Neoliberalism
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Seductive Neoliberalism
For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be
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Don’t Blame the Schools
From Salon this morning: The United States ranked in the bottom four of a United Nations report on child well-being. Among 29 countries, America landed second from the bottom in child poverty and held a similarly dismal position when it came to “child life satisfaction.” Keeping the U.S. company at the bottom of the report, which gauged material well-being,
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The Neoliberal World System
When the Keynesian settlement was finally put into effect, after World War II, it was offered only to a relatively small slice of the world's population. As time when on, more and more people wanted in on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the period from 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary
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Quote of the Day: David Graeber
What the 1% are is, effectively, a ruling class, they represent the point where concentrated wealth can be turned into political power. National politics in the US has been reduced to battles between different factions of that 1%. This is not just a traditional Marxist bourgeoisie though—and this is where I think it dovetails with
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School Choice is Not a Solution
The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: See here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools. Accountability? Read here about some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable. One of them opened in 2001. Over
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The Common Core State Standards
I remember when I first heard about the movement to develop a national common core for K-12 public school curricula, I thought, "Why not?" Why not set standards that will give a high school diploma some meaning? Why not set up a national curriculum that insures that every kid has a solid grounding in history,
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America’s “Education Crisis”
Linda Darling Hammond in a recent interview: Well, there are a couple of things to know before we talk about the scores. First of all, the United States has more children living in poverty, by a long shot, than any other industrialized nation. Right now about one in four children are living in poverty. In most
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Conservatives Backing away from Ed Reform . . .
. . .leaving Liberal Democrats holding the bag: Conservative and liberal "reformers" were joined at the hip in supporting top down mandates by the Obama administration that put NCLB-type testing on steroids. Now, presumably, conservatives will step back at let the Democrats take the full blame for Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and
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Education Reform and Neoliberalism
While it is impossible at this stage to know whether these resistance movements will be strong enough to force political leaders to withdraw their support from privatization and testing, they have created enough of a grass roots presence to publicly challenge and contest almost every Reform initiative at the local and national level. We now
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Obama the Subsidiarist
Frank Rich's column this morning makes much the same point about Clinton's campaign I made in this post last week: for all her vaunted experience and management expertise, the two most prominent opportunities for Clinton to demonstrate her executive competency were her heading the healthcare task force in her husband's administration and now her running