Teachers, teachers unions and the “Common Core”: This is a test
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Teachers, teachers unions and the “Common Core”: This is a test
1. More rigorous academic standards required by the new national curriculum, Common Core Curriculum Standards (CCSS) and its high-tech national test PARCC controlled by Pearson will alter employment for US students by making them “college and career ready.” 2. The Common Core Curriculum Standards are a “state-led” initiative.
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Beyond the ER
The February 6 issue of The New York Review of Books carried Dr. Arnold Relman’s account of his own hospitalization at Massachusetts General Hospital (and elsewhere) under the title “On Breaking One’s Neck.” In a subsequent article, I said that the appearance of Dr. Arnold Relman as a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, accompanied by…
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NEA feels the heat
It’s official. Colorado teachers and parents have launched a state-wide caucus, RAVE, that aims to transform both the AFT and NEA affiliates in their state. To my knowledge theirs is the first caucus that includes teachers in both AFT and NEA as well as parent activists. They’ve also reached out to student groups who…
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Jogging our Memory
Review of Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story By Natalie Byfield Temple University Press, 2014
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"Teacher jail" in Los Angeles now "jail teacher" in NYC
Intimidation of US teachers has become truly chilling. Denver has a "do not hire" list on which any school employee can be placed by any supervising administrator. Los Angeles, like New York City, can assign a school employee to what LA teachers have referred to as "teacher jail," and NYC the "rubber room." School employees…
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A Rejoinder to Greco on Chomsky
Anthony Greco, in his book Chomsky’s Challenge to American Power, charged Noam Chomsky with too often failing to meet “minimal standards of intellectual honesty” (p. 229). To prove his point he provided instances of things Chomsky wrote over the course of some fifty years that were inaccurate.
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Noam Chomsky on American Power: A Reply to Shalom
I conclude my book, Chomsky’s Challenge to American Power (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), by describing Noam Chomsky as a contradictory figure.
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Race, racism and teachers unions: Making the connections
This past week I participated in a “Don’t tread on educators” workshop for NYC teachers who are fighting against having been given unsatisfactory ratings by supervisors. They shared personal stories of being singled out for punishment after years of satisfactory service and of their union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) that will not…
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The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band 1970-1973
[Introduction by Naomi Weisstein: My paper, “The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band 1970-1973: A Slapstick Demolition of Male Supremacy” was presented at the end of March at the Boston University Conference “A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and early 1970s.” This landmark conference drew a multiplicity of papers, rigorously retrieving a suppressed…
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Two important precedents in building social movement teachers unions
One week, two precedents.
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Reply to Davenport on Climate Change
In a posting on March 4, 2014 Nicholas Davenport criticizes me for “a misunderstanding of activists’ arguments against carbon trading and, more fundamentally, a lack of attention to the dynamic of reform and revolution.”
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Adolph Reed's premature burial of the U.S. Left
Back in the day, (a cliché, I know) Adolph Reed wrote a waspish piece in the Village Voice, “Liberals, I Do Despise,” which made something of a splash and was hard to refute — this when the Voice was widely read, not a freebie and well-worth paying for — as he attacked a coterie of…
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The local and global in capitalism's project: A snapshot today
One can’t know from old modes of media, now state or corporate-controlled in every country I know of, how extensive resistance is to the destruction of systems of public education created in the past century, through struggles of working people to improve their children’s lives. (The best chronicle of these struggles is
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Lemisch's On Active Service Now Available Online
Starring: Samuel Eliot Morison, Oscar Handlin, Richard Hofstadter, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, Daniel Boorstin (including HUAC testimony), Allen Nevins, William Hardy McNeill, Eric Hoffer, John Blum, Stanley Elkins, and others. With 305 fact-filled footnotes!
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Looking Back at the Labor Party: An Interview with Mark Dudzic
In the 1990s, hundreds of U.S. labor activists came together to form the Labor Party. The initiative was the brainchild of Tony Mazzocchi, the passionate leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (which, after two mergers, is today part of the United Steelworkers). Mazzocchi held true to the dream of an independent…
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Greco on Chomsky
Anthony F. Greco. Chomsky’s Challenge to American Power. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013. Hardcover $69.95, paper $29.95, e-book $14.99.
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Militancy, social justice, and democracy: Teachers unions need them all
It’s hard for people who have never been on strike to understand how transformative the experience can be, especially if the job is one’s life work. All of sudden, power relations are reversed. Workers are calling the shots about what they will and will not do. Life in school is so routinized…
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Social movement teacher unionism in the NEA? In the South? As sure as there is BBQ
We’re seeing social movement teacher unionism arise in the South, in NEA, in Organize2020, a hardy band of activists who intend to transform their NEA state affiliate, North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE). I was invited to speak at their first state-wide conference but when we were iced
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Letter in support of Chicago teachers boycotting the Illinois standardized test
The following letter, to which I have added my name, is being circulated by education faculty. Dozens of education faculty have already signed and teachers at another Chicago school, with support of parents, have now decided to boycott the test. School administrators have threatened retaliation against the teachers, and support from outside the city is…
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Evaluating teachers and principals: What’s the role of teachers unions?
(This blog was adapted from my remarks in a remarkable forum on Feb. 8 in NYC that critiqued current policies evaluating principals and teachers and examined possible solutions. The panel was videotaped and will be uploaded shortly. I’ll give readers the URL when that occurs.)
