Justin Marquis Ph.D. On Education and the Occupy Movement

What it Should Mean for Public Education

Young girl at Occupy Texas State protest on October 13th. Photo by Lindsey Huckaby.

What would an equitable system of education look like at the elementary and secondary levels? For starters, we need to understand one thing that I have been aware of since my first student teaching experience in a public school – equal and fair are two different things, and things do not have to be equal in order to be fair. As a way of clarifying this, look at Brown v Board of Education (1954). In this landmark civil rights case, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that separate, but equal, is not equal. This decision illustrates how things that may seem equal may also not be fair.

So my opinion of fairness in education is going to tread a very fine line. For starters, a “fair” system of education requires adequate funding. Now adequate means a very Marxist thing here – from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. This notion removes “equality” from the equation. Some schools and individuals simply require more funding than others based on the demographics of the school and the pre-existing skills and abilities that students in a particular area bring with them when they enter the school. A school with students who are less-well-prepared would require more fiscal resources than a school with better-prepared students. Now this does not mean that either group of students should be forced to do without anything that would make their educational experience rich, meaningful, and rewarding. Adequate funding means just that – giving each school the funding that it needs to provide a positive educational experience for every student.

That said, fairness in education also has a great deal to do with autonomy, or, if you prefer, separateness. Each teacher, school, or district needs to have the discretion to run their classroom(s) or system in a way which they, as the local experts, know will best benefit their students. Students, parents, teachers, and administrators in impoverished rural or urban areas need to have input into decisions that concern their school in the same way that parents in suburban schools often do. National control and standards do a great injustice to the individual student by failing to account for differences in social, ethnic, gender, or other background factors that affect performance on these tests and should be abolished in favor of authentic assessments that measure innovative and critical thinking within a context that has meaning for the student and their community. This move away from standardization can only happen through local autonomy.

What it Could Mean for Higher Education

Higher education is a different animal than public education to its very core. In the U.S., there is no free, compulsory higher education. It is a luxury rather than a mandate. This is the first area in which a movement towards creating a fair society would have to look in terms of higher education. Signs of this are already starting to emerge. Yesterday I received an email from moveon.org asking me to sign a petition to have the federal government forgive all outstanding student loans as an economic stimulus initiative. While unrelated to Occupy Wall Street on the surface, such an initiative is very much inspired by the fact that a significant number of the protestors are disgruntled college students or recent graduates who are saddled with insurmountable college debt and little real hope for employment in a struggling economy (NPR, Oct. 14, 2011).

I am not going to propose that all colleges and universities should be free.  It will not happen. In the same way that some people choose to enroll their children in private schools, some, regardless of any societal shift, will enroll in high-cost, private colleges and universities. However, there needs to be a free, government funded college option for anyone interested in pursuing higher education. This free option could be through community colleges, state universities, or some other new system involving online and informal learning. Regardless of what the actual system looks like, the value of higher education is currently out of alignment with the actual costs. Given the immense value of learning and the importance of continuing education for all Americans, easily available free educational alternatives should be a priority of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Originally published on October 18th, 2011  in full here.

Occupy Texas State Movement Growing

Occupy Texas State Movement Growing

by Kolten Parker of The University Star

Following the “Occupy” protest trend in San Marcos and Austin, Texas State students are in the works of getting an organization on campus.

The Occupy Texas State group has doubled in size since its inception and is on the heels of sponsorship as a student organization.

The Occupy Texas State movement has nearly doubled in size since its formation and is on the verge of becoming a recognized student organization. The group held its second general assembly Oct. 13, attracting approximately 50 students.

Josh Harvey, organizer of Occupy Texas State, said the group is in the process of gaining university sponsorship with the only step left to pick a faculty adviser.

“I want to turn it [the protests] from a moment to a movement,” Harvey said.

Occupy Texas State held their second general assembly Sept. 13. Approximately 50 students gathered on campus in solidarity with the Occupy College movement taking place at more than 90 universities across the nation, according to their website.

Occupy College, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street effort, is taking issue with inflating costs of student loans and tuition.

“Higher education has become a business in itself,” Harvey. “Over the last eight years, cost for students per semester has risen 63 percent in Texas.”

As for Texas State, tuition increased 98 percent since the state legislature deregulated tuition in 2003, according to a Sept. 15 University Star article.

Harvey said once the group is sponsored, their goals would be to work with City Council, the Associated Student Government and the Texas State Board of Regents to find ways to make higher education more affordable.

