Randy Shaw: As corporate interests spend billions attacking teachers unions, the real obstacles to a quality public education—poverty, overcrowded classes, and physically rundown schools—are ignored.
The School Reform Credo
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Mark Naison: We must also unleash the genius of the business world into the system by subcontracting test development and evaluation to corporations with the resources to do these well and have all school employees wages and salaries targeted to performance the way virtually all business do.
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.
The Chicago Teachers and Their Students’ Test Scores
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Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: No standardized test can possibly penetrate or measure this domain, and the attempt to apply such a ruler only reveals the ignorance of those who pretend to know better.
Assessing Charter Schools: Follow the Money
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Mark Naison: Here are common sense criteria to judge charter schools intent to educate or to undermine public schools
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
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.
Battle Corporate Schools Locally to Win Nationally
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Mark Naison: The first step is to join the discussions about how public education is being destroyed wherever it takes place.
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.
America’s War on Teachers
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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.
Top 10 Most Read Led by Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement
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Ed Rampell’s introduction to our series on the “Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement” was LA Progressive’s 10 most read articles for the week running from January 14 to 21st.
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.
Can Labor Confront Obama Over Jobs?
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Shamus Cooke: Hefty splits in the labor movement have already emerged on whether to support Obama’s reelection, based on his complete lack of action on creating jobs combined with his false promises in the 2008 election.
Profiteering and Union-Busting Repackaged as School Reform
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David Love: But the larger picture here is that corporate education reform is big business. And the rightwing, plutocratic agenda – of school privatization, government austerity measures and deunionization – clashes with the needs of poor, working class, and disproportionately black and brown public school students.
Billionaires Unite! (Against Public Education and Teachers)
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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.
Unions Are WRONG to Refuse to Build the Mosque
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Linda Milazzo: Adding cultural and religious bias, logistic sensitivity and unfounded fear to the existing union stereotypes of over-coddled and over-paid, affords union detractors greater ability to incite anti-union sentiment with new pejoratives like hyper-sensitive, hysterical, illogical and emotionally weak.
Are Teachers and Democrats Headed for Divorce?
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Shamus Cooke: The Democrats continue on the road to corporate-inspired charter schools, using the tried and true method of “stronger teacher evaluations” to undermine “underperforming” schools and teachers — thus opening the door wide to private charter schools with their non-union workforce.
LA Progressive Articles — 11 July to 17 July, 2010
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Articles by Sylvia Moore, Sikivu Hutchinson, Sherwood Ross, Tom Degan, Sharon Kyle, Ivan Eland, David Swanson, David Love, Seth Hoy, Rev. Irene Monroe, Robert Reich, Michelle Waslin, Tina Dupuy, Tracy Emblem, Anthony Samad, Randy Shaw, Michael Sigman, Joseph Palermo, Andrea Nill, Tom Jacobs, Paul Hogarth, Georgianne Nienaber, Mario Solis-Marich, Michaelangelo Price, Ruth Rosen, Linda Milazzo, Berry Craig, and Robert Illes,
When Teachers Unions Back War Escalations
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David Swanson: There is nothing altruistic in the idea of peace activists helping workers and the unemployed here at home. That’s how you build a movement for any political end, and that’s how you keep our young people from becoming cannon fodder.
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.
LA Progressive Articles: March 14-20, 2010
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Articles by Carl Bloice, Randy Shaw. Ivan Eland, Shamus Cooke, Carl Bloice, Ivan Eland, Rev. Irene Monroe, Robert Reich, Randy Shaw, Tracy Emblem, Michael Sigman:, Georgianne Nienaber, Tom Hayden, Sharon Kyle, Joseph Palermo, Berry Craig
Why Teachers Unions Matter
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Shamus Cooke: The anti-teacher hysteria looks diverse on the surface, but underneath, this public controversy seeks to dislodge teachers unions: the right-wing trashes teachers’ unions outright, while the “liberal” media takes a more subtle, sophisticated approach, blaming the state of public education on “bad teachers” who must be fired and replaced.
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.
Teachers Union Stands with Students for Obama
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The student movement meets the new labor movement in the classroom. “How do we make democracy stronger?” community college instructor Salvador Sanchez posed to the room crowded with more students than chairs. By the end of the day, all the students stood loudly chanting “Yes, we can!” as Sanchez (pictured here) writes their paper assignment [...]
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