Tag Archives: Gandhi
Nature’s Allies – Larry Nielsen
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Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World
Genre: Nature
Price: $27.99
Publish Date: February 2, 2017
Publisher: Island Press
Seller: INscribe Digital
It's easy to feel powerless in the face of big environmental challenges—but we need inspiration more than ever. With political leaders who deny climate change, species that are fighting for their very survival, and the planet's last places of wilderness growing smaller and smaller, what can a single person do? In Nature's Allies , Larry Nielsen uses the stories of conservation pioneers to show that through passion and perseverance, we can each be a positive force for change. In eight engaging and diverse biographies—John Muir, Ding Darling,Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Chico Mendes,Billy Frank Jr., Wangari Maathai, and Gro Harlem Brundtland—we meet individuals who have little in common except that they all made a lasting mark on our world. Some famous and some little known to readers, they spoke out to protect wilderness, wildlife, fisheries, rainforests, and wetlands. They fought for social justice and exposed polluting practices. They marched, wrote books, testified before Congress, performed acts of civil disobedience, and, in one case, were martyred for their defense of nature. Nature's Allies pays tribute to them all as it rallies a new generation of conservationists to follow in their footsteps. These vivid biographies are essential reading for anyone who wants to fight for the environmagainst today's political opposition. Nature's Allies will inspire students, conservationists, and nature lovers to speak up for nature and show the power of one person to make a difference.
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A Journalist Was Just Manhandled and Detained at a Trump Rally
Mother Jones
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Videos posted on Twitter earlier this afternoon show a photographer for Time magazine being violently thrown to the ground by a member of Donald Trump’s security team, possibly a US Secret Service agent. Morris, an award-winning photojournalist who has covered war zones, struggles back to his feet and is led away by several other security team members.
It’s not clear what precipitated the incident, which happened at a Trump rally at Virginia’s Radford University, but the confrontation appears to have occurred inside the enclosure usually reserved for members of the press.
This is how reporters are treated at Trump rallies pic.twitter.com/hMxuEoKVeG
— Gabby Morrongiello (@gabriellahope_)
A uniformed police offer and other men in suits can be seen leading Morris away from the scene.
Another video shows the journalist being handcuffed by uniformed police offers. Morris says he was briefly detained and then released.
Reporter at Trump Rally accuses SS agent of choking him. pic.twitter.com/Q4oigVt3qf
— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany)
Gabby Morrongiello, a reporter for the Washington Times who was covering the rally, tweeted that the incident occurred when the Time photographer attempted to leave the press corral to take photos of protesters.
A spokesman for the Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment about the episode.
Update: Another perspective on the takedown.
@mattdpearce Well it’s a good thing I went ahead and captured it then. pic.twitter.com/nHe4gNUvTH
— Jake Godin (@JakeGodin)
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A Journalist Was Just Manhandled and Detained at a Trump Rally
Posted in Anchor, FF, Gandhi, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta
Tagged another, donald, february, gabby-morrongiello, Gandhi, journalist, service, twitter, university, washington
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China Slashes Coal Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions for the Second Year in a Row
Mother Jones
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China is continuing to drag itself off coal—the dirty energy source that has made it the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. Figures published Sunday night by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed coal consumption dropping 3.7 percent in 2015, marking the second year in a row that the country has slashed coal use and greenhouse gas emissions.
To put that in perspective, Greenpeace East Asia says China’s drop in coal use over the past two years is equal to Japan’s total annual coal consumption—a trend the environmental group says could “far surpass” China’s commitments enshrined in the Paris climate deal reached in December. Last year, China’s carbon emissions dropped 1-2 percent, Greenpeace says, a decline the group attributes to both falling economic output from China’s heavy industries and an upswing in renewable energy use. China is widely expected to meet or surpass its goal of “peaking” emissions (the point at which the country begins to permanently reduce its greenhouse gas emissions) by 2030.
But the shift away from coal will also hit the country’s workers hard: The government plans to slash 1.8 million jobs in the steel and coal industries—about 15 percent of the workforce in those sectors, according to Reuters. The government says it has a $15.27 billion plan over 10 years to relocate these workers.
Today’s news follows China’s promise of a three-year moratorium on all new coal mines. The country also plans to shutter 1,000 existing coal mines this year alone, with deeper cuts to come. All of this has been accompanied by massive investments in wind and solar that have made the country’s renewable energy firms world-leaders in clean power.
But with China—the world’s second largest economy—there is always a disclaimer. It’s right to be skeptical of official economic and energy statistics coming from China, which some experts say can be subject to political pressure.
Still, there are some undeniable signs of progress. The last major coal-fired power station in Beijing is expected to close this year, welcome news to residents of a city that is frequently blanketed in toxic smog.
Originally posted here –
China Slashes Coal Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions for the Second Year in a Row
Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, Gandhi, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power
Tagged blue marble, climate desk, climate-change, december-last, environmental, Gandhi, government, japan, Ona, statistics, venta, world
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Why Detroit’s Teachers Are Suing Their School District
Mother Jones
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After six years of growing class sizes, pay cuts, the declining quality of student work, and more and more mold, roaches, and rodents in their classrooms, Detroit teachers have had enough. On Thursday, the Detroit Federation of Teachers and several parents filed a lawsuit against the city’s school district, claiming the poor school conditions threaten students’ health and asking a judge to fire Darnell Earley, a state-appointed “emergency manager” who previously worked as an emergency manager for the city of Flint.
A few weeks earlier, teachers staged some of the biggest “sick out” strikes in recent memory. Because it’s against the law for teachers to organize a strike in Michigan, the Detroit educators used their sick days to make their point. During the most recent strike on January 21, 88 of the city’s 104 schools were shut down.
For more than a decade, the system has been struggling with large deficits caused in part by post-industrial middle-class flight from cities and the subsequent decline in school revenues. In 2009, there were about 95,000 students in Detroit’s public schools; last year that number was 48,900. Even though the funding per student has gone up—from $12,935 nine years ago to $17,995 last year, according to Mother Jones calculations—the overall money for the school district is in decline because funding follows the students.
Despite years of cuts and increased class sizes, the “total net deficit” (a budget line that measures shortfalls against assets) has grown from $369 million in 2008 to $763 million in 2014.
Earley is the fourth emergency manager to oversee the Detroit Public School system in almost six years. After Gov. Rick Snyder took office in 2011, he greatly expanded the power of emergency managers. They can now end contracts (including collective bargaining agreements), sell off public assets, abolish or create new ordinances, and decide what authority elected officials—from mayors to city council schools board members—can have over schools. And an emergency manager can make these moves without having to worry about being voted out of office. As Paul Abowd reported for Mother Jones, Michigan’s emergency-manager law is considered by many to be more far-reaching than any other like it in the nation.
A few weeks before the strike, Earley sent a memorandum to all teachers instructing them to report all instances of employees advocating for “work stoppage.”
