Portside

Reader Comments: Capitalism in our Future?; Bosses - Like Dictators - and now one is our President?; More on School Charters; Trump's Made in America or Working Class Internationalism?; Looking at Radical History - Black Panther Party, Paul Robeson, Peekskill, Dashiel Hammett, IWW; UN and Banning of Nuclear Weapons or a Return to "Duck Under Your Desk?"; South Africa, Israel; Rasmea Odeh; Resources; Announcements; and more...

Former NJ Charter teacher Rann Miller explains why high turnover helps strengthen the charter agenda.

A moratorium on charter schools draws a bright line between a political regime intent on serving the privileged and a Democratic party that seeks to uphold labor and civil rights.

While it is doubtful that US President-elect Donald Trump ever read George Orwell's 1984, Trump's cabinet choices appear to come right out of the doublethink that ruled Orwell's dystopian society. In Orwell's book, the Ministry of Plenty rationed essentials while the Ministry of Truth manufactured falsehoods. Trump's choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is perhaps the most extreme of Trump's cabinet nominees.

Betsy and Dick DeVos come from a family with a $5.1 billion net worth. Mother Jones called the DeVos clan "the new Kochs."

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Martin Walsh of Boston have correctly noted that charter schools are draining off enormous sums of money from already-underfunded public schools. But an even greater loss may be the draining-off of parents who no longer have a stake in advocating for the schools from which they’ve chosen to depart. Who will stand up for the children at the schools they've left behind?