Now and then, in private, affluent suburbanites concede that certain aspects of the game may be a trifle rigged to their advantage. Sure, it’s a bit unjust, they may concede, but that’s reality and th...
Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They ar...
East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Be...
Children long for this—a voice, a way of being heard—but many sense that there is no one in the world to hear their words, so they are drawn to ways of malice. If they cannot sing, they scream. They a...
A four-year-old says, My mommy lives in heaven. Her eyelashes go down instead of up because she is … in heaven, but I miss her. She feels consoled that her mother is with God, who, she says, has pink...
A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives...
Young children give us glimpses of some things that are eternal.
When I had asked Mrs. Flowers how she held up in the face of all the death and violence within her neighborhood, she had given me a simple answer: This family talks to God.
Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. If you don’t, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you’re asking for disast...
The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgivene...
That is the great luxury of long-existing and accepted segregation in New York and almost every other major city of our nation nowadays. Nothing needs to be imposed on anyone. The evil is already set...
Still, the facts are always there. Every teacher, every parent, every priest who serves this kind of neighborhood knows what these inequalities imply. So the sweetness of the moment loses something of...
Evil exists, he says, not flinching at the word. I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending tha...
A balancing act of equally unlikely options was the only answer that the city and the nation gave to the requests of these poor people. This juggling of options—in this instance, countering school-fun...
Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school—and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to...
This degree of equanimity in failure, critics note, has led most affluent parents in Chicago to avoid the public system altogether. The school board president in 1989, although a teacher and administr...
The report by the Community Service Society cites an official of the New York City Board of Education who remarks that there is no point in putting further money into some poor districts because, in h...
Pride in my father, thankfulness that he had been my father, and an ultimately grateful feeling of respect (grudging at first, it took a while to come) for the aching if imperfect love he never ceased...
If there were a multitude of schools almost as good as these in every city, so that applicants for high school could select from dozens of good options—so that even parents who did not have the sophis...
I can say it, but it doesn’t seem convincing to most people. I can call it an ‘injustice,’ but that doesn’t always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words t...