“We are focusing on raising the awareness of citizens to the fact that there is more segregation now than in 1954. It is a leadership that is hell-bent on privatizing every aspect of education.”
That was the message of educator Sam Anderson during the first State of Emergency Educational Town Hall Meeting held last month at the Fellowship Hall of Brown Memorial Church.
“The struggle is for power over an educational system that instructs mostly Black and Brown children, but is presided over by rich white men with no educational background,” Anderson said.
Sponsored by Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE), the meeting took place because of the need to have a militant Black educational group comprised of parents, students, teachers, and administrators of African descent to be a counter pressure to what they see as a system that is injurious to Black children.
“Moral suasion has run its course and is no longer an option in New York,” said Anderson. “This process must be fought against in the tradition of African people in the United States, who after all, formed the first free public schools open to all children in New York. That is a powerful and necessary tradition that we need to uphold.”
The perils of a system run by those without the empowerment of Black people in mind was explained by Lurie Daniel-Favors of the Sankofa Community Empowerment Project, who spoke of the fundamental difference between “what is happening in the schools, which is training, what could be happening, which is education.”
She cited the dog-training example given by educator Dr. Naim Akbar, noting that a well-trained dog will do as commanded. “The well-trained dog will roll over, sit, lay down, go outside and relieve itself when you want it to but an educated dog will learn how to go out and find food for itself, be able to defend its children, teach them how to go out and defend themselves and create a safe, welcoming, warm environment for the dog community.”
A trained dog, Favors added, is symbolic of what is happening in the schools today.
“I’ve just finished law school at NYU and I’ve seen this over and over again. We go through this system and we’re very good at getting jobs being lawyers, we can go to med school and get degrees, but very rarely does it translate into anything tangible or changes in the community,” she said. “We can see this is true because we have more doctors, more lawyers, more businesspeople, more politicians, and yet there is more poverty, more incarceration and more devastation happening in our streets than ever before. Our education and what we are teaching our children is not translating into an improvement of the condition of African people.”
Favors noted that as a group, Black people represent the ninth largest spending force in the world, upwards of $700 billion, but as media and education activist Bob Law noted, “This is mistakenly called Black consumer power. There is no such thing as ‘consumer power.’ Frederick Douglass said who you give your money to is who you give your power to.” Speaking of the need to have independently-owned Black schools with an independent curriculum, he says, “We have the money, we have the intellect, we have the resources, all we need is the willingness.”
Anderson said the goal of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence is to institutionalize Black militant action around public education. “We are focusing on raising the consciousness of our ordinary folks about what is really going on in the public school system and mobilizing them into a powerful fighting force to transform that educational system.”
The need for this consciousness-raising is obvious to BNYEE members who see that there is more segregation in the New York City schools than at the time of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision on desegregating “With all deliberate speed,” and they assert there is more miseducation of Black children than in 1954.
“In 1997, the New York State Assembly passed a law saying that the teaching of the Underground Railroad and Beyond is mandatory in all schools, public and private, in all grades,” Anderson added.
In 2006, almost ten years later, Anderson said that is not happening. “What is happening out of that law is that your children are getting curriculum teaching on the Irish Potato Famine History and the Jewish Holocaust history, but when it comes to the history of the African people and the Underground Railroad, which was so essential to the State of New York, they get nothing, unless it is a teacher who is doing it on the down-low.”
Attempting to correct that, BNYEE educators and former principals created a curriculum and submitted a proposal for a new school, centered on the Underground Railroad. That proposal was rejected the by mostly white review board.
The Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence rejects the board’s decision and declares that the Underground Railroad schools, for grades 6-12, must be implemented in 2006. “We want the board of miseducation to relinquish their stranglehold over these new schools and allow us to have our schools in action in 2006,” Anderson said.
Another of the many issues BNYEE has with New York schools is how they interpret the issue of school safety in meaning more police in the schools and making public schools for children more like prisons. Anderson insists, “There are ways to create a school safety program that respects the behavior, values and intelligence of our children. We know that can be done because we can look at schools where there are conscious principals and see it in action. We want to replicate those.”
Discussing the criminalization of young people in schools, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, a Brooklyn Democrat, said that in the School Safety Act, if two young people have a fight in school, where they used to be suspended now they will be charged with a violent felony, which is never erased from the record.
Another bill – and both of these were supported by the United Federation of Teachers – states that if you are disruptive, not necessarily violent, the student can be removed completely from the school.
Insisting, “criminal justice cannot be the solution to the problems of the youth,” Montgomery spoke of another recent bill introduced by Assemblyman Peter Rivera, a Bronx Democrat that mandates longer sentences for young people convicted of a crime, who are also gang members. The bill, which lists local Assemblymen William F. Boyland, Jr. and Roger L. Green, both Brooklyn Democrats, as co-sponsors, defines a street gang crime “as a group of two or more who share common characteristics and collaborate on crimes and require during sentencing a) additional 2 (mandatory minimum) to 5 years based on judges discretion for offenses committed as part of a gang b) additional 10 years for any violent crimes.”
Montgomery said this is the kind of legislation that contributes to the lifelong criminalization of Black youth.
“There is nothing in Rivera’s bill which speaks to early intervention, support of young people, how do we get them not to join gangs, what are we going to do to strengthen the communities they come from, none of that is part of the discussion. And as long as we allow government and people in power to use the criminal justice system to solve all the issues, especially of our young people, we are headed for extinction in a few generations,” Montgomery said.
Principal Baruti Kafeli of North Tech High School in Newark, New Jersey, spoke about how in his school he has an African-centered education that is culturally centered. “We have to come to a consensus that there is really no other way to teach African children. African-centered curriculum, African-centered instruction, African-centered learning that is all that is going to work.” Principal Kafeli sees no gain by tacking on extra hours in schools hoping for better education. “You can define insanity by doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
When he was a teacher, Kafeli said he built his role on three fundamental questions: “ ‘Who am I?’ Which is a question of identity. ‘Why am I?’ A question of consciousness. And ‘What is my role?” A question of purpose.” As a principal, he followed those same precepts and refused to accept failure in his school. This is critical because “on a national level only seven percent of African children in the eighth grade are at grade-level proficiency in mathematics, and only 13 percent at grade level in reading.”
Looking at data coming out of the Children’s Defense Fund, he noted, “Every four seconds of the school day an African-American child is suspended from school, which amounts to six thousand suspensions per day, one million per year. Every 52 seconds an African-American child drops out of school.”
Anderson ended the meeting by saying, “We cannot move forward on any of this without you being directly involved.” The group is planning a major demonstration at the Department of Education on May 17th, the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
