John Edwards Leaves with a challenge to the Democrats

Thank you all very much. We're very proud to be back here.During the spring of 2006, I had the extraordinary experience of bringing 700 college kids here to New Orleans to work. These are kids who gave up their spring break to come to New Orleans to work, to rehabilitate houses, because of their commitment as Americans, because they believed in what was possible, and because they cared about their country.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.It is appropriate that I come here today. It's time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path. We do not know who will take the final steps to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but what we do know is that our Democratic Party will make history. We will be strong, we will be unified, and with our convictions and a little backbone we will take back the White House in November and we'll create hope and opportunity for this country.This journey of ours began right here in New Orleans. It was a December morning in the Lower Ninth Ward when people went to work, not just me, but lots of others went to work with shovels and hammers to help restore a house that had been destroyed by the storm.We joined together in a city that had been abandoned by our government and had been forgotten, but not by us. We knew that they still mourned the dead, that they were still stunned by the destruction, and that they wondered when all those cement steps in all those vacant lots would once again lead to a door, to a home, and to a dream.We came here to the Lower Ninth Ward to rebuild. And we're going to rebuild today and work today, and we will continue to come back. We will never forget the heartache and we'll always be here to bring them hope, so that someday, one day, the trumpets will sound in Musicians' Village, where we are today, play loud across Lake Ponchartrain, so that working people can come marching in and those steps once again can lead to a family living out the dream in America.We sat with poultry workers in Mississippi, janitors in Florida, nurses in California.We listened as child after child told us about their worry about whether we would preserve the planet.We listened to worker after worker say "the economy is tearing my family apart."We walked the streets of Cleveland, where house after house was in foreclosure.And we said, "We're better than this. And economic justice in America is our cause."And we spent a day, a summer day, in Wise, Virginia, with a man named James Lowe, who told us the story of having been born with a cleft palate. He had no health care coverage. His family couldn't afford to fix it. And finally some good Samaritan came along and paid for his cleft palate to be fixed, which allowed him to speak for the first time. But they did it when he was 50 years old. His amazing story, though, gave this campaign voice: universal health care for every man, woman and child in America. That is our cause.And we do this -- we do this for each other in America. We don't turn away from a neighbor in their time of need. Because every one of us knows that what -- but for the grace of God, there goes us. The American people have never stopped doing this, even when their government walked away, and walked away it has from hardworking people, and, yes, from the poor, those who live in poverty in this country.For decades, we stopped focusing on those struggles. They didn't register in political polls, they didn't get us votes and so we stopped talking about it. I don't know how it started. I don't know when our party began to turn away from the cause of working people, from the fathers who were working three jobs literally just to pay the rent, mothers sending their kids to bed wrapped up in their clothes and in coats because they couldn't afford to pay for heat.We know that our brothers and sisters have been bullied into believing that they can't organize and can't put a union in the workplace. Well, in this campaign, we didn't turn our heads. We looked them square in the eye and we said, "We see you, we hear you, and we are with you. And we will never forget you." And I have a feeling that if the leaders of our great Democratic Party continue to hear the voices of working people, a proud progressive will occupy the White House.Now, I've spoken to both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. They have both pledged to me and more importantly through me to America, that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.And more importantly, 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.And I want to say to everyone here, on the way here today, we passed under a bridge that carried the interstate where 100 to 200 homeless Americans sleep every night. And we stopped, we got out, we went in and spoke to them.There was a minister there who comes every morning and feeds the homeless out of her own pocket. She said she has no money left in her bank account, she struggles to be able to do it, but she knows it's the moral, just and right thing to do. And I spoke to some of the people who were there and as I was leaving, one woman said to me, "You won't forget us, will you? Promise me you won't forget us." Well, I say to her and I say to all of those who are struggling in this country, we will never forget you. We will fight for you. We will stand up for you.But I want to say this -- I want to say this because it's important. With all of the injustice that we've seen, I can say this, America's hour of transformation is upon us. It may be hard to believe when we have bullets flying in Baghdad and it may be hard to believe when it costs $58 to fill your car up with gas. It may be hard to believe when your school doesn't have the right books for your kids. It's hard to speak out for change when you feel like your voice is not being heard.But I do hear it. We hear it. This Democratic Party hears you. We hear you, once again. And we will lift you up with our dream of what's possible.One America, one America that works for everybody.One America where struggling towns and factories come back to life because we finally transformed our economy by ending our dependence on oil.One America where the men who work the late shift and the women who get up at dawn to drive a two-hour commute and the young person who closes the store to save for college. They will be honored for that work. One America where no child will go to bed hungry because we will finally end the moral shame of 37 million people living in poverty.One America where every single man, woman and child in this country has health care.One America with one public school system that works for all of our children.One America that finally brings this war in Iraq to an end. And brings our service members home with the hero's welcome that they have earned and that they deserve.Today, I am suspending my campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.But I want to say this to everyone: with Elizabeth, with my family, with my friends, with all of you and all of your support, this son of a millworker's gonna be just fine. Our job now is to make certain that America will be fine.And I want to thank everyone who has worked so hard – all those who have volunteered, my dedicated campaign staff who have worked absolutely tirelessly in this campaign.And I want to say a personal word to those I've seen literally in the last few days – those I saw in Oklahoma yesterday, in Missouri, last night in Minnesota – who came to me and said don't forget us. Speak for us. We need your voice. I want you to know that you almost changed my mind, because I hear your voice, I feel you, and your cause is our cause. Your country needs you – every single one of you.All of you who have been involved in this campaign and this movement for change and this cause, we need you. It is in our hour of need that your country needs you. Don't turn away, because we have not just a city of New Orleans to rebuild. We have an American house to rebuild.This work goes on. It goes on right here in Musicians' Village. There are homes to build here, and in neighborhoods all along the Gulf. The work goes on for the students in crumbling schools just yearning for a chance to get ahead. It goes on for day care workers, for steel workers risking their lives in cities all across this country. And the work goes on for two hundred thousand men and women who wore the uniform of the United States of America, proud veterans, who go to sleep every night under bridges, or in shelters, or on grates, just as the people we saw on the way here today. Their cause is our cause.Their struggle is our struggle. Their dreams are our dreams.Do not turn away from these great struggles before us. Do not give up on the causes that we have fought for. Do not walk away from what's possible, because it's time for all of us, all of us together, to make the two Americas one.Thank you. God bless you, and let's go to work. Thank you all very much.

