NO SANCTUARY, part of our QUILTBAG history of creating safe places for youth

NO SANCTUARY: Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses
STEPHEN LANE
ForeEdge
$22.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: School can be a special sort of nightmare for LGBTQ youth, who are sometimes targets of verbal or physical harassment with nowhere to turn for support. No Sanctuary tells the inspiring story of a mostly unseen rescue attempt by a small group of teachers who led the push to make schools safer for these at-risk students. Their efforts became the blueprint for Massachusetts’s education policy and a nationwide movement, resulting in one of the most successful and far-reaching school reform efforts in recent times. Stephen Lane sheds light on this largely overlooked but critical series of reforms, placing the Safe Schools movement within the context of the larger gay rights movement and highlighting its key role in fostering greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals throughout society.

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My Review: This academic study of an important piece of Pride Month's celebrations...the history of how we, as Queer or QUILTBAG or Gay people came to have safe spaces and allies in Massachusetts's schools...starts its journey with a solid overview of the struggles to get going against conservative outrage and loudly performed "fear" of what they saw and see as sick, perverted people having open and honest contact with the youth of Massachusetts. This hideous risk to their children's physical, psychic, and moral safety was intolerable, and they made no bones about shouting it. The problem was that there was, and remains, no scintilla of evidence to support their fear-mongering. What the evidence showed, and still shows, is that QUILTBAG students face physical threats and psychic battering from their intimates, and need the schools the law says they must attend as safe spaces, as refuges against the ignorant fearful powers that control their very lives.

A group of teachers, whose front line positions place them in the path of evidence of physical harm and threats to mental health disproportionately meted out to these minority-among-minorities students, and allied administrators worked together to create some safety for the abused from their abusers while they were at school. But that story isn't the beginning of The Story. Education in the US is a fraught subject. We're arguing, in 2022, about what students should be allowed to see that might affirm and support ideologies like anti-racist thinking and identities like Queerness. Many conservative...misnomer; I believe these people are radicals, determined to remake Others into invisible or absent non-persons...parents are deeply threatened by their children learning that white is not Right. (See my review of Jason Stanley's HOW FASCISM WORKS: The Politics of Us and Them for more about why this fear is expressed now.)

In the more-openly racist times of 1970s Massachusetts, teachers were aware of the horrors their Black queer students were suffering. And that, bless their born-in-the-1940s hearts, moved them to action and got them nagging their administrators to assist in designing ways and means that school could be turned into the Safe Schools program, created to provide guidance and professional development for administrators and teachers about this at-risk population. It was, and remains, a startling resource to someone whose contact with the schools was indifferent at best and malevolent at worst.

What results from this program is remarkable both as educational and social policy. It affirms its allyship and it defends its vulnerable client-students. What the author does to make this come alive for us, however, is not always as energetic or as riveting as these results might suggest. If your first respsonse to this story is, "I don't know anything about the gay-rights struggle so I won't *get it*," allow me to assure you that you will know quite a bit more about the gay-rights struggles, the civil rights struggles, and the reactionary resistance to them by the time you get to the Safe Schools story.

The fact that we're given a whirlwind tour of forty years' activity before we get to The Story isn't necessarily a bad thing. It pays for you, the potential reader, to know what you're in for before starting the journey. I was passingly familiar with the history presented here on a national level but the specifics dealing with Massachusetts are new, or at least new in this kind of detail, to me. I do not think the subtitle, "Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses," overstates the delivered story or oversells the impact of the program Author Lane profiles.

Again quoting Author Jason Stanley's book referred to above, "For the fascist, schools and universities are there to indoctrinate national or racial pride, conveying for example (where nationalism is racialized) the glorious achievements of the dominant race." The gender and sexual minorities are very much included in this exclusion, if you'll forgive the ugly phrase that still says what I mean better than anything else I came up with. Safe Schools is an enemy enclave, a Mariupol that the reactionary right needs to take control of. It flies in the face of the fascist agenda of normalization for only the identities and people that the fascists deem desirable and worthy for schools to act as places of succor and freedom for those Othered.

In the four years since this book first appeared, its chronicle of good people seeking to give weak, vulnerable people safety and affirmation has become more elegiac in the reading. There are so few places left in the US where this kind of active, protective stance is being taken on this level and with goals as ambitious as these goals are. I'm sure the future holds more challenges to the Safe Schools program, and the need for it will only increase on a daily basis.

