Curriculum Book Soon Available

There’s great news for those of you who missed out on the distribution of free copies of the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum: Teachers College Press will soon be making copies of the curriculum book available shortly for purchase for the very modest fee of $13.95. Amazon.com is now accepting pre-orders at the discounted price of $11.16. Click here for ordering information.

Of course, you can still download the entire curriculum free of charge at this website; click here to do so. But if you’d prefer a bound and printed copy of the book, this is a wonderful chance to get one at a very low price.

Please note that the curriculum books do not include the DVD of When The Levees Broke, although it is now widely available at video stores and on such site as Netflix. But here’s more good news: HBO, through a new program called Watch It and Learn, is making copies of many of its documentaries and other programs available to educators for only $5. In addition to When The Levees Broke, teachers can order copies of such films as Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives; Sometimes in April, which explores the Rwandan genocide; Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls, about the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama; and many others.

To get these films at this price, however, you must register with HBO and provide such information as the name of your school and supervisor, and your school’s tax-exemption code.

Upcoming Conferences

Over the next month, teams from “Teaching The Levees” will be making presentations at three major conferences. If you’re planning to attend any of them — two are in New Orleans and one in New York City — we invite you to join us. Free copies of the curriculum will be distributed to those who attend our sessions at all three conferences. Prof. Margaret Crocco, general editor of the curriculum, will be at all three, as well.

Here’s the schedule:

• Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) in New Orleans, March 15-17. “Teaching The Levees” is scheduled for 5:15-6:15 pm Saturday, March 15.
• Organization of American Historians (OAH) in New York City, March 28-31. TTL is scheduled for 8-9:30 am Saturday, March 29.
• Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in New Orleans, April 2-5. TTL will present from 2-3:15 pm on Saturday, April 5.

See you there!

To much of the world outside New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward is the African-American face of the city.  Perhaps because it suffered less physical devasation after Katrina than the Lower Ninth, the historic neighborhood of Faubourg Treme has gotten relatively little attention in the popular media.  Until now.

A new documentary by filmmakers Lolis Eric Elie and Dawn Logsdon, Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, attempts to get the word out about a story that has never really gotten an adequate airing in the public imagination.  Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, a native of New Orleans who was featured heavily in When the Levees Broke, produced the film, which will be shown at the New Orleans Film Festival in the fall. (Filmmaker Stanley Nelson, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” and director of the excellent PBS documentary, The Murder of Emmett Till, serves as co-producer.)

The identity and historical importance of black New Orleans desperately need attention these days, as the African-American community struggles to rebuild.  Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans tells the story of Congo Square, where rhythmic slave dances in the 18th and 19th centuries lay the groundwork for the birth of jazz in the 20th.  It tells of the neighborhood in which the nation’s first daily black newspaper, The New Orleans Tribune, was published, and where local residents held regular literary salons and published a poetry anthology entitled Les Cennelles.  In a review in the modern incarnation of The New Orleans Tribune, J.B. Borders calls the film “flat-out brilliant,” a work that “finally captures the real New Orleans on film.”

The film does all this in just over an hour.  It presents filmmaker Elie uncovering the history of the neighborhood as he attempts to renovate a historic home with the help of a contractor who turns out to be the grand-nephew of an editor of the Tribune.  It combines archival photos and film footage with historical re-enactments and newly-shot material, including interviews with such experts as John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner.

Borders’ review suggests that the film itself marks the birth of a new post-Katrina creative vitality in New Orleans:

As this film makes crystal clear, the people of Tremé and New Orleans have endured tragedy before and are too beautiful and creative to be depressed for long. And if history is to be any guide, out of these recent misfortunes will emerge something culturally spectacular, something to rival the Negro Spirituals, blues, jazz and funk. Local musicians, writers and visual artists are already spewing out new creations that may spread across the globe in years to come.

Perhaps Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is the first of the new film masterpieces to emerge from this cauldron of suffering. It has certainly raised the bar extremely high.

Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans has not yet been distributed, and the film-makers are still trying to raise funds to help with the promotion (contributions can be made at the film’s website).  We will certainly keep our readers posted when we hear more about when and where it will be shown.

The very first sentence of the first blog posted on this website last August made reference to the toxic levels of formaldehyde that had already been documented in the “temporary” trailers given to Katrina victims throughout the Gulf Coast. The post referenced an article from last July in Time Magazine that clearly established the health risks posed by these trailers.

So it should be shocking to all of us that all this time later 38,000 people are still living in those trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi, which have “significant implications for public health,” as the Centers for Disease Control so tactfully puts it. Yesterday, the CDC issued its preliminary findings on its study of formaldehyde levels in the trailers and concluded that residents, especially those with children, the elderly or anyone suffering from asthma, “should make relocating to permanent housing a priority.” In other words, they should get out as quickly as possible.

FEMA, in turn, pledged to move as quickly as possible to step up its efforts to find alternate housing for these people, more than two years after Katrina struck.

“We’re moving as fast as we can,” FEMA administrator David Paulson told reporters during a press conference.

We’re moving as fast as we can???

This should be shocking. But this is FEMA we’re talking about. FEMA, whose staggering incompetence is the gift that just keeps giving.

There’s something absurdly metaphoric in FEMA — and the rest of the government’s — inability to deal with this problem. After World War I, thousands of severely wounded war veterans returned to their European homelands missing limbs or with parts of their faces blown off. Unable to deal with the magnitude of the situation, it became common practice for doctors to simply give these veterans masks to wear over their wounds. They couldn’t fix the soldiers; the best they could do was hide their injuries from the general public, which would no doubt panic if they were regularly confronted with these disfigured young men.

The FEMA trailers reek of the same sort of fatuous logic. Unable to deal with the fundamental problem of what to do with thousands of displaced hurricane victims, FEMA stuck them in trailers that were meant, at best, to be a very short-term solution. But it was better to give them some home than no home at all, so FEMA kept them in these trailers — even after they knew there were significant health risks involved — because that way the rest of us would think that our government was taking care of these people. For these victims, the trailers became like the masks worn by the World War I veterans; they kept the larger problem hidden from the public, while allowing the wounds underneath to fester.

(For a fascinating first-hand look at how living in a FEMA trailer has affected the health of one family in Mississippi, click here.)

Everyone from Barack Obama to Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and Governor Bobby Jindal chimed in with the usual criticisms of FEMA.

‘This is such gross incompetence. I really have not in my 10 years seen anything like this on the domestic front,” Landrieu said.

“It is simply inexcusable for FEMA to have a one to two year delay in addressing the serious health issues of these men and women along the Gulf Coast who have already suffered from the devastation of the 2005 hurricanes,” Jindal said.

Who knows? Maybe the outrage is enough to make this a bona fide campaign issue for the presidential election. Stay tuned.

One doesn’t normally think of MBA students as the kind of people rushing around to come to the aid of a struggling public school system, but that’s exactly what will be happening over the next two days at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

That’s where a group called the Education Leadership Case Competition is sponsoring its second nationwide competition for MBA students from 13 prestigious business schools across the country. Their task: devise innovative programs for rebuilding the New Orleans public school system post-Katrina. Winners will receive cash prizes and their proposals will be posted on the competition’s website at www.edcase.org.

“Education is an area where MBA students can add so much value,” says Joe Harrington, an MBA student at Haas and co-chair of the competition. “When outsiders think of education, they usually think of teachers. They may not think of other critical factors such as the management structure needed within districts, sustainable school finance, and market-based approaches to education.”

The Education Leadership Case Competition’s mission is twofold: to interest MBA students in education and encourage them to consider the field as a career option, while at the same time providing schools and other educational organizations with free advice and assistance from knowledgeable future business leaders.

