Raymond Santana, right, Kevin Richardson, and Yusef Salaam, left, react to supporters Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013, in New York. The three men who were exonerated in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case.
Teacher Says She Was Fired For Teaching Students About The Central Park Five
BY CASEY QUINLAN JAN 8, 2016 11:37 AM
A New York City high school teacher says she was fired after teaching her class about the Central Park Five — a case involving five black and Hispanic men who were accused of raping a jogger as teenagers but later exonerated after spending between six to 13 years in prison — because administrators were worried the lesson would “rile up” students of color.
Central Park Five members defend teacher who claims she was fired for teaching the case
The English teacher, Jeena Lee-Walker (pictured below), told the New York Daily News that administrators at her former high school critiqued the 2013 lesson, saying it should have been more “balanced.” Court papers show administrators said they feared the lesson would cause “riots.” And according to Lee-Walker, administrators were afraid the lesson would “rile up” the black students in her class.
In her interview with the Daily News, Lee-Walker said she thought “students in general, and black students in particular, should be riled up” about the case, which is often held up as an example of how the criminal justice system unfairly targets young men of color. But she subsequently received bad performance reviews and eventually received a dismissal.
Lee-Walker has since filed suit against the Department of Education and school administrators for failing to give her 60 days notice about her termination, which violates the teacher’s union contract.
The story has attracted a lot of attention from educators — and especially from teachers who are concerned about teacher diversity and who say this type of action from administrators may hobble teachers of color professionally. Jose Vilson, a middle school math educator in the Inwood/Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City and the author of This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education, sent several tweets criticizing the administrators for their comments.
UWS High School Teacher Claims She Was Fired For "Central Park Five" Lessons
BY BEN YAKAS IN NEWS ON JAN 8, 2016 5:30 PM
English teacher Jeena Lee-Walker screenshot via Daily News
Jeena Lee-Walker, 37, is suing the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry after she was fired for insubordination and poor evaluations, all of which she believes was the result of her pushing back on topics like the Central Park Five.
Lee-Walker tells the Daily News that her problems with administrators started almost immediately after she started working at the school in 2013. She says she was shocked when she was told to be more "balanced" covering the case of the Central Park Five in November 2013: "I was stunned,” she told the News. "I was kind of like, the facts are the facts. This is what happened. These boys went to jail and lost 14, 18 years of their lives. How can you say that in a more balanced way?"
Although she agreed to change her approach, she felt that students had good reason to be "riled up," telling the News, "I kind of wanted to hook them in, engage them, win them over. I thought that this material was not only engaging but important...They were really moved by the documentary and rightly so. They really identified with the teenagers."
Lee-Walker argues in her lawsuit that retaliation against her "violated her First Amendment right to discuss the Central Park Five case, and that the firing violated the city’s contract with the teacher’s union because she was not given a required 60 days notice."
The Central Park Five, who were wrongfully jailed for the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger, have received a $42 million settlement from the city in recent years. In 2014, they sued the state seeking $52 million in damages for the emotional trauma of being incarcerated for years for a crime they were coerced into confessing to.
Teacher Fired for Heroic Incompetence
by ADAM LAATS on JANUARY 10, 2016
http://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/
I’m no cynic. But anyone who’s paying attention knows that schools serve a range of purposes. We see depressing evidence today that one of their primary functions is to contain and control young people. How do we know? Because a teacher in New York City was fired, according to her, for talking about structural racism in a way that would “rile up” her African American students. Yikes.
The story is grim. Jeena Lee-Walker has sued New York schools for her termination. Beginning in 2012, school administrators asked her to tone down her teaching about the Central Park Five case. As all New Yorkers remember, a group of young men were falsely convicted of raping a woman. They were eventually freed, but only after spending long years in prison.
Lee-Walker taught her students about the case. Many of them, she thought, “should be riled up” about the deep injustice done, as well as about continuing injustices in American society.
Her administrators thought differently. They gave her several bad evaluations and eventually fired her for “insubordination.”
Let me be crystal clear here: I think all teachers should be like Ms. Lee-Walker. All teachers should “rile up” their students about injustices in our society.
But we need to recognize two complicating factors. Though I’m a big fan of his, I think Curmudgucrat Peter Greene misses the boat here when he says Lee-Walker was “fired for competence.”
She was fired for two other reasons, reasons central to the successful functioning of any school. Even as we praise Ms. Lee-Walker’s bravery and integrity, we need to be a little more clearheaded about what was really going on. In short, Ms. Lee-Walker’s unwillingness to go along with the school system really DID make her incompetent as a teacher. Heroic, yes, but not willing to do the job.
