AP is a fucked up system that facilitates inequality

By treating the gifted magnet at RHS as a racial project, this study has revealed the processes by which a desegregation program functioned to produce a system that conflated being white with being gifted. It has illustrated how a school could portray itself as a showcase of integration and academic excellence while at the same time perpetuating a system of racial inequality. The magnet program for gifted students made the racial category “white” disappear in its public discourse behind an alleged system of meritocracy, but not without producing a widespread conflation of whiteness with giftedness. Whereas the goal of desegregation was to raise the educational opportunities for non-white students, the beneficiaries of integration at Roosevelt High School were disproportionately white students in the gifted program. Integration and academic excellence was advertised in the school’s public discourse, but white exclusivity via giftedness was assured to the predominantly white audience of prospective magnet students.

It is not surprising that the gifted magnet would end up as a tool for preserving white privilege rather than for attaining racial equality. This raises the question of whether the compromise of enticing white and wealthier parents with the carrot of giftedness was acceptable in the first place, and whether the assumption that changing people’s behavior will ultimately lead to changed attitudes is valid.9 Furthermore, given the linkages of this racial project to other projects of white privilege, the question can be raised whether giftedness can ever be institutionalized without lending itself to racial exclusion and social control.

The dream school isn’t a school. An abolitionist society doesn’t need cops for us to be safe OR schools for us to learn. As bell hooks & Ivan Illich & Paulo Freire write: we can have deschooled society and liberatory & transgressive learning. we keep us safe / we teach each other

At this school, the anticapitalist, the antiracist, decolonialist, abolitionist, transformative justice school of my dreams, our dreams, design projects would not result in a jury or a critic. Instead, you would have a group that you’re working with, and the end of the project ..

It is absolutely wild and unjust that in many/most schools, you can be *expelled* for having bad grades. Imagine that you were on a hike on a mountain with a group. The group says: if you fall behind, we will kick you out of our group and leave you behind. Is this a good group? https://twitter.com/av_rose_ev/status/1271978534001471490

oriented in the same direction, like a school of fish, trying to find something together. oriented outwards, as if we are exploring a city of thought and agree to meet back in a few hours, with photos and notes of things we’ve discovered. Show this thread

The gender binary is part of the carceral continuum from the bathroom — where trans & non binary people are policed, attacked and arrested — to the prison. Trans liberation is an abolitionist affair.

The gender binary is part of the carceral continuum from the bathroom — where trans & non binary people are policed, attacked and arrested — to the prison. Trans liberation is an abolitionist affair.

SFPC | Code Societies Winter 2020 The School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), based in NYC, is a hybrid of school, artist residency and research group where students develop a deep curiosity of what it means to work poetically in…

On growing a cooperative like you’d grow a garden Dan Taeyoung discusses building trust within cooperative spaces, developing open-ended systems, and un-learning hierarchical ways of operating.

The Black Student Alliance at Columbia GSAPP (BSA+GSAPP) has written a powerful statement to the Columbia GSAPP Dean and Administration. The statement is titled, “On the Futility of Listening.” Please read it and sign your name in support! https://onthefutilityoflistening.cargo.site/

UNLEARNING WHITENESS A Statement from the Black Faculty of @Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation https://unlearningwhiteness.cargo.site

There was a man who would come every week to sculpt in front of the kids. The director said, “I don’t want you to teach sculpting, I want you to do what you do and love it in front of the children.” During that year, clay was never used more imaginatively, before or after…. A great gift of any adult to a child, it seems to me, is to love what you do in front of the child. I mean, if you love to bicycle, if you love to repair things, do that in front of the children. Let them catch the attitude that that’s fun. Because you know, attitudes are caught, not taught.”

“there are too many people talking about the future without considering the future of African Americans and other people of color. By not considering us, is the majority implicitly suggesting that we don’t matter? Do they think that as America ages, we will continue to play the traditional service and support roles for their communities? When I hear estimates from the U.S. Department of Labor that we’ll need nearly a million home health aides in the next decade, and I know that most home health aides now are Black and Brown women, I conclude that unless the wage structure changes, the future implications for those women and their families are frightening. But the futurists mainly seem to be predicting what an aging society will need without predicting who will provide it.”2

“It is thus the function of education, and even more so the arts, to point away from this mass media mythology to an ideal world.” (p. 209) “It is thus to their environment that McLuhan suggests these students turn in their quest for an education. McLuhan remained attached to this notion in his last book, The City as Classroom (1977; with Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon), returning to notions about the classroom that he had first begun to work out a quarter of a century before in Explorations. ‘Classroom without Walls’ (Explorations 7 [1957]) argues that the electronic information explosion has been so great that ‘most learning occurs outside the classroom’ (ExC 1). This has broken the hegemony of the book as a teaching aid and challenged the monopoly on education vested in official institutions of learning. Yet most educators persist in regarding the products of the mass media as entertainment, rather than as educative. McLuhan points out, however, that many literary classics were originally regarded in the same way, and that the English language is itself a mass medium. The educational imperative is, thus, to master the new media in order to ‘assimilate them to our total cultural heritage’ (2) which would ‘provide the basic tools of perception’ as well as developing ‘judgment and discrimination with ordinary social experience’ (3). This observation is the point of departure for City as Classroom, which outlines methods for training perception through a series of exercises in properties of the media, with the goal of helping students to understand the sociocultural context in which they live. The exercises encourage students to go out into the community and observe, listen, interview, research, and think about the way in which their classroom space influences what they can and cannot know — ‘What did the designers of traditional schools intend when they put thirty or so desks in rows, facing the front of the room? Why is the blackboard at the front? why is the teacher’s desk at the front?’ (4).” (pp. 220-221)

“Do the days of your school life seem like ‘doing time’ until you are eligible for the labor market? Do you consider that real education is outside the classroom? Do you find that what you learn inside the classroom is as useful as what you learn outside the classroom?” “Talk to your fathers (and updated for the 21st century, mothers) about the sort of work they do in the daytime. How much of their time at work is spent looking at papers and books? Do they also bring their books and papers home? How many people do you know who work day in and day out with papers and books?”