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A central idea in Change Matters: Critical Essays on Moving Social Justice from Theory to Policy, edited by sj Miller and David E. Kirkland, is that teaching for social justice cannot simply be an intellectual endeavor. Rather, it is a fundamentally practical action having a real and noticeable impact on the lives of children. In an era dominated by a policy discourse obsessed with testing, accountability, and even recrimination, it is refreshing to envision a different set of policy questions and practices through the prism of the concerns posed by a social justice worldview. In this sense, the essays that comprise sj Miller and David Kirkland's collection issue an important call to action for those engaged in social justice work in education.

In response to the question, 'Are teachers activists?' my answer is: No. Not inherently. Teaching brown kids math, helping recent immigrants master English, or even making an occupational commitment to public education, are none of them inherently radical acts, though they are often characterized as such. This is not to say that choosing education as a profession is in dissonance with struggling for social justice. It is when we believe that it is enough-that simply being a teacher by trade is activism-that we enter into dangerous territory. For this belief is complicit with a plethora of assumptions detrimental to justice, including the notion that learning is inevitably about competition, class mobility and community escape.

You're Fired! What prevents an unpopular teacher from losing their job for holding firm on class standards, procedures and/or guidelines: Teacher Tenure. It is in many ways vital to the educators ability to work effectively in much the same manner to that of a Justice on the US Supreme Court. The main purpose of life appointments or terms for Supreme Court Justices is to allow them to make decisions based on moral and ethical reasoning regardless of whether it is popular or unpopular publicly. The object of job security is to allow for "politics" to not influence the management of a situation. Educators, while their work does not impact the entire judicial system as that of the US Supreme Court, it does impact the lives of those involved. Many times teachers are faced with having to address or confront others with observations that may be unfavorable. As professionals they cannot avoid confronting these individuals for fear of losing their job. Truthfulness, honesty and accountability in a profession can often times be interpreted in alternative ways that result in retribution toward the educator. Teacher tenure allows instructors to do what is morally correct even when it's results or outcomes are not enjoyable. The other area that is upsetting to the vast majority of the public is the belief that tenure safe guards bad teachers from losing their jobs.

"A former public school teacher and union organizer picks his favorites."

"Justice in education---the idea that schools distribute opportunity to all children---must be systemic. A public education system like ours in the United States---publicly funded, universally available, and accountable to the public---is the best way I know to balance the needs of each particular child with society's responsibility to protect the rights of all children. While there are some excellent charter schools, I believe the growing charter school movement threatens our system of public education."

In the 2007 case Morse v. Frederick, when the court upheld the discipline of a student who had unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a school-related event, Justice Thomas joined the majority's opinion. But he wrote a separate concurrence, for himself only, explaining that he would go further and overrule the landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. That case, involving students who wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War, has been a fundamental guarantee of student speech rights in school.

"Death by a Thousand Cuts: Racism, School Closures, and Public School Sabotage, a stunning report released this week by Journey for Justice (J4J), cuts through the ideological babble on school "reform" and lets us listen as "voices from America's affected communities of color"-parents, students, and community leaders-tell us how school closures and privatization are affecting them, their neighborhoods, and their children."

"Teachers are one of the most important resources a nation has for providing the skills, values and knowledge that prepare young people for productive citizenship - but more than this, to give sanctuary to their dreams and aspirations for a future of hope, dignity and justice. It is indeed ironic, in the unfolding nightmare in Newtown, that only in the midst of such a shocking tragedy are teachers celebrated in ways that justly acknowledge - albeit briefly and inadequately - the vital role they play every day in both protecting and educating our children.  What is repressed in these jarring historical moments is that teachers have been under vicious and sustained attack by right-wing conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and centrist democrats since the beginning of the 1980s. Depicted as the new "welfare queens," their labor and their care has been instrumentalized and infantilized; [1] they have been fired en masse under calls for austerity; they have seen rollbacks in their pensions, and have been derided because they teach in so-called "government schools."  Public school teachers too readily and far too pervasively have been relegated to zones of humiliation and denigration.  The importance of what teachers actually do, the crucial and highly differentiated nature of the work they perform and their value as guardians, role models and trustees only appears in the midst of such a tragic event. If the United States is to prevent its slide into a deeply violent and anti-democratic state, it will, among other things, be required fundamentally to rethink not merely the relationship between education and democracy, but also the very nature of teaching, the role of teachers as engaged citizens and public intellectuals and the relationship between teaching and social responsibility.  This essay makes one small contribution to that effort."

I'm currently deep into Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation, a highly recommended read for those committed to learning about struggles for social justice in public education. An excerpt captured from the book's introduction serves as a catalyst for thought and questioning. In the foreword teacher activist Adam Sanchez interviews Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools.

