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In a recent private email exchange about Zohran Mamdani’s (D) New York City mayoral candidacy, a top aide to AFT President Randi Weingarten drew parallels to what happened when teachers union-backed Brandon Johnson was elected mayor of Chicago. Since his victory, Johnson’s approval rating has plunged to the 20s. “Winning an election,” his aide warned, “does not […]

As a Los Angeles Unified School District parent during the pandemic, I had a front row seat as my fellow Democrats and their teachers union allies lit the match that turned a global health crisis into an education inferno. I watched my daughters isolate at home every day during the school closures, logging onto the

On Independence Day, President Trump signed into law the biggest expansion of universal private school choice in American history. In its reporting, the New York Times inexplicably characterized a last-minute amendment limiting Education Savings Accounts only to states that opt-in as a “win for Democrats and teachers’ unions,” because blue states would presumably choose not

As a party leader, Weingarten gaslit Democrats into believing that the best response to the Republican free market smorgasbord of school choice with loosely regulated vouchers is to make sure there is no choice of any kind. To be clear, I am a former SEIU Local 721 member who strongly supports unions. I have worked in a

Years after his presidency, I got a chance to thank Bill Clinton for championing education reform as a Democratic president. I had worked on his campaign and in his White House as a young staffer, and I was in the process of reminding him that he ran for president as a charter school supporter when he interrupted

I’m an irredeemable physics nerd. I can’t say I’m proud of the deep spirituality I derive from quantum physics, string theory, the multiverse, and other literal and figurative mind-bending rabbit holes. Belief in higher dimensional reality isn’t exactly a chick magnet. One of the bedrock throughlines in the history of physics is the power of

The 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles Tells the Story of a City—and Nation—in Transition In 2000, I ended up in a cage outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in downtown Los Angeles wearing a dark suit, swimming against the current in a sea of pierced protesters, raging against Rage Against the Machine. As

Original By New Reality Roundup Fifteen years ago Ben Austin burst onto the education advocacy scene when he launched Parent Revolution. The group went on to invent and pass into law California’s landmark parent trigger law, which empowers parents to transform failing schools through community organizing. Ben eventually raised more than $20 million to bring

The arguments made by the Los Angeles Unified School District to fight a 2021 lawsuit attempting to reopen schools sparked a campaign to enshrine a constitutional right to a high-quality education. Let the politics begin. As COVID-19 began to abate in 2021, a group of Los Angeles parents filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School

By Antonio Villaraigosa and John Deasy Over the course of the pandemic and two years of prolonged school closures, public school students experienced historic ​setbacks in math and reading progress. California’s Smarter Balanced test showed that less than half of California students met the standard for English language arts, and fourth- and eighth-graders suffered the sharpest decline in