Policy Archives

Via Pam Spaulding, we catch John McCain, who was on Meet the Press and up to his usual weasel-iness on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” For months, McCain was calling for the results of a Pentagon study on the law before deciding whether to take any action on repealing it. Now that the study says that most Read More

If you remember back to the ’08 campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama were both touting the importance of creating “green-collar” jobs as a kind of economic and environmental silver bullet.  These jobs in wind and solar energy would help wean America off of fossil fuels and foreign oil, would put retrain skilled laborers Read More

Jamelle points out that Obama’s predecessors won re-election despite getting mollywhopped in their midterms. Colorlines’ editor Kai Wright says Obama can still change the state of the union, despite last night’s results. A reminder that Harry Reid won because he’s actually pretty good at what he does — being a politician. Lexington, Kentucky has elected Read More

Under Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s signature education initiative, state governments were lured by the prospect of billions of dollars in federal grants to bringing their school systems in line with certain vogue-ish educational reform ideas championed by the White House. Among the chief criteria for winning the money: relaxing local rules to encourage the Read More

Over on her blog, Dana Goldstein makes the important point that in so many discussions about education reform — a topic that seems to be inescapable right now — the issue of race is avoided. It’s important to note that the major problem with American education is the problem of class and race inequality. As Read More

When critics of standardized testing talk about how such tests are culturally biased, there’s a tendency to dismiss that concern as a bunch of p.c. claptrap. But what tests do is measure how well kids get the mechanics of the task; they’re actually not all that useful as gauges of whether  kids understand what they’re Read More

It seems that segregation is making it’s way back into New Orleans’ public schools: Three out of five schools are dominated by minorities with fewer than 30 percent of their attendees being white. Of those schools, 84 percent of them are considered “very high poverty schools,” where more than 75 percent of students qualify for Read More

cross-posted from TAPPED. I moved to D.C. for my current job from Connecticut, where I was a reporter for a daily newspaper. The demands of both my job and living in a suburban city dictated that I buy a car. My costs and frustrations went up, my fitness level went down. When looking for housing Read More

cross-posted from TAPPED. Bart Stupak is among the Democratic representatives who are reportedly receiving threats in the wake of the health-care bill’s passage, some from anti-abortion groups he says he believes are from outside his district. Stupak says his offices have been overwhelmed by phone calls, most of them from outside his congressional district, and Read More

So you may have heard: after eluding progressive presidents and lawmakers for nearly a century, House Democrats finally approved sweeping legislaton that would bring  America to near-universal health insurance coverage. The bill nearly died several times in the interminable debate, with interventions from President Obama and deft maneuvering by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (props due) keeping it alive. No matter Read More

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