The Brooklyn NY Sheepshead Bay marine biology classes took place during an activity of school closures and teacher strikes.  But these picket lines were peopled by unionized, public school professionals who had most recently gone south and volunteered in the 40+ Freedom Schools that had erupted in Mississippi and elsewhere, beginning in 1964.  These teachers knew better, had witnessed and survived mob violence first hand, and as a result, were not afraid of the NYC power elite.

The idea for those CRM ’64 schools began with other classroom teachers in Boston MA and Prince Edward County VA, who responded to right wing, racist resistance to the Brown vs. Board 1954 decision by refusing to cooperate with locked door policies.  Instead, they opened their own schools in off-site locations which became the epitome of liberated learning spaces, places where discriminatory facilities, textbooks, parents/teachers/administrators/elected officials, and curriculum held no sway.

In every case, social change was the order of the day.  Freedom schools were immediate and relevant, framing activism and investigation around local conditions that cried out for confrontation and change.  Youth attended but so did parents and intergenerational citizens.  Of course math, science, literacy, history, economics, civics and geography were embedded in all of it.  How could they not be?  But these were not empty, fragmented, reductionist, test-driven, corporate routines, passing for academics.  These subjects came to life as the entry points into activism on pressure-point issues.  All teachers were crystal clear that ignorance, illiteracy and incompetence formed the institutionalized foundation of separation, exclusion and oppression.

Today, it would be the same bitter wine but in newly branded bottles where the labels might read Race To The Top, TFA, Pearson, Common Core, ALEC, NCTQ, FERPA, Broad Foundation, or Vouchers and Charters.  But the 2015 reincarnations aren’t nearly as important as the essence that continues to promote and insure social isolation and injustice.  That multi-headed hydra is more than worthy of our eternal vigilance and our instinctive resistance.

In the case of Morris’ Sheepshead Bay marine biology classes, for some teens this was simply something to do while schools went silent and faculty on-strike.  Certainly there would have been typical teen grumbling that he or she had no interest in getting wet feet down by the bay.  The sentiment was that since we’d never explored there before, why bother now?  What does marine life or the pollution of the bay, its history or its economics have anything to do with my life, or my liberation, anyway?  Peer pressure and major NUDGing may have been brought to bear.

But the trade-off was the sight of sunrise over the water, and a story about the demise of oysters which meant the loss of the sheepshead porgy, and how we once ate what we caught right amidst the seaweed and salt marshes, fresher healthier and environmentally safer for adjacent communities.  There was the investigation into what REALLY happened to the Canarsie/Canarsee native people, a bloody legacy.  Following, was the discovery that slaves, and later emancipated slaves, were original founders of bayside villages since slavery was once quite legal in New York, among many other northern states.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the city teachers were exercising their professional responsibilities in determining curriculum and social behavior and they were free to be creative, without restriction, from a bureaucratic administration.  In fact, parents and teachers OCCUPIED some schools around the clock for the duration of a 1968 strike.

Principal Sid Morrison described that episode as a beehive in which parents covered administrative duties, helped out in classrooms and “slept-in” so the doors remained open.

Never before weekly meetings were held between parents and teachers to mingle, mix and discuss problems and goals. Classes became more relaxed and informal, and lesson covered a broader scope. When the strike ended, the group that had been active continued its investigation into changing the system in order to offer an enriched and more personal educational experience for every child.

From there it was a natural step into Open Corridors type classrooms where families contributed comfortable sofas, chairs, rugs, lamps and bookcases. Parents made games and materials for classroom use.

They built and painted storage units, painted classrooms, and provided pots, pans, measuring utensils, tools for workbenches, typewriters – all those items never before found in classrooms. Wardrobe trunks were fitted with casters and filled with colorful costumes. Incubators, sandboxes and indoor ponds were built. Animal cages and feed were donated.

Parents with media background worked with classes in doing films and filmstrips. Musicians shared their talents. Actors and dancers taught in their fields. The skills of sewing, cooking, carpentry work and teaching were utilized. A mini-market was set up in the school where children did comparison shopping, went to the wholesale market bought food, and learned to run their own co-op.

