Agitprop: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Propaganda

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?

The future of public education in Gullyvornia?

Reporting from Oakland -- Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: "We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply."

Sounds like Milton Friedman's wet dream. Or Augusto Pinochet's...

Under Chavis, the school also relied on humiliation to keep students in line, ridiculing miscreants and sometimes forcing them to wear embarrassing signs. When one boy was caught stealing, Chavis shaved his head in front of the entire school. (The boy, Jeremy Shiv, now a straight-A student at American Indian High, considers what Chavis did "pretty cruel.")

But John Winthrop-style degradation and humiliation pays off. The American Indian Charter School's Academic Performance Index is 967 on a scale from zero to 1,000. Hey, why should we worry about damaging a few young souls when the rest are performing at that level?

Kafka and the Classroom

Guess what New York?

Los Angeles Unified has rubber rooms too!