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One Student’s Quest To Reshape Schools

July 14, 2016 Catherine Gewertz, www.edweek.org ,
By Catherine Gewertz for Education Week - As Andrew Brennen crisscrosses the country listening to high school students, he is trying to build a huge wave of sound: the sound of students raising their voices to make school better. Brennen, 20, is on a national tour to engage 10,000 high school students in conversations designed to help them claim powerful roles in their education. The field director for the activist group Student Voice, Brennen has been catching buses and trains from city to city since February...

Save Our Schools: See You in DC July 8-9!

July 2, 2016 Anthony Cody, www.livingindialogue.com , ,
By Anthony Cody for Living In Dialogue - One week from today, on Friday, July 8, I will join thousands of activists from around the nation at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, to once again raise our voices for meaningful changes in our schools at a protest organized by the Save Our Schools Coalition. We will hear from Reverend Barber, from Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, Tanaisa Brown, Barbara Madeloni, Jtiu Brown and many more.

Thousands Of Schools Contaminated With Cancer & Birth Defect Causing PCBs

June 22, 2016 Kit O'Connell, www.mintpressnews.com , , ,
By Kit O'Connell for Mint Press News - AUSTIN, Texas — A toxic chemical that used to be prevalent in construction materials may still be hiding in the walls of thousands of American schools, and experts believe the EPA is doing too little to prevent it from poisoning a new generation of children. Polychlorinated biphenyls, a family of chemicals better known as PCBs, were commonly used in building materials until 1979, when they were finally banned due to the threat they pose to human health.

The Soweto Schoolchildren’s Revolt That Shook Apartheid

June 18, 2016 Baruch Hirson, www.roarmag.org , , , ,
By Baruch Hirson for ROAR Magazine - In this exclusive extract from Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Schoolchildren’s Revolt that Shook Apartheid, re-published this month by Zed Books (US/World), Baruch Hirson describes the socio-political and economic backdrop to the 1976 Soweto Uprising, which kicked off exactly forty years ago today. Tens of thousands of school children took part in the uprising that started off as a protest against the proposed introduction of compulsory tuition in Afrikaans

Teenagers Got Police To Remove Military Weaponry From Schools

May 31, 2016 Sarah Lazare, www.alternet.org , , ,
By Sarah Lazare for AlterNet - A coalition of Los Angeles high school students and grassroots organizers just accomplished the unthinkable. After nearly two years of sit-ins and protests, they forced the police department for the second-largest public school district in the United States to remove grenade launchers, M-16 rifles, a mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle and other military-grade weaponry from its arsenal. But the coalition did not stop there. Members took over a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board meeting in February to call for proof that the arms had been returned to the Department of Defense...

School Board Bans Climate Change-Denying Materials

May 22, 2016 Shasta Kearns Moore, www.portlandtribune.com , , ,
By Shasta Kearns Moore for the Portland Tribune. Portland, OR - In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating doubt of climate change and its causes in schools. “It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.” The resolution passed Tuesday evening calls for the school district to get rid of textbooks or other materials that cast doubt on whether climate change is occurring and that the activity of human beings is responsible.

Rogue Cops: Disturbing History Of Police In Schools

April 28, 2016 Mary Anne Henderson and Brian Platt, www.counterpunch.org , ,
By Mary Anne Henderson and Brian Platt for Counter Punch - Another week, another video of police abuse surfaces. This time thevideo shows San Antonio school resource officer Joshua Kehm body-slamming 12-year-old Rhodes Middle School student Janissa Valdez. Valdez was talking with another student, trying to resolve a verbal conflict between the two, when Kehm entered and attacked her. “Janissa! Janissa, you okay?” a student asked before exclaiming, “She landed on her face!”

Fighting For Play

April 27, 2016 Michelle Gunderson, www.livingindialogue.com , ,
By Michelle Gunderson for Living In Dialogue - The children in my first grade classroom play. There are no academic centers where a teacher rings a bell and children move from activity to activity. That might look like play, but it is not. We have body breaks where we sing and dance, but we do not call it play because it is not. We play – pure and simple – and it is self-selected, student-driven, and sustained for 60 minutes so that the play is deep and meaningful. Last week as I watched one of my students lost in play, washing one of our baby dolls, I was reminded how vital play is to a child’s sense of well-being, language and physical development, and sense of identity.

