The battle to privatize education as part of the neoliberal shock doctrine is in full swing--on one side we have a rank and file movement of public school K-12 educators and parents mobilized by the Chicago teachers' strike trying to save the teachers unions and neighborhood schools -- on the other side we have the "educational reform" agenda using the full power of Obama's "Race to the Top" (RTTT) policy which uses government funding to force the closure of "nonfunctioning" public schools and replace them with privately run "Charter" Schools .
U.S. public education appears in dire need of reform. To address that problem central to the health of America's democracy and economy (reformers note), committees must be formed and solutions proposed and then implemented:
An elementary school in Nashua, NH, has agreed with the parents to allow an unidentified transgender third grader to dress appropriately for her gender at school, be addressed as a girl, be treated like a girl, and use the female restroom.
The child and her parents were represented in the proceeding by Janson Wu of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD).
I think that as the environments become more and more welcoming to transgender and gender variant youth, we’re going to see a lot more students coming out. And that’s something that schools and parents will need to be prepared to deal with. Children often have difficulty having schools respect them for who they believe they are. If a transgender girl wants to be able to wear feminine clothes to school and be addressed as a girl, often times we see schools feeling a fair amount of discomfort around that. What we’re hopeful is that when the schools work with the student and the parents is they learn to understand that this is a sincere belief on the student’s part and they learn to support that.
As parents and educators and community members, you want to do what’s right for the children. When you speak to the youth themselves, you really do get the sense that these are children who have sincere belief about who they are.
This [past]weekend, for the third year in a row, NBC will kick off their Education Nation Week in New York City. It will involve MSNBC's rising stars like Melissa Harris-Perry, Chuck Todd and Alex Wagner. It will include a two-day summit broken down into a series of case studies about the various issues in K-12 education and how to improve it for America's children. It will also include a teacher town hall and a student town hall.
"When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run /There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun / Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one / But the union makes us strong."
In the spirit of his Education Week blog, Living in Dialogue, science educator and activist Anthony Cody entered into a five-part exchange with the Gates Foundation (GF) about education reform.
An elementary school in Nashua, NH, has agreed with the parents to 
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