School Daze: The Attack on Public Education Continues

chicago school closings

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 Zimmer Defeats the Billionaire Boys Club With a Cost-Effective Los Angeles School Board Campaign

steve zimmer

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.”

Who Are the Billionaires Trying to Defeat Steve Zimmer?

steve zimmer

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.

Diane Ravitch Warnings Ignored

Diane Ravitch

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.

School Reform Grudge Match: Diane Ravitch vs. Steven Brill

steven brill

David A. Walsh: Sure, Ravitch may “cherry-pick” her facts and sound like the tobacco companies, and Brill may be a defamatory admirer of Joel Klein, bosom buddy to Rupert Murdoch, but at least those are creative attacks.

Michelle Rhee, Human Beings, and Teachers

leonard isenberg

Leonard Isenberg: Using a pejorative word like “antiquated” to describe “last hired, first fired,” simplistically ignores at least the arguable logic that those who have done it longer tend to do it better.

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Billionaires Unite! (Against Public Education and Teachers)

teacher and student

Shamus Cooke: If the teachers’ unions combined with other public sector unions, parent associations, and the community at large to demand fully funded public education by taxing the rich, the billionaires would find themselves without allies. Their money might then be put towards something useful.

Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan — What’s the Difference?

Joseph Palermo: Nobody in power seems to be listening to what teachers have to say about how best to improve public education. The Administration is telling teachers that all those envelopes they licked, and all those doors they knocked on, and all those phone calls they made to help elect Obama in 2008 were nothing but a goddamned waste of time.

Financial Reform Too Small to Succeed

wall street reform

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.

From “Fired Up and Ready to Go” to “Tired Out and Staying Home”

Barack

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!”

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