That was then but this is now, where we remain one long continuum of struggle, related as a family of inexhaustible, global energy precisely because we can link arms with each other at every stage of the push-back.

Active Learning And Activist Learning

What if Active Learning and Activist Learning came to mean the same thing at Michael Brown’s high school? Maybe Ferguson would not have been inhabited by an occupying army. Students with the support and guidance of authentic teachers, meaning not adults simply drawing down a paycheck and going along with the educational-industrial atrocities, would have called a meeting. Maybe Michael would have lumbered in to listen, curious, skeptical but reflective.
In this meeting, students would have announced that they were lives in search of an education, one they were not receiving in their current “reformist” situation. They would have made it quite clear that a rich man with theme park “budget experience” had no business being given a phony title and phony authority anywhere within their school district’s hierarchy.

They would have declared that deliberately impoverished school budgets and segregated learning centers were nothing new, just the old, stale, sick repetition of the same old bigotry.
Video, protest art, interviews, dance, drama and public media exhibitions would have begun to document what passed for high school in Ferguson. Out of control students, teachers, police and politicians would have been denounced and then put on public museum display for all to see and censor.

This is what Active and Activist Learning is capable of and it is exactly why we only catch glimpses of it on the cover of an aging newsletter from the 1970’s.

Rest In A Disturbed Peace All Ye Who Love Democracy!

As you might guess, there was no resting in the imagined Normandy HS.

Active and Activist Learning requires action, action that disturbs the peace and prosperity of right wing, reactionary eejets like a plutocratic-appointed “President Of The Ferguson Board Of Eduction”,  the Silver Dollar City Theme Park tycoon from Branson, MO and his state school board cronies.

The community of learners at Michael Brown’s high school recognized a colonial model when they saw one. Some secret somebody announced the arrangement one morning by gaining access to the Public Address system and airing an up tempo version of Gil Scott-Heron’s hit song, Johannesburg, with revised lyrics that inserted Fergusonburg. And for that week, What’s The Word? Fergusonburg! was the chorus chanted over and over in every hallway, assembly, food line and sports team warm-up routine.

Michael Brown had never heard of Johannesburg, Steve Biko or poet Dennis Brutus but his teenage school mates made certain that he began to listen up and learn. If Normandy High was to be their Robben Island, then there was a rich history of resistance that cried out for absorption.

The first rule of survival in such a degraded, Power Over Paradigm is self discipline, survival and unified action.
When Michael behaved like a bully or was spotted hanging out with the wrong crowd, he got called on it in a community meeting. He didn’t like it much. He even stomped out a time or two but in the end, he embraced the upbraiding delivered in his best interest. He was no bull in a china shop and he could not muscle his way through life in Ferguson. Though oblivion was a logical choice, his friends cautioned him not to get lost in a haze of drugs and illegal misadventures. They needed his intelligence, his humor, his loyalty, his affection and his strength. A dead hero is no good to no living body. These kids were fighting for a good life and Michael’s spiritual muscle was a Must Have.

It was in this fashion that Michael Brown might have begun to master the art of channeling his outrage at the conditions that surrounded him. He could have learned that he was not alone, an aberration, a menacing giant or a renegade. In the end, he did become a young man with a purpose, the very big purpose of revealing Ferguson to the world for what it was, an oppressive arrangement, repeated across our USA in countless communities of class and color.
Did you really think the Ferguson Teens needed to read that the White House authorized U.S. torture centers around the globe? Of course not, because militarization of the entire culture was obvious on their neighborhood streets day after day. It was crystal clear in the corridors of Normandy where students roamed freely outside of assigned classes while unable to read and comprehend the front page of USA Today. Time to take the bull by the horns.

Michael Brown first argued that he did not have time to tutor anyone but he was soon persuaded otherwise by his affirming affinity group. They would set up shop after school at the library, in a church basement or barber shop, using whatever was at hand to launch their improvised adventures into literacy. It was crazy, sometimes raucous and rowdy but these were effective sessions and they knew it. It felt absolutely RIGHT.

