Here's why UK teachers are striking
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Here's why UK teachers are striking
UK teacher Rob Price explains in this FB post why we should care about and support the upcoming joint strikes of the country’s two biggest teachers unions. (My post tomorrow will discuss why this is a strike over much more than pay and pensions.) You can tweet messages of support to @nutonline with the…
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Media, TFA, and the Vietnam War "body counts"
During the war in Vietnam, I heard Frank Bardacke (honored recently for his wonderful book on union democracy in the Farmworkers), give a short speech at a rally laying out how all three national TV networks and major newspapers had carried exactly the same analysis of a battle.
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Stalin, the Soviet science wars, and “junk science” selling marketizing of education
One of the most glaring contradictions in policies being foisted on public schools (charter schools are generally exempt from these regulations) is that research on which they are based is fundamentally flawed. Ethan Pollock’s examination of “Stalin and the Soviet science wars” (Princeton University Press, 2006) teases out the complex relationship between science and…
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AFL-CIO Convention Days 3 and 4: Inspiring Resolutions & Internal Tensions
[I blogged daily for The Indypendent from this week’s quadrennial AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. This is my third blog. For my coverage from Days 1 and 2 of the convention, click here and here.]
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Jean Anyon: Loss of a giant
With Jean Anyon’s death, the Left and education have lost a giant.
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The Brazilian Spring: Still Under Construction
Brazil went to the streets in June this year with crowds never before seen in the history of the country. There were young workers and students who were demonstrating for the first time, but also sectors of the middle class and union members as well as social movement and left party activists who protested about…
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We Oppose Both a U.S.-led Attack on Syria and the Brutal Regime of Bashar al–Assad
Pressured by the British Parliament's historic rejection of military action against Syria and by the great opposition of most of the American people to getting involved in yet another bloody war in the Middle East, President Obama has been forced to take his plan to attack Syria to Congress. At the moment, Congress appears to…
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Back to school, with New Politics
Starting this week, I’ll be blogging at NP every Wednesday, expanding the range of topics on which I write to include issues of teaching and learning, as well as sticking with topics that seem more “political,” like teachers unions, school reform, and labor.
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Roundtable on the Syrian Crisis
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy has posted an interesting symposium on Syria. It was mostly written before the August 21 chemical weapons attack and the resulting war threat from Washington. None of the symposium participants favors U.S. military action, but the symposium provides useful background on the Syrian uprising that helps us make sense…
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Flipping burgers and school reform
Fast-food workers are striking today throughout the US. Tweets are flying with new hashtags announcing strike actions.
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Egypt: The Revolution at the Crossroads
As I write, a horrible tragedy is unfolding in Egypt. The old order has reasserted itself with a vengeance. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that Egypt will ever again be what it was before 2011.
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Letter to Supporters
The following statement from the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists makes a powerful case for socialism from below in the context of the Egyptian coup, the massacres carried out by the military and their horrific impact on the nation's democratic upsurge. Like others, the Revolutionary Socialists is evolving its point of view, challenged as it is with…
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Dream Sequences: Marching on Washington, Fifty Years On
It is the age of Barack, the age of Trayvon; a time for imagining post-racial transcendence, a time for recognizing obdurate injustice. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington this month, as new generations surround the reflecting pool, we will ask whether we yet judge each other by the content of our…
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Giroux on the War on the Young
Review of Henry A. Giroux, America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth, Monthly Review Press, 2013.
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How (not) to push back on the power elite's destruction of public education
A former PR apparatchik in the US Dept. of Education (DOE) in Obama’s first term, Paul Cunningham, has penned a snarky attack on Diane Ravitch, the best known liberal opponent of the bipartisan “reforms” of public education that are destroying it.
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Fighting the Landlords from Stuy-Town to Detroit
Books reviewed: Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made (Dutton, 2013). Laura Gottesdiener, A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home (Zuccotti Park Press, 2013).
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Yes, We Can
We hoped that our book, Continental Crucible, would open up a discussion of the future of the North American Left and labor movement, a discussion that is urgent in the face of the relentless capitalist offensive of the last forty years.
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A (Tiny) Treatise on Human Nature
In the left-academic circles in which I travel, the March release of Vivek Chibber’s book-length critique of Subaltern Studies caused quite a stir. Chibber debated one of his antagonists, Partha Chatterjee, at a plenary session of the Historical Materialism conference in May, a confrontation which provided endless fodder for debates on FB and within the…
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Wild Socialism
Book Review of Martin Comack. Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-1921. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. 97pp. Paperback or e-book: $24.99
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Getting personal: An open letter to TFA recruits in Chicago
Dear New TFA recruits in Chicago, Can we talk about your teaching plans, as if you came to my office, as do lots of students and college grads thinking about becoming a teacher?
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White Racial Delusion
“There is not a Black America and a White America….there’s a United States of America.” So proclaimed Barack Obama, to wild applause, at the launching of his national and global celebrity in his instantly lauded 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address.
