Teachers Unite Newsletter, June 2006

Letter from Teachers Unite's Founder

June 23, 2006

Dear Readers:

On March 30th, Teachers Unite co-sponsored its first event, in collaboration with NYCoRE, at the UFT headquarters in Manhattan. The screening of Granito de Arena, a documentary about the massive grassroots resistance movement of teachers in Mexico, drew eighty educators together for a thoughtful discussion of the role of teachers as a political force for community interests. Just weeks ago, teachers in Oaxaca came under fire by police during their peaceful protest for better school conditions. Reports have confirmed several deaths.For updates, please visit www.corrugate.org and www.narconews.com.

Teachers in New York City who care about making a meaningful difference in communities aren’t necessarily facing life-threatening risks. That said, they are often the most likely to burn out. “Idealists”, those who highly value “service to society” relative to other motivations to teach, are more likely to leave the profession because the conditions that limit how they serve children frustrate them (Miech and Elder 1996). That’s why we need to continue to create new spaces for educators committed to social justice to form communities in which they can inspire and support one another. Teachers Unite is dedicated to creating such spaces and will begin to do so thanks to the support of its first grant from the Sparkplug Foundation! Stay tuned for more information about Sunday Teacher Motivators that will begin this fall.

If you’re interested in contributing to Teachers Unite—with either a donation or a written piece about your experience with teaching and social justice to the online newsletter—please contact me at sally@teachersunite.net.

In solidarity,
Sally Lee
Founder
Teachers Unite

Radical Math

 
Civil Rights activist and math teacher Bob Moses writes that “the most urgent social issue affecting poor people and people of color is economic access… [that] depends crucially on math and science literacy.” As Jonathan Osler, a math teacher at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice and the founder of RadicalMath argues, we therefore need math curriculum that simultaneously engages students in addressing social issues and helps them become mathematically literate. This is one of the key ideas behind ‘Social Justice Math’.

In the past few years, a movement of educators working to integrate issues of economic and social justice into mathematics education has been growing rapidly. As examples, the book “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers” sold out all 5,000 copies from it’s first printing, and a recent 3-day workshop at Lafayette College called “The Mathematics of Social Justice” turned away dozens of college math professors after the 30 available slots filled up within days.

And last month, Osler launched a website called www.RadicalMath.org to serve as a clearinghouse for educators interested in integrating issues of social justice into their math classes. The free website provides over 500 lesson plans, articles, data sets, charts, maps, and much more, to support them in the process.

A few of the lesson plans that can be downloaded from the site include:
• A project that links students up with local grassroots organizations to develop, implement, and analyze community surveys
• A unit that compares the demographics of different states/neighborhoods with data about military recruits and active-duty soldiers from these areas
• An interdisciplinary unit called “Sankofa: Who Am I?” that collaborates with social studies, English, and art classes, and introduces students to algebra within the context of learning about salt-trade routes in Northern Africa.

According to RadicalMath, Social Justice Math can be grouped into three categories: Social, Economic, and Political Issues which can cover anything from prisons and gentrification to the War in Iraq and the AIDS crisis; Financial Education which teaches students about responsible money management; and Ethnomathematics which involves studying the ways that different cultures have contributed to and continue to use mathematical ideas.

With its increased popularity, Social Justice Math has also begun attracting a lot of criticism from those wishing to dismiss is as “fuzzy, rainforest math,” as Lynne Cheney wrote in a 1997 article. Last year, the Wall Street Journal published a widely-read editorial from conservative columnist Diane Ravitch, who claimed, “The students in American classes who fall prey to the political designs of their teachers and professors will not… [become]… the builders and shapers of technology in the 21st century.”

This criticism, deserved or not, does serve as an important reminder that Good Politics doesn’t mean Good Math. If developing math literacy in poor and of color community is a civil rights issue, than depriving students of a high-quality math education is as much of an injustice as the issues their classes may be discussing.

As RadicalMath points out, developing good curriculum takes time and a willingness to be self-critical. This reflective process results in rich lessons that expose students to real-world applications of math. By incorporating social justice-based math into curricula, schools can realize Bob Moses’ vision of education as a tool for liberation.

See: www.RadicalMath.org, or email info@radicalmath.org for more information.

Radical Possibilities

A must-read for anyone who cares about education, Radical Possibilities by Jean Anyon outlines the critical connections between public policy and schools. If you had any doubt that the struggle for educational justice begins with the demand for bold social change, or if you just needed the arguments to support your belief, read this book. For a glimpse, check out Jean Anyon's article for the Harvard Educational Review below. Many thanks to Professor Anyon for supporting Teachers Unite and contributing this piece to the newsletter.

Radical Possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement was published by Routledge. Jean Anyon teaches social and educational policy in the Doctoral Program in Urban Educaiton at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed "Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban School Reform".

A Critique of "Safe schools" Policies

 
NYCoRE’s Campaign Against the Criminalization of Youth is a group of educators working to build awareness about the dehumanizing discipline policies employed by New York City public schools. They wrote the following in response to the infamous cell phone ban initiated by the Bloomberg/Klein administration:

The New York Public School system, like many other urban school systems across the country, is beset by vast inequalities that are often characterized by race and class. Economically disadvantaged youth of color in these schools are routinely provided with fewer resources, fewer qualified teachers, and fewer levels of support than necessary for creating a safe, nurturing, and empowering educational environment. Instead, more is invested into funding narrow policies and punitive approaches that push youth out of school and into the criminal justice system. In 2004, for example, NYC converted sixteen more public high schools into prison-like institutions, where “Zero Tolerance” policies, metal detectors, and increased police presence serve as supposed solutions to the problem. However, these solutions have only led to the creation of the school to prison pipeline: the process by which children are prepared for prison instead of college. Similarly, this has also led to Joel Klein’s new scanning policy in pubic schools, popularly referred to as the "cell phone ban," as well as other stringent policies that ignore the real problems afflicting our schools and youth. Banning student electronics, iPods, CD players, and cell phones, along with metal detectors and school cops, do not respond to nor remedy the vastly segregated, overcrowded, poorly administered, under resourced, AND unequal city schools. We say enough is enough! How can we as educators offer an alternative to the tools that have converted out schools into virtual prisons? How do we help stop our youth from being criminalized and prepared for incarceration? In what ways can we help address the historical inequities and disparities that feed into the pipeline? Most importantly, how can we support the youth that are striving to bring justice to their schools? We hope that educators can find answers to these questions as well as student-centered solutions that help dismantle the school to prison pipeline.

NYCoRE’s Campaign Against the Criminalization of Youth (CACY) is a project initiated in the spring of 2005. We are committed to building awareness that punitive disciplinary measures such as “Zero Tolerance” and increased police presence in schools criminalize youth and are not an answer to crime and other social problems.

For more information about NYCoRE’s CACY working group, contact info@nycore.org.