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Nora De La Cour writes about education and has worked in public schools in a variety of roles.
When schools offer universal free meals, hungry kids eat. They also have better academic performance, behavior, attendance, and psychosocial functioning. These benefits should be available to all — with no questions asked, and no such thing as lunch debt.
School meal programs across the US are in disarray due to major staffing shortages and exploitative business practices, and kids are shouldering the burden. We can’t fix the nationwide cafeteria crisis without making life sustainable for the “lunch ladies.”
The “classical education” concept promoted by Ron DeSantis, Chris Rufo, and Hillsdale College is a reactionary far-right project. But it wouldn’t be gaining so much ground if bipartisan education reform hadn’t sucked the life out of our public schools.
A North Carolina charter school that receives 95% of its funding from public sources is forcing girls to wear skirts. If the Supreme Court hears the case, it could determine if constitutional protections governing public education apply to charter schools.
Despite what major news outlets say, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s attack on public schools is not the driving force behind his popularity. His recent success can be chalked up to a GOP-led voter registration effort and record-breaking campaign funds.
It’s an incredibly difficult time to be a public school teacher. Collective action can help teachers realize that their problems are caused by systemic issues, not individual failings, and that the solutions require acting together.
The Right has long pushed a narrative that parents are ready to turn away from public schools. But in this week’s midterms, voters in several states approved ballot measures that increase school funding.
New research finds that market-style education reforms, like those pioneered in Wisconsin decades ago, have devastating consequences for students. This election, Wisconsin and the rest of the nation must choose whether to plow ahead or reverse course.
Compared to similarly educated peers in the workforce, teachers earn 76 cents on the dollar. Bubble baths and mindfulness apps can’t make up for the systematic denial of life-sustaining wages.
The US education system is being desecularized as public money floods into private religious schools. This mix of religious conservatism and free-market fundamentalism threatens to unravel public education.
Our resource-starved public education system is not equipped to handle the increasingly extreme heat, condemning students and teachers to sweltering classrooms. New school infrastructure is an urgent priority if we want to have a functional education system.
Inflation isn’t just an economic abstraction. It’s a slow, deadly squeeze on working people.
A billionaire-backed network of free-market fundamentalists is ginning up controversy over “wokeness” in American schools with an ulterior motive: to demolish public education.
For decades, education reformers have proposed academic performance, measured by standardized testing, as the solution to inequality. It doesn’t work, and it’s losing Democrats votes. But most important, it’s costing kids the opportunity to learn through play.
School districts are facing a dire shortage of paraeducators, making it impossible to provide services to which students are legally entitled. For the good of paraeducators and students alike, it’s time for fair compensation.
Cafeteria staff make learning and healthy development possible by providing balanced meals to kids who otherwise might not get them. In return, they bring home some of the lowest earnings of the generally underpaid K–12 workforce.
Current pay and benefits for school bus drivers are grossly incommensurate with their incredibly challenging, multifaceted work. When they’re exploited and mistreated, drivers and kids both suffer the consequences.
After spending most of 2021 on the picket line, nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are returning to work. Their strike holds two lessons: health care corporations will erode standards infinitely for profit, and worker solidarity is the only way to stop them.
Chronic disinvestment in public education, a corporate reform model that punishes student poverty, and the pandemic’s disruption of school life are making it impossible for teachers to do the job they love. Many educators are reaching their breaking points.
The courts have attacked their right to picket, and the company has engaged in a campaign of misinformation. But 1,000 union miners in Alabama are still on strike after eight months, fighting for decent compensation and humane work schedules.