That might sound odd, so let me offer two long-winded explanations.
First, teachers are not simply private citizens. Ms. Lee-Walker will not have luck protesting that her First Amendment rights have been breached. And, by and large, none of us want to cede to teachers such rights. Consider, for example, what we might think if she had been accused of promoting political or religious agendas with which we don’t agree. What if she “riled up” students by denouncing abortion? Or by denouncing evolution?
In principle, then, we need to acknowledge that teachers are bound to stick within curricular guidelines established by the school and community. I’ll repeat: in this case I think those guidelines are utterly bogus. I think we should encourage all New York City high schools to emulate Ms. Lee-Walker’s decision to teach the Central Park Five case. It is the truth and young people deserve to learn about it.
But if and when a heroic teacher decides to go against her superiors, she should be prepared to be kicked out. That is equally true whether we agree or disagree with the teacher’s ideas. I’m going to say this again, just because I think it could be misinterpreted: In this case, I side wholly with Ms. Lee-Walker. Her protest, however, should not be taken as a simple case of good teaching vs. evil administrating. Rather, this is a heroic attempt to push the curriculum in New York City schools toward this sort of teaching. Ms. Lee-Walker should have expected to get fired—even WANTED to get fired—because that was her only chance to take her appeal to a wider stage.
We don’t have to like it, but I think we need to be clear about our terms. In this sort of case, the closest analogy is that of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses. To some, she was a hero, to others a poorly coiffed villain. In the end, however, she was a government bureaucrat who refused to do her job. Whatever we think of her politics or religion, no institution can function if it doesn’t purge such folks.
That brings us to our second point. This story drives home the depressing custodial role schools and teachers play in our society. We tend to think of schools as educational institutions—and they are—but they are also holding pens of varying levels of pleasantness.
As a result, a big part of the job of school administrators is to keep the students relatively calm. With a dizzyingly high student-to-teacher ratio, most schools rely on passive and compliant students. When and if students choose to throw off schools’ restraints, there is not much administrators can physically do to coerce them into submission.
In some schools, this results at worst in hijinx such as food fights. In other schools, we get a prison-like atmosphere in which students are continually monitored and physically controlled.
Is that a good thing? Not at all. But if we want to make sense of this case and the many other cases like this, we need to understand the many things that schools do in our society. Teachers are not merely Socratic wisdom-peddlers in the agora. They are street-level bureaucrats who help process large numbers of young people in educational containment systems.
The point of Ms. Lee-Walker’s actions—if she was acting intentionally—was not merely to teach children something true. The point was to make a public spectacle of the fact that New York City schools do not regularly include that sort of teaching. She was not “fired for competence,” but for her stubborn insistence on principled incompetence, her brave unwillingness to go along with a system that fails students so miserably.
Raymond Santana (c.), one of the members of the Central Park Five, came to the defense of a Manhattan teacher who says she was fired for teaching the case in her classroom.
Central Park Five members defend teacher who claims she was fired for teaching the case
BY VICTORIA BEKIEMPIS, STEPHEN REX BROWN, RICH SCHAPIRO NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Friday, January 8, 2016, 2:57 PM
(From l.) Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Yusef Salaam spent several years in prison after they were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in 1989.
“We're with her 100% to fight this injustice," Raymond Santana, 41, told the Daily News.
“We would love to be down at the federal courthouse when she goes in" and give “any other support that is needed.”
“I absolutely appreciate her and absolutely commend her," he said. "Anything (she and her lawyer) need, we will be here — and be ready."
Santana and Salaam spoke out a day after the Daily News revealed Lee-Walker’s claims that she was canned for teaching her students at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry about the racially charged case.
Yusef Salaam, 41, offered a similar vow to stand behind axed teacher Jeena Lee-Walker.
Walker’s Central Park Five program explored the travails of the five black and Latino teens who spent several years in prison after they were wrongfully convicted of raping a female jogger in 1989.
Lee-Walker, 37, was fired in May after school administrators told her to tone down the curriculum because they feared the lessons would “rile up” black students and trigger mini “riots,” according to a federal lawsuit filed by the axed teacher.
Lee-Walker says she was accused of insubordination and given poor evaluations after she pushed back against the administrators’ demands.
Lee-Walker, who graduated from Barnard and has post-grad degrees from Harvard and Fordham, did not specify damages in her suit.
Santana, who spent seven years behind bars for the crime, said he was “troubled” by the suit’s description of the administrators’ claiming the lessons might incite a riot.
"It takes us back to 1989, where the media put these labels on us — that we were animals," he said.
"A person working in the school system shouldn't view our kids like that."
Salaam said the news of Lee-Walker’s treatment has triggered painful memories.
