Florida Man... Again

On Saturday the NAACP issued a travel advisory for the state of Florida. Their press release explained it saying it “comes in direct response to Governor Ron DeSantis' aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools” and adds, “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.” 

The warning followed similar statements by other civil rights groups. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a predominantly Mexican-American group issued its travel advisory last Wednesday because of new anti-immigrant Florida laws. These new laws make it illegal for immigrants with inadequate documentation to drive in Florida with legally-issued out-of-state licenses. They make it a felony for the rest of us to transport such immigrants in our own vehicles. And they require hospitals that accept Medicaid to question patients about their immigration status.

Equality Florida, which supports the rights of LGBTQ people, issued its own travel advisory back in April. Last week they reaffirmed it, citing four bills signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in one day, which they call “the slate of hate.” The bills expand the scope of Florida’s “Don’t-Say-Gay” law; outlaw gender-affirming treatment for minors, even with parental approval; bar transgender people from using appropriate rest rooms; and ban drag performance in front of children. 

Sponsors of Pride Week events in Florida are already concerned about Equality Florida’s travel warning. They fear it will mean a loss of tourist revenue to their businesses and are calling instead for LGBTQ people to “flood the state” with their presence. Tourism in Florida is a $40 billion a year industry. But the truth is that the new anti-gay laws are themselves a threat to Pride celebrations. Port St. Lucie already had to cancel its Pride Parade because there was no way to prevent children in attendance from seeing marchers in drag. Orlando has the biggest one-day Pride event in the state, which brings in 200,000 people and $25 million in tourist spending. But it, too, is trying to figure out the legal repercussions of participants in drag.

And Florida’s agriculture industry is facing problems from its anti-immigrant laws that have nothing to do with a LULAC travel warning. Immigrant workers are already leaving the state ahead of the enforcement of the new anti-immigrant laws. Others are considering the move. The state itself realizes that its $7.4 billion farm sector is dependent on immigrants. It is a low-wage sector with difficult and dangerous working conditions and - even before the passage of these new laws - was having difficulty recruiting workers.

Most of Florida’s 100,000 farm workers are seasonal or migratory. Roughly half of them are now working on H2A visas. These visas, specifically designed for so-called “unskilled” workers are explicitly temporary, typically no more than a few months. As a result, many H2A holders overstay their visas and are therefore technically “undocumented.” Growers all over the country are desperately trying to extend the H2A program, which would allow workers to stay longer. Their bill, which already passed the House of Representatives, is stuck in the Senate, because they don’t want it to include any protections for workers’ rights. The Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act of 1983 doesn’t currently cover H2A visa holders. But a number of senators are rejecting a law that would create a class of permanent residents with no legal rights. Growers who watch their language say that extending MSPA to H2A holders would open them up to a flood of “frivolous lawsuits. But those who are more candid say they’re afraid their workers will form unions.

But let’s return to the NAACP and its concern with Florida’s new laws that ban the teaching of history. Yesterday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz responded to the NAACP’s travel warning with this tweet:

This is bizarre. And utterly dishonest. 

In the 1950s & 1960s, the NAACP did extraordinary good helping lead the civil rights movement. 

Today, Dr. King would be ashamed of how profoundly they’ve lost their way.

I will leave aside the irony of Senator Cruz describing anything (or anyone) as “bizarre” and “dishonest.” Instead I will simply share some of the history that Florida’s new laws make it illegal to teach.

In July of 1963 the St. Augustine, Florida NAACP Youth Council organized a sit-in at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter. I say “sit in” but what the youth did was go to the counter - like any other customers - to order a burger and a Coke. The wait staff told them repeatedly that “We don’t serve n——“ and that they would be arrested if they didn’t leave. The police did arrest all of them. Twelve youths who were 18 or older were all released on bond. But the four minors, Audrey Neil Edwards, JoeAnn Anderson, Willie Carl Singleton, and Samuel White, were told that they would be locked up unless they testified that they were coerced into participating by the local NAACP chapter head, Dr. Robert Hayling. The four begged their parents not to go along with this trick, which would have opened Dr. Hayling to a felony conviction for endangering the welfare of children. As a result of their courage, they were sent to “reform school.”

I put that phrase in scare quotes because the Florida School for Girls and the Florida School for Boys were notorious, violent labor camps. The School for Boys was known for beatings, rapes, torture, and murder of its “students” by the adult staff. A 2014 survey by forensic anthropologists discovered 55 unmarked graves away from the institution’s cemetery. They documented at least 100 deaths. Willie Carl Singleton later served in Vietnam and passed in 1989 at the age of 41 Samuel White lived to the age of 58. But to their dying days, neither ever told anyone about their experiences  at that “School for Boys.” JoeAnn Anderson remembered her mom visiting at the School for Girls and crying to see her knees bleeding from the time she spent scrubbing floors. She also remembered her arrest by Deputy Everett Haney. He told a another deputy,“You know what? If we kill these two n—s and say they tried to escape … nothing would be said.” The children were eventually released six months later, but only after an international campaign of outrage about their treatment.

And the NAACP chairman, Dr. Hayling? A few weeks later he and three other men were kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan and brought to a large rally and cross burning outside the city. They were beaten almost to death and then stacked up to be burned themselves. The Florida State Police rescued them from burning, but Dr. Hayling was arrested. He was charged - and convicted! - for assaulting the mob of Klansmen! 

