Time Inc. has purchased a house in Detroit to serve as a temporary headquarters for a year-long commitment to coverage of the city through its various outlets including Time Magazine, CNNmoney.com, SI.com, Fortune Magazine, and Money Magazine.

Read both response letters below.

An Open Letter to Time Inc.
On the occasion of the first article reflecting your yearlong commitment in Detroit.
By SHEA HOWELL

I just read Daniel Okrent’s article “Detroit: the Death—and Possible Life—of a Great City.” If this is your best effort, you might as well sell the house and move back to New York. The article offers nothing new and is a recycling of stories already told. Moreover, it continues to perpetuate the myths that Detroit’s ills are because of myopic auto companies, self-interested unions, riots and racial tensions. While there are measures of truth in these images, they are caricatures of the people and events you chronicle. You don’t need to be in Detroit to drag up these tired images and superficial views.

For example, to characterize Coleman Young as a “black politician who cared more about retribution than about resurrection” or as someone who spent most of his time “insulting suburban political leasers and alienating most of the city’s remaining white residents,” is simply not true. Nor is your tying of the decline of Detroit’s population to the uprising in 1967. These are the tales told by some suburbanites to frighten their children away from the city. They are not be supported by any historical analysis of the Young administration or the decline of city and they miss the real issue. Young believed that the rebuilding of Detroit rested on the return of some single new industry or development. He was not alone in this. This belief was shared by most other mayors around the country and encouraged by federal and state policies. From the building of the Ren Cen to the opening of casinos, Young and subsequent administrations, like Okrent, were looking for the simple solution.

The story of Detroit’s decline, and its great gift to those of us who live here, is that as the epitome of American industry in the last century, we are the first to have to deal fundamentally with deindustrialization and all that entails.

Okrent makes much of his early memories of the city and uses them to legitimize his current perceptions, but he has done little to provide a matured understanding of the people of this city, who are nearly invisible in his account. Instead he looks to worn out ideas, arguing for “regional government,” “moving occupants,” and positioning us as one of the “cheapest” labor markets encouraged by the government to produce “hydrogen” autos. Urban farming, where Detroit leads the nation, gets one short sentence. Green belts get a clause, and the possibility of creating a new definition of city already in the making gets no mention at all.

The tragedy of this piece is that so many other journalists have done better. In addition to our own local papers that have chronicled much of the imaginative redevelopment in the city, Rebecca Solnit writing in Harpers presented a compelling picture of the new agricultural movement forming a basis for a new economy in “Detroit Arcadia.” Flypmedia.com did a wonderfully imaginative presentation of the emerging trends in the city in its “Breath of Hope.” Even Al Jazeera had a stronger picture of the possibilities of what cities can become in the 21st century, as they are turn toward local economic structures. Last week a former UM student, Diana Flora, writing in the Michigan Daly captured more of the city’s reality in her “Viewpoint: Two sides of the same Detroit” than Okrent.

Okrent has much to offer in both his capturing of the devastation of the city as a slow Katrina and his recognition that the rebuilding of Detroit is tied to the redefinition of America. But he and subsequent journalists in your series need to shed a lot of baggage to recognize that Detroit is not just a bombed out city. While you are busy thinking of us as Baghdad, and consulting that bureau for how to approach our city, many see much stronger parallels with Chiapas and the rising movements of the global south. If you’re not willing to explore something new, spare us the effort.
- – – – – – – – – – – – -

RICH FELDMAN responds to the Time Magazine article.

I just read Danny Okrent’s article in Time Magazine. I am disappointed at how little Danny has been able to reflect on his own history to provide any new insights into his home town. Danny was raised in Detroit, went to UM in the 1960s, and became a nationally known writer. I was raised in Brooklyn, went to UM in the 1960s and have engaged with Detroit for more than 30 years, much of that time in an assembly plant, learned from and listened to people on both sides of 8 Mile. I spent 20 years on the line and ten years as an elected Union Official. Since 1970 when 30 of my activist friends from Ann Arbor moved to Detroit, many of us have been involved in community and social movement activity. When I moved to Detroit in the 1960s, I was looking for a return of the union power of the 1930’s, Danny Okrent seems now in 2010 to be looking for signs of 1960s solution. He is 40 years out of date. The abandonment of Detroit is about much more than the structural economic crisis brought on by a one industry town surrounded by racist policies and attitudes. Detroit represents the end of the industrial epoch in human history and requires deep and new thinking and imagination to re-define, re-spirit and re-build our city from the ground up.

