rhetorictoremember

[rhetorictoremember]

In the context of public education, [neoliberalism] constitutes a set of ideals that assume that efficiency is an important goal in managing schools and public education systems; that the best way to achieve such efficiency is to allow schools to function within a free market based on competition, where the best schools will succeed and the worst ones will be driven to improve or shut down… Through a neoliberal lens, “rather than ‘citizens,’ with rights, we are consumers of services. People are ‘empowered’ by taking advantage of opportunities in the market… neoliberalism pushes schools to focus on the “winners,” those exceptional students who will be successful by these limited metrics, and to abandon students who might lead to inefficiencies.

- Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve L. Ewing

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DOWNWARD RETRIBUTION MECHANISM: It means that when someone is exploited by a powerful party, instead of defending themselves by challenging the moral and/or legal impropriety of the situation, they take action first to survive the exploitation with tolerance and endurance (忍) and then to seek retribution by exploiting another weaker party when possible.

An Anatomy of Trump’s Appeal to Chinese Liberals: A Conversation with Teng Biao

Lots of great gems in this article, I’m ashamed it took me this long to read it

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... the U.S. history curriculum teaches black history from the perspective of whites, not through the experiences of African Americans...

Black History is Not American History: Toward a Framework of Black Historical Consciousness

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“Interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world.”

- Grit, Angela Duckworth (Ch 6)

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If Trump’s words were understood as layered in folksy exaggeration and schtick — designed to trigger media pedants, but perfectly legible to his salt-of-the-earth supporters — then much that would be too grotesque or false to embrace literally could be carefully endorsed at best and ignored as poor comedy at worst. And Republican elites could walk the line between eviscerating their reputations and enraging their party’s leader, all while blaming the media for caricaturing Trumpism by reporting Trump’s words accurately.

Trump Has Always Been a Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing

Ezra Klein, NYTimes Opinion

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Many American school reformers have this strange habit of positioning themselves as the moral defenders of kids while demonizing teachers and their unions as standing in the way of progress. Other countries do not do this; they recognize that the success of their students is intimately connected to the success of teachers. They make good on that understanding by paying for teachers’ preparation, compensating them fairly, and respecting the importance and complexity of their work [...] The pandemic is giving us an opportunity to make a pivot that we should have made long ago. We have been on a treadmill of short-term fixes, pretending that if we just get the right test, the right incentives, put the right pressure on teachers and students, they will achieve what is good for them, like it or not. But we are realizing what we should have known all along: that you can’t widget your way to powerful learning, that relationships are critical for learning, that students’ interests need to be stimulated and their selves need to be recognized.

Make Schools More Human

By Dr. Jal Mehta, Professor at HGSE

[rhetorictoremember]

You want this to be simple. To be clear and morally uncomplicated. You want the stories we tell about public education - especially for the poor and the poorly served - to be bracing and edifying, tales of determined teachers, high expectations, tough love, and muscular accountability that elevate every child. Put those things under one roof and reap the benefit - equity, excellence, and upward mobility. It's not simple. It will never be simple. We cannot wash our hands of Natalie. Neither can we say Tiffany will be fine or blithely tell her teacher that 'she's not your problem.' The homilies of education and education reform do not apply. We must see things as they are, not as we wish them to be.

How the Other Half Learns, by Robert Pondiscio

Other quotes:

“Walk into an elite private school [...] and poll the staff on who are the best teachers in the building. The list will likely consist mostly of those who have the best command of their subject matter and are passionate about sharing it with  children and successful in firing their imaginations. In a high poverty school, the list might very well be the ones with exceptional ‘control’ of their class.”

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Soo many fun (and horrifying) tidbits about soap and modern capitalism:

“Build it and they will come” -->  Entrepreneurs added potash and made soap, for which they then needed to create public demand.

“Consumers don’t know what they want” --> Soap companies, in order to expand their product lines, “had to sell the idea that soap was insufficient on its own—or that its effects had to be undone by yet more products...  To offset the drying effects of soap, you then needed other products—conditioners, moisturizers, toners. Hamblin identifies the 1957 introduction of Dove, whose cleaning power is reduced because it’s mixed with moisturizer, as the moment when the industry started moving toward selling a product that would do nothing at all.

“Assuming things make sense when there really isn’t scientific evidence” -->  The ad campaigns created a sense of lurking danger in the competition by claiming that their own products were safer and purer, or they promoted, as product virtues, obscure, jargony terms (“triple milled”) that consumers assumed to be important simply because they were touted on a package.

I also enjoyed this origin story of the biggest companies we know of today: “These early “soapers” included William Procter and James Gamble, who began working together after marrying a pair of sisters; another familial pair, whose company name eventually changed from Lever Brothers to Unilever; and a man named William Wrigley, Jr., who gave away chewing gum as a promotion for his soap, but found that the gum was in higher demand.”

... and I haven’t even mentioned all the other generally slimy business practices, like their not so subtle use of racism and classism to sell a “cleansing” product.