Harvey said one of the primary goals of the group would to be to establish a scholarship for students who are active in the community.

Wade Smith, elementary education junior, said he stopped to listen to the activists in between classes afternoon.

“I think a college campus is a perfect environment for this type of demonstration,” Smith said. “Based on what I’ve heard so far, they have done their research and are very passionate on the subject.”

ASG President AJ DeGarmo stopped by the rally and said he enjoys seeing students using their First Amendment rights. DeGarmo said it exemplifies Texas State’s Common Experience theme this year.

“It’s empowering to see students organize and take part in a national movement,” DeGarmo said.
However, not all students were in support of the protest.

Brent McArthur, marketing freshman, said the national movement “will destroy the country.”
“Their demands are illogical and unattainable,” McArthur said. “To fall to their demands would kill American banks and businesses. They want the minimum wage to be $20 and all the debt in the country to disappear.”

According to the Occupy Wall Street website, there is currently no official list of demands. However, Adbusters, the organization behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, released one specific goal Sept. 17, (the first day of protests): “President Obama to ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”

Other student critics of the protest like Eric Reaves, exploratory professional sophomore, said the protesters are wasting their time.

“Instead of holding a sign, they should get take off school for a semester, get a minimum wage job, save some money and go to a cheaper school where they won’t have to take out a student loan,” Reaves said.

Anne Halsy, wife of a faculty member, participated in the rally with her three children ages 6, 3 and 1.

“I brought my kids because it is important for them to learn that you have to stand up for what you believe in,” Halsy said. “If we don’t fight for a better education system, we deserve what we get.”

Occupy Texas State Profiled by Inside Higher Ed

Photo by Lori Alaniz

Occupy Texas State 

By Allie Grasgreen

The students at Texas State University at San Marcos who protested in Thursday’s second nationally coordinated campus event in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street dispute the oft-repeated charges that the movement’s participants are lazy, unfocused and un-American. And they have the ideas to prove it.

When the time comes to carry out their plans – which address such pervasive student issues as loan repayment and the poor job market – they plan to actually do most of the legwork themselves. They want to attend city council meetings and lobby for bills in the Legislature. They’re going to work with local businesses to establish more scholarships for students. And they plan to get more students registered to vote and active in local and state politics, so they can have a say in where the money goes.

That leaves them with one major obstacle to overcome in the meantime: getting everyone else to care. While protests in New York City and other major cities have attracted thousands, many of them students, the Texas State students are speaking out without a broad movement of local support.

Photo by Lori Alaniz

“In my mind at least, and I think in a lot of other people’s minds, at this point of the movement I think the main focus is raising awareness. We’re doing this and people are like, ‘Why are you protesting?’ And we explain it to them and half the people look at us like they don’t know what we’re talking about,” says Matt Barnes, a mass communications major who is documenting on video the activities of Occupy Texas State as well as Occupy San Marcos. Barnes will graduate from the university this year – $50,000 in debt. “The response that I hear is, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do’…. It’s apathy, but it’s apathy that has been created by a broken system.”

It’s a system, students say, that has resulted in rising tuition, the gutting of state grants meant for low-income students, and a general blocking out of young and disenfranchised voices.

They raised their voices with others across the country Thursday at 4:30 p.m. EDT, though not without resistance. The 40 or so protesters encountered a few hecklers – students and professors alike – during their march from the Texas State campus quad to the city courthouse rally. Many yelled at the protesters to “get a job” – though most of them already have one. Not all the encounters ended with the protesters getting the middle finger, though; one courthouse heckler with a sign calling the protesters communists and idiots, after an educational conversation, put down his sign and joined them.

Photo by Lori Alaniz

While word of other protests was harder to come across this week than last, students did assemble at a number of campuses that didn’t make the news last week, among them California State University at Bakersfield, Iowa State University at Campanile, New Mexico State and San Francisco State Universities, and others. And in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities, students are central to large, ongoing protests.

Last week’s nationwide walkouts on at least 75 campuses enjoyed varying levels of success but exploded on Facebook and Twitter (which is how most of them organized in just a few days) and in the news. While twice that many campuses told the national organizers they would participate on Thursday – meaning, at least one person submitted basic information online — it appears that last week’s occupation gave many of these students the jumping-off point they needed to get things going locally.

