public education

One Kansas school board has recognized the unintended consequences and changed course.

People fear the impact of difficult books. They aren’t entirely wrong.

According to Bree Picower, it starts with the teachers—80 percent of whom are White.

The world sees Black girls as dangerous. Morris shows them that they are scholars.

Courtney Martin invites progressive parents to reckon with racial justice.

School closures are difficult and disruptive. But this is how public protest works.

State governments have been cutting funding for schools. Many teachers have had enough.

Many reforms are needed to make college affordable. The main one, however, is cheaper tuition—which requires greater public investment.

Allison Benedikt’s anti-private-school manifesto is pretty entertaining:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Yes, this is a hyperbolic provocation. I agree with a lot of what Benedikt says, but I don’t think that private-school parents—or, for that matter, the many private-school teachers I know—are bad people.

A knotty issue in the Chicago teachers strike is teacher assessments.

I'm tired of seeing public education set up to fail and then blamed for its own failure, with special blame always reserved for teachers.

Years before Brown v. Board, the North Carolina Council
of Churches fought for integrated schools. Almost 75 years later, the council mobilized again for the same cause.