Comments on: Code Words and Green Dot’s Pandering to Westside Racism

By: tamara

tamara — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:50:29 +0000

i’m a parent of two kids who attend/ed Emerson, and live two blocks from the school. The “Parent Revolution” employee who came to my door with a petition to have it turned into a charter school was a young, white man with light brown hair.

excellent article. spot on.

i particularly liked Caroline’s telling statistics and Lichen’s “The rich already have their “choice” of private schools–any further privatization just means that most students are caught up in bad, test-oriented schools, run like prisons , where the teachers get paid pennies, there is no pta or school board, or any other system answerable to democracy.”

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:03:15 +0000

William Green just went to your web site and saw this.
Millions of people get their drinking water from rivers and lakes polluted by the coal industry.
How do they get away with this?

By: William Green

William Green — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:46:35 +0000

I believe that once these loud-mouthed bigots saw that president Obama would not be inclined to really give them the smack; that emboldened the nationalist Republicans to go to ridiculous extremes displaying their racism and anti-American behavior. They shame themselves and the country.

By: Michele Levin

Michele Levin — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:34:51 +0000

Ben Austin sat and talked. The air grew thin in the parent center as he went on and on about what “they” weren’t about. He apologized for his inflammatory remarks about Emerson. He said that any parent in his group who supported a separation of class and race was not welcome. I paraphrase. He was indignant at the thought. How offensive.

He could not tell me why Emerson was a failing school.
He could tell me that he would not stop his takeover attempts.
He would not answer a direct question.
Nayla gave me her card.

I graduated from Emerson in 1976. I teach there now. I look out of the tall Neutra window and see the light filtering in and the leaves of the elm tree outside. I think of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think of my students. We shall not not be moved.

By: lichen

lichen — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:16:35 +0000

The rich already have their “choice” of private schools–any further privatization just means that most students are caught up in bad, test-oriented schools, run like prisons , where the teachers get paid pennies, there is no pta or school board, or any other system answerable to democracy.

It is true that creating free schools, run democratically by the students and where each is allowed to design their own, dynamic curriculum and explore what they want to is ideal; but privatization and charter schools have nothing to do with that; no, indeed, they lead to a climate more like chicago, full of military schools and standardized-test mills.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:27:55 +0000

In a generation or so they will all be fighting for survival and that’s best case scenario. Still hard for many to understand. Chinese overlords no probably not as they will also be fighting for survival just on a bigger scale at first.

By: Obstreperous

Obstreperous — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:15:01 +0000

Let me see. So the solution to fostering other-centeredness, compassion and creativity in our children is to remove educational choice and enslave them in public institutions overseen by beureaucratic hacks providing political indoctrination in the place of education. Wow. Now that’s really something.
No worry. At this rate in a generation or so they will all be answering to our Chinese overlords.

By: lichen

lichen — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:18:34 +0000

“The kids need more work on their character and decorum and what it means to be a good citizen.”

Such fascist scumbags! These people who want schools to be made even more punitive, child-hating, standardized lockups, they are the ones lacking integrity, kindness, and human decency. The likes of boy-hating Arne Duncan, falsely imprisoned masses people in suffocating, violent, fascist, anti-life military schools for being born male, are disgusting almost to Israeli proportions.