Replies

Democratic mayors challenge teachers unions in urban political shift ......”The mayors want a raft of changes. They want to replace the uniform pay scale with merit pay. They seek to expand public charter schools, which are largely non-union. Some want to lengthen school days, requiring teachers to work more hours.

And nearly all of these mayors have set their sights on the one workplace protection that teachers have held central for more than 100 years: tenure.

The unions say many of the “fixes” embraced by the mayors are trendy ideas without evidence that they help children learn. Instead, they allow politicians to appear as if they are making improvements without having to confront the profound problems of urban schools, labor leaders say.

“We don’t want to have honest conversations about poverty and segregation and race and class, all those other sorts of ills,” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “Those are really tough issues. So this gives them an excuse to focus on something else.”….

Naomi Schaefer Riley and the Corruption of the Academy Even though The Chronicle of Higher Education long ago reflected the leftist agenda of its readership, I never could have imagined it would stoop so low as to fire someone for writing a piece at variance with the political correctness it has come to uphold. But it did. The Chronicle fired Naomi Schaefer Riley for revealing what almost everyone on any campus knows, but is reluctant to say, about black studies: it is a political cause masquerading as an academic discipline, and if there were real intellectual, and not political, standards on campus, it would be shut down.

There is, however,a larger issue: not only is what Schaefer Riley says true about why black studies should be closed down, but her statements could also be easily extended to many fields in the social sciences and humanities. The vulnerability of the campus on this issue is why the Chronicle chose the unseemly and totally inappropriate device of censorship. It was so willing to placate its audience of ideological leftists massing with pitchforks in hand that it inadvertently gave Riley's exposé on black studies far and away more visibility than it would otherwise have achieved."..............