Joshua Christopher Harvey is a Texas State junior majoring in international studies, who served in the Air Force as a Russian linguist but was discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the since-repealed federal policy banning openly gay people from serving in the military. Harvey organized the first Occupy Texas State event last week, which about 20 people attended after it was hastily planned in two days, and since then he and dozens of others have drafted a group declaration and begun forming a list of demands. The specificity of their plans makes them more organized than most small groups.

Texas State’s declaration is similar to that of Occupy Wall Street’s, with a few tweaks; it calls on students to peacefully assemble against, among other things, a 63-percent tuition increase over the past decade and a 40-percent decrease in state grants over the past year.

Photo by Lori Alaniz

The demands are not final, and their burden is shared between the university, the city and state, and the students themselves. At this point, the demands include extending the six-month grace period during which students must begin paying back their loans; reducing costs on textbooks sold through the university, as well as the “influence of marketing firms” on institutional operations like dining and other areas such as website design where students could be filling jobs; raising and creating new scholarships for Texas State students active in civic life; getting more students registered to vote; and student monitoring of the university’s budget, redirecting funds toward grants when possible.

“We just want to be able to create solutions and not just a list of demands,” says Harvey, who hopes to continue the work as part of a formal group with weekly meetings. “To express our anger through these protests and then, once we get the attention from the media and from the community, to say, ‘Here are our problems, we do have some solutions, and are you willing to work with us to achieve those solutions?’ ”

In addition to helping with that, Jamila Bell, a freshman studying psychology at Texas State, is trying to figure out how she’s going to pay back $3,000 in loans by November. Since the state cut her grant, it’s been an endless cycle of repayment after repayment, each time with a fleeting relief followed by another notification that more money is due – even when she thought it was already taken care of.

“One day I have a grant and the next it’s gone. Every time a paying period comes up something new happens – literally. Is it even worth it?” Bell says. She’s not sure yet, but if things don’t become more stable, she might have to transfer to a community college or a less expensive university, even though her father – who, while supporting Bell, is paying off his own loans for the master’s degree he’s pursuing – is a Texas State alumnus and they both wanted her to go there.

So for Bell, Occupy Texas State is really about showing other students that this all affects them, too; every dollar that goes to a bank instead of a grant is a dollar that one of them will have to pay back.

“Paying off loans – that’s going to be my future. It won’t be having a house or a nice car or anything. I’m going to be paying off loans for the rest of my life,” Bell says. “This movement can open up people’s eyes, and since we do have a voice we can try to help people get grants … and show them we’re all struggling, no matter what class, we’re all college students.”

Photo by Lori Alaniz

While also lobbying for more grants and scholarships from local businesses and state government, the protesters want to make and sell their own clothing, the profits from which will go into a fund for local kids to attend college. A common lament among the protesters is that despite growing up having been told anything was possible – and working hard to make sure it was – they now face nothing but barriers.

“You have an economy with no job market, you have a six-month grace period to pay back loans, you have to somehow find a job in six months after you graduate that pays you enough interest to not only take care of yourself and your basic needs, but to start paying back your loans plus interest,” Harvey says. “We just want a movement for change.”

Nicholas Cubides, a Texas State senior who is also running for San Marcos City Council, has registered more than 2,000 students to vote – and if they all turn out and back him in the election, he’ll win hands-down. But whether they do remains to be seen; many have said that, even if they register, they won’t vote.

“It’s really sad. It’s really sad,” Cubides says. “It’s sad to see that this is my generation of people … and the people we need to create massive sweeping changes with the occupy movement, but they have zero interest in doing that.”

So all they can do is try to educate. As Harvey puts it, “My goal is to change this from a moment to a movement.”

Like the one happening in New York.

“I think everything we do, we act in solidarity with other Occupy movements. It’s all one national movement starting at Occupy Wall Street,” says Matthew Molnar, a Texas State freshman studying political science. “I think that the sheer humanity that I’ve witnessed through this movement has been really, I guess, touching. The way that complete strangers can come together and become family through these common grievances, take something negative and turn it into something positive, it’s really amazing; it’s inspiring. It gives me hope.”

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/14/occupy-texas-

Huffington Post: Students United In Solidarity

Occupy Colleges: Student Supporters of Occupy  Wall Street Continue To Show Solidarity

by Amanda M. Fairbanks

NEW YORK — Thursday afternoon, in concert with the Occupy Wall Street movement, students from nearly 150 college campuses across the country will participate in their second protest in as many weeks.

