San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Education

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: Livin’ La Vida Logan

by

Barrio Logan is one of the oldest neighborhoods in San Diego. It used to be one whole community called Logan Heights, named after congressman John A. Logan, but the creation of the Interstate 5 freeway that bisected the neighborhood changed that. Then the building of the San Diego–Coronado Bridge changed it again. Thousands were displaced from building the freeway and the bridge. Now Barrio Logan encompasses a relatively small patch of land sandwiched between the San Diego Bay and the I-5 freeway and north of National City and south of San Diego’s East Village.

Fewer than 5,000 people inhabit my barrio. Thousands more come during the day to work here in the shipyards, the Port of San Diego and the other companies that line the bay side of Barrio Logan. Of those 5,000 barrio denizens about 85% of them are non-white, most of which are of Mexican descent. But things are changing.   [Read more…]

US Represents Cautionary Tale about Media System Dominated by Market Values

by

Until corporate libertarianism is dismantled, it is difficult to achieve an effective “media democracy” which protects collective rights held by publics, audiences, and communities over the individual rights of corporations.

By Victor Pickard / CommonDreams

Taken as a whole, the American media system is atypical. It is a largely commercial system that is offset by weak public alternatives, it’s lightly regulated by public interest protections, and in many sectors it’s dominated by a few corporations. Other countries’ media systems may face one or two of these structural problems, but rarely all three. This “American exceptionalism” was not inevitable or natural; it was vigorously contested.

The system that Americans have inherited resulted from specific policy battles, with commercial interests and values triumphing over others. Much of this system crystallised during a period of fierce red-baiting in the United States, when even light regulations were attacked for being “socialistic.” Keeping this power arrangement intact today is a “corporate libertarian” ideology, in which the rights of media corporations are privileged over those of everyone else.   [Read more…]

Photography Keeps Alzheimer’s Patients In The Moment

by

Most people in San Diego know that the Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA), located in Balboa Park, offers exquisite exhibits throughout the year. Lesser known are their outreach programs.

Kevin Linde, Adults Programs Coordinator, has been offering workshops to Spanish language communities in the South Bay for the last two years. Recently, in collaboration with the Shiley-Marcos Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC), MOPA reached out to Spanish speaking seniors who have been diagnosed with various stages of Alzheimer’s.   [Read more…]

A Higher Calling for Downtown San Diego’s East Village

by

By Bill Adams / UrbDeZine

I read an op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune that made me want to stand on top of a downtown high-rise and scream . . . YES!!!

The opinion piece was entitled “A higher and better use for downtown,” and was written by Wayne Raffesberger and co-authored by Rob Quigley, Jack Carpenter, Pete Garcia and David Malmuth – individuals who have exceptional knowledge of downtown San Diego’s East Village neighborhood and a promising vision for its future.*

I was compelled to write a lengthy comment to the piece and perhaps I should have just stopped there (in any case, I have regurgitated some of it in writing this piece). But this topic has been an issue that has been sticking in my craw for several years.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: From the Border to the Fields

by

By Juanita Lopez

It is the year of 2014 and both of my grandparents are very old but alive, though suffering from dementia. I decided to pay them a visit to interview them. Believe it or not, they still live in the same one-bedroom apartment in San Ysidro where they established their U.S. residency in the late 1970s. From their yard, I am able to look at the thousands of tiny houses in Tijuana, where they once lived, dreaming of crossing over for a better opportunity. I look at my dark-skinned grandmother and admire her toothless smile. Her eyes light up every time she sees me. She normally asks me how my brother is doing, and I tell her he’s okay, working like always since he has a baby to take care of now. She smiles and two minutes later asks me the same question. I go over to her kitchen and wash some strawberries that were in her refrigerator. I offer her some after I cut them and sprinkle some sugar on top—my grandmother smiles again and starts telling me about her life, a not-so-sweet story about the times she labored as a farm worker picking strawberries and cutting flowers.   [Read more…]

What to Do About a School Named After Robert E. Lee?

by

By Lucas O’Connor

I’m not from San Diego.

I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, surrounded by the Lee-Custis Mansion, Lee Highway, Washington-Lee High School, and Jefferson Davis Highway. A place where schools and streets co-mingle presidents and traitors. Raised in a house a mile and a half from the intersection of Lee Highway and Lincoln Street with no apparent embarrassment or irony. Maybe it’s a perfect metaphor.

