Chen Guangchen has left the embassy – possibly because his family was threatened. Pearl, He Peirong, has not been heard from since she spoke to Fu.

A brave activist who risks her life for others deserves our support. Freedom is a bipartisan issue, and I hope progressives and conservatives can join forces to make sure Pearl doesn’t have to die in a cell. Call your congressperson.

Update 5/4/2012 : Here is a Facebook page with a petition: http://www.facebook.com/FreePearlHer – please Like or sign

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Note – I think not all Pearl’s blogs have been blocked – I believe this is her site: http://pearlher.org . I love her motto: “A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cage”

Chen Guangcheng’s Rescuer Needs to be Rescued: He Peirong (wire)

The full interview text is here: Choosing a Middle School? The scoop on Paulo Freire Freedom School (charter) and I won’t repeat it word for word; but what struck me is the key factor of connectedness. Being known, being safe, and being connected are key ‘best practices’ at the school – JoAnn asserts ” If those things don’t exist, learning won’t happen; if they do exist learning is more likely to happen. That is research based.”

I tend to agree – and more, that maybe connectedness is a key component in the workplace as well. Not if its fake, just manipulation to get employees to work harder for the company profit. I am thinking more of a nonprofit, or a B Corporation – a way for individuals to effectively work together and get paid, while working on common goals. Companies certainly have uses in making a more efficient work environment, and the corporate structure is useful for raising money. I have issues with the legally required profit-only motive that corporations must currently follow (read The Corporation by Joel Bakan for some well-written background), and would like to see alternative beasts arise that have profit-plus-principles written into their mission and articles of incorporation. Investors would invest with open eyes, knowing that the company was not only intending to make maximum profit but also promising to balance profit with other factors. Such corporations are legal now in five states and hopefully more coming soon.

But back to connectedness – I have certainly worked hardest, for pay and for free, when I felt a team was depending on me and that what I did mattered to people I know. Although I might be evaluated at the end of the project, that was not much of a factor in my daily motivation. I’ve worked at companies where we were monitored down to the half hour, and companies where weeks would go by without any official check on our work. Neither is particularly motivating. But if I know that my buddy needs the stuff I’m writing, I’m going to be careful and on time if I have to stay up all night to get it done. Army units are much the same, from what I understand, though I’ve never been in one. The guys aren’t risking their lives for their commanders back at base, or for their country – they are doing it for their buddies in the field. This sort of thing works on a certain level whether or not the overall goal makes sense, but more so when all the team members actually do give a damn about the eventual goal.

Back to Paulo Friere and connectedness, and other principles. PF uses several national models, one of which is the Common Principles for Essential Schools. These talk about assessment, depth over coverage, budgets, personalized and authentic learning and so on. Are there such principles for the workplace?

Most employees I know want to be respected and left alone to do their jobs, with as many perks as possible, and that is always an option. But, different work environments certainly make some difference, and there are principles even if unstated ones – in an engineering culture, for instance, all team members generally open themselves to criticism and it is acceptable to straightforwardly and publicly tell people they are wrong. This might not be the case in other types of work, but in software at least it is the norm to have one’s work always exposed to public comment and to learn from peer review.

Toyota certainly thinks workplace culture is a critical issue, with a focus on continuous improvement (kaizen) and respect for people, and using a long-term philosophy. These principles might well apply to many kinds of organizations, though perhaps not all the detailed procedures that work for Toyota, such as chaining assembly lines together so that problems become highly visible immediately.

Tucson has several excellent models of well-organized nonprofits: The Community Food Bank has won high marks for accountability and transparency and been rated one of 50 best nonprofits to work for nationally. They must be doing something right.

All this ‘cultural technology’ fascinates me. After all, what really separates Tucson from Tripoli? And how will Libyans change from a violence-ridden society into a working democracy? Somehow it has to do with connectedness, respect and other invisible cultural puzzle pieces that we take for granted in our daily lives, but which might just be the most important technologies for solving thorny global problems.

The Rio Nuevo board appears to be trying to execute a ‘land grab’ to take ownership of property that should belong to the city of Tucson. As a Tucson taxpayer and voter, I want you – my elected representatives – to control this property, NOT an unaccountable, governor-appointed board that I cannot contact and do not trust.

I know that if there is a problem – and yes, there have been some – I can go to my city council representative and talk about it. I know that as elected officials who have to face the voters regularly, you will be responsive to our concerns.