Danny missed the significance of Detroit’s great transformation. While on the surface it is about the auto industry, it is really the end of the economic American Dream and the birth of a 21 century American dream based upon local sustainable economics and community building. The crisis of Detroit wasn’t only about pursuing wrong strategies, it was a fundamental failure to recognize that for the first time in human history, people will not be needed in our country to produce and make goods. The new stage of technology, starting with automation, the rise of the global market and global sourcing, the rising global urbanization would create world wide permanent unemployment. In 1963, James Boggs wrote about the rise of the “outsiders” and “the permanent underclass” that would no longer be part of the success of the economic American Dream. Detroit is now faced with the questions of what are people for, if not to be cogs in mass production? What is the reason for cities? How and why should they be sustained?

Today 2 million people live in prisons in our country. Detroit, Rockford, Youngstown, Bessemer have been left behind almost 30 years. These people, deemed expendable by our society are, like the problems of Detroit, often hidden from view, but telling the tale of a deep transformation in our society.

The auto industry defined Detroit and America. Through it we have seen the slow transformation of most Americans from producers of goods and services to consumers. In this transformation, we lost more than the auto industry. As a people we came to value things more than people, profits more than communities. What was good for GM became the standard by which we judged what was good for America, and if it meant destroying whole communities quickly as in Poletown (something Danny doesn’t even mention) or through vast unemployment through automation and plant closings, no one objected.

It was this transformation to a “thing oriented society” that compelled Martin Luther King Jr. to talk about a radical revolution in values and the struggle against racism, materialism and militarism.

Danny defines the crisis in economic and mechanical terms. He gives your readers no sense of the spirit of the people and the dreams of dignity motivated both the Labor Movement of the 1930s and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements that shaped Detroit .

Danny is looking for economic answers and sees Detroit in economic terms. He holds onto the belief that the past will return and the middle class will be rebuilt, only greener. He cannot image the future except in terms of an economic standard of living. My own experience in the plant, working every day with folks trading lives for dollars and overtime, living on credit cards, believing that “a job was the answer” to all our problems has given me a much deeper understanding of today’s crisis. Simplistic formulations of the self-interest of labor, the bad decisions of management miss the challenge we all face to develop new ways of living that are sustainable, that develop local capacities and that encourage civic life.

Continued concerns about growing violence, totally failed educational systems, discussing and working for insurance reform rather than working to create healthy communities, continuing to rely on food sold in party stores or gas stations and a leadership with no vision are not the result of the auto industry failing, or the politicians and leaders not creating good strategies, but the failure to see Detroit as the canary in our country.

While Time seems to be missing it, many others are not. Next summer 30,000 people are coming to Detroit in June 2010 as part of the US Social Forum. The call for this historic gathering is: Another World is Possible!, Another US is Necessary! and Another Detroit is Happening! Most of these people, struggling with similar challenges as those we face in Detroit, see the city as a source of hope emerging at the grassroots as individuals and organizations create food security, new schools committed to community building, neighborhood based cultural centers and villages, urban gardens and farms with community mobile markets. Artists and activist bringing new life, creating new art forms, and offering visions in music, color and words in every neighborhood and community center across the city.

Danny needs to stop circulating the same old stories and take a look at what is emerging in the cracks of this city. Otherwise, Time will have missed one of the best stories of this new century.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/learn-as-you-go/a-lifelong-search-for-real-education/

LIVING FOR CHANGE

A NEW SCHOOL YEAR BEGINS

Last week Bill Cosby was in Detroit going door to door with Robert Bobb, Detroit Public Schools financial manager,  urging parents to send their children to our failing  public schools.  Cosby is on the crusade which he launched five years ago when, to his credit,  he shook up the celebrities  celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education by asking ” What the hell good is Brown if nobody wants it?”

