"I reckon if there's ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora."
-- William Faulkner, "As I Lay Dying"
by Fred Barton, Chair, SLATE Steering Committee
Outgoing Editor of SLATE Update
March 2009
Well, OK, couldn’t find a Cora so I’m going with Clarissa. It looks like Washington D.C., isn’t the only place change has made an appearance in this new year. It has also come to your favorite SLATE Update. This will be my last edition as your Captain and while I’d like to say we changed the world during my tenure, of course we didn’t, but I’m pretty sure that an engaged, informed and committed group of people such as you all did at least nudge it a little. And isn’t that how democracies move anyway? I tell my students that democracies are all about tension between the ins and the outs and it’s in the intersection of those competing and sometimes conflicting pressures that policy is born, and even after that policy is born, the tensions don’t go away, they merely reform. In short, democracies are never done. So, to expect a democracy to turn on a dime, or do a complete about-face as a result of an election is sort of like expecting a battleship to fit in your bathtub. That’s kind of the good news and the bad news about this new era we’re entering.
And speaking of never being done, the humble SLATE Update goes on as well, but before I turn the Con over to the new Captain, Clarissa West-White, let me tell you just a little about her. Clarissa received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Florida State University. Her major areas of concentration while earning her doctorate were Multiethnic Literature, Counseling/Social Work, and ESOL. She has presented at numerous conferences, including the National Council of Teachers of English (where she serves as member and incoming newsletter editor on the SLATE (Support for the Learning and Teaching of English) Steering Committee), Florida Council of Teachers of English (where she is a board member and SLATE representative), Florida Association of Teacher Education, Florida Reading Association, National Association of African American Studies, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication; she's also participated in the Fulbright-Hays Seminar in Turkey. Clarissa also serves on several state committees including FCAT Writing + Advisory Board and Framers Committee for the Next Generation English language arts standards development.
I’ll let Clarissa take it from there because there is one more item of business I’d like to bring to your attention before I disembark, and that is Advocacy Month in April, with special emphasis on Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C., on April 23.
When I went to Advocacy Day last year it was with a bit of a heavy heart because I knew my Congressman was a dyed in the wool Bush sycophant and my Senators (both Democrats) where of the “Let’s throw up our hands and complain about the mean Republicans” school. To put it mildly, I didn’t have very high expectations. Still, it was a positive and energizing experience because I got to meet a lot of people who convinced me that government is more than the bloviators you see on Fox News. I left there feeling more—dare I say it—hopeful than I had in a long time.
This year we are at the beginning of something rather than the end. We have a real chance to help set a course for education that will begin to repair some of the damage we have inflected on our children these last eight years. We have a chance to move the responsibility and the authority for education children back to the teachers and away from the bureaucrats, ideologues, and publishers that have been in charge for too long. We have a chance to begin to heal a generation.
I realize that everyone can’t go to Washington on the 23rd, and for those of you who can’t, promise me you’ll mark a date on your calendar sometime that month to write, call, or visit your Congressperson in his or her local office and add your voice to the voices that spoke out in the last election. The tools for doing that are simple and readily available. This chance is too important to slip through our hands.