By: John Whitfield

Student Activism, Friday morning walkout

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/students-don-t-want-to-learn-in-a-covid-petri-dish-they-re-walking-out-to-prove-their-point/ar-AASLV2J?ocid=msedgntp

Students don't want to learn in a 'COVID petri dish'

As teachers unions and schools battle over in-person and remote learning, students nationwide are demanding a seat at the table. Many are staging walkouts this week.

“We are the ones who have been in this environment every day. It's our bodies that we're putting at risk," said Kayla Quinlan, a 16-year-old student activist at Boston Day and Evening Academy. “Students should have a say in what their learning environment looks like, but our voices are always left out."

School officials have also faced pressure to stay open for the sake of students' academic, social and mental well-being. Research has shown extended school closures during the pandemic have exacerbated mental health challenges and worsened learning outcomes.

While specific demands vary, students' requests largely center around allowing remote learning options as an alternative for those who are worried about coming to school, rather than shutting classrooms down altogether. Student coalitions that have advocated for shifting fully to remote have only called to do so temporarily if schools do not enforce stricter COVID-19 precautions, including more frequent testing and higher-quality masks.

Despite surging COVID-19 cases across the country, fueled by the highly-contagious omicron variant, Quinlan said many Boston schools have started to take precautions less seriously, often not enforcing masking or social distancing.

SCHOOLS AND COVID:The pandemic changed American education overnight. Some changes are here to stay.

“It feels like a breeding ground for COVID, like a COVID petri dish,” she said. “How are you supposed to feel safe?”

This is why students in Boston and elsewhere in Massachusetts are planning a walkout Friday morning, Quinlan said. Similar student walkouts and protests have happened in New York City, Milwaukee, Seattle and Oakland, California.

And after returning to class just two days ago, students in Chicago will also stage a walkout Friday morning, led by a new organization called Chicago Public Schools Radical Youth Alliance. The alliance has demanded CPS and government officials “bring students to the bargaining table” in ongoing negotiations with teachers, who refused to come to in-person school for a week. Students also want public apologies for comments officials made about the Chicago Teachers Union during the intense stand-off last week.

“We stand with the educators, mentors, adult supports, and parents of our school communities, but most importantly, we stand for ourselves, our peers, & our needs,” the alliance said on Twitter last week. “We believe that WE should be the ones to execute, steer, and decide what is best for ourselves, our lives, our health, and our safety.”

Around lunchtime Tuesday, hundreds of New York City students walked out of class to call for remote learning options during a wave of cases as the omicron variant rapidly spreads through the city.

Samantha Farrow, a 16-year-old student organizer at Stuyvesant High School, called it an “uplifting moment” and said she felt less alone in her fears about COVID cases in schools.

Before winter break, she cried to her mother, anxious about going to school with surging cases, especially while living with an immunocompromised family member. When she returned to school this year, she said it was “pretty desolate,” with half-empty classrooms and missing teachers. Due to staffing shortages, most days have been “non-instructional days” spent reading on her own or scrolling through her phone.

She said a remote learning option will not only help students feel safer but offer better-quality instruction in classrooms already disrupted by spikes in cases.

“Students are the ones having to go to school every day in these conditions,” she said. “We have ideas about what can help make this better.”

KIDS ARE GETTING COVID: How the omicron surge is impacting child hospitalizations, school safety

Several student activists told USA TODAY walkouts nationwide have offered hope and a sense of solidarity after they've felt sidelined by local and district officials in conversations about COVID in schools.

"It's encouraging to see that we're not the only ones fighting, that there are people in other states who are fighting for the same cause and we have each other's backs," Farrow said.

In Oakland, students organized a sick-in Thursday and created a petition signed by over 1,200 students. Ayleen Serrano, a 15-year-old sophomore at MetWest High School, said organizers have gotten emails of support from students in cities across California, including San Jose and Los Angeles, as well as from Florida, Texas and Canada.

"It's so exciting to see this spread so far," Serrano said. "I hope what we're doing is inspiring others to use their voices."

The string of walkouts this week are part of a renewed period of growth for high school activism, said Joseph Kahne, a professor of education policy at University of California, Riverside.

He said much of this spike in student protests came about in response to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, George Floyd's murder and concerns about climate change. He hasn't seen such an upswing in student activism since the 1960s and 1970s.

RAPID TESTS, LOTS OF RAPID TESTS: How US schools plan to stay open amid omicron-fueled COVID-19 surge

"We're living in a tumultuous time, and the stakes are high. Students recognize that these issues will affect them," he said. Protests over COVID policies "add something valuable to our political discourse by letting us hear from the young people these policies affect most."

When her fellow student activists leave their classrooms in Boston on Friday morning, Quinlan won’t be joining them in the walkout she helped organize. On Wednesday, she found out she tested positive for COVID-19.

“I'm really sad that I won't be able to be there showing solidarity with my fellow peers,” she said. “There's this sort of painful irony. But this is exactly the reason why we're doing this. We deserve more. We deserve safety. And we are going to fight for change.”

Contact News Now Reporter Christine Fernando at cfernando@usatoday.com or follow her on Twitter at @christinetfern.

By: John Whitfield

Legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As we reflect today on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., let us also look at how the abiding movement for social and economic justice he led informs our union’s daily work and struggle.