“Stop Oppressing Us”: Detroit Teachers Speak

April 12, 2016 Eliza A. Webb, www.truth-out.org , , ,
By Eliza A. Webb for Truthout - A new investigation by the US Attorney's Office has uncovered evidence of long-lasting corruption within the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) system and has charged 12 current and former Detroit principals with fabricating invoices, evading taxes and taking $1 million in bribes and kickbacks from the district's vendors. This newly unearthed scandal is wholly unsurprising to the teachers of Detroit, who have seen corruption and injustice dominate the city's education system since 1999, when state-appointed emergency managers were first given the power to override Detroit's elected school board.

Wars In Our Schools: An Ex-Army Ranger Finds New Mission

April 9, 2016 Rory Fanning, www.tomdispatch.com , ,
By Rory Fanning for TomDispatch - Early each New Year's Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and boots, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where the snowpack meets the shore and boot through a thick crust of lake ice, yelling and swearing as we dive into near-freezing water. It took me a while to begin to understand why I do this every year, or for that matter why for the last decade since I left the military I've continued to inflict other types of pain on myself with such unnerving regularity.

A Great National Sick-Out – It’s Past Time

March 20, 2016 Laura Flanders, http://www.lauraflanders.com , , ,
By Laura Flanders for the Laura Flanders Show. The teachers sent out pictures of something that’s had a hard time getting seen: the social cost of austerity.The teachers secured attention from at least one national candidate - Hillary Clinton who pointed out such conditions wouldn't be tolerated in more affluent places. Majority Republicans in Michigan's Legislature threatened new laws to make it easier to crack down on protesting workers. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, it’s worth reviewing how the Detroit schools got into such a fix. The system wasn't always broke. According to analysis by the Citizens Research Council, a Michigan based policy group, the Detroit schools were enjoying a surplus in the 1990s. Now, 41 cents of every dollar appropriated for students is being spent on servicing city debt.

How To Counter Recruitment And De-Militarize Schools

February 11, 2016 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org , ,
By David Swanson for Let's Try Democracy - U.S. military recruiters are teaching in public school classrooms, making presentations at school career days, coordinating with JROTC units in high schools and middle schools, volunteering as sports coaches and tutors and lunch buddies in high, middle, and elementary schools, showing up in humvees with $9,000 stereos, bringing fifth-graders to military bases for hands-on science instruction, and generally pursuing what they call "total market penetration" and "school ownership."

Chicago Teachers Union Takes Over Downtown In Protest

February 5, 2016 Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org , , , , ,
By Kevin Zeese for Popular Resistance. he Chicago Teachers Union organized a mass protest of thousands of teachers, students, parents and residents of Chicago. They took over downtown Chicago for the day. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) describes the reasons for the protest writing: The march came two days after Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s handpicked Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Forrest Claypool declared war on public school educators by threatening $100 million in classroom cuts—roughly 1,000 layoffs—and just one day after the CTU withdrew nearly $1 million from Bank of America. Sarah Chambers, one of 16 people arrested for sitting in at Bank of America, said, "Rahm has money for the banks but not for our students, When it’s reached a point where teachers are occupying banks to make their voices heard, it shows that we need an elected school board.”

Schools, Black Children, And Corporal Punishment

February 2, 2016 Dick Startz, www.huffingtonpost.com , , ,
By Dick Startz for The Huffington Post - As we recently celebrated Dr. King’s life, it is worth examining the difference in how our schools discipline black and white children. In public schools in the United States, black children are twice as likely as white children to be subject to corporal punishment. Figure 1 shows the comparison, derived from nationwide data reported by schools to the Office of Civil Rights, Department of Education. (All data is for the 2011-2012 school year, the latest year available.) The continuing disproportionate corporal punishment of black children is a reminder that some aspects of the “bad old days” are not fully behind us.

100,000 NYC School Children Face Airport-Style Security Every Day

January 14, 2016 Cecilia Reyes, www.propublica.org , , ,
By Cecilia Reyes for Pro Publica and WNYC - On the coldest morning New York City has seen this winter, a stream of teenage students hit a bottleneck at the front of a Brooklyn school building. They shed their jackets, gloves and belts, shivering as they wait to pass through a metal detector and send their backpacks through an x-ray machine. School safety agents stand nearby, poised to step in if the alarm bleats. It’s an everyday occurrence for more than 100,000 middle and high school students across the city. On this morning, as on every school day, senior Justin Feldeo prepares to be pulled aside for separate screening by a hand wand. Feldeo is studying to be a firefighter and the boots he wears for class trigger the metal detectors.
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