Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as sinkhole when opposing funding for Chicago's children. We can't keep throwing money, said Governor Thompson in 1988,...
Childhood does not exist to serve the national economy. In a healthy nation, it should be the other way around.
The idea that private money can solve our problems is very dangerous. Ultimately that's charity. Charity is a lovely thing. I'll never turn it down. But charity is not a substitute for systematic just...
When a school board hires just one woman to retrieve 400 missing children from the streets of the North Bronx, we may reasonably conclude that it does not particularly desire to find them. If 100 of t...
[Of] particular importance is the relationship between education and the political process.
When they pray, what do they say to God?
'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Ma...
Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs.
I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.
So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and econo...
By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated...
Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. Bu...
If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people’s children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people’s children is, however...
I want to correct something I told you once,' she says. 'You asked me once if I thought white people wish that Puerto Rican and black people would just die or go away. I thought it over and I changed...
According to our textbook rhetoric, Americans abhor the notion of a social order in which economic privilege and political power are determined by hereditary class. Officially, we have a more enlighte...
A physical education expert, asked to visit a grade school in East Orange, is astonished to be told that jump ropes are in short supply and that the children therefore have to jump in groups. Basketba...
When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedo...
Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.
At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains...
If any lesson may be learned from the academic breakthroughs achieved by Pineapple and Jeremy, it is not that we should celebrate exceptionality of opportunity but that the public schools themselves i...