Mark Naison: I thought it might be appropriate to momentarily drop my Junkyard Dog/Badass Teacher persona and offer some positive ideas about how to improve our educational system.
Occupy Sandy Builds on Longstanding Progressive Tradition
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Mark Naison: The Occupy Movement is making a turn to communal action and mutual aid that the most effective radical organizations in American history all employed at key points in their history.
Why Iowans Doubled-Down on Obama
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Mark Naison: Some people are astonished that a 92 percent white state, which is heavily agricultural, voted for President Obama in two straight elections.
Sorry, Occupy
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Mark Naison: The transformative role that Occupy activists have played in coordinating relief to the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Sandy has shown me that the Occupy networks that survived the evictions were much stronger than I realized.
Rockaway Forgotten After Sandy
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Mark Naison: The people of Rockaway are again reminded that they are living in the land that God, and the City of New York has forgotten.
A Victory for Outer Borough New York
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Mark Naison: So the event was cancelled. Not because the Mayor came to his senses. But because outer borough New York had risen in revolt.
New York Firefighters Rescue in Worst Storm Ever
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Nark Naison: This is the ethic of loyalty and sacrifice they grew up among, a New York working class tradition passed on from generation to generation among members of the uniformed services .
Today, They Drug Boys Like Me
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Mark Naison: I was lucky I was born in 1946 not 1996. They would definitely try to drug a kid like me in a growing number of America’s public schools.
What Teachers Do
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Mark Naison: Teachers are some of the most selfless, generous people in our nation. They deserve better than what they are currently getting from our political leaders and mass media
The Bronx Example: Urban Food Deserts
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Mark Naison: For the last few years, public health experts have used the term “Food Deserts” to describe communities where residents lack access to healthy food and suffer the twin problems of hunger and obesity
R.E.S.P.E.C.T.- What Teachers Everywhere Gain From the Chicago Strike
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Mark Naison: Chicago teachers have shown the way, not only to force changes in policy, but to create a new narrative about what is really going on in the nation’s schools.
Stubborn Facts About Obama Education Policies That No Amount of Convention Sugarcoating Can Cover Up
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Mark Naison: If you watched the Democratic Convention, you would never know that the Obama Administration’s education policies were extremely controversial with America’s teachers and had provoked outrage among many of the nation’s most distinguished education scholars.
Time For “Testing As Child Abuse Suits” to Fill the Nation’s Courts
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Mark Naison: When a massive threat emerges to the health and well-being of the nation’s children, action must be taken. Protecting children from abusive testing is the REAL civil rights cause of our time.
Assessing Charter Schools: Follow the Money
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Mark Naison: Here are common sense criteria to judge charter schools intent to educate or to undermine public schools
Where You Will Find the Democratic Spirit This Fall
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Mark Naison: The signs of popular initiative are all around us, if we care to look. They are the real hope of the future in a country where the mainstream economic and political systems have been rendered stagnant by a concentration of wealth at the top.
Rich Klimmer: Pride of the American Working Class
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Mark Naison: Richie, a tough, working class kid from Chicago who had played basketball at Marquette, approached this campaign as if it might be the last of his life because, in fact, it was.
The Ryan Nomination, The Obama Re-Election Campaign, and the Left
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Mark Naison: Obama supporters who want progressives to take precious energies away from grass roots movements to re-elect the president are, whether intentionally or not, sabotaging long term possibilities of democratic change.
Driving Out Our Best Teachers
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Mark Naison: How you can improve the quality of a profession by subjecting its members to public ridicule and abuse, in everything from campaign speeches, to editorials, to Hollywood films, is a mystery that I am too dense to unravel
How “Race to the Top” Has Magnified the Obesity Problem in Poor and Working Class Neighborhoods
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Mark Naison: On Fordham Road, most of the people including the children, are heavy, some to the point of obesity.
The Hypocrisy of Current Initiatives to “Improve Teacher Quality”
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Mark Naison: Teach For America has done NOTHING to improve the quality of the teaching profession. And their policies are symptomatic of an ideological trap that all Education Reformers have fallen into.
Not Every Bronx Tale Has a Geoffrey Canada Ending
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n his memoir, Fist, Knife, Stick, Gun, Geoffrey Canada describes growing up on Union Avenue in the Morrisania section of the Bronx as a harrowing experience — a place where bullies terrorized young people and where no institutions, certainly not the local public schools, offered refuge or protection. It was only when Canada’s family moved [...]
Let’s Stop Overlooking the Impact Poverty Has on Urban Students
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Mark Naison: I would like to see urban schools emphasize community involvement, artistic expression, and physical and emotional health on the part of their students.
The Army Occupying America’s Public Schools
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Mark Naison: Many teachers, parents, union leaders, and school administrators secretly despise the policies being imposed on them; but see no way off opposing them with sacrificing their careers or children’s welfare.
Elections and History
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Mark Naison: The fate of grassroots movements often depends on those who hold public office, especially those who control the power to suppress such movement through the application of armed force.
Battle Corporate Schools Locally to Win Nationally
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Mark Naison: The first step is to join the discussions about how public education is being destroyed wherever it takes place.
Intimidating the Poor: The Ugly Underside of Hipster New York
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Mark Naison: New York is the greatest city in the world if you have cash in your pocket and love culture and the arts, but if you are poor, and a person of color, Michael Bloomberg’s New York can be an expensively maintained prison,
Why Business Leaders Should Not Manage Schools
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Mark Naison: All across the country, we have more and more teachers who hate their jobs because their job security has been destroyed, and more and more children who hate school because of the constant testing
What Is Lost When Teaching as a Lifetime Calling Is Undermined
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Mark Naison: Current reforms will make our schools places where inquiry and imagination are stifled, and students and teachers are always looking over their shoulder to see if they have violated some rule. If that happens, something very precious in our lives will have been lost.
Fault Lines in the Plutocracy and the Police Harassment State
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Mark Naison: In gentrifying cities like New York, Chicago, and Oakland , police harassment greets young people of color wherever they turn, from the schools they attend, to the neighborhoods they live in, to downtown business districts, to the public transportation systems they use.
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Defending Teachers and Teaching
Mark Naison: Every time I walk into a classroom, I am trying to do for my students what the best teachers I had did for me; to capture my imagination to such a degree that what went on in that class would be etched in my memory for life.