I also know that the Rio Nuevo board is extremely difficult to contact, that they have lawyers answer their messages (at what cost per voice mail?) and that they were appointed by the governor, thus several layers removed from any accountability to me as a voter. Unlike the city council, the Rio Nuevo board meetings do not have audio or text transcripts online and even the minutes are only updated thru last March.

Please stand up to them and do not give them our land. I hope there is something we can do to get their hands out of our tax money and off our property. Mistakes were made with Rio Nuevo management, but I would rather have you guys fix it than have them steal us blind.

Suing the city is just taking our tax money that should be paying for police and pools, and putting it into the pockets of their lawyers. Let me know if there are steps we voters can take to make this stop.

Sincerely,

Golda Velez
[address deleted from online version]

See also editorial at Grinnell wants to be mayor – but his board is suing the city and Jonathan Rothschild’s statement on the lawsuit

Kids like bugs, and they are a very accessible part of nature. Kids of almost any age can cultivate arthropods successfully – and our own Sonoran Arthropod Studies Institute will set you up with a free habitat every month at Community Day. See http://sasionline.org

High school students might find opportunities to volunteer in an active research lab, extremely valuable experience and maybe credit depending on your school. Southern Arizona has a huge diversity of insects and arthropods, with new species of ants discovered right here in the Tucson mountains.

Check out Dung ball races at Old Main! for more information on the event tomorrow.

The Research Park owned by the University of Arizona is host to a number of high tech firms, for-profit entities such as IBM, Raytheon, Canon, and others. This is a great thing for the economy and local job market, and the research park does an excellent job managing their property with a 98% occupancy rate. But they don’t pay any property tax, because the park is owned by the University of Arizona. When this was brought up to the legislature, their solution was to give free space to Vail Academy and High School. Again, this is great for Vail students, who not only have high quality school resources, but also get to intern with high tech firms and learn valuable job skills. That part is wonderful. But the rest of us don’t get any compensation for the loss of property taxes, and then Antenori has the gall to call our elected representatives ‘pathetic’ and tell them to make deeper cuts to Tucson schools

Antenori has also sponsored several anti-Tucson measures in the legislature. I seem to recall something about ‘cities over 600,000 but less than 2 million’ having restrictions on their ability to pass revenue measures – why not just say ‘Tucson’ and be done with it? And this guy is thinking about running for regional office?

Antenori, you owe the TUSD board and community an apology. I don’t allow my kids to engage in namecalling, I wouldn’t put up with it if I heard it at their schools, and we shouldn’t have to hear it from someone who supposedly represents part of our community. I request that you apologize.

This letter is also mailed directly to Antenori’s email. I’ll let you know if he responds.

– Attendance matters. Kids who miss days in first grade are the ones who struggle in fourth and fifth.
– If your child is a first grader this year, they have to be reading by the end of third grade in order to be promoted. The AIMS reading test requirement starts in the spring of 2014.
– Making friends, and family connections is really important to kids. One way to help out is to make a class directory for your child’s classroom. Bring a sign-up sheet to open house or ask the teacher to send home forms with each child asking parents to give their contact information for a class directory that will be shared with everyone in the class. Then assemble the info and give it back to be handed out. This needs to be a parent initiative since teachers are generally doing all they can just to teach!
– Reading at home is key! Here are some ideas for teaching reading: http://bteaching.com/subject/language/reading

Pima Library has lists of recommended books for kids of different ages:

http://www.library.pima.gov/kidsweb/books/

The teen site even has recommended books for guys and girls, writings by teens, and a link to the lexile test to help recommend books by reading level:

http://www.library.pima.gov/teenzone/read/

– If you have time, volunteer to tutor or help out at your school. Family involvement can make a huge difference to your child’s community.
– Holladay Elementary will be offering ESL classes onsite for parents who want to learn English. Is your school doing this?

Do you volunteer at your child’s school already, or have other ideas to help out? Please spread the word. I posted these ideas also to http://btucson.com/194474 and http://btucson.com/194475, feel free to post yours as well.

Meanwhile, front line operators are filing problem after problem with their supervisors, providing detailed information about dropped calls, calls that wouldn’t transfer, and the inability to hear callers:

7/15 7:25:15 PM “Call was disconnected in the middle of questioning. It was a child caller reporting his mom having a seizure. Very frustrating!”

“Would not transfer using ‘MED’ or ‘MED CELL’ transfer button”…”Unable to transfer to TPD” …”Transferred caller to TPD using genovation pad. After 3 rings it stopped ringing”…”As soon as the call was picked up …, call was disconnected. This happened twice!”…”Anytime I log off to go on break or give a break or first time logging in the first caller [reports] that calls can’t hear me.”

