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Teach for America’s Mission in Chicago

Kenzo Shibata Jacobin Magazine
TFA is in crisis mode. With the organization losing true believers within its rank-and-file, it doubled down on recruitment and doubled down on marketing. It’s just a shame that none of this has anything to do with improving teaching and learning.

Teach

Signe Wilkinson amuniversal

Book Review: Union City Blues

Richard D. Kahlenberg Washington Monthly, July-August 2013
How a poor New Jersey town and its teacher's unions turned around its schools.

Tidbits - May 30, 2013

Portside
Reader Comments: Terrorism, Drones, Afghanistan, Benghazi, Obama terrorism speech, Bradley Manning, Chicago Schools, Climate Change, Letter to "The Nation" from a Young Radical, Math, Malvina Reynolds, Africa, Asia, Hope Foye, Race & Biology, Peabody Coal, Bittorrent... Announcements - Gerald Horne keynote's Chicago Human Rights Awards - Jun 15; Film Premier - Camp Kinderland "Commie Camp" - New York - Jun 28; Jerry Tucker Memorial Conference, St. Louis - Oct 11-13

Chicago School Closings-Largest in US History

Diane Ravitch, Mark Naison, Karen Lewis, Randi Weingarten
Never in U.S. history has a local school board - or any other board, appointed or elected - chosen to close 49 public schools. School closings are part and parcel of a strategy for remaking the American metropolis and will further cement economic inequality. "Today is a day of mourning for the children of Chicago. Their education has been hijacked by an unrepresentative, unelected corporate school board. Closing schools is not an education plan."

Chicago Teachers Speak Out Against School Closings - CTU President Karen Lewis Statement on CPS School Closings

CTU Communications Chicago Teachers Union
Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.

labor

Kansas Casts Eye On Teachers Unions

Brad Cooper The Kansas City Star
The battle over teachers unions has marched its way across the country. Ohio. Michigan. Wisconsin. Idaho. And now it’s in Kansas, greeted by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his conservative allies in the Legislature.

If This Is The Deal, Philly Teachers Should Strike

Will Bunch Philadelphia Daily News
Here come the contract demands that the Philadelphia School District would like to cram down the throat of the city's unionized school teachers. The so-called City of Brotherly Love is on the brink of setting a new standard in squeezing middle- class workers to death. It's not like we haven't seen this story before: Working men and women asked to take a sizable pay cut...and work longer hours...and pay more for shrinking benefits.
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