Subjects Archives: Education

Pickets appeared at Chicago Public Schools city-wide Thursday morning as 32,000 teachers and staff struck for the first time since 2012. Educators are fighting for smaller class sizes and more nurses, librarians, social workers and other support staff, along with increased spending to improve conditions in all schools.

Trump is depriving 500,000 kids of their school lunches for no damn reason—even after 139 members of Congress warned him not to.

Why are Democratic candidates going on about student loan debt? Why, the problem is practically solved already!

Those with responsibility for the strategic direction of universities have a clear choice in this matter. They can embrace the funding and accolades that come from saying things the Government and other funders want to hear; or they can do what most ordinary people think universities are supposed to do.

Hundreds of thousands of students around the world walked out of their schools and colleges Friday in the latest in a series of strikes urging action to address the climate crisis. According to event organizers Fridays for Future, over 1664 cities across 125 countries registered strike actions, with more expected to report turnouts in the coming days.

They can be a force for change, explains Rachel Thain-Gray

By working three jobs while in college and with some financial assistance from her mother, Karen Hawkins managed to pay off her undergraduate loans of US$12,000 eight years after completing her bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In an interview with The Wire, the well-known Marxist scholar talks about the surge of populist and right-wing politics and the future of neoliberalism, capitalism and technology.

Dr Martin Luther King’s writings and speeches “should be a part of the curriculum of public schools,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, based in Newark, New Jersey.

I don’t remember where I was on September 12, 2012. I was in Chicago, but I wasn’t in the streets when the approximately 26,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) walked out of school and onto the picket lines.

Last spring a teacher uprising swept the red states. Today it reached the West Coast, as the 34,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles began a long-anticipated strike in the nation’s second-largest school district.

The student population today is unrecognisable from that of a generation or more ago, writes Matt Myers. And it is central to any socialist project for the future.

In a massive display of social opposition, more than 50,000 teachers, school personnel, parents and students marched in downtown Los Angeles Monday on the first day of the strike by educators in the nation’s second largest school district.

Fifteen districts started the school year on strike in Washington state—the latest to ride the West Virginia wave.

In this episode, we speak with Emma Caterine (@emmacaterineDSA), a law graduate and writer with more than a decade of experience working within economic justice, feminist, LGBTQ, and racial justice movements. We talk Democratic Socialists of America, MMT, the advantages of a federal jobs guarantee over a universal basic income, the place for sex work in a jobs guarantee program.

In this episode, we speak with Fadhel Kaboub (@fadhelkaboub), associate professor of economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. Fadhel outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining financial sovereignty is a crucial next step for postcolonial nations hoping to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice.

Today, academic freedom is increasingly under threat from marketisation, in particular as a result of the mutually reinforcing pressures on academics to meet instrumental, neoliberal economic objectives, imposed from above via national-level performance management systems–the TEF, REF and KEF–and from below through local-level, bureaucracy-heavy managerialism.v

In this episode, Money on the Left cohost Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) expands upon the argument made in his video essay, “Inglorious Basterds: Nazi Desire Fully Employed,” which takes a neochartalist lens to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008).

The two retired professors are internationally reputed scholars, and are serving the honourary position of Professor Emeritus.

In this bicentennial year of Karl Marx’s birth, there has been a great deal of celebration of his work and ideas. Many essays appeared in the global media during the first week of this month –Marx was born on May 05, 1818 – emphasized the relevance of his critique of capitalism even today.