Newspapers / Winston-Salem Chronicle (Winston-Salem, N.C.) / March 19, 2020, edition 1 / Page 7
Part of Winston-Salem Chronicle (Winston-Salem, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
The Chronicle March 19, 2020 A7 FORUM The coronavirus has made America hit the pause button 1 am in the 4th quar ter of my life, like some of you. As a result, I have witnessed a lot of things in my life. Having a man on the moon, the Civil Rights Movement, 9\11, and electing our first Af rican American president are just a few of the mile stones. When you observe these events happening, you realize they are de fining moments in your lifetime. We re-live these and other events with our family and friends. Our history books are filled with an unending series of significant and noteworthy events in our nation’s his tory. Over time, these historical events have brought cheers, fears and tears. You can probably re call where you were when 9\11 happened. I couldn’t believe it, even as I saw it unfolding on television. It was so tragic and pain ful that we commemorate 9\11 each year. Some weeks ago, a virus started in a foreign country and is now in our country. Quite honestly, when the coronavirus be gan in Wuhan, China, I didn’t pay much attention to it. I thought, like most of you, that the virus would stay in that region. How could a virus start in one country and literally travel all over the world? This is what this illness has done. It has medical experts in a healthcare frenzy. According to the latest reports, there are 148,838 presumptive cases world wide of the coronavirus. A little over 5,000 people worldwide have passed away from this virus. European countries like Italy are seeing dramatic increases in coronavirus casualties. These numbers are staggering and alarm ing. Each day the news starts with the coronavirus as its lead story. It seems, at least at this moment, that other news stories have been temporarily put aside. There isn’t a walk of life that hasn’t been af fected by COVID-19. Ev eryday essentials such as milk and tissue are being scooped up by the casel oad. Stores like Walmart have empty shelves on almost every aisle. Just days ago, they issued a statement saying that ef fective immediately, their stores will open at 6 a.m. and close at 11 p.m. Stores under reduced hours will keep those hours. Walmart is the nation’s largest retailer, so this an nouncement tells us the seriousness of this medical emergency. Sports organizations have succumbed to the coronavirus. Every major sport has either cancelled or suspended their season. March is usually when the NCAA presents “March Madness.” Last week, the NCAA announced that all NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tour naments have been can celled. So, for basketball fans like me, it was an up percut, but the right deci sion. So now fans can give their passionate orations about who would have been crowned the cham pions. If you are New Or leans Pelicans fans like us, you won’t be seeing Zion Williamson anytime soon. Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner, says the league might be playing in the summer. We will have to wait and see what hap pens. All the states have been affected by COV ID-19. In the city of New Orleans, there are present ly 53 presumptive cases of the coronavirus. In nearby Mississippi, there are 10 reported cases. Unfortu nately, there will be other cases to follow. Places of worship have also had to either cancel or modify their services. Fred Luter Jr, pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, held an on- line service. His sermon title was “Trusting God During Difficult Times.” He used Isaiah 41, verse 10, as the spiritual founda tion for his message. He said to his Internet listen ers: God is still in control; do not allow your faith to be replaced by fear. In his message, he gave illustra tions of God’s presence, God’s power, and God’s promise. Now is the time to be strong together and to stay together. These are tough times and in the short term may get even tougher. However, we must have both the physical resolve and the mental capacity to persevere. My Bible tells me that this too, shall pass. James B. Ewers Jr., Ed.D., is a former tennis champion at Atkins High School and played col lege tennis at Johnson C. Smith University where he was all-conference for four years. He is a retired college administrator and can be reached at ewers. jr56@yahoo.com. War, profit and the coronavirus If you want expertise, don’t bother reading any further here. I know as much about coronavirus as any stunned disbeliever with a sudden, irresistible urge to touch his face. This is a news story that’s spookily personal — far more personal, some how, than all those other ongoing horror stories out there, about war, refugees, climate change. Those sto ries are real, yet compared to the coronavirus story, they feel like abstractions. This is about a pandemic — the possibility of hun dreds of millions of deaths worldwide — and it’s about the need to use hand sanitizer. Right now. And also, don’t touch people anymore. And stay home. Part of me feels posi tively Donald Trumpian about this: Come on, this isn’t real. Indeed, my urge is to defy the warnings and hug my friends, shake strangers’ hands, continue living a connected and joyous life. But part of me stops cold, thinks about the post-World War I influ enza pandemic that wound up infecting almost a quar ter of the world’s popula tion and killed as many as 100 million people. These things really happen. Don’t be ignorantly dis missive. But don’t panic either. So, stabbed with “may