 Since then, Cosby has been making headlines by chiding inner city mothers who buy expensive sneakers for their kids but won’t spend a dime on a phonics book, and also acting as a recruiter for public schools. Yet, in response to a question, the popular comedian with a Ph.D in Education said that if he lived in Detroit, he would send his children to a charter school.

 Meanwhile, beneath the radar, ex-convict and current father and freedom fighter Yusef ” Bunchy” Shakur* is giving out school supplies to children in his Detroit neighborhood and urging residents to begin a dialog about how to “put the neighbor back into the hood.”

 Yusef is pioneering the paradigm shift towards a community approach to education that we urgently need, as it becomes obvious that young people by the tens of thousands are abandoning  our pipelines-to-prisons schools, resulting in wholesale school closings, staff layoffs and increasingly unsafe neighborhoods.

 Our challenge is two-fold:

• How do we change our schools so that children want to attend them?
• How do we put the neighbor back into the hood to create safe neighborhoods?

 The solution lies in linking these challenges to rethink Education .

 Just imagine how safe and lively our streets and our schools would be, almost overnight, if, as a natural and normal part of the curriculum from K-12,  children were taking responsibility for maintaining neighborhood streets, planting community gardens, recycling waste, rehabbing houses, creating healthier school  lunches,  doing errands for the elderly, organizing neighborhood festivals, painting public murals.  The possibilities are endless.

 This is the fastest way to motivate all our children to learn and at the same time turn our communities into lively neighborhoods where crime is going down because hope is going up. By giving children a better reason to study than just to get a job,  become middle-class or help the U. S. compete on the world market, we will also get their cognitive juices flowing.  Learning will come from practice which has always been the best way to learn.

 This school year schoolchildren  can take a giant step in this direction  by leaving  their classrooms one day  (or one day every week) and spreading out in their communities, e.g to clean up a park or to knock on doors and ask residents  to place a “Peace Zone for Life” sign” in their window.

 The date for this direct action can be chosen by students in cooperation with community residents.  It can be in response to an especially senseless act of violence in the neighborhood or on some date in the school calendar like “Count Day” to show that students count for more than a school budget item.

 When black students in Greensboro, N. C. refused to leave a Woolworth lunch counter on February 1, 1960 until they were served a cup of coffee, they helped build the civil right movement which changed this country.

 Students in Detroit can play a comparable role in building  today’s movement  to rebuild our cities  by leaving their classrooms  for a day to work in the community and then returning to educate themselves by evaluating their experience.

 They can get “Peace Zones for Life” window signs from the  Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality  which is encouraging Detroiters to go beyond protesting and begin organizing ourselves to make our neighborhoods safe.

*Window to my Soul by Yusef Shakur (14.95) can be purchased from  his bookstore, Urban Network.  5740 Grand River , Detroit 48208,   or at the Boggs Center, www.boggscenter.org

In a recent article, long time Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs addressed an issue not tackled by the glossy leaflets circulated by Detroit school candidates. Sadly, nearly 50 percent of Detroit students are dropping out of our city’s schools. Grace called for our city to view this statistic as validation that our schools are not serving its students, whose rejection of their current public education needs to be seen as walking out on a flawed system. This perception of their action connects them as potential activist in movement for fundamental educational change.

As an eighth grade teacher at a school in northwest Detroit, I am faced with the challenge of harnessing this frustration in a way that these students can be empowered enough to see themselves as activists in the continual process of creating an educational system that serves them, even if they choose not return to the classroom.

