News for educational workers.

NO WAR ON IRAQ

Antiwar activities at schools and colleges are spreading across the country. Below are just a few examples.

Following the lead of Qakland and San Francisco, Chicagoans Against War on Iraq (CAWI) initiated the Chicago City Council's 46-to-i vote opposing a pre-emptive US war on Iraq. CAWI is now encouraging broad discussion of the City Council antiwar resolution in the over 200 high schools in the metropolitan area. So far, the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union are eager to participate.

The Qakland Unified School District and Oakland Education Association sponsored enormously successful teachins on Iraq in the middle of January 2003. The San Francisco School Board also passed a resolution to hold teachins, with equal success. These antiwar activities were reported in the Oaland Tribune (http://www.oaklandtribune. com/cda/article/print/0,1674), the Associated Press (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi), and Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,73).

The National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) called on students on campuses across the U.S. to join in a one-day student strike on March 5, 2003. Titled "Books Not Bombs!" the strike focused on the real needs of Americans, especially education and decreasing financial aid opportunities, decreasing access to higher education, and increasing student debt, all while the U.S. military budget steadily increases. For details on the strike, and an essay "Why a National Student Strike?" see www.nyspc.net.

"Seeds of Protest Growing on College Campuses" describes individual students and how they are reacting to the new antiwar movement on campuses. Some students are slow to join, others are forming multicultural coalitions and some college presidents are struck by the speed of the antiwar mobilization (www.nytimes.com/ 2002/10/12/national/12PROT.html).

EDUCATION AND THE MILITARY

Of the thousands who attended the annual protests against the School of the Americas, the Fort Benning, Georgia, U.S. military program that trains Latin American soldiers and dictators, more than 90 people, including six nuns, were arrested for marching onto the military school grounds. About 6,500 protestors gathered for this 13th annual demonstration against School of the Americas.

Katha Pollitt (The Nation, November 11, 2002) describes how the New York City public schools found "$50,000 to send the parents or guardians of all 250,000 high school students a letter informing them that if they didn't want their child's name, address and phone number to be given to military recruiters they had to fill out a form (enclosed) stating they did not consent to the release of the data." According to the new No Child Left Behind Act, military recruiters may now request information on students' contact information. Combined with the Solomon Act, which denies funding to colleges that refuse military recruiting, the armed forces now have total access to the student population.

With the nation preparing for war, the military needs lawyers and the usual avenues for recruitment such as ROTC are no longer sufficient. However, many law schools have in the past refused official support to campus recruitment because of the military's antigay "don't ask, don't tell" policy which excludes anyone who is openly gay. Under the Solomon Amendment, however, federal funding may be withdrawn from any university with a law school not allowing military recruitment, which could amount to millions of dollars. At Yale, Harvard and Stanford law schools, recruiters are being allowed on campus, but gay and straight students are signing up for interviews during which they discuss the military's homophobic position (The Nation, November 4, 2002).

For a report on the U.S. military presence in public high schools, see the editorial in In These Times, January 6, 2003. About 500,000 students in about 3,000 high schools participate in Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) and such newly developed programs as the Young Marines and the Navy's Starbase-Atlantis. Not surprisingly, most of the JROTC programs are established in poor school districts of African American and Latino students, those most needing the social mobility the military "promises."

STUDENT RIFGTS

After September 11 and the passing of the USA Patriot Act, library staff can be ordered to submit all user records to law enforcement. The University of Illinois studied over 1000 libraries during the first two months of 2002 and found that government sources asked 85 universities and public libraries for information on students and patrons following the World Trade Center attacks (In These Times, November 25, 2002). Some librarians, meeting for an American Library Association convention in Philadelphia, "worry that the FBI has returned to routinely checking on reading habits of intellectuals, civil rights leaders and other Americans. Those tactics, common in the 1950s and 1960s, were occasionally used to brand people as Communists." The 10,000 librarians meeting for the convention are likely to draft a resolution condemning the opening of library records to government inspection (January 26, 2003, The Associated Press). In a specific case of library surveillance, Bill Olds reports, "I have uncovered informat ion that persuades me that the [FBI] has bugged computers at the Hartford Public Library. And it's probable that other libraries around the stare have also been bugged. It's an effort by the FBI to obtain leads that it believes may lead them to terrorists ... The FBI system apparently involves the installation of special software on the computers that lets the FBI copy a person's use of the Internet and email messages.... Circulation lists that show which books someone borrowed are also accessible to the government." For more information and the source of the above quotes, email [e-mail].