Under the rule of emergency management. #supportDPSteachers pic.twitter.com/NxIVgiI0Z4
— Detroitteach (@teachDetroit)
“Teachers call it the ‘snitch memo,'” Margaret Weertz, the editor of the Detroit Teacher, a magazine published by the Detroit Federation of Teachers, told Mother Jones. Despite the memo and a restraining-order request by the district against 23 teachers who took part in the strikes, the protests prompted an inspection of school buildings by Mayor Mike Duggan and a written promise from Earley to take care of the many code violations the inspection uncovered. (Earley’s former work in Flint isn’t helping teachers have faith in their boss and his promises, Weertz added.)
Earley also reportedly failed to meet with teachers in any public forums before the sick outs, says William Weir, a veteran social studies teacher with 19 years of experience in the Detroit Public School system under his belt. Weir tells Mother Jones that none of the four emergency managers he’s worked under “made any real efforts to engage with us.” He added, “The biggest changes and cuts in my school took place under Earley.”
Earley’s office didn’t return repeated phone calls from Mother Jones.
Weir was hired by the Schulze Academy for Technology and Arts in 2010 when the school’s scores were at rock bottom. Like much of the Detroit population, 82 percent of the students at Schulze are poor; only 12 percent of the kids’ parents in the neighborhood have at least a bachelor’s degree, according to Bridge Magazine, a nonprofit publication of the Center for Michigan. And yet, even though half of Weir’s students read below grade level and a third of the class has issues that range from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to learning disabilities, a few years ago his students won a statewide award for a research project on the lack of neighborhood grocery stores.
Image by Brian Widdis, courtesy of the Bridge Magazine
Over the last three years, the Schulze Academy has lost its music, arts, and gym classes, and Weir’s classes grew from 25 students to between 30 and 36 students. The teachers’ aides are gone, too. And this year, even though Weir is a social studies teacher, the principal asked him to teach English classes. The gym teacher became the social studies teacher.
Because of the school system situation—pay cuts, deteriorating conditions, class sizes—it’s simply difficult for Detroit to attract enough teachers. According to the union, there are 170 vacancies right now. “The English and math tests are the big tests that matter. It was either me or our gym teacher doing English,” Weir explained.
Citing the growing budget deficit, Weir says, “Why should we keep these emergency managers around if they are not doing their main job and the quality of student work is going down?”
Weir believes that Earley and previous emergency managers have added to the deficit by wasting resources on expensive consultants that haven’t increased students’ achievement. “Once we got these managers, we started getting these consultants,” Weir said. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was hired by Earely’s predecessor, Robert Bobb. The Detroit Metro Times reported that Bennett was paid close to $18,000 a month and brought at least six other consultants with her who were collectively paid about $700,000 for nine months of work.
“It’s not that our teachers don’t like professional development,” Weir explained. “But we have all of these successful, experienced teachers right here. Why not pay them to do coaching? They won’t leave like these consultants and they know our kids.”
In the same time, Detroit public school test scores in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, have remained the worst among large cities since 2009, according to Bridge Magazine.
“These consultants bring expensive books that the principal tells us to take home. And every year there is a new method. And they show you these videos with kids in a middle-class school, with 12 kids in the classroom, and tell us we should teach the same way,” Weir says, “Well, I have 35 kids and about half of them are about three grades behind.”
The consultant-led curriculum, Weir says, “is designed at the grade level and slightly above. Can you imagine being a child who is three grade levels behind? Knowing you’ll be a failure every day you come in?”
“It used to be you’d have a class where five or six kids were behind,” Weir says about the years before the schools started losing students to suburbs and charter schools. “Now you have five or six who are not behind,” he told Bridge Magazine.
About 100 new charter schools have been opened in the Detroit area since mid-’90s taking some of the most motivated and skilled students away from public schools.
Students at the Schulze Academy in Detroit protesting the loss of gym and music programs Photo courtesy of William Weir
Despite all this, Weir—who worked as a police officer before—says teaching is the best job he’s ever had. He wants to be able to meet the kids where they are, he says, providing as much individual tutoring as possible, a difficult task in a classroom with 35 kids and no teacher aides.
Earlier this year, in his first class as an English teacher, he taught the kids a course he helped create, called “Take a Stand.” Students read standard texts about Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez, and after weeks of reading and writing, Weir assigned them a research project he had designed himself.
“What would you like to take a stand on?” he asked 35 wiggly, excited 11- and 12-year-olds. “I really miss our gym and music classes,” one student replied. “Why don’t we have them anymore?” another student chimed in.
In the next few weeks, Weir’s students read studies about the cognitive, physical and emotional benefits of music and gym classes. They also researched articles about their school’s financial woes, budget cuts, and emergency managers—and they held a protest at the district and wrote letters to their federal, state, and local officials. The state superintendent of Michigan schools, Brian Whiston, responded to students by promising to restore the programs as soon as he can. Emergency Manager Darnell Earley still hasn’t replied.
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Buddhist Boot Camp – Timber Hawkeye
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Genre: Self-Improvement
Price: $1.99
Publish Date: February 19, 2013
Publisher: HarperOne
Seller: HarperCollins
Buddhism is all about training the mind, and boot camp is an ideal training method for this generation's short attention span. The chapters in this small book can be read in any order, and are simple and easy to understand. Each story, inspirational quote, and teaching offers mindfulness-enhancing techniques that anyone can relate to. You don't need to be a Buddhist to find the Buddha's teachings motivational. As the Dalai Lama says, "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are." So whether it's Mother Teresa's acts of charity, Gandhi's perseverance, or your aunt Betty's calm demeanor, as long as you're motivated to be better today than you were yesterday, it doesn't matter who inspires you. Regardless of religion, geographical region, race, ethnicity, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, flexibility, or vulnerability, if you do good you feel good, and if you do bad you feel bad. Buddhism isn't just about meditating. It's about rolling up your sleeves to relieve some of the suffering in the world. If you are ready to be a soldier of peace in the army of love, welcome to Buddhist Boot Camp!
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Posted in FF, Gandhi, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized
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"Sorry, I’m Not Taking This Test"
Mother Jones
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One hot morning in May, Kiana Hernandez came to class early. She stood still outside the door, intensely scanning each face in the morning rush of shoulders, hats, and backpacks. She felt anxious. For more than eight months she had been thinking about what she was about to do, but she didn’t want it to be a big scene.
As her English teacher approached the door, she blocked him with her petite, slender frame. Then, in a soft voice, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to take the test today.” The multiple-choice test that morning was one of 15 that year alone, and she’d found out it would be used primarily as part of her teacher’s job evaluation. She’d come into class, she said, but would spend the hour quietly studying.
From our September/October 2012 issue: “Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong”
The teacher stared at her dark-brown eyes in silence while students shuffled past. “That’s a mistake,” he said with a deep sigh.