be,” all I can do is grope for understanding. We live in a dan gerous and paradoxical world. OK, fine. But is our social infrastructure capable of calmly and sanely handling new dan gers that emerge — or is it more likely to make them worse? I begin with this crumb of data from a recent USA Today story: According to the (Cen ters for Disease Control and Prevention), the Com merce Clause of the U.S. Constitution grants the federal government isola tion and quarantine au thority. The Secretary of Health and Human Ser vices can take actions to prevent the spread of com municable disease from foreign countries into the United States and between states. The words invoke both a need for top-down, authoritarian control of things and what I call the Yikes Syndrome: the idea of a viral invasion from a “foreign coun try,” from somewhere out there beyond our bor ders — beyond what is known and safe. Some how the assumptions qui etly hidden in this sort of wording throw me into a spiral of doubt. Like cli mate change, a potential pandemic requires global cooperation: people and governments pulling to gether to survive and tran scend the danger. While enforced order and tem porarily isolating people is also sometimes necessary, I see in such wording how panic spreads. We’re quick to “go to war” against a problem and haven’t learned yet, at the high est levels of government, that wars don’t end and are never won; they simply set the stage for further war. In that regard, consider these words from the so cial-justice and peace or ganization Code Pink: This is bad. Since Feb ruary 19, when the first coronavirus cases were identified in Iran, at least 6,566 people — about one in every 12,000 Irani ans — have been infected. At least 237 people have died. Iran is third, behind China and South Korea, in cases of coronavirus per population. Due to U.S. sanctions, Iran is suffer ing from a shortage of the medical supplies, products and equipment required for diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of the coro navirus. Is this a learning mo ment? As the Code Pink message goes on to point out, the U.S. Treasury De partment has said it will waive some of the sanc tions against humanitarian supplies sent to Iran, but this slight give in the rules is probably too late to do any good. It also points out the danger of playing war. The unintended and often shocking consequences of war have not yet fully pen etrated humanity’s collec tive awareness. Prepara tion for war, as well as the declaration of a national enemy du jour, remain as sumed and unexamined functions of most national governments. And one of the costs of this is ... everything else. For instance, at a re cent coronavirus round- table in Detroit, someone asked Deborah Burger, president ofNational Nurs es United, how the United States, when it develops a CO VID-19 vaccine, could afford to make it free for everyone — a stunning question, when you con sider the cost, to everyone, of not making the vaccine universally accessible. Burger responded: “How insane and cruel is it to suggest that we have to figure out how to pay for it when we can actually go to war and not ask one question, but to prevent this kind of a disease, we have to say, ‘How can we pay for it?’” And Bernie Sanders, who was also at the round- table, added: “Does any body in their right mind believe that if you’re rich you should be able to af ford a vaccine and save your life, but if you’re poor you gotta die? Is that really where we’re at in the United States of Amer ica?” Guess what? Not ev eryone agrees with Sand ers on this. Fox News (of all places), for instance, quoted Tom Schatz, presi dent of Citizens Against Government Waste, who asked: “Who’s going to want to make a new drug if the government is just going to come along and confiscate the profit?” As I read these words, I quickly reach for the hand sanitizer. If there’s an ounce of sanity in this de fense of profit, it can only be because the possibil ity of a coronavirus pan demic is fake news — a profit-feeding scare tactic. But if the possibility of a global pandemic is real, how could anyone ques tion the urgency of gov ernment investment in the development of a vaccine and then making it univer sally available? Had Fox News been around during good old World War II, my guess is that it wouldn’t have tossed snarky chal lenges at the Manhattan Project or lamented that the military-industrial complex should have been able to patent the atomic bomb. But, oh yeah, we worship war. Waging it is the point of government. But then there’s Jo nas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. In 1955, Edward R. Murrow asked Salk, in a live TV inter view, who owned the patent for this vaccine. Speaking from a mountain of higher values, Salk re sponded: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no pat ent. Could you patent the sun?” Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by Peace Voice, is a Chicago award-win ning journalist and editor. He is the author of “Cour age Grows Strong at the Wound.” Equality, equity: Leveling the playing field for black students Charity Brown Griffin Guest Columnist Recently, Winston- Salem/Forsyth County Schools (WSFCS) re moved the principals of four underperforming el ementary schools - and reassigned six other prin cipals to these schools plus two other struggling elementary schools. Ac cording to WSFCS, these six veteran principals were shifted from their former posts because they have a track record of “growing students.” Whether you believe these changes were good, bad or are unsure, one thing is for certain: Change was needed. These shifts in school leadership de mand we have a larger dis cussion about equality and equity, and how acknowl edging the distinction be tween these concepts is important for student suc cess in WSFCS. So, what’s the differ ence between equality and equity? When teaching about these concepts in class, I often use a commonly provided practical exam ple: Think for a moment about runners sprinting around an oval track dur ing a competition. The concept of equality would have us treat the runners in exactly the same way, ensuring that they all start at the same place on the track. Though on the sur face, this seems fair, we know that runners in the inside lanes have a distinct advantage over runners in the outer lanes because the distance they have to trav el is shorter. Therefore, equality, the same start ing place, doesn’t result in fairness. In contrast, if our behavior is guided by equity, we would stag ger the starting positions of the runners in order to offset the disadvantages facing those in the outer lanes. From this example, we can more easily under stand how equity recog nizes differences and pro vides tailored treatment in an attempt to counteract unequal individual oppor tunities. Educational spaces that center equality treat all students the same way, without giving weight to individual needs. Though foundational to granting rights and opportunities, ensuring everyone has the same is not the end post we currently need to be seeking. WSFCS, like the majority of school systems around our nation, must first strive for equity. Sim ilar to the example used above, educational spaces that center equity ensure that students are provided the resources they need to have access to the same opportunities. The science is clear and shows that all students do not experience school in the same way. In my own research over the past several years, I have come to understand that black students, in particular, have unique experiences because they are required to navigate schools that systematically reproduce inequity as a result of rac ism. WSFCS is not immune to systemic inequity. Using funding from the Center for the Study of Economic Mobility at Winston-Sa lem State University, this past summer my under graduate students and I de veloped and implemented a research-based summer program we called, Youth- RISE. Our program sought to empower youth to be come community change agents and gain insight into their perceptions of opportunities and barriers to economic mobility - an important topic given that Forsyth County ranks as the third poorest county in the U.S. for upward economic mobility. The program involved 11 black youth in grades 8-12 who were residing in East Win ston-Salem. Our research team found that, while these youth perceived education to be critical for improving their eco nomic opportunity, they experienced unfair treat ment within the education system, which presented barriers. These students spoke boldly about deplet ed infrastructure, lack of technology equipment, the high number of long-term substitutes who did not engage them with the cur riculum, large class sizes, and teacher perceptions of incompetency due to their race, as key issues in their Title 1 (or low-income) schools. Most notably, these students shared that they fully recognized these as observations from their own school spaces, but that “other high schools” located on a “different side of town” do not have these same “issues” because they have “more money.” Given the evidence from national and local re search, it is clear that cen tering equity, rather-than equality alone, is critical for creating opportunities for students to succeed in WSFCS. Assigning new leadership to these six underperforming schools was a critical step in im proving equity, as each school’s achievement data clearly indicate that there are unique needs in these buildings that are thwart ing student success. None theless, this step is likely insufficient, and more rad ical changes that intention ally agitate the status quo will be required to redress existing disparities. Such changes might include widening access to high quality, early child hood education programs; eliminating de facto (i.e., by personal preference) and de jure (i.e., resulting from racially-motivated public policy) racial and economic segregation; allocating resources for increasing the capacity of teachers to deliver evi dence-based, gap-closing instructional and learning strategies; and informing educators on how cul ture, identity and context interact and building on the cultural assets that black students bring with them to the classroom. Ultimately, WSFCS must work collaboratively with local government, busi nesses, and community stakeholders, to improve the social and economic conditions of the commu nities surrounding under- performing schools. Under the leadership of newly appointed su perintendent Angela Prin gle, optimistic changes are happening. However, I hope WSFCS will ag gressively push forward to disrupt oppressive systems that are breeding inequali ties, by prioritizing equity so that all students, and not just those attending certain schools, have an equal op portunity to attain their maximum potential. Charity Brown Grif fin is an assistant profes sor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Winston-Salem State Uni versity and a 2018-2019 fellow at the schdol’s Cen ter for the Study of Eco nomic Mobility.
Winston-Salem Chronicle (Winston-Salem, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
March 19, 2020, edition 1
7
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75