Progressive Media Advocates
Is the US system of public education in crisis? Many say the answer to that question is no. But almost all agree that we have two systems of public education in the United States - one based principally, though not entirely, in the suburbs and another that is based principally in poorer urban and rural areas. One is, unarguably in crisis. The other is not. These articles discuss the root causes and possible solutions.
Nancy Pearlman: As the job market becomes more competitive, the community colleges in Southern California need to revamp their vocational and avocational courses to prepare students for the twenty-first century and to reeducate workers in modern green technology jobs.
Lawrence Wittner: Although many Americans believe their universities are places where administrators and faculty members coexist on a fairly equal basis, the reality is that this is far from the case.
Mark Naison: Virtually everyone I interviewed who was able to move from a working class childhood to professional status had someone invest large amounts of time and energy in expanding their “cultural capital” by building their self confidence as well as their skills.
James Rhodes: In Hanoi, university staff are poorly paid, yet theirs is a lasting bond among nation, family, individual, university and teacher.
Mark Naison: As I watch the teaching profession be destroyed before my eyes, through bi-partisan initiatives that are difficult to fight, I am filled with anger. I hate what is going on, and will fight it with every ounce of my energy, but as a historian, I am hardly surprised.
Mark Naison: Race to the Top redistributes income and not in a good way. Why has this ambitious education reform effort become an economic engine in reverse for poor and working class families.
Randy Shaw: Instead of becoming a vital training incubator for young teachers committed to improving schools, TFA is just as likely to demoralize young people and turn them away from schools and activism.
Walter Brasch: Because of grade inflation, students avoid professors who believe the grade of “C” is the average grade and who set up standards that require students to do more than show up, read a couple of hundred pages, and answer a few questions.
Mark Naison: School reform, as it is being implemented today, destabilizes poor communities and inflicts a regimen of test prep on the nation’s children which destroys their joy of learning but the policy makers are buffered from the consequences of the decisions they make for other people’s children.
Sikivu Hutchinson: In many American classrooms, black children are treated like ticking time bomb savages, shoved into special education classes, disproportionately suspended and expelled then warehoused in opportunity schools, juvenile jails and adult prisons.
Mark Naison: Our goal is to have teachers around the country to describe how they have experienced No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and the policies stemming from them, in their professional lives.
Sikivu Hutchinson: In the march of great Western liberal democratic traditions there were no textbook portrayals of the homegrown activism in our own communities or link between the apartheid legacy of the past and its echoes in the present.
Mark Naison: As I have become involved with an Opt Out movement in New York State that has inspired thousands of families to demand that their children be allowed to sit out state tests, I have become even more appalled by what current school policies are doing to children.
Berry Craig: Mitch McConnell headlining Murray State’s graduation might be less egregious if he hadn’t made his entire political career flipping students the bird.
Anthony Samad: This new public discourse around the “school to prison pipeline” is not new at all. It was a predictable outcome of social control planning where the prison industrial complex started forecasting how many prison beds would be needed based on fourth grade test scores two decades ago.
Mark Naison: “For anyone who says teachers are to blame for our students failing, I have one thing to say: How DARE you? Teachers are heroes to a lot of children who have none!”
Tina Dupuy: I was raised as a creationist. I’d come home from school with a brain full of evolution and an enthusiasm for T-Rex and my mother saw it as her mission to put an end to it.
Joseph Palermo: It’s as if the baby boomers, having gotten their own quality schooling for a fraction of the price students pay today, are kicking the ladder out from under their children and grandchildren and substituting it with a shoddy, privatized product to which they, in their youth, never would have succumbed.
Mark Naison: As high-stakes tests have proliferated in our public schools, and are increasingly used as the basis of closing schools and firing teachers, more and more people despair of challenging policies that have bi-partisan support, are championed by the media, have the nation’s economic elite pressing for their implementation.
Rudy Acuña: This rise in the cost of higher ed will have a disastrous impact on the lower half (income wise) of the Mexican American and Latino community. This is where the dropout numbers are concentrated. Over time, this trend will destroy all hope that si se puede, it can be done.
Gary Cohn: At first glance, it is one of the nation’s hottest new education-reform movements. But a closer examination reveals that the “parent-trigger” movement is being heavily financed by the conservative Walton Family Foundation,
Randy Shaw: As corporate interests spend billions attacking teachers unions, the real obstacles to a quality public education—poverty, overcrowded classes, and physically rundown schools—are ignored.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: What is really curious is why The New York Times author was so quick to uncritically adopt the corporate perspective and jump on the bandwagon of attacking the teachers. Perhaps she was one of the few students who failed her critical thinking course.
Vivian Rothstein: In the name of quality education, the business model reformers are working to contract out many of our public schools to private for-profit and non-profit charter schools which are largely excluded from the public decision-making processes.
Steve Hochstadt: The message from the proponents of at-large voting, at all the forums I have attended, is that the School Board has failed, but let’s do nothing. Let’s not change the voting system. And let’s not talk about anything else.
Mark Naison: Workers who approach their jobs with real autonomy and creativity are a threat to a system that thrives on intimidation and micromanagement as ways of extracting “productivity.” And in which productivity gains almost exclusively accrue to those at the top.
Sara Roos: “Deasy’s Revenge” is a maneuver of breathtaking vindictiveness. It disenfranchises the very spirit of the compromise language dictated by his own employers and our representatives, the LAUSD school board.
David Lyell: Propelled by private foundation money, District leadership and several School Board members have lobbied state and national legislators to gut seniority laws and have been trying to overwhelm UTLA with cases to defend.
Mark Naison: We must also unleash the genius of the business world into the system by subcontracting test development and evaluation to corporations with the resources to do these well and have all school employees wages and salaries targeted to performance the way virtually all business do.
Mark Naison: It is one thing to show, as a Met Life Survey has, that teacher satisfaction has plunged to the lowest level on record, dropping 25 percent since Barack Obama took office, it is another to describe in detail why this has taken place, and what the texture of teachers lives has been since policy makers have started evaluating schools and individual teachers on the basis of student test scores
Hollywood Progressive/LA Progressive film critic/historian Ed Rampell will introduce the movie and lead a post-screening discussion.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers: Now there is no need to cut essential services with extreme austerity; instead there is an opportunity to invest in a new, sustainable economy based on clean energy and to correct so much of the misdirection of the nation.
Eric Garcetti Wins Los Angeles Mayoral Race! See outcome of the Los Angeles city election here.
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