Read this deeply tendentious tale of the right thing getting done. Let its factual basis inspire you to take action of your own.

NO STUDY WITHOUT STRUGGLE, a different lens on an ongoing, increasingly urgent social issue

NO STUDY WITHOUT STRUGGLE: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education
LEIGH PATEL
Beacon Press
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Examines how student protest against structural inequalities on campus pushes academic institutions to reckon with their legacy built on slavery and stolen Indigenous lands

Using campus social justice movements as an entry point, Leigh Patel shows how the struggles in higher education often directly challenged the tension between narratives of education as a pathway to improvement and the structural reality of settler colonialism that creates and protects wealth for a select few.

Through original research and interviews with activists and organizers from Black Lives Matter, The Black Panther party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Combahee River Collective, and the Young Lords, Patel argues that the struggle on campuses reflect a starting point for higher education to confront settler strategies. She reveals how blurring the histories of slavery and Indigenous removal only traps us in history and perpetuates race, class, and gender inequalities.

By acknowledging and challenging settler colonialism, Patel outlines the importance of understanding the relationship between the struggle and study and how this understanding is vital for societal improvement.

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My Review: Universities are under siege from as many angles as there are. Activists have campaigned, more or less successfully, for disinvestment from socially irresponsible industries. They've made the possession of a racially insensitive mascot a lightning rod for criticism. These news stories are commonplace enough to be readily Google-able, and to have a selection of attitudes and viewpoints from which to choose.

I'd also recommend taking a few minutes to read Author Patel's Q&A on The Beacon Broadside's website for a trenchant, quotable précis of her thoughts on this difficult to dismiss subject. It is a clear statement of her purposes in writing this book.

What makes this a worthwhile read is that it requires the reader to re-evaluate every university activity. There comes first identifying then admitting prospects "worthy" of the opportunity, with the "right kind" of work ethic both within their schools and outside them. Next the institution busies itself with identifying, designing, and inculcating the capitalist dogmas that will serve the needs of the ownership class. And finally, the cruelest step: indenturing students with mountains of debt to that ownership class for the privilege of enjoying the experience, which serves to prevent the offensive-to-them class and ethnic mixing. The fear being that, unburdened by economic chains, their students will inevitably rise above their starting points and cause their owners' control to be diluted. Reading Author Patel's work will, I'm sure, give the students and their parents the perspective to see through a definitively different lens. What makes that a good idea is that many will experience a sudden and usually pretty painful awakening. Those who are screaming about "critical race theory" are calling this propaganda spreading, brainwashing, or just plain indoctrination. As always, examine the accuser's accusations for cues as to the real source of their rage: the examination Author Patel demands we her readers undertake will cause some number of us to reject our present indoctrination as the unfair, exclusionary artifact of an exploitive ownership class's control paradigm.

Since I've already had a pitcher of that Kool-Aid, this wasn't fresh stuff for me.

What I needed to learn about was Author Patel's encouragement of the University's students to interrogate everything they are being offered through the awareness of settler colonialism's existence, reach, and signals of control. Her book is a call to arm yourself, youthful learners, with skepticism and information, not simply and passively accept the way things are without understandig how they got that way and who wants them to stay that way.

What lowers my rating to four of five stars is my sense that the message, while complete and well-thought-through, isn't presented in such a way as to lead to action. In the world of young persons it's my experience that theory is best left to emerge from actions at the maxiumum possible number of times. I'd've been much more stirred and delighted had I seen some non-theoretical analysis..."when one sees this, then that is the likeliest cause; now, do this or that to draw attention to it with the aim of changing it." After all, Author Patel spoke to many whose lives of resistance and struggle included forging action agendas. Why not bring this facet, underpinning the work as it does, to the fore?

But never mind all that Monday-morning quarterbacking. The book that is here, that is available from the estimable Beacon Press, will offer you much. If your child is leaving for college soon, I want to push you towards the read with some extra fervor. If your child is in school now, please send them one. There is no bad or wrong time to give someone not yet ossified into a brittle psychic shape the chisels and files and rasps to add refinement and enhancement to their awareness.