As with the nationwide walkout held last Wednesday, the students will band together to make their voices heard — with many expressing frustration over increasing amounts of student loan debt and the rising cost of tuition, in addition to a paucity of jobs for recent graduates.

“We’re planning to do these walkouts and shows of solidarity every two weeks until these issues are resolved,” said Natalia Abrams, 31, who helps to organize Occupy Colleges, a student-led grassroots group based in Los Angeles that helped facilitate both nationwide protests. “If Occupy Wall Street is indefinite, we’re indefinite as well. We plan to keep the solidarity protest going for as long as it takes.”

In many ways, today’s protest marks a significant challenge for student backers of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not only in terms of coordination and organization, but also with respect to maintaining momentum.

“Participating in something that’s clearly ascendant is always something of a rush,” said Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford University. While McAdam said it was inherently difficult to build on the momentum of a movement that’s neither centralized nor coordinated, he cautioned against making too much of its diffuse nature.

“We like to talk about big, historic movements as if they were these spectacularly well-coordinated affairs. They almost never are,” said McAdam, who teaches a course on political movements. “Very broad, diverse efforts are generally more effective because you can speak to different constituencies. It becomes quite difficult to suppress a movement that doesn’t have one distinct leader or head.”

Occupy Colleges, which started as a Facebook page and Twitter handle less than two weeks ago, has quickly blossomed into a burgeoning movement bolstered by a groundswell of student-led support. As of Thursday morning, student organizers at 136 college campuses — from Sarah Lawrence College to Boise State University to San Diego City College — have pledged to participate in Thursday’s show of solidarity.

“Around the country, more and more high school students are foregoing a college education because their families can no longer afford it. So many more are graduating with inconceivable amounts of debt and stepping into the worse job market in decades,” reads a statement on Occupy Colleges’ website. “They take unpaid internships that go nowhere and soon can’t pay college loans. We represent students who share these fears and support Occupy Wall Street.”

Shay Berman, a 20-year-old junior at Michigan State University, is organizing his campus’s show of support later today. Based on rough Twitter estimates, Berman is hopeful that about 50 of his classmates will join him at the Rock, which is a common area on the East Lansing campus dedicated to free speech and protest.

“We’re worried about our future and that the middle class won’t exist once we get out of school. Also, the rising cost of tuition is a big concern,” said Berman, who said his participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests marked his first significant political involvement. “We’re just frustrated with America and the whole way our society is run. “

According to Gonzalo Vizcardo, 21, a senior economics major at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., 45 students plan to attend a general assembly on campus later this afternoon. Meanwhile, about 40 students at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, are readying for a similar gathering.

Last night in San Marcos, a handful of students spent the evening making hand-painted signs in preparation. Later today, the same group plans to meet at the Stallion, a “free speech zone” at the center of campus. From there, the group will march to the nearby square in downtown San Marcos. Their aim: increased visibility and the dispelling of apathy.

Photo by Lori Alaniz

“Student debt is a huge issue, with some students starting to question the wisdom of even having a degree anymore,” said Joshua Christopher Harvey, a 24-year-old junior who previously served in the U.S. Air Force prior to being discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Harvey organized both last week’s walkout and today’s march. “The main thing that’s come up at our meetings is that there’s only a six-month grace period to start paying our loans back — and we’re worried there won’t even be jobs available once we get out.”

Brayden King, an assistant professor of management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, sees college students as a natural constituency in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“If, say, you’re a middle-aged investment banker, you might look around your social group and think the economy isn’t doing all that bad,” said King. “But if you’re a college student or a recent graduate, you’re thinking the exact opposite when all of your friends are either unemployed or working in jobs that are much lower paying than what they expected to be doing after they graduated.”

Michael T. Heaney, an assistant professor of organizational studies and political science at the University of Michigan, also sees the college protests as a natural part of the movement’s evolution.

“For young people in particular, it’s an opportunity for them to learn about activism and politics for the first time,” said Heaney. “While the 2000s were an intense period of protest, the current generation in college wasn’t really exposed to the earlier period of activism of the last decade. And for a lot of these students, this is their first movement.”

Heaney is currently studying how the first time an individual participates in an activist movement later reverberates throughout the course of their lives. “The point is that first experience with activism will have a long-lasting effect, affecting the way they think about activism, the tactics they think are important and even affecting their social networks,” said Heaney. “But it also has the opportunity to put them off.”

