Who’s Behind the Money?
While names like Rockefeller, Ford, Annenberg, and Carnegie traditionally have dominated foundation-funded education reform, in recent years a new group of foundations has emerged — Gates, Walton, and Broad, to […]
Capitalism
Books: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid…
Books:
It’s Still the Economy, Stupid…
Dirty Oil and Shovel-Ready Jobs
High school students learn about the conflict over the pipeline by participating in a role play.
Got Coal?
Students play a game promoted by the coal industry, then dig beneath the surface to look at the realities of mountaintop removal mining.
Coal at the Movies
Video resources for the classroom, plus links to activist websites.
Review: Our Dignity Can Defeat Anyone
By Julie Treick O’Neill A review of the film Maquilapolis [City of Factories]
Kid Nation
CBS goes overboard with this painful exploitation of children.
Raising Money, Raising Consciousness
A writer and mother sifts through the fund-raising business and discovers that products that educate students and consumers and reward workers.
‘Narrow and Unlovely’
Before the floodwaters receded in New Orleans, conservative education reformers rushed in selling a market-based future.
Living Algebra, Living Wage
Eighth graders finally get what they ask for: an algebra lesson for the real world.”
We’re Not Blind. Just Follow the Dollar Sign
Chicago’s renaissance” could mean dark age for city’s public schools.”
Katrina’s Lessons
It wasn’t just the hurricane that devastated the Gulf; it was also a slower, more preventable surge of racism and poverty.
Film: Inspiration From Mexico’s Rank and File
Film: Granito de Arena (Grain of Sand) by director: Jill Friedberg, Corrugated Films, 2005, DVD. 60 min.
The Tsunami and Other Disasters
The Dec. 26 tsunami swept away the lives of more than 200,000 people and ravaged the livelihoods of millions more. Throughout the world teachers and students discussed the tsunami and […]
The Gates Foundation and Small Schools
The Gates’ $735 million have made them key players in small school reform.
Racial Justice Is Not a Choice
High-stakes tests have not only failed to achieve racial equality in schooling, they’ve also made it worse for students of color.
The Green New Deal and Our Schools
So often, the climate crisis is presented in frightening, threatening terms: rising seas, superstorms, raging wildfires, unlivable temperatures, species extinction, disappearing glaciers, dying coral, climate refugees. These are real. But the paradox is that this dystopian possibility is forcing us to imagine an entirely different kind of society. Schools have a central role to play in devising new alternatives and equipping young people to bring those alternatives to life. This is the work we’ve been assigned.
Time to Get Off the Testing Train
While high-profile tests like the SAT are problematic, Karp argues that we need to end the routine standardized tests that plague students and teachers.
Tax the Rich, Fight Climate Change
The latest installment of our Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms column looks to a piece of very good news that national media missed following the 2018 midterm elections. By a margin of almost two-to-one, tens of thousands of Portland, Oregon, voters approved an imaginative clean energy initiative that offers a model for the rest of the country — at the ballot box, but also in our classrooms.
Teaching Social Activism in Prison
A Connecticut educator who taught English to incarcerated young men for 20 years describes what happened when she introduced her students to the Canadian “Leap Manifesto.”
Who Is Allowed to Teach Spanish in Our Public Schools?
The director of a world language teacher preparation program argues for an end to the edTPA because it bars native Spanish speakers from public school classrooms.
Teach the Fossil Fuel Industry — Our Students’ Enemy
“Climate justice” education means a lot of things. But one key aspect is that we involve students in probing the social and economic roots of the crisis.
Fighting Manufactured Chaos in Puerto Rico’s Public Schools
Union activists have been tirelessly organizing with communities, recognizing that these are the same stories of communities across the United States. The fight will go on, even as disaster capitalism on steroids wants to destroy the public education system.
LeBron’s School Should Be Every School Public, Fully Funded, and with Arms Around the Community
There are few public schools receiving as much attention these days as LeBron James’ I Promise School in Akron, Ohio — and it’s because it’s just that: a public school.
Sorry Not Sorry
A high school teacher uses the #MeToo movement and students’ own experiences with apologies to interrogate the government’s 1993 apology to Native Hawaiians for the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i.