By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Students need to be able to express themselves; the freedom to do so is not only a question of their intellectual development but also one of human rights. Schoolkids may well rebel at the rules. They may challenge authority or, God forbid, even resist.
But punishing students for their political beliefs or their opinion of their school is to chastise developmentally appropriate behavior. Believe it or not, students have views on how good (or not) a school is beyond a standardized test score – and it’s in our best interest to hear them. They know their schools; plus, education is meant to help students grow, to help them be free-thinking citizens. Alas, many school leaders seem too afraid of what their students are thinking to let them voice those thoughts out loud, and they suppress their students’ rights in the process.
Last month, Joseph Munno, founder of University Preparatory Charter School for Young Men (UPrep) in Rochester, New York denied the first black valedictorian of the school, Jaisaan Lovett, the opportunity to give the ceremonial commencement speech, traditionally the preserve of valedictorians. Munno has not explained his decision, but there are several clues in Lovett’s six-year tenure at the charter school, where he had had several run-ins with the school’s principal. Lovett led a five-day student strike in his senior year, according to a USA Today report, because the school allegedly wouldn’t order needed safety equipment for a lab.

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Posted on July 13, 2018

By Leah Litman/Take Care

In a post last week, I highlighted the utter meaninglessness of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-Maine) claim that she would look for a Supreme Court nominee who respects precedent. The claim was bunk, I wrote, because Collins had professed that Justice Neil Gorsuch, whom she voted to confirm to the Supreme Court, was, in her view, a pillar of a judge who respects precedent. As I explained, in his first full term on the Court, Gorsuch voted to overrule or suggested he was open to overruling a prior precedent in 11 of the 60 cases heard.
Also last week, Rich Chen, a professor at Maine Law, wrote an Op-Ed for the Portland, Maine Press Herald offering some other reasons why Collins’ promise to look for a nominee who respects precedent was utterly meaningless. As Rich observed, all judges respect precedent and believe in stare decisis (the doctrine that says even wrong decisions shouldn’t necessarily be overruled). All judges also believe that respect for precedent and stare decisis are not inviolable and have exceptions; thus, all judges believe that some precedents can and should be overruled. The real question is which ones, and under what circumstances. (Here’s a spoiler for you, Susan: Roe v. Wade,* and preferably soon.)

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Posted on July 10, 2018

A Statement By Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.

It was Steve Bannon – at the time, President Trump’s top political advisor – who said, ‘If the subject is race, we win.’
So, the U.S. Justice and Education Departments have launched an attack on affirmative action just in time to make sure Donald Trump can exploit race to drive conservative white turnout in the mid-term elections.

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Posted on July 5, 2018

By Sam Edwards/The Conversation

This year’s July 4 celebrations will come freighted with rather more complexity than usual, and on both sides of the Atlantic too. 2018’s commemoration of independence from British rule will take place just nine days before Donald Trump crosses the Atlantic for talks with his British counterpart, Theresa May. The two will follow the annual celebration of severance with a performance of togetherness, as Independence Day makes way for the “special relationship.”
Given Trump’s remarkably poor grasp of history – this is a man who recently asked if the Canadians had burned down the White House in 1814 – he’ll quite probably be oblivious to any such tensions between the upcoming events of July 4 and those of July 13, the date of his visit to London. But if his advisers take a glance at the history books to think through this coincidence of timing, they might be pleasantly surprised. While many Americans unambiguously celebrate July 4th as a national event marking independence from the “mother country,” in Britain the day has long been a chance to celebrate Anglo-American ties. How can it be both?

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Posted on July 4, 2018

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

After a lengthy government career defined by his central role in bailing out predatory Wall Street banks as former President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner appears to have found his true calling in the private sector, where he now heads a large financial institution that exploits the economic struggles of poor Americans for profit.
As president of Warburg Pincus – a major New York private equity firm – Geithner helps manage a lucrative predatory lending outfit called Mariner Finance, which mass-mails loan checks to low-income Americans, hides exorbitant interest rates in the fine print, and quickly sues those who fail to repay the loan and interest in time, according to a detailed Washington Post report published late Sunday.

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Posted on July 3, 2018