In terms of Occupy Wall Street’s ultimate impact, McAdam notes that while early participation in a movement can help shape young activists, equally important is the historical context of the movement itself.

McAdam studied participants in Freedom Summer — the 10 week-period in 1964 when civil rights activists, many of them college students, traveled to Mississippi to register black voters — who later became more politically engaged members of society as a result.

He found that it wasn’t simply their activism that mattered, but the fact that they participated in the movement during the beginning of sixties-era radicalism.

“In many ways, this particular moment looks a lot like a Freedom Summer moment,” said McAdam. “With our economic woes likely to continue, or perhaps even deepen, for some time and the election coming up next year, it is very likely that we are entering a period of escalating economic, political and social turmoil.

“For students, it won’t have a long-term impact simply because they went to an Occupy Wall Street demonstration a few times, but because it began a process that carried them in the way that Freedom Summer started a process for the Mississippi volunteers.”

The Statesman: Rally at the Hays County Courthouse

Occupy Texas State Protestors Rally At The Hays County Courthouse

by Ciara O’Rourke

Photo by Lori Alaniz

An Occupy Texas State movement started to take shape Thursday afternoon, when about 30 people, mostly students, rallied outside the Hays County Courthouse to show solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Joshua Harvey, 24, a junior at the university who organized the march, said the group was largely focused on issues that concern students, such as debt, high tuition rates and the lack of available jobs for recent graduates.

Facing the courthouse, the crowd chanted in unison that corporations have a “held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right. They have turned education into a business while reducing our national marketability to attract companies which could offer us jobs.”

Harvey said that the group is planning future marches and hopes to have at least one person holding a sign in protest on the university’s Quad at all hours.

The group had one detractor, a man with a sign that read “Rebels without a clue,” who was engaging a handful of students in debate.

San Marcos resident Anne Halsey, 37, had joined the students with her three children. Sadie, 6, held a sign that read “Books not bonuses.” Halsey’s sign asked “Who stole my house?”

Her home has depreciated 66 percent in value in three years, she said. “That’s criminal.”

Marching around the courthouse, protesters chanted “We are the 99 percent” and “End corporate greed,” before heading back to campus.

Photo by Lindsey Huckaby

The University Star: Occupy Wall Street Reaches San Marcos

OCCUPY WALL STREET REACHES SAN MARCOS

by Kolten Parker

Approximately 25 students rallied together near The Fighting Stallions Wednesday in The Quad to voice concerns with American corporations.

Photo by Adrian Rox

Texas State students gather in support of the “Occupy Wall Street” Oct. 5 at the Fighting Stallions. The group encouraged passers-by to take part in the movement and travel to Austin Oct. 6 to protest at city hall.

Occupy Wall Street, which began Sept. 17, is a protest that has gained national attention. Protests have followed suit, with the same message, in large cities and on college campuses throughout the United States. The Austin American-Statesman reported police are preparing for large crowds of more than 1,000 activists to gather in Austin.

Joshua Harvey, protester and international studies junior, said the group of students who rallied in The Quad Wednesday are not directly affiliated with any organization.

“We are trying to get students to wake up to the fact that corporations run our government and country and now is the time to take back democracy,” Harvey said. “It is time to put the power of the people back in government.”

The students were chanting “We are the 99 percent,” and “The people united will never be divided.”

University Police Department Sgt. Jeff Jamison said he has dealt with protests on campus in the past.

“The students are exercising their rights by being out here. Our job is to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand,” Jamison said.

Jamison said UPD received a briefing on the protests during the shift change, but were not bringing additional units on campus to handle the protest.

Johanna Lima, protester and computer science freshman, said she was encouraging students to get involved without being “too pushy.”

“This is the most beautiful movement I’ve seen because it is breaking down partisan walls,” Lima said. “I have democrats, republicans and libertarians standing next to me with the same mission—a revolution.”

Harvey said the students’ biggest motive was to bring attention to the movement on campus and encourage and facilitate civic debate.

“Most college students are too apathetic,” Harvey said. “They are more worried about MTV or their iPods to care about what is really going on in the government.”

Mercedes Banda, applied sociology senior, sold fruit cups in The Quad during the protest for the Latino Student Association. She said the group made their agenda clear and gathered students’ attention.

“Lots of students were coming by and asking what they were protesting,” Banda said. “When I told them it was part of the protests on Wall Street, most of them didn’t know anything about it or seemed like they didn’t care.”