|Lois Weiner February 26, 2014|
(This blog was adapted from my remarks in a remarkable forum on Feb. 8 in NYC that critiqued current policies evaluating principals and teachers and examined possible solutions. The panel was videotaped and will be uploaded shortly. I’ll give readers the URL when that occurs.)
|Dan La Botz February 22, 2014|
This article was written for Mexican Labor News and Analysis and therefore emphasizes NAFTA’s impact on Mexico.
The Three Amigos summit meeting of President Barack Obama of the United States, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, and President Stephen Harper of Canada just held in Mexico amounted to little more than a reaffirmation of the neoliberal agenda represented by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that took effect twenty years ago.
|Lois Weiner February 19, 2014|
There’s no single recipe for building the social movement we need to make public education what it should be, to nurture and protect democracy and kids’ well-being. But we can see essential ingredients coming together in many different places.
|Dan La Botz February 17, 2014|
Four Argentine oil workers were convicted last December 12 of having killed a policeman in the midst of a strike and a demonstration demanding the release of a jailed union member. The four—Ramón Cortez, José Rosale, Franco Padilla, and Hugo González—were sentenced to life in prison, while six other defendants were each sentenced to five years in prison on charges of coercion.
|Dan La Botz February 13, 2014|
Steve Kindred, an irrepressible American radical— student and antiwar activist, socialist, and labor organizer—died of cancer on December 9, 2013 in New York City at the age of 69.
|Lois Weiner February 12, 2014|
In California a legal battle is being fought that has political implications for teachers everywhere. It’s being cast - incorrectly - as a confrontation between teachers’ jobs and students’ rights.
|Dan La Botz February 11, 2014|
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor and publisher of Jacobin, has written an article for Al Jazeera America that, while ostensibly a defense of the great American songwriter and folk singer Pete Seeger, is actually an apologia for the American Communist Party.
|Lois Weiner February 5, 2014|
Is the push for preschool something we should celebrate? Yes and no.
|Dan La Botz January 30, 2014|
Susan Weissman. Victor Serge: A Political Biography. New York: Verso, 2013. Notes. Biographical glossary. Bibliography. Index. 452 pages.
From its opening pages Susan Weissman’s Victor Serge: A Political Biography thrusts us into the life of this remarkable revolutionary and writer as he plunges into the Russian Revolution with all of its contradictions. Weissman has written a wonderful intellectual and, above all, political life of Serge that focuses on his experience in the Bolshevik Party and then in the Left Opposition, explaining how he attempted to understand and express through his journalism, essays, histories, memoir, novels and poems the meaning of it all as the workers’ revolution first faltered and was then transformed into the Stalinist regime. Weissman’s Victor Serge takes up virtually all of the major incidents, issues, and personalities of the revolution during the 1920s and 1930s, giving particular attention to Serge’s coincidences and differences with Leon Trotsky.
|Lois Weiner January 29, 2014|
It’s hard to overstate how frightened US teachers are in many schools and districts. We know from research that many teachers in schools now chose this career because they love kids and/or their subject matter. Some of activists in social justice causes but many have never taken an interest in what they’ve viewed as “politics,” remote from their work. These teachers aren’t prepared for the ferocity of the attack they’ve experienced, and teachers unions have been so weakened, legally and politically, that teachers