I have met several students who have walked out of school, many of whom make the trek back to come visit during school hours. I always ask the standard teacher question, “Why aren’t you in school?” Usually they shrug and nonchalantly reply “its boring.” Every once in a while, I’m visited by an articulate group of boys who are bored with school. Once I probed a little harder with them, and was given a provocative answer. They claimed that school just doesn’t help them with life. They were told that “education equals success”, a popular cliché plastered on posters that line the walls of many schools. Sincerely, one of the boys said that he didn’t want a job like that, because he was successful on his own. When we spoke he was crisply dressed and admitted that he spent, most of his time selling drugs . When I asked why, he chuckled and said “success.”

The media is constantly serving images of what it means to be successful, or human for that matter, to our children who readily swallow. My students watch an average of five hours of television a day, and even though they claim it does not effect them, they admit that it influences their friends. As students passively consume entertainment, we have not provided them with the thinking skills or a place for students to digest these messages, let alone given them the possibility of exploring their own meaning of success. The messages that students receive from school is that its sole purpose is as a means for this success. Every year on the first day of school, I ask my students why they walked through the door, and as predictable as the hook of a 50 Cent song, they reply to “get a good job.” The messages we have sent to students is that very fabric of education is knitted together by measure of material success. Its no wonder, some of the more empowered students figure they can grab this success through innovative means.

This message is inherent to the way we approach teaching students to read, and I believe that if we can reconceptualize what it means to be literate and strive to teach accordingly, we have hope in eradicating the cities 45 percent illiteracy rate, 50 percent drop out rate, and prepare students to become participants in the ongoing narrative that shapes our society.

The debate over how to teach literacy is battled in educational journals and championed by textbook companies competing for the purchase of their products. But until we address the question of why we teach children to read, we will continue to push students out of school, ponder over floundering illiteracy rates and support an educational system that maintains class structure. How we are teaching reading is impotent if not closely connected to why we teach students to read in the first place.

Reading is currently taught as tool. From early on students are asked to decode words so that they can attach meaning to symbols, and not necessarily interpret these meanings. When I ask my students why people should learn to read, the answers are predictable: to order food off a menu, pass a drivers test or get a good job. Reading is reduced to a skill that is to be mastered. This type of literacy is called functional literacy. People who are functionally literate can decode words, but may not enable the deep comprehension mechanisms that allow them to become analytical thinkers. Many curriculums are constructed around teaching functional literacy, and have adapted pedagogies of comprehension to fit this mission. The importance of reading is not being communicated to students beyond its utilitarian purposes. Several of my students struggle with reading not because they can’t decode words but because they can’t interpret texts, and feel as if the individual meanings they attach to a text are incorrect.

In the past, settling for functional literacy methods may have sufficed, because we could hope children would be exposed to critical thinking that are applied to deeper text comprehension like interpreting, synthesizing, analyzing, and asking questions through daily dialogue and conversation. In short, children were required to think as they conversed and could apply these thinking skills as we read. The focus on functional literacy has marginalized reading as communication and actually alienated people from participation in real communication. After all the group of boys who walked out of school were all functionally literate, and they no longer saw the value of sitting in an English class.

We read to be connected to the narratives of others, which inspires us to generate and share our own ideas. This ability to think through language distinguishes us as humans, and needs to be defended. People are not reading and thoughtlessly consume information from other mediums with out the skills to interpret. Consequently they have quick access to a flood information that they rarely have time to process, question, or decipher what is valid. Our schools could serve a place where children cultivate thinking skills through the way we approach teaching reading. These skills can then be embedded in the way they approach discourse, allowing people to discern between misinformation and legitimate sources.

Creating a space for what is known as critical literacy is essential to the survival of our city. Critical literacy is pedagogy rooted in the theories of Paolo Freire, that extends the importance of reading beyond a tool. Critical Literacy emphasizes the importance of reading as connecting ourselves to the narratives of others through interpretation of discourse. Through reading students explore their own values as they interpret their world so that they are empowered as agents in it.

Currently we hide this purpose of reading from students. If we teach students these skills, as they digest the written word, we are developing critical thinking skills linked to action. What we read can then become a forum for the discussion of how we can shape and impact our own word. Students then interpret, analyze, synthesize, question, and respond. These are the same characteristics we would hope for from the citizens of our city.

