Rick Ayers

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...

The circus haunts our subconscious like some kind of childhood bestiary - filled with fantastical creatures and explosions, danger and allure - all setting our understanding of commonplace reality on its ear. Everything that our older, skeptical selves reject as artifice and tawdry manipulation, our childhood selves accept with glassy-eyed...

So my nephew Malik, a fabulous renaissance man who has taught sixth grade math, science, and Spanish as well as coaching basketball and baseball for the last six years, was given a pink slip. Again. It's a March ritual around here. School districts are dealing with slashed budgets and are...

I happened to pick up Declan Kiberd's new book, Ulysses and us: The art of everyday life in Joyce's masterpiece, for two reasons. First, my son in New York was taking a class on James Joyce's Ulysses. Second, it has a beautiful photo on the cover -- Marilyn Monroe sitting...

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

William Butler Yeats penned those lines after the Irish Easter uprising of 1916. And how haunting and true they remain. Watch the explosions of joy at Tahrir Square and across the Middle East. The people of Egypt have changed much...

Some in the education field were cheered during the State of the Union speech by President Obama's call for people to go into the profession of teaching. He said, "If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in...

Previously I have written about what a pathetic mess is made of education reform when a group of MBAs, with little understanding of education, begin to call the shots in education policy. They invoke a kind of faith-based reliance on so-called "market forces." And pretty soon we are caught up...

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had one of those high concept PBS interviews with Gwen Ifill the other day. What struck me is how the reactionaries have seized the narrative, taken over the points of arguments that we -- progressive teachers, social justice activists and critical students --...

One of the barriers we must overcome in framing a reasonable debate on school reform is the powerful hegemony of right-wing ideology which sees free-market mechanisms as the only way to organize a large social project such as education or health care. Indeed, the notion of a public space, a...

I was fortunate to catch a most stunning new documentary film which has quietly premiered at a few film festivals and is about to go into broader distribution. Trust: Second Acts in Young Lives is one of those brilliant pieces which reminds us what documentary does best: captures...

There is something in a policy discussion that just loves numbers. We need data. No matter if the data are fuzzy, distorting, or simply unusable. People in the social sciences suffer from physics envy, we want clear and settled facts backed up by interesting charts, slopes, regression tables. Never mind...

Davis Guggenheim's 2010 film Waiting for Superman is a slick marketing piece full of half-truths and distortions. The film suggests the problems in education are the fault of teachers and teacher unions alone, and it asserts that the solution to those problems is a greater focus on top-down instruction driven...

A review of recent fiction about Vietnam, specifically the Vietnam war, points out something important: the US gets involved in fights around the world, generally with the idea of maintaining our "way of life" and our economic power; we never seem to take the time to understand the "other" --...