The following year there was another episode that led to international outrage. This time the owner of the Monson Motor Lodge poured a gallon of acid into the motel’s swimming pool because Black people were swimming in it. And, unlike the beating and near-burning of Dr. Hayling, this was done in daylight with journalists present. And it, too, like the imprisonment of the four teens, caused an international outrage.

Perhaps the retrospective honor that Ted Cruz pays to the NAACP of the sixties is due to Executive Director Roy Wilkins threatening to take away the St. Augustine chapter’s charter. Dr. Hayling told him over the phone that he would put the charter right into the mail, but would not back down from the white supremacists. Dr. Martin Luther King, though, was a supporter, both of Dr. Hayling and of the St. Augustine Four. While she was incarcerated he wrote Audrey Neil Edwards, praising her as a warrior.

But I think Ted Cruz is just “utterly dishonest.” He aligns himself with Klansmen and racists today. In what alternate universe would he have done anything else in 1963 and 1964?

Worshipping the Rich, Demonizing the Poor

 In the past few centuries, personal financial success has - in different times and by various people - been attributed to:

• God’s grace
• Racial superiority
• Hard work
• Good genes
• God’s grace (again)

Poverty has, on the other hand, been blamed on:

• Immorality
• Racial inferiority
• Laziness
• Unfit genes
• Lack of faith in God

It should be glaringly obvious that the lie blaming poverty on the poor has nothing to do with religion, pseudoscience, empirical observation, actual science, or the pseudo-religions of the 21st century. Why else would evolutionists and creationists, believers and unbelievers, converge on the same doctrine? Why would they contradict each other on every other detail, but agree only on venerating the rich and scorning the poor?

Worship of wealth doesn't emerge from pragmatism, theory, science, or religious faith. It comes from the wealthy themselves.

Humbled

 In 2010 I attended the national conference of VANGO, the organization for  Vietnamese American Non-Governmental Organizations, in Houston. For me there was the hope that I could get some help raising money to bring four high school students from the Bronx on a medical mission with Project Viet Nam after having gone myself the previous spring. Those hopes went nowhere. So did my ambition of scaling this up from a pilot program with four kids who I knew well to something that would build internationalism among students without the resources to polish their college resumes with a trip to do service overseas. The closest I came that weekend in Houston was an enthusiastic CEO of another organization who suggested that we do car washes. I smiled and didn’t tell him about the Bronx.

For Quynh, the director of PVN, I think my purpose in being there was to showcase the safe-drinking-water initiative I had proposed. When we ended up going that spring she had recruited a hydrology engineer to work on wells along with my work introducing a water-testing curriculum to Vietnamese school kids at all grade levels. I think she may also have been showing off that she had a white American high school principal working with and for her. 

A lead speaker was a specialist on emotional intelligence and group process. He closed with an activity in which he gave everyone a river stone - polished by the water - and asked us to write on it the negative quality that was most holding us back. The instructions were to get rid of it within the next day of so, symbolic of discarding that quality. I didn’t do that; I held on to mine for many months. I kept it in the console of my car so I could look at it again and again to remind myself what was stopping my growth. I finally decided that looking at it wasn’t helping. This was not a surprise. What was a surprise was that a young woman from Houston wanted to talk to me about her own challenges. A bigger surprise was that the words she wrote on her stone were the same as those I wrote on mine: Self-Doubt.

There is a degree of self-doubt that has been helpful to me. It enables me to reflect. It keeps me from always believing that I am right. It has always let me apologize to children. When I was a principal it let me give permission to teachers to try things I was skeptical about. But it goes well past that. Today I finished reading a book about Chicana feminism in the 60’s and 70’s. I wrote the editor that I was humbled. Humbled by the courage and persistence of those women. Humbled by the shallowness of my understanding back then when I was following their work from a distance. Humbled by the work of the historians who are recovering their stories today.

But humbled isn’t really an adequate word; humiliated is closer. I compare my professional work and my movement work with theirs and I feel inadequate and wasteful: wasteful of time and wasteful of talent.

Yes. When they were doing all that work I was a few years younger. They were in the world with real people and I was in college. My movement work then was planning and carrying out campus demonstrations and participating in larger city-wide and national demonstrations planned by others. The closest I came to any significant work then was when I chaired the planning committee for a citywide rally to demand the impeachment of Richard Nixon and then when I MC’ed the rally itself. I was chosen by the politically-diverse group to do that because I consistently heard everyone and made certain that they were all heard, summarizing their views and delineating the similarities and differences. I suppose that is a skill. I know that it is a preference that is not shared by those who are more interested in ensuring that their own views “win.” A victory for me at that rally was keeping it to the agenda we agreed on and not letting anyone hijack it, including Representative Bella Abzug who tried to sneak another speaker on as she concluded her own remarks. It is not nothing but it feels small.

That was 1973. For the next few years most of my public political work was in an organization called PARE (People Against Racism in Education). Almost everybody in it was a teacher or a professor of education. Everybody was white. The leadership was aligned with a group called Prairie Fire, which was a kind of above-ground auxiliary for the Weather Underground. We got a candidate elected to a local school board who later served on the City Council and as Manhattan Borough President before losing the mayoral race to Rudy Giuliani in 1997. I suppose helping her get started counts as an accomplishment of some sort, but it feels small. 

