Books

The following is an excerpt Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice, by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green, 2015). The United States is among the richest countries in all of history. But if you’re not a corporate or political elite, you’d [...]

The following is a Truthout interview with Kristian Williams, Author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. MARK KARLIN:Your book, Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, is nearly six hundred pages, thoroughly documented and cogent. Let's [...]

Darren was kneeling, but he was not praying. Baptized Catholic and brought up in the church, Darren had turned to his faith to get him through the early years of a decade-long confinement, including months spent on isolation units. Now he [...]

Academically overbearing parents are doing great harm. So says Bill Deresiewicz in his groundbreaking 2014 manifesto Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. “[For students] haunted their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first [...]

If you were a fan of the HBO series “The Wire,” you likely remember the scene in the fourth season focused on Baltimore public schools where the term “juking the stats” defined how corporate-driven reengineering of the public sphere has distorted public institutions so [...]

I was sitting in a sweltering California courtroom, serving as an expert witness on an adult case, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a tiny girl, fully shackled, walking down the courtroom aisle beside me. I was [...]

If you want a good education, you need to have good teachers. It seems ridiculous to have to say as much, but such is the state that matters have reached, both in academia and in the public conversation that surrounds it, that apparently we do. [...]

Fixing Public Education Published by Pepper Tree Fixing Public Education After three years of research and writing ten educators derive the ideal public (or private or charter) school curriculum. What does “Ideal” mean? The ideal school in FIXING PUBLIC EDUCATION is titled the [...]

"Children, it turns out, will never thrive in storage," Nell Bernstein writes in the recently released Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. It's a statement that shouldn't seem radical. (I Googled "thrive in storage," just to make sure, and it [...]