Belabored Podcast #87: Class War in the Classroom
Megan Erickson joins us to discuss her new book, Class War: The Privatization of Childhood, and how education can’t solve inequality, but can become less unequal.
Winter 2024
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Classroom Saints and Fiends
Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars shows that the failed ideas underlying today’s ed-reform crusade are as old as public education itself.
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This August, as I look over names of my incoming prekindergarten and kindergarten students, my attention is divided. I’m also focused on Ferguson. At an assembly on August 14 in Washington, D.C.’s Malcolm X Park, I joined the hundreds gathered …
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It was an ad on a subway train that first gave me the idea to become a teacher. In March of 2003, my senior year of college, I was riding along listening to my MP3 player when I looked up and saw an advertisement for New York City Teaching Fellows—a black background with stark white lettering: “How many lives did your last spreadsheet change?” The job seemed like a challenge, and that was what I was looking for.
“Empowerment” Against Democracy: Tinseltown and the Teachers’ Unions
“You know those mothers who lift one-ton trucks off their babies?” says Jamie Fitzpatrick, a working-class mom (played Maggie Gyllenhall), in a confrontation with a corrupt union rep in Daniel Barnz’s edu-drama, Won’t Back Down. “They’re nothing compared to me.” …
Chicago Teachers on Strike
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For the last decade and more, a generation of self-proclaimed “ed reformers” has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools. Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money…
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Who would believe that Albert Shanker, the late, controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers, was one of the original backers of the charter school concept, publicizing the name and idea in his weekly “Where We Stand” column of …
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It’s been a tough year to be a teacher, especially a unionized one. Popular opinion holds that unions protect bad teachers at the cost of poor kids’ education. If only we teachers would stop being lazy and complacent, American students …
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Cathie Black and the Education Business
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