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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

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.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

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.