About Mary Turck
News Day, written by Mary Turck, analyzes, summarizes, links to, and comments on reports from news media around the world, with particular attention to immigration, education, and journalism. Fragments, also written by Mary Turck, has fiction, poetry and some creative non-fiction.
Mary Turck edited TC Daily Planet, www.tcdailyplanet.net, from 2007-2014, and edited the award-winning Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG, in its pre-2008 version. She is also a recovering attorney and the author of many books for young people (and a few for adults), mostly focusing on historical and social issues.
February 24, 2015 · 7:33 pm
© Manuel Carmona – Fotolia.com
Adjunct teaching horror stories started circulating after the death of Margaret Mary Votjko in 2013. She died at age 83, alone, sick, penniless, almost homeless, after being let go from her 25-year job teaching French at Duquesne University. Daniel Kovalik’s moving column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette explained that for years, “Margaret Mary worked on a contract basis from semester to semester, with no job security, no benefits and with a salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course.”
Wednesday, February 25 is National Adjunct Walkout Day, a day organized to draw attention to adjunct professors and to efforts to unionize and gain better wages and working conditions. Equity for adjuncts is an urgent issue, for faculty and students alike. Continue reading →
February 23, 2015 · 9:22 am
The Facebook post linked to charges of “deaths, sex abuse, and blunders in screening, training, and overseeing foster parents at the nation’s largest for-profit foster care company.” My first reaction was disbelief: a for-profit foster care company? I remember my own days as a foster parent of teenagers, and the financial and emotional challenges of caring for them. How could a company make money on foster care? And why would anyone think it’s a good idea to place kids with a company whose purpose is to make money from them? Continue reading →
February 18, 2015 · 4:06 pm
© dule964 – Fotolia.com gavel
On February 17, Texas federal district court judge Andrew Hanen issued a preliminary injunction to stop immigration changes. That’s an order saying the government may not proceed with expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Permanent Residents (DAPA). The order is one of the very early steps in the lawsuit against the federal government by 26 states. These states want to overturn President Obama’s executive orders on immigration. Continue reading →
February 17, 2015 · 6:51 am
Minnesota’s state butterfly, the dazzling orange-and-black Monarch, is a treasure that we share with the world during its multi-generation migration between Minnesota and Mexico. Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warns that, “Unless we act now to help the Monarch, this amazing animal could disappear in our lifetime.” According to the Washington Post, “what’s happening to monarch butterflies is nothing short of a massacre.” The Center for Biological Diversity is petitioning for endangered species protection for the monarch, citing a 90 percent decline in the population over the past 20 years. Continue reading →
February 15, 2015 · 1:35 pm
Sally Jo Sorensen calls out all kind of nonsense in her Bluestem Prairie blog, especially in the legislature, and especially on rural issues. As Republicans flex their new majority muscle in the MN legislature, one of their first targets is the Citizen Advisory Board of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Sally Jo skewers this vendetta, which is triggered by the one-and-only decision to require a mega-farm to produce an Environmental Impact Statement as part of the permit process. Continue reading →
February 8, 2015 · 4:54 pm
Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt, published under Creative Commons license
What if success at school was like a snowball fight? The kids with thin, raggedy mittens or no mittens at all are at a distinct disadvantage. They’ll be much better able to compete on an equal basis if they have good mittens, so let’s give all kids the same warm, water-repellent mittens. Continue reading →
February 7, 2015 · 9:54 am
My latest post on Al Jazeera:
President Barack Obama’s proposal to make community college free for all students sounded like a great way to extend free public education beyond high school, giving low-income students a path to college. Critics say the plan could further ghettoize lower income and black high school graduates and spends public money on students who can afford their tuition. …
Published in Al Jazeera – click here to read full article.
February 3, 2015 · 10:00 pm
Children’s Defense Fund Twitter photo
For generations, the Children’s Defense Fund has been a national voice for children. Growing out of the civil rights movement, CDF has been led by Marian Wright Edelman, a civil rights activist and the first Black woman licensed to practice law in Mississippi. CDF’s just-released report, Ending Child Poverty Now, denounces the “national moral disgrace that there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely poor children in the United States of America – the world’s largest economy,” and describes a blueprint for reducing child poverty by 60 percent. Continue reading →
February 3, 2015 · 8:25 am
As Minnesotans congratulate ourselves on paying more attention to preschool, we need to face painful facts. We know a lot about what works to get children a fair start in school, and we are still far from providing or funding that fair start for poor children. Continue reading →
January 30, 2015 · 10:36 pm
Want to shut down a news site? Facebook will help. A new Facebook “hoax button” lets anyone flag any news article posted on Facebook as false. The mechanism is the same as flagging a post as “annoying or distasteful” or pornography. Just click, and you’re done. Continue reading →
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Mary Turck