Why are Chicago parents on a hunger strike to save a neighborhood school? Because after five years of fighting, they’ve run out of options...
The College Board has revised its guidelines for teaching Advanced Placement History, which has broad influence in high school history courses, to accommodate right-wing pressures. Among the changes: Manifest Destiny is given a more benign treatment and violence against Native Americans is downplayed.
For Wisconsin's schools, Scott Walker's new budget is a blueprint for abandoning public education. In Milwaukee, in addition to insufficient funding, the budget includes a "takeover" plan that increases privatization and decreases democratic control of the city's public schools.
In higher education, whether as affordable land-grant state colleges, tuition-free municipal universities, grants to children of the poor or need-blind admissions, access to learning was at least prized as a right, not a privilege. As tuition and administration costs soar, the number of low-paid adjuncts explodes and financial aid collapses, college funding shifts from the public purse to student debt. Wither democracy or plutocracy?
We share a national ideal that everyone should have the opportunity for prosperity and success. Reclaiming this vision for our children begins with ensuring that all children start school on equal footing.
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Not only have states been generally slow to restore the cuts to public school funding that they made during the 2007-2008 economic downturn, but there are often extreme disparities between the per pupil spending in wealthy school districts and low-income districts.
Physicians for Social Responsibility recently calculated that since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. wars have killed at least 1.3 million and quite possibly more than 2 million civilians. Their report chides U.S. political elites for attributing on-going violence in Afghanistan and Iraq to various types of internecine conflicts as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization caused by decades of military intervention.
Eighteen-year-old Evan Young was supposed to be the 2015 class valedictorian. But his principal prevented him from giving his graduation speech after learning he would announce he is gay.
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