By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--October 17, 2016
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We are a rank-and-file organization within the Seattle Education Association that is dedicated to strengthening progressive values inside SEA, promoting quality and culturally relevant pedagogy to provide the best possible education for Seattle's students, and building a strong SEA that can fight for the rights of our membership.
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We believe in curriculum that reflects the needs and desires of the community that the school serves. For to [sic] long, the dominant pedagogy has not adequately represented working class children and children of color.Not surprisingly, the covers of three leftist books popular in the halls of academia appear in the section. One is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire, a Marxist theorist who advocated using education to indoctrinate and agitate students so that they become agents of radical social change. Freire held that the so-called dominant pedagogy "silences" poor and minority children and that there is no such thing as a neutral educational system. Another book listed is A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, a member of the Communist Party USA deemed at one time to be such a great potential threat to national security he was placed on the FBI's "Security Index" and "Communist Index," designations that would have allowed him to be detained by the U.S. government in the event of a national emergency. The third book is Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, edited by Eric Gutstein and Bob Peterson. It advocates intertwining mathematics with social justice teachings because with radicals everything everywhere is always political. SEE also leads the fight against education reform in Seattle, which leftists say is code for privatization. SEE's Jesse Hagopian regards public school classrooms as just another battleground in the fight against the mythical "white supremacy" that dominates America. He writes:
Today, a new Black rebellion has erupted -- from the sit-down protests on NFL fields, to the urban rebellions in the streets -- galvanized by extrajudicial executions of Black people by the police and racist vigilantes. While the movement to defend Black folks from unaccountable, racist police has been the most prominent aspect this new movement, Black Lives Matter doesn't end with the demand that Black people not be shot down in the streets. While there are certainly many prerequisites to achieving a society where Black lives truly matter, one of them, certainly, is confronting the long legacy of racist schooling and replacing it with an a consciously anti-racist education system.Hagopian doesn't provide much in the way of evidence that the current school system is actually racist because with these people it's all a matter of faith. Proof is never required. Pushed no doubt by people like Hagopian, the Seattle Education Association has spent lavishly on community organizing in recent years. It is unclear how much SEA spends on all aspects of its radical left-wing indoctrination program but its Form 990 disclosures filed with the IRS provide a clue. Over 10 years it spent more than $600,000 on what it describes as "community organizing." Its IRS filings show that SEA spent $77,312 on "community organizing" for the one-year period ending Aug. 31, 2015. For the 10-year period ending the same date it spent $602,252 for the same purpose. In the Obama era the SEA dramatically ramped up spending on community organizing. (The figures are: $77,312 (2015); $78,592 (2014); $82,759 (2013); $67,896 (2012); $42,101 (2011); $70,496 (2010); $70,567 (2009); $56,658 (2008); $32,671 (2007); and $23,200 (2006).) The planned pupil indoctrination fest in Seattle comes the month after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump unveiled a revolutionary proposal to change public education and American politics forever. It consists of a modern-day Marshall Plan to rescue poor kids in low-income neighborhoods from failing public schools. The unprecedented proposal includes a $130 billion plan to bail poor inner-city kids out of schools that don't teach them, thus condemning them to lives of grinding poverty. But that's not okay with Hagopian. In his mind Black Lives Matter and the fight against charter schools are inextricably linked. "Black organizations [are] bolstering the movement against the central components of the corporate education reform agenda," he writes. He notes approvingly that the NAACP voted at its national convention in July to call for "a moratorium on privately managed charter schools." He continues:
A moratorium would halt the granting of any more licenses to open new charter schools -- that is, schools funded by the public but privately run and not accountable to democratically elected school boards. The NAACP announcement has corporate education reformers reeling. Rick Hess, director of education policy at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said that if local governments adopt the NAACP's proposed moratorium, "It would give a permanent black eye to the sector."Except that getting away from "democratically elected school boards" is precisely the point of charter schools which seek to liberate inner-city children from the big city Democrat-dominated education systems that keep them poor and uneducated. Hagopian and his kind quite properly view charter schools as a threat to the sclerotic, dysfunctional public school system, which helps to explain their visceral contempt for charters. SEA, by the way, is an affiliate of the Washington Education Association which in turn is an affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA). NEA has long been controlled by radical leftists. NEA is the largest labor union in the U.S. with a membership of just under 3 million as of 2014. Its members are public school teachers, faculty in colleges and universities, retired education employees, and college students preparing to become teachers. NEA has embraced the community organizing techniques of Saul Alinsky for decades. In recent years the group's website has recommended Alinsky's two organizing books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, and described him as a "master political agitator, tactical planner and social organizer" who wrote a "guidebook for those who are out to change things." "Alinsky's goal seems to be to encourage positive social change by equipping activists with a realistic view of the world, a kind of preemptive disillusionment," according to the NEA. "If a person already knows what evil the world is capable of, then perhaps the surprise factor can be eliminated, making the person a more effective activist. Alinsky further seems to be encouraging the budding activist not to worry to [sic] much about getting his or her hands dirty. It's all a part of the job, he seems to say." NEA also posted training materials from 1972, the year Alinsky died. The document, more or less a blueprint from Alinsky on how to wreck public education, is called "Alinsky for Teacher Organizers," by J. Michael Arisman, who is identified as a Midwest training consultant for the NEA. Arisman explains that "Alinsky believes that the teacher association's real power base is not in the teachers, but in the community." Arisman summed up what teachers needed to do to bring about radical change in the education system.
Because he sees the teacher's power base outside the membership and in the community, Alinsky offers a straight line route to organization of that power base: 1. Forget the older teachers four or five years from retirement. They will fight organizing. 2. Find one or several local teacher leaders. 3. Get those teacher leaders to organize the community to put pressure on the superintendent or the school board to get things done for education. Develop a multi-issue base in getting to the community. Local taxes, for example, is an issue teachers could use to organize other community elements. 4. Organize the community by using the natural interest in the children to get into the homes. That is, send teachers into the homes. Once teachers show interest in kids by visiting homes, they develop a relationship with parents. 5. Once one or two teacher leaders begin to push and get near community wide success, the rest of the teachers will go along.It seems like the radical teachers of Seattle and elsewhere in America followed Alinsky's advice.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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