Radical Teacher

Bryan Conlon, February 21, 2018, The South Lawn So you’re going to high school and have decided that you can’t abide the notion of your classmates getting gunned down by yet another perpetrator of domestic violence. You want to walk out of your classes in protest, be it on 3/14 or 4/20, but you haven’t really done anything like this before. Worse, you live somewhere that has Confederate battle flags flying near the Interstate and there’s not many adults you can trust to help you organize a walkout at your school. Don’t worry, I am here to help guide you Read More …

Sheridan Aguirre and Bruna Bouhid, United We Dream, February 22, 2018,United We Dream On March 24th, immigrant youth will march in solidarity with the courageous survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and students across the country who are calling on Congress to protect the lives of young people and communities by enacting stricter gun control laws. Immigrant youth will organize marches at Pompano Beach High School (Pompano Beach, FL), Woodrow Wilson High School (Washington, D.C.), and Central Washington University (Ellensburg, WA) with more to come. Camila Duarte, high school student and immigrant youth leader at United Read More …

Richard Luscombe, February 21, 2018, The Guardian Student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting confronted Florida’s lawmakers on Wednesday to demand gun control reforms, as thousands of teenagers walked out of lessons in solidarity at schools across the state. About 100 students from the Parkland school travelled 450 miles to the state capital of Tallahassee to spend the morning meeting with Republican and Democratic party legislators, and the Florida governor Rick Scott, in small groups. “Some heard us loud and clear, others did not,” Spencer Blum, a Stoneman Douglas junior, said of the meetings, which took place exactly one Read More …

Rebecca Stoner TAMPA, FLA.—In a fluorescent lit classroom with handmade posters covering one wall, approximately 15 high school students are chanting the words of black revolutionary Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and we must support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” With some embarrassed giggling, they recite it once, twice, three times, led by their visiting speaker, Pamela Gomez of the Hillsborough Community Protection Coalition, an alliance of local progressive groups. These students are some of the 40-odd members Read More …

Kim Janssen, February 16, 2018, Chicago Tribune Within the last month, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been heckled on out-of-town campuses on the West Coast and in the Midwest about his plans for a new police academy. Now it looks as if he’ll add an East Coast Ivy League academy into the mix. A group of 35 students and community group members at Harvard University have signed an open letter protesting Emanuel’s forthcoming Feb. 20 onstage conversation at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, complaining that the event “erases how destructive Emanuel’s policies have been to Black and Brown residents of Chicago and to the City Read More …

Bill Ayers, Crystal Laura, Rick Ayers, February 6, 2018, Praxis Center Public schools are plagued by gangs and fighting, assault and battery, drug dealing, and other criminal behavior, including, in extreme instances, actual shoot-outs between students. All of these hard realities demand an active and alert police presence to maintain safety, order, and discipline. Schools must be safe havens for all kids, as well as for all school personnel. The good kids who want to learn and feel secure must be shielded from the actions of a minority of bad kids who get no discipline at home and have no Read More …

Alex Carp, February 7, 2018, New York Review of Books According to the surviving records, the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with the rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island (the estate, in a stroke of historical irony, was named Whitehall). The scholarship’s first recipient went on to found Dartmouth, and a later grantee co-founded the College of New Jersey, known today as Princeton. Georgetown’s founders, prohibited by the rules of their faith from charging students tuition, planned Read More …

ELIZABETH A. HARRIS, The New York Times, JAN. 30, 2018   Columbia University announced on Tuesday that it would not bargain with its graduate students who voted to unionize more than a year ago. The case will now wind its way to a federal appeals court. In addition to studying, graduate students do much of the teaching of undergraduates at many universities, and the question of whether they can unionize has seesawed back and forth for years. The National Labor Relations Board established the right during the Clinton administration in a case that involved graduate students from New York University. A few years later, that Read More …

NEMONA HARTOCOLLIS, The New York Times, FEB. 1, 2018   Religious colleges would be able to bar openly same-sex relationships without fear of repercussions. Religious student groups could block people who do not share their faith from becoming members. Controversial speakers would have more leverage when they want to appear at colleges. A 590-page higher-education bill working its way through Congress is a wish list for a wide range of people, groups and colleges saying that their First Amendment rights — freedom of speech, religion or assembly — are being trampled. Many of them are religious, right-leaning or both, and the Republicans behind the bill Read More …

Jacob Sugarman, February 3, 2018, Alternet Just eight percent of American high school seniors can identify the cause of the Civil War; less than a third (32 percent) know which amendment abolished slavery in the U.S.; and fewer than half (46 percent) know that the “Middle Passage” refers to the harrowing voyage across the Atlantic undertaken by Africans kidnapped for the slave trade. These are only a few of the more unnerving findings from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, which concludes that in classrooms across the country, the subject of slavery is as mistaught as it is misunderstood. Drawing Read More …