Cycling the Boston Post Road

Perhaps it comes as a result of too much Whitman and Kerouac in the bloodstream but ever since I was a kid and I learned of it snaking its way through the city I’ve been intrigued with the Boston Post Road, the Indian trail that, higgily piggily, became the oldest highway in America. It was not, of course, the car strewn thoroughfare paved of bituminous macadam found everywhere in the USA that I was moved to see, but rather the ghosts of that first, fabled mysterious road.

Or whatever remained therein.

I wanted to get a glimpse of the road that Paul Revere had ridden to warn of the coming of the redcoats, that General George Washington had fought to secure during the Revolutionary War, that President George Washington had lit out on for his first presidential tour, and all the rest of that early American boyhood school book stuff.

My interest was piqued considerably by a chance discovery of The King’s Best Highway by Eric Jaffee, a beautifully written and witty history of the road which I’d recommend to anyone who has an interest in the thing.

With the coming of spring I set out to see what I could see and, with trusty Trek in tow, boarded a Metro North New Haven line train to Stamford, Connecticut. My intention was to slowly wind my way down to New York along the Boston Post Road.
This I did, beginning with the nightmare of corporate architecture that is Stamford on through pretty Cos Cob and Greenwich, past working class Port Chester into pleasant Rye, Mamaroneck, New Rochelle and straight into the industrial entrails of the Bronx. Sadly, I saw no ghosts, only an odd plaque or two commemorating the way or some forgotten battle or general. But I did encounter a lot of beautiful architecture, a tiny old theatre where some great rock and roll bands once played, and a road that, like life, was seldom straight.

Here are some pics I took along the way.

Enjoy!

Statue of Jackie Robinson who lived in Stamford.

Entering the kingdom of Conde Nast

Along the way.

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Graceful Greenwich

Entering Port Chester

Capital Theater

Lifesaver’s Building

Boston Post Road leaving Port Chester

The BPR entering Rye.

Along the road in Rye.

BPR near the town of Rye.

Monument for Rye Firefighters.

Sign in a window in Rye

Smoke Shop

Rye High School

Doorway of Rye High School

Whitby Castle in Rye

Good deal!

A family business survives

The BPR in Larchmont

Larchmont

Entering New Rochelle

Roadside cemetary

Modern

Empty Building

BPR leaving New Rochelle

Leaving New Rochelle on the King’s Highway

King’s Highway in Pelham Manor

The BPR over the Hutchinson Bridge

A view of the Bronx from the BPR

A view of the Knucklehead from the BPR

Dyre Ave and the end of the journey.

Resistance to High Stakes Testing Grows and Grows

If there is anything positive that can be said to have come out of the relentless billionaire backed corporate hijacking of public education, it is the building of communities of resistance.    In the end, after the initial shock wears off and the public relations campaigns are exposed as just that, almost nothing  can stronger create communities of resistance than attacks on one’s children in the guise of “reforming” their education.  This is that much the more when “reforming” their  education is little more than boiling it down to a number on a standardized test: the same number, mind you, that can be used to fire your child’s teacher and close your child’s school.

Such a community of resistance, hundreds strong, was in overwhelming evidence at a rally last night on the steps of the Tweed Court House, home of the NYC Department of Education. The crowd was united behind one overall goal:  the end of high stakes testing and all that goes with it.  As high stakes testing comprises nothing less than the central nervous system of corporate education reform, an end of the high stakes dictate would effectively paralyze their entire campaign. Corporations would lose out on a multi-billion dollar taxpayer guaranteed revenue stream which explains the insidious nature of the entire corporate education reform campaign.

Organized by Change The Stakes (www.changethestakes.org) and Time Out From Testing (info@timeoutfromtesting.org), the rally drew parents, teachers, and students a like from all corners of the city and even a stray politician or two. ( Mayoral candidate John Lui was there.)  The rally  was a joy to  partake in and a joy to behold.    There will be more.  Many more. As many as it takes.

People will do what they have to do to protect their children.

Richie Havens, R. I. P.

I am saddened to read of the death of Brooklyn born folk singer Richie Havens who died of an apparent heart attack at age 72 in his home in Jersey City.  I first became aware of Havens as a child when hearing his singular sound through the walls of my elder brother’s room.  Songs like “Handsome Johnny” and “Follow the Drinking Gourd”   have stayed with me ever since.  Staying with me as well, as doubtless as with millions of others, was Haven’s sublime interpretation of the sublime spiritual,

“ Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” which he  performed at Woodstock and was included in both the record and film of the event.   Havens later admitted he largely improvised the tune as he had run out his song list while the next act was stuck in traffic and the concert promoters were pleading with him to keep playing.  Keep playing he did.  It was a magnificent, unforgettable improvisation and, to my mind, the most moving version of that most moving song I’ve ever heard.

Moreover, even as much if not most of the music of that event seems hopelessly dated and anachronistic, it is not so with the music of Havens.  It proved  the highlight of a steady and honorable  career which ended only in his death.

Havens’s gifts lay not in writing but rather interpretation  but Havens did create  something that few musicians of any genre accomplish: a sound that is   immediately recognizable as his own from the very first notes of a performance.

A working musician in an age of the rock star   (rock stars  do not live in Jersey city) Havens  continued to record, tour and perform in small venues long after many of his contemporaries retired or died.

