Letter from Cartagena. #2. Chasing Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Dear friends,

In 1982 when the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature, he said,

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, “I decline to accept the end of man”. I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

Today we stood by the clock tower, an iconic symbol of Cartagena. It looks down on the Plaza where two hundred years ago slaves were sold. More slaves arrived here than anywhere else on this continent.

We also sat on a bench in the square dedicated to the Great Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia: Simon Bolivar.  The bench is said to be where Fermina sat, a character from the Garcia Marquez novel, Love in the Time of  Cholera.

A group of school children on a field trip gathered beneath the statue of the great Liberator and scattered peanuts to the pigeons. They waved as I asked to take their picture.

Today we shopped, walked, ate and drank Colombian beer. We watched a bit of the the World Cup in Donde Fidel, a well-known local salsa bar. We chased away a never ending army of street vendors with endless “no, gracias.”

Every afternoon at about one o’clock the skies open up and so much rain comes down that some streets are filled with water from curb to curb.

So we time our lunch to correspond with the rain. Today we ate at a restaurant in Plaza San Diego. Looking down on us was a huge photograph of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Letter from Cartagena. #1

Dear friends,

We had a few stressful moments on the flights from Chicago to Miami to Cartagena. Nothing terrible considering the state of air travel these days.

We met our dear friend Nathalie in the Miami airport as planned. She took the red-eye from San Francisco. And we all boarded an Avianca flight that took us down the keys, over Cuba and Jamaica, to Cartagena, Colombia.

Cartagena is a jewel. But the old city, a favored destination for many Europeans, is surrounded by miles of shanty towns with nothing but dirt roads. The Centro Historico is filled with fancy upscale stores and boutique hotels, but poor Cartageneros are plentiful.

Last night we took a carriage ride through every plaza in the area. We really just wanted to get to Plaza San Diego to a ceviche restaurant. But the driver must have thought we wanted a grand tour and he kept pointing out historical sites. Between our pitiful Spanish and his Cartagena accent, we understood nothing. We smiled. He pointed to the sites. And the seven blocks to the restaurant ended up being a twenty-minute ride through a beautiful, brilliantly lit quarter of the city at night.

Some news from home: I see Mark Kirk has lied about more than just his military experience. Now it turns out he is a liar ABOUT BEING A TEACHER!

Okay. I draw the line.

On the floor of the House, in campaign commercials and during interviews, Mr. Kirk has invoked his experience in the classroom. At a speech this spring to the Illinois Education Association, Mr. Kirk declared, “as a former nursery school and middle school teacher, I know some of what it takes to bring order to class.”

But the NY Times is reporting that the son of a bitch totally made that up.

A review of public comments that Mr. Kirk has made over the last decade shows that while he may refer to himself as a former teacher, he does not talk about the brevity of his experience: a year in London at a private school and part-time in a nursery school as part of a work-study program while he was a student at Cornell University.

What a schmuck!

Talk to you soon.

-Fred

Cartagena.

This afternoon, Anne, a friend and I landed in Cartagena, Colombia. This is a beautiful city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Not much thoughts of schools or oil spills.

Maybe there will be an occasional post these next two weeks (after which you will be flooded as I head for New Orleans and the NEA convention.

But I will post pictures of Cartagena. It is not hard to take a good one.

The Billionaires Boys Club.

It was Diane Ravitch who coined the name, “The Billionaires Boys Club,” to describe the crew of hedge fund managers and philanthropists who are the angels behind the union-bashing and private management charters that the Obama administration seems so infatuated with.

In a Democracy Now! interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez Ravitch explained:

“The Billionaires Boys Club” is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.

In this month’s issue of New York Teacher, Maisie McAdoo names names.

Education Reform Now, a group once named Democrats for Education Reform and run by a former Milwaukee education reporter named Joe Williams, is a main player in the Democratic Party and represents their most rabidly anti-union, right-wing, pro-Wall Street fringe. But it is a very wealthy fringe.

Sitting on their board:

John Petry. A partner at Gotham Capital Management. Petry’s Gotham Capital LLC, founded in 1985 with $7 million from junk-bond king Michael Milken, is a privately owned hedge fund.

Sidney Hawkins Gargiulo. Hawkshaw Capital, founded in 2002 by a former Lehman Brothers analyst.

John Sabat.  SAC Capital, a Stamford, Conn.-based private investment firm.

Brian Zied. Maverick Capital, a Dallas-based investment adviser managing hedge funds and private investment funds.

Also included among Education Reform Now’s funders is Julian Robertson, the founder of the Tiger Management hedge fund. According to McAdoo, Robertson’s gifts include $71 million in 2008, including $250,000 to Education Reform Now, $1 million to the Achievement First charter network, $2 million to KIPP charters, $3 million to the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, $7.1 million to Teach for America and $200,000 to the New Teacher Project.

Of course, all this is open and above-board. But not always. Back in April of 2009, Ed Reform Now’s Joe Williams got in a mess of trouble for functioning as a bag man, channeling money through different organizations and funds to hide its source and destination.

Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez reported that $500,000 was quietly donated by Plainfield Asset Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund to Al Sharpton for the purpose of promoting charters. Former NY schools Chancellor Harold Levy was a managing director at Plainfield Asset Management. Gonzalez found that the money given to Al Sharpton was channeled through Williams and Williams refused to tell Gonzalez how the donation was handled or what it was used for.

Back in 2008, I ran a couple of posts about Democrats for Education Reform which bag man Williams didn’t like too much, although he wasn’t sure which Klonsky he was mad at.

…one of the Blogging Klonsky brothers, I can’t remember which one, but I’m not worried because I am pretty sure I can kick both their asses.

Call for emergency picket from CORE.

From Chicago’s CTU caucus, CORE:

CEO Ron Huberman called an emergency board meeting this Tuesday.
He is still claiming a $600 million deficit, but won’t show the numbers.
Now he wants to borrow $800 million and be granted the authority to fire tenured and probationary teachers, increasing class sizes to 35 per class.
Let’s tell Huberman that this is unacceptable.

Emergency Picket

Tuesday, June 15th
6:00-7:00 AM
Chicago Board of Education
125 S. Clark

300,000 teacher pink slips. Call congress now.

An estimated 300,000 teaching jobs across the country are at risk. Congress is considering a $23 billion dollar emergency education funding bill. Call now: 866 608 6355.

Central Falls High wins a Tony Award. August Wilson must be smiling.

The superintendent of schools in Central Falls, Rhode Island wanted to fire all the teachers. Arne Duncan thought that was a fine idea. Even President Obama applauded the decision.

But at last night’s Tony Awards, Viola Davis, a Central Falls alum, won the prize for Best Actress in a Drama for her portrayal of the wife of Denzel Washington’s character in August Wilson’s great play, Fences.

She made a special point of thanking God and her Central Falls teachers.

Lucky for God that he doesn’t have to answer to Arne Duncan.

Viola Davis, from Central Falls, and Denzel Washington, the two stars of the revival of August Wilson’s “Fences,” won for best actors in a play and gave speeches that seemed to complement each other.

“My mother always says, ‘Man gives the award, God gives the reward.’ I guess I got both tonight,” Washington said after winning for his performance as the sanitation man who might have been a baseball star. It was his first Tony Award and nomination.

“I don’t believe in luck or happenstance. I absolutely believe in the presence of God in my life,” said Davis, honored for playing Washington’s all-sacrificing wife. “It feels like such a divine experience eight times a week.”

Davis also thanked “the teachers of Central Falls in Rhode Island.” Many of those teachers, of course, narrowly missed being fired en masse this year in a bid to turn the city’s struggling high school around.

Fences is such a good play. James Earl Jones was the last Black actor to win a Tony in this category and that was for the original Broadway production of the August Wilson play.

August Wilson wrote ten plays that chronicled the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th Century. The last play, Radio Golf, was produced just after his death several years ago.

We were fortunate that all the plays were produced at the Goodman Theater in Chicago before heading for Broadway. Anne and I always attended these productions and we always made sure that we bought preview seats. Not (only) because they were cheaper. But also because Wilson was always there, sitting in the same seat, stage right, first row past the first aisle. He was easy to spot as he always wore the same cap.

After each play we would walk past him as we left. It took about three plays before I had enough nerve to approach him, shake his hand and thank him for the experience.

When we sat down for Radio Golf,  we looked to Wilson’s chair and were hit by the sense of loss at not seeing him in his regular spot.

The Wall.

http://chicagoist.com/2010/06/12/around_town_490.php?gallery0Pic=1#gallery

Sunday links.

Here’s Karen Lewis, the newly elected president of the Chicago Teachers Union. We need more like her.

Another day, another report of charter school thievery.

Here are the first-person stories of pink-slipped teachers. Blogger Alexander Russo thinks they should get over it and stop whining. I wouldn’t wish getting fired on anybody. Except Russo.

They’ve noticed. The Chicago Sun-Times headlines this morning that new CTU prez Karen Lewis is a “fierce foe” of the Mayor Daley agenda. Apparently, so are 12,000 Chicago teachers.

NY’s Mayor Bloomberg. This guy blames teachers and defends BP CEO Tony Hayward. Who should be surprised?

Another day, another Mark Kirk resume story blown out of the water.

The BP station at 47th and Woodlawn is full up. There are cars hooked up at all the pump stations, both sides and an unruly line waiting to get their turn. Most folks pay at the pump but there’s a cluster up at the register hidden behind grimy bullet proof glass; customers drop their bills, then pluck cigarettes and junk food from the drawer sliding in and out of the white brick hut and go on with their lives.

Here in North Kenwood – just like in Hyde Park and Bronzeville – BP stations dot the landscape, each of them crowded with cars: Camaros and Caravans, Camrys and Sebrings, Cavaliers and Taurus, even a Cadillac deVille or two.

In other words, nearly two months into BP’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf, and in spite of boycott calls from Ralph Nader and a zillion environmental and political groups, it’s business as usual at BP’s flagship stations in my neighborhood.

“Man, where else am I gonna go?” says a young man as he shoves the nozzle into the side of his Honda Accord. Achy Obejas