Vivian Rothstein: By refusing to raise property, we’ve left it to the teachers to volunteer for the sacrifices the rest of us are not willing to make for the welfare of our state’s public school children.
Splitting Hairs in a Multi-Cultural School
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Walter Brasch: Students can only have “natural hair color.” They can dye their hair honey blonde or raven, and highlights and lowlights in female hair are also acceptable. But a blue streak? No way.
Founding Wisdom
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Nick Capo: According to Jefferson, freedom and liberty rely on the existence of an educated citizenry, one difficult to manipulate, while economic growth relies on the continued advancement of human knowledge.
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.
Preparing All Los Angeles High School Students for California’s Public Universities
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Maria Brenes: Before the A-G Resolution, only one out of 12 students who graduated from Eastside high school had completed the A-G courses, preparing them for California’s public universities.
Save Our Schools and Vietnam War Protests
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Mark Naison: Within three or four years, revolt against testing and privatization may well cripple many school systems.
Closing the Academic Achievement Gap Without Jailing Parents
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Unai Montes-Irueste: Students are not only condemned to life sentences of educational inequity, their caregivers are jailed for breaking them out of underperforming schools.
High School Students Protesting Corporate Education Reform
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Mark Naison: It is one thing to subject yourself to prison-like conditions and militarized discipline if the result is escape from poverty and a ticket to the good life. But what if neither of those result from all this sacrifice?
Jamming Too Slow on Student Loans
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Andy Love: While Democrats are merely trying to maintain the status quo, they should be building the groundwork for more progressive reforms to help students, such as 0% loans and/or free tuition as public colleges.
Student Loan Borrowers Dazed and Confused by Servicer Shuffle
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Marian Wang: The Department of Education has been transferring large batches of federal student loans to new loan-servicing companies — leaving in the lurch some borrowers who are suddenly encountering problems with their loans.
Police, Student Protesters, and Pepper Spray
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Tom Hayden: Unless meaningful action is taken immediately against relentless tuition hikes and the warnings of the Reynoso report, the university will continue disappearing down the path of policing to protect its privatizing.
Beware the Education–Industrial Complex
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Alan Singer: The Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate support a range of what they champion as educational “reform,” but their primary interest in each case is to undermine the system of public education by promoting market-based initiatives based on competition, privatization, high-stakes testing, and anti-union activities such as campaigns for “merit pay.”
Education Reformers and “The New Jim Crow”
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Mark Naison: Current school reform policies represent a brilliant tactic to avoid dealing with the real causes of poverty and inequality in society, while finding a convenient scapegoat in public school teachers and their unions.
How Do We Improve Public Schools?
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Elizabeth Walters: I believe that the education that can be received in public schools is the heart of the American dream.I believe that instead of starving those schools, we should work to improve them.
How Civil Rights Law Demonizes Teachers
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Mark Naison: The notion that “School Reform is the Civil Rights Cause of the 21st Century” has become a cruel joke to teachers and students who find themselves deluged with unnecessary tests and placed under intolerable stress in the name of educational equity.
Public School Reform Won’t Solve Income Inequality
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Mark Naison: We can do a lot more to promote racial and economic equality through programs of progressive taxation, promotion of unionization in low wage enterprises, and efforts to uproot discrimination in the labor market.
Intellectual Incest: Teaching Mexican-American Students
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Rodolfo F. Acuña: Mexican American Studies (AKA Chicano Studies) came about because of the failure of the educational establishment to deal with systemic problems such as high school drop outs.
CSU Leaders Modeling “People’s University” After “For-Profit Education Sector”
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Lillian Taiz: Ex officio members of the CSU Board of Trustees—the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of education, and Assembly speaker—now need to send their own designees to Trustees meetings to participate in discussions and cast votes on behalf of the constitutional state leaders and the legislature.
Bring Back Apprenticeship Programs
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Craig Williams: When the issue of a national industrial policy comes up, opponents of an industrial policy often argue that with such a policy we would be “picking favorites.”
California State University: The Coming For-Profit Train Wreck
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Joseph Palermo: Why should CSU administrators be paid more than the Governor of California, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and even the President of the United States? Why isn’t the Chancellor termed out like California legislators and most other public officials?
Test Mania: A School Is Not a Spreadsheet
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David Lyell: The current LAUSD school board majority needs to remember that the immeasurable elements of nurturing, protecting, and fostering growth and development in every single child are qualities that simply can not be quantified in a score.
Undocumented and Unafraid
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Janeth Silva: Not long after I started telling people I was undocumented and determined to go to college, I found out my friend Liz Soria was also undocumented and together we formed AB-540 Crew.
Race to the Top: Squeezing the Life Out of Children
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Mark Naison: Are parents and their children doomed to ten years of torture introduced in the name of “restoring national competitiveness,” “preparing young people for the job market” and “weeding out bad teachers?”
America’s War on Teachers
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Mark Naison: One question we must ask is why this campaign has acquired such strong bipartisan support and why the public has not spoken out more against it.
Education for the 99%: How the Top 1% Is Destroying Public Education
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Jose Lara – With the top 1% in control of education policy and responsible for creating a financial crisis that is defunding our public schools and eliminating essential programs such as Adult Education and Early Childhood Education, we must join together as the 99%.
Stop Starving Public Universities and Shrinking the Middle Class
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Robert Reich: Public higher education has been the gateway to the middle class but that gate is shutting – just when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s, and when America needs the brainpower of its young people more than ever.
Care to Talk about LAUSD Staff Disciplinary Process?
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Leonard Isenberg: If you are finding what Superintendent John Deasy is saying about the LAUSD disciplinary process to be something less than factual, now is your chance to have your say, while maintaining you anonymity.
Supreme Court Set to End Affirmative Action in U.S. Schools
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Randy Shaw: In accepting a Texas case of a white student challenging racial preferences, the United States Supreme Court is again set to reverse decades of court precedents and impose its own conservative agenda.
Creating Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Our Nation’s Children
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Mark Naison: The punitive, stress-filled environment that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Hop has created is good for no one’s children. But it is especially damaging to children who come to school hungry and fearful because their families are living on the edge.
The Real Culprits in America’s Decline Are Shifting Responsibility to Schools and Teachers
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Mark Naison: Are 28 percent of the homes in the United States under water because of union teachers? Can they also be blamed for the 44 percent Black unemployment rate in the city of Milwaukee?
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