Conservatives, including those of the Tea Party variety, aren’t “anti-government.” In most respects they are pro-government to the point of authoritarianism. What they really oppose is any form of cooperative or collective solution to the problems of a complex industrial (or post-industrial) society – especially when the beneficiaries are people they regard with suspicion or fear.

Weekly Diaspora: Hitting Immigrant Kids Where It Hurts

Jim Moss’s response to the “homework assignment”, the Three Things Project for Labor Day.

While charter schools are good on some levels, they also cause a lot of damage to our public education system. If we do not focus our education reform efforts on our current public schools, we will only increase the inequities in the system.

Kansas City school officials promised Thursday to shut down nearly half the district’s schools by the start of classes in the fall.

60 years ago, Bible classes were taught in U.S. public schools as routinely as reading, writing, and arithmetic. By the latter part of the 20th century, however, religious instruction was confined to private institutions. A strong movement is building, however, to bring the Bible back into public education: Three Democratic state senators (in Kentucky) are [...]

Now here’s a subject I don’t see hardly anywhere in the blogosphere: education politics. Given that education politics is a matter of students, teachers, and parents in communities of lower-class children versus the political class, the educational corporations, and its Veal Pen, though, it’s no wonder. But if “progressives” really wish to have some degree of autonomy from the business interests, and to be “with the people” on this one, they’d better pay attention to educational politics. The most important struggle, as I will discuss below, will be that of empowering lower-class parents by improving their socioeconomic status, rather than by testing their kids and blaming their teachers.

(Crossposted at Orange)