education – Page 5

Dispatches: Education reform needs capital

Dispatches is available — it’s one Obama and education.

Back to school

This piece of legislation seems an innovative way to turn a negative in a positive: create incentives to encourage those recently unemployed in two of the state’s most important industry — Big Pharma and finance — to become teachers. This would create jobs for people who need them, filling a need in the public schools for science and math teachers.

The college cost shift

This is a good and important post — and one that should remind us that the eight-year Clinton administration has a lot to answer for in terms of our current national plight.

Long story short: The Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae) was established as a government-sponsored enterprise in 1972, and was privatized as part the bipartisan neoliberalism of Clinton’s second term, starting in 1997, and concluding with full privatization in 2004, and whopping bonuses all around. It’s a perfect example of how a program conceived within the liberal welfare state model was repurposed to serve conservative welfare state ends.

But it wasn’t just he loans. You need to go back to the early days of the Reagan administration to understand the full breadth of the conservative antipathy toward broad access to college. It was under Reagan that federal aid for students was first slashed, forcing more students to seek loans.

Broken Cord: An Anthology of Writing on Alzheimer’s and Dementia

We are looking to raise seed money for an anthology of writing on Alzheimer’s and dementia. The anthology will be the first project from a new small press. All proceeds will go to research and care groups. Contributors who donate $20 or more will get copies of the anthology and a mention on the acknowledgements page. Writers, we are looking for poems, fiction, and essays on dementia and Alzheimer’s. They can be from any perspective — care-givers, family, the person with dementia.

Contribute here.