Numbers swelled and soon bands of teen tutors and tutees began a next logical step, mounting voter registration drives across the most under-served sections of Ferguson.

They fashioned themselves after the freedom-seeking literacy/voter movements on John’s Island SC in the 1960. They knew full well how literacy and grassroots empowerment were linked and they also knew that the cops would interfere the moment their work began to pose a challenge to the White Power Structure. What’s The Word? Fergusonburg! And in Fergusonburg it became a badge of honor to be stopped by the police and interrogated or threatened for distributing handbills that laid out the particulars on how and why to register and vote out the ruling junta.

Well, you know how youth are. They talk to each other. They post and twitter, message and selfie and before too long, surrounding public high school student bodies began to hear about the active/activist Ferguson learning movement. No one needed sanctioned internships or co-op experiences. It was not a self-serving resume citation they were seeking nor did they request official transcript credit. They knew the real deal when they saw it and they wanted in.

Soon, the P.D. was hassling the sons and daughters of hard-working county clerks, plumbers, beauticians and practical nurses. These parents were having none of it and so their dignity and influence brought an entirely new audience to the inhumane horror that was Fergusonburg.

When the private schools arrived, it really went viral. After a day of voter reg sidewalk pounding, the new recruits headed home with iPods and iPads full of video, audio, photos and Instagrams documenting the paramilitary protocols practiced in Fergusonburg.

These pampered parents were fast and furious with a response that rained official censure all over the pathological parade that passed for a community police presence in Ferguson. Talk about class warfare. The 1% were finally throwing their weight around someplace where it would do some good. A whole new world of energy, citizenship and inclusion began to take shape.

The desegregation of St. Louis County county took place spontaneously, outside the purview of court orders, as 2015 youth broke bread together, exchanged mix tapes and dance steps, played hoops and Xbox, toured each other’s homes and neighborhoods, silkscreened banners, placards, teeshirts and hosted teach-ins on how institutionalized racism is an economic arrangement benefitting only a malignant few.

Ferguson students of grassroots democracy artfully and courageously moved the details of their lives ever closer, until a seamless web was sewn that pulled everyone together in a civic embrace of inclusion and participation.  The spirit of Michael Brown was their instigator and their inspiration.

It’s a miracle Michael Brown even graduated from this beleaguered school!

By Mark Sumner @ Daily Kos

In Pluto’s diary on the life of Michael Brown, you might notice one detail that’s both touching and disturbing:
Mike’s graduation photograph was taken in March 2014, still many months ahead of when he would be able to graduate in August. Imagine the “why” of this fact:
The grinding poverty in Mike’s world only allowed Normandy High School to acquire two graduation gowns to be shared by the entire class. The students passed a gown from one to the other. Each put the gown on, in turn, and sat before the camera to have their graduation photographs taken. Until it was Mike’s turn.

What kind of American school would have to share robes across the entire senior class?
The kind that’s been the subject of a lot of attention from the state board of education.

This district was created by merging two of the poorest, most heavily minority districts around St. Louis—Normandy and Wellston. The poverty rate for families sending their kids to Normandy Schools was 92 percent. At Wellston School District, the poverty rate was 98 percent. Every single student in the Wellston district was African American.

Still, the state education board voted to merge the districts in 2010 (the first change to state school district boundaries in thirty-five years). Plagued by white flight, crashing property values that destroyed tax revenues, and a loss of state funds as the better-off residents of the area sent their children to private schools, the resulting district isn’t just short of gowns, it’s short of everything. Residents of the district voted again and again to raise their own property taxes, until their rates were actually the highest in the state, but a higher percentage of nothing was still nothing, and district revenues trended steadily down.

After the merger, the state board proceeded with the next step on their plan. In 2012, they rated Normandy as a failed district, removed its accreditation, and placed it under direct state control. The idea was to reform the district to the state board’s design, only there was one problem: the Missouri State Supreme Court ruled that students in a failed district had the right to go to other districts. Hundreds of Normandy students signed up to do just that, heading for classrooms in surrounding districts, some of which were majority white. At first, this generated tension:

News of the Supreme Court’s upholding of the transfer law initially sparked anger and fear among some white Francis Howell parents.
“I deserve to not have to worry about my children getting stabbed, or taking a drug, or getting robbed,” one mother said during a school board meeting, referring to the prospective arrival of Normandy students.

“We don’t want this here in Francis Howell,” another parent said.

But for the most part that attitude didn’t last. Normandy students settled in at their new districts, and despite a financial drain—Normandy had to cover the cost of transportation and pay tuition to the other districts for those students who transferred—things seemed on an upswing in the district.
…the remaining students and school community came together to celebrate a spirit of new beginnings. They held pep rallies and welcome-back-to-school gatherings. Students at Normandy High School said they began tutoring each other to improve the school’s academic ranking…
Indeed, walking the halls of Normandy High School at the beginning of the school year, there was a sense of optimism despite the dire state of things.

Well, you know what they say about optimists. Read below the fold for what happened next.
Funding the transfer students was costing the district more than it cost to educate students within the district. Part of that was transportation, but most of it was the simple fact that other districts spent far more on their students than the poverty-stricken Normandy district.

The state board of education took over the district’s finances, but rather than providing a new stream of revenue, they figured out a simple way to reduce costs:

On Friday afternoon, the board met in a hastily called meeting to change the Normandy’s accreditation status — or at least how that accreditation is described. Normandy now has “accreditation as a state oversight district,” the revised June minutes now read.
Get that? The state board, which had taken away the accreditation, now argued that Normandy was accredited, magically, without having the district actually meet any of the standards they had set. How did that happen?
“The Missouri State Board of Education, pursuant to its statutory authority to waive its rules, including those regulating accreditation, has accredited the Normandy Schools Collaborative and thus its schools,” the state’s motion to the court says. “Because of that accreditation, the Plaintiffs are not entitled to relief. … ”
The school is now accredited because the board has the right to ignore the law the board claimed it was enforcing in the first place, and parents now have no right to transfer their kids to another district … because the school is accredited.
Naturally, the case is headed back to court. And if the accreditation by decree isn’t enough for you, there’s another bit of magic applied by the board. That transfer law? It only applies to school districts. But see, Normandy Schools are no longer in a school district. Normandy schools are now in a special collaborative and, according to the state board, “are not in any district in this state.” So there you go. You can transfer from a district if you’re not in a district, and if you happen to be in a district, it’s magically accredited. Problem solved.

So who actually runs Michael Brown’s school district? Well, the president of the board of education is Peter F. Herschend of Branson, Missouri. Herschend isn’t a former teacher, or a former principal, and doesn’t have any training in the education field. He’s the owner of Herschend Family Entertainment, which runs Silver Dollar City and other amusement parks. He’s also one of the biggest contributors to the Republican Party in the state.

So, when you’re wondering who runs Michael Brown’s school district—when you’re wondering who’s in control of an urban, minority district so poor that the students have only two graduation gowns to share—it’s a white Republican millionaire from out state.

Children’s playscapes are often messy, ingenious spaces cobbled together from whatever is at hand.  The embodied intelligence and determination is obvious and always worth following and learning from.
One hot, basketball hoop day some city boys took me on a tour of their neighborhood.  They meant for me to know how it feels to trudge through a succession of courts only to find each one damaged beyond repair.  We saw surfaces graffiti-ed up with gang signs and swear words, iron standards pried and pounded loose from their concrete bases, equipment hanging cock-eyed and at crazy, impossible angles.  Metal nets were torn apart and shredded with what must have been a crowbar, so that shards lay scattered on the ground with remaining links hanging limp in function-less rows like wet strands of dirty spaghetti.  It was so discouraging.

“This makes me want to throw up,”  I told them.

