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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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....

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...