By her own estimate, Kiana had spent about three months during each of her four years at University High in Orlando preparing for and taking standardized tests that determined everything from her GPA to her school’s fate. “These tests were cutting out class time,” she says. “We would stop whatever we were learning to prepare.” The spring of her senior year, she says, there were three whole months when she couldn’t get access to computers at school (she didn’t have one at home) to do homework or fill out college applications. They were always being used for testing.
Kiana had a 2.99 GPA and is heading to Otterbein University in Ohio this fall. She says she did well in regular classroom assignments and quizzes, but struggled with the standardized tests the district and state demanded. “Once you throw out the word ‘test,’ I freeze,” she tells me. “I get anxiety knowing that the tests count more than classwork or schoolwork. It’s a make or break kind of thing.”
Photo By Robyn Twomey
Junior year had been particularly hard. She’d failed the Florida reading test every year since sixth grade and had been placed in remedial classes where she was drilled on basic skills, like reading paragraphs to find the topic sentence and then filling in the right bubbles on a practice test. She didn’t get to read whole books like her peers in the regular class or practice her writing, analysis, and debating—skills she would need for the political science degree she dreamed of, or for the school board candidacy that she envisioned. (Sorting students into remedial classes, educational research shows, actually depresses achievement among African American and Latino students in many cases, yet it remains common practice.)
Kiana was living with her mother, and times were tough. Some days there was no food in the house. “The only thing that kept me going to school was my math teacher,” Kiana says. “The only place that I felt that I had worth was Mr. Katz’s class. That’s the thing that kept me going every day.”
On the news, Kiana saw pictures of students and parents carrying signs reading “Opt-Out: Boycott Standardized Testing.” Her high school didn’t have activists like that. In the library, Kiana made flyers that read: “Are you tired of taking time consuming and pointless tests? Boycott Benchmark Testing! When given the test, open the slip and do NOT pick up your pencil. Refuse to feed the system!” She passed them out to her classmates, but they were worried that opting out would hurt their GPAs.
Kiana talked about this with Mr. Katz, who regularly met with students who needed extra help during his lunch hour and after school. One day during their tutoring session, he mentioned Gandhi. Kiana went to the library and found some of Gandhi’s essays. She determined that what it took to make change was someone taking a personal stand.
Next, she researched state education rules and discovered that the end-of-course tests that Florida required in every subject were being used primarily for job evaluations. (She says one teacher told her: “Please take the test. My paycheck depends on it.”)
The English teacher started passing out the computer tablets used to take the test. He put one on her desk. Kiana raised her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’m not going to take this test.”
The noise dropped abruptly.
“You should wait until you are done with high school before you try to change the world,” the teacher said.
Kiana reached into her backpack and pulled out a notebook to prepare for her psychology final.
Critics have long warned that a flood of standardized testing is distorting American education. But in recent months, an unprecedented number of students like Kiana, along with teachers and parents across the country, have chosen to take matters into their own hands—by simply refusing to take part.
“This school year saw by far some of the largest numbers of families opting out from standardized tests in history,” Bob Schaeffer, director of public education at the advocacy group FairTest.org, told me this spring. In New Jersey, 15 percent of high school students chose not to take state tests in the 2014-15 school year. In New York state, only a few districts reported meeting 95 percent participation, the minimum required by federal rules, according to a New York Times investigation. There are opt-out activists in every state, and in Florida—thanks in part to the hardcore pro-testing policies implemented by former Gov. Jeb Bush—the backlash is especially severe.
“Half the counties in Florida have an opt-out group,” Cindy Hamilton, a parent and cofounder of Opt Out Orlando, told me. She said her group is not against tests per se, but against the process being taken out of the hands of teachers and schools and turned over to outside vendors. (As NPR’s Anya Kamenetz has documented, the testing industry, controlled by a handful of companies such as CBT/McGraw-Hill, Harcourt, and Pearson, has grown from $263 million worth of sales in 1997 to $2 billion.) “Our movement,” Hamilton said, “is civil disobedience against the gathering of all of this data by for-profit companies that doesn’t help students learn.”
Students in American public schools today take more standardized tests than their peers in any other industrialized country. A 2014 survey of 14 large districts by the Center for American Progress found that third- to eighth-graders take 10 standardized tests each year on average, and some take up to 20. By contrast, students in Europe rarely encounter multiple-choice questions in their national assessments and instead write essays that are graded by trained educators. Students in England, New Zealand, and Singapore are also evaluated through projects like presentations, science investigations, and collaborative assignments, designed to both mimic what professionals do in the real world and provide data on what students are learning.
In the past three years, I interviewed hundreds of students across the nation while reporting my book, Mission High. In schools both urban and suburban, affluent and struggling, students told me that preparing for such tests cut into things that advanced their education—projects, field trips, and electives like music or computer classes.
“Testing felt like such a waste,” Alexia Garcia, a 2013 graduate of Lincoln High in Portland, Oregon, told me. “It felt really irrelevant and disconnected from what we were doing in classes.” As a senior, Garcia became a lead organizer with the Portland Student Union, a coalition with members in 12 area high schools that has been one of the most visible student groups in the national student opt-out movement. Garcia, who is now at Vassar College, told me that this year—thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement—students are also increasingly talking about how standardized testing contributes to inequality and ultimately the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
Joshua Katz, Kiana Hernandez’s math teacher, says he tests his students using a variety of challenges and quizzes, but the only ones that officially count are the fill-in-the-bubble variety. “They tell me I must have data, and they don’t consider tests data unless it comes from multiple-choice,” Katz told me.
Every nine weeks, Katz has to stop whatever his students are doing and make time for the district’s benchmark tests measuring student progress toward the big Common Core exam in the spring. (Proponents of the Common Core standards, now in place in 43 states, promised fewer tests and less of a focus on multiple-choice. But most of the teachers told me there had been no change in the number of standardized assessments. “This year was a circus—16 weeks of testing scheduled at the high school level,” Katz said.)
And University High, whose neighborhood and student population is largely middle class, didn’t bear as heavy a load of tests and drills as its poorer counterparts: One recent study found that urban high school students spend 266 percent more time taking district-level exams than their suburban counterparts. That’s in part because the stakes for these schools are so high: Test scores determine not just how much funding a school will get, but whether it will be allowed to stay open at all. In response, some administrators have been taking desperate measures, including pushing the lowest-performing students out entirely. Suspensions have been growing across the country, especially among African American and Latino students, and many researchers correlate this with pressure to raise scores. And in the 2011-12 school year, the Government Accountability Office reported that officials in 33 states confirmed at least one instance of school staff flat-out cheating.
With so much controversy revolving around the effect of testing on struggling students and schools, it’s hard to remember that the movement’s original goal was to level the educational playing field. In 1965, as part of the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration sent extra federal funding to low-income schools, and in return asked for data to make sure the money was making an impact. As more states started using standardized tests in the 1970s and 1980s, urban education researchers were able to identify which schools were helping students of color and those from poor families achieve—giving the lie to the idea that these students couldn’t succeed.
By the late ’80s, many educators were pushing to deploy reliable, external data to measure student progress, a movement that culminated in the bipartisan support for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative. With NCLB, states were required to gather and analyze vast amounts of testing data by race, ethnicity, and class. Researchers soon started mining this information, convinced that they could reveal what really worked in education. One 2006 study found that putting students in a top-rated teacher’s class raised average scores by 5 percentage points. Another connected increases in test scores to higher earning levels, lower pregnancy rates, and higher college acceptance rates.
Findings like this encouraged two major beliefs in policy circles: First, that test scores were a key factor in how students would do later in life. And second, that the best way to improve teaching was to reward the top performers and fire the bottom ones, based in large part on their students’ scores. High-profile charter schools like KIPP and Uncommon Schools, whose model relied in part on avoiding teacher tenure, helped cement that belief.
By 2009, President Barack Obama used his Race to the Top initiative to promote using test scores to hire, fire, and compensate teachers. Today, 35 states require teacher evaluations to include these scores as a factor—and many states have introduced new tests just for this purpose. Until this year, Florida used end-of-course tests in virtually every subject to give bonuses to some teachers and punish others. When Kiana’s math teacher, Joshua Katz, was downgraded to “effective” from “highly effective” this year, his salary was slated to drop by $1,100.
But while using student test scores to rate teachers may seem intuitive, researchers say it actually flies in the face of the evidence: Decades of data indicates that better results come not from hiring innately better teachers, but from helping them improve through constant training and feedback. Perhaps that’s why no other nation in the world uses annual, standardized tests to set teacher salaries. (Other countries use test scores to push teachers to improve, but not to punish them.)
Nor do other developed nations have such a drastic gap in funding between rich and poor schools. Mission High School in San Francisco, for example, spends $9,780 per student, while schools in Palo Alto, just 30 miles away, spend $14,995. New York spends $19,818 per student, California just $9,220. The per student funding gap between rich and poor schools nationwide has grown 44 percent in the last decade—even as the number of needy students has grown. In 2013, for the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of US public school students came from low-income families.
In July, EdBuild released an analysis of child poverty in some 13,000 school districts nationwide. In the districts outlined in red, more than 40 percent of students came from impoverished households. EdBuild
All this presents a significant risk for a country that has relied on schools as the primary avenue for social mobility. Prudence L. Carter, a professor in the school of education at Stanford University, says in fact, kids have very different opportunities: Affluent students ride through the education system in what amounts to a high-speed elevator supported by well-paid teachers, intellectually challenging classes, and private tutors. Middle-class kids are on an escalator. Their parents may struggle to keep up, but still can access resources to help their children prepare for college. And then there are low-income students like Kiana, who are left running up a staircase with missing steps and no handrails.
When it comes to standardized testing, this means that schools that educate low-income students start out at a disadvantage: They are much more likely to have lower-paid and less-qualified teachers; lack college preparatory classes, books, and supplies; and offer fewer arts and sports programs. When their students don’t make it to the same “proficiency” benchmarks on yearly tests as their wealthier counterparts, politicians label them and their teachers as “failing.” And that begins a vicious cycle: Struggling students are pushed into remedial classes that zero in on what’s measured on the tests, further limiting their opportunities to learn the advanced skills they’ll need in college or the workplace.
“What I observed was egregious,” Ceresta Smith, a 26-year veteran teacher in Miami and a cofounder of United Opt Out National, told me about a predominantly African American, low-income school where she worked from 2008 to 2010. Some teachers tried to incorporate writing and intellectually engaging readings, she said, but most resorted to remediation of basic skills. “Students are reading random passages and practice picking the correct multiple-choice. It was very separate and unequal.”
The proponents of testing-based reform like to argue that—while imperfect—the current approach has been working better than any other, leading to rising graduation rates and standardized test scores. But as Stanford researcher Linda Darling-Hammond has pointed out, there’s a bit of circular logic at work here: A system singularly focused on producing better test scores leads to…better test scores. Meanwhile, though, American students’ performance compared to other nations—on tests that measure skills and knowledge more broadly—remained flat or declined between 2000 and 2012.
Most importantly, test-based accountability is failing on its most important mandate—eliminating the achievement gap between different groups of students. While racial gaps have narrowed slightly since 2001, they remain stubbornly large. The gaps in math and reading for African American and Latino students shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind—when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores. In the 1970s and ’80s, the achievement gap between black and white 13-year-olds was cut roughly in half nationwide. In the mid-’70s, the rates at which white, black, and Latino graduates attended college reached parity for the first and only time.
In the decades since, the encouraging news is that the black-white achievement gap has kept slowly shrinking. But at the same time, the gap between students from poor and affluent families has widened into a chasm, growing by 40 percent between 1985 and 2001. Sean Reardon, a Stanford professor who focuses on poverty and inequality in education, says this is not surprising—affluent families can spend more than ever on enrichment activities. He argues it’s up to government to level the playing field, by making sure low-income students get the opportunity to succeed. But in many places, government is instead pulling back from the civil rights era’s focus on educational inequality.
Today, many students of color are once again going to segregated, high-poverty schools that struggle to offer advanced classes and attract teachers and counselors. Some 40 percent of black and Latino students now are in schools at which 90 to 100 percent of the student body are kids of color.
To be sure, the test-based reform movement still has powerful proponents—politicians like Jeb Bush and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, philanthropists like Bill Gates, some teachers, and prominent civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and National Council of La Raza. “For the civil rights community, data provide the power to advocate for greater equality under the law,” a coalition of 12 groups argued in a recent joint statement criticizing the opt-out movement. “We cannot fix what we cannot measure.” Some teachers I spoke to echoed that message: Lauren Fine, an elementary-school teacher in Denver, believes that without the standards and annual assessments, we won’t be able to maintain “a high bar for every student.” President Barack Obama agrees with this line of reasoning and recently said that as Congress debates rewriting the No Child Left Behind law, he won’t sign any bills that don’t include requirements for annual testing, accountability, and state interventions.
But a growing list of others, from the students and parents in the opt-out movement to youth and labor groups and education researchers, are arguing that the push for standardized testing has in fact exacerbated inequities. Journey for Justice is a coalition of grassroots youth and parent groups in 21 cities. “Our concern is that the people who are most directly impacted by these education policies are never consulted,” director Jitu Brown told me.
Brown, who saw firsthand the impact of the recent closures of 50 low-scoring schools in his native Chicago, says politicians should look at the real world rather than listening to “education entrepreneurs who are implementing mediocre interventions in our communities.” In Chicago, he notes, “you had young people being displaced as the one stable institution in our community was eliminated. You had the massive firing of black teachers, as if they were the problem—when equity never existed.”
So assume for a moment that the opt-outers succeed: We’d still need ways to improve teaching, assess what students are learning, and reduce the achievement gaps. How should that happen instead?