All through the night

For the past two years and a few months, this Cole Porter song has been all too useful for me. The song, which can be heard as referring to an imagined or lost love who is never there "when dawn comes to waken" the singer of the tune has been for me and, I'm sure a billion others like me, a refrain used when facing an actual loss of a romantic partner. For the past week, however, on and off, at differing times of day and night (because my sleep cycles have been completely disrupted) I've gone back to the memories of a different time, place and...job. I've been remembering as best I can what it was like to have worked at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School when Malaika Bermiss was principal and many of my colleagues and I were even younger than we are now. The more I go back, the more I want to, and in fact, a great deal of yesterday was spent just doing so in my own head while not doing anything else except tending to my cats all day. Whenever I tell people about Malaika, I always start with how she hired me which she actually did twice in almost the exact same circumstances. I'm only going to write about the first time here.

I had been working for a year and three months at an adolescent teaching facility on Rikers Island. Although the students were some of the most brilliant people I have ever met or taught (as a rule, the worse the crime, the better the brain), the job wore on me. The prison system added to the educational system is a lot of quagmire to be involved in at once, the program itself was kind of a factory and I was being asked by the principal, regardless of my skills as a teacher and the fact that my classrooms were comprised entirely of imprisoned 18-21 year old males to start putting on dresses and look prettier when I came to work. Needless to say, it wasn't the kind of place you imagine throwing the energy of your early 20's wholeheartedly into in order to change the world. Nothing more was going to be done for the students than what was being done, and no student took the GED who wasn't very likely to pass. It was a good statistics machine. All the principal was asking me to literally do was ease up and be "Vanna White". Moreover, she wasn't going to release me from my job because I was too good. I needed someone really, really smart, politically savvy, trustworthy and most of all, who actually cared about education to get me out of this. Someone at WBAI where I worked in the Arts Department told me they had just interviewed with this really interesting principal but that they couldn't take the job because of the hours -- they were at night. Night didn't bother me -- I was only a year away from college and endless all-nighters.