“The purpose of the case competition is to bring attention to a critical, real-time issue in education, and to provide an opportunity for talented and dedicated graduate students to create potential solutions for the issue,” says a release from the ELCC. “With all of the innovative initiatives in New Orleans right now, we feel the case will be an incredible opportunity to students to explore an exciting educational landscape. In addition, we hope that teams will provide real and practical solutions to educational stakeholders in the city.”

Organizers traveled to New Orleans to observe the school system firsthand and recruit four educators from that city to serve as judges for the competition.

The competing students come from some of the nation’s top business schools, including those at Stanford, Northwestern, UCLA, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Texas.

This competition is a reminder that all students, at every educational level and interest, can make a meaningful contribution to the public good. Student power is probably one of the greatest untapped natural resources in the country. Getting these business students excited about the prospect of helping New Orleans rebuild can serve as an educational model for us all.

For the first time in this presidential election season — and hopefully not the last — the New Orleans recovery has taken center stage. That’s because tomorrow’s Louisiana Primary, usually an afterthought in presidential campaigns, may actually mean something, at least to the Democrats, this time around.

Barack Obama visited the city yesterday, stopping at a restaurant and an elementary school, and speaking before a crowd of 3,500 on the Tulane campus. His speech focused almost entirely on Katrina and the candidate’s pledge to not only help rebuild the city, but address the underlying social problems exposed when the levees broke.

Hillary Clinton has not scheduled any stops in Louisiana — she appears to have conceded the state to Obama, who has shown remarkable strength in the South — but Bill was planning to spend today making a swing through the state. He began with an address before a small crowd at Dillard University, promising listeners that Hillary would make rebuilding New Orleans a top priority.

“Disaster response gets a fresh surge of discussion,” rings today’s headline in the Times-Picayune. In an editorial called “A Primary That Counts,” the paper urges candidates “to take this chance to highlight for people here and across the nation their plans to assist in our recovery from Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures that devastated so many neighborhoods. Several candidates alluded to the issue in speeches Tuesday night and that was encouraging.”

With any luck, this sort of thing could continue in to the regular election, where Louisiana and its nine electoral votes could very much be in play. Though it voted red in the last two elections, Louisiana voted Democratic in 1996, 1992, and 1976 (when the Democrats ran Southern candidates). (Click here for a complete history.) When Sen. Russell Long convinced LBJ to show support after the devastation of Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Johnson’s loss in Louisiana in 1964 was a central part of his pitch.

“Now, if you want to go to Louisiana right now—You lost that state last year,” Long told Johnson. “You could pick it up just like looking at it right now by going down there as the President just to see what happened. Now if you want to you could . . . you could save yourself a campaign speech. Just go there right now. Just go, and say, “My God, this is horrible!” (Click here for a full transcript of the conversation.)

Johnson went. He didn’t run for re-election in 1968, and Independent George Wallace carried the state. But you get the point. Paying attention to the victims of a disaster may not just be the right thing to do; it can also be good politics.

Obama, for his part, seemed to do a bit more than just offer sympathy in his speech at Tulane. In a relatively rare moment for American politicians, he seemed genuinely to understand the larger significance of Katrina to the nation. For a complete text of his address, click here. Here are some highlights:

We can talk about what happened for a few days in 2005. And we should. We can talk about levees that couldn’t hold; about a FEMA that seemed not just incompetent, but paralyzed and powerless; about a President who only saw the people from the window of an airplane. We can talk about a trust that was broken – the promise that our government will be prepared, will protect us, and will respond in a catastrophe.

But we also know the broken promises did not start when a storm hit, and they did not end there….

Yes, parts of New Orleans are coming back to life. But we also know that over 25,000 families are still living in small trailers; that thousands of homes sit empty and condemned; and that schools and hospitals and firehouses are shuttered. We know that even though the street cars run, there are fewer passengers; that even though the parades sound their joyful noise, there is too much violence in the shadows.

