Portside

Teachers at Chicago’s Urban Prep Academies voted to form a union—then a whole bunch of them got fired…

Because their traditional allies from the Democratic Party have obsessively embraced corporate-motivated innovations, teacher unions seem paralyzed, unable to respond with a new strategy. They criticize the overuse of standardized tests, but they keep electing Democrats to office who, once elected, more often than not join the corporate attack on education.

Agustin Morales was fired from his job as a Massachusetts public school teacher after being elected president of his union and after he participated in collective protest against an element of education reform. Here is the story of how community groups, parents and other teacher union activists came together to support him and help him win his job back.

Civilians need to understand-- the biggest problem with the destruction of tenure is not that a handful of teachers will lose their jobs, but that entire buildings full of teachers will lose the freedom to do their jobs well.

More than two-thirds of states quickly adopted Common Core in 2010, but four years later, the standards seem to have become, among other things, a proxy for whatever in education people are unhappy with.

Adapted from a longer piece in the current issue of New Politics (see link below). Fighting corporate education reform is less about restoring the old system to its former glory than building a just one for the first time.

Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.