Two days after the Homeland Security Act passed 90-7 in the Senate, the following document began appearing on campuses across the country 'ATTENTION INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS FROM: Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. ... Special call-in registration for certain non-immigrants. All male nationals or citizens over the age of 16 ... are required to report... to be registered (photographed, fingerprinted, and interviewed under oath).... If you do not, you may be considered to be out of status and deportable" (email from [e-mail]). More than six Middle Eastern students in Colorado were jailed during December, 2002 for not taking enough classes as required by their student visas. The second round of registrations was held in January 2003 (The Associated Press, December 27, 2002). While FBI agents are asking colleges and universities for help in amassing extensive electronic dossiers on their foreign students and faculty, some universities are refusing to comply unless they are given a court order. The Department of Education and The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers offer guidance on educational privacy laws. General counsels at the University of Kentucky at Lexington and Morehead State University refused to devolve information on foreign students unless given a court order (The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2002).

A new web sire, www.noindoctrination.org, allows students nationwide to anonymously accuse their professors of political bias. Very few professors have dignified the web site with a rebuttal (http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/11/2002112605n.htm, November 26, 2002).

In "Privacy vs. Security on Campus" The New York Times (August 4, 2002) reports on how college and universities now collect a tremendous amount of data about their students.

David MacMichael, former CIA senior estimates officer and, since 1984, an outspoken critic of the agency, gave a talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) about the presence of secret government activity at colleges and universities and the responses of concerned students and faculty who organize opposition to such secret activities. Using RIT as an example, MacMichael reminded the audience that "by 1990 RIT was doing almost $2 million a year in CIA business, mostly in technical fields like document forgery, computer scanning, and construction of special furniture to conceal listening devices." For a copy of the talk, see CovertAction Quarterly, Summer 2002.

For a history of how drug testing arrived in American schools by way of the armed forces and the prison system, and how the Supreme Court recently made it legal for school districts to test students participating in any extracurricular activity, see In These Times, January 20, 2003.

GRASSROOTS EDUCATION

Popular educators from Latin America and the United States gathered in August of 2002 at the historic Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee with the theme of a counter-movement of "globalization from below," a way to educate against corporate globalization and discuss the future of popular education (Dollars and Sense, November/December 2002).

While Pennsylvania has adopted privatization as a solution for failing schools in Philadelphia, a statewide grassroots campaign called Good Schools Pennsylvania is working to focus on inequity in public funding. The highest-spending district currently spends over $14,000 per student while the lowest spends just over $5,000. Pennsylvania provides only 35 percent for funding for public education, so the rest of the money must come from property taxes, the source of the inequity in the first place. The group lobbies for changes in the tax system and greater access to all-day kindergarten, pre-kindergarten, smaller class size, advanced technology; and other advantages to improve student performance (In These Times, September 30, 2002).

In the November 2002 elections, even though conservative winners abounded, improvements in education remained a primary winner. "In state after state, while other ballot initiatives failed, voters showed strong support for smaller classes, afterschool programs, college scholarships, school construction and universal preschool, even when the price tag was daunting and there was no clear source for the money (The New York Times, November 10, 2002).

Reg Weaver, the newly elected president of the National Education Association, has wasted little time criticizing President Bush's education plan. Weaver says "the federal legislation sweeping through the nation's schools was created without input from the very people charged with carrying out the reform effort--teachers." For an interview with Weaver about the No Child Left Behind legislation, teacher unions, and vouchers, see In These Times, September 30, 2002.

SEX EDUCATION

In 1995, when still governor of Texas, George W. Bush signed a law making Texas the third state requiring schools to follow an abstinence-only sex education curriculum. Now, as President Bush, he is promoting abstinence-until-marriage programs nationwide. In the eight years since the original law, young people have been anything but abstinent. Teen pregnancy rates in Texas are above the national average and the number of Texas youths with sexually transmitted diseases has risen steadily (The Washington Post, January 21, 2003).

As an antidote to the increasing threat to reproductive rights and sensible sex education from the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress, Planned Parenthood has a year-old program funded by a state health grant in El Cerrito, California. Under this clinical program, teenagers have access to birth control, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, and a registered nurse on campus after classes one day a week. At El Cerrito High School, teen birth rates have dropped 7.5 percent (In These Times, January 6,2003).

INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION

The Pentagon's George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, located in Garmisch, Germany, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary after being created in 1992 when Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary in the first Bush administration. The Marshall Center's purpose was to reform former Soviet-bloc nations by teaching principals of democracy to military leaders of the new Eastern European governments. For critics, however, the Center is a waste of money, to the tune of about $400 million, and no serious academic work occurs there for either students or faculty. The Pentagon, with full knowledge of its troubled record, not only protects the school but also creates a near blackout of critical reporting about the Marshall Center (The Nation, October 7, 2002).

