April 20, 2011

Education Roundup: “Socialist” Kindergartners?

Photoillustration by Nick Baumann. Sources: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jectre/544530510/">Jectre</a>/Flickr, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/3708151311/sizes/l/in/photostream/">courosa</a>/Flickr, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/3796415185/sizes/z/in/photostream/">stevendepolo</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


  • Ah, kindergarten, where you learn that sharing is “socialist” and cooperation is…also “socialist.” Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy examines GOP presidential contender Tim Pawlenty’s controversial education record, which includes selecting an education commissioner for Minnesota who…well, read the rest here.
  • In Los Angeles, it’s illegal for people under the age of 18 to be on the streets while school is in session. To enforce this policy, Los Angeles Police Department has conducted sweeps around schools, detained students for 45 minutes, and given out $250 curfew tickets before letting them go to class. Guess who’s getting cited, Huffington Post reports: “According to LA school police data, none of the more than 13,000 tickets they issued from 2005 to 2009 went to a white student.” Thankfully, advocates from the Community Rights Campaign, Public Counsel, and the ACLU of Southern California prodded LAPD Chief Charlie Beck to issue a new policy that ensures curfew sweeps don’t occur during the first hour of classes and discourages officers from giving a ticket if a student is clearly headed toward school.
  • The private school Bill Gates attended has an average of 16 students per class. But Bill Gates recommends increasing class size in the country’s public schools. The New York Times reports on the discrepancies between what public education reformers recommend for everyone else’s kids and the elite private school education most of them received as children. Example: “If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here, I guarantee that.” Guess whose wife said that?
  • Remember Mission High student Eman? Mother Jones education reporter Kristina Rizga reports on the impact one Mission High student had on MoJo readers—and vice versa.
  • Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb issued layoff notices to all 5,466 public school teachers in Detroit.
  • Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel selected charter and merit pay proponent Jean-Claude Brizard as the new Chief Executive Officer of Chicago Public Schools. This is to the dismay of 95 percent of teachers who voted “no confidence” in Brizard.
  • Arne Duncan announced that New Hampshire is receiving $1.47 million to convert its lowest performing schools into charters or replace their principals, or close these schools altogether.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate