In studying urban teacher preparation (the hat I wear professionally when I’m not thinking about teacher unionism), I examine how school practices and organization influence teachers and students.  To understand what goes on inside classrooms we have to look at the welter of powerful influences within schools and outside their walls.  Blaming “teacher quality” f

Ghana, known for its stability and economic prosperity in the last 50 years, is praised as a model African state. Despite their rise to a middle income country, Ghana is struggling to deal with the rise of Kayayo’s, a destitute working class who go unacknowledged by policy makers. This is the story of an American living in a Kayayo town.

Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Haymarket, April 2014, $15 paperback.

When you think of ghost stories, you may recall Henry James, Hamlet, or Banquo. Maybe you smell a camp fire, the story going around, the threat of the flame as you extend your arm and that impaled marshmallow over the heat. Or maybe you sense those dying embers, the cool of night taking its grip.

The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which was founded in 1989 as the hope of the left, celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on May 5 amidst expressions of disappointment and disillusion. The hope that the PRD would become a left political party capable of winning the presidency and a majority in the legislature and changing the face of Mexico has not been fulfilled.

The salad days.  Too cold or hot or wet for much of anything this time of year, and rereading E. P.

            This is “Teacher Appreciation Week.”  Should we mark the occasion? How? Why?

            Union Power’s sweep of the election for union officers in United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) signals a seismic shift in power relations in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Review of Jason Schulman (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg — Her Life and Legacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 214 pp.

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.

Americans’ profound cynicism about Washington finds full expression in the wildly popular House of Cards, the Netflix series created by Beau Willimon and based on a novel by Michael Dobbs in which Francis J. “Frank” Underwood (Kevin Spacey), will stop at nothing—including murder—to achieve his political ambitions.

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 his wife, Dr.

Save the earth by buying a Prius? That seems to be the takeaway message from this year’s Earth Day New York taking place on April 22. Earth Day events in the city will be sponsored by – Who would have guessed? – Toyota.