Category: Education

In the past five years, we have witnessed a demonization of teachers unions that is close to achieving its goal: destruction of the most stable and potentially powerful defender of mass public education. Teacher unionism’s continued existence is imperiled — if what we define as "existence" is organizations having the legal capacity to bargain over any meaningful economic benefits and defend teachers’ rights to exercise professional judgment about what to teach and how to do it.

The New York Times front-page story extolling bonuses for “highly effective teachers” repeats claims about teacher quality and retention that are both highly inaccurate and widely-promoted, especially by those advancing “free market” policies in education. This piece marks a low in the NYT’s journalistic standards in reporting on education.

A powerful new video, “The truth behind Stand for Children,” tells a cautionary tale for the Left.   Even if you already understand how charter schools have become a vehicle for destruction of public education, take five minutes to watch this concise analysis of how “Stand for Children,” which began as a grassroots organization of parents fighting for increased school funding and reform,  was taken over by the most powerful educational lobby in the world, the Billionaire Boys Club.

     As part of his program to deal with America's economic catastrophe, economist Robert Reich has proposed a revival of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps.

[reprinted by permission from Inside Higher Ed]

“Bill O’Reilly has connected the dots to identify me as being behind the occupation,” said Frances Fox Piven. “I’m sorry to say that’s not true.”

The gutsy young people who are encamping on Wall Street, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, are probably doing more to save public education than anyone else.(Pace, Diane Ravitch). In pushing back on the economy, they are creating space for a meaningful discussion of what schools can and should do — and what they can’t. The mantra repeated daily in the media, by politicians from both parties, is that education can solve the nation’s economic problems.

Several thousand teachers and their supporters rallied in Washington July 30, for the SOS (Save Our Schools) march, a grassroots effort organized by an Oakland CA science teacher.

Anyone living in the United States today has, undoubtedly, been bludgeoned over the head with the key argument of those who don the false mantle of education reform, despite never having set foot in a classroom themselves: that the biggest obstacles standing in the way of education today are teachers and their unions.

Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) at one time had space for progressive ideas, (that’s where I earned my doctorate) but it was never a “liberal bastion.” True HGSE had space for critique of US society, but the culture and institutional structure were dominated by the very wealthy annoyed that their children had to be exposed to critiques of US society in order to get the Harvard credential to which they consider themselves entitled.