THE BECOMING RADICAL
EMPATHYEDUCATES!
the becoming radical
A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness
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What You Need To Know About Charter Schools
Parents, pundits and politicians, did you get what you expected? If you thought you would get the biggest bang for the buck by pouring taxpayer dollars into charter schools and devoting yourself to public school disinvestment might it be time for a reassessment? After years of being […]
JUL 01
Black and Hispanic Kindergartners Are Disproportionately in High-Poverty Schools
By Elaine Weiss and Emma García | Originally Published at Economic Policy Institute. June 25, 2014 Growing up black or Hispanic in the United States today means high odds of living in concentrated poverty: in neighborhoods in which at least 40 percent of the residents are poor. […]
JUN 30
Study: How Much Education Does It Take to Get a Job? Depends on Your Race
Photograph; Members of the University of California, Merced, Class of 2009 listen as first lady Michelle Obama delivers the commencement speech on May 16, 2009. | David Paul Morris/Getty Images By Erin C.J. Robertson | Originally Published at The Root. June 26, 2014 12:01 PM Six years […]
Attack on “Balanced Literacy” Is Attack on Professional Teachers, Research
The allusion in Robert Pondiscio’s Why Johnny won’t learn to read accomplishes something different than intended. Pondiscio’s uninformed swipe at balanced literacy actually reveals that, once again, ideology trumps teacher professionalism and literacy research. The reading wars are about almost everything except reading, but the most important lesson from this newest version of the same old thing
JUL 02
Schneider’s Ten Reform Claims: A Reader
Jack Schneider’s Ten Reform Claims That Teachers Should Know How to Challenge provides a powerful framework for educators to mobilize our much needed roles as teachers for the wider public. I want here to use his ten claims as a basis for providing support for anticipating and then challenging the flawed claims and policies coming from the reform movement, primarily driven by political leadership
JUL 01
Welcome to the Oligarchy: The U.S. Needs a New Mythology
An oligarchy exists when power rests with a very few. The U.S. was founded as a rejection of the sort of oligarchy in which royalty (the accident of birth) determined power—although that movement was driven mostly by a potential privileged class that sought ways in which they could become the elite with power. In 2014, the U.S. is but another sort of oligarchy, the logical and inevitable developme
JUN 27
Loss: A Dog’s Life
I was listening to sports talk radio, an interview with Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, who characterized an athlete’s career as “a dog’s life,” meaning that career is short. And this spoke to me in the wake of having just lost our first family dog, Hershey, a chocolate lab we had for about 14 years. On the Sunday night just after the U.S. World Cup match with Portugal, Hershey began to bar
Who Are We? We Are the Resistance
Diane Ravitch’s post about the debate over the Gates moratorium includes a comment from John Thompson that deserves close attention: In a note to me, John Thompson pointed ou