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.
Education Reform
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.
Prison House of Textbook History: Remembering the Chicano Blowouts
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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.
Public Schools, Private Agendas: Parent Revolution
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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,
The Making of an “Educational Saboteur”
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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.”
Looming Crisis in Higher Education
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Mark Naison: Too many college graduates are leaving college with huge debt and no realistic prospects of paying off the debt
Diane Ravitch Warnings Ignored
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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.
Hope for Embattled Educators
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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.
Driving Out Our Best Teachers
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Mark Naison: How you can improve the quality of a profession by subjecting its members to public ridicule and abuse, in everything from campaign speeches, to editorials, to Hollywood films, is a mystery that I am too dense to unravel
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.
10 Most Read Articles This Week
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This week’s 10 most read articles leads off with Rudy Acuña’s “How Democrats Have Abandoned Their Core,” decrying that party’s propensity for selling out to pressure from the Tea Party.
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?
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.
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.
Turning the Tide: An Historian’s View of School Reform
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Mark Naison: Over time, people of courage and integrity will turn the tide and begin to restore sanity to educational discourse and develop a powerful alliance of teachers, parents and students, supported first by the Occupy movement, and later by unions, religious organizations and progressive politicians.
How a Crackpot Education Reform Theory Became National Policy
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Mark Naison: Someday, Test Based Education Reform will go the way of Prohibition. But not before incalculable damage is done to the nations children
Los Ángeles 1% Maneuvers to Privatize Public Education
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John Cromshow: Privatizing education has two goals: 1) increase the number of charter schools; and, 2) weaken the teachers’ union.
What Occupy Wall Street Has Accomplished in Two Short Months
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Mark Naison: While Occupy Wall Street and its spinoffs around the nation have certainly not developed “leaders” who articulate its goals to the media or negotiate with public officials, it has already registered a formidable list of accomplishments for a movement this young.
Why Teachers Must Become Community Organizers and Justice Fighters
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Mark Naison: Teacher Activists must put forth a vision of Radical Democracy which envisions an education which empowers students as critical thinkers and agents of historical change, not just as obedient test takers and which envisions schools playing a central role in neighborhoods united and mobilized to get a fair share of the nation’s resources.
School Reform Grudge Match: Diane Ravitch vs. Steven Brill
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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.
Anti-Teacher Union “Reformers” Hoisted on Own Petard
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Randy Shaw: After years of teachers union bashing and corporate-led school “reform” efforts, anti-public school forces are now on the defensive. And the main reason is that the statistical measurements do not support their arguments, and even show a pattern of falsification.
Why Teach For America Is Not Welcome in My Classroom
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Mark Naison: Every spring, without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: “Sorry.”
Racism in K-12 Public Schools
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Jessie Daniels: The clever, sinister thing about institutional racism in education is that it operates relentlessly on its own, like a machine, even when people of good will want it to operate differently.
The National Education Association Flunks a Crucial Test
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Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: As long as the N.E.A. as well as organized labor in general remain tied to the corporate-dominated Democratic Party, public education will deteriorate, critical thinking will be undermined, wages will remain low, and the working class will continue to suffer a decline.
Keeping Public Schools Public
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Craig Williams: As progressives, we should also argue that educators need more funding just to deal with the increased poverty created in large part by the private sector.
Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Who Need It Most
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Mark Naison: While people are losing their homes, jobs, and medical coverage, new school professionals are flooding communities with programs that have offer little to the people they were allegedly designed to benefit.
Why LAUSD Does Not Work?
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Leonard isenberg: By what standard do people who continually fail to fix public education remain the leaders of public education reform
Deception Alert: “Liberal” Huffingtonpost Distorts the Education Debate
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Adam Eran: Waiting for a race of cyborg/celebrity super-teachers distracts from the egregious income inequality and the childhood poverty that worsens educational outcomes in the U.S.
Ed Asner Supports Marcy Winograd for Congress
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Join Ed Asner and PDA at a Fundraiser to get Marcy Winograd Elected to Congress
LAUSD Releases Its Own “Value-Added” Rankings of Schools
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Cynthia Liu: What’s troubling is that rhetoric surrounding use of student standardized test scores–even if student performance year-over-year is compared to eliminate external influences–appears to include other measures of teacher performance, yet those other measures have never been identified.
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