In my classroom, I have been successful in reconstituting the way we think about reading and applying critical literacy methodology. We held a debate questioning the impact of media violence on our lives. Some of my students struggling to read, or even come to classes were empowered by the idea that they were participating in an ongoing societal question. They tackled complex articles eager to craft their own arguments. I even had some visitors walk back in to watch the debates.

Nate Walker is an 8th Grade English teacher at Cerveny Middle School in northwest Detroit.

http://www.criticalmoment.org/issue19/walker

Cheating Our Kids

The Crisis of Standardized Testing in Public Schools

Nate Walker
On August 13th, two weeks before the Detroit Federation of Teachers officially went on strike, I interviewed with Detroit Public Schools. Although I had been working for Detroit Public Schools for the past four years, I recently finished my state teaching certification, and am now officially considered “highly qualified” to teach our youth. Although I was assured my position before the interview, it was a necessary but irksome procedure of district bureaucracy.

As I drove to the school’s center building, I rehearsed answers to potential questions. I tried to concisely articulate my teaching philosophy, and reminded myself of successful classroom management techniques. While waiting in the office lobby, I flipped through my portfolio, stopping at every page that had a picture of a former student. Each picture reminded me of a relationship built on a shared six hours for a hundred and eighty-one days, some of which have blossomed into friendships. I smiled. Then my name was called, and the interview began.

When I returned to my car an hour later, I was frustrated, discouraged and angry. As expected, I was hired on the spot. But the aggravation I felt was far more disturbing than any conversations I would have about district mismanagement and contractual shortcomings in the upcoming weeks. During the interview, I was not asked about teaching philosophies, past experiences, or building a classroom community. I was never given the opportunity to share strategies for helping children become active readers. The district wasn’t even concerned with whether or not I had goals as an educator. Instead, I was asked a series of questions about the content of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), a state-wide standardized test.

The interviewer probed my understanding of the MEAP test’s structure, and asked how I would prepare my students for specific portions of the exam. The interview then became centered around the direct instruction reading curriculum purchased by Detroit Public Schools with the hope that it would improve standardized test performance. The interviewer only seemed concerned with whether or not I could list the components of this curriculum. She asked if I could name the four reading skills identified by the program, but never questioned how I planned to implement these programs. We never discussed children or learning. Instead, it was as if I was being quizzed on an instructional manual for MEAP success.

The interview made it clear to me that in the eyes of the Detroit Public schools, The people in the classroom were secondary to the information they were expected to receive. I felt like a technician and was not sure if I wanted to be a teacher anymore.

Much has been written about how standardized tests are culturally biased and only measure certain forms of intelligence based on rigid standards. Nonetheless, they are still accepted as an educational reality, even though most educators openly disagree with the merit of the tests. In fact, several of the administrators I have worked with have openly chastised the MEAP test only to shrug their shoulders and then profess that they are something we have to deal with, especially if we intend to keep our jobs. It is time we recognized the larger impact that our compliance with standardized tests has on a larger educational climate.

Standardized testing is not just a reality of the educational system, it has become the driving force behind it, with reprehensible consequences. In Detroit, the MEAP test dictates our pedagogical practices, and determines both how and why we educate our children. Even if we believe MEAP’s contents will ultimately benefit the future lives of our city, this connection to future life skills is lost. Scoring well on the test has become more important than the concepts the test is suppose to measure.

Our society defines successful schools by their ability to prepare students to output information. This educational paradigm emphasizes a product, high test scores, over any educational process of developing skills – skills such as critical thinking and the ability to ask questions, skills that are imperative for any potential citizen.

Emphasizing test performance not only impedes an educator’s ability to prepare students to become lifetime learners, but creates an educational environment that does not even really consider children. Every professional development workshop I have attended this year has been centered on MEAP preparation. The district is explicitly asking us to “teach to the test.” This has led to a harsh bureaucratic atmosphere in the name of accountability. Administrators and specialists evaluate teachers’ performance according to whether or not they are preparing students for the MEAP, instead of whether or not they are engaging students in meaningful lessons.

