THE BECOMING RADICAL
EMPATHYEDUCATES!
the becoming radical
A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness
by
We Socialize Girls To Be Better at School But Set Them Up For Failure in the Real World
Credit: Shutterstock By Sarah Jane Glynn | Originally Published at Think Progress. April 30, 2014 2:43 PM The New York Times’s Upshot blog reported on Tuesday that the “behavior gap” (which includes a combination of cognitive and social skills) between boys and girls when they start kindergarten […]
APR 30
My Students Don’t Know How to Have a Conversation
By Paul Barnwell | The Atlantic . april 22, 2014 Recently I stood in front of my class, observing an all-too-familiar scene. Most of my students were covertly—or so they thought—pecking away at their smartphones under their desks, checking their Facebook feeds and texts. As I called […]
Does the NRA Invite Suicide?
Police barred the Guardian entry from the room in which the NRA held gun-themed activities for children. Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images Introductory Essay By Betsy L. Angert | Originally Published at EmpathyEducates. April 27, 2014 Surely, it will not happen to you. The telephone will not ring […]
Girls Do Better Than Boys in School at All Ages and Subjects, Study Finds
By Maggie Fox | Originally Published at NBCNews April 29, 2014 11:50 am It may come as no surprise to teachers, but girls do better than boys in school, a new study finds. What may be a surprise is that this holds true at all ages, in […]
APR 28
Separate and Unequal: The Charter School Pedestal the Public Can’t Reach
By Trymaine Lee | Originally Published at MSNBC News. April 25, 2014 06:53 AM—UPDATED April 25, 2014 12:07 PM There are two pathways for children at one of the largest school buildings in Harlem. One route, reserved for a select few, comes with new carpeting, bright paint […]
APR 27
A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools
Mary Ann Carlson with pupils at a charter school in Washington run by KIPP, an organization aided by the Walton foundation. | Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times By Motoko Rich | Originally Published at The New York Times. April 25, 2014 WASHINGTON — DC Prep operates […]
The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Left
(Reuters/Joshua Lott) By Gary Young | Originally Published at The Nation. April 23, 2014 At a panel titled “Grassroots Organizing” at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin in March, an audience member asked the all-white panel for its definition of “grassroots.” The conference had been […]
APR 26
Is There an Alternative to Accountability-Based, Corporate Education Reform?
By Paul L. Thomas, Ed.D. | Originally Published atThe Becoming Radical. August 20, 2013 and AlterNet. April 22, 2014 During three decades of accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing at the state level and another decade-plus of federal oversight of that accountability, the overwhelming evidence has […]
Token Outrage and “Oafish” Racists
The recent racism controversy over Donald Sterling prompted me to examine more on two Americas and ask, Where Is Outrage for Systemic Racism? To that question, I found a powerful and important response by Ta-Nehisi Coates: This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist. At the center of Coates’s piece is how token outrage allows the U.S. to simply ignore systemic racism: But style is the hero. Cliven Bu
Welcome to SC: A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude
This is my 53rd year of living in South Carolina, the totality of my life. This is my 31st year as an educator in SC—18 years as a high school English teacher and 13 years now in higher education. My teaching career, coincidentally, began the exact year SC officially stepped into the accountability/standards/testing arms race that grew out of the early 1980s. Over the past 30 years, SC has created
MAY 01
Revisiting James Baldwin’s “Black English”
The first five or six years of teaching high school English have blurred in my memory, but certain days, certain events, and certain students remain vivid. One day in those years a young woman in my tenth-grade course blurted out in utter exasperation, “When are we going to do English? All we do is read and write!” No, she was not being sarcastic. This student had been taught in her first nine yea
APR 30
More on Two Americas
Recently, I posed an argument about two Americas, personified by George W. Bush and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Over the past few days, the controversy surrounding Donald Sterling has offered even more evidence of two Americas. Let’s start with the unlikeliest of places—the ever-ineloquent Charles Barkley, who weighed into the Sterling situation by noting that Barkley (and other NBA players) is Black, bu
APR 29
Where Is Outrage for Systemic Racism?
Where is the outrage for this? The New Jim Crow Where is the outrage for this? Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment Incarceration Rates by Race and Ethnicity, 2010 Where is the outrage for this? Revealing New Truths About Our Nation’s Schools Where is the outrage for this? A Generation Later: What We’ve Learned about Zero Tolerance in Schools And thus …
APR 28
Teacher Quality: On Hyperbole and Anecdotes
In 2011, 3,764,698,318 retail prescriptions were filled in the U.S. If 0.01% of those prescriptions were filled incorrectly (and thus jeopardizing the health or even lives of patients, including children), 376,469 events could have constituted the danger of tolerating “bad” pharmacists. Every day, patients are also served by doctors and surgeons who completed their degrees at the bottom of their c