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Nora De La Cour writes about education and has worked in public schools in a variety of roles.
The Right is selling a vision of classical education that promises to build character and nurture wonder. Liberals are stuck aiming for higher test scores and employability. Public education defenders need our own inspiring take on the meaning of school.
Right-wing efforts to undermine public schools are designed to shock the public into permanently lowering our expectations for what public schools can be. Those efforts may be backfiring.
Flash-in-the-pan school controversies distract us from the Right’s long-standing aim: destroying public education itself. To preserve this audacious experiment in democracy, we must bridge cultural and ideological divisions to find common ground.
For the past 40 years, privately funded interest groups and lawmakers have promoted the idea that US schools are failing and causing economic dysfunction. The story provides cover for the real culprits of inequality: wealth-hoarding bosses.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
Across the US, right-wing state legislatures have disregarded popular will to enact costly school privatization plans. In North Carolina, they flouted democracy to advance their agenda.
North Carolina’s voucher plan diverts vast amounts of public money to private schools, many of which provide substandard education and engage in open discrimination. Weakening public schools in the process, the scheme violates the universal right to education.
A church-run charter school is on track to open in Oklahoma — publicly funded but run by the archdiocese. The arrival of religious charter schools is one more piece of evidence that public charter schools are not so public after all.
Texas governor Greg Abbott is on a crusade against public education. But even rural Republicans aren’t going along with his privatization scheme, recognizing the threat it poses to youth education, adult employment, and Texas’s beloved football teams.
Unwilling to disrupt the economic system that created mass inequality, liberals invested schools with magical powers to fix a broken society. When public schools failed to clean up capitalism’s mess, they ended up on the chopping block.
When we sort children into “proficient” and “failing” categories based on test scores, we’re not solving the opportunity gaps that show up in public education — we’re just creating new ones.
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.