I found some answers as I spent two years in classrooms with Pirette McKamey, a highly respected teacher at Mission High, and Ajanee Greene, a bright, resilient senior who had just finished a powerful 10-page research paper—even though, as a freshman, she got a D in English at her old school. As I watched McKamey and her colleagues design lesson plans and pore over Ajanee’s writing together, I realized that a focus on accountability doesn’t have to sacrifice teachers’ growth or students’ love of learning.
One winter morning in 2013, McKamey and seven other teachers sat in an empty classroom at Mission High. A light February rain drummed against the windows as Shideh Etaat passed around roasted almonds and talked about her weekend plans. The teachers had convened for one of their three weekly planning hours. This one was dedicated to in-depth case studies of individual students’ math worksheets, essay drafts, and written notes for science lab investigations.
Etaat, a first-year English teacher, had brought in a poem written by a junior named Jay, who came to California from Thailand two years ago. “Jay is that student who will say, ‘Oh, I don’t write poetry. I’m not creative,'” Etaat said. “But I find that English learners are able to see outside of the box. They have an ability to play with language in this really creative way.”
Etaat explained that she’d given her students photos of five different pairs of shoes. She’d asked them to pick a pair they would not wear, and to create a character to go with them. She passed out the “scaffolding” documentation for her lesson—directions for how to develop a character, some sample stanzas, a poem she had written herself based on the assignment. Educational theorists call this teaching in the “zone of proximal development“: that place where we can’t progress by ourselves, but we can with targeted assistance and constructive feedback.
The wind whistled through the old window frames as the teachers read Jay’s poem.
My shoes look like a pair of cheap running shoes
Full of sweat and heat
In his shoes, he works hard every day
He sees himself working in the mud
And sleeping on the street with other hobos
In my shoes, I see a student running in the hallway
Trying to get his lunch as early as possible
In his shoes, he hears the heavy metal noise of his hammer
Striking at that thick jet black rock until it resolves
In my shoes, I hear the noisy noise coming out of the classroom
The sound of electronic devices and ceaseless hip hop music
In his shoes, he feels pain coming from his body,
The pain of loneliness and betrayal.
“It’s very hard to scaffold creativity just right,” said Dayna Soares, a second-year math teacher. “Sometimes teachers give you a blank paper and that’s too much freedom. I’m always struggling with this—how can I give my students just enough structure, but in a way that doesn’t make them fill in the blanks?”
They talked about the craft of grading and commenting on student work. When teachers provide feedback on writing, research shows, many default to a “what’s wrong with this paper” strategy, instead of writing responses that promote growth. “Every time a student does an assignment, they are communicating something about their thinking,” McKamey told the group. “And even if it’s far away from what I thought they’d do, they are still communicating the ways they are putting the pieces together. There are so many opportunities to miss certain students and not see them, not hear them, shut them down. It takes a lot of skill, experience, and patience not to do that.” Looking over multiple-choice questions doesn’t help teachers detect these signals, McKamey told me, because they won’t tell you where and why someone got stuck.
In other words: It’s not just students who miss out on a chance to learn when standardized tests set the pace. Teachers, too, lose opportunities to improve their craft and professional judgment—for example, detecting where their students’ thinking hits what McKamey calls a “knot” and figuring out how they can improve. That’s when many fall back on the only available option: repetitive instruction, more testing, and remediation.
What’s essential for teachers to grow, McKamey told me, is collaboration with fellow professionals—and that mutual accountability, she said, is more effective than test scores or even financial bonuses. “What teachers care about,” she said, “is the feedback they get from students, parents, and peers they respect.”
Max Anders, a first-year English teacher, told me that working with McKamey helped him learn how to teach every student individually. “My understanding before was you give work for the middle,” explained Anders, who was teaching Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” at the time. “But the best approach is to give rigorous work that challenges everyone and learn how to break it up and scaffold it just right.”
McKamey’s small, sunlit office is lined with binders filled with the lesson plans she has built up over the last 27 years of teaching, including one for Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War memoir, The Things They Carried. Every year she teaches the novel, McKamey adds material to the binder, because she learns new things from her students and colleagues each time. Underneath her heavy desk, three pairs of shoes sit neatly lined up: black loafers and Mary Janes for teaching and coaching, light-gray sneakers for dance class after school.
I talked to Ajanee Greene in that office one afternoon. Independent and astute, Ajanee wrote the strongest research papers in the English classes I’d been observing. She was about to become the first in her family to graduate from high school and had started filling out college applications.
From the moment she stepped into McKamey’s classroom, Ajanee told me, she started to feel like an intelligent person. “By middle school, I could tell which teacher is looking at my grades and test scores and is just teaching me basics without opportunities to challenge myself. Just because I struggle with some grammar rules doesn’t mean I can’t think deeply. Ms. McKamey believed in me and then pushed me to work really, really hard.”
Ajanee and McKamey had just finished their lunch meeting, an occasional check-in to talk about life and school. As McKamey left for a meeting, Ajanee told me that she’d chosen the topic for her paper—titled “Black on Black Violence: Why We Do This to Ourselves”—because she’d lost her stepfather and several close friends to gun violence.
For the paper, Ajanee had read and analyzed about 20 articles and studies and, with McKamey’s encouragement, had interviewed her neighbors and added her own point of view. She didn’t like how the local paper described her stepfather as a “flashy” man who had recently purchased a piece of new jewelry—implying, it seemed to her, that greed might have been the reason he’d been shot.
Ajanee wanted her readers to understand that her stepdad was a dedicated father of four who was home with his seven-year-old nephew when he was killed. The violence didn’t just affect the victims; it scarred the survivors, Ajanee wrote. “Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone can inflict. The violence stays with families and becomes a part of their lives. Nobody feels the same and family relationships get strained.” She also added a section on the history of slavery and Jim Crow, writing, “The epidemic of African Americans killing each other didn’t start because we just hate each other. It started when we began to believe the things other races said about us and began to hate ourselves.”
“When you go to school, you learn about math and reading, but you rarely learn new ways of looking and thinking about life,” Ajanee explained. “Learning the skills to research and write this paper helped me learn so much: how many people are dying, why they are dying, how to tell the stories of others and learn about the world. It gave me a better understanding.”
She got an A- for the paper. “When they told me the grade, I thought it must have been a mistake,” she says—she’d read her classmates’ drafts and didn’t think hers measured up. “Before this, the longest paper I wrote was three pages. Now, if I have to write 15 pages in college next year, I feel ready,” she told me. (That was in 2013. This year, after two years in community college, Ajanee transferred to Jackson State University in Mississippi.)
But as politicians, economists, and philanthropists focus on ever more sophisticated number crunching, opportunities for teachers to nurture students’ intellect the way McKamey does have grown more limited. Mission High teachers never complained to me about being overworked, but they worked more hours than anyone I met in the corporate world. For more than a decade, McKamey woke up at 5 a.m., got to school by 6:30, left for dance class at 4:30 p.m., and then worked almost every evening and every Sunday. Most teachers I met worked with students after school and colleagues on weekends, without pay.