I also helped with elections in Washington Heights and in Brownsville. In the Heights, the Orthodox rabbis were sending their congregants out to block-vote for hacks against progressive parent candidates and some of those voters, whose own children attended yeshivas, were happy to take a palm card from my Jewish self, assuming that I was endorsing the same people their rabbis were. In Brooklyn I was a poll watcher because the money in school budgets was enough to get people very committed to controlling the local boards. I was threatened at gun point by some hired hood. The monitors from the Justice Department took my report and I suppose they wrote it up somewhere. I don’t think our involvement in either of those elections made any big difference. 

Worse was when we went to Canarsie where some high school kids from Brownsville and East New York had been rezoned in order to integrate the overwhelmingly-white South Brooklyn schools. We were given a narrative about a violent white community and the need to protect Black teens. But when we got there what I actually saw was a minority of racist white parents who were trying to enforce an unpopular boycott - to bully the rest of the white people to keep their kids home - while most of the white parents just wanted to accompany their kids through the pickets so that they could attend the first day of school. That felt to me like a giant missed opportunity to bring together the great majority of white kids with the arriving Black kids. 

I was finally expelled from PARE because I raised a series of questions about the factuality of their claims that the reason we were a white organization was because we were supporting a movement of Black and Latin parents, parents who we never actually saw. I also challenged their view that racism had to mainly be fought in ourselves, rather than in its systemic control of the schools. So I look back on all that without any sense of accomplishment at all. I wrote up the experience and I think two or three people read that.

Then there was my work in what I guess people now call the movement to build a party. Our circle was small, but its membership was impressive to me. Most of the comrades were Black or Puerto Rican and they included former leaders of the Young Lords Party, SNCC, and the Health Revolutionary Union Movement. I cannot say there were no accomplishments. We established a working print shop in order to provide concrete aid to exiled revolutionaries from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Iran, and Ethiopia. I’m proud of that. We also provided support to the movement for Puerto Rican independence, both practical and with our own literature. But, honestly, most of our own publications were dense polemics with other circles. In retrospect they feel entirely insignificant. I devoted immense amounts of time to typing them up, time which I will never get back. 

I once represented us at a conference in California of similarly-sized circles from Alabama, Missouri, and North Carolina, as well as Oakland, LA, and San Diego. The outcome will give a sense of the emptiness of that work, too. After a couple of days of exchanging views and experiences everybody agreed that some ongoing common work might help us find unity going forward. But some circles insisted that it must be a common study, as opposed to, say, work on international solidarity, or women’s rights. Okay. Then one circle said they would only participate if the study was on the three-worlds theory, which the Party of Labor of Albania had recently denounced the Communist Party of China for holding. I said that we would not be bullied into something by a group saying they would only continue if they got their way, especially when it was about something that wasn’t terribly important to the actual work of stopping exploitation or of transforming the lives of oppressed people. When I got back to New York and reported, the comrades agreed. We had already had an internal split over our refusal to make that same question the absolute living center of our time and attention. And within another year or so we had all drifted apart. 

In the late eighties I spent months writing up a summary of all that work. It included a history of the entire revolutionary movement in the United States as well as my take on all the organizations and trends of the 70’s, so far as I had seen them. I think two other people read it. I suppose it was worth writing because it helped me clarify some thoughts that I needed to abandon.

I look at all those meetings and wonder what was accomplished.

Meanwhile, I was teaching high school. Even in my worst moments of doubt I can’t write that off as a failure. There are simply too many former students telling me what a tremendous difference I made in their lives. But I keep asking myself, “In what way?” I imagined myself, first and foremost, a teacher of social studies. I imagined myself raising generations of kids who would be skeptical of the official story, who would dig deeper, who would even be original thinkers. And many of them did remarkable work. 

I am proud of the girl - now a 48-year-old mom of two - who thought the 911 system was a scheme to ignore emergencies and arranged a class trip on a school holiday (and got her classmates to go!) to the phone center. She concluded that the system would work better if callers would take a breath and be more cooperative with the questions the operators ask. I am proud of the three boys - now fathers in their early forties - who reimagined Langston Hughes’s poem “I Am the Darker Brother” as being about younger siblings, which all of them were. I can go on… and on.

The problem is that none of them can. When I bring up these things, with a few exceptions, they don’t remember the significant and original intellectual work they did in my classes. They remember my encouragement. They remember my consoling words when they were down. They remember grace that I don’t believe I have. They talk about wanting to model themselves on me. They almost never speak about academics. One woman who is near fifty remembers me standing in the gap because her dad, a former Black Panther, was locked up from the time she was thirteen. But she doesn’t remember that I brought another former Panther in to address the class when he was finally released from prison because of massive irregularities in his original trial. She doesn’t remember that I had him speak privately to her about her dad, whom he knew well.

I know this sounds whiny. I know that having a strong positive impact on three generations of young men and women matters. I know that I should feel good about a highly regarded counselor who tells everybody that she learned it from me. I know that a school administrator who repeatedly credits me as mentor is a good thing. It’s just not what I set out to do. I wanted to teach the history that isn’t in the books. I wanted to raise up kids who would transform the world.

That plan to allow urban youth the opportunity to do international service crashed and burned in the absence of any funding. Even my Plan B died. I was going to bring my pilot group of four by car to participate in a Native youth leadership camp in New Mexico. The execs, who had previously interviewed me for a position on their board, never got back to me.

I wrote two books of historical fiction about the US in the early 20th century to teach the stories that have been erased to readers. But if the number of actual readers reached fifty I would be surprised. I am hurt by the sheer numbers of former students who excitedly purchased those books but never read them.