Michael LaFond, a 911 operator with 17 years experience and fired after reporting errors with the new system, confirmed the same problems. As many as 4 or 5 times per shift, LaFond experienced “serious things like losing sound – so I have a caller on the line and I cannot hear the person speaking. When I go back and hear the recording, they could hear me, they were talking, but I couldn’t hear them. So they were on the line and they were unable to get help. There was a caller that was having an emergency and I was unable to transfer the call.”

Specifically, LaFond was fired for researching the June 1 call that ended in the death of a 10-year old girl.

Why would researching a serious problem be a fireable offence if the department were not trying to cover up issues?

KGUN9 news found out in an interview that ‘Operators say they were told to log any unexplained troubles as “Code 17″ and later found “Code 17″ was the tag for operator errors.’. So when Ron Lewis as General Services director reported to the city council that ‘most of the problems were operator error’ this is just what operators were directed to record things as!

We need to fix the problems. I hope that fire chief Jim Critchley will take those seriously and be able to solve them, whether it takes going back to the old system, leaning on QWest and Motorola to fix the Meridian ACD, or replacing faulty hardware. But we can’t fix them by hiding them, and Tucson may have bigger problems than just the 911 system. We need to take a hard look at how this was handled by our local managers – Mike Letcher, Ron Lewis and Isaiah Twombly, I understand are the managers in charge. And we need to fight back hard against the state legislature to stop them from taking funds that are critical to our community. Thanks to City Council member Steve Kozachik for standing up for public safety and the front line workers some of this has gotton exposed, but he can’t do it alone. What is your ward council member doing about it?

See 911 Tucson for the in-depth report. I spent about an hour on 8/18 talking to Michael LaFond, and his passion and dedication to public safety really shone through. We need more people like Michael LaFond working for the city of Tucson, but instead we have one less.

I picked up my 10-year old after the first day of school yesterday and she was escatic, jumping up and down in happiness over her teacher, her art class, and just the good feeling she had from being at Holladay Elementary. Channel 13 was there in the morning, filming my younger daughter’s first grade class with the voiceover something like ‘this school was slated to be closed down last year, now packed with students on the first day’…the new first grade, approved only in mid-May, had 22 students who signed up over the summer. The whole school was incredibly upbeat, welcoming new staff and with parents already organizing a book fair on day 1.

All this would not have been possible without Judy Burns speaking out at the board meeting last March where four schools were up for closure. I listened to the meeting on the audio feed and transcribed it word for word. I loved how Burns spoke with common sense, defending kids, teachers and schools. I want her there representing me and defending my kids and their schools.

Judy Burns: “I can’t even believe we’d even consider – these kids were bused for 30 years, and now you want to bus them further? You want to retain kids, bring them back. Some kids learned, and some parents learned from a television report last night, about possible closure of their schools. Whatever dialog has gone on has not been extensive. People in the know has shown up, but people who put their kid in 4th grade at Holladay this year for the first time, didn’t know. So all this happened before you Dr Pedicone, so I’m not blaming you, mostly this happened last year. But I would like us to see, now that the discussion has started, not to vote to close schools, but give it a year to gel, and have people give us real input…

Not the data, you want to tell me why people are leaving schools, they have to get on a bus to go to another school – we changed boundaries at some time to accomodate growth, and we put the least resistent people farther away, and the people that were making the most noise where they wanted to go….

I would like to make a motion at this point to Not close any schools. To go out to the community for the next year…realign boundaries to be closest to the school and their neighborhoods. Make Robbins a K-8, that is fine; and certainly mothball space that is not being used. ”

Read fuller transcript at bTucson: Carson considered for closure, all other TUSD schools safe at least this year – thanks to Judy Burns! or listen to the recording at http://tusd1.org/contents/govboard/gbmeetings.html

This was something of an epiphany for me – all is not lost, and there are reasonable people up in Phoenix who just want the state to make sense. It seemed to me a personal obligation to at least find out about them, and help out where I could. Several interviews later, I was even more encouraged. The leader of the recall, Randy Parraz, was clearly a dedicated and intelligent guy who knows how to get things done. But more than that, talking to some of the volunteers, I realized that there is hope for Arizona – we don’t need a progressive revolution, we just need more active moderates, people who care about educating kids, dealing with problems, facing the tough issues and don’t necessarily have a particular ideological drum to beat. And there are more of those folks than you’d expect, even in conservative Mesa, Arizona.

