Suchergebnisse

From "teacher spring" to teacher insurgency -- Part one. The origins of the teacher insurgency: The issues behind the teacher insurgency -- The political context of the teacher insurgency -- Part two. The strategic challenges in perspective: Mobilization and organization - from civil rights to social media -- Protest and politics - syndicalism and labor history -- The teacher strike - conditions for success -- Organizing with community - bargaining for the common good -- Part three. Organizing teachers, teachers organizing: Teacher organizing and collective identity -- The discourse of teaching as nurturance -- The discourse of teaching as a profession -- The discourse of teaching as labor and craft -- The discourse of teaching as democratic work -- Conclusion: The power of teacher collective action.

Public education is one of the most important "public goods" of a democratic society. In recent decades, public policy analysts, public intellectuals, and politicians have debated the state of public education in the United States and have argued about the sorts of public policies that might best promote the academic achievement, educational success, and political socialization of youth. Terry Moe and John Chubb have been important contributors to these debates. Their 1990 book,Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, set the terms of much subsequent discussion about the importance of school autonomy and "educational choice." Moe'sSpecial Interestextends these arguments through a more frontal critique of the role of teachers unions. This book represents an important contribution to public discussion of school reform. It also incorporates a distinctive perspective on the relationship between power and public policy, and between the role of states and that of markets in the provision of public goods and services. In this symposium, we feature a range of serious commentaries on the book's central arguments about educational policy and politics and on its approach to "engaged" or "applied" political science.

In recent months, a number of official announcements from inside Cuba have led to speculation that meaningful political change could be underway. From a declaration that it will release a number of political prisoners to an apology for past repression of gays to an acknowledgment that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," the Castro regime has sought to signal that a more benevolent rule is rep the last half-century. But civil society activists have found that Cuba when it comes to respect for human rights and labor rights. Adapted from the source document.

The 2008 election was historic on many counts, but one of the more significant developments was the decisive defeat of the politics of smear and fear. As the campaign wore on, and the prospects of the McCain-Palin candidacy appeared increasingly bleak, the Republicans turned to an old playbook, one that had been used to much positive effect over the last decade. In recent elections, the patriotism and good names of Democratic war hero candidates, from John Kerry to Max Cleland, had been impugned so successfully that a neologism for such smears—to "swift boat"—was coined out of the assault on Kerry. The fears that arose out of the September 11 attacks were exploited to defend a failed war of choice in Iraq, with the claims that this adventure was the "front" in the war on terrorism and that those who criticized it were "soft" on terrorism. So when Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of "palling around with a terrorist," and John McCain demanded the "truth" of his connections with an "old, washed-up terrorist," they were invoking tried-and-true tactics that echoed over a century of electoral "scares" from the right, harking back to fear of turn-of-the-twentieth century anarchism and the "red scare" of the 1920s.

After recounting the 2008 presidential campaign affair involving conservative & Republican Party accusations of Barack Obama's relationship with former Weather Underground founder & leader Bill Ayers, the group's role in the "destructive" period in the history of the US Left as it sought the end of the Vietnam War is explored. At issue is the verity of Ayers's public relations bid following the Obama relationship episode, which is rejected here as a "self-serving whitewash." Ayers's "deeply ahistorical" Fugitive Days is drawn on to describe the Weather Underground as lacking political substance & its members as violently nihilist. Ayers's claim that the Weather Underground never attacked people & respected human life is rejected in light of the Greenwich Village townhome bomb explosion that killed three of its members: it is asserted that the bomb was antipersonnel in nature & intended for a Fort Dix dance. It is then argued that Ayers is operating absent a politics of responsibility, ie, without offering a full public accounting for his 1960s actions, which denies a politics of redemption; that he has led a "good life" since the end of the Weather Underground is deemed insufficient. The Weather Underground is seen to have started from a politics of moral witness & lapsed into moral self-righteousness, leading to actions that wreaked profound havoc for the New Left & antiwar movement. It is contended that a genuinely radical democratic politics of moral witness must be part of a politics of civic virtue with a true respect for the demos. D. Edelman. Adapted from the source document.

"Don't talk to strangers." These four simple words contain one of the first pieces of worldly wisdom American parents teach their children. The words may help protect children from physical danger, Danielle Allen writes in her book of the same name, but the political message they convey ill serves education for democratic citizenship. The capacity to "talk to strangers," to hold a dialogue, to reason, and to deliberate with one's fellow citizens in a context of civic trust, Allen tells us, lies at the heart of democracy. And she makes this argument in an extraordinary philosophical text that is itself a conversation among different intellectual traditions and different approaches to race in America—traditions and approaches that rarely engage with each other. Allen is distinctive among contemporary political philosophers in her focus on the actual practice of the democratic politics she advocates.

In a way that prefigured the work of the civil rights movement, the photograph revealed a 'public sphere' from which African Americans were excluded and showed how that exclusion was enforced through the ever-present threat of violence. The theme of sacrifice is initially drawn from Ralph Ellison's reading of African American history, and especially from his response to Hannah Arendt's infamous misunderstanding of the civil rights movement (in an essay first published in these pages ['Reflections on Little Rock,' Winter 1959]), but Alien gives it a broader political meaning.

The reality of Venezuela under the rule of Hugo Chávez Frias, Gregory Wilpert tells us, is a "complicated truth" ("Venezuela's Other Path," Spring 2005). Whereas many observers see in Chávez another Fidel Castro, an authoritarian caudillo pushing his nation toward a dictatorial regime, Wilpert finds such portraits stereotypical, based more on the propensity of both men to deliver marathon speeches than on actual developments in Venezuela. He accepts that Chávez is a charismatic figure who has encouraged a cult of personality, but believes that Chávez's initiatives have broken through Venezuela's "ossified democracy," bringing into the political process those who had been excluded, awakening an "apathetic citizenry" and "energizing civil society." There is much in Chávez's rule to celebrate, according to this view.