This week I read that book on Chicana feminists who accomplished so very much and I held up my life against their lives and found it wanting. I wrote the editor to thank her. She wrote back immediately and appreciatively. But every word of her response felt like critique of my compliments: It isn’t her work; it is collective work that she participates in with colleagues and with the subjects. They aren’t recovering the work of the 60’s and 70’s; they are continuing it. They don’t participate in the isolation and competition of the academy; they subvert it. I am so excited to hear this. I am so chastened by it.

The Great LHS Walkout

 Some of my high school classmates are fond of describing us, the Class of 1970, as The Class That Walked Out. I have strong memories of that day and it comes up often for me. My short story, "The Sun Shone So Brightly," in my collection Stones from the Creek, is about a mine strike. But the scene in which all these underground miners stand celebrating their resistance under a sunny sky is drawn from my experience walking out of Livingston High School. The protagonist of that story, Joey Quintana, is threatened by a foreman: "You see all these men walking out? Every one of them is going to be fired. But if you walk out, you're a dead man." I wasn't threatened with death. The school administrator just told me that the other students who walked out would be suspended, but that I would be permanently expelled. There's more, but I think it just reinforces my self-aggrandizing view, and that's what I want to dispel here.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post here about becoming a teacher because of the frustrations of my schooling. On the subject of the walkout I wrote:

An eleventh-grade boy stood up in front of the cafeteria before class with a paper and said that he wanted to share some thoughts. Immediately every cafeteria door flew open and the male teachers ran in. (Who knows how long they had been waiting to put on this bully-boy display?) Some of them grabbed that junior boy and hustled him out, but most of them just started pushing everybody outside into the parking lot. 

I promised to get back to that story someday, but this is not that day. Because even a cursory reading of this short quote tells you that the great LHS Walkout began as more of a push out by paranoid adults.

Compare our walkout to the East Los Angeles walkouts of 1968. I'll start with the issues. The East LA high schools - Garfield, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Wilson - were three-quarters Chicano and the issues were all about racism. The buildings themselves were inferior and so were the academic facilities, such as libraries, labs, and even textbooks. The teachers were mostly white and their expectations for the students were low. The shop classes had obsolete equipment. Students were paddled for speaking Spanish. And the disrespect of faculty for the kids was just notorious. One of those teachers had no problem publicly stating:

Most of the Chicanos have never had it so good. Before the Spanish came, he was an Indian grubbing in the soil, and after the Spaniards came he was a slave. It seems to me that America must be a very desirable place, witness the number of "wetbacks" and migrants both legal and illegal from Mexico.

Livingston High School was an overwhelmingly white school in an affluent suburb. I will not make any claims for the quality of the education, because I think it was lousy. But the expectations were that most of us would go to college and that many of us would enter the professions. Yes, the teachers disrespected us, but with the privilege of adulthood, not with the contempt of white supremacism. Yes, like the East LA high schools they frequently kept most of the bathrooms locked and rotated which ones were open. But our issues were issues of privilege: we wanted changes to final exam policy, a more relaxed dress code, and the right to circulate our own publications, independent of administrative censorship. As the joke from a few years ago had it, first world problems.

Then there is the preparation (or lack of it.) The leading students in East LA met together for months laying the groundwork for the protests with surveys, petitions, and presentations to the school board. Then they met for weeks preparing for the walkouts themselves. Some of us in Livingston had brought proposals to the principal, to be told the matters had to be brought to the school board, then sent back to the principal by the board. We ran a student candidate for the Board of Education.* We brought a suit against the superintendent of schools. But when it came to the walkout itself, well, we never planned one. We did plan and carry out a public meeting to report to the student body about the lack of progress with any of our proposals, and about the contempt with which they were received. But the walkout itself began with teachers shoving students out of the building when it merely looked as though another public meeting was beginning.

And, perhaps most important, there is the difference in official response. LAPD had undercover officers in the student leaders' planning meetings. When the students walked out they were met with absolutely massive violence, beatings, and arrests. Thirteen leaders were charged under sedition and conspiracy laws and faced 66 years in prison. And us? We were in the faculty parking lot next to the cafeteria listening to music and speeches when the chief of Livingston Police walked up from his headquarters across the park, about five minutes on foot. He was smoking a pipe, in a relaxed mood, and unaccompanied by any of his officers. I realized even that day that angry faculty and administrators - and even some parents - had undoubtedly demanded that he bust our heads and arrest us. But he was police chief in an affluent white suburb and you don't keep that job by beating the townspeople's precious children. He chatted with kids he knew, assessed the mood, and strolled back to his office. 

The next school board meeting was moved from their public hearing room to a middle school auditorium, with the overflow crowd filling the cafeteria and listening over the PA. Sure, there were plenty of authoritarian types who were enraged that we had been allowed to get away with a display of defiance, but none of us were arrested. The suspensions we had been promised on the day of the "walkout" were quietly reduced to a single day - the day of the walkout itself - and then never heard of again, despite all the threats we heard every day in school about "your permanent record that will follow you for the rest of your life." I was proud to have been threatened with expulsion, as I mentioned above. It made me happy to be viewed as a menace by authoritarian assholes. But that was the last mumbling word I heard about it. 

In fact the only police action at all was against my dad, at that big public school board meeting. One of the loudmouths libeled the secretary of the student government, and she rose to a point of personal privilege in order to respond. She had attended American Legion Girls' State and she knew that Robert's Rules gave her priority. The board, of course, ignored her so my outraged dad stood up and very loudly demanded that she be heard. The chairman of the board asked the officers to remove him, and they did.** 

I hope I am adequately making a point about the privilege that encircled us, even as we protested a school regime that was disrespectful and antidemocratic, but that never tried to reduce us to super-exploited gardeners and chamber maids. The thing is that I was only partly aware of it at the time. Watching the HBO drama "Walkout!" about the East LA student protests and reading teacher Sal Castro's book Blowout! helped me appreciate the differences. Then, last year, I learned about the 1970 student walkout in Uvalde, Texas. Yes, that Uvalde, Texas that the whole world heard about last spring because of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. But unlike our walkout that same spring, it lasted six weeks! Like the East LA students, the kids at the Uvalde high school were overwhelmingly Chicano. The immediate trigger for their walkout was the firing of Josue Garza, a fifth-grade teacher who was one of the very few bilingual Spanish speakers in the entire district. As in East LA they were demanding equal resources in the predominantly Chicano schools. They were protesting punitive disciplinary practices against Chicano kids that included frequent suspensions, paddling, and even fines. And, as in LA, they got extreme responses to their protests. Many of the participants were held back an entire school year. The valedictorian of the senior class was never allowed to graduate. And when they gathered near the school the Texas Rangers posted snipers on the roof.

My intention in writing this is not to disparage our protest at Livingston High School. As I wrote above, our education was authoritarian, antidemocratic, disrespectful, and - I believe - mediocre, too. The response to our protest was an attempt to reimpose the kind of strict control that we had been objecting to all along. But if you consider the differences you will see that Texas and California had been imposing a system of lifelong subordination on people of Mexican descent. And they were prepared to bring the full violence of the state apparatus against the students to maintain that system. 

A final note: I mentioned above that we sued the school superintendent for the right to distribute independent literature.*** We brought that case late in 1968. It wasn't finally heard until I was a freshman in college, the fall of 1970. But consider the case the Uvalde students brought against their school system in 1970, for racial discrimination. It was eventually settled in 2008, thirty-eight years after it was brought. It wasn't settled until 2017, when the parties agreed that the terms of the settlement had been met. Do I really need to say more?

_______________

* That candidate was me; again, a story for another day.

** A side note: My dad had known that man since we first moved to Livingston fourteen years earlier and we had been in one another's homes. To this day I don't know what to make of that.

*** I discuss this suit briefly in another context at the post linked above.

Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with the Lord

There is a meme on the internet that purports to derive from “the Talmud” saying: 

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

It appears to have two sources.

One is Micah 6:8:

הִגִּ֥יד לְךָ֛ אָדָ֖ם מַה־טּ֑וֹב וּמָֽה־יְהֹוָ֞ה דּוֹרֵ֣שׁ מִמְּךָ֗ כִּ֣י אִם־עֲשׂ֤וֹת מִשְׁפָּט֙ וְאַ֣הֲבַת חֶ֔סֶד וְהַצְנֵ֥עַ לֶ֖כֶת עִם־אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ׃

Which I will translate as, “He has told you, o Man, what is good and what the LORD requires of you: Do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”

The second is Pirkei Avot (2:15), the Sayings of the Fathers, which is a collection of aphorisms and proverbs in the Mishnah:

רַבִּי טַרְפוֹן אוֹמֵר, הַיּוֹם קָצָר וְהַמְּלָאכָה מְרֻבָּה, וְהַפּוֹעֲלִים עֲצֵלִים, וְהַשָּׂכָר הַרְבֵּה, וּבַעַל הַבַּיִת דּוֹחֵק: הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה

Which I will translate, “Rabbi Tarfon says, ‘The day is short, the work is great, the workers are lazy, the pay is good, and the Master of the House is demanding.’ He used to say, ’It’s not on you to finish the job, but you aren’t free to abandon it.’” 

Tarfon is very clear that “the job” is the study of Torah. In fact his very next words in this passage are, “If you have studied much Torah you will be given much reward.” But I am taken with the idea that “the job” is exactly what the prophet said: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly.

In the next chapter of Micah (7:18-20) the prophet asks: Who is a God like You, forgiving sin, pardoning transgression; who has not maintained His anger forever against the remnant of His people because he desires kindness? He will take us back in mercy, blot our crimes and hurl them into the depths of the sea, keeping faith with Jacob and loyalty to Abraham as You promised our fathers in days gone by.

Micah tells us that God “desires kindness” (חָפֵ֥ץ חֶ֖סֶד הֽוּא) and that he requires us to “love kindness” (אַ֣הֲבַת חֶ֔סֶד) I am translating the Hebrew “chesed” as “kindness.”

Rabbi Moses Cordovero (1522-1570) wrote an entire treatise on that second quote from Micah, (“Who is a God like you…) which he described as Thirteen Attributes of Mercy (Rachamim), and which he argued we should learn to practice in our own lives. He had plenty to say about kindness. 

He said that the secret of kindness is to love God so completely that you could never leave His service because that love surpasses everything else in your heart. But he also suggested some practices with other people. These are some of them.

• Provide a child with everything from the time of its birth
• Visit and heal the sick
• Charity to the poor
• Welcome strangers 
• Make a wedding for a bride
• Reconcile people who have become estranged

(Tomer Devorah, Southfield, MI, 1993)

So those are some ways of being kind. But don’t forget, Micah also said that God wants us to walk humbly with Him. 