Accountability is certainly important, but we need to be accountable to student growth and development, not to a single test. When educators feel a greater responsibility to succeed on a test than to their students, lessons and tools are not selected for their value to the students, but for the potential ability to raise test scores.

The urgency to perform well on the MEAP test stems from the funding tied to successful scores. The drive to achieve on the test has very little to do with student growth, and more with procuring future funding for the school. In other words, schools are not emphasizing test performance because of a deep philosophical belief that it will be educationally beneficial for their students; they are focusing efforts on test preparation to ensure the their school’s survival. Schools fear that they will lose resources or be closed down if they are not proficient, so they find it necessary to focus massive amounts of resources on preparing for the test.

Certainly federal and state legislation has increased the pressure on school districts to perform by threatening the loss of funding. At the same time, school districts are spending an exorbitant amount of money to prepare and implement these tests. There needs to be a cost benefit analysis measuring the amount of money received from taking and performing well on the test, versus the amount of money the district spends to prepare for the test.

This fall, shortly after a teacher strike against district mismanagement of funds, my school has received a seemingly endless supply of test prep books solely designed for the MEAP and professional development workshops. Many striking teachers demanded that the district allocate more money for classroom supplies, but should we continue to strive for increased funding for materials that have little value for students’ education?

We must no longer allow standardized testing to dictate our educational institutions, nor can we shrug it off as a reality of education. As educators, we can hold our schools accountable by demanding curriculum and instructional practices that encourage human development.

The first step is recognizing that we have a powerful voice. We can demand a cost benefit analysis for compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act and other legislation that mandates high stakes testing. We can also boycott the test. Parents have the option to refuse that their child takes the MEAP test. Similarly, suppose teachers and students refused to attend school on test taking days, and instead met to discuss the potential for real education in Detroit. The district and the state would be forced to reevaluate the whole purpose of education.

Nate Walker is a 7th grade English teacher at Cerveny Middle School in northwest Detroit. He is a member of the Detroit Summer Collective.

http://www.criticalmoment.org/issue19/putnam

Movie Review: Half Nelson

reviewed by Julia Putnam
Unlike other films about inner-city schoools, Half Nelson, directed by Ryan Fleck, is not a gross stereotype of the conditions and inhabitants of urban schools. While there is a long list of problems with our educational system, student behavior, and the condition of schools in this country, Hollywood has gone out of its way to exaggerate behaviors and simplify problems to an insulting extreme. The eighth graders depicted in Half Nelson are not the precocious cuties or hardened thugs of mainstream films. They’re average city kids with acne, braces, and braids. This is an impressive film that challenges many stereotypes.

Daniel Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a white man teaching in a Brooklyn middle school, but he is not the selfless, white do-gooder teacher with an insulting there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I-attitude that we have seen in other films about white teachers in urban schools. Dunne is a man raised by 60s era activists and reads radical black literature such as Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois, but the cliché stops there. He’s teaching his middle school students the theory of dialectics in (get this) engaging lectures.

What is history? Change, he tells them. And dialectics is the study of how things change over time. His assignments include his students standing up to report on the impact of historical events such as Brown v. Board, Attica, and the assassination of Harvey Milk. Some of the best scenes of the film are the shots of individual students reporting on these events, the stark contrast of their modern faces speaking with real-life footage interspersed. All this while the school principal hounds Daniel about being on a certain page in the Civil Rights binder, a conversation that any thinking teacher will recognize.

Daniel Dunne is also a crack addict. And when one of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), accidentally discovers his secret, the two characters engage in a remarkable friendship that is all at once, intimate, troubling, and beautifully poignant.