Dr. King’s fight for civil rights touched on every political injustice before our nation: equal rights for all, a groundswell of poor people’s movements to demand real economic equity, growing resistance to the harrowing consequences of the Vietnam War and a widening consensus that without true justice, there can be no true peace.

On Friday, students across our city embraced the traditions of the non-violent movement Dr. King anchored by walking out of schools in protest of failed institutions and school policies. As a history teacher, it was imperative that my students learn how events of the past shaped contemporary struggles, and learn how to use the power of their voice, and their agency, in demanding change for their families and communities.

Students’ fight for safety and security in their school buildings stemmed from an understanding of inequities that have plagued our country for generations, just as Dr. King and pioneers of the civil rights movement understood that any campaign for equality must be understood in the context of centuries of enslavement and discriminaton in America’s past.

I taught my students that Dr. King and the movement were not just citations in history books, but part of a living and evolving journey toward liberation and dignity for Black and Brown children and adults. At the end of that journey is social and economic justice for every working class community.

Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, standing up for striking sanitation workers as part of the Poor People’s Campaign when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet. The campaign had been launched a year earlier to demand living wage work and public education to provide disenfranchised Americans with a path out of poverty and oppression. The task of movements such as these — people’s movements — was to derail the exploitation and indifference of business, and speak truth to power in forcing truly substantive, progressive change. Dr. King knew that labor rights were an essential plank in this platform.

One tenet of our union’s mission is promoting "racial, economic and social justice in order to achieve educational justice, and build community and labor coalitions to achieve that objective.” I am proud to say that Chicago Teachers Union educators, and their students, are among leaders in upholding Dr. King’s legacy, and embracing a commitment to fighting for greater good for us all.

In solidarity,

Jesse Sharkey

CTU President

By: Dr. John Kugler

MLK Never Attacked the Working Class

Dr. King fought against institutions and ideas, not people or businesses.

By: john whitfield

Hannah-Jones speaks at MLK Dream Week at Northwestern Made headlines at Union League Club last week

By Olivia Olander Chicago Tribune

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones addressed Northwestern University virtually Monday, calling for a more diverse journalism industry and a recognition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s radicalism, as part of the school’s weeklong celebration of the civil rights leader.

“I’m always fascinated by how every year, when we commemorate Dr. King, how few of his words we ever hear, how little we actually talk about what he said and what he stood for,” Hannah-Jones said at the public event.

Hannah-Jones created the 1619 Project, a journalistic and historical examination of the legacy of slavery, with The New York Times in 2019.

The project has received criticism and has been weaponized, particularly on the political right, for centering racism and slavery as “animating forces of the American experiment,” Northwestern Medill School of Journalism Dean Charles Whitaker said as he led Monday’s conversation.

Hannah-Jones said she expected criticism when she led the project and that all her work is imperfect. “But that particular critique, frankly, I think is ludicrous,” she said, citing the vast number of American laws involving race, and the fact that 10 of the first 12 presidents were enslavers.

King’s legacy in particular has been “whitewashed” by those who ignore his more radical stances on workers’ rights, economic justice for Black people, anti-militarism and anti-capitalism, she said, repeatedly calling for action to enact change.

“We talk about him as a dreamer,” she said. “This was a man who was nearly killed, putting his life on the line. He wasn’t sitting around his house dreaming.”

Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist, also addressed questions on her industry, advocating for more Black and Indigenous representation in investigative journalism.

She said she first encountered African American studies as a student bused out of her neighborhood to a predominantly white high school in Waterloo, Iowa, where she was inspired to write a column for the newspaper about the Black student experience.

“It was a sense of both empowerment, because I realized there was all of this history that could be learned and all of these contributions we could learn about,” Hannah-Jones said of learning African American history, “but also anger that no one had ever felt it was important enough for us to learn this history.”

As an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, she was able to study history and African American studies, and eventually pursue a career in journalism that bridged stories from academia to the masses, she said.

The 1619 Project’s elevation of certain ideas out of academia and into the public discourse has prompted pushback as it made many white people uncomfortable, Northwestern history professor Kate Masur said last week. But this trait is in line with King’s work, Masur said: “Many thought he was moving too fast, was too radical or wasn’t doing it right.”

Hannah-Jones was “enthusiastically selected” by Northwestern’s Dream Week committee, Robin Means Coleman, vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion, said in a news release.

“Her reporting comes at a critical time when we must all be reminded to be agents of positive change in our society,” Means Coleman said. The university’s annual Dream Week aims to commemorate King’s life and legacy, according to the event’s website.

After an appearance at Chicago’s Union League Club last week, Hannah-Jones made headlines when she said she altered her speech in response to critics from the civic and social club.

Emails circulated online before the event had shown at least two members of the club criticized Hannah-Jones and her work, and said she had mischaracterized King.

“I scrapped my original speech and spent the entire first half of it reading excerpts from a bunch of Dr. King’s speeches, but without telling anyone that I was doing so, leading the audience to think King’s words were mine,” she wrote in a viral Twitter thread on Jan. 17.

She addressed the incident at the Northwestern event.

“I really wanted us to come back to King’s radical self,” she said of her speech last week.

Hannah-Jones also attracted media attention last year, when she chose to join the faculty at Howard University instead of the University of North Carolina. UNC trustees had waffled about whether to grant the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist tenure.

She taught her first class at Howard on Monday afternoon, before the appearance at Northwestern, according to a tweet.

“I am HOME, y’all,” Hannah-Jones said in the post.