With the first tumultuous year of Donald Trump’s presidency winding down, Capital & Main looks back at the images and stories we presented over the last 12 months.
Click the right arrow button to go to the next slide. This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series (Andy Warner’s comics have appeared in many places, including Slate, Medium, American Public Media, Symbolia, KQED, popsci.com and for the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency.)
Capital & Main: Do you see risk in Democrats running away from a populist progressive agenda? Mayor Bill de Blasio: Absolutely. I think the biggest development we saw [in the midterm election] was Democrats not standing up for the ideals of the Democratic Party, not talking to the economic realities of our people, not […]
Dino Degrassi and Jason Campbell engage in dialogues for a living. They also put the electrical wiring into some of Los Angeles’ largest and most recognizable building projects. Every morning at 6:30 the two electricians ride the street level elevator down into the construction site at Wilshire and Figueroa, where the core of the Wilshire […]
The latest sign that the nation’s 14-year romance with the for-profit cyber charter industry might be cooling came last week when the Board of Trustees for Pennsylvania’s scandal-plagued Agora Cyber Charter School discussed completely severing its relationship with K12 Inc., the nation’s largest for-profit cyber charter management and curriculum supplier. The action came nearly three […]
Large corporate lobbies have, in recent years, accelerated their push to expand private charter schools. America spends nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars on public education annually and companies such as “cyber-charter” giant, K12 Inc., Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify and Rocketship, a darling of the venture capital industry, see a pot of gold. A new […]
The nomination of Californian Ted Mitchell to the number two position at the U.S. Department of Education is the latest indication that proponents of school privatization are continuing to gain influence over the Obama administration’s education policy. “He represents the quintessence of the privatization movement,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former Assistant Secretary of […]
Sandy Hellebrand was concerned. She needed to find a school that could educate her son Gabriel, who has autism and was about to enter high school. Hellebrand thought she had found the perfect solution: She would enroll Gabriel and her two younger children in Sky Mountain Charter School, one of a rapidly-growing number of virtual […]
(See full infographic at OnlinePhdPrograms) Driving a 15-year-old car 70 miles a day between three different college campuses took a toll on my ride – and on me. I was teaching as adjunct professor at three different L.A. community colleges. An adjunct is a part-time professor who is hired on a contractual basis rather than being […]
“Sometimes it seems that eliminating public education itself is the goal of this reform era,” Diane Ravitch told a cheering crowd of public school teachers and education activists who had packed Occidental College’s Thorne Hall Tuesday night. The audience had come to hear the 75-year-old scholar, author and former Assistant Secretary of Education drive home […]
Currently a Research Professor of Education at New York University, Diane Ravitch served as the Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration and later worked for Bill Clinton’s White House. A tireless critic of the public school testing standards she once endorsed, the 75-year-old Ravitch remains a clear voice against the stampede […]
Frying Pan News reviewer Vivian Rothstein called Go Public: A Day in the Life of an American School District “an antidote to the doom and gloom pronouncements of Waiting for Superman and other recent corporate-sponsored films.” This documentary, created by Jim and Dawn O’Keeffe, memorably follows 50 individuals (students, faculty and others) during a single […]
President Obama [has] released a plan to combat rising college costs and make college affordable for American families. The president’s plan outlines three proposals: tying federal student aid to college performance based on yet-to-be developed college rankings; promoting innovation and completion by instituting a college scorecard that would give consumers clear, transparent information on college […]
Thursday’s community meeting in the auditorium of Boyle Heights’ Lorena Street Elementary School was ostensibly a Los Angeles Unified School District briefing on why the school was about to share half of its classrooms and campus resources with a charter school. The players were right out of Central Casting. To one side of Lorena Elementary’s […]
Ever since the emergence of talking pictures, schools have been a major subject of both Hollywood movies and documentary films. One consistent theme of Hollywood portrayals of schools – from Blackboard Jungle (1955), Up the Down Staircase (1967) and Stand and Deliver (1988) to Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995), October Sky (1999) and Freedom Writers (2007) – has been the idealistic teacher […]
“Work hard. Get good grades. Go to a good school and you will be successful.” Our generation has been told time and again that through hard work and dedication, we will be able to live happy lives, have secure jobs, and start families built on comfortable finances. But on the day of action around student […]
When it comes to schools and kids, progress might actually just involve a unified push from everyone in a community – no matter how hard it looks. That’s the view of Joyce Parker, an energetic and passionate resident of Greenville, Mississippi. She is the director of Citizens for a Better Greenville (CBG), an organization that […]
At first glance, it is one of the nation’s hottest new education-reform movements, a seemingly populist crusade to empower poor parents and fix failing public schools. But a closer examination reveals that the “parent-trigger” movement is being heavily financed by the conservative Walton Family Foundation, one of the nation’s largest and most strident anti-union organizations, […]
Sometimes you have to just love the California state constitution. It may right now be the one thing protecting us from the chaos inflicted on Chicago, where the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history is underway. You might remember when Antonio Villaraigosa was first elected Mayor of Los Angeles. One of his […]
(Lisa Schiff is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco. Her post first appeared in BeyondChron and is republished with permission.) A friend of mine emailed me last fall incredibly worried about the impact of potential sequestration cuts on schools and students across the country. He was a long-time Washington D.C.-based public […]
For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live […]
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