Drey is the most realistic female teenager I have ever seen depicted on film. She never falls into the stereotypical put upon girl who drowns her problems in promiscuity, drugs or ditziness. Shareeka Epps plays her flawlessly with an exterior full of bravado and a tender, vulnerable smile always at the ready.
Drey’s story is that of a young girl who must grow up too fast because the adults around her are struggling to keep their own lives afloat. She listens mournfully as her hard-working mother berates her father over the phone for not taking a more active role in her life. She finds her teacher in a crack stupor, beseeching her to stay with him “just one more minute.” Her beloved older brother is in jail for drug dealing. And Drey finds herself accepting the occasional guilt-induced monetary contributions from Frank (Anthony Mackie), the local drug dealer, who is responsible for her brother’s incarceration.

Like Daniel, Frank is also a complex character who defies our preconceived assumptions. Frank is likeable; he looks after Drey, but he also offers her a job slinging drugs. At one point, Frank questions Drey’s relationship with Daniel, explaining to her “a base head doesn’t have friends.” And neither do drug dealers, apparently. Frank is not malevolent, but he clearly does not have Drey’s best interest at heart. He, like all drug dealers, ultimately cares about the money he can make, not about the community around him. Drey eventually tries out the job of running drugs for Frank, setting up a powerful scene in which Drey experiences the temptations and realities of the drug economy.

All this Drey endures with an air of weary acceptance that never descends into cynicism or despair. This movie highlights the resilience of young people that I think our society all too often takes for granted. Where are the adults who are grown up enough to take care of our children?

Half Nelson eschews the neat “everything will be okay in the end” finale. Questions are left unanswered. Will Daniel get sober, can he maintain his job as a teacher despite his addiction, will he and Drey remain friends, will she be okay? None of these questions are answered.

Like the dialectics that Daniel teaches, this is a film of forces colliding. The film’s characters are nearly destroyed by the pressures surrounding them. But there remains the hopeful possibility that change is possible, that we can respond to the contradictions in our lives by connecting with one another and choosing to live differently.

Julia Putnam was the very first volunteer to sign up for Detroit Summer in 1992. She has taught in Detroit public and charter schools for five years. She lives in Detoit with her husband, Peter, and their beautiful son, Henry.

http://jezebel.com/5334915/how-gardening-could-save-detroit-amanda-rosman-urban-education-pioneer?skyline=true&s=i

I am excited that you have taken an interest in our project.  If you have other specific questions or you please feel free to email us at projeceducation313@gmail.com, also make sure you register as a contact on our site. Nate

CBO schools are public schools that are run by community based organizations. The article shares how two schools use the process of addressing community issues as the driving force behind educational experiences.
The practical examples of the learning that is happening iss nothing short of inspiring, but I also found the theory and vision behind these learning experiences to be very comforting. The following passages echo many of the discussions that are framing the Boggs Educational Center, and reminds us that communities across the country are participating in an educational movement that is humanizing and visionary.  We consider our process a part of this movement. 

“The words education and community have become what linguist Uwe Poerksen calls “plastic words”: words that are “rarely used in a particular, precise, appropriate manner.” Education is commonly conflated with “school attendance.” In everyday conversation, education is often referred to as a thing to which every child is entitled. As a metaphor, community must be one of the most overused words in the English language. I realize, therefore, that in writing about education and community, I risk being misunderstood. So, I better begin by defining terms.
Education is the process by which people become responsibly mature members of their communities. And a community? A human community is a group of people who live together, work together, and practice together the arts of living and learning in a particular place.”
… “Somehow, we convinced ourselves that the division of labor used to manufacture pins or widgets most efficiently could be applied to education. So, in our approach to schooling, we tried to create what historian David Tyack called The One Best System and inserted it between our communities (the villages) and education (the raising of our children). But children are not pins or widgets. Systems cannot substitute for communities. When learning is separated from the life of a community, education becomes impossible.

“The myth that must be debunked, therefore, is that schools educate children. They do not. Communities do. Schools are only tools that communities can use as part of the educational process. The responsibility for education belongs to the entire “village.”"
… “The second task in designing an effective school is to embed it in the life of the surrounding community. Adults must be asked to exercise their responsibility in the educational process and interact with students. The students, in order to move toward responsible maturity, must become actively and positively engaged in the community around them.”