront the school boards, politicians, and courts that stand in the way of their educational development.

Because educational and political authorities see math as vital to 21st-century schooling, they are willing to provide some funds to those who succeed in teaching it, and they interfere less with the process. Gillen puts it: “Math hides the student insurgency as it learns how to walk.” This approach differs from the admirable Mexican-American Studies program in Tucson, which was banned by Arizona lawmakers despite—or perhaps because of—its success in motivating and educating students to confront injustice.

A project seriously devoted to teaching math is insulated against the charge sometimes registered against radical education projects that they are indifferent to students of poverty learning the basics. Mathematical knowledge is, of course, a goal of the Algebra Project, just as the vote was the goal of SNCC organizing in Mississippi. The brilliant analogy between voter registration and learning algebra in school, which Gillen has derived from Bob Moses’ work, is apt, first, because young people are key to implementation. (Continued)

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Cleveland Uprising, Yet Another Battle Front For Justice

By Frank Chapman, Field Organizer
CAARPR (Chicago Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression)

First let us express our unconditional solidarity with the Cleveland protestors. Cleveland Officer Michael Brelo was a participant in a lynch style murder of two innocent Black people and the Judge, John P. O’Donnell let him go. So the Judge is just as guilty as the cop lynch mob. And our government is making claims in the international community that there is no human rights crisis in the United States when they should be prosecuting all these criminals in Cleveland who sit in positions of authority.

Some of my comrades in struggle tell me that Cleveland is just another example of the fact that there is no justice for victims of police crimes. That is true; there is no justice and our communities exist in a constant state of harassment, racial profiling and murderous assaults by the police. But this observation by itself does not capture the essence of the momentous events we are witnessing in Cleveland and throughout the land. We are not witnessing in Ferguson, New York, Madison, Baltimore and now Cleveland just more incidents of racist injustice we are witnessing in conjunction with these incidents a continuous stream of protests and uprisings. If we confine our thinking to “this is just another example” of a decrepit, racist system doing what it was designed to do then our focus is not on the momentous fact that presently there is a significant mass uprising against this unjust system so it can’t continue to do what it was designed to do.

As organizers and fighters for justice and freedom it is our job, our responsibility, to focus on the mass uprisings but not like chroniclers, pundits or distant observers. The establishment newspapers, media and official society as a whole continue to describe the uprisings as “riots, and breakdowns in law and order that cannot be tolerated”. They don’t understand that so long as the police murder our people with impunity there can be no peace between the people of oppressed communities and the police. The cries of our people have been (for decades) “No Justice, No Peace!” Today these words are not just in the mouths of a few, it is in the mouths of millions. As participants in the struggle we see in the present uprisings a turning point in the struggle against police crimes, we see the beginnings of an organized resistance movement of national and international significance. Yes this is the struggle developing before our very eyes and those of us immersed in these struggles need to pause for a moment and sake the dust out of our eyes so that we can clearly see the point that has been reached.

The unrestricted power of the police is presently being challenged in Ferguson, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Chicago and even in places we haven’t heard of by a mass demand for community control of the police. These are all different battle fronts with uneven advances toward the goal of empowering oppressed communities to hold the police accountable and to determine how their communities are policed.

We must pay close attention to the dynamics of all the present struggles. We must acknowledge where we have made advances and where there have been set backs. We must always be summing up our experiences and preparing for the next battle. We must keep before the people concrete political objectives like an all elected Civilian Police Accountability Council and consistently engage our people in this political struggle. We must focus on the solution part of the problem of social misery and racist injustice. We must see ourselves not just as victims of police tyranny but as freedom fighters, as strategists and tacticians in the struggle for democracy and freedom for our people.

We have entered an era of uprisings of the people where contradictions that have been ripening for decades (with Black people for centuries) are coming to light. The Black masses who have long been ignored by official society, and frequently miss led by pretended political saviors, are now entering upon the stage of history to claim their rightful place. We are learning in the dirt and blood of battle, as the world watches and often joins in solidarity with us, how to take necessary steps in the struggle against police tyranny. We have known the pain and agony of a cowardly and trivial pass of racist and political repression, we have crossed rivers of blood to get to this time and place in our movement where we say

NO MORE! THIS STOPS TODAY!

Iowa Working Families Summit Advances Push for Progressive Agenda

By Emily Foster
Campaign for America’s Future

May 25, 2015 – While well-heeled conservatives watched Republican presidential candidates make their pitches for support in an Iowa convention hall at the GOP’s Lincoln Dinner on May 16, grassroots progressives gathered in a much less lavish college auditorium to discuss pressing issues for America’s struggling middle class.

The Iowa State Campus University in Ames, Iowa, was where people from more than 50 organizations (including co-sponsors of groups endorsing CAF’s Populism 2015 Platform) gathered for the Iowa Working Families Summit. The summit had a huge turnout of more than 600 people from all over the state. Their focus was on showing that progressive policies, such as investing in infrastructure, raising the minimum wage and strengthening labor unions, are the key path to American prosperity.

Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America and vice president of the AFL-CIO, elaborated on the cohesive ideas shared at the conference by the participating groups, and said he has never seen a “better statewide effort” to advance ideas important to American workers. He also explained how important it was for the groups to “get out of the silos and into the streets.”

“It’s not just about the choices of our candidates” Cohen said when asked about the impact of the conference on the 2016 elections. “It’s also about how we’re building our agenda for the middle class.”

The keynote speaker – Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor (1993-1997) – noted that the U.S. economy has grown twice as large in the past 30 years, but wages for the middle class have gone “nowhere,” due to a political system that rewards the wealthiest Americans and corporations.

Essentially, we have an economy “that’s rigged against the average working people.”

Reich emphasized that Americans in the middle class need to “stand up together,” and rebuild the strength of the middle class through raising support for labor unions, education, and infrastructure.

Sue Dinsdale, executive director of the Iowa Citizen Action Network, said her organization plans to build on the ideas considered at this past weekend’s summit. Throughout the upcoming election cycle, the organization plans to “take the summit on the road – take ideas out into communities and towns throughout Iowa, and to organize similar events.”

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