“Us too!” they insisted, nodding their heads in united agreement.  “Nothing we can do about it,” they muttered in angry disgust.  “Bums or big guys tear everything up.  Go look at the sandbox over there.”

I did take a peek at the sandbox – yucky, gross and very dangerous.  What once was a spacious wooden box of pine planks and comfortable ledges for sitting and digging with sieves, shovels, molds, scoops, tablespoons and fingers was now a ghastly garden of shattered glass, liquor labels, cigarette butts and junkie syringes.  Where cups of water from an adjacent fountain once encouraged the early science formation of mountains, mounds, hills, valleys and riverbeds, now only the overpowering stench of human urine puddled and pooled across the sandy expanse.

Maybe somewhere a Parks Authority Person could lean into a big map with a boast and point out the multitude of well-provisioned recreation opportunities, strategically located, available to all, discriminating against no one, equalizing the playing field for everyone but really it was a big, fat insult in the last analysis.  Yes, an insult and an eyesore to erect a Big Rock Candy Mountain and then allow all the yummy surfaces to remain covered with people debris and dog droppings.  Don’t Touch.  Don’t Explore.  Don’t Enjoy.  Don’t Return.

In the end, it was a big brother who took affirmative action. He and his friends confiscated a solid beam from the demolition salvage of a once elegant apartment greystone. The beam, standing over 7′ tall, was nailed into a platform of pallets discovered at the backdoor of a grocery store. To the underside of the pallets four wheels were attached, these liberated from a dolly at a nearby warehouse. The net was fashioned from a bright blue milk crate with its bottom carefully removed so no rough edges interfered with artfully executed slam-dunks. The contraption was then rolled into any street or alley space available for a game of pick-up and tucked away at night where no one could dismantle it. Amazing to behold.

James Van Der Zee Dignified Classroom

The cafeteria is percolating with lunch time fifth graders eating, laughing, chatting and sitting at tables like diners do. It all would all look comfy-cozy except for the backs of students who line the walls and ring the room, with noses pressed firmly into cold, sterile concrete block, policed by two adult males. For the offense of speaking too loudly, they must now assume the position of statues or prisoners from an old Jimmy Cagney jailhouse movie. On punishment, they probably won’t be fed this day unless it is covertly by the kitchen ladies. The administrators, who established this “consequence” as standard protocol, have flown to Boston for a celebratory meeting with their national, school reform cohorts. What a waste of plane, hotel and restaurant fare but so it goes for the do-gooders. Instead of the big front lawn sign celebrating this fine institution of learning with a phony rating proclamation, maybe they should call it what it really is, education defamation. It gives everybody involved in the profession a bad name.

I point this out to them upon their return which, of course, they deeply do not appreciate. I suggest that should there be a spot-check by any unscheduled foundation officer, the J-Block image just might burn a bit too brightly as a summary memory. Clearly, I have not caught on to how things are done in the lucrative world of philanthropy. But it turns out that I am not that slow a study. I get the picture pretty quickly.

First, it is all about the money. Any charade, any atrocity, any act antithetical to the loving development of creative human beings is tolerated as long as the finances keep flowing. Naturally, the Potemkim Village must be erected within an impoverished community but the mistake here is that this really is a community, an old one dating back to the early 1900’s.

Here, Citizens own their small homes, maintain productive gardens, operate businesses just down the block and pay attention to the school that sits right across from several front doors. One day a boy walks in and asks me if I like homemade cabbage rolls. I stare at him in pleased astonishment and assure him that it is one of my all time favorite meals. The next day I am presented a foil covered plate loaded down with cabbage rolls, pinto beans and cornbread. Heaven on earth is my reaction.

I am also visited by a grandfather who thanks me for signaling “Science” by installing an outdoor display of rock and mineral collection, pine cones, acorns, potted mint, chives and assorted bird nests, He assures me that everyone wanted me to know that they’d be “keeping an eye” on things. I concluded that the individuals looking out for the intellectual welfare of these children were large and in charge but not employed by the on site bureaucracy.