A Brightly Marked Path

 If you choose to follow your own path in life, expect to be lost a good part of the time.

Becoming a teacher was not the path that was marked out for me. 

There were other brightly-marked paths. Engineering, for example: my dad, two of my uncles, two of my cousins were engineers and it seemed an obvious choice to me. My friend Bob became an engineer. We were Bar Mitzvah together. We were lab partners in high school for three years in chemistry, physics, and organic chemistry. His dad, like mine, was an engineer. They knew each other from college. But I didn't choose that path.

When I was 17 I was completely without direction. I talked a lot about not going to college, which was anathema in my family, community, social strata, etc. I thought I could stay in the warehouse where I was employed during holidays and eventually drive a truck. I remember my mom weeping and shouting about this ambition. One day my dad saw an old Chevy pickup for sale and suggested my brother and I buy it, fix it up, and travel around in it together. If you have never seen the Sierra Club book On the Loose it will give you an idea of the romantic note this struck for me. If you know that book, well, you already know. But don't take it out and look at it again. I, at least, am always disappointed. In any case, Mom went into a paroxysm of tears and accusations. Dad said not a word.

So I found myself seeing a vocational counselor. I didn't yet know the origin of the word "vocation" in the idea of a calling, as in being called to prophesy. But I was impressed by the magic of multiple-choice interest index assessments, especially sticking a pin in the paper instead of bubbling in a scantron. I imagined being struck by the power of what would be revealed for me. Instead, the counselor revealed triumphantly that I could be a... Doctor! I matched successful and happy doctors with a desire to care for others and I had aptitude in math and science. To me, this was a giant let down. I had less-than-no interest in this, I suspect because it was a cliché, such a cliché. Every smart Jewish boy who was good at science could make everyone proud and be a draw for the girls (and their ambitious moms) by going to med school. When I was in my forties I realized that I could have been a good doc, but at 17 it was the last thing on my mind.

Another road that had lights shining on it was the one that led to becoming an attorney. If you were a smart Jewish boy who wasn't  good at science, the obvious choice was law school. When I try to count the numbers of friends and classmates who became lawyers - high school and college, Jewish and not - I don't know where to start. It seems easier to count those who did not. And the appeal was obvious. When I was in high school we sued the school superintendent over our First Amendment right to create and distribute our own independent publications. Our pro bono attorney was the mom of a student at the school, but she was also a clinical professor at Rutgers Law School. She made us do our own legal research and draft our own briefs. I really loved that work. My absolutely favorite part was at the hearing which came three years after we initiated the case, when I was already a freshman in college. Our lawyer was questioning the superintendent and he launched into his customary bloviation instead of answering her questions. The hearing examiner, who was the Chancellor for the State of New Jersey, just cut him off and told him to confine himself to responding to what he was asked. A triumph! But not enough to make me turn myself into another cliché.

So why school? Most people who become teachers love school and want to be like a teacher they had. I'm from that minority who go into education to fix their own experience. I'll go into some detail about this, because I really did like learning and books. I had a couple of teachers in elementary school who encouraged exploration, a couple. In second grade I would closely watch other kids who were engaged in what was called "seat work." As soon as the first ones finished I would jump up as if I, too, had done anything at all, and work with the prisms, hand lenses, weather instruments, tuning forks, etc. that enriched that classroom. In sixth grade I hand copied scenes from the scripts of Broadway plays and enlisted classmates to act them out. I have no memory at all of what I was supposed to be doing instead, but that teacher didn't seem to care. 

But that was two teachers. Most years the teachers were all about compliance. I was locked in supply closets to stop me from talking to my neighbors. My desk was overturned repeatedly because it wasn't neat. Once I was even put in a garbage can for that same offense. In third grade the teacher sent me to sit in a sixth grade class while the big kids laughed at me. I chose to pay attention to them reading aloud from their science book about the parts of the ear and the parts of the eye. I had no idea what I was even being punished for. It was only many years later, as an adult and a teacher myself, that I learned that this was meant to be enrichment! As if listening to someone reading aloud from a text book was actual science education. I have told elsewhere the story of the fifth-grade teacher who gave us fifty nights of homework he called "study guides" on each state. I eventually discovered that these sheets were completed by copying directly from the World Book Encyclopedia, an expensive reference work my family did not own and a fact he never divulged.

A moment's digression on the subject of punishment for unknown offenses: In junior high school that experience was just endless. It seemed that because I was known for talking too much I was given detention every time anyone in the class spoke out of turn. In ninth grade I never left on time because I had detention every day. Once I fell from the rings in gym class and broke my arm. I got detention for that, too. 

The worst incident has stayed with me and I have told the story over and over. The assistant principal called me in and ordered me to clean all the halls in the school every day for a week after classes were let out. I asked what I had done to deserve this, so he blew up and shouted that he would tell me at the end of the week. When I met the custodian who was (angrily) supervising my work I discovered that he was providing me with a rolling garbage can, but not with a broom. They expected me to do this work with my fingers. 

And I did. Everyday for a week I carefully picked up every scrap in the long halls of both stories of the building which served about a thousand kids. At the end of the week I went to ask that assistant principal to, please, tell me what offense I had committed. He blew up again, opened his desk drawer, pulled out a fat sheaf of papers, and slammed them down on his desk, yelling, "Next time be more careful about where you throw your garbage!" But they weren't mine. They belonged to another boy with a similar name. And I said so. He ignored that. I stood waiting for... an apology? an acknowledgment of any kind? But he studiously ignored me for a long few minutes. And then he shouted at me to get out of his office. 

