BY AARON BARLOW The act of teaching is political. Yet Americans like to pretend that its schools are removed from the public sphere, that they focus on knowledge and skills, nothing more. Rightwing firebrand (though his spark has dimmed against the bright flames of newer agitators like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos) David Horowitz has…
BY LARA SCHWARTZ This blog post originally appeared on the Huffington Post on September 27 and appears here with the author’s permission. Lara Schwartz teaches law and government at American University School of Public Affairs On the night of Sept. 26, shortly after historian Ibram Kendi introduced American University’s new Antiracist Research and Policy Center, an as-yet unidentified man hung posters of…
BY LUIS I. PRÁDANOS Every time I mention the obvious in a classroom—that most industrial economic activities deplete energy and materials and, therefore, constant economic growth in the context of a limited biosphere is a biophysical impossibility—I am moved by some students’ honest reactions. Their response will be some variation of “That makes sense. Why did nobody tell us before that as the global economy grows, the living systems of…
BY PAT BOWNE David Brooks apparently hit a nerve with his sandwich column. My friends’ reactions on social media ranged from stories about their own discomfort in fancy restaurants to comments about food snobbery to accusing me of wanting the right-wing PC police to stop us all from eating kale. Perhaps the commonest remark I…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN It was a tale of two speeches. Yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addressed the right-wing American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) meeting in Denver, where she accused teacher unions of being “defenders of the status quo” who care only about “school systems” and not about individual children. Just hours earlier Randi…
BY GILLIAN STEINBERG When I tell people that I left a tenured university position to teach high school, most suggest that I’ve taken a significant step backwards. But with so many college teachers either underemployed or feeling desperately pressured, more might want to consider the switch to high school teaching. High school teaching is not,…
BY AARON BARLOW In the weeks after the Kent State killings in 1970, I grew increasingly perplexed and withdrawn. My campus—I was attending Utica College in upstate New York—shut down and students seemed triumphant. Triumphant, that is, in the matter of standing for a moment on center stage. But I was unhappy. For it wasn’t…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following News Brief has been distributed by Education Dive: A professor at Youngstown State University has decided against teaching an optional summer class for students because the institution decided to cut his pay for the class by 43% after fewer students enrolled than the required 15, according to WKBN…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND Dr. Anne Lucietto, of Purdue Polytechnic Institute, is a researcher in STEM education. She is in the preliminary stages of a project concerning educators, especially STEM educators and their experience teaching STEM students. She is requesting that educators at any level—K-12, undergraduate, or graduate—take the survey, which covers three areas: demographics,…