And yet the story of Mission High holds out hope for a different kind of school reform—one that builds on resources that already exist in thousands of schools and doesn’t require spending a dime on the next generation of tests, software, or teacher evaluation forms. That’s because Mission has already been through exactly the kind of harsh treatment for “failing” schools that the standardized-testing movement supports—and then it found another way.
In the mid-1990s, Mission had rock-bottom test scores and was targeted by the district for “reconstitution.” The principal was removed and half the teachers were reassigned. Yet in 2001, the school once again had some of the lowest test scores and attendance rates among all of San Francisco’s high schools, and more teachers were leaving it than almost any other school in the district.
Then Mission High tried something new. Instead of bringing in consultants, it mobilized a small group of teachers—including McKamey—to lead reforms on their own. It increased paid time for them to plan lessons together, design assessments, and analyze outcomes. The teachers made videos of students talking about what kind of instruction helped them succeed. They read research about how integrated classes, personalized teaching, and culturally relevant curriculum increased achievement. They asked successful teachers to coach colleagues who needed help.
To focus their efforts and keep each other accountable, McKamey and her colleagues regularly pore over data, both qualitative and quantitative. They look at achievement gaps, attendance, referrals, graduation rates, and test scores. They also walk through classrooms, delve into student work, and interview teachers and students. “We are always looking at and trying to understand different kinds of data, including anecdotal,” McKamey told me. “Then we can settle on something we need to concentrate on each year.” One year, social studies teachers discovered that too many students didn’t fully grasp the difference between summarizing a text versus analyzing it, so they spent the next year building more opportunities to practice those skills. The math department, meanwhile, focused on one-on-one coaching to help set up effective group work.
By contrast, back in Florida, Katz told me that the typical way he receives professional development entails an observation of a model lesson by a district consultant demonstrating how to teach Common Core standards. While University High struggles to keep teachers, Mission High has very low attrition. It is no longer considered a “hard-to-staff” school by the district. “Mission High is famous at the district because it is known as a learning community and a good, supportive place to work,” Soares told me. “It’s hard to get a job here.”
The school does well on a bevy of other metrics, as well. The graduation rate went from among the lowest in the district, at 60 percent, to 82 percent; the graduation rate for African American students was 20 percent higher than the district average that year. Even though close to 40 percent of students are English learners and 75 percent are poor, college enrollment rose from 55 percent in 2007 to 74 percent by 2013. Suspensions plummeted, and in the annual student and parent satisfaction survey from 2013, close to 90 percent said they liked the school and would recommend it to others.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges. Standardized test scores went up 86 points, to 641 (out of 1,000) in 2012, but that was still far from California’s target for all schools of 800. The numbers of African American and Latino students in AP math and science classes don’t fully mirror the student body, and their passing rates on the California high school exit exam went down in 2013 and 2014. The work continues, but so does the commitment of teachers to keep at it. “No one here does 7:45 to 3:10 and then calls it quits,” science teacher Becky Fulop, who has worked at Mission High for more than a decade, told me. “That by itself doesn’t necessarily make teachers effective, but the dedication here is extraordinarily high.”
Nationally, there are thousands of struggling schools like Mission where teachers are engaged in similar hard, messy, and slow work. What if instead of spending more money on new rounds of tests, we focused on their ability to learn and lead on the job?
No country has ever turned around its educational achievement by increasing standardized tests, according to research conducted by Lant Pritchett at the Center for Global Development. The best systems, it turns out, invest in supporting accountability at the school level—like those teacher meetings at Mission High.
“It’s always an attempt to hijack the effort by the teacher to think about education,” McKamey told me one morning as we talked about the dozens of reform efforts she’s seen come and go in 27 years of working in inner-city schools. The only thing none of the politicians, consultants, and philanthropists who came in to fix education ever tried, she said, was a systemic commitment to support teachers as leaders in closing the achievement gap, one classroom at a time.
“Let me remind you what analysis is,” she said a few hours later, standing in the middle of her class with those black leather loafers from under her desk. “When I was little, I used a hammer and screwdriver to crack a golf ball open. As I cracked that glossy plastic open, I saw rubber bands. And I went, ‘Ha! I didn’t know there were rubber bands in golf balls. I wonder what’s inside other balls?’ It made me curious about the world. So we are doing the same thing. We’ll analyze the author’s words to dig in deeper.”
The 25 seniors had just finished reading a chapter from The Things They Carried titled “The Man I Killed.” When they were done, McKamey asked them to pick out a quote they found intriguing.
David, a shy, reflective teenager whose face lit up when the class read poetry, raised his hand:
“He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole.”
“What do you notice in this passage?” McKamey probed.
“The man the narrator killed is the same age as him,” Roberto commented.
“Exactly,” she replied. “Now you are one step deeper. What do I feel inside when I think of that?”
“Guilt, regret,” Ajanee jumped in.
“That’s right,” McKamey commented. “I personally would use the word compassion. But what you said is 100 percent correct. And what does that do when we realize that this man is the same age as us?”
“It makes me think that he’s young, likes girls, probably doesn’t want to fight in a war,” Roberto said.
“Exactly. Now take that even deeper.”
“It’s like he is killing himself?” Roberto said more hesitantly, glancing at her for affirmation.
“Perfect! Now you made a connection,” McKamey said, excitement in her voice. “That’s what this quote is really about. Now, why is O’Brien saying ‘star-shaped hole’? Why not ‘peanut-shaped’ hole?”
Ajanee raised her hand. “The image in his mind is burned.”
“Exactly!” McKamey replied. “O’Brien wants us to keep that same image in mind that he had as a young soldier in his mind. It’s the kind of image you never forget.”
Originally from:
How A Leaderless Climate Change Movement Can Survive
Mother Jones
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
The history we grow up with shapes our sense of reality—it’s hard to shake. If you were young during the fight against Nazism, war seems a different, more virtuous animal than if you came of age during Vietnam. I was born in 1960, and so the first great political character of my life was Martin Luther King, Jr. I had a shadowy, child’s sense of him when he was still alive, and then a mythic one as his legend grew; after all, he had a national holiday. As a result, I think, I imagined that he set the template for how great movements worked. They had a leader, capital L.
As time went on, I learned enough about the civil rights movement to know it was much more than Dr. King. There were other great figures, from Ella Baker and Medgar Evers to Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X, and there were tens of thousands more whom history doesn’t remember but who deserve great credit. And yet one’s early sense is hard to dislodge: the civil rights movement had his face on it; Gandhi carried the fight against empire; Susan B. Anthony, the battle for suffrage.
Which is why it’s a little disconcerting to look around and realize that most of the movements of the moment—even highly successful ones like the fight for gay marriage or immigrant’s rights—don’t really have easily discernible leaders. I know that there are highly capable people who have worked overtime for decades to make these movements succeed, and that they are well known to those within the struggle, but there aren’t particular people that the public at large identifies as the face of the fight. The world has changed in this way, and for the better.