With support from Spot.us, a community sponsored journalism site, I’ve written up my attempt at ‘real’ journalism, complete with statistics about tax cuts and revenue, connecting the dots between prisons, politicians, redistricting and the rise of the moderate activist. Check it out:

Arizona Divided

http://btucson.com/Tucson/Politics%20&%20Government//194163

No, that’s not Sheriff Arapio or Russell Pearce talking. That’s Cholla High teacher Lorenzo Lopez, facing hard facts head-on in an explanation of why the Mexican American Studies program at TUSD is important to Tucson’s kids.

“It is the responsibility of all of us to find the most effective educational models available.” Lopez and his fellow teachers, as well as many former students and parents, believe strongly that the Mexican American Studies program is providing something that many students are missing. Connection, caring, a sense of one’s place in history, a sense of responsibility to the community – Lopez describes it as a ‘cultural cure’ for apathy and frustration. Does it work? According to numbers gathered through the program, 70% of its alumni have enrolled in post-secondary education vs the national average of 24% for Mexican American college enrollment.

Becky Harvey, whose daughter went through the Mexican American Studies program at Tucson High School, spoke passionately about its importance for their family. “Ms Federico was her saving grace in high school. She was feeling physically and emotionally damaged (due to a major health issue). Ms Federico had her do her family tree, do interviews. All of a sudden, she could see herself in history. She came to believe education was her obligation. She would say, ‘They made me feel its my obligation to help my community’”

Obligation and responsibility. Isn’t that something we want our teenagers to grasp?

Maria Federico Brummer, TUSD teacher since 1998, describes her committment to the program: “I taught at Hohokam middle school, which had a 40% turnover rate, for seven years. I was committed to staying with those kids, and only this program could pull me away.” Brummer was a history major at the UofA with a minor in sociology; she explains the history of the Mexican American Studies program as part of the civil rights movement, something that parents and teachers were fighting for back in the 1960′s. The program finally got impetus as part of the Fisher-Mendoza desegregation lawsuit in 1978, and after a strong grassroots effort by parents, students, community members and teachers the program was finally established in 1998.

What about the accusations of un-American and racist language? Perhaps most telling were the reactions of Lopez and Brummer to a heckler who showed up at the Save Ethnic Studies meeting on July 22. The heckler interrupted repeatedly, at times at length: “I’m Italian and I don’t need Italian studies.” “God doesn’t tell you about that? (whether you are white or another race)” “Are you teaching students to reject capitalism? What are you doing to promote capitalism?”

I was impressed by the patient and respectful tone both Brummer and Lopez used in response to these interjections. Brummer repeatedly explained that all the classes meet or exceed state standards and cover all state mandated areas, including discussion of capitalism, but explained that she wasn’t familiar with a part of the state standard requiring promotion of capitalism. Lopez responded that “We don’t promote anything – we teach all sides of history…We promote academic rigor, academic achievement, and equitable educational opportunities.”

“We teach young people skills for original research, in collaboration with the University of Arizona. They have an impact – however they decide – in government. They complete a research project and present it to school board members or other decision makers”

Students who study the civil rights movement as something vital and alive, students who are taught that they can have an impact in their government may also sometimes take part in activism that is uncomfortable to adults trying to run the schools – such as the students who took over the TUSD board meeting on April 26, 2011. Listening to the teachers explain their classes, and viewing the video of the students, a coherent picture begins to emerge of a passionate community taking on issues head-on: dropout rates, apathetic students, or opposition from the powers that be. Whether you like or dislike the idea of public schools teaching ethnic studies, think they already are teaching Western European ethnic studies, or are indifferent, don’t expect this community to give up and go quietly.
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Golda Velez also writes at bTucson.com. See related article Ethnic Studies Audit actually positive, Huppenthal apparently misrepresented it

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I’ve set to moderated comments on this and other articles. There seem to be a crowd of haters who use the Tucson Citizen as a soapbox, and I have no desire to play into that. One comment accused that ‘This article is just another “tool” article of the MAS Program’ – I have nothing to do with the MAS program, I am a local citizen with an interest in teachers, schools and cultural issues. In particular, I am interested in how leaders in the Mexican-American culture address problems in their own community and are helping others grow and change.

Thoughtful, constructive comments welcome whether you agree or disagree, as long as they are free of name-calling and racism. Otherwise, find another place to write. We all have freedom of speech, but that includes freedom not to promote hateful speech and I’m not going to display it here.