A legacy of love informs teachers, to not speak against hatred is to act for hate

 Pastor Dietrich gave his all to stand against hate in Germany

Dr. King gave his all standing against hate in America

My teachers, are asking how do we deal with this hatred showing its face in America? Sadly, hatred in America not new. What is always new? Is our individual opportunities to stand against it. Please, don't waste this moment to speak up, stand up, and act against hatred and racism?

German Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, highly respected theologian and Anti-Nazi dissident returned from the safety of studying in America to Germany to speak out against Hitler's Nazi Germany.  He did this when everyone opposed to Hitler was trying to get out. He was an outspoken member of the clergy in Germany during that time when many others remained silent. He would eventually be arrested, and executed by SS in April 1945 just weeks before American and Russian troops would liberate Berlin. He left us, a legacy of love that defines morality in the face of evil. He said: “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Pastor Bonhoeffer legacy informs us, when we do not speak against hatred we act for hatred. History informs us, hatred and racism is not new in the Americas. We carried it with us on those first ships across the Atlantic from the old world to the new world.
Every slave grave marks us. It's embedded it into the very fabric of our nation's constitution, in the Three Fifths of Clause that labels Black slaves as property. There is an 500 year old legacy of hate here. I say meet it, with what our Quaker brothers and sisters called their oath "Speak Power to Truth".  To not speak truth is to act for a lie. 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” 

So, teachers, we must speak, we must act, but let us do it with the dignity and the love of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We have no pictures of an angry Dr. King.

We have no recordings of Dr. King screaming in anger.

We have no recordings of Dr. King calling anyone names, or slurs.

He preached with the moral vigor of a saint.
More than any other American, he represents our nation's moral compass of love, dignity, and grace. 

His activism was so full of dignity and love, that I often think his living was as close to Jesus as any human being has ever come.
Please teachers speak against hate,
Please teachers speak for love,
To not to speak against hate, is to act for hate.
After Heather Hayer's murder in Charlottesville, our children need teachers of moral action more than ever. 
But speak, with the dignity, love, and grace of Dr. King, and the fearlessness of Pastor Bonhoeffer. 

Their shoes are too big for me, but with God's grace maybe someday I might grow in them just a little.
Silence and apathy are not acceptable,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner

--> If you like to listen to the song comforting my heart through the hate on my walk today. It's Northern Ireland's Omagh Community Youth Choir singing "Love rescue me"
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xNmhhB3fjw  

Why isn't everyone walking? A Walking Man SOS

Facebook shared this picture from 7 years ago this morning. It inspired me to revisit that moment, and to tell the wold. I am still walking!

This above picture is my first walk to Washington DC from Connecticut as I crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge from Camden New Jeresey to Philadelphia. I had hoped for a change in the policies of No Child left Behind from President Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Instead I found more of the same.

The 2008 United States Impact Study on "Reading First School", the center piece High-States Testing policies demonstrated K-3 students exposed to NCLB reading reform interventions, actually lost comprehension at in every grade. The only group that demonstrated growth were the control groups. The schools not using any Reading First Reading programs. Reading First Grants continued to be funded for nearly 8 years. In defiance, of the annual data indicating they it's failure. They were finally ended, but not after billions of dollars were spent on failed reading programs rooted in high-stakes testing. As an educator this also opened my eyes to the fact the United States Department had no real clue as to what works and doesn't work.

When Secretary Arne Duncan announced with great fanfare, and every single state department of education in all fifty sate his "Race To The Top" policy? I understood, this policy would be NCLB focus on high-stakes testing on steroids. As an academic and literacy expert I spoke up against it everywhere. No one in Washington, at the state or the local level seem to follow the data on the failure of high-stakes testing policies, or the harm they were having on our children.
No one heard me, people thought I was some oddball. What does an oddball do?

I decided to walk to Washington DC to Connecticut to protest high-stakes testing policies.
BECAUSE,
When our federal, state, and local legislators refuse to listen,
When our public school administrators refuse to listen,
When our federal and state policy makers refuse to listen,
You take your case to the people.

