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...
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...
People who know but do not act do evil too. I don’t know if I would call them evil but they’re certainly not thinking about heaven.
Equity, after all, does not mean simply equal funding. Equal funding for unequal needs is not equality.
The inequalities are greater now than in '92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the 'equal level' very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately.
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...
New York City manages expertly, and with marvelous predictability, whatever it considers humanly important. Fax machines, computers, automated telephones and even messengers on bikes convey a million...
It has recently become a matter of some interest to the press and to some academic experts to determine whether it is race or class that is the major factor in denial of these children. The question a...
A caste society, wrote U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel 25 years ago, violates the style of American democracy.… The nation in effect does not have a truly public school system in a large...
You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is t...
The Ann Arbor superintendent ridicules what he describes as simple-minded solutions [that attempt] to make things equal. But, of course, the need is not to make things equal. He would be correct to ca...
Segregation, he concluded, is neither sought nor imposed by healthy … human beings.
MEET MR. HIV, writes an 11-year-old child, over a diamond-shaped face from which six scaly legs extend. He invades your body. This is what he looks like when he does, another child writes over a scary...
We are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively through rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn to think, because their teachers are stra...
The usual reduction in class size, says the —from 30 to 24, for instance—isn’t enough to make a difference. If this were really true, and if the wanted to help the poorest children of Chicago, the lo...
The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutio...
The New Jersey constitution, says the court in its decision, requires that all students be provided with an opportunity to compete fairly for a place in our society.… Pole vaulters using bamboo poles...
Still, I think it grieves the heart of God when human beings created in His image treat other human beings like filthy rags.
Sometimes, he [Congressmen John Lewis] said, you have to ask for something that you know you may not get. And still you have to ask for it. It's still worth fighting for and, even if you don't believe...