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Rick Ayers
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Rick Ayers is a Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He received his PhD in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education. He has his Masters in Education from Mills College and taught at Berkeley High School from 1995 to 2006. He has worked as a Master Teacher for KQED Education Department, on the Teacher Advisory Board for Youth Speaks, and as a core team member of the Berkeley High School Diversity Project. He received the Berkeley Community Award, Berkeley Community Fund (2004), the Distinguished Educator of the Year Award, Occidental College (2004), and the Distinguished Adviser Award, Journalism Education Association (2000).

Rick is co-author (with Bill Ayers) of Teaching the Taboo (2010, Teachers College Press) and of the book Zero Tolerance: Resisting the drive for punishment, A handbook for parents, students, educators and citizens (2001, New Press). He is co-author (with Amy Crawford) of Great Books for High School Kids: A Teacher’s Guide to Books That Can Change Teens’ Lives (2004, Beacon Press), author of Studs Terkel’s Working, a Teaching Guide (2000, New Press) and co-creator (with students) of the Berkeley High Slang Dictionary (self published 2000, North Atlantic Book published, 2003.)

He is co-editor of a special education edition of Monthly Review, “Education under fire: The US corporate attack on students, teachers, and schools.” (Summer, 2011). He is the author of numerous articles including “Both Sides of the Mic: Community Literacies in the Age of Hip Hop” in The Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy through the Communicative and Visual Arts, “La Silent, What is To Be Done? Profile of a Chicana student in trouble,” in Democracy and Education.

Rick grew up in Chicago and is married to Ilene Abrams (College Advisor at Oakland’s Envision Academy) and has three children, Aisha, Sonia, and Max, and a grandchild, Eliel.

Blog Entries by Rick Ayers

American Education Research Association Meeting in San Francisco -- a Site of Contention and Hope

(0) Comments | Posted April 29, 2013 | 3:53 PM

The annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) is a little bit of everything. After all, there are 18,000 researchers for the meeting in San Francisco this week -- graduate students, professors, and private foundations -- coming together to share and reflect on the research on schooling today....

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'We Made A Lot of Mistakes But We Were Right' -- Robert Redford Explores Radical Questions From the 60s and Today

(4) Comments | Posted April 16, 2013 | 3:50 PM

It has finally happened. We knew it was coming. With the release of Robert Redford's film adaptation of Neil Gordon's book The Company You Keep, the Weather Underground has achieved the status of a cultural trope. Starting with Sam Green and Bill Seigel's documentary, following Bill Ayers' eight months as...

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Twisted Rhetoric on the Anniversary of the Iraq War

(8) Comments | Posted March 18, 2013 | 10:10 PM

National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation program attempted on Monday to address the tenth anniversary of the launching of the disastrous war in Iraq. It was their typical line-up of white males, from this guy from the Naval Academy to that guy from West Point to another guy from...

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War Strategies of the Blind

(1) Comments | Posted January 29, 2013 | 3:12 PM

The New York Times has run two reviews on the front page of the Sunday Book section, purporting to explore the contradictions inherent in the U.S. military strategy. But both of the books reviewed, Fred Kaplan's The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way...

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"Maybe the Press Failed Then": An Interview With Ken Burns and Raymond Santana

(1) Comments | Posted November 29, 2012 | 11:18 AM

Directed by classic American filmmaker Ken Burns as well as his daughter Sarah Burns and David McMahon, the documentary The Central Park Five is an incredible document -- exposé, really -- of justice denied. Most Americans are familiar, because it is burned into our collective memory, the case of the...

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Artists and Activists Take to Social Media Airwaves to Counter Super PAC Ads

(1) Comments | Posted October 25, 2012 | 6:55 PM

While the billionaire donators are giving a boost to the media company bottom-line with massive advertising for their boy Mitt Romney, the number of progressive homemade ads, usually costing nothing or next to nothing, has exploded in this election year. These candidates don't buy media time and they don't test...

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Talkin' That Talk

(3) Comments | Posted October 9, 2012 | 5:56 PM

Ginia Bellafante's article in Sunday's New York Times is wrong in so many ways it takes an educator some time to even begin to address it. Her thesis, one that is old and worn out, is that poor children are behind in the education race because they are...

