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By John Thompson. Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase (1965) is the teachers’ and students’ Catch-22 (1961). She captures the fecklessness of bureaucracies, especially those damaged by a culture of powerlessness. She also illuminates the best single antidote to the situational ethics that …

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By Paul Horton. An important new study, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood by Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson, casts doubt on the current policy push to starve neighborhood public schools and fund charter schools that are not connected to …

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By Michelle Gunderson. My friend who is a janitor in the Chicago Public Schools told me that he warned his daughters to only use the bathrooms at school if they have to. He said, “I know how impossible it is to get our schools clean right now. It just can’t be done with the cutbacks.” Can you imagine telling …

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A Response to Marc Tucker’s Response to Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody on Fixing Our National Accountability System By Yong Zhao. I was very impressed with Marc Tucker’s indictment of the test-based accountability system that has been in place for over a decade: The test-based accountability system now …

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By Stephen Krashen Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) is enthusiastic about the Common Core because he feels that there are some basic principles that students simply need to know: Everybody needs to learn “a little bit of physics, chemistry, mathematics and you got to learn some evolution. …

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By Sara Lahm. Is there a crack forming in the anti-child world we have been subjecting our children to for far too long? I ask this question on the heels of Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s announcement that, effective immediately, preschoolers, kindergarteners, and first graders …

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By Michelle Gunderson. We have a saying in the testing resistance movement – don’t feed the beast, starve the data monster. When parents opt their children out of testing they are taking a strong stance against having their children’s data used as a mechanism to sort students, punish teachers, and privatize …

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A high school teacher asks us to consider the techrights and human rights of the underage human subjects of business-imposed edtech experiments and “innovations”, and to reflect on Audrey Watters’ column, Ed-Tech and the Templated Self: Thoughts from the “Reclaim Your Domain” Hackathon. by Mary …

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Notes on building our movement and the AFT following the Los Angeles convention By Kipp Dawson (rank-and-file delegate to the AFT convention from Pittsburgh) This is a life-or-death time for the American Federation of Teachers. The July 12-14, 2014, convention reflected both positive movement, and continuing …