Malaika Bermiss was sitting at her desk in her very overcrowded office, still working in the late afternoon, on the day I met her. Calculating with my very rough math skills, since she turns out to have only been 17 years older than I am, she was probably about 40, the age I will be in a week and a few days. I told her when I called that if she wanted to interview me that day then I didn't have time to change into my interview suit and I'd be in jeans because that's what I had worn to work. She said that was fine. I think she was wearing either a denim shirt and skirt--her clothes were elegantly loose and comfortable as I learned they would always be whether they were cotton or silk, high fashion or a sweatsuit. So that I don't get overwhelmed and so that I can take small readings first, I glom onto a person's initial gestures only and maybe one or two facial characteristics. With students, I am much the opposite, but I want to confine adults to a few controlling variables. Malaika was a firm handshake, a commanding and intelligent mezzo-soprano voice, and big-brown-no-b.s. eyes. She turned around in her chair and looked straight at my face. There was no up-and-down of my clothing, my weight or my bearing. I think I smiled and I know we looked straight at each other during what was not a short conversation. That sounds like nothing, perhaps, but there's almost no one I will look directly at for more than three minutes at a time and usually not even that in an initial meeting. I can do so with students because I need to. Usually, I fidget, look at my shoes, the sky, my fingernails or just away. It's not that I mean to be rude to adults I've just met, but I need time to trust them and like to do so in bits and pieces. Malaika Bermiss could be trusted instantly because she meant what she said.
We agreed on a lot, at least in spirit and having taught at Rikers made it easier for me to articulate how I felt about giving people second chances and the fact that I didn't want to judge those students or the students I would meet at her school based on what they had done in their past. By then, I also knew how to bluster about "having control of my classroom" as well as anyone, which I'm sure she saw through, but I did have a fairly decent technique for teaching essays and I liked doing it. What was clearest from what she was saying and the way the school was already running was that this was going to be a school designed for this population and we were really going to work with that in mind. She's the only person I've ever met who has ever recognized in practice that growth means you have to be allowed to make some mistakes-- and who knows how to look at something other people call a mistake and find what is useful in it.
I can hear people chiming "those mistakes are happening with children" -- and I'm afraid I will have to tell you that more mistakes happen when you don't try to fix problems than when you do and you still have to work out the fine tuning. Ours was a school where test scores and graduation rates got better and better. We're being closed because it's cheaper to run a GED program for the population we serve than an intensive high school. And the program won't even be run by the DOE -- it will be run by a non-profit organization and the students' statistics won't be counted in NYC public school numbers.

The woman I met that day, was most importantly, accountable. She wasn't going to let the school remain a "program" -- it was going to be a regular "high school" and not an "alternative high school". These students were not going to be cut off from the mainstream more than they had been. They were going to get a solid high school education which could serve as preparation for college. And somehow we were going to figure out how to do it. The same somehow, sort of, that she used to get her superintendent to call the superintendent in charge of the program I was working in and tell my principal to let me go which she finally did on the last day she had to do so.

It's 5:23 am. Soon it will be daytime. Confound it.

In Memory of Malaika Holman-Bermiss

Ad astra per aspera -- To the stars despite the difficulties. January 14, 2008.

In lieu of flowers, the family has established an endowment fund at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of Malaika’s favorite institutions. The goal is to endow a chair in the Opera house on the mezzanine level that will have a plaque that bears her name. More importantly, the endowment helps BAM to continue bringing world class performance art to the people of Brooklyn. Please send any donations to:
Brooklyn Academy of Music

Attn: Endowment Office

30 Lafayette Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11217
Please note on the check "In memory of Malaika Bermiss."

Some of Mrs. Bermiss' last published thoughts about Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School are in the article below from CITY LIMITS, March 19, 2007.

