On Wednesday, Mark wrote of Ted Kennedy: If he had known that the administration didn’t intend to fund the No Child Left Behind legislation, he might not have lent his support in 2001…It took him a while, as it did most liberals, to appreciate that there were no real opportunities in the Bush years, that […]
Dana Goldstein
Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.
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“Destiny” and the Kennedy Women.
Coverage of Ted Kennedy‘s death has been suffused with the narrative that he was a man held hostage by a sense of family destiny. In 1959, then-Senator JFK said, “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if […]
Posted inEducation in America
The New Yorker Hits Teachers’ Unions — Hard.
The New Yorker‘s big political story this week is an attack on the New York City teachers’ contract, by Steven Brill. By now, most people who follow education news know about the “Rubber Rooms” in big city school districts — reassignment centers for teachers who have been found guilty of misconduct or incompetence but who […]
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Will Health Reform Mean Easier Access to Abortion?
In his recent Time piece on abortion and health reform, Mike Scherer confuses the issue. As he writes, under the current House compromise, both private and public health plans operating in the exchanges would not be able to use government subsidies or taxes to provide abortion — abortions would have to be paid for from […]
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Limbaugh’s Masculinity Very Threatened.
Sadly, I’m going to have to interrupt our Very Serious coverage of torture and Ted Kennedy‘s death to point out that Rush Limbaugh, referencing the CDC’s consideration of circumcision as an HIV prevention method, has said: “If we need to save our penises from anybody it’s from Obama.” —Dana Goldstein
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Ted Kennedy, In His Own Words.
Senator Kennedy died early this morning at the age of 77. Here, some excerpts from his 1980 speech to the Democratic Convention, in which he conceded defeat to Jimmy Carter. The speech is incredibly rich; it is about economic justice as the center of the progressive movement, and about cities as the center of the […]
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ON WRITING, WORTH A READ.
At the Times, Stanley Fish argues that college writing courses need to focus more on grammar, syntax, and rhetoric, and less on discussing, debating, and imitating popular writing on hot-button issues. I agree, but don’t think higher education can solve the problem of poor writing ability. Far and away, the most useful class I took […]
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BEHIND THE STORY: CIRCUMCISION AND HIV.
One of the great things about being a magazine writer is that itallows you to develop quirky areas of expertise. And indeed, as regular readers will know, I’ve beencovering the HIV/circumcision story on and off for over two years,since I first wrote for In These Times about Mayor Bloomberg‘s attempt to encourage circumcision among gay […]
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MICHELLE RHEE DEFINES “GOOD TEACHING.”
For the past year, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has run into roadblocks in her effort to institute what would be the nation’s most ambitious teacher merit pay scheme — in part because of criticisms that D.C. simply didn’t have a fair system for measuring good teaching. Now Rhee’s department has responded with a document […]
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Shaking Up Suburbia
The Obama administration has told affluent Westchester County it can’t continue to segregate low-income and minority housing. Is it the end of the all-white suburb?
