The Potential State of Libraries

Cities and states across the country are cutting their library budgets.  Currently the one getting the most media attention is Chicago.  Rham Emanuel's proposed 2012 budget would lay off 363 library employees and cut $11 million from the Chicago Public Library's current budget.  This would reduce the hours of operation for the city's libraries which provide necessary help to students, people searching for jobs, and run special programs that serve over 40,000 children per year.  The group protesting these cuts has a facebook page where you can get updates and offer support for their efforts.

But, as I said, Chicago isn't the only place with Library budget cuts.
Last year New York City Public Libraries lost over 200 employees, however they managed to block further budget cuts because of public support for the libraries and protests against the proposed budget cuts.
In Seattle budget cuts closed all branches of the public library for over a week.
Potential budget cuts of $2.5 million in Denver threaten to close half of the cities public libraries.
In Oakland, CA proposed cuts might result in 14 of the city's 18 public library branches being closed for good.
In attempts to keep open many libraries have had to find creative ways to raise money.

The American Library Association published their 2011 report on The State of America's Libraries.  They found that 65% of people use public libraries every year, 31% of adults and 38% of seniors rank public libraries as the top tax-supported service. 91% of people greatly value the educational and work related information provided at libraries.  93% of people believe libraries should be free.  However, in 2011 US City Mayors reported that cutting library hours, staff, and services was the second most popular way to enact budget cuts.

Public Libraries provide vital services to the community.  Besides housing millions of books for people to borrow or use as references for school work, libraries keep local city and town records of newspapers and politics for citizens to access.  They are often the only place that provides free internet access.  They have free community rooms of groups to use as meeting places.  They have specific resources for students and unemployed people looking for jobs.  Libraries have child services, and sometimes even provide short term child care during specific hours.  They can provide warm places for homeless people in winter and cooling zones during summer heat waves.

You can also visit this sarcastic (warning: uses swears) page for information about all the different things you can use the library for.  

A Child of the Library

Chorus:
I’m a Child of the Lib’ry, it made me who I am,
It taught me about freedom and the fellowship of Man
A sea of story waits for you behind the lib’ry door,
Don’t say we can’t afford them any more.

The Lib’ry’s where I made some friends I’ve known my whole life through
The Walkers and the Blacketts and the Pevensies so true.
Simp the canine cannonball, Galadriel the fair.
The daughter of a pirate king and Paddington the Bear

I’ve travelled South with Shackleton and all his gallant crew
And to the African interior that Mary Kingsley knew
I’ve rode the trackless prairie where the bison used to roam
An travelled round the Universe, not half an hour from home.

And as I grew the libr’y fed my curiosity,
All there for the asking. All of it for free.
It’s there I found the stories that I couldn’t find at home.
It’s where I learned I was myself and not my father’s clone.

So make friends with your library, don’t let it fade away.
Teach your kids the lib’ry’s where you go on Saturday.
Don’t let the bastards tell you they will cost to much to save
While they’re shovelling our taxes down the hole the bankers made

So make a stand for the lib’ry. Stand up while you can.
Stand up for your freedom. Stand for your fellow man.
Ignorance is never bliss, don’t close the lib’ry door.
For a lib’ry lost is lost forever more.

Lyrics © 2011 Piers and Gill Cawley
Music © 2011 Piers Cawley

Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License.

Calvin and Hobbes - Testing

Spot on analysis of  the worth of testing the the first level of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Direct Action in the System of Education

First a video from NYC - Occupy the Department of Education

Maryland State Board of Education - Search for the new State Superintendent of Schools
Superintendent's dramatically shape the way education happens in schools.  They can support or suppress the Arts, focus on testing to the exclusion of other programs, support or end extended day programs, and so much more.  Maryland will soon hire a new State Superintendent, but first they're giving everyone a chance to voice what qualities they think the Superintendent should have.  People interested in directly participating in this can go online and complete the survey by November 18 2011, or attend a series of open forums held at 2:30 pm and again at 7pm at each of the following locations.

11/3 - Seneca Valley High School (Montgomery County) 19401 Crystal Rock Drive, Germantown, MD 20874

11/7 - Huntingtown High School (Calvert County) 4125 N Solomons Island Rd, Huntingtown, MD 20639

11/7 - Mountain Ridge High School (Allegany County) 100 Dr. Nancy S. Grasmick Lane, Frostburg, MD 21532

11/9 - Edgewood High School (Harford County) 215 Willoughby Beach Rd, Edgewood, MD 21040

11/10 - Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (Baltimore City) 1400 West Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore, MD 21209

Hey, Relentless Conservative, Did Our Time Together Mean Nothing to You?

For some reason the Relentless Conservative (RC) decided that 6 am on Sunday, October 16^th, the day after a Global Call to Action, was a great time to head down to Liberty Park to get his questions answered about Occupy Wall St.  And I suppose it is if you want to debate with sleeping or just woken people.  It certainly meant there were less people to challenge his classist opinions about bootstaps or call him out on his blatant lies.