In this week's show (Part One of a two part series), Education Radio continues to disrupt the dominant narrative of corporate education reform by investigating the organization Teach for America (TFA). TFA is one of many insidious examples of how the language of social justice and equity is hijacked and appropriated, and instead employed to further the goals of the neoliberal education reform agenda. This agenda includes a firm belief that education should primarily serve the interests of private profit and as with all neoliberal education reformers, TFA is actively intensifying racial and class inequality, and the destruction of education as an essential public good along with the continued decimation of unions - two institutions that are primary determinants of a democratic society.

Replacing teachers at the remaining 26 turnaround schools could cost the city as much as $60 million, according to a new analysis released today by one of the city's most vociferous opponents. The report, released by the Coalition for Educational Justice in advance of an organized student and parent protest at City Hall, also took aim at the process the Department of Education used to assessed many of the schools that remain on the turnaround list. A dozen schools are doing well enough on their annual progress reports that they cleared the city's own closure benchmark.

In this second of our two-part exploration of Teach for America, we'll explore TFA's larger goals and connection to corporate education reform. In doing so, we examine TFA's impact on professional teachers and their unions, and their hijacking of a social justice discourse in an effort to manufacture public acquiescence to the imposition of an agenda that ultimately seeks to further consolidate knowledge, wealth and power for a few at the expense of the many.

This is the text of the commencement speech that Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, gave this past weekend at the Loyola University Chicago School of Education. The institute is a non-profit organization created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. Rothstein is also the author of several books on education issues, and is senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law. From 1999 to 2002, he was the national education columnist of The New York Times.

As Blue Jersey reported, Chris Christie's nominee to the state Supreme Court, Phillip Kwon, was voted down by the Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines. This is a very big deal in the NJ education debate, because Christie has made it clear he wants to overturn the court's ruling that mandated adequate funding for the poorest districts in the state. These are the famous "Abbott Districts," named for the landmark case brought by the Education Law Center. The original ruling has since been superceeded by the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA). Christie has made no secret that he wants to stack the court with nominees that will overturn SFRA; that would mean a huge cut in school funding for the poorest districts, and big tax cuts for Christie's wealthy base. This is in addition to the changes he has proposed to SFRA, which ELC estimates will be a $400 million cut to at-risk children across the state.

"In 1954 the Supreme Court declared that public education is "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education stood for the proposition that the federal government would no longer allow states and municipalities to deny equal educational opportunity to a historically oppressed racial minority. Ruling unanimously, the justices overturned the noxious concept that "separate" education could ever be "equal." Yet today, nearly 60 years later, our schools remain separate and unequal. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are nonwhite. The average white student attends a school where 77 percent of his or her peers are also white. Schools today are "as segregated as they were in the 1960s before busing began." We are living in a world in which schools are patently separate."

Embattled faculty members at Bronx High School of Science are rejoicing after a state judge ruled to erase an unsatisfactory rating from a former teacher's record. In a decision last Wednesday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Paul Feinman granted a petition to overturn a "U"-rating for Peter Lamphere, which he received from principal Valerie Reidy during the 2008-09 school year.

With the publication of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, the education reform debate in the U.S. is moving into a second round of Finnish envy-the first being the corporate reformers' distorted claims about international comparisons and the new being calls to examine the full and complex picture of why Finland has achieved both social and education reform that has pushed them to the forefront of education quality. This second round, however, appears to be exposing a nonpartisan failure among all concerned with public education moreso than the needed turn away from corporate education agendas and toward democratic ideals seeking social justice and human agency. Education Week recently reprinted Erin Richards' piece (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) addressing Finland's education system, titled, "Better Teachers, Common Curriculum Are Hallmarks of Finnish Schools." While such coverage should signal the shift needed in discourse about international comparisons and what the U.S. should gain from Finland's social and educational commitments, the headline alone shows that we persist in seeing not what the evidence shows, but what we already assume about schools and reform.

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than the overstated former Washington D.C. Chancellor of Schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty's term in office Michelle Rhee, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk. This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher's unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education-and the role of public school teachers-in a deeply unequal society.

What counts as a "fact"? New York State Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern's ruling on the release of the New York City Teacher Data Reports reflects a view very much at odds with the social science research community. In ruling that the Department of Education's intent to release these reports, which purport to label elementary and middle school teachers as more or less effective based on their students' performance on state tests of English Language Arts and mathematics, was neither arbitrary nor capricious, Kern held that there is no requirement that data be reliable for them to be disclosed. Rather, the standard she invoked was that the data simply need to be "factual," quoting a Court of Appeals case that "factual data … simply means objective information, in contrast to opinions, ideas or advice." But it is entirely a matter of opinion as to whether the particular statistical analyses involved in the production of the Teacher Data Reports warrant the inference that teachers are more or less effective. All statistical models involve assumptions that lie outside of the data themselves. Whether these assumptions are appropriate is a matter of opinion.

This was written by Brock Cohen, a teacher and student advocate in the Los Angeles Unified School District who contends that we can no longer afford to trivialize the critical role that poverty plays in a child's learning experiences - and that true school reform begins with social justice. Brock's students were recently featured in an NPR piece that charts some of his students' daily struggles as they pursue their education.