What do "social movement teachers unions" look like?
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What do "social movement teachers unions" look like?
One question I’m frequently asked is what “social movement teacher unionism” looks like and how to get there.
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Wealth and Power in the U.S Out of Whack
Growing Income Disparities ‘Danger to System,’ says Former Clinton Labor Secretary (A mixed review of Robert Reich’s documentary ‘Inequality for All’)
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Should we “play nice” with the NEA and AFT?
The teacher activist blogosphere has been buzzing about the perfidy of the AFT’s and NEA’s endorsements of teacher evaluation tied to students’ standardized test scores and a new national curriculum, the Common Core. Both policies are key to the neoliberal dream of a national, privatized system of public education that will synchronize educational outcomes with…
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Left Third Parties in 2013: The Wave Begins?
The 2013 municipal election contained mixed results for left third party advocates.
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Christie's coast to victory was not inevitable
It was clear from the start that teachers had an uphill battle explaining why NJ Governor Christie’s educational policies, his vicious bashing of teachers, were harmful to kids and the state. One of the most serious obstacles is that media are captive to neoliberal propagandists. Conveying a different message requires concentrated, savvy use of social…
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Queering Socialism: An Interview with Alan Sears
We’re at an interesting (and terrible) moment where we’re witnessing attacks on most every gain working people have made for at least the last half century. The curious exception to that has been the advance of marriage and civil rights for gay and lesbian couples in many U.S. states and core imperialist countries.
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Doug Ireland, 1946-2013
Doug Ireland, radical journalist, blogger, passionate human rights and queer[1] activist, and relentless scourge of the LGBT establishment, died in his East Village home on Oct. 26. Doug had lived with chronic pain for many years, suffering from diabetes, kidney disease, sciatica and the debilitating effects of childhood polio. In recent years he was so…
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An Open Letter to the Climate Justice Movement
[The following open letter to more than 60 environmental justice organizations is a revised version of a talk given at a conference on "The Political Economy of the Environment" held in Brooklyn, New York, on October 5, 2013, co-sponsored by the Union of Radical Political Economy and New Politics. It will appear in the Winter…
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Capitalism Gone Wild
Review of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013 This American life is a mess, argues George Packer in The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. It’s a nation fraying, with core institutions from government and finance to housing, jobs and education dysfunctional…
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Mediocrity in teacher education?
Bill Keller’s op/ed piece in the NY Times about the mediocrity in teacher education deserved a political rebuttal that responses in the “letters” section didn’t provide. My letter, rejected, slipped in my doctoral work at Harvard and my book on urban teaching, which in the past has allowed my radical critique to pass as…
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Socialism and Sports
The two great loves of my father’s life were the Green Bay Packers and golf. Every fall Sunday we worshipped at the altar of the Green and Gold. My brother and I learned, at an early age, that we could only talk during commercials and half time. Our Sunday routines created my love of armchair…
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Connecting the dots: The "new mindset" we confront
One of the most deceptive aspects of neoliberal reforms in education is that destructive policies often contain one element that is seductive for progressives who care about inequality in schools. When the Dems and Republicans rewrote federal aid to K-12 schools in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) many liberal researchers were dazzled by the…
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Wasting money on educating the masses and "fear of elitism"
When I speak to teachers and education activists about my research, I am often told that the vast, well-organized project I describe could not exist without our knowing about it and that what I am describing sounds like a conspiracy. No, it’s not a conspiracy because conspiracies are, by definition, secret.
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What can retired teachers do to help?
Welcome news: The strike last week of England’s two largest unions was highly successful, gaining strong favorable publicity on social media and rallies. (Mea culpa: I was corrected by a Scottish comrade about my use of “UK” – Scotland has an independent government and educational system. Wales didn’t strike because its government nudged a bit…
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Another International Labour Movement is Necessary
[New Politics readers will be interested in the following article by Dan Gallin, who advocates social justice unionism, international solidarity and the need for workers' movements that actually move.
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German Lessons
Passionately watching last week’s election returns* at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s office in New York, without ever having been to Germany or learned more than a half-dozen German words, was an unusual experience. It was easy enough to orient my sympathies — as an American socialist they stood with the Left Party.
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Jobs vs. the Environment
Is there a fundamental conflict between a healthy environment and a healthy economy?
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COIN of the Realm: Sprawling Police State Brings the Wars Home
Review of Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, ed. by Kristian Williams, William Munger and Lara Messersmith-Glavin (AK Press, 2013); and Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, by Matt Apuzzo & Adam Goldman (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2013).
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You Want MORE?
Fewer than two weeks before the US House of Representatives brought on the government shutdown, it voted (9/19/13) by a slim margin to cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, over the next 10 years. Now, $4 billion a year may not seem like much, given the enormous figures our…
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AFL-CIO Charts a New Course
[Originally posted on the Indypendent, Sept. 27, 2013]
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Far more than a struggle over pay and pensions: Why the Oct. 1/17 UK teacher strikes matter
Both teachers unions and headline-writers seem to agree that the NUT (National Union of Teachers) and NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers) joint strikes that start Tuesday 1 October are over pay and pensions. They’re wrong.