So in 2010 seven years ago I walked to 400 miles in 40 days to Washington DC from Connecticut.
In 2015 I walked again to protest ESSA, which in my professional opinion still places the center of education reform on high-stakes testing. Very little has changed, our children, teachers, and our local public schools are under attacked from the very policies that should protect them.

Seven-years later NCLB and RTTT are considered failures by most people, and more people are fighting back.  But, not enough to end these education reforms that harm our children, demoralize our teachers, and are destroying our public local public schools. 
I am still wondering why every parent, every student, and every teacher in the nation isn't standing up, speaking up, walking against 15-years of failed education reforms policies harming our children, teachers, and public schools?
Parents and teacher here is a simple Truth To Power statement:
When we all start standing up, speaking up, and walking 15 years of failed education reform polices end. 15 years of harmful high-stakes testing for children in our public schools ends.
Still standing,
Still speaking up,
Still walking,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner

If you are interested in the letter I wrote to Anthony Cody that launch my walk? Here is the link: http://childrenaremorethantestscores.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-letter-to-president-obama-one-that.html


Back in DC outside the United States Department of Education at the January 20, 2017 Women's March with Save Our School Mach.

If you are wondering what song I listened to on my walk over the Avon mountain this morning it's Barry Lane "Jesse Turner Is A Walking Man" https://barrylane.bandcamp.com/track/jesse-turner-the-walkin-man

Teachers are the first responders for humanity in the classroom.

Friends, you know me. I am a happy warrior in the campaign to bring joy, equity and justice into our public schools.

Nelson Mandela said: "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."

As teachers and parents, we are the defenders of the children in our classrooms and families. We are the first-responders of hope for children.
Our political leaders and policy makers are not driven by hope, equity, and justice. Since 2002, they have become driven by big data, test scores, and workers of the future efficiency models. It may well be this is where they have always stood?
I have come to view them as the first responders of Big Data Profit models that rob children, parents, teachers, and our public schools of their humanity.
I will fight them in DC, in our state capitals, local school boards, and in my classroom.
I may not win the bigger political battle, but I am the champion of equity, justice, and joy in my own classroom.
I am the champion of humanity in my classroom, and in the end what matters to the children, parents, and teachers I work with this is what really matters.
We can fight for equity, justice, and humanity every day in our own classrooms and communities.
Here is all you champions of humanity, and to the new school year.
Here is to being a champion of equity, justice, joy, and hope in your own classrooms.

Remember, in our classrooms, we are the defenders of humanity.
The big battle for equity and justice in our public schools will go on, and teachers shall be in the thick of that fight.

We are the Champions of Humanity in our own classrooms.
A simple "Truth To Power realization. Teachers can be undefeated in their classrooms.
Teachers be the champions of humanity you were born to be,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner

If you are wondering what this walking man is listened to on his walk over the mountain this morning....it is Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, and Music Superstars Sing "We Are The Champions" (A Cappella

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHHqPTQDIlo

170 years of equity and jusitce delayed in our public schools is White Supremacy

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Ask any White Supremacist if Black, Brown, Jewish, and Immigrant children deserve equity and justice in our public schools?
They will answer: NO!
Ask America if Black, Brown, and immigrant children deserve equity and justice in our public schools?
America will say yes, BUT!
America's Policy Makers and Elected Leaders answer. We are working on it, someday. Lately it is until then let the schools that educate Black, Brown, Immigrant, and Poor Children compete against each other for limited resources. That Someday tune, began in the the first days of public education in America. Over 170 years of inequality and injustice, and counting.

Somewhere along the way someday became the rallying cry of standardization. We are working on it. Someday, until then we will use test scores and rigorous standards. America started its love affair with standardization and testing in the Nineteenth Century. Since 2000, education reform policies have added make poor schools compete against each other for limited resources. Test scores and educational standards without equity has been the norm since the National Education Association's Committee of Ten recommended the standardization of  high school curriculum, (1892).
I would argue for the past 125 standardization has provided cover for an America that refuses to do the right time for all for Black, Brown, and Immigrant children?  If it provides cover for not doing the right thing for Black, Brown, and Immigrant children? Then it is racist, and more aligned with White Supremacy than any American educator wants to admit. 

