Krugman: The Fear Economy
is the title of this op ed for Friday's New York Times. The fear is economic. The fear is not having a job. It is made worse by the cutting off of extended unemployment benefits as of Saturday. It is exacerbated because, as Krugman points out, employment generally involves a power relationship: you have a boss, who tells you what to do, and if you refuse, you may be fired. This doesn’t have to be
A conversation with Andy Shallal on education
Andy Shallal is an artist, a restaurant owner, a businessman, and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Washington DC. I have known Andy slightly for a number of years, and briefly worked for him in the bookstores at his Busboys & Poets restaurants until I decided to return to classroom teaching. Readers of Daily Kos have already been introduced to Andy and his positions
Public Education Under Siege
In an important postrevolutionary essay on education, eighteenth-century journalist Samuel Harrison Smith wrote that the free play of intelligence was central to a democracy, and that individual intellectual growth was intimately connected to broad-scale intellectual development to the "general diffusion of knowledge" across the republic. As we consider what the reform initiatives might
12-25-13 teacherken at Daily Kos: One important Christmas ritual
Daily Kos: One important Christmas ritual: Wendell Potter on Obamacarein an interesting piece at Reader Supported News dated yesterday and titled Obamacare: What's in It for You? Plenty, So Take Time to Find Out. He notes a number of things that most Americans do not seem to know, in large part because of how the media has covered the roll-out, starting with this: the average increased in premium