Portside

Parents, students, and teachers all over the country have joined the revolt to liberate our kids from a test-obsessed education system. As the number of government-mandated tests multiplies, anger is mounting over wasted school hours, “teaching to the test,” a shrinking focus on the arts, demoralized students, and perceptions that teachers are being unjustly blamed for deeply rooted socioeconomic problems.

Benn stood by his principles, even when they were damaging to his career and his party’s electoral ambitions. “Charming, persuasive and sometimes deeply frustrating,” is how former British Home Secretary David Blunkett described him to The Independent newspaper. “[But] what you would learn from Tony Benn was to think for yourself.”

In the years since the destruction of the occupations, the critique of inequality has only broadened and deepened in the U.S. Occupy should claim credit for getting it on the map, while political iterations old and new have been keeping it there. Today, the fight against inequality is taking greater institutional shape, and seemingly exerting more leverage, in places inspired by Occupy but moving beyond its initial tactics.

Hoopsters honor Debs; Pacifica exec exed; Methodists measure up; St Pat's sans Guinness; Reclaiming digital privacy

This month Latinos will make up 39% of most populous US state, but group still struggles to convert numbers into results.

As regulators look to restart two reactors in southern Japan, workers at crippled Daiichi plant talk of dangers, low pay.

Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

Of 3,200 children's books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

The well-intended regulations don’t do enough to protect students who are easy prey for for-profit universities.

[This is] a paper presented as an argument for a position. It is not presented as a final position. It is, instead, inspired by the content of the February Left Strategies web discussion on the labor movement. This paper does not try to present the ideal tactics or all elements of strategy. It does, however, attempt to identify--for purposes of discussion--issues and concepts for consideration in the development of a full-blown left labor strategy. Feedback is welcomed.