AOL News has a new home! The Huffington Post.
Click here to visit the new home of Politics Daily!The Providence School Board has voted 4-3 to send dismissal notices to all of the Rhode Island school district's 1,926 teachers. Thursday night's meeting was held in a school gymnasium to accommodate the more than 700 teachers who turned out to voice their opposition to the move. The board vote came after two hours of discussion. "I'm feeling disrespected, devalued and marginalized," teacher Ed Gorden told the panel, according to The Providence Journal. "Termination is a career-ender. You are putting a scarlet letter on every one of us." Providence Teachers Union President Steve Smith said ...
(Nov. 12) -- Disparaging our children's teachers and blaming teachers unions won't improve public education. While, sadly, bashing unions is the specialty and mission of the Center for Union Facts, as it demonstrated in its AOL News opinion piece last week ("Will Teachers Unions Bend to Education Reform?"), the American Federation of Teachers prefers to focus on concrete solutions that will improve the current state of the American public education system. Do we have to makes changes? Absolutely. But improving schools requires building on what works and replicating it. There are countless ...
(Nov. 5) -- Democrats in Congress aren't the only ones who had a bad day on Tuesday. So did their No. 1 cash cow, the teachers unions. The two largest teachers unions -- the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which combine to form the single largest source of donations to Democrats -- have hit a rough patch. Not only did their political apologists in Congress just lose more than 60 seats in the House and Senate, but they've been enduring a PR nightmare of epic proportions ever since the release of the much-discussed "Waiting for 'Superman,'" a ...
The director of "Waiting for Superman," Davis Guggenheim, has a way of making friends who happen to know their way around the White House. In his 2007 breakout documentary and Oscar winner, "An Inconvenient Truth" (starring former Vice President Al Gore), Guggenheim's excellent creative bloodlines were shown to great advantage as he essentially brought a Power Point presentation to life. (He is the son of four-time Academy Award winner Charles Guggenheim and is married to movie star and Academy Award nominee Elisabeth Shue). His new film was released last month and despite harsh criticism of ...
It seems like every time I turn over a charter school rock, some unpleasant fact crawls out. That's how I felt after watching "The Lottery," a new documentary about the Harlem Success Academy and its leader, Eva Moskowitz. Like Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for Superman," this film addresses the failures of the traditional public school system, in this case zeroing in on a New York City public charter school and the challenges it faces. (Guggenheim offers a broader picture of charter schools in the nation's capital and around the country.) Some of the facts spotlighted in "The Lottery" just ...
Who was the greatest teacher you ever had? I remember mine, but I can't quite put my finger on what made her so good. It didn't have anything to do with age or gender. Nothing to do with years of experience or where she got her college diploma. There was some indescribable quality, a certain touch. The way how, during tests, I would remember exactly how she explained concepts but couldn't necessarily remember the same ideas as explained by the textbook. Of all teachers, why was she so special? And why weren't there more like her at my school? Despite constant indicators that our nation has ...
Follow Politics Daily
POPULAR
News From Our Partners




Top News
More News
More on Aol
Local News
More Blog/Sites
Sites and Services