To confront these challenges we have to understand that Katrina may have battered these shores – but it also exposed silent storms that have ravaged parts of this city and our country for far too long. The storms of poverty and joblessness; inequality and injustice.

When I was down in Houston visiting evacuees a few days after Katrina, I met a woman in the Reliant Center who had long known these storms in her life.

She told me, “We had nothing before the hurricane. Now we got less than nothing.”

We had nothing before the hurricane. Now we got less than nothing. I think about her sometimes. I think about how America left her behind. And I wonder where she is today.

America failed that woman long before that failure showed up on our television screens. We failed her again during Katrina. And – tragically – we are failing her for a third time. That needs to change. It’s time for us to restore our trust with her; it’s time for America to rebuild trust with the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast….

So many of us live a life that is ordered, with comforts we can count on. Somewhere, we know, there are people who don’t have a house with a sturdy roof; who have nowhere to go when they can’t make rent; who don’t have a car to drive to another city when a storm is coming; who can’t get care when they’re sick, or get the education that would give them a chance at their dreams.

But too often, we lose our sense of common destiny; that understanding that we are all tied together; that when a woman has less than nothing in this country, that makes us all poorer….

I promise you that when I’m in the White House I will commit myself every day to keeping up Washington’s end of this trust. This will be a priority of my presidency. And I will make it clear to members of my Administration that their responsibilities don’t end in places like the 9th ward – they begin there.

But I will also ask the people of this city to do your part. Because together, we can do more than rebuild a city; we can create a model for America – for how we prepare for disasters; for how we fight poverty; for how we put our kids on a pathway to success.

If we do this, then we can once again make New Orleans the city that stands for what we can do in America, not a symbol for what we can’t do.

If we do this, then we can begin to turn the page on the invisible barriers – the silent storms – that have ravaged this city and this country: the old divisions of black and white; of rich and poor. It’s time to leave that to yesterday. It’s time to choose tomorrow.

We all hope, of course, that this isn’t just empty talk and that it translates into some meaningful action. But for the moment, it seems a major victory just to have the talk, which seems to have been glaringly absent up to this point. Let’s hope this isn’t the last time in this campaign we hear this sort of thing.

At first glance, the multiple tragedies unfolding in Kenya, Chad, Darfur, and elsewhere in Africa don’t have much to do with the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum. But one doesn’t have to dig all that deeply to recognize that TTL is ultimately about producing an informed, caring citizenry that refuses to stand idly by in the face of human misery.

If our central theme is, “What kind of country are we? What kind of country do we want to be?” it should be fairly obvious that the logical extension of the question is, “What kind of world are we? What kind of world do we want to be?” The students in our schools are not simply citizens of the United States, but citizens of the larger world, which at the moment, is bleeding profusely from more wounds than we seem able to count.

Take the situation in Kenya, for example. Long hailed as one of the stablest democracies in Africa, Kenya has descended into the kind of atavistic violence that gripped neighboring Rwanda in the 1990s. Night after night, the BBC has televised gruesome images of gangs of young men indiscriminately slashing other young men with machetes. More than once, the tape had to be stopped because the images were simply too graphic. This is what is happening in front of the cameras; one can only imagine the grim realities unfolding when there are no cameras in sight. (Click here to see an example, but be warned that the video is very explicit and disturbing.)

The point is not simply to wring hangs and decry the violence. The point is to make sure our students are aware of what is happening in these places and why, whether it is part of our formal curriculum or not. I have no idea how many high school classrooms have paid much attention to the Kenya crisis (or to the escalating violence in Chad and its relation to the ongoing Darfur crisis), but my guess is very few.

For teachers who want to help their students make some kind of sense of these crises, the BBC is an excellent place to start. Many PBS stations carry daily broadcasts of the BBC World program (here in New York, for example, Channel 13 airs the half-hour broadcast at 6 pm and Channel 21 at 7 pm). Major satellite providers, such as DirecTV and Dish Network, carry the BBC America channel, which airs three hours of world news every morning from 6-9 am and another hour every evening at 7. The BBC website also has excellent background articles: click here and here for background pieces on the violence in Kenya; click here and here for articles on Chad and Darfur.

