News for Educational Workers

Books by Radical Teacher Collective Members

Nick Thorkelson, former Radical Teacher layout and design artist, has published (with text by Chuck Collins), the very funny Economic Meltdown Funnies (December 2008, www.economicmeltdownfunnies. org), a co-production of Jobs with Justice and the Institute for Policy Studies-Program for Inequality and the Common Good. Thorkelson's work as a cartoonist and graphic designer has appeared in the Boston Globe and Dollars & Sense. He is working on a book-length comics memoir about his adventures in San Francisco at the end of the 1960s.

K-12

In the mostly white suburb of Greece in Rochester, New York, police arrested and jailed a woman of color for using her mother's suburban address and enrolling her children in the Greece public schools, although she and her children lived in the city of Rochester. The Greece newspaper headline read "Woman Arrested in School Scam" and the paper gave a phone number to report other cases of suspected "larceny" (The Nation, April 13, 2009).

Research on sex education in the United States is creating a consensus that abstinence only- programs are far less successful than programs that include information on contraception. During the Bush administration, funding for abstinence-only sex education grew from $80 million in 2001 to $176 million in 2008. In these times of budget cutbacks, the question is whether the Obama administration will take the opportunity to put in place a more effective and less costly program (In These Times, March 2009).

In January of 2009, the Cleveland public schools discovered that the number of homeless students so far that year had jumped to 1,728. Compared with three years earlier in 2006, this number represented a jump of 150 percent (The Nation, February 9, 2009).

"Teaching's Revolving Door" (Rethinking Schools, Winter 2009/2009) uses two intimate teacher case studies to explain that new teachers leave the profession at an alarming rate. Teacher turnover is especially high among new teachers, with half leaving within five years. In urban districts, it takes only three years for half of new teachers to resign.

Israeli high school seniors are being imprisoned for refusing to serve in an occupying army. These conscientious objector students are asking for international support, especially from diaspora Jews. To offer support, visit Jewish Voice for Peace (jvp.org) and 18december.org or send a message directly to the students at shministim@gmail.com (WIN, Fall 2008).

"In School for the First Time, Teenage Immigrants Struggle" (The New York Times, January 25, 2009) explains how children from all over the world have long brought education challenges to New York City classrooms. The new twist, however, is that "hidden among the nearly 150,000 students across the city still struggling to learn English are an estimated 15,100 who . . . have had little or no formal schooling and are often illiterate in their native languages." Half these students arrive as older teenagers and come from extremely rural areas of their home countries, have fled religious persecutions or civil wars, and have spent valuable schooling years in refugee camps.

Charter Schools

On Change.org, the continuation of the Obama presidential campaign website, two public school parents, Sharon Higgins and Caroline Grannan, wrote on March 17, 2009 that "Charters Exclude the Most Challenging Students." In addition to writing that "numerous studies confirm that their achievement is indistinguishable from that of traditional public schools," they go on to write that "charter schools may enroll some very low-income students, but they do not enroll the very troubled, high-need, at-risk students who post the greatest challenge to public education." Although these parents voted for and strongly support the Obama presidency, they feel he is badly misinformed about charter schools as the solution to America's public school problems.

Unionization within charter schools, which have largely and perhaps purposely operated without union representation, is on the move. Nearly 80 percent of the teachers at The Accelerated School south of Los Angeles have turned in pro-union signature cards, making Accelerated's faculty the first from a charter school to join United Teachers...