Portside

Reader's Comments - Assata Shakur, Israel, Korea, Thoreau's Radicalism, Thoreau's Plea for John Brown, Cuba, Benghazi, Spanish town solves unemployment, Viet Nam, more. Announcements - Conference on the Veterans' Peace Movement - New York - May 18; Greek American Radicals - screening - New York - May 25; Radical Teacher on line; Symphony for Palestine; The Future of the Left - Conversation on Socialist Unity - New York - June 5; NY Times full page ad to close Guantanamo

Teachers at one of Chicago's largest charter- school networks - run by the United Neighborhood Organization - have voted to organize into a union. Public school teacher, responds to question - what is behind charter schools. Idea of a motivated community of adults - parents, teachers, administrators - creating a unique school from the ground up, designed to serve that particular community - are not charter schools. AFT calls for moratorium on Common Core testing.

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.

This much is clear: the teachers and staff at the Sandy Hook Elementary School reacted with astonishing courage to the unthinkable, the terrifying intrusion of a man intent on murdering them and their students. With no thought of their own safety, they defended their children. Everyone of them is a hero, those who died and those who survived....All at Sandy Hook Elementary School displayed courage. They did their jobs.