Progressive Media Advocates
Peter Dreier: The Zimmer-Anderson school board race attracted national attention, including articles in the New York Times, because it was seen as a test of the effort by corporate power-brokers to run schools like businesses, a strategy that they and the media misleadingly call “school reform.”
Sikivu Hutchinson: Even as President Obama forges ahead with a more “liberal” second-term agenda, the administration’s robber baron race-to-the-bottom corporate education policy and its indifference to the scourge of mass incarceration underscore the lie of the American dream.
Peter Dreier: The outcome of Tuesday’s LA School Board District 4 election has national implications in terms of the billionaires’ battle to reconstruct public education in the corporate mold.
Walter Brasch: When you’re looking at a four-column picture of a smiling athlete at a signing ceremony, ask yourself why do we wring our hands, furrow our brows, and complain about low educational scores.
Mark Naison: Why any school district would want to bring in teachers who have been trained for five weeks and have no classroom experience to replace teachers with years of training, experience, and mentoring would seem to defy common sense unless one considers the budgetary considerations at stake.
Mark Naison: In the last five years, I have had to switch gears and devote large amounts of time to protecting my profession and the institutions I have built, against powerful forces seeking to reduce teaching and learning to quantifiable “outcomes.”
Mark Naison: When presidents, or governors, or mayors create educational policy or school reform commissions, they make sure that business leaders and foundation heads have the determining voice, with lifetime educators, especially teachers, often entirely excluded.
Mark Naison: After school and night centers were a fixture of every public school in New York City until they were closed during the NYC fiscal crisis of the 1970’s.
Marian Wang: The government should make the funding for the Pell program an entitlement in the federal budget, shielding it from annual wrangling, and should boost the maximum amount of individual grants, the report says.
Steve Hockstadt: In recent decades, three major problems have developed in American universities which threaten the whole system: exorbitant funding of athletics, replacement of full-time faculty with temporary part-time staff, and the growth of for-profit institutions.
Mark Naison: Too many college graduates are leaving college with huge debt and no realistic prospects of paying off the debt
Mark Naison: Teachers have become “collateral damage” of an effort to transform public education from above, financed and implemented by people who regard teachers with contempt.
Mark Naison: Deluging schools with tests in every grade and every subject beginning with pre-kindergarten, to the point where little else goes on in school but preparing for tests.
Mark Naison: the most tragic thing about this kind of austerity is that school districts have shown they are far more willing to use increasingly scarce funds on testing and evaluation rather than art, music, sports, gym, and school counselors and librarians.
Mark Naison: I think you begin with creating a child-friendly environment. That means sharply reducing the number of tests, leaving ample room for exercise and play, giving primacy to the arts, and having instructions in subject areas, when possible, incorporate hands-on learning and project based activity.
Mark Naison: Ravitch, an Undersecretary of Education in the Bush Administration, and an initial supporter of “No Child Left Behind” warned against many of the policies that are destroying our public education system.
Mark Naison: Policies which claim to be in the “public interest” that only affect other people’s children and affirm race and class privilege, should be subject to the most careful kind of scrutiny.
Steve Hochstadt: Books are an endangered species. Reading itself, as entertainment and education, has long since been replaced by more visually stimulating pastimes: Television, video games, smart phones.
Mark Naison: We need to have more people reaching out with love and support to the wounded children who surround us, inside and outside of our schools.
Mark Naison: We now have a Counter Narrative, based on strong scholarship as well as experience, which warns that Reform policies are likely to widen educational disparities rooted in race and class and weaken the nation’s schools by driving out the most committed teachers.
Mark Naison: The idea of closing low performing schools, designated as such entirely on the basis of student test scores, removing half of their teaching staff and all of their administrators, and replacing them with a new school, has tremendous appeal among business leaders and almost none among educators.
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.
Walter Brasch: About 800,000 Pennsylvanians are members of labor unions, and the state has a long history of union rights and activism, but neither of the two largest university systems has a labor representative on its governing board.
Joseph Palero: Working hand-in-hand with California’s teachers, nurses, students of all ages, and the state’s labor unions, Governor Brown rallied the troops, and in doing so helped save from fiscal ruin not only the state’s public schools but also the nation’s biggest and most important system of public higher education.
Charles Hayes: It’s an old cliché to say that victors write the history of their times, but the opportunists who take full advantage of these biased histories are the ones to keep an eye on.
tlawing Shakespeare: The Battle for the Tucson Mind is a documentary that focuses on the elimination of the Mexican American Studies program within the Tucson Unified School District;
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.
Kathleen Peine: Universal healthcare is off the table, of course. Because in America, our table is only open for fine dining. It’s that or nothing, kid.
Jim Kent: Enter the boarding school system, which Native American children would be forced to attend and where they would be “assimilated” into the dominant Western European culture.
Julie Driscoll: Call me crazy, but I believe firmly that the statutory laws are in place for a reason – to prevent the exploitation of young men and women who don’t have the ability to make informed decisions, who don’t have the ability to “consent.”
Lauren Steiner: Please help us spread the word across Los Angeles! Come with signs that say “Bruce Karsh, please don’t sell the LA Times to the Kochs” and “Bruce Karsh, our democracy is not for sale” We are gathering Thursday, May 23 for a rally and march.
JP Sotille: Everyone is a potential target in the War on Terror’s lingering “With Us or Against Us” protection racket, and drones are the crooked-nosed enforcers that kill without remorse, without hesitation and without accountability.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Are Our Best Teachers an Endangered Species?
Mark Naison: Given the fault lines that have been revealed in our society by Hurricane Sandy, the last election, and the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, do we really want to make our schools so impersonal and bureaucratic that the best teachers leave