It’s true, too, in the battle where I’ve spent most of my life: the fight to slow climate change and hence give the planet some margin for survival. We actually had a charismatic leader in Al Gore, but he was almost the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, a politician makes a problematic leader for a grassroots movement because boldness is hard when you still envision higher office; for another, even as he won the Nobel Prize for his remarkable work in spreading climate science, the other side used every trick and every dollar at their disposal to bring him down. He remains a vital figure in the rest of the world (partly because there he is perceived less as a politician than as a prophet), but at home his power to shape the fight has been diminished.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the movement is diminished. In fact, it’s never been stronger. In the last few years, it has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone pipeline, convinced a wide swath of American institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel stocks, and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas. It may not be winning the way gay marriage has won, but the movement itself continues to grow quickly, and it’s starting to claim some victories.
That’s not despite its lack of clearly identifiable leaders, I think. It’s because of it.
A Movement for a New Planet
We live in a different world from that of the civil rights movement. Save perhaps for the spectacle of presidential elections, there’s no way for individual human beings to draw the same kind of focused and sustained attention they did back then. At the moment, you could make the three evening newscasts and the cover of Time (not Newsweek, alas) and still not connect with most people. Our focus is fragmented and segmented, which may be a boon or a problem, but mostly it’s just a fact. Our attention is dispersed.
When we started 350.org five years ago, we dimly recognized this new planetary architecture. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a central place—the Mall in Washington, D.C.—for a protest, we staged 24 hours of rallies around the planet: 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called “the most widespread of day of political action in the planet’s history.” And we’ve gone on to do more of the same—about 20,000 demonstrations in every country but North Korea.
Part of me, though, continued to imagine that a real movement looked like the ones I’d grown up watching—or maybe some part of me wanted the glory of being a leader. In any event, I’ve spent the last few years in constant motion around the country and the Earth. I’d come to think of myself as a “leader,” and indeed my forthcoming book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, reflects on that growing sense of identity.
However, in recent months—and it’s the curse of an author that sometimes you change your mind after your book is in type—I’ve come to like the idea of capital L leaders less and less. It seems to me to miss the particular promise of this moment: that we could conceive of, and pursue, movements in new ways.
For environmentalists, we have a useful analogy close at hand. We’re struggling to replace a brittle, top-heavy energy system, where a few huge power plants provide our electricity, with a dispersed and lightweight grid, where 10 million solar arrays on 10 million rooftops are linked together. The engineers call this “distributed generation,” and it comes with a myriad of benefits. It’s not as prone to catastrophic failure, for one. And it can make use of dispersed energy, instead of relying on a few pools of concentrated fuel. The same principle, it seems to me, applies to movements.
In the last few weeks, for instance, 350.org helped support a nationwide series of rallies called Summerheat. We didn’t organize them ourselves. We knew great environmental justice groups all over the country, and we knew we could highlight their work, while making links between, say, standing up to a toxic Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, and standing up to the challenge of climate change.
From the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, where a tar-sands pipeline is proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is planned, from Utah’s Colorado Plateau, where the first US tar-sands mine has been proposed, to the coal-fired power plant at Brayton Point on the Massachusetts coast and the fracking wells of rural Ohio—Summerheat demonstrated the local depth and global reach of this emerging fossil fuel resistance. I’ve had the pleasure of going to talk at all these places and more besides, but I wasn’t crucial to any of them. I was, at best, a pollinator, not a queen bee.
Or consider a slightly older fight. In 2012, the Boston Globe magazine put a picture of me on its cover under the headline: “The Man Who Crushed the Keystone Pipeline.” I’ve got an all-too-healthy ego, but even I knew that it was over the top. I’d played a role in the fight, writing the letter that asked people to come to Washington to resist the pipeline, but it was effective because I’d gotten a dozen friends to sign it with me. And I’d been one of 1,253 people who went to jail in what was the largest civil disobedience action in this country in years. It was their combined witness that got the ball rolling. And once it was rolling, the Keystone campaign became the exact model for the sort of loosely-linked well-distributed power system I’ve been describing.
The big environmental groups played key roles, supplying lots of data and information, while keeping track of straying members of Congress. Among them were the National Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and the National Wildlife Federation, none spending time looking for credit, all pitching in. The Sierra Club played a crucial role in pulling together the biggest climate rally yet, last February’s convergence on the Mall in Washington.
Organizations and individuals on the ground were no less crucial: the indigenous groups in Alberta and elsewhere that started the fight against the pipeline which was to bring Canadian tar sands to the US Gulf Coast graciously welcomed the rest of us, without complaining about how late we were. Then there were the ranchers and farmers of Nebraska, who roused a whole stadium of football fans at a Cornhuskers game to boo a pipeline commercial; the scientists who wrote letters, the religious leaders who conducted prayer vigils. And don’t forget the bloggers who helped make sense of it all for us. One upstart website even won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the struggle.
Non-experts quickly educated themselves on the subject, becoming specialists in the corruption of the State Department process that was to okay the building of that pipeline or in the chemical composition of the bitumen that would flow through it. CREDO (half an activist organization, half a cell phone company), as well as Rainforest Action Network and The Other 98%, signed up 75,000 people pledged to civil disobedience if the pipeline were to get presidential approval.
And then there was the Hip Hop Caucus, whose head Lennox Yearwood has roused one big crowd after another, and the labor unions—nurses and transit workers, for instance—who have had the courage to stand up to the pipeline workers’ union which would benefit from the small number of jobs to be created if Keystone were built. Then there are groups of Kids Against KXL, and even a recent grandparents’ march from Camp David to the White House. Some of the most effective resistance has come from groups like Rising Tide and the Tarsands Blockade in Texas, which have organized epic tree-sitting protests to slow construction of the southern portion of the pipeline.
The Indigenous Environmental Network has been every bit as effective in demonstrating to banks the folly of investing in Albertan tar sands production. First Nations people and British Columbians have even blocked a proposed pipeline that would take those same tar sands to the Pacific Ocean for shipping to Asia, just as inspired activists have kept the particularly carbon-dirty oil out of the European Union.
We don’t know if we’ll win the northern half of the Keystone fight or not, although President Obama’s recent pledge to decide whether it should be built—his is the ultimate decision—based on how much carbon dioxide it could put into the atmosphere means that he has no good-faith way of approving it. However, it’s already clear that this kind of full-spectrum resistance has the ability to take on the huge bundles of cash that are the energy industry’s sole argument.
What the Elders Said
This sprawling campaign exemplifies the only kind of movement that will ever be able to stand up to the power of the energy giants, the richest industry the planet has ever known. In fact, any movement that hopes to head off the worst future depredations of climate change will have to get much, much larger, incorporating among other obvious allies those in the human rights and social justice arenas.
The cause couldn’t be more compelling. There’s never been a clearer threat to survival, or to justice, than the rapid rise in the planet’s temperature caused by and for the profit of a microscopic percentage of its citizens. Conversely, there can be no real answer to our climate woes that doesn’t address the insane inequalities and concentrations of power that are helping to drive us toward this disaster.