“For us, in terms of the Central Park Five, it’s like we're being tried and prosecuted all over again,” said Salaam who was also imprisoned for seven years.
"There are lots of people out there who truly feel like we are guilty of something.”
Donald Trump and the Central Park Five
BY AMY DAVIDSON JUNE 23, 2014
Kharey Wise as he looked when he was arraigned, in 1989, in the Central Park jogger case. Photograph by John Pedin/NY Daily News Archive/Getty.
WOLF PACK’S PREY
Female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang
And the headline from the next day:
Park marauders call it
‘WILDING’
…and it’s street slang for going berserk
The Times, that same week, reported, “The youths who raped and savagely beat a young investment banker as she jogged in Central Park Wednesday night were part of a loosely organized gang of 32 schoolboys whose random, motiveless assaults terrorized at least eight other people over nearly two hours, senior police investigators said yesterday.” And: “she was raped by at least 4 of the 12 boys, Chief Colangelo said.” The five schoolboys who were eventually tried—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise—were all black or Hispanic.
And, in early May, 1989, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the Daily News to say what he thought he knew about the case. Trump was on the front page of the papers often enough that season; the Post’s “SPLIT!” headline marking the end of his marriage would help fill the tabloid space between the teen-agers’ arrest and their conviction, as did “MARLA BOASTS TO HER PALS ABOUT DONALD: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD,’ ” which quoted his then-mistress and second wife; soon, there was also coverage of his baroque business failures. Perhaps he thought it gave him gravitas, that spring, to weigh in on the character of the teen-agers in the park: “How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” And his headline suggested what ought to be done with them:
BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.
BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
The “park marauders,” the “roving gang,” the “crazed misfits” were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old. The confessions they gave, as children, had been false, spun out under the pressure of hours of police interrogations. (They were, had anyone been ready to acknowledge it at the time, also inconsistent; they also had parents whom they weren’t able to see before their questioning.) The boys were sent to prison. One of them, Kharey Wise, who at sixteen was the oldest and sentenced as an adult, was still there when, eleven years after the rape in the park, he happened to cross paths with a prisoner named Matias Reyes. It occurred to Reyes that it was his fault that Wise was there. He confessed that he, and he alone, had raped and beaten Meili, as he had raped other women over the years. He described to police how he had tied her with her clothes; it had been part of his M.O. in other cases, something that gave credibility to his confession. It moved beyond a doubt when a DNA test matched Reyes to the semen found on Meili’s body. The DNA hadn’t matched any of the teen-agers—one of the many details that got blinked over in the trial. They were exonerated twelve years ago, and the charges were formally dropped.
Since then, talks about some form of restitution for the young men dragged on even as a movie, “The Central Park Five,” gave a wider perspective on the real injustice in the case—the failure of the police, the courts, the press, of the word on the street, of any engine of public doubt. Everything that should have struck one as odd—the cartoonish way that the boys, in their confessions, talked about the rape itself—was taken as proof of the boys’ perversity. Their guilt had been a given; the only question that people seemed interested in, at the time, was what their supposed wildness said about our society, about the boys’ ”culture,” or lack of it. A real-estate developer could take out an ad that contemplated executing children, and only be considered disreputable because of the decor of his buildings.
The Daily News reprinted that ad on Saturday, next to Trump’s new op-ed. Perhaps he feels that he got a good deal, having the ad run again for free; there is no contrition in what he has to say now. The settlement, which Mayor Bill de Blasio had said, in his campaign, he wanted to get done, gives each man about a million dollars for each year he spent in jail. (Together, that was forty years.) Trump wrote on Saturday that this was “a disgrace”; he said that he’d talked to a detective who called it “the heist of the century.” How much would Donald Trump pay to not spend a single year in jail? He doesn’t mention Reyes; he talks about police “blunders” as if they were all in the teen-agers’ favor—“The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.” Does he imagine that it must be obvious to them, as it is to him, that the decades of their lives weren’t worth much anyway? He wrote, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.” At fourteen years old, one doesn’t have much of a past to speak of; what one might have is a future. Or is an angel, for Trump, someone who stays in a hotel with a lot of gold paint on the wall?
It’s simple, in some ways, to see the Central Park jogger case as an artifact of a feverish moment in late-eighties New York—of a piece with its joyous and awful kinetics, the crack epidemic, the painted-over subways, the fear of AIDS, the absurdity of Ivana’s ski-slope confrontation with Marla. But some fevers never seem to subside. The tendency to write off teen-age boys because of distrust of their neighborhoods or the color of their skin, to assume that jail is the place for them, has not gone away. Neither, somehow, has Donald Trump.
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