Posted on 09/27/2008 7:46:43 AM PDT by GVnana
Mike Klonsky has had a blog on Obama’s official website for a few months now (His first article is from February)...
Soooo who’s Mike Klonsky?... Quote: Michael Klonsky (born 1943) is an American educator and political activist. He is perhaps most famous for being National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in 1968...
...On May 12, 1969, Klonsky and four other SDSers were arrested at the organization’s Chicago national headquarters for assaulting a police officer, interfering with a firefighter, and inciting mob action[/b]. A prank call to a local police station said there had been a shooting at SDS’ offices. When the police arrived, Klonsky and the others were convinced it was a ruse to gain access to SDS’ offices.
Klonsky convinced the police everything was fine, when a second prank call brought local firefighters to the scene. When the police attempted to force entry to the offices, Klonsky and the others resisted. Convinced state repression of SDS was coming, Klonsky told a national television audience on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that police repression of the New Left was being planned by the U.S. Department of Justice...
...At SDS’ June 1969 national convention in Chicago, Klonsky played a major role in the dissolution of the organization. A group of 11 SDS national leaders—including Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, John Jacobs, Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers, Terry Robbins, and Howie Machtinger—had met in April and May of 1969 to craft a response to PL supporters within SDS.
Their article, “You Don’t Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” was published in New Left Notes on June 18, 1969, the day the convention opened.
Mike Klonsky - Communist leader...and along with Bill Ayers, promoter of American terrorism, created a school workshop that received a grant from the Annenberg Challenge, the Chicago branch created by Bill Ayers and had Barack Obama as president and chairman, and now Klonsky gets his own little blog on Obama’s offical website...
A Convergence of the Movement for a Democratic Society
November 8-10, 2007
All Events are free! at Loyola University
2:00 pm Sullivan Center.
1968 CONFIDENTIAL!: How they lived, What they dreamed, and How they organized in that world historic year!
SDS Activists to Tell All!
Marilyn Katz, Michael James, Franklin Rosemont, Michael Klonsky, Susan Klonsky. Katz is a noted speaker, an excellent debater, a publicist for good causes.
James an SDS organizer was a founder of Rising Up Angry; he edits the Heartland Journal.
Klonsky was National secretary of SDS in 1968, responsible for much of the planning and coordination of the SDS events of that year. He has devoted himself to educational reform, Teaching for Social Justice.
Susan Klonsky worked in the SDS National Office, has an excellent memory of that time and has been also working in educational reform. In the 60s Rosemont helped form the Louis Lingg Memorial chapter of SDS and was editor of Rebel Worker and Surrealist Insurrection. Beau Golwitzer, moderator.
BTTT
Mike Klonsky – a sixties New Left leader (Susan, his wife,
who was also active in SDS)
Susan and Mike live in Chicago; they co-authored Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society.
Michael and Susan Klonsky, educators who were among the early leaders of the small-schools movement, tell the story of how a once-promising model of creating new small and charter schools has been used by the neocons to reproduce many of the old inequities. “Small Schools” is the engaging story of what happens when the small-schools movement meets the Ownership Society.
Mike Klonsky:
Susan Klonsky and I write from the perspective of long-time educators and school activists who were heavily influenced by democratic schooling (and de-schooling) movements in the ‘60s, including the Freedom Schools and Citizenship Schools that were central to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the ‘60s.
The early small schools efforts in New York, Philly, and Chicago were filled with much of the same transformational spirit and sense of purpose. Mainly created by rebel teachers and supported by community-based organizations, the early small schools, beginning with Deb Meier’s Central Park East in 1974, had the potential to be much more than replicable models of corporate-type restructuring (in the Starbucks sense). For us, they were primarily ways to engage whole school communities in the education of children.
Many of the new small schools were democratically run and focused on making kids more visible and on building a professional community of teachers. Even the early charter schools that followed, pioneered by progressive thinkers like Ted Kolderie, Ted Sizer, Joe Nathan, Albert Shanker and Ray Budde, looked nothing like today’s chains of Edison and KIPP schools. Words like autonomy and choice didn’t mean what they mean now under the Bloomberg/Klein reforms in N.Y. or Daley/Duncan Renaissance 2010 in Chicago. Autonomy meant teachers would have more power over their teaching/learning environments and be freed up from stupid rules, while choice meant expanding choices and options within local schools for students with diverse interests and ways of learning.
Our book tells the story about what happened when that movement ran head-long into the “Ownership Society” (to use George Bush’s own campaign slogan) with its penchant for eroding public space in favor on shock-and-awe privatization, standardization, and school closings. The early small schools visionaries couldn’t have imagined their efforts to create a critical and innovative force within public education being taken over by corporate-type school operators and program vendors. They wouldn’t have dreamed of chains of small schools, bankrolled by the world’s richest men—schools actively excluding ELL kids or students with disabilities for the first two to three years.
How could this have happened? Is there a way out of the quagmire? More on this to follow.
Michael Klonsky, PhD. is a professor of education and Director of the Center for Innovative Schools.
Susan Klonsky is the Director of the Small Schools Workshop.
Would-be reformers need to beware of those who would co-opt the language of reform to undermine its ideals. Mr. Ayers and Mr. Klonsky examine how Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 initiative has used the terms of the small schools movement to promote privatization and the erosion of public space.
by William Ayers and Michael Klonsky
WE started the Small Schools Workshop in 1991, with the goal of supporting Chicago’s reformminded teachers as they tried to create new, smaller learning communities in an environment that was historically toxic. While the small schools movement at that time represented a wide range of political and educational philosophies, our vision of small schools was closely connected with issues of social justice, equity, and community. For us, small schools were not some new efficiency or simply a technical AT ODDS change. Neither were they an innovative, sophisticated
way to sort and track kids. Rather, the small schools
movement offered a strategy for engaging teachers, students, parents, and whole communities, the people
with the problem, in a movement for democratic education.
It’s no secret that the language of social movements(they are admitting that ‘their school’ is a SOCIAL MOVEMENT) can be co-opted or reduced to empty clichés. In the world
of Chicago school reform, the simple word “choice” has
become a two-edged sword.
The small schools movement was, from its inception,
a collage of educational and political forces. There
was an initial group of autonomy-seeking young activist
teachers who were trying to carve out some space
for innovation and good teaching. Dozens of new schools
were started, and new innovative models like the multiplex
at Cregier High School emerged. Later, the rug
was pulled out from under that movement, and the
new schools were all put on a strict test-prep regimen.
WILLIAM AYERS is Distinguished Professor
of Education at the University of Illinois,
Chicago. He founded the Small Schools
Workshop in 1991. MICHAEL KLONSKY
is a professor of education at Nova Southeastern
University, Ft. Lauderdale-Davie,
Fla., and has served as the workshop’s director
since 1993.
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