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    Direct Action & Elections: Wisconsin's Labor Struggle Lee M. Abbott June 20, 2011

    No one could say they'd seen it before. That’s what was so genuinely exhilarating about those first weeks of protests in Madison against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s effort to take away public workers’ right to collectively bargain. People had seen protest, confrontation, and direct action before, but now these were taking shape and combining in ways no one had ever expected. Rallies wouldn’t let up—protestors wouldn’t go home and more returned every day. An open-ended, intense confrontation between the people and the government grew day by day in the State Capitol.     

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    Tadamon! 10 Years of Notes from the Global Intifada The Editors March 11, 2011

    Notes from the Global Intifada – Believe it or not, over the past year we at Left Turn had been discussing changing our tag line, it is as though a long time can go by without fundamental change happening, and then all of a sudden there is a week when everything takes off.

    Ten years ago when Left Turn emerged, momentum seemed to be on our side. In 1999 historic protests shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle. A wave of anti-corporate globalization protests that had begun building in the movements of the Global South seemed to sweep into North America and finally caught the people of the US. A project that could document and project this global rebellion for a specifically US audience seemed necessary and full of possibilities.

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    Labor in a Moment of Crisis Peter Brogan, Andrew Cornell November 1, 2008

    “Crisis” seems to be on everyone’s lips in recent weeks. Though the term evokes both common sense notions and the complex formulations of Marxist economists, perhaps the most useful definition is the one professor and prison abolition activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore provides: crisis is simply the inability of an organization or system to continue achieving acceptable results by continuing to act in the same way it had been.

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    The Myth of the “Crappy Teacher” Crystal Sylvia March 11, 2011

    On February 2, I attended a forum at the Fordham Institute titled “Are Bad Schools Immortal?” One of the speakers was Jeanne Allen, founder and president of the Center for Education Reform, which promotes “school choice,” a.k.a. charter schools and vouchers.

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    The Corporate Hijacking of Public Education Crystal Sylvia March 11, 2011

    *See "The Myth of the 'Crappy Teacher'" which accompanies this article in the print edition.

    The education reform movement currently sweeping the country has been embraced by the likes of Bill Gates, President Obama, Al Sharpton, Newt Gingrich, Bill Cosby, and Oprah Winfrey. Some may be inspired to see such a divergent group joining forces to help make public schools better for children. However, when you take a closer look at the policies involved in this reform, the reality is quite chilling.

    Michelle Rhee, the former Chancellor of DC Public Schools (DCPS), is the face of what needs to be called corporate education reform. The premises of corporate education reform are: the main impediments to improving public schools are teachers’ unions because they rigidly defend bad teachers; schools need to be run like businesses to make them less bureaucratic and more dynamic; educational experience is not required to be a teacher, principal, or chancellor; the corporate education reform model is the only way public education can be transformed; and success can be measured through data-driven outcomes, with the most important data being student test scores.

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