I am glad the Mass Teachers Assn has hired the Union of Minority Neighborhoods and Jobs with Justice to organize in the community in support of public education. With all the attacks on public education, this is a welcome move. It has taken years for the teachers’ union, and other public employee unions to recognize [...]
Read more →All Politics May Be Local and the State is “Local” Too The things that we feel the most may be local but the way to change them is often beyond the local. Take my daughter’s middle school and our town. Local, to be sure. Most of the funds for her school come from our local [...]
Read more →I learned how to put on tefillin this past weekend at my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah retreat with our temple, Beth El, of Sudbury MA. There were about 25 of us at NewFound Lake Inn in Bristol, NH, in a big barn. I realized that tefillin, little boxes connected to long leather straps that Jews have [...]
Read more →Just read George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of An Elephant! Lakoff makes a good argument that progressives need to re-frame out language and not to rationally argue that, for example, that “taxes are good.” We need to not contradict the language and frame of the right-wing (which, for example, call for “tax relief” – which frames [...]
Read more →Much has been written about inequality in our schools and it is certainly is true. Even among suburban schools, I see big differences in teacher salaries, class sizes and per-pupil spending. I have been working some in Dracut, MA where hard working teachers labor under per pupil spending of less than $10,000. In my own [...]
Read more →