[The video is amazing for so clearly capturing six officers brutalizing a 15 year old in broad daylight and being broadcast on TV news (and available in this link), but what is also very disturbing is the Houston Mayor Annise Parker's attempts to defend the police brutality, her attempt to suppress the video, and her attempt to threaten community activist Quannel X (awesome in the video) for releasing it to the media.]
Firedoglake: Police Brutality Alive and Well in Houston: Teen Battered [Video]
Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Fort Worth, Texas, City Councilman Joel Burns Tells Gay Teens "It Gets Better"
(Extra Credit for HUM 121 students--watch this and respond to it with your understanding of peace & conflict issues)
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
John Thornton: Long Odds on Texas Education
Long Odds on Texas Education
by John Thornton
Seven Stories Press
So on March 13, conservatives in the Texas State Board of Education managed to radically rewrite state-mandated curricula for the social sciences. They made the following changes:
* The US government is no longer to be described as "democratic," but exclusively as "constitutional."
* Students are no longer required to learn that the Constitution prohibits the government from establishing one religion as superior to others. Separation between church and state as a guiding principle of the government is no longer to be emphasized, or necessarily mentioned.
* Thomas Jefferson is out as an Enlightenment thinker, replaced by dominionist Christian go-to figure John Calvin.
* The curriculum is no longer allowed to refer to sex and gender as social constructs -- otherwise, students might be exposed to "transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else."
* The mention that Tejanos fought at the Alamo is to be omitted. (This is a big deal if you come from Texas and had to learn about the Alamo literally every year of your life until you were 16 -- it's a different Alamo without Mexican people in the picture.)
* Sociology students are no longer required to consider the possibility that American societal institutions are racist by design.
* The rise of the Moral Majority, the fight against the ERA, and Newt Gingrich's Contract With America are now required subjects in any history class, to be taught as significant cultural movements of the 1980s. Hip-hop, on the other hand, is not to be referred to as a significant cultural movement of the 1980s. (Chuck D's "Fight The Power" is another thing we never learned about in Texas schools.)
At least they got rid of the requirement to include the idea, when teaching the civil rights movement, that the movement was ultimately a failure, leading to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes."
I'm a product of the Texas public education system. I didn't know about the existence of the Stonewall Riots until I was 23. There's no reason it should have been so late: I was interested in modern LGBT rights debates, had read things like Confessions of a Mask and The Immoralist and far too many William Burroughs books. I knew that logically, there had to have been some signal moment at which LGBT people popped into visibility as a viable political force. Still, I didn't know about the existence of the Stonewall Riots until I was 23. Similarly, I didn't realize that our neighborhood's name for pick-up football -- "Smear the Queer" -- referred to the act of beating up a gay person, and when Matthew Shepard was talked about at all, it was as an entry point to the argument that hate crime laws involved the government violating free speech.
Texas, our Texas, huh?
What's so chilling about all of this to me is that it would literally never have occurred to me that events like Stonewall -- or Compton's Cafeteria, or the pie in Anita Bryant's face -- had happened, that LGBT people had actually won their acknowledgment by society through violent resistance, rather than waiting around patiently for their turn. I only learned about these events basically by chance: I read enough and was interested in enough that sooner or later, statistically, I was going to hit that data point.
So what about people who don't boost their statistical chances of learning things in that way? All you've got is your basic public education, and the off-chance that something you're professionally or personally interested in -- for a lot of my old classmates, computer science or mechanical engineering professionally, movies involving car racing or interplanetary war personally -- will combine with some knowledge that an oppressed group in America stood up and fought back and won some kind of right, that your government was designed to work in certain ways. If that alchemy doesn't hit, public education is it for the rest of your life.
An old classmate and I were arguing shortly after 9/11. He's since become an industrial engineer, a good one, and a born-again Christian who advocated seizing "suspects" without trial and using torture to extract information in order to "win the War on Terror." "What about the Fourteenth Amendment?" I asked. "What about the Eighth Amendment?"
"There are parts of the Constitution that are like rotten wood," he said. "They deserve to fall away." On the wall behind him was a poster of the Statue of Liberty giving the finger.
You have to forget everything you know about how the government works to say a thing like that. And if those lessons had never been there in the first place? If they're not required elements in a curriculum increasingly loaded with required No Child Left Behind test prep taking up two days out of every five, taught by underpaid instructors with zero professional stake in going beyond the strict letter of the Board of Education's law?
I'm not talking here about random violent rednecks working in gas stations in the Great Dark Regions of North America. The problem with education in the South has to do with a class of reasonably elite people -- technologists, businessmen, even teachers themselves -- who will not seek out knowledge for its own sake, and who will grow up with only a remote statistical chance of learning that violent resistance to the status quo is not only a part of our history, but a desirable and necessary part. These are the people who start tea parties. These are the people who donate to the Palin 2012 campaign. These are the people that the Board of Education wants to generate more of.
