EDUCATION

Charter school promoters are skilled at promoting disinformation about charter schools and public schools; they have decades of experience.

It was a scandal of the highest caliber. On November 23, the Senate of the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa was practically bullied to reverse an earlier decision that called for the academic boycott of Israel. While the story may seem relevant in South Africa’s political and academic contexts, in reality, it exemplifies the nature of a brewing war between supporters of Palestinian rights and Israeli interests, worldwide.
In fact, the UCT scandal began much earlier.

Guest Post by PARESH HATE It has been more than a month that students in JNU have been protesting against the new IHA Hostel Manual. The fight had initially begun against the exorbitant fee hikes, introduction of curfew timings and dress codes, lack of reservations and deprivation points in the manual, and the undemocratic manner … Continue reading Why the JNU #FeesMustFall is a Mass Intersectional Movement: Paresh Hate →

The word was the ember and the forest was my life.
― Jimmy Santiago Baca, “Coming into Language,” March 3, 2014

We’re at the Flip ‘n Chicken sharing food, swapping stories about El Paso, and philosophizing about what it means to be an educator in the Early Childhood program at Oregon Coast Community College.
His looks are a cross between Lee Trevino (golfer from El Paso) and my buddy the muralist from El Paso, Mario Colin.

Despite the vehement objections of thousands of teachers, parents, college professors, public school advocates, state officials, and teachers’ unions, in late 2017 the State University of New York (SUNY) Board of Trustee’s charter school committee voted 4 to 1 to unilaterally and illegally lower training and preparation standards for teachers employed at privately-operated charter schools approved by SUNY (about 165 across the state). State officials called SUNY’s irresponsible decision to put more unqualified teachers in classrooms “an insult to the teaching profession.”

After nearly 30 years of hype surrounding charter schools, a large number of charter schools across the country continue to perform poorly. This is especially disturbing given the fact that non-profit and for-profit charter schools routinely cherry-pick their students, have high teacher turnover rates, are run by unelected individuals, oppose unions, over-pay administrators, and siphon enormous sums of money from public schools. Further, while academic failure is one of the main reasons charter schools close regularly, financial malfeasance is the number one reason charter schools close.

We the undersigned, are alumni of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. We are appalled at the complete lack of sensitivity shown by the JNU administration and concerned government officials to the issues raised by the students on the recent proposal of irrational 999% hike in their fee structure. We also strongly condemn the inappropriate … Continue reading Solidarity Statement by TISS Alumni with Students of JNU →

Workers produce all the wealth of society. Unions have been around for generations and exist to protect the rights of workers.
Currently, 90%—93% of privately operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools across the country have no teacher unions, whereas about 90% of public school teachers are unionized.

There seems to be no limit to Qataris tossing around their wealth. This tiny kingdom with 2.6 million inhabitants is full of ridiculously lavish gold-plated palaces, most of them built with terrible taste. It is overflowing with Lamborghini racing cars and Rolls Royce limousines, and now, even with ludicrously wasteful air-conditioned sidewalks (cold air blows from below, into the 35C heat).
Downtown Doha

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint that teachers hear that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issues here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be boring. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate New Flesh that is too wired to concentrate and the confining concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems.