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 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...
There is a belief advanced today, and in some cases by conservative black authors, that poor children and particularly black children should not be allowed to hear too much about these matters. If the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Two years ago, George Bush felt prompted to address this issue. More spending on public education, said the president, isn’t the best answer. Mr. Bush went on to caution parents of poor children who s...
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...
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...
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...
What may be learned from the rebuttals made by the defendants in New Jersey and from the protests that were sparked by the decision of the court? Much of the resistance, it appears, derives from a con...
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.
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...
When they pray, what do they say to God?
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...
Young children give us glimpses of some things that are eternal.
Showing 101 to 117 of 117 results