I know a little bit about what it means to be raised as though the Confederacy is an awkward family footnote we try not to bring up at Thanksgiving, even in an otherwise liberal bastion like Arlington (Obama twice won by 40 points there). I know growing up that way warps you. There’s no way around it. When these people are not only normalized, but memorialized, it’s a struggle to grasp the enormity of what they did.   [Read more…]

#BlackOnCampus, #MillionStudentMarch Create ‘Chaos’ At Colleges

by

There were demonstrations on college campuses coast-to-coast yesterday. Some were in response to the recent success of students at the University of Missouri at calling out racism.

Others were responding to an earlier call via social media to protest the increasingly desperate economics of getting an education.  And some events were inclusive of both causes.

The far-right media, eager to fan the fires of the rabid uncle on Facebook set, actually provided more comprehensive coverage than their ‘objective’ mainstream brethren. Breitbart News even sent reporters to UCSD, looking for chaos. They didn’t find any.     [Read more…]

Can BikeSD Make a Dent in Income Inequality through Advocacy and Embracing Equity?

by

By Sam Ollinger / BikeSD

Last year, Councilmember David Alvarez appointed me to represent his council district, District 8, at the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee. It was an incredible honor and a challenge, because I live in Council District 9, not 8. In an attempt to understand the district, the needs of the community, and the challenges I would be dealing with, I met with one of Alvarez’s staffers for coffee one morning.

At the meeting, the staffer told me, in no uncertain terms, that bike infrastructure was not necessarily a priority for the district. I was a bit blindsided and it has taken me almost an entire year to understand what she meant when she gave me the low-down on District 8. This post is an attempt to explain that understanding.   [Read more…]

#MillionStudentMarch and the Soul of Higher Education

by

By Andrew J. Mackay

The Million Student March emerges from a long-running crisis. A public good, an educated citizenry, is being misclassified as a private luxury in the name of profit. It emerges from growing mass resistance to what higher education has become- expensive, corporatized, exploitative.

115 marches are planned for this Thursday, November 12. They span the entire country, from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa to Montclair High School in New Jersey. Institutions private and public, small and large, famous and obscure.   [Read more…]

Missouri Students Stand Against Racism, Sexism and Homophobia

by

One week ago University of Missouri graduate student Jonathan Butler began a hunger strike as a protest against “a slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., incidents that have dynamically disrupted the learning experience.” His decision to undertake this hunger strike followed months of futile attempts by different groups to get the school to pay attention to what was going on their midst.

This non-violent challenge to the status quo garnered nationwide attention. This morning University President Timothy Wolf announced his resignation as protests on the campus continued to build.

The media caught on to the story when MU football team has announced it would no longer practice or compete. Faculty members called for a walk out, and the student Missouri Student Association executive board joined in Butler’s call for the removal of school president Tim Wolfe, saying he has “enabled a culture of racism and has disrespected and ignored the concerns of students.   [Read more…]

Surviving Sudden Poverty

by

By Jeeni Criscenzo

While trainloads of Americans, who never expected to make the journey from the complacency of middle class to the downward spiral of poverty are trying to figure out how this could have happened to them, those fortunate enough to still be holding on to the American Dream seem oblivious to their own vulnerability. Smug in their financial security, they watch the repo man haul off their neighbor’s car as everything they own is unceremoniously carted to the curb under the oversight of the sheriff.

And they think the fate of their neighbor was their own doing, the result of poor choices. It will never happen to them, they believe, because they have worked hard and managed their finances and played by the rules. No doubt their unfortunate neighbors believed that myth once too—not long ago.
  [Read more…]

Colorado’s Legalization of Marijuana Is a Huge Success

by

Pot taxes to fund school construction and substance-abuse programs

By Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos

Colorado voters agreed on how to spend $66 million of the revenue generated by the legal sale of marijuana.

The measure sends the first $40 million to school construction and $12 million designated for youth and substance-abuse programs. The remaining $14.1 million goes to discretionary accounts controlled by lawmakers.The ballot question was the third time in four years that voters considered how to spend pot taxes, after approving Amendment 64 in 2012 to legalize marijuana and Proposition AA in 2013 to levy sales and excises taxes. In both prior ballot questions, voters sanctioned sending $40 million toward school construction.

The vote was important because otherwise, those revenues would have been redistributed to citizens at about $12 to $16 per person—not as meaningful as spending it on education and drug prevention.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry