"…I thought about my moral obligation to tap into this injustice, this birthplace of anger and rage, to expose it and validate students’ experiences. But if I unleashed this rage and pain, I knew I had the parallel moral obligation to teach students how to navigate a society that discriminates against them and to teach them how others have dealt with these injustices. So I designed curriculum to address the needs of these black youth, and also the needs of all my students who feel singled out because of a defining feature that turns them into a target…."

- Linda Christensen, The Danger of a Single Story

RE: voucher program

"

Everyone who supports public education believes that only effective teachers should be in the classroom; ineffective teachers who can’t improve should lose their jobs. Accomplishing this requires a sound method for evaluating teachers and a fair process for firing. In the current system, school principals have the responsibility to assess teachers’ performance and dismiss ineffective ones. Making sure that principals do this well is the district superintendent’s responsibility (not the teachers’). The system works if administrators at all levels and school boards do their jobs.

Even with these assumptions stated, a productive discussion can’t begin without first addressing two questions: what accounts for variations in student achievement, and what is the overall state of K-12 education in the United States?

….

While ed reformers push a top-down technocratic procedure, the programs for assessing teacher performance that actually work take a radically different approach. They’re based on two assumptions: administrators and teachers should design and implement a program together, and it should incorporate “professional development” (showing teachers how to improve). One such program—“Peer Assistance and Review” (PAR)—is being used successfully in seven school districts around the country: in Toledo since 1981, Cincinnati since 1985, Rochester since 1987, Minneapolis since 1997, San Juan since 2000, Montgomery County since 2001, and Syracuse since 2005.

"

- http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=504

adventuresinlearning:

(via Angela Glover Blackwell on the American Dream | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com)

Angela Glover Blackwell has spent her adult life advocating practical ways to fulfill America’s promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all. Now, with our middle class struggling, poverty rising, and inequality growing, the founder and chief executive officer of PolicyLink, an influential research center, finds reasons for hope in the face of these hard realities.

On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers and Blackwell discuss what fuels her optimism.

“I’m not discouraged, and I wouldn’t even dream of giving up, because we’re at a moment right now where I think we have more possibility than I’ve seen in my adult lifetime,” Blackwell tells Moyers. “Part of what I’ve been feeling is that all the issues are finally on the table… So many people who are being left behind are now in places where they have voice, and influence, and they’re forcing their way into the conversation.”

“America doesn’t want to talk about race,” Blackwell states, but says the future “is a five-year-old Latina girl. It is a seven-year-old black boy. What happens to them will determine what America looks like.”

“And so this country, as a democracy, really cannot expect to continue to be proud on the world stage, competitive in the global economy, or having a democracy it can put forward as working in a multi-racial society if we don’t invest in the people who are the future.”

"When students feel ownership of their school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together, they demonstrate phenomenal feats of growth and achievement. Give them some power, sit back, and watch the show!"

-

Will the Real Students Please Stand Up? « Cooperative Catalyst

A quote from Nikhil Goyal a junior at Syosset High School in Syosset, N.Y.

(via cooperativecatalyst)

(via adventuresinlearning)

‘you see, i have this little policy about honesty and ass-kicking; that is, if you ask for it, you’re going to have it.’

adventuresinlearning:

Noam Chomsky - The Purpose of Education (by lwf)

"Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory. Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, ‘Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.’ Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, ‘Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit… You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.’ Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it."

-

 Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher/ sociologist/ psychoanalyst (via rethinkcapitalism)

Absolutely. If you’ve had the privilege of an education, you’d best make damn good use of it — educate your comrades.

(via ideasandopinions)

(via warofpositionist-deactivated201)