However, around 8 am he did find me and my friend to talk to.  We’d been up for half an hour and just started on our tea and muffins which we’d bought from one of the food carts that line one side of Liberty Park (we decided we’d rather financially support these people than McDonald's).  We debated the RC for over half an hour; we told him about ourselves, explained why we participated in Occupy Wall St (making sure to discuss specifics), and our opinions about the police response to the protests.   He praised us for our knowledge and ability to articulate our views.  I (as someone who works in childcare and blogs about education and literacy) called him out when he displayed classism and belittled other protesters for the coherency of their arguments.  He ended up agreeing with me (at least at the time), made some patronizing comments about if we were his daughters, thanked us for the conversation, and left. 


 None of this interaction appears in his Oct. 19^th post, The Relentless Conservative - Occupy Wall Street at 6am. Apparently the RC didn't think our 30 + minute debate added anything to his story.  And considering how we made nearly point by point refutations of his whole post I can see why he wouldn't want to acknowledge our voices.  And certainly our existence as adult, employed, and middle class supporters and protesters dismantles his narrative of everyone being naive students or dirty, incoherent hippies.  I’m not OK with being silenced and I’m not OK with his assertions that “It seemed to me in the final analysis that their protest was about greed ... about what they didn't have rather than what they had. And in the end, there was a lot of petty jealousy on their part toward others…I asked all those who said "greed" was the reason they were there, if that wasn't silly, ‘that greed has always existed, why protest it now?’ None of them had anything other than a blank look on their faces. No cogent answers.”  Way to ignore our half hour conversation and my very existence, RC. 

But hey, he’s a blogger, not a journalist. And I’m a blogger too.  So here’s my account of the conversation with the Relentless Conservative and a response to the claims he made in person, and in his article.

First, his claims about OWS protesters assaulting a black police officer, which he also mentioned in our conversation. Is he aware the video he linked to shows a black officer punching a white man in the head? That's all the video shows, but the NYPD claim the protester (and others) assaulted the cop previous to the punching.  It's interesting that there are videos (from different angles) of the officer assaulting the protester, but absolutely none of the reverse.  But Certainly we can trust the NYPD to take police brutality seriously, after all Officer Bologna lost 10 vacation days for his unprovoked pepper spraying of multiple women. As for his complaint that the protester was HIV+  and still thought he had his First Amendment Rights of Assembly, does the RC still live in the early 1990s? I thought we were over our unreasonable fear of people with HIV.


Secondly, his anger at Hollywood supporting OWS and thinking they can be active in political movements. Does he remember who the hero of the Republican Party is?  Or did he just conveniently forget Reagan’s first career? And his idea OWS will turn on President Obama and House Minority Leader Pelosi like the French turned on Marie Antoinette shows both a pathetic understanding of history and an inability to listen to the people he speaks to.  Marie Antoinette was an Austrian princess and hated by many aristocratic and poor French from the beginning of her marriage to the then Dauphin of France. They never liked her; there was no turning of public opinion.  And many OWS supporters have already turned against President Obama and the majority of politicians in all parties.  We've realized the truth about corporate campaign contributions (one of the main points of Occupy Wall Street) and don't trust any of them to adequately support the needs of the 99% over their corporate masters. And it should be noted how quickly contributions have shifted since President Obama has even partially supported OWS. 

Now onto the Relentless Conservatives claims about his visit to OWS in the early hours of Sunday morning.  Really? You smelled urine while walking out of the subway, and decided to attribute it to the protestors who were over a block away?  Has he never taken the subway before? Is he even trying to make logical arguments?   And the supposed fight between a black man and a white man over cigarettes.  The image he provides as “proof” shows multiple feet of space between the three men, but (maybe it’s the lighting) they all seem white.  I don’t know why this was even included unless the RC is trying to portray OWS as actively racist (which is not to say the OWS is as diverse as it should be).

His complaints about the number of people seem specious, especially since he had the time to check the internet to find that “assault on an officer”.  Surely he’d noticed the 100 or more arrests that happened between Citibank, Times Square, and Washington Square Park?  A representative told me it seemed that the volunteer staff had been targeted and that the Media Team alone was missing about 12 staff members. And, oh my god, the only people awake before 7 am were too busy to talk to him or were incoherent.  What drugged out, lazy riff-raff!  I know all gainfully employed people are up and about by sunrise on Sunday, but let’s try to take into account that the Oct. 15th protest actions didn't end until after midnight.

As for the claims of drunk or high people, Occupy Wall Street has a policy of not allowing any drugs or alcohol at Liberty Park.  This has been agreed upon by the General Assembly.  So while some people might still do drugs it is certainly not the majority of protesters nor condoned by them.