Coretta Scott King said: “I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”

In Coretta's words above we find this line " Neglecting school children is violence". When we accept equity and justice someday. We are accepting violence against school children today. When I read "Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness", I recognized a School to Prison Pipeline rooted in Jim Crow.  I would argue, our public-school system is committing acts of violence against Black, Brown, and Immigrant children. We can add acts of violence against poor children and special education children as well, for they too have been waiting for equity and justice. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his 1963 letter from a Birmingham Jail "Justice too long delayed is justice denied" Ascribing it to a "distinguished jurist of yesterday". Let me say this publicly, and make it as clear as I am able. When equity and justice is delayed for over 170 years in our public schools? Then, that system is more aligned with the violent acts of White Supremacy than anyone wants to admit.
Equity tomorrow is justice delayed, and justice delayed is INJUSTICE,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner 

If you like to listen the song that inspire my morning walk this morning...it is Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAGkuPaatdc

The liberation begins somehwere between page 1 and the soul

My vacation in the Mountains is coming to an end this weekend. I have fished a little, walked and prayed in the Lord's Cathedral Forest, seen some local theater, walked the streets of small town USA,  wrote a little, and reflected deeply while reading Ta-Nahisi Coates "Between "The World and Me" again. A person who wishes to know themselves must read because, books are our mirrors.

Louise Rosenblatt's Seminole Work "Literature as Exploration" freed the reader from the text: She took us outside the cover of the text: “The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition."
She views the possibility of reading as a transactional experience offering the reader the opportunity to walk in another person's shoes. That walk becomes a transformation experience that binds the reader to the world, the author, the text, and is unique and different for every reader. It changes us. She opens the door to multiple perspectives, and frees readers from the slavery of those literacy critics exposing their responses’ rule. Those critics who in many many ways are the protector of a Cannon Literature more rooted in White Supremacy than anyone dare admit.

As I read Ta-Nehisi Coates, I know I can't be Black, can't cast off my privilege, but I can walk a little in his shoes. In reading his words: “Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said, “You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.” I can begin to understand just a milometer of what it means to be Black in America. I cannot change being White. However I can begin to fathom the evil of an injustice that Black Americans live with from birth to the grave. I can't change the world, but I can change me.

I have marched with my Black Lives Matters brothers and sisters, but my role is not to speak, not to push to the front, but to listen, learn, and support the moral quest for racial justice in America. I cannot be Black, but I can stand with my Black brothers and sisters who have never known justice in America. I can do this, because of the books I have read.

But, books alone are not enough. I was blessed to be the last White Boy in my neighborhood, and instead of feeling isolated, afraid, and alone. I was made welcomed, loved, and embraced by every shade of Black and Brown there is. I was immersed in a world of color and languages that still feed my soul today. God blessed me with the most beautiful extended family any one could ever have. Somehow that experience makes the reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates a perfect bridge to understanding that Black Lives Matter.
Rudine Sims Bishop said “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”  So, I am stepping through sliding glass doors, when I read" Ta-Nehisi words:

“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.”

I am discovering this baggage of White Privilege I carry, and the hint of a possibility of becoming something greater.  The library is my personal key to unlocking that White Supremacist jail that has for far too long held White America back from living those words in our nation's pledge " One Nation Under God, with Liberty and Justice for All."

I am a better man, because Ta-Nehisi Coates opened his Black soul to all who dare to walk a mile in his shoes. I am 4 days from returning to the struggle for justice for all. I plan to hit the ground running on day five,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner

If you like to listen to the tune that inspire my walk this morning in these woods this morning...it's Play For Change cover of "A Change is Gonna Come" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zDeBIA-vQ8