As luck would have it, I had a brief but very memorable encounter with the man many years ago when we both much younger. It took place at an event at the New School  where Havens was to speak and it was my job to make the speakers coffee.   I was a 18 a year old guitar playing fool and one intrigued and flabbergasted by Havens’ unique rhythmic guitar playing which I loved but which made no sense to me whatsoever in terms of  playing.  I summoned up the courage to ask  Havens how he did what he did. The man was the epitome of grace and decency, patiently explaining to me the mysteries of open tuning and its strange fingering, demonstrating as best he could without a guitar.  There was not an ounce of idiot rock star in the man.

Those moments of kindness were of great importance to me then and were again today when, reading of Haven’s death, they swam up from my memory.

“Little things , “ a wise man once told me, “ are  big things.”   And so they are.

Rest you in peace,  Richie Havens.  Thank you for the music and the decency. You finished the race.  You fought the good  fight. You kept the faith.

Fear and Loathing and the Common Core

This morning, like yesterday morning and the morning before that, I was complicit in the wholesale corporatization of American public school education, playing my small but essential role in a corporate experiment of unprecedented proportions and titanic intent.     This morning and yesterday morning and the morning before that, I, like thousands of my fellow teachers, administered to my students the first of a promised endless battery of New York State standardized tests.

It is hard not to feel demoralized if not utterly invisible administering such things, that much the more when you know that few in your profession had any say at all  in the production  of such things, that such tests are incapable of measuring and therefore subtly  dismiss the most sublime human gifts such as creativity,   and that they are designed, in large part, to strip teachers of our  autonomy.

And more than that:  you know that under the current data crazed evaluation systems, the outcomes of such these tests threaten your very livelihood.

It is harder still to believe that such emotions are not part of the design of the entire project.  After all, a cowed, terrified workforce is a compliant workforce and no word is more operative in today’s “new normal” school system than “compliance.”

The Pearson produced tests are all aligned to what are deceitfully  called the  Common Core State Standards, the first of countless tests to be so,  and as such are designed to insure the ten year olds in my charge were on track to be “college and career ready”, the better to help them succeed in the global economy and “win the future.”

And who can argue with that ?

I can.

I can because not only is such a notion of education limited and limiting to the point of vulgarity, but because everything about the Common Core State Standards Initiative, beginning with its name, stinks to high heaven. Everything about this privately funded, privately owned, secretly created scheme, sponsored by the un-elected National Governors Association and given pseudo academic legitimacy by the equally unelected but lofty sounding Council Of Chief State School Officers, is meant to obscure or hide altogether what the Common Core is, why it exists and how it came — ready or not —  to be rammed down the throat of almost every school kid in America  — including the ten year olds I saw pointlessly suffer through  it the  past three days.

Search the New York State Education website and you will find nothing about the Core’s (as it is now called) main funders, Bill and Melinda Gates, nothing about its fantastically lucrative connection to Pearson Publishing, who have already made millions and stand to reap billions of tax payer bucks creating more tests for our kids — beginning in kindergarten — than have ever been seen before in human history, nothing about the multi million dollar Common Core paraphernalia industry.

Lord of American Education

Seek and you will find nothing to indicate the “Core”, in Common Core is, in fact, nothing less than the arbitrary selections of educational entrepreneur and non teacher, David Coleman, pal of Michelle Rhee; he , who gets to pretty much single handedly decide what is and what is not important in our children’s education.

The Divine Decider

And this, does he , from sea to shining sea.

Seek and you will find nothing about the grossly coercive manner in which the Obama administration forced the Common Core upon cash starved states in exchange for their autonomy and enough strings attached to slowly strangle their teacher unions who insanely went along with it;  nothing about  the totalitarian ethic inherent in the Core that mandates that once “adopted “ ( what a disgracefully manipulative use of our language !) by a state not a single comma of the holy document could be altered.

Seek and you will find nothing to indicate the fact the “initiative” in the Common Core State Standard Initiative is the initiative not of states, teachers, or parents  but only that of its  super rich sponsors and   corporations. Seek and you will find nothing about the incredible fact that the vast experiment called the Common Core has never even been field-tested — even as it is utterly remaking the American public  school system as we breathe.

What kind of  people would do this ?

Nothing I can  think of  in the current political landscape more clearly illuminates the insidious transformation of the United States from a problematic democracy into an outright oligarchy and corporate fiefdom than the remarkable series of outrageous experiments currently  being performed on American public school children at the behest of a handful of unelected, wholly unaccountable,  madly narcissistic billionaires and their  corporate allies via the  machinations of their hirelings in elected office.  As yet, the most outrageous of these experiments is the Common Core and its concomitant testing frenzy than comes with it.  As many have pointed out,  the children of the  proponents of the Common Core go to schools that hold such stuff in outright disdain.

We should do as well. Those intrepid parents in the Opt Out movement are showing the way.  The testing industry is the central nervous system of the entire corporate education reform campaign.  If enough refuse to  feed it,  it will die.  If we continue to accept it,  our already deeply enfeebled democracy will.

Next year my child will enter  “a testing grade” and is therefore meant to share in the glories of the Common Core Initiative.  Let me rephrase that:  She will be forced to share in the glories of the Common Core Initiative.

Note:  as they are expanding their empire to kindergarten, next year just about everyone’s child is meant to share in the glories of the Common Core State Standard Initiative.

I do not know what will happen from now till then but I know this: My child will partake in this ruthless, rapacious corporate hustle over my dead body.