In response to suicide attacks on Tel Aviv, the Israeli army stormed the University of Birzeit and held 100 students in the freezing cold rain for four hours. Two students died. An international coalition of teaching unions condemned Israel for such aggression and for reportedly ordering the closing of three Palestinian universities, including Birzeit (The Guardian, January 14, 2003).

EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY

A report by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance found that nearly 170,000 highly qualified high school graduates would have to forgo college in Fall 2002 because of rising tuition and fees, a lack of adequate financial aid, and cutbacks in state aid programs and federal Pell grants (The Nation, August 19, 2002). For further exploration of these economic factors facing education, Dollars and Sense (January/February 2003) has a special section on education focusing on the prohibitive costs of higher education, for-profit schools, tuition hikes, and school funding gaps.

TESTING

A study commissioned by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice found that "rigorous testing that decides whether students graduate, teachers win bonuses and schools are shuttered, an approach already in place in more than half the nation, does little to improve achievement and may actually worsen academic performance and dropout rates." Performed by researchers at Arizona State University and financed by teachers' unions that have expressed skepticism about such tests, the study "found that while students show consistent improvement on these state exams, the opposite is typically true of their performance on other, independent measures of academic achievement." For example, after adopting these exams, twice as many states slipped against the national average on the SAT and the ACT as gained on it. Elementary math scores slipped and advanced placement tests were below the national average in over half of the states using high-stakes resting (The New York Times, December 28, 2002).

A report by the Center on Education Policy; considered by the authors to be the most comprehensive overview of graduation tests to date, found that "an increasing number of poor, black and Latino students are at risk of being denied diplomas because schools do a bad job of preparing them for the high-stakes exams." To view the entire report, go to www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14651-2002Aug13.html.

EDUCATION AND RACE

To commemorate what would have been Sidney Hook's 100th birthday, a group of admirers and scholars decided to honor him in New York in the fall of 2002 with a two-day symposium, "Sidney Hook Reconsidered." Some of the leading neoconservative invitees, like Irving Krisrol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Hilton Kramer were all delighted to come until they found out that Cornel West, who recently wrangled with Harvard over his position as a professor in the Afro-American Department, was also invited. Hook's conservative colleagues no longer wished to be associated with the event in any way; a kind of "boycott" denying the sort of free expression Hook always supported, even in his later conservative years (The New Yorker, July 8,2002).

"Here Comes the Neighborhood: Charlotte and the resegregation of America's public schools" (In These Times, January 20, 2003) uses Charlotte, North Carolina as an example of a school system that, less than two decades ago, was one of the most integrated but has now returned to a segregated system. Nationwide the trend is no better. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard shows that more than 70 percent of the nation's African American students attend primarily minority schools. The percent for Latinos is even higher.

The first national conference on Critical Race Scholarship and the University was held at the University of Toronto from April 25-27, 2002. The goals of the conference were to bring together Aboriginal scholars and scholars of color from across disciplines in order to reflect critically on the state of Canadian critical race scholarship; to examine the structures and conditions of knowledge production on race issues in Canadian universities; and to examme University partnerships with communities of color in order to explore the connections between scholarship and social change.

RESOURCES

Literacy Update (Summer 2002), a publication of the Literacy Assistance Center, has a lead article called "Addressing Diversity: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgendered Concerns in the Adult Education Classroom." For a copy, email [e-mail] or call 212-803-3332.

For the past 23 years, Education Week has been available for educational leaders interested in professional development. For more information, write Education Week, Suite 100, 6935 Arlington Road, Bethesda MD 20814.

The Fall 2002 issue of Rethinking Schools: An Urban Educational Journal has a special section on "Teaching to Make a Difference: Inspiration and tools to get the school year rolling." If you missed it last fall, check it our for this coming fall. www.rethinkingschools.org.

The War Resisters League's 20022003 "Literature List" can be seen at www.warresisters.org.

"Action for Better Schools"(Fall 2002), the newsletter of the National Coalition of Education Activists, describes the growth and renewal of NCEA and invites teachers to join NCEA in its efforts toward school reform. For mote information, see www.nceaonline.org.

The National Association for Humane and Environmental Education produces KIND News, an elementary-school classroom newspaper that teaches children the value of kindness toward people, animals, and the environment. NAHEE also publishes KIND Teacher, a resource book for grads K-6 of lessons and activities in humane, environmental, and character education. For more information, call 860-434-8666, ext. 17 or email [e-mail].