The RC did ask us about the  political groups present at OWS, mentioning the Nazi party specifically.  We told him about the Socialist Party and how they waited for people to come up to their booth instead of actively hunting down potential recruits.  Of any Communist or Nazi Parties I saw not a hair, and considering the Nazi Party’s fascism, homophobia, and racism I really don’t see them being welcomed by people at Occupy Wall Street.  And his suggestion of the sometimes violent protests of Europe with riots and looting spreading to the US like the Ebola virus, it’s both a bad metaphor from a scientific standpoint (the Ebola virus is only communicable through liquid transfer and kills its host too quickly to seriously spread) and factually inaccurate.  I specifically contradicted his comparisons to London since those riots were sparked by police killing a young man of color and decades of police brutality and economic suffering of the people in the rioting neighborhoods. 


Now this point and the rest of our debate don’t make the article.  My friend and I never existed in the story by the Relentless Conservative.  We never discussed the slow destruction of Glass-Stegall under Presidents both Republican and Democrat. We never discussed that this allowed savings banks to act like investment banks (and the RC certainly didn't voice his main objection about this was the increased competition investment bankers would face).  We didn't agree upon the insanity of bailing out the banks in 2008 without earmarking how the money could be spent.  We never discussed how JP Morgan Chase donated $4.6 million to the NYPD and how this might affect the police response to protests against big banks. We never discussed toxic assets and how bankers should be investigated for fraud and criminal negligence.  We never discussed unemployment and how it's worse for young people. Or the fact that the average US household income has decline 10% in the last two years. We never discussed Citizens United.  We never shared personal accounts from our lives, like the fact that even though I’m employed full time in a job I love, I can’t afford health care (which I didn’t know desire for affordable health care equaled greed, but apparently it does in the RC’s world view) and I sometimes need financial assistance from my parents.

Also these words were never exchanged:

“I can barely survive.  I have little hope for my future.”

“So you’re a pessimist?”

“No.  I believe things can change.  That’s why I’m here.”

And I certainly didn’t call the Relentless Conservative out for his classist derision of the coherency and education of my fellow Occupy Wall Street protesters.

 

In reality, all that was discussed and I totally did. 

I explained that everyone here came from different experiences and therefore naturally had various concerns about politics and corporations.  I explained that the US was devaluing teachers and education.  (I offered to discuss this at length, for at least two hours, but the RC didn’t take me up on this for some reason).  I explained how not everyone has the privilege of a good education or is taught how to eloquently express their opinions on politics and finance and we can’t belittle people for the negative effects of poverty and poor education when the political and financial institutions in place exacerbate these problems (hey, another goal for OWS).  He tried to reference the exceptional people who have risen above these hardships to attend Harvard.  I countered that all these exceptions proved the rule since they had unusual support from adults who pushed them.  He agreed that all these people cited some amazing teacher who inspired them to academic achievement and that maybe I was right about all this.  I finished this aspect of the discussion by explaining that just because people don’t have the correct jargon to express their feelings it does not diminish the importance of their experiences and opinions.

But none of this fits the narrative constructed by the Relentless Conservative so I presume he deleted my salient points and his agreement from his consciousness when it came time to write the article. 

We finished up the conversation with the RC complimenting my friend and I on our political knowledge and ability to articulate our views.  He suggested we not spend our time eating breakfast, but rather spend it in front of the cameras.   Which really, he wants to tell me how to best help a cause he wants to see demolished?  And the best way to do that is to ignore my bodily needs? But I suppose he thinks he has the right to tell women how to behave.  The Relentless Conservative certainly felt he had the right to tell me and my friendthat we reminded him of his daughter and how he’d never allow her in a place like this.  Thereby suggesting that if he were our fathers he’d somehow keep us from coming out to Liberty Park.

Which by this point my friend and I decided he was a troll and I told him that was incredibly demeaning.  I much prefer my father’s response when I told him I was coming to OWS and might get arrested:

“Awesome, I always wanted to bail one of my kids out of jail.” 

My father said this because I’m an adult and he knows he doesn’t have the right to stop me from doing anything.  My father said this because, unlike the Relentless Conservative, he isn’t patronizingly sexist nor does he think his grown daughter needs protection from a democratic protest.  My father sees me as an individual, capable of independent thought, which is more than the Relentless Conservative acknowledged in any of us at Occupy Wall Street.  

Re-Blog - Occupy Wall Street and Education

I've been very into the Occupy Wall Street movement recently.  I've spent an hour or two a day reading articles on it, re-posting them and commenting on social media to spread the word.  I've gotten into some adamant debates with libertarians and neo-liberals/conservatives.  I attended Occupy Wall Street last weekend.  But I haven't written about the movement here.  I felt there was a relationships between education and the economic injustice that OWS is protesting, but I wasn't certain how to write about the two.

Luckily Nicholas D. Kristof did and his Op-Ed for the New York Times Occupy the Classroom addressed this relationship.

"One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator."