Almost all of what you’ll read in the new, just off the press,  education issue of the Brooklyn-based newspaper, The Indypendent, (“a free newspaper for a free people”) contradicts the narrative of school failure and reform you read and hear in the press and media.

As a parent who sent my child to New York City public schools, as a former teacher myself, I’ve seen my share of bad teachers. Great, good, mediocre, and awful teachers exist in every school. The same range of job performance describes the lawyers, doctors, customer service representatives – you name it – I deal with on a daily basis.

So what explains this hysteria, and it is a hysteria, about bad teachers?

The House of Representatives has passed a $26 billion jobs bill, engineered by Democrats, that is aimed to save jobs of public employees, mainly teachers and help states pay for Medicaid health insurance. Funding will come from taxes on multinational corporations– and from slashing money for food stamps. Congressional Republicans lament that this is a “giveaway” to teachers unions.

A note on "Mean Bastards": This short piece, posted after the death of George Steinbrenner, has received a kind of confirmation in Ellen DeGeneres walking out on her five year contract worth tens of millions with "American Idol." I had criticized Simon Cowell (a former AI judge) along with Steinbrenner, Trump, etc.

President Obama’s speech to the Urban League about education July 29 didn’t cover any new ground, but there were some shifts worth noting. He tweaked his administration’s rhetorical stance towards teachers and teacher unions, adopting a less combative stance than his and Arne Duncan’s support for firing teachers in a “failing” Rhode Island school.

I admire Claudia Dreifus’s interviews with scientists in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, and particularly her attention to women in science, and I know of her honorable history in the left and feminism. So I befriended her on Facebook. There she publicized her book, with Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About It, to be published by Times Books/Henry Holt on August 3.

         All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard — even in the Seinfeld version — and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would seem paradoxical to be deep in grief over a man universally acknowledged to be a Mean Bastard.

The trial of the Decommissioners lasted three weeks, in which time the jury heard not only from the Decommissioners but also detailed evidence of war crimes committed in Palestine and testimony from EDO managing director Paul Hills, who faced questions about his company’s dealings with Israel. All the defendants were acquitted by unanimous jury decisions. One of the defendants, Chris Osmond, said: “It was the right verdict. Our action was because nobody else was willing to take action.

Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective, Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca (Oakland: PM Press, 2008) and Peter Kuper, A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Oaxaca (Oakland: PM Press, 2009).

On the 17th of January 2009, Israeli warplanes pounded the terrified inhabitants of the densely populated Gaza strip in over 50 air-strikes. It was the 22nd day of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military assault on Gaza that left an estimated 1400 dead, including over 300 children.

Unions Representing Workers in Canada, Mexico qnd U.S. Explore Merger:
Would Create International Union of One Million Metal Workers and Miners

     The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore uniting into one international union. The agreement to begin exploration of a merger was signed on June 21.

       Alan Dershowitz has suggested that to be effective Israeli propaganda should support 80 percent of what Israel does, and be critical of the other 20 percent. So I expected that Dershowitz would only approve 80% of the Israeli killings on the Gaza flotilla, while expressing some mild criticism regarding the IDF’s other victims. Silly me.