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Criminalizing Kids: The Overlooked Reason for Failing Schools
The nation’s dropout rate reached crisis levels in 2009, and test scores posted by its poorest public schools were also grim. Only 70 percent of first-year students entering America’s high schools were...
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Calling the Shots in Public Education: Parents, Politicians, and Educators Clash
The gap between calls for parental engagement in education and institutional realities is wide. Educators say they value parent participation, but by that they often mean a junior partner role in which...
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Hired Guns on Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reform
For Barkan’s other writing on the self-proclaimed “education reform movement,” click here, here, and here. If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications...
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Chicago Teachers on Strike
Update (9/10): read Bill Barclay’s background on the strike here. Update (9/12): watch Dissent contributor and editorial board member Joanne Barkan discuss the strike on Al Jazeera English. After...
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“Empowerment” Against Democracy: Tinseltown and the Teachers’ Unions
“You know those mothers who lift one-ton trucks off their babies?” says Jamie Fitzpatrick, a working-class mom (played Maggie Gyllenhall), in a confrontation with a corrupt union rep in Daniel Barnz’s...
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How Many Lives Did Your Last Spreadsheet Change?
It was an ad on a subway train that first gave me the idea to become a teacher. In March of 2003, my senior year of college, I was riding along listening to my MP3 player when I looked up and saw an...
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Teachers, Education Reform, and Mexico’s Left
Mexican leftists have flocked to support teachers’ unions in their protests against proposed education reforms. But by overlooking the unions’ undemocratic features and lack of popular support, the...
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Where the Promise of Preschool Ends
This August, as I look over names of my incoming prekindergarten and kindergarten students, my attention is divided. I’m also focused on Ferguson. At an assembly on August 14 in Washington, D.C.’s...
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Class Wars
The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein Doubleday, 2014, 368 pp. The crusade—now more than a decade old—to remake K–12 public education in the image of a...
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Belabored Podcast #87: Class War in the Classroom
Megan Erickson joins us to discuss her new book, Class War: The Privatization of Childhood, and how education can’t solve inequality, but can become less unequal.Continue Reading…
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