I thought about this experience a lot when I became an assistant principal thirty-five years later. But the "learning" in that school was no better. In every subject, the expectation was just to repeat what the teachers told us. Sometimes we were even held accountable for things they hadn't yet said. Our ninth-grade biology teacher, for example, spent precious class time every week berating us for being "behind." She would inventory all the units we had "covered"* and those we hadn't yet gotten to. And she kept telling us that the most important unit was genetics, which would be the last one. We never got to that unit on genetics before the year ended. But our final exam consisted of one hundred multiple-choice questions and fifty of them were about genetics. Fortunately, for me I had already cultivated enough contempt for our teachers that I spent two nights studying the section of the textbook on genetics. I killed that exam.

Things didn't change much in high school. If we were asked for "Four Causes of the Civil War" we could lose points twice for including one that the teacher hadn't mentioned: once for leaving one of hers out, once for adding one of our own. Our final exam in Qualitative Analysis consisted of a practical, identifying an unknown. My partner and I carefully did those tests. When we got a different answer than we were supposed to, our grade was lowered, because there was no way that teacher could acknowledge that she had been less careful and that the sample had oxidized.

The emphasis on conformity had only gotten worse, too. One day I came in carrying two guitars - electric and acoustic - along with a large amplifier, in addition to my books. One of the assistant principals (the nice one!) stopped me in the hall to ask what I was forgetting. I had no idea. I thought maybe he thought I should have greeted him: "Good morning, Mr. Winter?" I asked. No, that wasn't it. He wanted me to put everything down so that I could take off my hat, because, you know, no hats in the building. 

Another day I got called in to the office of one of the other APs who said - I swear - "I've got you now!" And what did he have me for? An overdue library book, which was, in fact, not overdue; which was, in fact, on the library shelf where it belonged. 

Their need for conformity crossed the line into paranoia because this was the sixties. Friends were removed from the crew doing morning announcements for saying the word "cheese" on the PA. Our confident administrators thought this was the signal for a student uprising. The editors of the school paper were fired for publishing a photo of the wrapped presents for a Christmas toy drive. The toys were stored - and the photo taken - in a locked girls' room. (Yes, most of the bathrooms were kept locked to deal with the cigarette problem, and yes, we had to guess which one was open on any given day.)  Anyway, if you knew to look you could discern a white spot on the wall behind the smiling volunteers holding up packages, and if you knew what you were looking for you might realize that it was a tampon dispenser. So the editors who allowed this pornography obviously had to go. I brought this up in student council, so I was removed from the journalism class and had to spend the rest of the year sitting in the guidance suite during that period.

But the height of their paranoia went on display in the spring of my senior year. The incident came to be called a walkout and the class of '70 remembers ourselves as "The Class that Walked Out." Here's what I remember: A week earlier the elected student leaders invited some of us to join them in organizing a morning meeting to discuss the administration's negative response to a long list of requests we had made on subjects ranging from dress code to leaving the building for lunch. (We were allowed to leave for lunch when we were in elementary school. Why should we be held captive now that we were in high school?) The immediate trigger for the officers of the student government was less serious than many others, their suggestion that final exams not be weighed so heavily. But it was the first time the principal actually said "No" instead of asking for more time to study the question. It was also the first time he called us "ants" and said that our opinions were irrelevant. 

So the next morning we called everyone to attention in the cafeteria where students gathered before classes on days when the weather was less than perfect. We updated the people who were there on the situation and expressed our disappointment and anger. 

The administration's response (because how could they possibly not respond to this breach of decorum!?) was to change the day's schedule in order to have three assemblies, one for each grade, where they could tell the students THE TRUTH and counter THE LIES we had told. That plan changed immediately after the first assembly because the sophomores responded to the administration's TRUTH with catcalls and shouted contradictions. Not only were there no assemblies for juniors and seniors, but now THE TRUTH was that none had ever been planned! 

That was a Friday. By Monday the faculty had all been briefed on lockdowns and lock ins and the code words that would trigger them, as well as on the need to provide intelligence on student plans (of which we had none) to the administration. They also implemented a "rumor clinic" where students could go to find out THE TRUTH. Of course, everybody who went in to check out something they heard told us that the immediate response - to everything - was, "Who told you that?" Because it was another ploy to find out our "plans."

That Thursday an eleventh-grade boy stood up in front of the cafeteria before class with a paper and said that he wanted to share some thoughts. Immediately every cafeteria door flew open and the male teachers ran in. (Who knows how long they had been waiting to put on this bully-boy display?) Some of them grabbed that junior boy and hustled him out, but most of them just started pushing everybody outside into the parking lot. Everything else that happened afterwards is significant, too, but it is a story for another time. I will just report that the AP who "got me" for an overdue library book set his sights that morning on catching me, chasing me around the cafeteria and yelling until I hopped a table and escaped upstairs to my homeroom.

Am I conveying the story of a boy who loved school? Who loved his teachers and wanted to grow up to be like them?

My college definitely did not encourage a career in teaching, either. Some schools have a whole education department, or at least a program. We did not. By a series of missteps and coincidences during my freshman year I ended up taking an advanced-level course in the Sociology of Urban Education. I hadn't done the (multiple!) prerequisites because I was a first year student. The readings themselves were interesting, but I really loved the requirement that we spend a few hours a week at a public elementary school in the West 80's. I mean I loved it because it was real work, off-campus, with people who I would otherwise not have met. And it got me thinking, because I still had no career goal. Why had my education been so sterile? What if I worked as a teacher when I graduated college, at least until I figured out what my actual calling was?