BLIND SPOTS: Why Students Fail and the Science That Can Save Them presents problems with solutions attached...how rare

BLIND SPOTS: Why Students Fail and the Science That Can Save Them
KIMBERLY NIX BERENS, PhD
The Collective Book Studio
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the United States, a majority of students graduate below proficiency in all academic subjects. Parents of struggling students feel overwhelmed and confused about how to help their children simply survive school, let alone succeed. Various school reform efforts have been tried and all have failed. But all hope is not lost. A science exists that allows children to learn as individuals even though at school they are educated in groups. One that avoids senseless labels that sentence children to lifetimes of failure and mediocrity.

Dr. Kimberly Berens and a team of scientists have spent the last 20 years perfecting a powerful system of instruction based on the learning, behavioral, and cognitive sciences that they call Fit Learning. This method of teaching has been proven to markedly improve how students understand and achieve, even for children who have been told they have learning disabilities or other disorders that interfere with their ability to learn.

Blind Spots reveals the history of our broken education system and shows that by using this teaching system in the classroom, we can unlock the vast potential hidden within every child.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER IN A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAGAZINE GIVEAWAY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a class of non-fiction book, driven by an agenda (usually religious or economic), that breaks me out in giant urticaria. People who feel, intensely, that Their Way Is Correct, aren't usually interesting to me. When I received this book, I worried that the problem would be especially strong here because Dr. Berens is a proselytizer for an educational system of her own devising.

The problem sounds obvious, doesn't it....damn near inescapable, really. Not so fast....

Yes, there is a lot here that is self-promotional, and that does indeed make me very uncomfortable. I was willing to keep going because the issue Dr. Berens is attempting to fix is one about which I am passionate as well: EDUCATE MY GRANDCHILDREN don't teach them how to take a damn test. We have forty years of lousy learners whose reading skills are such that comic books and audiobooks and podcasts are literary genres. I am, frankly, appalled by this...you need someone to read a book to you? You need lovely art to look at to make all those dull words come alive?! Is there no silence for you, someone must always be talking, talking, talking? When do you ever *think*?

Such are my concerns...Dr. Berens doesn't address them, but she does address the sad and worsening situation that teachers and students are enmeshed in. The first four chapters of the book clock in at 108 pages. They are the case-making chapters, the ones where we're informed of how we got here. I found them depressing and hard to motivate myself to read because honestly, seeing what's happened to the young people I know, there is such an immense wrong that's been done to them in the name of education that I want to weep.

The establishment sets an arbitrary timeline that teachers and students are expected to follow. Thus, students spend a predetermined amount of time on a particular lesson, get tested on that lesson, receive a grade of some sort, and are pushed on to the next lesson—regardless of the grade received. Grades are viewed as an evaluation of the student, not an evaluation of instruction. Students are expected to raise their hands, sit quietly and attentively in class, and make good grades. When students fail to do these things, that failure is attributed to problems inherent in the student.
...I'm hoping that uncovering your blind spots regarding how learning actually occurs might be the tipping point {to cause action}. ... Educational practices should be based on how learning actually occurs, not on how the establishment believes learning occurs.

Having spent the preceding hundred-plus pages bringing the fallacies and unsupported assumptions to your attention, the next chapter (five, for the detail-oriented) explodes nine myths about learning:

1. All Kids Learn Differently


2. We Should Teach to A Child's Strengths


3. They're Just Not Ready Yet


4. They're Just Not Good at It


5. Curriculum Materials Must Capture Student Interest


6. It's All About Self-Esteem


7. But They're The Experts!


8. Learning and Behavioral Problems are Medical and Often Require Medication


9. It's All About the Brain

...that's pretty comprehensive, isn't it...and the simplest thing about it is the number of times you've nodded your head, and thought (or said out loud, don't front!) "yeah, _____ said that when..." you've interacted with The System. Any parent has, and has heard those very ideas expressed with great confidence. And, it turns out, surprisingly circular intellectual justifications. (That's those first four chapters I had to make myself read.)

Chapter five, then, is about preparing you for chapter six: The Solution. Isn't that a reassuring title? You've made me all verschmekeled about the problem, yes, but here is The Solution. Thirty pages of assertions that I myownself think sound like they can't miss...but, says the Voice of Doubt, what makes these ideas better than the ones we're living the failure of? Chapter seven: The Evidence.

Yep. The structure of the book is a well-designed version of the solution it presents. I'm borderline panicked at the middle-aged people who, during this pandemic, have taken no lessons away from their experience of being forced to be their kids' teachers except "teachers aren't paid enough" (which, true enough, they aren't). The way your own kid looks at you as you're trying to explain a lesson shouldn't fill you with dismay and embarrassment. It should make you goddamned good and mad. This is what school means to them! It's not (just) you, it's the bloody awful things we've done to kids for forty years and called education!

