by Howard Zinn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
October 12, 2009

Image by Whiskeygonebad via Flickr

An excerpt from A People’s History of the United States.

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

The Cowen Institute at Tulane University has been promoting the New Orleans Charter Miracle since 2007. Cowen Institute has been trying since then to sell the “transformed” post-Katrina education system in New Orleans.

The results are tepid. Still, Cowen tries to sell this New Orleans. Consider this excerpt from Cowen’s history:

[Following Hurricane Katrina] the majority of schools reopened as charter schools, which are publicly-funded and operated by nonprofit organizations or universities, giving New Orleans a greater percentage of students in charter schools than any other district in the United States.  Education entrepreneurs and veteran educators from around the country flocked to the city to participate in the greatest public school renaissance in the country. …

…the new model of delivering education to the city’s youth has begun to yield results.  Parental involvement, teacher quality, and community engagement have all improved.  Between the 2006-07 and the 2007-08 school years, student…

Must read article in The Atlantic.

Excerpt:

In December 2012, an Icelandic woman named Thorlaug Agustsdottir discovered a Facebook group called “Men are better than women.” One image she found there, Thorlaug wrote to us this summer in an email, “was of a young woman naked chained to pipes or an oven in what looked like a concrete basement, all bruised and bloody. She looked with a horrible broken look at whoever was taking the pic of her curled up naked.” Thorlaug wrote an outraged post about it on her own Facebook page.

Before long, a user at “Men are better than women” posted an image of Thorlaug’s face, altered to appear bloody and bruised. Under the image, someone commented, “Women are like grass, they need to be beaten/cut regularly.” Another wrote: “You just need to be raped.” Thorlaug reported the image and comments to Facebook and requested that the…

This is one of the silliest, most embarrassing articles I have read in a very long time. It was allegedly written by two teachers as a rebuke to Carol Burris, the experienced high school principal who has made a hash of Common Core in her many writings for Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet in the Washington Post.

The teacher who says she teaches kindergarten wants to make sure that her 5-year-old students are “college-and-career-ready.” Really? So if a 5-year-old can’t count to 100, they won’t have a career or go to college? Surely, she jests.

Has she ever heard of “Defending the Early Years,” an organization of early childhood experts who believe the Common Core standards are indeed developmentally inappropriate. In this article, Professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige says that it is “ridiculous” to expect little children to count to 100. So what if they learn to do it next year or…