THE BECOMING RADICAL
EMPATHYEDUCATES!
the becoming radical
A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness
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Obama Administration Sends Mixed Messages on Teachers and Testing
President Obama and 2014 National Teacher of the Year finalists applaud Sean McComb, second from right, a high school English teacher from Maryland, as the 2014 National Teacher of the Year during an event at the White House. | Photograph Credit/Susan Walsh/AP By Ross Brenneman | Originally […]
MAY 07
Mayor Stirs Summer Of Discontent
By Laura S. Washington | Chicago Sun Times. May 3, 2014 5:48PM It’s Rahm Emanuel’s hot mess. Crime is out of control, the summer is close at hand. The mayor faces heated discontent from unions, education activists and parents, particularly black folks. A year ago, Emanuel and […]
Charter Schools Fail: New Reports Call Their ‘Magic’ Into Question
Kendra Herber teaches at New Choices Community School, which the state is suing to close.| Mark Lyons for The New York Times By Jeff Bryant | Originally Published at The Education Opportunity Network. May 7, 2014 When members of the U.S. House of Representatives consider, beginning today, […]
MAY 06
Karen Lewis Public Address: ‘It’s About The Money’ – City Club Chicago
On behalf of the members and staff of the Chicago Teachers Union, I want to thank you for inviting me to the City Club again. I am always honored and pleased to stand before you. One of my fondest memories of growing up in Chicago was when […]
CTU’s Karen Lewis Promises 2015 City Election Will be ‘Contentious’
By Ted Cox | Originally Published at DNAinfo Chicago. May 5, 2014 RIVER NORTH — Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis threatened Monday to throw another round of labor unrest into the midst of next year’s municipal elections, specifically targeting Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “Maybe it’s time we […]
MAY 05
Consumed by the Digital Divide
Photograph: Echo/Getty Images/Cultura RF By Paul L. Thomas, Ed.D. | Originally Published at The Becoming Radical. May 5, 2014 The term “digital divide” is commonly used in education as a subset of the “achievement gap”—representing the inequity between impoverished and affluent students. Both terms, however, tend to […]
MAY 03
Can Big Data Transform Social Justice?
Tracking police stops and use of force will allow researchers to analyze police behavior across the country, says Phillip Goff | Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images By Phillip Atiba Goff | Originally Published at Cable News Network [CNN]. Updated May 2, 2014 1:08 PM EDT Editor’s note: Phillip […]
Once Again, NAEP? Nope: “states and schools have lied about the rigor of their courses”
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. “Fire and Ice,” Robert Frost While it appears I was right about Teacher Appreciation Week 2014, I was a tad bit off about the source of the Zombie Apocalypse or Armageddon: The world will not end because of PISA score rankings, but because of stagnant NAEP scores by high school students. In fact, the U.S. Department of Education has just rele
MAY 07
PISA Brainwashing: Measure, Rank, Repeat
When Mary Catherine Bradshaw, a teacher since 1984 in Nashville, TN, announced her retirement from public schools, Bradshaw pointed her finger at one major reason, standardized testing: [S]he says standardized testing is the reason…. Testing, she said, has taken away from instructional time and taken the joy out of learning. Much has changed, she said, since she took her first job as a teacher at
MAY 06
If This Is Teacher Appreciation, I’m Glad It Is Only a Week
Talk back, speak up, be heard. Bill Ayers, To Teach. This is not the time for the teacher of any language to follow the line of least resistance, to teach without the fullest possible knowledge of the implications of his medium. LaBrant, L. (1947, January). Research in language. Elementary English, 24(1), 86-94. The first full week in May 2014 is a swift punch in the gut of teachers across the U
MAY 05
Consumed by the Digital Divide
The term “digital divide” is commonly used in education as a subset of the “achievement gap”—representing the inequity between impoverished and affluent students. Both terms, however, tend to keep the focus on observable or measurable outcomes, and thus, distract attention away from the inequity of opportunity that is likely the foundational source of those outcomes. Currently, South Carolina appe
MAY 04
Celebrities, Thank You, But…
My formative years, thanks to my mother, included George Carlin, The Firesign Theater, and Richard Pryor. I am convinced a powerful line from Carlin to Kurt Vonnegut remains the most important foundation of who I am outside of the people directly in my life. So I am offering here first my indebtedness to comedians, including my much more recent affinity for Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman, and Louis