Liberal-initiated efforts to eliminate poverty have been top down for about 50 years. But to be successful, development can’t be done to them from on high; it has to be done by the people most affected. We shouldn’t have low

America’s public education still relies on grading practices geared to the industrial revolution of the early 1900s. This antiquated system undermines effective teaching and learning and inadvertently filters students based on privileges. In his new book Grading for Equity: What

Remember your not-so-great high school days? Remember wanting to be respected while being consistently treated as less-than? According to author Eric David Dawson, “the system is set up to be destructive of everybody.” His new book, Putting Peace First: Seven

The pervasive myth of kids just needing “grit” and lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps is false and is doing real harm.Our guest today Linda Nathan spent fourteen years as founder and co-headmaster of Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s only

Both parties in recent decades have bought into the idea that letting private business needs dictate the direction of public schools will help education. According to Noliwe Rooks, director of American Studies at Cornell University, de facto segregation in public

The forces currently in power may actually believe that by killing democracy they are saving America. Or they may just be driven by simple greed. In his new book: Kill It to Save It; An Autopsy of Capitalism’s Triumph Over

How dangerous is it that Americans are adjusting to truths changing by the hour? What is official truth now may not be so tomorrow. It’s all up to Trump’s White House. We mere citizens must accept and believe the dictate

We all focus on the top, the presidency and then congress. But more than you may think is at stake at the state level. Top corporations are focused where they can accomplish a lot for themselves relatively cheaply. A little

“Just following orders” is no defense. In a democracy we assume that individuals in society will take personal responsibility and disobey immoral commands. But as many experiments have shown, people rarely question orders from authorities. Our guest on this show

http://media.blubrry.com/keeping_democracy_alive/dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48358971/LowerEd.mp3At for-profit universities, they’re not admission offices, they’re sales forces. It’s no accident that today for-profit colleges and universities are proliferating. They exist to turn a profit for investors, and that means maintaining a class of low income people. Instead

Sometimes citizens must break the law to uphold the law. History shows that sometimes patriotic resisting requires taking personal risks. But how to determine which risks are worth it and will yield the results we want? For a long time,

The Vikings were brave explorers and they found wondrous new things. Today Scandinavia holds promise of how America can become happier and more free. George Lakey, author of the new book Viking Economics, talks about struggling toward something rather than

Generally American cites are dumped on: Budgets cut, services eliminated, schools ignored. But 80% of us live in cities and despite the pressure from uncaring financial interests and their politicians, we are close to a tipping point where an urban

It was a disastrous day for Democrats. Senior strategist and media advisor to the Bernie Sanders Campaign Mark Longabaugh (remember that great “America” ad?)talks about opportunities ahead for traditional liberal Democrats. He argues Trump’s victory was less about hate and

Is there a worse crime than child abuse? Is the complicity by knowing adults just as bad? Is there something about the very nature of authoritarianism in schools? Guest on this show is  Amos Kamil, author of Great is the

Populism has been part of our country’s identity since before the Constitution. It looked like there was a great populist uprising this year. Now, with the scare of Bernie Sanders behind them the corporate-serving Democrats are back to their “happy

http://media.blubrry.com/keeping_democracy_alive/dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48358971/YoungWarComplete.mp3They call it “youth development programs.” Seven hundred million of our tax dollars are being used to lure kids into the schools-to-soldier pipeline. The mainly poor students are presented the image of exciting video games, which millions of kids love.

How many women do you think have run for president? Of the 200 or so who have done it, there are three before Hillary who made a difference. In her new book, The Highest Glass Ceiling; Women’s Quest for the

Independence day: Many Americans see our freedom to choose as consumers as what independence is all about. But recovering corporate CEO and Huffington Post columnist Richard Eskow on this show shines a light on how far we’ve veered from what

They sought a better life from the Jim Crow South and freedom, but what they found was something else. It may not be bricks and mortar prison, but black citizens have been intentionally limited to specific areas on the map

Girls of color make up 16% of female high school students, yet they make up more than a third of all girls with a school-related arrest. They are systematically pushed out of the education system, and that helps no one.

Our founders knew how essential education is to have a functioning democracy. Teachers today face challenges more than one might imagine: balancing community demands with needs of individual students. In their new book, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics, authors Meira Levinson

Are we watching a train wreck in progress? Journalist Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories, offers his insight into how the 2016 Democratic Party may have ignored important lessons from the 1968 crack up. There will be

Adam Hochschild has written best selling books about a Belgian King’s holocaust in the Congo and another about the brave British women who fought against the insanity of the first world war. His new book is Spain in Our Hearts:

To research for his new book, Thomas Frank specifically went to pro-Bill Clinton sources. Yet what he found left a profoundly negative impression of his presidency and what it did to the Democratic Party. Author of 2004’s What’s The Matter

Between 1945 and the Reagan era, Americans understood that work benefited all and when productivity when up, all stakeholders shared in the rewards. Of course that all changed. But in his new book “Shaping the Future of Work: What Future

Throughout American history there have been times, rare moments in which the political establishment’s movers and shakers quiver as their best laid plans have gone awry. Their too-often successful efforts to keep citizens believing that we are powerless are on

He’s a leading contender, surging in the polls but the Democratic Party is wielding a real war on Bernie Sanders. According to Princeton history professor Matt Karp, it’s without precedent. Bernie Sanders is clearly carrying on FDR and LBJ Democratic

When Americans hear the word socialism, they feel frightened. Bernie Sanders has looked to the nations of Scandinavia for models, while Hillary Clinton runs away from that. What is reality? On this show, Ann Jones (author of Kabul in Winter

Work hard, do well at school, play by the rules and you’ll do OK. That does not seem to apply to the more than 2 million young Americans whose parents may have fallen through the large cracks in our broken