Teachers Taking Control: A Historical Context

In my previous blog piece, “Teachers Take Control of a Detroit School”, I got generally positive comments on Daily KOS on the good news this story represented for progressives. One commenter, a former teacher, wished they could have been involved in such a school, while instead…

I taught in secondary schools for sixteen years. I left because I had two choices… 1. Fight constantly with administrators, school boards, district officials et al for the freedom to teach the best possible curriculum with the best possible methodology for the students in my classroom… OR 2. Blindly follow the wishes of all of the above people regarding curriculum and methodology to the detriment of my students… I got tired of fighting and left the profession. I would give anything to teach in a school like this where teachers and students matter more than filling out forms that confirm that standard 12.1.3 Letter H was taught on school day 42.

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Teachers Take Control of a Detroit School

The Palmer Park Preparatory Academy
Just read the Education Week article, “Teacher-Led School Innovates With Student Regrouping”, about some innovative governance and methodological changes happening in a Detroit public school. Detroit, if you are not aware has had a crumbling public school system, even before the current recession has put extra pressure on state budgets and as a result, school spending. What I like about what’s happening at Palmer Park Preparatory Academy is that former worker-bees from the conventional educational hierarchy are demonstrating agency beyond what is expected of people at the bottom of the pecking order. As my mom always said, “The teachers should run the schools”, and that is what’s starting to happening here. The only missing ingredient IMO… bringing the students into that school administrative and governance processes. Continue reading →

Moving Beyond “Us and Them” to only “Us”

In response to the Arizona shootings, congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on the PBS News Hour Thursday that we’ve got to “stop treating our opponents as enemies”. President Obama eulogizing nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green said, “I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations”. The issue of civility in political and legislative discourse, which I attempted to address in my last two blog pieces, is now front and center in public discussion in the media.

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Respecting your Adversary

In response to my piece yesterday attempting to call out the dysfunctional rhetoric of both sides in the current Congressional debates, the most incisive criticism I received on the Daily KOS version of my post was essentially that I was making a false equivalency between the critique of conservatism from progressive voices like MSNBC and the critique of progressives from conservatives like Fox News. The former being based on a mostly responsible analysis of the facts while the latter being unprincipled propaganda. In fact the commenter felt that the entire conservative movement over the past thirty years is at its base an unprincipled effort. Another commenter framed it that my frustration with both sides in the current legislative debate was…

Beating the dead horse of false equivalence between radical extremists on the far right and the center-right Democratic party, which constitutes the far-left of allowed US political discourse. Both sides are guilty of something, but not in the way the diarist thinks.

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Winner Take All Governance?

I read the title of the on-line CNN piece, “Democrats dismiss GOP health care repeal push”, and had to groan. Here we go again! A fresh new year, but the same old same old in terms of “us and them” thinking in our national governance. As a Unitarian-Universalist, a hardcore egalitarian and a “governance nerd”, it struck me that though I’m used to this kind of rhetoric from our Congressional reps, from the point of view of effective legislating, it is really quite dysfunctional and corrosive to the process.

Washington (CNN) — Top Democrats are dismissing Republicans’ plans to ram a repeal of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul through the House of Representatives in the opening days of the new Congress, portraying the move as little more than a hollow nod to the GOP’s conservative base.

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The Forgotten Mythos of Reason

In my previous piece, “Got Mythos?”, inspired by Karen Armstrong’s book, The Case for God, I concluded that…

Our country has a great principle of separation of Church and State, which acknowledges a role for both. How about agreeing as well on some sort of principle of the separation of logos and mythos, and acknowledging the value of both as well? If religion stayed in what [Karen] Armstrong describes as its original realm of a vibrant and non-discredited mythos, would people be expressing so much hate and acting with such violence in the name of religious “truth”.

Months later now and finally getting back to Armstrong’s book, I finished reading chapter 3, “Reason”, where she talks about the origins of the kind of principled thought, discourse and learning, developed in Classical Greece between 600 and 300 BCE, that became the foundation of the principles and methods of science.

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Lefty Parent 2010 Year in Review

As I continue to try and broaden my writing skills I occasionally try my hand at a different sort of content than my typical essay featuring a personal experience that I link to what I see as a broader trend, straight out rant, or a wrestling with ideas I’ve encountered in a book or article I read. Like recently I did a piece trying to capture the zeitgeist of the moment in US education as reflected in a selection of recent articles in Education Week magazine and the Public Education Network weekly e-blast (which was a challenge and tons of work and something I’d do again but not all the time).

Today I’m going to try my hand at another genre of short essay, the end-of-year year-in-review type piece, calling out some highlights or trends from the year past. Given that, I won’t even attempt to be comprehensive, other than scoping my piece on the items from 2010 that I’ll be curious to see play out going forward in 2011 and beyond. Here goes… wish me luck!

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Moving Toward an Egalitarian Work Place

In everything I write and everything I do I am all about calling out and promoting our societal transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian institutions and practices. I do not stop in these efforts at my workplace, and am pleased to report that my work environment has a lot of egalitarian features, thanks to the efforts of my boss, many of my co-workers and myself. Following up on my piece from back in July, “Much More and Much Less than a Boss”, I want to call out some of the aspects of that effort.

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Celebrating the Birth of a Child… Every Child

It’s a rainy “winter” day (currently a bone-chilling 57f) here in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles as I sit cozily in my little Perks wi-fi cafe and look out the window at the gray sky and the drops of water making little splashes on the pavement of the strip-mall parking lot full of glistening wet cars. The owner Gayle has told her staff to regale their customers with a satellite radio channel that plays all Christmas songs all the time. Though I enjoy a lot of the songs (some bringing back fond memories of the holidays from my youth) it can wear on you after an hour or so when they start repeating “Jingle Bell Rock”.

One of the schmaltzier classics caught my ear this morning, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, sung by perhaps Bing Crosby. The specific lyric was…

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,
“Do you know what I know?
In your palace warm, mighty king,
Do you know what I know?
A Child, a Child shivers in the cold–
Let us bring him silver and gold,
Let us bring him silver and gold.”

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My Tentative Embrace of Left-Libertarianism

Logo of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left
In the profile section of my Facebook page and increasingly in conversation when asked, I’m describing my political orientation as “left-libertarian” rather than “progressive” or “liberal”. I kind of feel like an adolescent experimenting with or trying on for size a persona that they are intrigued with but may not yet be fully comfortable with. Perhaps in wrestling with principles built around the primacy of liberty, I’m trying to rationalize some sort of continuity with ideas that I inherited from my parents. My mom always saying that in terms of parenting principles, that “kids will tell you what they need”, and when it came to education, “teachers should run the schools”. My father (though never explicitly stated as far as I can recall) believing that life at its best is an adventure, with twists and turns and outcomes always in doubt.

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