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... I've never gotten used to how much effort it takes just to be a woman in the public eye. I once calculated how many hours I spent having my hair and makeup done during the campaign. It came to about 600 hours, or 25 days. I was so shocked I checked the math twice. [...] The few times I've gone out in public without makeup, it's made the news. So I sigh and keep getting back in the chair, and dream of a future in which women in the public eye don't need to wear makeup if they don't want to and no one cares either way.

What Happened, by Hilary Rodham Clinton

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Some resonant quotes:

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

Evictions were not simply the consequence of tenants’ misbehavior or landlords’ financial accounting. Landlords showed considerable discretion over whether to move forward with an eviction, extending leniency to some and withdrawing it from others. [...] Property management was a profession dominated by men and by a gruff, masculine way of doing business. That put men like Jerry at an advantage.

No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves. In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose [...] Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things [...] When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of ‘all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,’ they lost confidence in its political capacity.

[rhetorictoremember]

A compelling case for reparations. It’s long, with too many incredible portions, but a selection of really resonant quotes:

Racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father. 

Most white Americans felt that black Americans should be grateful for their freedom, that the bloody Civil War had absolved any debt.

To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., who were compensated for their loss of human property.

The way we are taught this in school, Lincoln “freed the slaves,” and then the nearly four million people who the day before had been treated as property suddenly enjoyed the privileges of being Americans like everyone else. We are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children or money to buy any of it.

There has never been a point in American history where even half the black children in this country have attended a majority-white school.

The Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination in housing, but it did not reset real estate values so that homes in redlined black neighborhoods whose prices were artificially deflated would be valued the same as identical homes in white neighborhoods, which had been artificially inflated.

King has been evoked continuously during this season of protests, sometimes to defend those who looted and torched buildings, sometimes to condemn them. But in this time of foment, there has been an astounding silence around his most radical demands. The seldom-quoted King is the one who said that the true battle for equality, the actualization of justice, required economic repair.

In March 1968, just a month before his assassination, in a speech to striking, impoverished black sanitation workers in Memphis, King said: “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”

That 2019 Yale University study, called “The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality,” found that Americans believe that black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10.

To summarize, none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to “lift themselves” out of poverty and gain financial stability — not marrying, not getting educated, not saving more, not owning a home — can mitigate 400 years of racialized plundering. Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against black Americans doing the same.

Reparations are not about punishing white Americans, and white Americans are not the ones who would pay for them. It does not matter if your ancestors engaged in slavery or if you just immigrated here two weeks ago. Reparations are a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it and our federal government initiated, condoned and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that pays.

Each year Congress allocates money — this year $5 million — to help support Holocaust survivors living in America. In backing the funding measure, Representative Richard E. Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in 2018 that this country has a “responsibility to support the surviving men and women of the Holocaust and their families.” And he is right. It is the moral thing to do. And yet Congress has refused for three decades to pass H.R. 40, a bill to simply study the issue of reparations.

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Interesting story about the intersection of feminism and capitalism.

REMINDER: Just because you’re a woman (or any marginalized identity), that doesn’t mean you’re automatically not racist, sexist or otherwise abusive.

She saw gender inequity everywhere she looked; this gave her something to wage war against. Racial inequity was never really on her radar. That was someone else’s problem to solve.

Woke capitalism lets the elites maintain the status quo while paying lip service to the demands of activists, and, as ethical consumers, millennials get to feel like they’re making a difference every time they go shopping.

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Watch 1:38 - 5:16 for a beautiful and still highly relevant argument for violence in the civil rights movement. Appalling how accurate this still is almost 50 years later.

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Keeping this here as a constant reminder to actually do something. 

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"The more we pursue excellence... the more our lives will be miserable."

"Everything out there right now is about 'live your best life'! Everything is a promise for greatness. And it's not.”

[rhetorictoremember]

We should cultivate the wit of Ben Franklin, the thoughtfulness of Abraham Lincoln, the ingenuity of Thomas Alva Edison, the spirit of the Wright brothers, the eloquence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Were they good test-takers? Who knows? Who cares? I bet that the financial wizard Bernie Madoff (now in jail for his crimes) and the guys at Enron had great test scores.

Slaying Golaith, by Diane Ravitch 

Love how this woman is SAVAGE in all her writing. Love to see this no-holds-barred, passionate plea against standardized testing and the privatization of public schools

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A specific quote is below, but the entire article is worth posting because of its unique examination of the Coronavirus pandemic. Discussion is less focused on the specifics of the crisis and more about the societal and epidemiological factors that have led to the crisis, why it’s so difficult to process information, and why we are uncomfortable with so much uncertainty. 

Especially worth reading is the last section “VIII. The Narrative”. Here’s a short quote: 

The coronavirus not only co-opts our cells, but exploits our cognitive biases. Humans construct stories to wrangle meaning from uncertainty and purpose from chaos. We crave simple narratives, but the pandemic offers none.