Category Archives: politics

Scapegoat Season

politics, teaching Leave a comment

Pamela Segal and Molly Mee: Don’t blame teachers for looking out for safety of themselves, children | COMMENTARY (Capital Gazette) I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pinpoint an exact moment when the fight to give all American children a good education became so intractably perverse, but the broader movement of neoliberal Democrats towards big business’ vision of American education was certainly one of the key shifts that made the struggle monumentally more difficult for the rest of us. From the edubusiness ties…

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To Slaughter

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High schools nationwide ask athletes to sign coronavirus waivers in case they die (New York Daily News via MSN)Wisconsin teachers unions urge online-only start (WIFR) Several years ago, I was put in the uncomfortable position of having one of my students at the start of a semester die before the semester’s end. This would have been a serious problem under even the best of circumstances, but the college I was teaching this class at didn’t even tell me of the student’s passing; I only learned…

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Teachers Are Not Your Canaries

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If You Weren’t Afraid to Send Your Kids Back to School, DeVos’ Disastrous Interview Might Change That (Rolling Stone)‘Scared for my life,’ but needing a salary: Teachers weigh risks as COVID-19 looms (USA Today via MSN) In researching the history of education in America for my next book, I’m constantly struck by how so many of the battles being fought today are similar to ones being fought decades, or even a century, ago. From big corporations trying to force their ideas of “appropriate subject material”…

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Agonizing

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Wisconsin Breaks Single-Day COVID-19 Case Record (Patch via Yahoo! News)‘A Nightmare’: Georgia Tech Faculty Push Back Against In-Person Reopening Plans (NPR) I’ve always been a very passionate person, and one of the advantages of working as a teacher is that my job allows me to channel my passions in very productive ways. I care very deeply about improving the lives of other people, and my work allows me to do that improvement in a very hands-on way, something that lets me get immediate feedback on…

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Every Day, in Every Way

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My generation was supposed to be the “short attention span” generation, at least according to many of the adults around me when I was younger. Their thinking went that since we grew up with MTV just always there in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to focus on anything for longer than four minutes or so. The rise of social media and smartphone-toting adolescents led to its own wave of ballyhooing about how 140-character tweets would lead to a newer generation of young people being…

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