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Category Archives: Schools and Politics
Schools and Politics: Teacher Evaluation Reform
Summary: Top down federal or state mandates have a role, but may also suppress professionalism on the local level. The latter, not good. About the time I wrote my last post urging union and administration alike to find common ground … Continue reading
Schools and Politics: Bargained Success in the New Haven Schools
Summary: A reflection on Nicholas Kristof’s recent column “Uniting to Oust Failing Teachers”. He leaves out a critical element. In his column, “Uniting to Oust Failing Teachers”, as published in the Seattle Times February 18, 2012, the peripatetic Nicholas Kristof … Continue reading
Schools and Bureaucracy and Some Politics: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does — Part D
Summary: Referring back to last week’s post, a plan to provide study time in our school served as a promising example of the incremental changes needed to further reform in schools. The story is here continued. On what seemed to … Continue reading
Schools and Politics: Reflections on the Occupy Movement and Teachers
Intuitively the conditions of economic imbalance that have spawned the Occupy movement and the condition of school bureaucratic inertia have similarities worth taking a look at. Currently both systems, our schools and our economy as a whole, are dysfunctional, or … Continue reading
Schools and Politics: A Fall Strike Pondered
Summary: What are the issues involved in the Tacoma, Washington, teachers’ strike? Greetings those reading here. School has started, or has in most places, the most notable exception being communities where teachers have gone on strike. Tacoma, Washington, is one … Continue reading
Schools and Politics: Let Us Now Praise on Labor Day
Summary: Around Labor Day, a salute to teachers and their fellow travelers, and a review of the nature of teachers unions, professional or labor, within the current political context. Though past Labor Day, I am belatedly inspired to echo the … Continue reading
Posted in School Bureaucracy, Schools and Politics
Tagged teachers' unions, teaching, teaching culture
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Schools and Politics: Corollary to Labor, Capital, and the Public Good (5/30/11)
The long term historical assault on protections for the working man is corollary to the health of public schools and stems from the urge to aggrandize capital. This does not mean that our schools (or our health care) flounder solely … Continue reading
Posted in Schools and Politics
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Schools and Politics: Labor, Capital, and the Public Good
My daughter has given me for Christmas a history of the American labor movement by Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union. My reading of Dray has caused me to reflect on struggles within American politics and culture that … Continue reading
Posted in Schools and Politics
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