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
By
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
By
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?”
Silicon Valley Leaders Fund Effort to Help DREAM Students
By
Michele Waslin: A group of technology leaders from Silicon Valley are providing scholarships, career advice and legal assistance to undocumented students through a campaign called Educators for Fair Consideration
America’s War on Teachers
By
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.
Politics: It’s About Identity, Stupid
By
Charles Hayes: Elections are won and lost through appeals to identity. It’s that simple and that complicated. This is why symbols and 30-second, hot-button commercials sway public opinion.
Stop Starving Public Universities and Shrinking the Middle Class
By
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?
By
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.
Feeding Off Latino Misery
By
Rudy Acuña: As a group Latino politicos have not been especially progressive. Indeed, they have been less than courageous when it comes to police brutality and capital punishment.
Creating Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Our Nation’s Children
By
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.
LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy’s Fairytale
By
Leonard Isenberg: Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk, “The buck stops here.” LAUSD’s John Deasy should have one on his desk, “The buck never stops here.”
American Schools: When “The Best and The Brightest” Don’t Have the Answers
By
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
By
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.
From Ghetto to Graduate Studies
By
Alvaro Huerta: Too often, corporate-minded outsiders who never experienced poverty or attended overcrowded public schools preach to inner-city Latinos and African Americans about working hard, making the right choices and being accountable for their actions as the sole means to upward mobility.
How a Crackpot Education Reform Theory Became National Policy
By
Mark Naison: Someday, Test Based Education Reform will go the way of Prohibition. But not before incalculable damage is done to the nations children
Worse Off Today Than in the Sixties: Who Gives a Damn?
By
Rodolfo Acuna: The major reason for the lack of progress of Mexican American and other minorities is society’s historical amnesia or more aptly its Alzheimer disorder that erases the memory of previous efforts or commitments to bridge the gap between black, brown and white – rich and poor.
Latino Students: Don’t Get Angry, Get Even
By
Rodolfo F. Acuña: ALEC Arizona and Latino Students – In Tucson, brutalizing immigrants and Latino students is part of the grand strategy ALEC and others use to keep Mexicans in their place.
Michigan’s Free College Tuition Plan
By
Tanya Somanader: Hoping to refocus priorities in 2012, Michigan’s Senate Democrats have released a new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.
The Sixties Student Movement and the Working Class
By
Mark Naison: During the 1960’s, New York city was the scene of an incredibly powerful anti-war and student movement. Like Occupy Wall Street, this movement was often attacked for being unrepresentative of the city’s working class. In reality, this movement was far more diverse in class and race than critics at the time, or historians, realized.
Nasty Bosses on College Campuses
By
Vijay Prashad: Values are taught not just in the classroom but in the very bones of an institution. How it treats its workers sends a message to the student body about what is acceptable in our society.
LAUSD’s John Deasy Disses Parent Group
By
Leonard Isenberg: What LAUSD has done is to front an alternative group called Parents as Equal Partners that it believes it can control, while arbitrarily and without legal authority disbanding DAC without even minimal guarantees of due process of law.
LAUSD Public School Choice: More Non-Reform
By
Leonard Isenberg: What LAUSD says in terms of parent, teacher, and student input is belied by the reality of the clear legal language that again and again say the principal and superintendent maintain absolute control.
From Behind Bars to Law School
By
Bruce Reilly: I came to New Orleans knowing but a few criminal justice activists, legal professionals, and some friends of friends. It was good to have folks who knew I had spent twelve years locked in prison.
Los Ángeles 1% Maneuvers to Privatize Public Education
By
John Cromshow: Privatizing education has two goals: 1) increase the number of charter schools; and, 2) weaken the teachers’ union.
Student Activists Deserve Our Thanks
By
Randy Shaw: On this Thanksgiving week, the students risking physical harm and school discipline to demand greater social and economic fairness truly deserve the nation’s thanks.
Violence Goes to College
By
Vijay Prashad: The priorities of the campus are clear. An Assistant Professor earns an annual salary in the low $60,000 range; a Lieutenant in the campus safety department (the man who fired the pepper gas, for instance) brings home $110,000.
Why California State University Faculty Will Strike on November 17
By
Lillian Taiz: Tomorrow—November 17th—the faculty of this great university system will take the historic step of striking on two campuses—Cal State East Bay and Dominguez Hills.
Why Teachers Must Become Community Organizers and Justice Fighters
By
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.
The Port of Oakland Statement
By
Scott Prosterman: Our crappy education system isn’t even producing effective radicals these days. Where is Saul Alinsky when you need him? Has anyone read “Rules for Radicals” lately?
Ken Brown, El Camino College District, Trustee
By
Sharon Kyle: I want to press upon my friends in Los Angeles to vote for Ken Brown — Board of Trustees seat for El Camino Community College Board.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Recent Comments