Margot Pepper
Hasta la victoria del amor siempre.
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ArticlesTV Selfishness and Violence Explode During “War on Terror:" Second graders discover new trends in TV since 9/11by Margot Pepper Six years into the “War on Terror,” my second grade Spanish immersion students found that aggression, selfishness and insults have exploded on national television. For the last decade, I’ve had my students at Rosa Parks Elementary in Berkeley, California analyze television shows preceding National TV-Off week organized by the TV-Turnoff Network, which this year is April 21-27. I ask the seven and eight-year-old students to collect all the data themselves, since I’ve never owned a television. For seven days, students study a random sampling of about 35 English and Spanish-language children’s television shows—and one or two soap operas or reality shows. The Drive to Oust the Middle Class from Inner City Public Schoolsby Margot Pepper No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law in 2001 by President George Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. The backbone of the program, allegedly designed to hold schools accountable for academic failure, is standardized state testing for students and educators. Rather than improve public education, however, there is now ample evidence that NCLB testing is part of a systematic effort to privatize diverse urban public schools in the United States. The objectives of privatization have been threefold: first, to divert taxpayer money from the public sector to the corporate sector; second, to capture part of the market, which would otherwise be receiving free education; and third, to drive out middle class accountability, leaving behind a disposable population that won’t have a voice about the inappropriate use of their tax dollars, nor the bleak outlook on their futures. Seven-Year-Olds Lead A Strikeby Margot Pepper For over a decade I’ve been teaching my six-, seven-, and eight-year-old students to strike against me in the classroom. I drew the inspiration from “the Yummy Pizza company” labor unit1 and my own experience in the Berkeley Federation of Teachers and National Writer's Union. Instead of producing pizzas, students at “Pepper Ink.” produce laminated bookmarks of the best poem they’ve written in a year-long study of the genre. This year, however, the experience took a different turn when one of our potential Pepper Ink. workers was forcibly removed from the school. Deconstructing "Return to Sender"by Margot Pepper Recently, sending a message of resistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Berkeley and Oakland, California adopted sanctuary city measures disallowing the use of city funds and staff time in aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Over 60 sanctuary city initiatives protecting immigrants have been promulgated in 21 states across the United States. Critics of immigration reform argue that sanctuary proposals send the wrong message to immigrants who, they argue, are responsible for eroding citizens’ living standards. They claim stiffer penalties and stronger barriers are the answer. Little publicized is the fact that actually the opposite is true. Rather than posing a monumental problem, undocumented migration is a desired outcome of unequal international trade policies, boosting the living standards of U.S. citizens and enriching a powerful sector of the U.S. economy. Rather than discourage migration, dangerous but surmountable barriers and unenforceable, cruel laws only contribute to the “illegal,” status of needed workers, rendering them a cheap, profitable source of labor. An Open Letter to an Immigration Judgeby Margot Pepper No Corporation Left Behind: How A Century of Illegitimate Testing Has Been Used to Justify Internal Colonialismby Margot Pepper “I feel like a bad person.” “I feel like a snail without a shell whose heart has been stepped on.” These feelings were jotted down in Spanish by my second graders during the four weeks of standardized tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The educational policy was instituted on the heels of the September 11 attacks by President George Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. My students are required to take tests in Standard English, though half have yet to make the transition from Spanish to a second language in my immersion classroom. Work Work Workby Margot Pepper Studies have shown that the time workers believe they have to themselves really belongs to an authoritarian presence, particularly on week nights. For no apparent reason the subject will up and leave a movie, a party, even a steamy moment of passion. In 97% of the cases the explanation the subjects gave was the same: “I have to work tomorrow.” The Smell of Smokeby Margot Pepper The U.S. government and corporate media's reactions to the crimes against humanity last September 11 are giving me, the daughter of Luis Buñuel's favorite producer-- blacklisted George Pepper "Werker"-- flashbacks to the Cold War. While, as a child I could only admire the surrealist French film-maker for his swing set and director Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten for his magic tricks, I've absorbed the lessons of their legacies. If I am skeptical of unrestrained authority under the pretext of "national security"-- beside the fact that it contradicts the checks and balances allegedly inherent in our triumvirate government structure and Bill of Rights--it is because I saw first-hand how it destroyed thousands of innocent U.S. lives.  |