Portside

An appeals court has decided that the School Board wrongly terminated more than 7,000 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. Those teachers were not given due process, and many teachers had the right to be rehired as jobs opened up in the first years after the storm, the court said in a unanimous opinion.

There is something about the Common Core standards and testing, about their demand for uniformity and standardization, that reeks of early twentieth century factory-line thinking. In the present climate, the Common Core standards and testing will become the driving force behind the creation of a test-based meritocracy.

Sharon died last week, eulogized by the very people he despised and turned into a shallow folk hero. The Ministry of Education compared him to Moses. In real life he was a very complex person, as complex as Israel. His personal history is interwoven with the history of Israel. His main legacy was catastrophic: scores of settlements which he implanted all over the West Bank – each of them a landmine which will have to be removed at great risk when the time comes.

As written, this bill does not protect the rights of racial minorities against discrimination at the polls. The North Carolina State Conference of Branches of the NAACP is not willing to accept any legislation which does not mandate that North Carolina is designated as a covered jurisdiction.

Poverty is not just a function of lack of adequate income. Providing income alone does not eliminate poverty.

There’s nothing like realizing that our regulators and our corporations rely on semi-educated guesses, dependence on corporate testing of chemical compounds, and squeaking by on the lucky chance to make one feel safer.