The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Did I just Leave a Cult? Because it Feels Kind of Like I did... “The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.” ―  Marty Rubin I grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%. We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my father at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. If you look carefully you can see it in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Pandora’s Box turned out to be just what marrying my father was like for my mother. Her whole world changed. She had three daughters right in a row and now had four kids all before the age of 24. Then my parents split and she raised us as mostly a single mom...

  By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.” But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient. Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago.  The failure list in math is even longer. There are 53 schools statewide where not one kid is proficient in math. The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schoo...