So...do I think you should buy this book and read it? Yes. Yes, I do. I know you won't necessarily like the experience but the information makes me want to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to read it and share it widely...parent, grandparent, or just citizen of the world these schoolchildren will make for you.

THE PRIZE, a damning indictment of greed and careerism with a huge dollop of blame for the Lady Bountiful syndrome

THE PRIZE: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?
DALE RUSSAKOFF
Mariner Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker were ready to reform our failing schools. They got an education.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced to a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the downtrodden schools of Newark, New Jersey, then mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie were beside him, vowing to help make Newark “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” But their plans soon ran into the city’s seasoned education players, fierce protectors of their billion-dollar-a-year system. It’s a prize that, for generations, has enriched seemingly everyone, except Newark’s children.

Dale Russakoff delivers a riveting drama of our times, encompassing the rise of celebrity politics, big philanthropy, extreme economic inequality, the charter school movement, and the struggles and triumphs of schools in one of the nation’s poorest cities. As Cory Booker navigates between his status as “rock star mayor” on Oprah’s stage and object of considerable distrust at home, the tumultuous changes planned by reformers and their highly paid consultants spark a fiery grass-roots opposition stoked by local politicians and union leaders. The growth of charters forces the hand of Newark’s school superintendent Cami Anderson, who closes, consolidates, or redesigns more than a third of the city’s schools—a scenario on the horizon for many urban districts across America.

Russakoff provides a close-up view of twenty-six-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his wife as they decide to give the immense sum of money to Newark and then experience an education of their own amid the fallout of the reforms. Most moving are Russakoff’s portraits from inside classrooms, as homegrown teachers and principals battle heroically to reach students damaged by extreme poverty and violence.

The Prize is an absorbing portrait of a titanic struggle, indispensable for anyone who cares about the future of public education and the nation’s children.

Another gift from a special friend. Thank you, darling heart, but can I have a comic book now?

My Review: Betsy DeVos is the Secretary of Education. That sentence, plus the one about the racist, sexist shitheap that is Jeff Sessions becoming the Attorney General, really should drive home the point that these people your fellow Americans voted into office are the lowest of the low, the lowest and the least principled represented in halls of power where their like should simply never be allowed.

I do not belong to the school of thought advocating healing our divisions. I advocate the secession of the decent people from the rotten-souled fascist right-wing rest of y'all. And we'll take our tax money with us...we pay more than we get.

But then my conscience gets to me. What about the desperately poor and the hungry whose lives will, horribly, get still worse? The schools that will close? The school lunch programs that will vanish forever?

This book makes the cost of the Union's dissolution stark. It's never mentioned. It's not part of Dale Russakoff's brief in the least. But listen to this:

To those...who see education through the lens of students and classrooms, it is obvious that urban public schools are being asked to overcome nothing less than the effects of poverty. Reformers are right...to insist on consistently excellent teaching and leadership, but the results in Newark and in distressed cities across the country make clear that much more support is needed.

Given that most of the nation's schools are financed by property taxes (a system as blatant in its intent to preserve and protect the existing system of privilege as can be designed), and given that US government spending on early childhood support is abysmal compared to the entire rest of the planet, where is that support meant to come from? DeVos won't be there in her seat of power advocating for the Head Start program or the school lunch program. So now what?

Here's one perspective:

“Education reform is not about its leaders and their prerogatives. It’s about communities,” Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund and an ardent reformer, wrote on The Root, an online magazine. “Education reform doesn’t have to be—indeed, cannot be—force-fed to communities of color . . . We can be equal partners in ensuring what is best for our children and all children. It won’t work any other way.”

Inviting dialogue! Wow. What a concept. Except that there are a lot of people with huge financial stakes in the status quo that do NOT want to see reform. A 1994 Department of Education audit (mentioned in the book) of the Newark system found breathtaking corruption, a building that a school board member was selling to the district for $2.7 million that was generously worth under $200,000 being the one I was most repulsed by. In fact, "outsider" Democrat Newark mayor Cory Booker presented machine Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie with a school reform plan that warned explicitly against opening the process to public scrutiny since the unions and the other money-suckers would subvert or derail the process to protect their slots at the trough. (My phrase, not his.)

