But just as legal segregation in the South was a huge national horror hidden in plain view, so too the massive desolation of the intellect and spirits and the human futures of these millions of young...
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...
Placing a black person in control of an essentially apartheid system—whether that system is a city or its welfare apparatus or its public schools—seems to serve at least three functions. It offers sym...
Phone calls aired on several radio stations voice a raw contempt for the capacities of urban children (money will not help these children) but predict the imminent demise of education in the richer di...
One cannot dispute the fact that giving poor black adolescents job skills, if it is self-evident that they do not possess the academic skills to go to college, is a good thing in itself. But the busin...
Conservatives are generally the ones who speak more passionately of patriotic values. They are often the first to rise up to protest an insult to the flag. But, in this instance, they reduce America t...
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...
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...
I find I like to talk with her as often as I can. It feels to me as if I'm standing with her on a very solid piece of ground after a tornado's passed. Strength, it seems, in somebody who had a lot of...
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...
But what is now encompassed by the one word (school) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nati...
But many human beings do take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and those who have the least to be proud of or to be happy about are often the ones who take that pleasure most.
A polarization of this issue, whereby some insist upon the primacy of school, others upon the primacy of family and neighborhood, obscures the fact that both are elemental forces in the lives of child...
A dream does not die on it's own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.The motive may be different, and I'm sure it often is; the consequence...
She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those detai...
I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives; but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more rel...
In effect, a circular phenomenon evolves: The richer districts—those in which the property lots and houses are more highly valued—have more revenue, derived from taxing land and homes, to fund their p...