Organizing

Shaking Foundations

Virginia professors take on the state’s attempt to eliminate Social Foundations of Education” from required course work.”

Do Ask, Do Tell

Two Chicago educators question the premier teacher education accrediting agency’s removal of social justice and sexual orientation language from its standards.

Rethinking Agatha Christie

The strange and offensive history of Ten Little Indians” (Hint: They weren’t always called “Indians.”)

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Dressing Up

A principal deals with a student’s unusual request.

Walk the Line

A Los Angeles teacher paints an intimate self-portrait of what it was actually like on the picket line during one of the most important public sector strikes in recent years.

The Constant Testing of Black Brilliance

An educator reflects on how the education system has continually tested her Blackness from grade school through professional development, and argues that we need more Black spaces to nurture brilliance.

Ignoring Diversity, Undermining Equity

NCTQ, which claims to “provide an alternative national voice to existing teacher organizations and to build the case for a comprehensive reform agenda that would challenge the current structure and regulation of the profession,” was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000 and incorporated in 2001 as a policy response to a perception that colleges of education were not adequately preparing teachers. According to education historian and NCTQ critic Diane Ravitch, the conservative members of the Thomas B. Fordham foundation perceived teacher training as problematic due to an overemphasis on social justice and a lack of focus on basic academic skills and abilities. Thus, NCTQ was originally founded as an entity through which to encourage alternative certification and circumvent colleges of education. Indeed, early on, NCTQ was closely connected to ABCTE (American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence), which created a series of tests that potential teachers could pass in order to bypass teacher education programs altogether by paying $1,995.00.

In Philadelphia, Teacher Book Groups Are the Engines of Change

On a chilly day in the late fall of 2015, in the pews of the Old First Reformed United Church of Christ in the Old City Neighborhood of Philadelphia near the Delaware River, we sat, excited with anticipation, among nearly 200 participants at the second annual Philadelphia Caucus of Working Educators (WE) daylong convention. The nine members of our slate who would challenge existing union leadership in the upcoming election had just been announced and Ismael Jimenez, the nominee for vice president of high schools, took the mic:
We need to start shifting this paradigm. This paradigm that has us disengaged. Powerless. Beholden to interests that aren’t ours. They are treating us like objects. Things just happen to us. No longer can we sit in complacency. The victory that I’m talking about isn’t just a PFT [Philadelphia Federation of Teachers] election. This is a means to an end. And the end is justice.

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