DAVID GELLES and CLAIRE CAIN MILLERDEC. 25, 2017.   NASHVILLE — Tim Vogus, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s business school, was stoking the debate in his classroom one day this fall, asking first-year M.B.A. students about one of the most successful, and controversial, companies of the day. On the syllabus was Uber, a case study in both sensational business success and rampant corporate misbehavior. “A toxic culture might be obvious when you think about Uber,” Professor Vogus said. “But I’m an old person. What is this whole ‘bro’ thing?” There were some awkward chuckles, and then hands started popping up. Read More …

Kalyn Belsha, December 19, 2017, Chicago Reporter When Chicago Public Schools announced plans to close their neighborhood elementary school in March 2013, Lettrice Sanders and her children protested the proposal together. Sanders, the president of the local school council at Emmet on the city’s West Side, became a familiar face in the media.  “My momma, when she talked on the news, she was fierce,” her 16-year-old daughter, Brittany, recalls. Lettrice and her husband, Kenneth Sanders, didn’t finish high school. She wouldn’t let the closures disrupt their children’s education. But Emmet and 48 other elementary schools closed in an unprecedented decision for Chicago Read More …

Dawson Barrett,  December 27, 2017, Truthout   These teenage rebels have the right idea, but they’ll need a lot more help in the New Year From the Women’s March to the airport occupations, the Trump era very quickly established itself as one of widespread protest and dissent. Despite having little political capital or economic power, teenagers, as they have been throughout US history, were on the front lines of much of it. On a wide range of issues, high schoolers across the United States opposed the Trump agenda this year, both directly and in principle. At the end of a Read More …

Ellen Brown, December 26, 2017, The Web of Debt Blog The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery – ownership of humans as a property right – were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War. It read in part: Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. Slaves had to be housed, fed and Read More …

ERICA L. GREEN, DEC. 12, 2017, The New York Times.   WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans began work Tuesday on an extensive rewrite of the law that governs the nation’s system of higher education, seeking to dismantle landmark Obama administration regulations designed to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges and to repay the loans of those who earned worthless degrees from scam universities. But in its systematic effort to erase President Barack Obama’s fingerprints from higher education, the measure before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce could undermine bedrock elements that have guided university education for decades. One provision Read More …

Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, December 8, 2017,  Huffington Post. Brown University announced Thursday that it will no longer provide loans, only grants, in an effort to help students graduate with less debt. Starting in the fall of 2018, all students who receive financial aid from the Ivy League university will receive scholarships, which they don’t have to pay back. The goal is to make the university more affordable and accessible, particularly to middle-income families, said Brown spokesman Brian Clark. The students who will most likely benefit are those who previously may not have qualified for the university’s grants to low-income students from Read More …

Ulrich Boser and Abel McDaniels, November 16, 2017, Center for American Progress   Under the tax plan currently before Congress, billionaires like U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos would save hundreds of millions of dollars. A new analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund suggests that the money used to give DeVos and her family just one of these tax breaks would be enough to pay more than 6,000 teachers. Similarly, the money used to give President Donald Trump and his family an enormous tax break would be enough to pay more than 20,000 teachers. CAPAF’s analysis underscores Read More …

The Nation, November 20-27, 2017   What does it mean for parents and their children to be “consumers” of education? The worst fate for a conservative is to be dependent on the state. The worst fate for a liberal is to be without opportunity. These two competing ideologies have informed a century of tinkering within American education. Conservatives have had occasional success chipping away at government spending, as President Trump seems poised to do. But it’s liberals like Success Academy founder and chief executive Eva Moskowitz who have managed a more inspired achievement: They’ve redefined the goals of educational policy. Read More …

The Network for Public Education releases Charters and Consequences, a 48 page report that is the result of investigations, visits and interviews over the course of a year. From San Diego, California to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, NPE learned about the consequences of loosely regulated charter policy and the effects that charters are having on democratically controlled, true public schools. We have concluded that this unregulated, taxpayer-funded business model of education is a fiscal and educational disaster. Whatever the benefits it offers to the few, the overall negative consequences must be addressed. Read Charters and Consequenceshere and cut and paste this link to share it with Read More …

Richard Ohmann, November 13, 2017, Inside Higher Education. Activists from my cohort will soon mark 50th anniversaries of events that shook the world in 1968. We will recall, retell, reinterpret, revalue, reflect upon and draw lessons from those famous events, as well as from less famous ones that nonetheless changed alignments and life scripts. One such event for me and other scholars in language and literature was a 1968 uprising within the Modern Language Association. It derailed the stately procedures of that learned society, infused it with rebellious politics and enraged or inspired 30,000 members. For me and others in Read More …