So what do we do about this mess in the Lone Star State?
I wouldn't have known about Russell Means or Wounded Knee, either -- neither were on the standard Texas educational curriculum at the time, to my knowledge -- had it not been for an excellent teacher, Mrs. Walkup, who taught my ninth grade U.S. History.
"From now on as you move out into the world," she said on the first day of class, "you need to arm yourself intellectually against people. Everyone you meet has a political agenda, whether they know it or not, and they're going to try to influence you toward believing in that agenda. You need to be able to recognize that, and to avoid being taken in."
"How do we know you're not trying to push an agenda on us?" asked a student.
"You don't," she said.
And for all her virtues, all her willingness to talk about COINTELPRO, AIM and everything else, her agenda never included Stonewall.
This kind of local resistance is nice work, as a student, if you're lucky enough to get it on your course schedule -- and lucky enough to live in socioeconomic circumstance that permit the hiring and retention of such a teacher. But for ten years, Texas students are going to have to depend exclusively on that kind of luck for any kind of balanced view of the world.
And, of course, they'll rely on textbook publishers, who are now faced with a choice: do I tailor my books for national distribution and sale to the newly-corrupted Texas curriculum? Or do I take the long-term view that it is not a good thing to have a generation of technologists and businessmen who grow up without knowing that if a minority group wants something, they generally have to fight the power for it?
As a textbook publisher, do I lose money by taking that long-term view, and is it worth it? How long are those odds, in the end?
John Thornton is an editor at Seven Stories Press.
by John Thornton
Seven Stories Press
So on March 13, conservatives in the Texas State Board of Education managed to radically rewrite state-mandated curricula for the social sciences. They made the following changes:
* The US government is no longer to be described as "democratic," but exclusively as "constitutional."
* Students are no longer required to learn that the Constitution prohibits the government from establishing one religion as superior to others. Separation between church and state as a guiding principle of the government is no longer to be emphasized, or necessarily mentioned.
* Thomas Jefferson is out as an Enlightenment thinker, replaced by dominionist Christian go-to figure John Calvin.
* The curriculum is no longer allowed to refer to sex and gender as social constructs -- otherwise, students might be exposed to "transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else."
* The mention that Tejanos fought at the Alamo is to be omitted. (This is a big deal if you come from Texas and had to learn about the Alamo literally every year of your life until you were 16 -- it's a different Alamo without Mexican people in the picture.)
* Sociology students are no longer required to consider the possibility that American societal institutions are racist by design.
* The rise of the Moral Majority, the fight against the ERA, and Newt Gingrich's Contract With America are now required subjects in any history class, to be taught as significant cultural movements of the 1980s. Hip-hop, on the other hand, is not to be referred to as a significant cultural movement of the 1980s. (Chuck D's "Fight The Power" is another thing we never learned about in Texas schools.)
At least they got rid of the requirement to include the idea, when teaching the civil rights movement, that the movement was ultimately a failure, leading to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes."
I'm a product of the Texas public education system. I didn't know about the existence of the Stonewall Riots until I was 23. There's no reason it should have been so late: I was interested in modern LGBT rights debates, had read things like Confessions of a Mask and The Immoralist and far too many William Burroughs books. I knew that logically, there had to have been some signal moment at which LGBT people popped into visibility as a viable political force. Still, I didn't know about the existence of the Stonewall Riots until I was 23. Similarly, I didn't realize that our neighborhood's name for pick-up football -- "Smear the Queer" -- referred to the act of beating up a gay person, and when Matthew Shepard was talked about at all, it was as an entry point to the argument that hate crime laws involved the government violating free speech.
Texas, our Texas, huh?
What's so chilling about all of this to me is that it would literally never have occurred to me that events like Stonewall -- or Compton's Cafeteria, or the pie in Anita Bryant's face -- had happened, that LGBT people had actually won their acknowledgment by society through violent resistance, rather than waiting around patiently for their turn. I only learned about these events basically by chance: I read enough and was interested in enough that sooner or later, statistically, I was going to hit that data point.
So what about people who don't boost their statistical chances of learning things in that way? All you've got is your basic public education, and the off-chance that something you're professionally or personally interested in -- for a lot of my old classmates, computer science or mechanical engineering professionally, movies involving car racing or interplanetary war personally -- will combine with some knowledge that an oppressed group in America stood up and fought back and won some kind of right, that your government was designed to work in certain ways. If that alchemy doesn't hit, public education is it for the rest of your life.
An old classmate and I were arguing shortly after 9/11. He's since become an industrial engineer, a good one, and a born-again Christian who advocated seizing "suspects" without trial and using torture to extract information in order to "win the War on Terror." "What about the Fourteenth Amendment?" I asked. "What about the Eighth Amendment?"
"There are parts of the Constitution that are like rotten wood," he said. "They deserve to fall away." On the wall behind him was a poster of the Statue of Liberty giving the finger.
You have to forget everything you know about how the government works to say a thing like that. And if those lessons had never been there in the first place? If they're not required elements in a curriculum increasingly loaded with required No Child Left Behind test prep taking up two days out of every five, taught by underpaid instructors with zero professional stake in going beyond the strict letter of the Board of Education's law?
I'm not talking here about random violent rednecks working in gas stations in the Great Dark Regions of North America. The problem with education in the South has to do with a class of reasonably elite people -- technologists, businessmen, even teachers themselves -- who will not seek out knowledge for its own sake, and who will grow up with only a remote statistical chance of learning that violent resistance to the status quo is not only a part of our history, but a desirable and necessary part. These are the people who start tea parties. These are the people who donate to the Palin 2012 campaign. These are the people that the Board of Education wants to generate more of.
So what do we do about this mess in the Lone Star State?
I wouldn't have known about Russell Means or Wounded Knee, either -- neither were on the standard Texas educational curriculum at the time, to my knowledge -- had it not been for an excellent teacher, Mrs. Walkup, who taught my ninth grade U.S. History.
"From now on as you move out into the world," she said on the first day of class, "you need to arm yourself intellectually against people. Everyone you meet has a political agenda, whether they know it or not, and they're going to try to influence you toward believing in that agenda. You need to be able to recognize that, and to avoid being taken in."
"How do we know you're not trying to push an agenda on us?" asked a student.
"You don't," she said.
And for all her virtues, all her willingness to talk about COINTELPRO, AIM and everything else, her agenda never included Stonewall.
This kind of local resistance is nice work, as a student, if you're lucky enough to get it on your course schedule -- and lucky enough to live in socioeconomic circumstance that permit the hiring and retention of such a teacher. But for ten years, Texas students are going to have to depend exclusively on that kind of luck for any kind of balanced view of the world.
And, of course, they'll rely on textbook publishers, who are now faced with a choice: do I tailor my books for national distribution and sale to the newly-corrupted Texas curriculum? Or do I take the long-term view that it is not a good thing to have a generation of technologists and businessmen who grow up without knowing that if a minority group wants something, they generally have to fight the power for it?
As a textbook publisher, do I lose money by taking that long-term view, and is it worth it? How long are those odds, in the end?
John Thornton is an editor at Seven Stories Press.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
James C. McKinley Jr.: Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
(Dialogic recommends James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong as a good prep for the history of this American school textbook misinformation/disinformation/propaganda effort and Texas' inordinate influence on national textbook adoption policies. Report via Michael Marchman.)
Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
The New York Times
AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.
The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.
In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.
Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.
“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
More reports:
(via Betsy Taylor) Huffington Post: Texas Textbook MASSACRE -- 'Ultraconservatives' Approve Radical Changes To State Education Curriculum which provides this nugget: "The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum's world history standards on Enlightenment thinking, 'replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.'”
Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
The New York Times
AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.
The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.
In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.
Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.
“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
More reports:
(via Betsy Taylor) Huffington Post: Texas Textbook MASSACRE -- 'Ultraconservatives' Approve Radical Changes To State Education Curriculum which provides this nugget: "The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum's world history standards on Enlightenment thinking, 'replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.'”
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Weekly Signals: James W. Loewen -- Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History
An interview with James W. Loewen author of Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History.
Weekly Signals
Loewen takes history textbooks to task for their perpetuations of myth and their lack of awareness of today's multicultural student audience (not to mention the astonishing number of facts they just got plain wrong).
How did people get here? Why did Europe win? Why Did the South Secede? In Teaching What Really Happened, Loewen goes beyond the usual textbook-dominated viewpoints to illuminate a wealth of intriguing, often hidden facts about America's past. Calling for a new way to teach history, this book will help teachers move beyond traditional textbooks to tackle difficult but important topics like conflicts with Native Americans, slavery, and race relations. Throughout, Loewen shows time and again how teaching what really happened connects better with all kinds of students to get them excited about history.
James W. Loewen is the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America. He taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont and gives workshops for teacher groups around the United States. He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, and employment cases.
To Listen to the Interview
Weekly Signals
Loewen takes history textbooks to task for their perpetuations of myth and their lack of awareness of today's multicultural student audience (not to mention the astonishing number of facts they just got plain wrong).
How did people get here? Why did Europe win? Why Did the South Secede? In Teaching What Really Happened, Loewen goes beyond the usual textbook-dominated viewpoints to illuminate a wealth of intriguing, often hidden facts about America's past. Calling for a new way to teach history, this book will help teachers move beyond traditional textbooks to tackle difficult but important topics like conflicts with Native Americans, slavery, and race relations. Throughout, Loewen shows time and again how teaching what really happened connects better with all kinds of students to get them excited about history.
James W. Loewen is the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America. He taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont and gives workshops for teacher groups around the United States. He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, and employment cases.
To Listen to the Interview
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