That’s why it’s such good news when people like Naomi Klein and Desmond Tutu join the climate struggle. When they take part, it becomes ever clearer that what’s underway is not, in the end, an environmental battle at all, but an all-encompassing fight over power, hunger, and the future of humanity on this planet.
Expansion by geography is similarly a must for this movement. Recently, in Istanbul, 350.org and its allies trained 500 young people from 135 countries as climate-change organizers, and each of them is now organizing conferences and campaigns in their home countries.
This sort of planet-wide expansion suggests that the value of particular national leaders is going to be limited at best. That doesn’t mean, of course, that some people won’t have more purchase than others in such a movement. Sometimes such standing comes from living in the communities most immediately and directly affected by climate change or fossil fuel depredation. When, for instance, the big climate rally finally did happen on the Mall this winter, the 50,000 in attendance may have been most affected by the words of Crystal Lameman, a young member of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation whose traditional territory has been poisoned by tar sands mining.
Sometimes it comes from charisma: Van Jones may be the most articulate and engaging environmental advocate ever. Sometimes it comes from getting things right for a long time: Jim Hansen, the greatest climate scientist, gets respect even from those who disagree with him about, say, nuclear power. Sometimes it comes from organizing ability: Jane Kleeb who did such work in the hard soil of Nebraska, or Clayton Thomas-Muller who has indefatigably (though no one is beyond fatigue) organized native North America. Sometimes it comes from sacrifice: Tim DeChristopher went to jail for two years for civil disobedience, and so most of us are going to listen to what he might have to say.
Continued:
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Artists Support Gandhi Ashrams in India: Buy Art to support their efforts
5yearplan.org has again created an opportunity for best planet practices by creating jhola bags. With the help of artists from around the world, Aaron Sinift has provided work for the Gandhi ashrams in India. Now you can own a piece of art by Yoko Ono, Francesco Clemente, Chris Martin, and many others and by purchasing a jhola, you can support the work of the Gandhi ashrams. Get your jhola here!
Aaron Sinift
At seven, Aaron Sinift (’02) told his mother, “Someday, I’m going to change my name to Harry Whitecloud and travel to India.” When he finally made the trip at the age of 24, he felt as though “I was returning to an essential facet of my heart.” He loved India’s color, vibrancy, and culture, so different from his native Iowa. He was distressed by the country’s extreme poverty and drawn to the work of the ashrams, service institutions promoted by Mahatma Gandhi to help India’s rural poor maintain self-sufficiency by spinning and weaving khadi cloth. “The khadi is so beautiful and so fragrant, and rough in certain ways,” Sinift says. “Gandhi wore it, and it has a lot of soul.”
Sinift bought a traditional jhola [jho-la] shoulder bag made from khadi cloth and printed with an image of Gandhi. “I was attracted by the tender awkwardness of the artworks created by anonymous ashram artists for common people. These are authentic Pop Art creations from the very roots of the land.” As a CFA graduate student, he hung the jhola on the wall of his studio and found that his bold, colorful paintings began to take on some of the jhola’s themes. His advisor, Professor of Art John Walker, noticed the change. “That bag is not an artifact,” Walker said. “It’s a living work of art.” This casual line stuck with Sinift, and it would direct the course of his career.
After graduating from CFA, Sinift took a job as the preparator at a New York gallery, Feature Inc., and painted in his Brooklyn studio with the hope of being discovered. “I was seeking the approval of people who didn’t know I existed, and I decided to reinvent myself into the person I wanted to become. I wanted to be an artist who serves those in need and to create a community in which people feel connected to one another.”
Sinift invited the ashrams to create a book made entirely from khadi cloth featuring screen- and block-printed artworks by 24 artists from 8 countries. He commissioned well-known artists like Francesco Clemente, Yoko Ono, and Chris Martin, as well as emerging artists such as Tamara Gonzales, Tim Wehrle, and Pushpa Kumari to contribute one page each. He called this project the “Five-Year Plan” and aimed to print 180 copies, which would be packaged in handmade jhola bags.
In accordance with Gandhi’s philosophy, the Five-Year Plan would need to be entirely nonprofit and autonomous, so instead of seeking institutional backing to assist with the printing cost, Sinift raised more than half of the funds by preselling the book online. “Citizen artists need to find ways to fund their work with modest means,” he says. “When we do so, we realize that we’re not helpless. We realize how much power we have.” Sinift pledged the first $25,000 revenue to Doctors Without Borders and the remaining proceeds to the next Five-Year Plan project. But first, he needed the cloth.
“Citizen artists need to find ways to fund their work with modest means. When we do so, we realize that we’re not helpless. We realize how much power we have.”
Sinift traveled to the outskirts of New Delhi to to find an ashram that would collaborate on the Five-Year Plan. During a visit to an ashram in Meerut, Sinift met with the director, “a stony guy who was used to people coming to buy their cloth because it’s cheap. When I showed him the drawing that I made for the cover of the book, his eyes began to water. He saw that I respected his labor and was not there to take advantage of it. That was the moment I knew I was on the right track.”
Sinift commissioned 1.4 kilometers, almost a mile, of khadi from the Manav Seva Sannidhi Ashram in Modinagar, which employs 700 spinners, the majority of whom are women over the age of 55. The ashram also employs 45 weavers (mostly men over the age of 45), and 35 helpers. Most of these workers are Dalit Muslim or low-caste Hindu, and are the sole providers for their families. Spinning and weaving the khadi for the Five-Year Plan created more than 2,400 days of work for the ashram and kept 100 families employed for a month.
The artists, too, benefited from the Five-Year Plan. “Most of the artists are very poor,” Sinift says. Each artist received a copy signed by all of the contributors, and “they can sell their copies of the book and use the proceeds however they wish.” Indian painter Pushpa Kumari, whose intricate work is inspired by stories from the Hindu epics, is using the proceeds from the sale of her book to help build her house. True to Gandhi’s ideals, Sinift has not profited from the Five-Year Plan; to support his life and his art, he works part time at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Katzen Arts Center at American University, which he finds as fulfilling as his work with the ashrams.
And Sinift is just getting started. He plans eventually to take the project a step further by beginning a book from seeds, commissioning organic farmers in India to grow one ton of cotton that will be spun into the thread used to weave the khadi. He will invite the farmers, spinners, and weavers to contribute original artworks, completing a “sustainable cycle of collaboration.”
“The ashram workers provide incredible value to the world by supporting Gandhian ethics and helping people to maintain self-sufficiency,” Sinift says. “The people in Doctors without Borders dedicate their lives to saving people in crisis. The Five-Year Plan gives artists a chance to make a tangible contribution to the common good, simply by doing what they already do naturally. If people just give what they do naturally, everyone can live together with dignity.”
Posted in Gandhi
Tagged Francesco Clemente, Gandhi, Yoko Ono
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