Then again, it's not just the greed factor that's at work in this process and its manifest failures:

“Education reform comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades,” [an insider] said. “It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.”

So even though our kids are failing to get even the minimal education they're being offered in the first place, who the hell asked your white ass to come sit at the table and tell us what's what? The Annenberg education initiatives of the 1990s (the Chicago branch of which featured one Barack Obama among its leading lights) faced the same issues. Here's a piece by a Teach for America alumnus. He isn't sanguine about the efficacy or the future of the program. Russakoff gives more detail, which I felt was nicely summed up by this:

“The ethos when I went through Teach for America was that good teaching and good leadership could solve the problems of poverty,” said [a Newark program participant]. “That’s part of the pie, but that’s not all of the pie. Our most dynamic teachers were burning out—the need and anger in the children, the mental health issues, the absenteeism, the transience.” They were witnessing the effect of what researchers call adverse childhood experiences, multiple traumas that, studies have shown, significantly interfere with learning and focus in children in the most disadvantaged communities.”

Back to the problems of poverty that education is being asked to overcome. That is manifestly absurd. Education is the way out of poverty. This is an article of faith among the educated. But what does that statement look like to a child whose world contains one educated person, usually not of his or her own ethnic background? "Be like me," they hear said earnestly and with all the best wishes in the world.

How? What does that look like?

Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words. (my emphasis)

By. Age. THREE.

Are you getting a view of the biblical proportions of this problem yet? The sheer magnitude of the changes needed to make even a minuscule dent in the problem? The reformers have hammers. The problems become nails:

“A lot of high-stakes accountability has become self-defeating—focusing solely on the identification of bad schools, the bad teachers, as opposed to creating a signal and involving teachers in processes that lead to investigations and changes,” [an expert] said.”

So here's The Purpose Explained:

[An expert] said the system, known as Student Growth Percentile, was designed to measure student gains or losses, not to assign blame or credit for them. “Simply focusing on teachers as being the only potential cause of growth of students is pretty obviously myopic..." The data would be more useful...as a starting point for discussions with teachers on the reasons individual students are improving or losing ground, which could include many factors in and out of school.

Mmm hmm. Statistics used as ploughshares, not swords, in the battle to save yet another generation of poverty-mired Black children from a lifetime of marginal existence. That's gonna happen. After all, the entire system isn't based on the need for the Black child to grow up to be a grunt worker, a pawn, or a prisoner, is it?
/sarcasm

So what's the answer? Mark Zuckerberg, who comes across in this book as a genuinely well-meaning man with a slightly different hammer he wants to wield on Newark's public school system:

Zuckerberg’s document laid out similar goals: “Restructure pay scale to increase base salaries for new hires . . . Abolish seniority as a factor in all personnel decisions and incentivize the removal of poor performers.” He also wrote that he wanted the best teachers to receive bonuses of up to fifty percent of their salary, the kind of incentives paid to top workers in Silicon Valley.”

Selected from among many other equally utopian proposals to stand for the dangers of false equivalency in public conversation about society's needs. Zuckerberg, a political conservative, wants to model the world on a business platform created by and for people who are high achievers. In Alcoholics Anonymous, this is called "acting as if," or "fake it til ya make it," an idea that behavior becomes habit becomes character.

Oh dear. That's not such a great idea, Zuck, especially since your own organization is so...fallible, let's say, due to its constituent members aping your own regressive politics and enforcing the attendant repressive and unpleasant standards on the billions who don't want any part of them. But that's another rant for another day.

Businesses aren't by their nature equipped to deliver what the teachers in the trenches say with near unanimity what they really want:

[T]eachers consistently tell researchers that, given the choice, they would opt for a good principal and supportive working conditions over merit pay. Indeed, research had found no correlation between merit pay and student achievement, although reformers and venture philanthropists were fighting hard to make it a staple of new teacher contracts.

So that's easier and cheaper than the throw-money-at-the-problem shtik, right? That's the teachers sorted. And the kids?

Children with more than one traumatic experience—violence, severe poverty, family breakup, or substance abuse in the home—were more than twice as likely as others to fail at least one grade.

And we're back to square one: Support the family that a child comes from, help the family eat, live in a stable location, get the services that it needs, and the battle's more than half won.

Does any of that seem to you likely to happen in Trump's America?