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Occidental College professor and local progressive leader Peter Dreier has a pretty interesting blog post at the Huffington Post detailing how parents and school officials got the Pasadena Star-News to correct an erroneous story about that city's school test scores. On Wednesday of this week the paper ran a story saying Pasadena's scores were sagging. On Thursday, there was a front page mea culpa and a story proclaiming good news. Dreier:
Usually, when people are angry or frustrated they just vent. But sometimes they take action -- initially a few people, who recruit others to the cause -- and sometimes they win. Social movements are typically built on small victories -- stepping-stones that give people a sense of their collective power and whet their appetites for further change....In a world of big injustices, getting a small daily newspaper to print a correction may not seem like a major achievement. But what's important is how it happened. A small group of people, angry over a shared grievance, enlisted others, developed a strategy, focused their frustrations on a target, acted together, and got a problem solved collectively that none of them could have solved individually.