Progressive Media Advocates
Anthony Samad: This new public discourse around the “school to prison pipeline” is not new at all. It was a predictable outcome of social control planning where the prison industrial complex started forecasting how many prison beds would be needed based on fourth grade test scores two decades ago.
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.”
Jasmyne Cannick: Why it’s going to take more than a college degree and a clean criminal record for Shameicka to get a job today.
Leonard Isenberg: Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali tried the impossible task of trying to reconcile her optimism with her equally honest assessment that there was not only no money to fix public education, but even less in the future.
Leonard Isenberg: George Carlin puts it rather succinctly when he says, “They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.”
Leonard Isenberg: If UTLA was not in bed with LAUSD, they would aggregate the exploding number of cases against teachers for dismissal where LAUSD has violated these teachers’ California Ed.
Andrea Nill: The report concludes, “In the No DREAMers Left Behind scenario, 2.1 million undocumented immigrants would become legalized and generate approximately $3.6 trillion” over a 40-year period.
Dick Price: To get a handle on the damage California’s current approach to incarceration is having on its citizens, consider this: In a recent 23-year period, California erected 23 prisons—one a year, each costing roughly $100 million dollars annually to operate, with both Democratic and Republican governors occupying the statehouse—at the same time that it added just one campus to its vaunted university system, UC Merced.
This whole alarming privatization process is accelerating across the country and here in California, propelled by corporate interests who are writing state legislation and school board policies to facilitate their takeover of public schools.
Sikivu Hutchinson: Black Skeptics Los Angeles spearheaded its First in the Family Humanist Scholarship initiative, which focuses on providing resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless and LGBTQ youth who will be the first in their families to go to college.
Carl Matthes: Despite the much-heralded 2008 success of Prop 8 in California to stop same-sex marriage, that vote, and it’s subsequent ramifications, provided not only 18,000 lesbian and gay couples with legal marriages, but the accelerant for the Prop 8 case currently being decided by SCOTUS.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
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