Five Posts You May Have Missed in 2014

These posts didn’t get as much love. Sadly, none of them is out of date.

1. Criminalization is Pretty Harmful Too

Here is some push back on the idea that decriminalization of things will lead to harms, as if criminalization isn’t a massive source of harm.

Is prison harmful? Is ripping apart families harmful? Is the endemic sexual assault found in prison harmful? What about the risk of violence, or the torture of solitary confinement? Or overcrowding, or lack of medical care? How about the collateral consequences of imprisonment–unemployment, being barred from public housing, food stamps, federal education aid and a whole host of professions or voting? What about the impact on communities where many people are shuffled between prison and the neighborhood? What about the police harassment that comes with hyper-aggressive law enforcement?

[Speaking of which, High incarceration may be more harmful than high crime h/t Gerry Canavan.]

2. Charter Schools’ False Promise

Top Posts for 2014: Wall Street, Education, Charts and Fighting

1. Wall Street and the School House Part I: The Culture of Smartness

This was the first of three posts exploring the connections between Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, and so-called “education reform.” I have Alexis Goldstein to thank for pushing to to stop talking about this idea and just do it.

[T]his sort of smartness infuses the movement for corporate education reform.  It can be seen in the pattern of seeking to provide maximum power to a few executives over public education, displacing the authority of schools boards, unions and the constituencies these represent: parents and teachers, and more broadly, citizens.  This can mean mayoral control over schools, or top school administrators (some, like in Chicago, now labeled CEOs), or state appointed boards like Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission. The idea that a single strong authority can “fix” schools by overriding the concerns of other stakeholders is so commonplace it was the theme of the movie Waiting for Superman, which focused on reform darling / authoritarian and DC Chancellor Michele Rhee.  Rhee made a name for herself through her confrontational style in relation to teachers and parents, famously taking a film crew along with her to fire a teacher. Significant experience teaching or administering schools is not required to wield this sort of unchecked power.

2. The Donald Sterling Supremacism No One’s Talking About

What’s a good leftist book for a liberal who is looking to learn more about the left?

I asked this question on Twitter the other day, got a lot of interesting suggestions, and several people asked me to post it.  If you suggested any of these to me, and would like credit, let me know (since I didn’t say I was doing that ahead of time, I didn’t want to do it without asking). I’d love to hear more from people about their thoughts, and I’m glad to add more books if you have further suggestions. I’ve left off a couple that were either jokes or that I think missed what I was getting at–it’s possible I missed some.

I’m less interested in a book that a liberal would like than one that would be a good starting point if they are looking to explore beyond where they are today. Of course, asking this question leaves two crucial ones unanswered–what do we mean by liberal and what do we mean by left? I left these terms vague because I was curious to see what people’s answers were without me imposing my definitions. My sense is that this list leans U.S.-centric and white male. And it’s also true that different books would make sense for different people.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

And here’s the list, in no particular order: