One would not have thought that children in America would ever have to choose between a teacher or a playground or sufficient toilet paper. Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which...
Liberty, school conservatives have argued, is diminished when the local powers of school districts have been sacrificed to centralized control. The opposition to desegregation in the South, for instan...
It is the comfortable people, by and large - those like the Reading Teacher - who make the decisions in our society. It is the people who those decisions are going to affect who are expected to stand...
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...
The willingness to relegate a person in my father's situation to a lower and less vigilant degree of medical attention was an accurate reflection of the values of a social system which, as I had learn...
Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.
We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
Many people, even those who view themselves as liberals on other issues, tend to grow indignant, even rather agitated, if invited to look closely at these inequalities. Life isn’t fair, one parent in...
We should invest in kids like these, we're told, because it will be more expensive not to. Why do our natural compassion and religious inclinations need to find a surrogate in dollar savings to be voi...
The slowness of change is always respectable and reasonable in the eyes of the ones who are only watching; it is a different matter for the ones who are in pain.
If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this soci...
No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.
The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of socie...
I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.
There is a parallel in this to arguments that we have heard in New York City in regard to health facilities that serve the rich and poor. There, too, we were told by doctors that the more exhaustive s...
Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.
A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endle...
This, then, is the dread that seems to lie beneath the fear of equalizing. Equity is seen as dispossession. Local autonomy is seen as liberty--even if the poverty of those in nearby cities robs them o...
School boards think that, if they offer the same printed information to all parents, they have made choice equally accessible. That is not true, of course, because the printed information won’t be rea...