The Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, reported on a major court decision affecting New York City’s public schools. The battles over segregation began in the nation’s largest city in the 1960s. Until the mid-1960s, the city’s public schools had a white majority. From that point forward, the white enrollment steadily declined and is now slightly less than 15% of one million students. While racial balance in every school would be impractical, given the great distances that students would have to travel, demands for desegregation have been replaced by demands ..read more

Nick Covington taught social studies for a decade. He recently decided to delve into the mystique of “the science of reading.” He concluded that we have been “sold a story.” He begins: Literacy doesn’t come in a box, we’ll never find our kids at the bottom of a curriculum package, and there can be no broad support for systemic change that excludes input from and support for teachers implementing these programs in classrooms with students.  (Two hands pull apart a book) Exactly one year after the final episode of the podcast series that launched a thousand hot takes and opened the latest f ..read more

Thom Hartmann is releasing his new book The Hidden History of Monopolies on his blog, one chapter at a time. This one is fascinating. Big business has always opposed labor unions. They drive up wages, meaning less profits. Thom explains: When people consider monopolies, or even highly concentrated markets like airlines or pharmaceuticals, generally the only thing they think of is the ability of companies in concentrated markets to set prices wherever they’d like. But there are fully three primary benefits to monopoly or oligopoly, from the monopolists’ point of view. In addition to setting pri ..read more

Geoff Duncan, a former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia and a lifelong Republican, explained in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution why he could not vote for Donald Trump: It’s disappointing to watch an increasing number of Republicans fall in line behind former president Donald Trump. This includes some of his fiercest detractors, such as U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who raised eyebrows during a recent interview by vowing to support the “Republican ticket.” This mentality is dead wrong ..read more

Really, you must remember that billionaires have feelings too. So how’s about some sympathy for Bill Gates? Yahoo News reports that he’s slipping down the list of the world’s biggest billionaires, and two of his yachts may be up for sale. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and a renowned philanthropist, has been slipping down the ranks of the world’s billionaires. Despite boasting a net worth of nearly $128 billion, Gates is at No. 9 on the Forbes Billionaire Index, a significant drop from his previous position at No. 7 a month ago. This marks his lowest ranking since 1990 when he r ..read more

Dana Milbank wrote recently about the latest foibles of Trump: his endless verbal gaffes; his inability to stay awake at his trial in New York City; his endless lies about everything. But the main point of his article is that the students protesting against Israel and calling Biden “Genocide Joe” are helping to elect Trump. Trump will be far harsher towards student protestors than Biden and far closer to Netanyahu. Trump promises to use the National Guard to crack down on student protestors and to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. He wrote that Trump: ….said he would change the law to reverse ..read more

Thank you to the best of our citizens, the immigrants who come to seek the American Dream, as our parents, grandparents, and ancestors did. Six citizens died in the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. All were immigrants. They were working on the bridge in the middle of the night, repairing potholes, when the bridge was hit by a massive tanker that had power. Think of them the next time someone starts spouting off about immigrants as criminals. Immigrants actually have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. Campbell Robertson of The New York Times wrote: The b ..read more

Carl J. Petersen is a parent in Los Angeles who writes here about a politician who is mean enough and dumb enough to kill a 14-month dog. Cricket didn’t obey her orders so she took him to the bottom of a gravel pit and shot him in the head. Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota justly earned national scorn for her act of animal cruelty. Next to holding a baby at a campaign rally, nothing does more to humanize a political candidate than a video of them frolicking with the family dog. The love of man’s best friend is bipartisan with dog owners “just as likely to come from either side of the polit ..read more

Now here is a wonderful protest. Russians and Ukrainians marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in a protest against Putin’s war in Ukraine. They joined together to denounce the war, to oppose fascism in Russia, and to counter Russian propaganda. They mocked Putin as a modern-day Hitler. The two allied groups live in harmony in Brooklyn ..read more

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reports on the cruelty of Oklahoma’s new crackdown on test scores. He writes: I wonder how most teachers responded to Nuria Martinez-Keel’s Tulsa Public Schools Ups the Intensity to Prepare for High Stakes Testing. I’m confident that few educators would be surprised by the language used by those who are implementing Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ teach-to-the-test program.  But, how many would believe that fellow educators really believe it will work?  Martinez-Keel reports that “Angie Teas, a Tulsa Public Schools ..read more