Subjects Archives: Education

For those who may have missed it, a major economic indicator emerged regarding student loan debt last week. Excessive debt, like student loans, has become one of the biggest barriers to current economic growth in the United States. On Thursday, March 1, 2018, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, appeared before U.S. Congressional representatives.

Welcome to Pt. 2 of the multi-part critical Review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Education’. This part of the Review focuses on Willetts’ plans for so-called ‘alternative providers’ – a euphemistic term which should be read as synonymous with for-profit colleges and universities – and his reflections on wanting to see a British higher education (HE) monopoly rise up to compete with global HE mega-corporations.

Before Jo Johnson and Sam Gyimah, there was David Willetts. As the Minister of State for Universities and Science from 2010 until 2014, under the Tory-led ‘coalition’ government, Willetts oversaw the introduction of a market into the English higher education system – often referred to as ‘marketisation’.

The Washington, DC Public Charter School Board oversees some 120 public charter schools in the nation’s capitol, serving more than 43,000 students. And one member of that school board, John Goldman, is an MRA with clear white supremacist leanings. He has admitted to having an alter ego, “Jack Murphy,” under which he posted to websites and participated in debates.

On Sunday, the international press agency EFE did not have enough words to praise the not-even-that-new initiative of a Mexican “seduction school”, lamenting that this kind of workshop remains largely “taboo” in the country.

The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching colonial thinking in universities.

“DON’T LET YOUR CHILDREN GO INTO CRIPPLING DEBT LIKE I HAVE!” I shout, as I and a group of students with SENS-UAW make our way to a major intersection just off Union Square. We wave signs, hoist our banner and merge into the crowd. We are protesting the new GOP tax bill, which will affect the lives of current, previous, and prospective students in critical and long-lasting ways.

To celebrate the 100th episode of FreshEd, I’ve saved an interview with a very special guest.

Judith Butler asks what happens when free speech clashes with other basic values.

István Mészáros, Marxist political philosopher. Born: Budapest on 19 December 1930. Died: Kent on 1 October 2017.

There is now a political appointee of the Trump administration at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), John Konkus, reviewing grant solicitations and proposals in the public affairs office.

The 25-year national gamble on charter schools has been a losing bet, resulting in a series of missed opportunities and creating a tragic distraction from what most education researchers agree are the real inequities underlying the so-called achievement gap, former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch said this week.

Stuart Jeffries on the Frankfurt School’s absence of women and the points of contact between the thinkers associated with the Institute für Sozialforschung and theorists of feminism.

How do you kill Mr. Phil and nothing happens?” According to parent Zuki Ellis, this is the question students at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in St. Paul were asking just a few days into summer. On June 16, the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile, or Mr. Phil as students knew him, was acquitted on all charges.

One thing is clear: school lunches have a long way to go, and there’s no simple solution in sight. As school districts struggle to balance costs with meeting federal nutritional standards and other requirements, students are left to weather the storm with lackluster food choices that may not be having the positive effect on their mental and physical health that educators and parents want—and are certainly not having the tastebud-pleasing effects students hope for.

The latest issue of the London Review of International Law features an interesting review essay by Robert Howse, in which he makes the case for progressive international lawyers attending to the discipline of economics and the insights that can be gained from it, in particular from what he sees as more progressive economists. Howse’s essay […]

“The ‘culture war’ against higher education has been an astroturfed conflict, a well-funded propaganda campaign bankrolled for decades…. Conservative’ figures from the business world (there is nothing conservative about unfettered capitalism that commodifies everything and makes ‘the market’ the arbiter of all moral questions) have funded a decades-long attempt to delegitimize higher education in the eyes of American citizens.”

I did not know that Albert Einstein was a socialist. Maybe I had known once, or more likely, never cared. But in 1949, when the great physicist and Nobel laureate declared his beliefs, in the innocuously titled “Why Socialism?,” a lot of people would have cared. Indeed, by 1953, Joseph McCarthy was after him, and people were sending hate mail to the Institute for Advanced Study asking that Einstein, a founding member of the research center, be sent packing.

Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

Visitors will be invited to reflect on capitalism as if looking back at it from a world in which capitalism is dead. “Much of the evidence of capitalism is either eroding over time or simply not known or easily accessible to the public,” the mission statement reads. “Our ambition is to connect and integrate these many efforts before the evidence is erased forever.”