GOOD NIGHT, NIGHT SCHOOL:BROOKLYN COMP TO CLOSE
When this nontraditional school closes next year, only one other similar school will be left for students who are busy from 8:00 to 3:00. > By Matt Sollars


Ladonna Powell, 19, lives on her own, works at a bakery in Manhattan to pay the rent, and attends high school classes at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School because they fit into her schedule. Powell says the school, one of only two night high schools citywide, is important for struggling students who can’t make it to a day school but want to earn a diploma.
“Each person has their own problems,” she said. “We need this school to stay open. It’s a second chance.”
The public school is slated to close, however. The city announced in December that Brooklyn Comprehensive, which opened in 1990 to help students who had trouble in a traditional high school setting, would close this June. Teachers and students said they felt stunned and betrayed. The teachers’ union mounted a lobbying campaign, and by late February the staff was told the school would remain open until June 2008.
The city says five new "transfer schools," designed for “overage, under-credited” students, will replace Brooklyn Comp’s services. But while they will have some nighttime classes, it looks like they may not have an after-hours curriculum as complete as Brooklyn Comprehensive, which has the full high school curriculum except art and P.E. The other similarly complete nighttime school in operation is the Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, located on Second Avenue near Stuyvesant Town. The Department of Education cites “low demand” as the reason for closing the night school.
“Attendance has dropped significantly in recent years,” said Melody Meyer, a department spokesperson. She pointed specifically to an abysmal 33 percent attendance record at Brooklyn Comp last year.
The school’s former principal, Malaika Holman Bermiss, says “attendance was always horrendous.” But she and some current teachers counter that the attendance rate dropped precipitously after the school was moved from Midwood High School to South Shore High School in Sept. 2004, due to space constraints at Midwood.
Indeed, school attendance records seem to support Bermiss’s argument. Brooklyn Comp had a 66 percent attendance rate in 2003-04, its last at Midwood. That’s not too far from the 72 percent average for transfer schools in the city. But in the next school year – the first at South Shore – attendance fell to 49 percent. Then it dropped to 33 percent last year. Meanwhile, attendance at traditional high schools citywide is 90 percent.
South Shore, which itself suffers poor attendance and is slated to close, is a large white building at the intersection of Flatlands and Ralph Avenues in Canarsie. A 20-minute bus ride from the nearest subway stop, the school is remote to reach even by car. In addition to the long commute for a student population scattered throughout Brooklyn, teachers and students do not feel safe, particularly at 10 p.m. when the school day ends. The day begins at 4 p.m.
“Muggings have been bad,” according to English teacher Sharon Pearce, in an observation echoed by several others. “Some parents won’t allow their kids to come to school any more,” says the 14-year Brooklyn Comp veteran.
Current principal Catherine Bruno-Paparelli did not respond to requests for comment, and officials declined to show a reporter around the school.
Charles Turner, Brooklyn district representative at the United Federation of Teachers, called moving a night school to such a remote location “a thoughtless decision.” He believes Brooklyn Comp has become “collateral damage” of the decision to shutter South Shore, one of five schools that DOE announced in December would close.
Pearce finds it ironic that the city decided to close Brooklyn Comp and send students to transfer schools, which accommodate up to 250 students. “We were one of the new ‘small schools’ before there was the expression,” she said.
Bermiss fears that a new school, even one that looks like Brooklyn Comp but meets during the day, will miss out on helping a certain sliver of students. “It’s a time frame issue,” she said. “Some of our students had neither children or jobs, but what they needed is what we offered them at 7 p.m. in the evening.”
She believes Brooklyn Comp was hampered by not ever having its own facility. Before she retired in 2005 after 34 years in the city school system, Bermiss did propose an expansion of Brooklyn Comp that would have included a dedicated facility. Now she hopes that the extension through next school year will allow the teachers and staff at Brooklyn Comp to keep the school going in a different format and location.
“My concern is that there be a full-time night school in Brooklyn to meet the needs of students,” Bermiss said.
Student Natalie White, 19, certainly agrees. White started at Brooklyn Comp in September after she “messed up” at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush. Close personal attention from teachers quickly helped White gain confidence in herself.
“I never got an A in any class before,” she said. But after getting help from teachers in English and Spanish and A’s in both classes, she said, “I kind of knew I had some kind of potential.”
However, White knew she would not have enough credits to graduate by June 2007, so she stopped going to school. “I thought it was the end,” she said. “I was kind of thinking of giving up or going to another school.”
Now that another school year has been added, White says she will return and hopes to have enough credits for her diploma by January 2008.
- Matt Sollars

Work?

I urge everyone concerned about work, getting it, keeping it, etc. to read this post.

http://nyceducator.com/2007/12/work.html