The bottom line is that if we don’t have an educated citizenry that understands these situations in all their complexity, it’s highly unlikely we’ll have a government that is able to act on them intelligently. And if we don’t have a citizenry that feels the pain of the ordinary people caught up in this horrendous violence, the answers to the questions of what kind of country/world we are won’t be very encouraging.

The graphic footage of the Kenya and Chad conflicts are, to say the least, disturbing. So are many of the images in When The Levees Broke. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show them to our students. I remember consulting a veteran teacher for advice in my first year of teaching after a parent complained that some of the students had found a classroom screening of The Killing Fields “very upsetting.”

“Genocide is upsetting,” he replied. “They should be upset. That’s a good thing.”

He was right, of course. We always want our students to think. But there are days when what we really need them to do is cry.

I began my presidential campaign here to remind the country that we, as citizens and as a government, have a moral responsibility to each other, and what we do together matters. We must do better, if we want to live up to the great promise of this country that we all love so much.

–John Edwards in New Orleans on his withdrawal from the presidential race, 1/30/08

Whether or not you supported John Edwards, he was the only presidential candidate who made poverty and the other issues surrounding Katrina a centerpiece of his campaign. (His words above sound as though they were pulled directly out of the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum, which pointedly asks, “What kind of country are we? What kind of country do we want to be?”) Edwards announced his candidacy in the Ninth Ward in December, 2006, standing in front of a home destroyed by Katrina. He ended it not far away on Wednesday, in New Orleans’ Musicians Village, telling supporters that he has been given pledges by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to “make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.”

“More importantly,” he said, “They have pledged to me that as President of the United States they will make ending poverty and economic inequality central to their Presidency. This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause.”

Edwards talked about homeless people in his speech, about working with college students to rebuild homes in New Orleans destroyed by Katrina, and how America must “end the moral shame of 37 million people living in poverty.”

And, invoking a phrase that is near and dear to us at “Teaching The Levees,” he concluded his remarks by saying “it’s time for all of us, all of us together, to make the two Americas one.” (For a complete text of the speech, click here. And for our lesson on “Are There Two Americas?” see the curriculum book, pp. 58-61)

Edwards sounded almost more like the LBJ of the 1964 “War on Poverty speech” than a candidate for office in 2008 America. Why this sort of rhetoric resonated in the 1960s but doesn’t seem to have much a shelf life these days is a question for historians and political scientists with greater insight than I can provide.

Edwards himself seems well aware that combatting poverty is not the nation’s top priority at the moment — even if it should be — and a good part of the reason for the collapse of his candidacy. More than a year ago, before joining the presidential race, Charlie Rose asked Edwards, “Can you win politically… if you say poverty is the thing that we have to put at the top burner of America’s challenge?”

“You mean, do I think poverty as a substantive issue is a political winner?” Edwards replied. “No.”

He continued: “But I do think it’s true that America feels like it needs less politicians and more leaders — and they’re looking for people, I don’t mean me — who are out there standing up for what they believe in, whether America completely agrees with it or not. And I think that sense of sort of being honest and sincere and genuine, I think it matters to most people. And honestly, this is just something I genuinely care about.” (Click here to see the entire interview).

There are, of course, many ways all of us, including John Edwards, can combat poverty without becoming President of the United States. Edwards did it by starting the University of North Carolina’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. We can do it in numerous ways in our classrooms, particularly by using the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum.

But as we prepare for another nine long months of this presidential campaign, it’s a shame Edwards’ voice and message won’t be playing a central role. As little as we’ve heard about Katrina and New Orleans in the campaign thus far, we’re likely to hear even less with Edwards gone. Poverty may not be a “political winner,” as he put it, but no matter which candidate we ultimately support, we’re all losers when we stop talking about it.