Liza Featherstone
REPORT CARD: Dubious Standards for Charter Schools
By Liza FeatherstoneThe city’s Office of Charter Schools knows what good education looks like, but just doesn’t think poor, black kids need to have it.
REPORT CARD: Reform via Gentrification
By Liza Featherstone"Stay in your own neighborhood,” the parent coordinator at a sought-after school on the southern side of Park Slope recently admonished a group of prospective parents who had come from all over Brooklyn.
REPORT CARD: Drama of the “Gifted” Program
By Liza FeatherstoneParents all over Brooklyn are now learning how their preschoolers performed on entrance tests for the city’s Gifted & Talented program. (Yes, we do test children who are too young to tie their own shoes.) The children’s scores will determine whether they are eligible to apply for a range of advanced tracks and special schools throughout the city.
REPORT CARD: The Great Technology Scam
By Liza FeatherstoneDescribing her tour of the Community Partnership Charter School (CPCS) in Clinton Hill, one Brooklyn mom was amped. She didn’t have much to say about the curriculum or the school culture: the school’s primary appeal was the stuff.
REPORT CARD
By Liza FeatherstoneThere’s no money, city officials keep condescendingly insisting, as battles over Bloomberg’s austerity budget continue to raise tempers this muggy New York summer.
REPORT CARD
Our Fake School Board
By Liza Featherstone
The meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy may look like democracy in action, but nothing the public says can influence how the mayor’s appointees vote.
REPORT CARD
On Stealing from Kids
By Liza Featherstone
Providence Hogan, a P.S. 29 mom, may go to jail for embezzling more than $80,000 from the Cobble Hill elementary school PTA.
REPORT CARD
Education for the 99 Percent
By Liza Featherstone
For more than a month, hundreds of people have been sleeping outdoors on the cement in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, decrying the fact that our country is run for the benefit of the richest 1 percent, at the expense of the other 99 percent.
REPORT CARD
The Privatized Mind
By Liza Featherstone
Throughout this fall I was constantly texting. Anytime I had a free moment, I’d whip out my cellphone, never satisfied until I’d made contact.
REPORT CARD
On Hakeem Jeffries
By Liza Featherstone
The shops, restaurants, and dry cleaners in Clinton Hill are festooned with signs hailing a rising political star. The neighborhood is economically diverse—there are large housing projects, and Susan Sarandon just bought a place here—but politically, liberalism is a cheerful consensus
REPORT CARD
A Philadelphia Story
By Liza Featherstone
Mayoral control has its critics, and “Report Card” is among them, believing that the public deserves much more control over education policy. But there’s a chilling possibility that for the elites and the profiteers, the present-day structures are too democratic.
REPORT CARD
The Dumbass Factor
By Liza Featherstone
This spring, a group of eighth graders exposed the leaders of a multinational corporation as a drove of braying dopes. It started, of course, on Facebook where the kids tweaked Pearson, a profitable testing company to whom New York State pays millions, by exposing one of its “reading comprehension” exercises as nonsense.
REPORT CARD: “Who Wants to be a Teacher Now?”
By Liza FeatherstoneIt was exhilarating to see so many people in Madison defending teachers, instead of blaming them for failing schools and ailing budgets, as we tend to do here in New York—and just about everywhere else in this country.
REPORT CARD
Beware the Return of For-Profit Schools
By Liza Featherstone
Republicans in the New York State Senate have included, in their version of the budget, a provision allowing for-profit companies to establish charter schools.
REPORT CARD
“Education for Sale”
By Liza Featherstone
Republicans in the New York State Senate have included, in their proposed version of the budget, a provision allowing for-profit companies to establish charter schools. Most likely, this effort at wholesale privatization will fail, but it shows that the for-profit forces are gearing up for a renewed assault on our fragile public system.
REPORT CARD
Here Comes Success
By Liza Featherstone
An escalating charter school battle serves as a jarring reminder that even District 15 parents are still only the 99%—and that it’s the 1% that runs the show.
REPORT CARD
Ending Mayoral Control
By Liza Featherstone
The sober sixth grader was small for his age and wore a handsome pinstriped suit, just the kind of suit a mother wants her son to wear.
Change-a-lujah!
By Liza Featherstone and Doug HenwoodThe anti-consumerist left’s tactic of non-buying emerges from a broader ascetic anti-consumerism. The most egregious example of this unfortunate tendency is “Buy Nothing Day,” the demand that people refrain from spending money on the day after Thanksgiving, the second-biggest day on the retail calendar.
