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.
Chicago Teachers Union Vs. Mayor Rahm Emanuel (The Democrats’ Scott Walker?)
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Joseph Palermo: The 29,000 striking Chicago teachers are sending the message to Emanuel that their teacher bashing and privatization schemes for public education have become so onerous and destructive to the teachers’ mission and profession that they have no choice but to fight back.
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.
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.
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.
Obama Forced Out on Gay Marriage
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Rev. Irene Monroe: There’s one thing that has always irked me about Obama’s evolutionary narrative on same-sex marriage—and that’s not his position on it per se so much as the insincerity of his homophobia.
“I Think Same Sex Couples Should Be Able To Get Married…”
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Carl Matthes: “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”
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.
Why Campaigning for Democrats Cripples Labor Unions
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Shamus Cooke: Millions of union and non-union workers have seen their lives worsen under Obama while he promotes stunts that are intended to serve the wealthy and fool everybody else.
American Schools: When “The Best and The Brightest” Don’t Have the Answers
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Mark Naison: President and his chief education adviser, Arne Duncan, believed that a key problem in America’s schools was the low quality of the people working in them, they felt no need to include principals and teachers.
10 Most This Week Led by Julie Driscoll’s Take on the Komen Trainwreck
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ulie Driscoll’s look at the long-term effects of the Komen Foundation’s ill-advised decision to strip its funding for Planned Parenthood for what were rather obviously political reasons, led this week’s LA Progressive 10 Most Read articles list.
Teachers Demand Arne Duncan’s Removal
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Mark Naison: We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s teachers and their supporters, wish to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Why Obama Must Replace Arne Duncan
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Mark Naison: Today, America’s teachers are so disillusioned with the Obama administration that their participation in the 2012 is a big question mark.
White House Continues Drumbeat for DREAM
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Seth Hoy: Yet even with the weight of the White House and a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score that has DREAM reducing the deficit by $1.4 billion over ten years, Republican votes may be short.
Recession Is Over! (If You Want It)
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Joseph Palermo: The National Bureau of Economic Research tells us the Great Recession is “over.” The only thing this announcement reveals is just how out of touch and compassionless those who view human society through the lens of quantitative measurements can be.
University of Phoenix: Right Out of David Mamet
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Joseph Palermo: Any institution that calls itself a “university” yet tells its enrollment officers to “burrow” down deep into the “pain” of its students with the aim of hooking them into government-subsidized debt to rake in the profits not only doesn’t deserve to be accredited, but should be barred from having any access to federal student aid programs.
LA Progressive: July 4 to 10, 2010
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Articles by Tom Hall, Joseph Palermo, David Love, John MacMurray, Georgianne Nienaber, Ed Rampell, Mario Solis-Marich, Randy Shaw, Randal Jelks, H. Scott Prosterman, Carl Bloice, Ron Wolff, Jasmyne Cannick, Steve Hochstadt, Anthony Samad, Michael Sigman, Paul Hogarth, Rev. Irene Monroe, Wayne Williams, Andrea Nill, Tina Dupuy, Sylvia Moore, Adam Eran, Robert Reich, Simon Balto, Norman Solomon, Wade Graham, Michele Waslin, Berry Craig, Joseph Palermo, and Sharon Kyle
The Otherworldly Attack on Public Education
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Carl Bloice: Why is it that the richest, most powerful nation on the planet, one that produces more and more billionaires each year and can spend one million dollars each on the soldiers it sends off to war, can’t afford to educate its kids? It remains a mystery to me that an administration that can spend millions of dollars to bribe states into facilitating its quite controversial school “reform” programs can’t come up with the resources to stave off the pending mass layoffs of teachers.
Financial Reform Too Small to Succeed
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Joseph Palermo: The financial reform legislation currently winding its way through the Congress is a step in the right direction but it retains too much of the status quo that brought down the economy in the first place. The key problem, as many economists have been telling us, is that the top financial institutions remain “too big to fail.” Congress can enact all the regulations it wishes but even the best written rules won’t be enough to prevent another financial meltdown.
The Looming Educational Catastrophe is Scary. Indeed.
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Carl Bloice–September is four months away and one thing is certain: the public is not be adequately alerted to the seriousness of the situation and mobilized to do anything about it. We would know far less about how critical things are in the schools had not students in California – where thing are really rough – set off nationwide protests about the cutbacks. And, as soon as that happened, on cue, voices popped up to declare that the protesters were deficient because they had no real analysis of the cause of the crisis and offered no solutions. The obvious response was: so what? Isn’t it the job of professionals in politics and government to provide those things?
From “Fired Up and Ready to Go” to “Tired Out and Staying Home”
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Joseph Palermo: During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years the center of American politics was pushed about a hundred degrees to the Right. Obama gets elected and tries to move it about a half degree leftward and all we hear are screams of “socialism!”
The Fight to Save Public Education
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Shamus Cooke: The first battle tactic against public education was to starve it. Politicians have consistently lowered taxes on corporations and the rich for the past three decades, thereby lowering state revenues that have created the budget crises in nearly every state. Consequently, public education is in a state of shell shock.
Student Protests and the Threat to Public Education
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Carl Bloice: Why can a naton and a government that can raise $1 million each to send young men and women to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan not find the resources to adequately educate young people here at home?
From Oxy to Encino: Making Friends and Creating Waves
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If you’ve glanced at the LA Progressive recently, you know that our weekend last week was consumed with the media workshop at Occidental College, which this magazine sponsored and which Sharon and I helped organize. We learned a bit, met some interesting folks, and had a blast. Called “Local Media for Social Change,” the day-long [...]
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