Join the 6th district Democrats for an evening of policy discussion about environmental issues featuring Prof. Mike McKinney and 2nd Congressional District Renee Hoyos discussing her candidacy. The 6th district is in the west Knoxville Karns area where folks are canvassing once a month and organizing electorally. Contact 6thdemskcdp@gmail.com

STANDARDIZED - Lies, Money and Civil Rights
How testing is ruining public education

Review by Jaime Franchi in the Long Island Press

The documentary Standardized: Lies, Money, and Civil Rights: How Testing is Ruining Public Education, the brainchild of producer and former teacher Daniel Hornberger, is a powerful artistic translation of this both cerebral and passionate battle. It stars real-life parents, teachers and experts from across this country testifying as to how schools are being destroyed by this federal education mandate—the Obama Administration’s answer to predecessor George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. The groundswell of protest from parents and teachers is quickly reaching critical mass, causing politicians who had previously dismissed critics of the reform to reconsider their positions. In New York, State Education Commissioner John King faces a vote of “no confidence” by the teachers’ unions for implementing the program. Standardized’s cinematic examination of the effects of high-stakes standardized testing on schoolchildren and the multi-billion-dollar industry perpetuating it comes as the battle here on Long Island is really heating up.

The inspiration for the film comes from the book Making the Grade, by author Todd Farley, who spent his career working in the standardized testing industry and confirmed Hornberger’s suspicions that high-stakes testing not only stifles the creativity of teachers and is harmful to students, but it’s ultimately fraudulent, too.

Harold Meyerson - TAP- Culture eclipses class

In an op-ed in the Chattanooga Times Free Press that ran several weeks before last week’s vote at Volkswagen, Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom (a spin-off of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform), compared the UAW’s campaign to the Union Army’s occupation of Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War and urged workers to repel it as Confederates forces had done to that Union army at the battle of Chickamauga. Clearly, this was not an argument Patterson would have made had the plant employed more than a handful of African-Americans, but Chattanooga remains one of the whiter bastions of the New South.

Rich Yeselson - Jacobin Magazine - After Chattanooga

There is certainly no working class inherently predisposed to achieve emancipation — I hope we all understand that by now. The Marx of human agency has to be privileged over the Marx of the “iron bound laws of history.” And there is no natural worker’s majority for unionization, either. There never has been. It has always required organizing and struggle.

Lawyers Guns and Money - A Titanic Defeat

There were almost certainly several hundred no votes from the beginning. Why? First, the white South has always been very difficult to organize. A combination of ideas of self-reliance, the fact that unions are seen as something northern with Yankee ideas, the impact of evangelical religion, and a culture that united rich whites and poor whites through racial solidarity that also created other ties within communities that cut across class have all made unionization strikingly difficult.

American Prospect on Cantor and the Working Peoples Party

Like many who came out of the 1960s left, Cantor came to realize that community organizing and movement building were both indispensable and insufficient to win lasting change. He still identifies with those movements, but his distinctive aptitude has been to find ways in which the electoral process can advance progressive goals. “I feel we’re in a long line of people going back to the abolitionists: the populists, the suffragists, the labor activists, the civil-rights workers,” he says. “These were all extra-parliamentary movements. We strive to be like them, and we recognize we have to contest for these values through the state, through elections. That’s what most people think politics is. That’s our role.”