education

If the truth will rile people up, then the people much not learn the truth. Authoritarianism at its finest.

NYC high school teacher claims she was fired for Central Park Five lessons that administrators feared would create 'riots' (www.nydailynews.com)

A teacher at an Upper West Side high school was fired for creating a curriculum with lessons about the Central Park Five that administrators feared would “rile up” black students, according to a new federal lawsuit.

English teacher Jeena Lee-Walker said her bosses at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry urged her in November 2013 to be more “balanced” in her approach to the racially charged Central Park jogger case that ended with five black and Latino teens being exonerated after spending several years in prison for the attack.

They told her the lessons could create little “riots,” according to court papers.

The Nation reports on the perversion of college athletics into big business: The Smartest—or Dumbest—Tweet an Athlete Ever Sent

Ohio State’s third-string freshman quarterback, Cardale Jones....tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”

...

But Jones’s crime wasn’t authoring what the Daily News called a “lame-brained tweet.” It was committing, to paraphrase Michael Kinsley, the greatest sin in sports: he was caught telling the truth.

In These Times reports on the movement to turn public school funding into stockholder profit: The Right-Wing Machine Behind ‘School Choice’

The pro-corporate ideology behind school choice asserts that business style competition will be invariably good for education, and that putting school management and teaching into private (and nonunion) hands will make education less expensive, more efficient and more effective.

The statistics do not bear out their claims. By 2011, test results for the two oldest school voucher programs in the nation–Milwaukee and Cleveland–had reported disappointing results.

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...The multi-billion dollar budget for the nation's schools is a rich prize for those who would profit from the privatization of public schools, and they are joined by equally determined anti-public education ideologues.