What does Evil in America Sound like

What does evil in America sound like? The link below is to an interview with the KKK leaders members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Pelham, N.C. They openly state they are glad that Heather Hayer dies, and people were injured. They applaud the actions of young man who killed young Heater Hayer. It ends with one of them purposely twisting the last words of Jesus Christ just before he died from “Forgive them for they know not what they are doing” to Forgive them for they know what They’re doing”. This interviewed may be too graphic for some, but it is the picture of hatred in America. http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article167303682.html 
I met Elsie Wiesel once in Bayonne New Jersey nearly 40 years ago. We had taken a group of adolescents to hear him speak in a small library. It was a intimate event, a chance to get close to him. There were less than 25 of us there. It was a perfect moment, and a perfect place to learn from one of the world’s greatest humanitarians. After he was done speaking and reflecting on “Night,” one of our young men said that can never happen in America. He said no one could have ever imagine that happening in Germany either before Hitler. He told us Germany was the intellectual capital of the world. It was the hub of philosophy, and it’s universities were temples of tolerance. If I leave you here with one message today, let it be that this could happen anywhere. Be diligent young man, and never be silent in the face of hatred. Hatred is on the march in America, and it offers no apologies for it ugly actions. White Supremacists are celebrating the murder of our daughters and sons. 

As a father, I can think of no greater evil than these people who dream of a race war.
As an American, I can think of no greater threat to freedom and justice White Supremacy.
As a man of faith, I am lost in their lack of remorse, their lack of humanity, and their endless hatred of humanity.
Americans, must fight evil,
Americans, must stand against evil,
Americans, must not be silent,
Justice is under attack in America, and they have taken to killing our daughters,
Americans must reject their hate,
If we shall over come, we cannot stand silent in the face of evil,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1osKWCDXl40 Link to Pete Seeger “We Shall Over Come 

Charlottesville's Teachers' call to action.

In Maya Angelou's Inaugural Poem "On The Pulse of Morning", we find these words:
"For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream." (1/20/93)

The Day, can't break new until we lift up our eyes, and view this back to school year as something more than another same old, same old, go along to get along school year. 
We must face history's wrenching pain, realizing this is not only about after Charlottesville, but about after: slavery, Columbus,  wars on labor, women, immigrants, and people of diverse faiths.  
After Charlottesville, back to school should be, America's invitation to study hatred in America.
After Charlottesville, back to school should be, our invitation to talk about culturally relevant curriculum.
After Charlottesville, back to school must become the undoing of defining education success as higher standardized test scores.
After Charlotteville, history should be faced with enough courage to not be lived again.

Valerie Strauss's August 13, The Answer Sheet column we find: "The first thing teachers should do when school year begins, is talk about hatred in America. Here’s help." Valerie Strauss is asking teachers to make sure that going back to school this year is different. This is a must read for every educator in America.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/08/13/the-first-thing-teachers-should-do-when-school-starts-is-talk-about-hatred-in-america-heres-help/?utm_term=.7c0222b7a3f3

Let us start:

Perhaps the best place to begin is to reject education reform policies rooted in high-stakes testing, and sanitized curriculum of academic resistance.  I have lived sanitized curricula, resisted it, and learned to teach against it.

Before Charlottesville:
A little over twenty years ago before I became a university professor I taught Native American Tohono O'odham and Pasqual Yaqui Upward Bound students. Many were struggling in their individual Tucson high schools. Schools where the history books and English books did not tell their story.  Instead the text books there denied 500 years of broken treaties, lies, and atrocities against their people.

What many considered academic failure in the lives of Native American students, I came to view as resistance to a curriculum that did not see them, or value their history. At the time, being a young doctoral student, I discovered that academic failure in oppressed communities is well documented in the research in public education. "Resistance theory proposes that students actively or passively resist learning as a way of responding to the oppressive school system.  Resistance theories demonstrate how individuals negotiate and struggle with structures and create meanings of their own from these interactions.” (Bernal & Ramp; Solorzano, 2001, p. 315).

I also discovered in the literature,  Liverpool England (Home to The Beatles) had young people resist similar schooling.  Their so-called academic failure reflected not a lack of intelligence, but a resistance from a public-school system that viewed their parents, the work of their fathers and mothers, and their way of living as undesirable.

