Critical Thought…Editorials
Creative Thought,…Reflections, Journals, Oral History
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 [...]
Earlier this month, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) proposed a bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA. The ESEA is seven years overdue for a reauthorization. The process presents an opportunity to improve U.S. school systems for communities of color. Unfortunately, Sen. [...]
On this 50th anniversary year of the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act it helped inspire, national attention is centered on the iconic images of “Bloody Sunday,” the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the interracial marchers, and President Lyndon Johnson [...]
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 [...]
In November of 2014, Achieve a Hart Research independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization, asked 1,347 High School graduates, "Do you feel prepared for college and work?" Did you "Rise to the Challenge and get a good education?" Public high school graduates responded, there was [...]
Abstract Social and economic disadvantage – not only poverty, but a host of associated conditions – depresses student performance. Concentrating students with these disadvantages in racially and economically homogenous schools depresses it further. Schools that the most disadvantaged black children [...]
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. [...]
A ProPublica analysis of killings by police shows outsize risk for young black males. Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater, according to a ProPublica analysis [...]
When the early New Deal first constructed public housing in New York City and elsewhere, projects for blacks were built in existing ghettos or undeveloped areas where planners wanted to shift existing black neighborhoods. [1] But projects for whites were built in existing white [...]
