Democracy Now! Mobile. JUAN GONZALEZ: As children across the nation head back to school, we turn now to a number of recent developments in education news.
Here in New York, nearly 780 employees of the city’s Education Department will lose their jobs by October in the largest layoff at a single agency since Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002. I reported in today’s Daily News that those layoffs are going to be hitting particularly hard the poorest school districts in the city. The layoffs stem from budget cuts to schools, which have occurred in each of the last four years.
The cuts have cost more than 2,000 full-time public school teachers their assignments and now threaten the job security of more than 400 school aides and 82 parent coordinators. At last month’s "Save Our Schools" rally in Washington, D.C., education author Jonathan Kozol criticized the drive toward fewer teachers and larger classes. JONATHAN KOZOL: Class size is soaring in the poorest schools. DIANE RAVITCH: Thank you. DIANE RAVITCH: Right. Grace Lee Boggs book. Become a subscriber or online account holder to read this article and hundreds more.
Learn more. Already a subscriber or account holder? Log in here. Reviewed by Greg Smith Few, if any, U.S. leaders can match the long-term and sustained commitment to civil rights, social justice, and grassroots democracy of 95-year-old Detroit activist and intellectual Grace Lee Boggs. At the heart of Boggs’ critique of the current world system is the same concern about the “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism” that King articulated in his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
Central to this transformation must be a recognition that the lifestyles of most Americans are directly related to the exploitation of people in less advantaged countries and the planet itself. The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. Minority Kids’ Crippling TV Addiction. Twenty-one were stabbed in a Pennsylvania school rampage Wednesday, but all are expected to live—and one even took a selfie.
Think how different the toll would have been with bullets. The dead take no selfies. So there might well never have been the remarkable selfie that 16-year-old Nate Scimio took after his heroism at Franklin Regional High School if he had faced a gun rather than two knives on Wednesday morning. In all, Scimio and 19 other students, along with one staff member, were stabbed when a sophomore allegedly stormed through the school in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. Three students were critically injured. One, a girl, was saved from bleeding to death when a classmate kept paper towels pressed against her wound.
And, as of the end of the day, none of the 21 victims had died. “Without Nate, me and Lindsay would’ve been injured and there’s not enough words to describe how much of a hero he is,” McCool tweeted. Scimio survived to take a picture of himself in Children’s Hospital. I Don't Want to be a Teacher Any More.