I recognized it in my own urban schooling.  Our teachers often told us "You kids live in the ghetto, and school is your ticket out". But, that ghetto was our home; our parents and families were not broken.  They were our working class heroes.
We found liberation from the oppression of public education, blasting out of radios in our kitchens and cars, on the records playing in our living rooms, and Ghetto Blasters on our street corners. In between War's "Wild Rodriquez", The Temptations "Poppa was a Rolling Stone", George Clinton's "Tear the Roof of Sucker" we found the Clash's "This is England". By the time, we found Bob Marley "Trench Town Rock" we were fully immersed in our liberation of resistance. While we did not find our stories in school, we were finding our stories, lives, and views of the world validated in the music calling us from the radio waves coming from outside our neighborhoods and even from across the Atlantic.

 
I never found academic failure, but then again, I wasn't looking or it.  I was searching searching for academic success. On the journey, I found  academic resistance not failure in my Native American students in Tucson, AZ.  Something well documented in the literature of resistance theory.   Through my Tucson students, I was able to see it in my own school experiences.  I was taught by some of my teachers to "get out" as soon as I could;  not to stay and improve the very streets I grew up on. To this day I  often go back to the streets of my boyhood home, but I don't feel "at home".   I lost something beautiful, a future possibility of making a better life right there in the hood that to this day defines me. A great deal of urban education in improvised commuities is about getting out not staying in. What I failed to see was getting out meant losing some of me. 

Dr. Yetta Goodman took this young urban doctoral student under her wing  at the University of Arizona. More than anyone else,  she made sure I earned my Ph.D.  She once called me "Our Ghetto Doc Jesse".  It was  Yetta  who taught me to use my past in order to build my future. I learned that my past was the fire that could see me home. I would use that fire, and the music of my liberation to feed my research; I would come to understand that much of the academic failure in oppressed communities is in fact academic resistance. Dr. Goodman in taking me under her wing, defines what is best in American Higher Education. The mentoring of one generation of researchers to another. 

For my dissertation "Creating A Transactional Classroom" I had been given the go ahead to shift the focus of readings in my Native American Upward Bound classes from the Classics of Western Culture,  that I had studied in high school, to the readings of Native American culture.  This was not  a simplistic decision.   There is a strong belief among many that a greater focus on the "cannon" of Western Culture helps prepare Native Students for the kinds of reading and writing they will encounter in college. This is true for some educators in all diverse communities. I would examine that belief with the director of the Upward Bound Program, Dr. Angie Listo. She is a member of the Tohono O'odham nation, and like me, she saw her own education in the Literature of Resistance Theory. After deep discussions, research, and reflection, we made the shift.   My dissertation documents the   successful academic journey of these Upward Bound students.   Their success grew out of a change of curricula, one that focuses on culturally relevant teaching.

Where to go after Charlotteville:
American history is not mono-cultural, or mono-lingual.  

It is one of the most diverse histories in the world.   
American history should be the telling of powerful truths, that when faced with courage, will produce the best symphony of diversity ever heard! 
We have within our reach the ability to come to know ourselves like no other people before. When curriculum is culturally, racially, economically, and linguistically irrelevant to learners ~ it fractures hope.
It injures the individual.
It breaks learners. 
Academic Resistance becomes survival.
Schools become the planting ground for dissent.
  
President Trump needs to know what Makes America Great is not boastful, but the humbling of a public school experience where we come to know each other, come to face our past, and come together as Americans.  What makes America great is not pitting one against the other, but finding what brings us together. We can be a great people if we face history's wrenching pain with dignity, respect, and honor.  

I find truth and hope in Maya Angelou's poem: "On The Pulse of Morning,"  
Live a memory never forgotten, I still hear her reciting

"Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, and into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope --
Good morning."
 
I pray for the Angels of Justice like Heather Heyer who gave their all.  For the 19 who were injured, for Charlottesville, and for America.   With Peace, Love, and Understanding.
I promise this back to school year will be different in my classes,
I shall be more,
Do more, and
Live the life that Maya Angelou begs us all to live:
Good morning New School Year,
Good Morning America,

If you would like to listen to the tune that inspired my  walk in these New Hampshire Woods this morning...it’s The Clash "This is England".  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5vAn3Fe1TA

Whose America?
Our America!
Jesse The Walking Man Turner