By Mark Naison (November 11, 2019) During the last few years, it has been a matter of extreme frustration to me that I have been able to do little to prevent our country from “going off the rails.” I saw what was coming four years ago, warned people about it, and had virtually no influence on anybody that didn’t already…
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By Mark Naison (October 13, 2019) Letter to the President of Georgia Southern University regarding book burning at his school President@georgiasouthern.edu Kyle Marrero President, Georgia Southern University Dear President Marrero As a historian of race in the United States, who has written 7 books on the subject, and a professor for 49 years at one of the nation’s major universities,…
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By Mark Naison (August 19, 2019) If there was a piece of advice I would give to young people, it would be the following: Don’t normalize racism. Speak out against it and challenge it wherever you see it, whether it is in a classroom, a dormitory, a locker room or at your family dinner table. Do so with kindness when…
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By Teka Lark (June 24, 2019) Direct action is a tool that should only be used when it needs to be used. Protesting with a permit is not direct action. Anytime you appeal to authority in a way that puts them in the position of reasonable, you’re not doing direct action. What is direct action? When you resist with your…
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By Mark Naison (April 3, 2018) For the last twenty years, beating on teachers has been the national pastime, as popular among Democrats as Republicans, among liberals as conservatives. Teachers have been the nation’s most convenient scapegoat for rapidly rising levels of inequality and have been the target of an immense array of accountability measures which funnel profits to test…
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By Irami Osei-Frimpong (March 19, 2018) I think that a whole lot of political problems come from an inability to share power with genuine people you may not necessarily like. This barrier is baked into our political culture, though I will say that there are marked differences between subordinate and dominant groups, for a variety of reasons. Well-ordered democracies concern…
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After twenty two years of award-winning teaching of moral theory, feminism, and ethics of diversity at Oregon State University, Dr. Lani Roberts retired and eventually moved to eastern Oregon. Soon after she moved there, she began teaching again, but this time, she taught citizenship classes as a volunteer for the largely Mexican immigrant community of Hood River, Oregon. She also…
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By Ana Castillo (August 4, 2017) XICANISMA 2017 Sadly, I know of whence she speaks. It is a reality in this country that defies the belief that education is a sure way for all to climb up the economic ladder. Instead, college grads are in debt, taking on jobs not related to their fields in order to make ends meet,…
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By Mark Naison (June 27, 2017) Ever since the Clinton Presidency, the Democratic Party has been an advocate of top-down school reforms whose goal has been to make the nation more economically competitive and reduce inequality. Not only have these policies failed to achieve their stated objectives, they have destabilized communities where Democrats have traditionally found support, created widespread distress…
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By Chris Lowe (May 30, 2017) I first ran across the term “neoliberal” in the context of being a scholar of Africa in the 1980s when neoliberal economists and policy makers took over the World Bank and IMF under Reagan and Thatcher, and began imposing what were known as “structural adjustment” policies on poor countries seeking to renew loans. For…
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By Mark Naison (March 11, 2016) I just had an epiphany. I’ve been thinking about why our economic and political elites are devoting so much energy to destroying public education. What’s in it for them, other than the profits to be made from investments in technology, software, real estate and other direct benefit to corporations from testing and school privatization?