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The Real Face of Health Care Today

(1) Comments | Posted October 1, 2012 | 5:40 PM

The Waiting Room is a punch to the gut, an unblinking gaze at the real lives of people cast off and left out of the medical system in the U.S. Shot in cinema verité style, the film takes place entirely in the emergency room at Oakland's Highland...

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Education Struggles Aflame Across the Hemisphere

(1) Comments | Posted September 25, 2012 | 7:39 PM

The attacks on public education seem sharp and relentless these past few years. In higher education, this has particularly taken the form of state legislatures strangling education budgets, private corporations using universities as sponsors for their research projects, and tuition rising to ridiculous levels. There have been protests across the...

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Clashes in California's Fields

(0) Comments | Posted September 18, 2012 | 2:14 PM

Before I was a teacher I worked for 12 years in a restaurant kitchen as a cook/chef. I always found it odd to read newspaper accounts of restaurants that were all about the romance, the aesthetic, the unrestrained consumerism of the public eating. No one had a sense of the...

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Spike Lee's Unique Vision: Red Hook Summer

(1) Comments | Posted August 22, 2012 | 4:45 PM

Colors! Bright, primary colors. United Colors of Benetton colors. Ghanaian marketplace colors. Spike Lee slaps you in the face with his big splashy palette from the first scene. Yellow! Blue! Orange! A red rug, a purple church, red blood. Never go to a Spike Lee film expecting a traditional, polished,...

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It's the Curriculum, Stupid!

(23) Comments | Posted June 26, 2012 | 5:23 PM

While many educators believe the development of a just, multicultural society is central to our values, very powerful forces have been fighting against such a vision for decades.

Here's the kind of thinking that drives the education standards writers: "The costs of multiculturalism -- in terms of disunity,...

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Some Anti-war Reflections on Memorial Day

(9) Comments | Posted May 30, 2012 | 11:15 AM

Across the country this memorial day, in parks and at parades, before sporting events and at graduation ceremonies, the hypocrisy of paunchy old men extolling the glories of warfare was on obscene display. And President Obama's performance at the Vietnam Memorial Wall was another pathetic case of pandering to an...

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Anarchists, Cops, the Super Rich -- It's New York 100 Years Ago

(0) Comments | Posted May 22, 2012 | 10:04 AM

The thing about New York is that its streets and alleys, neighborhoods and wharves, pulsate with traces of the millions who have gone before. There is no corner you can turn where there was not some grave injustice done, some despicable crime, some tragic ending. And there is also no...

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A Modest Proposal

(7) Comments | Posted April 9, 2012 | 12:35 PM

Last week I spent two hours a day leading an exploration of T'ang Dynasty Chinese poetry with an incredibly awesome group of 11th graders in Julie Daniel's English class at East Oakland's Fremont High School. This was particularly delightful because Julie was my student in 11th grade some 9 years...

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The Empire's Pretentious New Clothes

(17) Comments | Posted March 16, 2012 | 2:43 PM

This past year has seen the blossoming of a new genre: the end-of-empire-anxiety-film.

It lurks just beneath the surface in The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and War Horse. Some messy feelings crawl into the collective subconscious and are represented on the screen and beyond. The angst is...

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Occupy Thoughts -- Oakland General Strike

(8) Comments | Posted November 3, 2011 | 6:31 PM

As I write this on Wednesday night, people are still massed at the Port of Oakland. This day of the Oakland General Strike has gone past like a dream. Something unimaginable just happened. The sleeping giant has awakened. This changes everything.

My thoughts right now are not political analysis...

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Occupy Our Schools

(9) Comments | Posted October 19, 2011 | 3:10 PM

Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? The sea change that is Occupy Wall Street does not have to do with the list of demands. It does not have to do with Obama's election chances. In a perfect example of conflicting narratives,...

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Get Angry, Please?

(3) Comments | Posted August 15, 2011 | 12:21 PM

Let's say someone rapes you and then gets just a slap on the wrist. Then let's say that same someone arrests you for looking disheveled, because he has now seen the light and wants to be a stickler for the law. And say that someone was named Standard and Poor's....

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A Graduation Speech to Remember

(1) Comments | Posted June 6, 2011 | 3:53 PM

Sometimes when I get caught up in the policy debates, all the hollering and posturing of political skirmishing, I feel that I lose touch with the real stuff, the important stuff about teaching and education and schools. I lose touch with the students. I was fortunate enough to get pulled...

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