Although Black children filled the corridors of this school, Black History Month was ignored by the majority of White teachers, who later would prove quite adept at turning the place Green in anticipation of St. Patrick’s Day. Suspecting this in advance, I summoned the ghost of James Van Der Zee with a postcard exhibition of his Harlem photographs which resulted in a tearful mother hugging me in thanks for the dignified portraits of her “people”.

What kind of improvement society ignores the most empowering achievements of those they are supposedly in service to? One that benefits from things not improving!

If I Had Five Bucks did not have two plug nickels to her name.  But her financial fantasy displayed both age-advanced computation and an endearing generosity toward her equally impoverished peers.  She reminded me of a destitute Michael who once liberated fifteen dollars and then immediately met up with his classmates in the lunchroom where he bought them all a round of ice cream bars, fancy pencils and decorative erasers. 

Money and Morality go hand in hand.

So do Hull House and Honest Abe, it seems.

Naturally, the locked closet concealed a basket of freedom fighters.

Jane Addams, Abraham Lincoln, Crispus Attucks, Betsy Ross and Harriet Tubman Hand Puppets were historical strangers to these children but that was about to change. 

Before a round of courteous introductions could be completed, Jane and Abe were snatched up and born into brothels. A helplessly, wide-open-to-the world seven year old, being raised in what 1909 Addams described as “The Wrecked Foundations of Domesticity,” seized an opportunity to cry for help by staging an intimate revue in which Jane and Abraham engaged in vivid dramatizations, complete with grunts, groans, exclamations and anatomically-correct contortions. 

I immediately reclaimed the puppets and returned this enthusiastic audience to a chapter out of Twenty Years At Hull-House in which Ms. Addams described the influence of Lincoln upon her childhood.  She was four and a half years old when, for the first time, she stumbled upon her father sobbing grown-up tears.  He told her he was crying because the greatest man in the world had died.  She was stunned, never forgot the moment and developed a life-long admiration for this martyred president. 

After that, she made a practice of standing out in the family apple orchard, scanning the skies and hoping for a glimpse of the famous Eighth Wisconsin Regiment war eagle known as Old Abe. When the aging bird failed to appear, and after many appeals, her father drove her to the state capital where she finally met the feathered veteran of thirty-six Civil War battles and skirmishes.  It was there that John Addams turned to his daughter and said, “You must never forget that Mr. Lincoln believed in the American form of government.  He thought that it could make a better world.  He believed that every man should be equal under the law.  Mr. Lincoln held that ideal before the nation, as the soldiers held the great eagle before the regiment.  We must make this ideal come true.”

And who will preserve that ideal for our seven year old playwright?  When questioned about the circumstances of his home life, grade level team leader, guidance counselor and assistant principal all admitted to full knowledge of the horrific circumstances.  As to why none took action to protect this acting-out vulnerable one from his abusive over-exposure to adult life, the answer was simple.  They had marching orders to focus on a test score bottom line that had nothing to do with the birth of a new world.

This morally-empty accountability movement they’ve embarked upon provides them the absolution and abdication necessary for not acting in behalf of significantly human lives. Finally, lest we believe that our born into brothel 7 year old holds no significance or promise, we conclude with an excerpt from his homework journal in which he describes an after school adventure connecting nature science and neighborhood.

A moth is different from a butterfly. How? Because a moth has hair on it and a butterfly doesn’t have hair on it. Cause when me and Glenn found a light green caterpillar at our apartments, it was hanging upside down from a spider web.

And Glenn said, “Look, a light green caterpillar.” And then Glenn said, “Hurry up and take it off the spider web.” And then I took it off of the spider web and gave Glenn the caterpillar.
And me and Glenn ran around the corner to my house and I went up the stairs and digged out a box. But the caterpillar couldn’t fit up in there because we really had big leaves.

Then I had a problem with my sister’s bike because it rained over their in town and I stayed over their trying to fix it. Then Glenn had went to a lady’s house that he had showed the caterpillar to and she gave him a jar. It worked like a magnifying glass and it had the top on it and had some air holes around the top.