I said above that my college actively discouraged this thinking. I went to the dean and asked if I could take a summer course at a college that did prepare teachers. He laughed, said that I would receive no credit for attending such a school, but promised that he would arrange for me to do student teaching during my senior year. It is not a spoiler at this late date to reveal that when that time came he insisted that he did not make such a promise, could not have made such a promise, and did not remember ever having had a conversation of any kind with me. 

I think these are enough shitty memories for one morning. I'll come back to this another day.

*That notion of "coverage" is one of the stupidest things educators talk about, as if you have actually taught anything because you said it or assigned reading about it. I think its best to understand them as meaning "cover" in the sense of "obscure" as in covering something with a blanket, or covering up a crime.

School Choice

School choice sounds like a no-brainer, right? What could possibly be wrong about giving parents the opportunity to choose the best school for their child?

It doesn't take much of a second glance to see how the advocates of choice have been waging war on all public education for over forty years that I know about. 

Consider the state of Arizona. In 2011 the legislature created a $2.5 million program for children with special needs that weren't being served adequately by their public school. The children were given vouchers to pay for private schools that would provide appropriate services.* In New York, special-needs children who can show that they are not receiving appropriate services are given a Nickerson Letter, which guarantees that the state will pay their private school tuition. In New York, affluent parents who can afford attorneys who specialize in this area of the law find it much easier to obtain those letters than other parents. In both states it is very difficult in practice to actually find private schools that will serve more difficult cases. We personally visited several very impressive schools, especially designed for children with special needs, and charging astronomical tuitions, who balked at serving children on the autism spectrum. 

But Arizona's voucher law was never really intended to help the parents of children with special needs. It was transparently intended as a foot in the door to normalize the practice of vouchers in order to give them to other parents, especially richer parents. It is now "universal" meaning available to anybody, or at least anybody who can afford the balance of a private school tuition after the value of the voucher, and who can get their child into one of those private schools.

Just in the first quarter of this 2022-2023 school year Arizona spent $300 million on vouchers, or 120 times the original cost of the program. More important, 80% of that money went to families that were already sending their children to private schools! In other words, Arizona robbed $240 million from public schools and from the children who attend them. This is a give-away to the affluent families that send their children to private school. It is a gift to the private schools themselves, especially the for-profit private schools. It is a giant step toward segregating schools by race and by social class since private schools can exclude anyone they want.

I have said many times that privatizing a public service serves at least three purposes. First, ideological. There are so many people who believe that there is no "we", that none of us is ever responsible for or to anyone but ourselves. This is a fraudulent ideology. It denies facts about our personal lives in which all of us are mutually dependent and it denies facts about human history in which all of our progress has been collective.

Second, it is a way to transfer money from the have-nots to the haves. Rich people get to lower their own taxes by refusing to pay for anyone else's needs, even when they - the rich - actively create those needs, as in cutting corners on environmental and workplace safety (or spilling toxic chemicals into public water supplies) to increase their profit margins. And in the case of school funding, they take it for their own kids. Instead of getting a public education for their children, poor people pay taxes to support the tuition of wealthy kids in private schools.

Third, it is always (always!) an invitation to corruption. The rapid and barely-regulated expansion of charters has given us so many examples of "schools" that didn't exist except on paper or were led by people with no educational experience and - in some cases - no education at all! The idea that the profit motive is a stimulus for excellence and efficiency is a story that we have been sold. Profits can be increased to 100% of revenue by the simple method of reducing costs to zero: providing us with nothing at all in return for what we pay.

Now the Texas legislature is considering a universal voucher program, which would give every parent reimbursement for private school tuition, whether in-person or online. In the Texas Observer article linked below, Josephine Lee calculates a $3 billion loss to Texas public schools if this law is passed. On the face of it, that makes sense. If parents vote with their feet by taking their children out of the public schools, why should they have that money? 

But look again. Despite its wealth, Texas is among the stingiest states in per pupil funding, under $10,000 per pupil per year. That 10K won't go far in allowing a poor family in Dallas, say, to send their children to Good Shepherd Episcopal, with its $24,000 a year tuition. But it is a windfall to the parents who already send their children there. And that $3 billion figure is not for an exodus of children from public to private schools. It is the cost of giving a voucher to all of the roughly 300,000 children in Texas who already attend private schools. It isn't an opportunity for the 5.5 million children in Texas public schools. It is a theft of $545 per kid. It can be thought of as as a $13,000 pay cut for a teacher with 25 students in her class. Or perhaps the loss of an after-school program. Or new books. Or lunch.

Our enemies love the word "choice." They tell us we should be able to choose our doctors, but don't want us to be able to pay for our medical care, or even know what it will cost until we receive the bill. They tell us we should be able to choose our employment, but don't want us to choose what our employers pay us, or even to know what that will be before we apply for the job. They even want us to be able to choose which deodorant we use while selling us hundreds of brands, with different scents and different packaging, that all have the identical active ingredients. So why do our choices always turn out to benefit them?

Beware school choice.

* Note: Much of the data for this essay is from an article in this week's Texas Observer by Josephine Lee, "School Voucher Programs Are Hurting Special Needs Students They Claim to Help"