By John Thompson. Former President Barack Obama recently recommended his short 2019 Black History Month reading list: It included classics by and about James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Frederick Douglass; and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The overflow crowd at Oklahoma …
By Anthony Cody. Across the nation, educators have awakened to the reality that charter schools are a threat to the health and even survival of public schools. For that reason, charters have become a major point of contention in teacher strikes, from Oakland to Los Angeles, and even in West Virginia. But at …
By Paul Horton. Technopoly and Addiction In his recent novel,Purity, Jonathan Franzen nearly kills off an expert hacker who is addicted to a video game that he plays without sleep or food to compete at higher and higher levels against players from all over the world. The hacker is not aware that he is dying as …
By John Thompson. The theme of my previous post on the 2018 Network for Public Education conference was: How Was I Wrong? Let Me Count Some Ways. As I explained, the 2014 NPE conference in Austin hit a nice balance in terms of messaging and research that allowed us Davids to defeat the corporate reform Goliath. I …
By John Thompson. Part One of Two. Read Part Two here. The theme of the Network for Public Education’s fifth annual conference was that corporate reformers have lost the “David versus Goliath” battle over public education. We public school supporters have defeated the privatization campaign known as …
By Paul Horton. As concerns about a return of monopoly capitalism seem to be bubbling up in national political discussions from the progressive left and the libertarian right, in education circles a growing counter-discourse is emerging to challenge the digitalization of the education and learning. Teachers have …
By John Thompson. An important result of the teacher walkouts in Oklahoma and elsewhere was unexpected, at least by this former inner city teacher. Even though the majority of Oklahoma students are low-income (eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch), only a small percentage of educators teach in high-poverty schools …
By John Thompson. The Justice for Julius rally at the Oklahoma state Capitol began as a spiritual gathering with a prayer and a remembrance of Paul Howell, the victim of the 1999 carjacking murder for which Julius was improperly convicted. Then the evidence which was not heard by the mostly white jury who sent …
By John Thompson. Diary of Some Webster Kids: Advocacy in Action is a powerful anthology written and edited by middle school English Language Learners. The first thing that jumps out of the essays is the students’ moral character and their heroism. The second thing their writing communicates is that they are …
By John Thompson. Diary of Some Webster Kids: Advocacy in Action was written and edited by the students. This is the third year that middle school students have published a book. Some chose to remain completely anonymous, while others have adopted a low profile. Their book opening, at Commonplace Books, was …
