Category: Education

                        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.

                        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 hashtag #teacherroar.

                        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.

                     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 ideology.

With Jean Anyon’s death, the Left and education have lost a giant.

                        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.

Fast-food workers are striking today throughout the US. Tweets are flying with new hashtags announcing strike actions.

Review of Henry A. Giroux, America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth, Monthly Review Press, 2013.

     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.

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?

Liberals have taken way too long to understand that the bipartisan educational agenda, which started with the so-called “excellence” reforms in the 1990’s, has done harm.

I’d be heart-broken by the layoffs announced by the Chicago Public Schools, (CPS) even if my pal Xian Barrett (in the photo, talking teaching with me at the DC Save Our Schools demo last April) weren’t one of the folks given a pink slip.

The exchange between Herman Benson and Dan La Botz highlights one, if not the primary, issue that has to be resolved if we are to turn back the tidal wave of anti-union and anti-democratic policies that have transformed the nation’s social and political landscape.  I think both Herman and Dan would agree that we need a revived labor movement. But what will drive the revival? And what form should it take?

Diane Ravitch has been a powerful voice for US teachers against the Billionaire Boys Club, who have carried out a program of social engineering that has devastated our schools.  Ravitch is a friend of public education, a friend of the social movement trying to push back these terrible "deforms." This distinction is one Ravitch misses when she defends her personal pal, Randi Weingarten, who is coming under intense pressure for  supporting the Common Core,  a national curriculum that is gener

Most of the current literature on the international education crisis gives little to no big-picture context for planning a fight back. Given the parochial view of most popular education authors, many earnest, well-intentioned proposals for fight back are written within parameters the ruling class tolerates.

 In These Times describes reformers winning elections in two key teachers unions, Washington DC and Newark NJ.  While the change in the DC local shows members’ dissatisfaction, that’s nothing new in the local, which for many years has been riven by competing cliques and individuals vying for power.  In contrast, the caucus that provided the organizational backbone for the Read more ›

A reform caucus in the Newark Teachers Union (NTU) made remarkable gains in the union election that ended on Friday. Out of about 3,000 members eligible to vote, 1,200 NTU members cast their ballots.  (Sadly, that proportion is about par for US unions.) The New Visions candidate for President lost by only 9 votes to the long-time chief, Joe Del Grosso, who will now serve his 10th two-year term.

Hats off – again – to Chicago’s smart, courageous teachers and the union leadership they’ve re-elected, from the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), including Karen Lewis as Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president.

The union representing Greek secondary school teachers has asked for messages of support.  The Greek government has banned its strike and other public employee unions have come out in support of the teachers. Mary Compton’s newly-reconfigured website about teachers’ global resistance to neoliberalism’s destruction of public education has the information about the strike and how/where to send messages of support.  

     Mexican teachers, particularly in the south of the country, have joined a regional rebellion of rank-and-file teachers that erupted in violence in late April. In the state of Guerrero the offices of all three major political parties were vandalized and set afire to protest their support for the educational reform passed by congress and the states over the last five months. At the same time there have been marches and demonstrations in several other states, and there are plans afoot to strike indefinitely beginning on May 1.

Teachers at Garfield HS in Seattle, Washington are re-launching the MAP test boycott of the spring  test with a press conference at which they will announce important developments. Garfield  teachers are concerned that because evaluations are  directly tied to the spring version of the test, the district will not give the same leeway for their boycott this spring.