“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Good teachers create little oases for themselves, while others who are less well prepared adopt approaches that are ineffective or even sometimes harmful. Some seek knowledge that is not readily available to them; others batten down the hatches and eventually become impermeable to better ideas. Schools are vulnerable to vendors selling educational snake oils when...
By failing to recognize that we now live with the severe, enduring effects of de jure segregation, we avoid confronting our constitutional obligation to reverse it. If I am right that we continue to have de jure segregation, then desegregation is not just a desirable policy; it is a constitutional as well as a moral obligation that we are required to fulfill. “Let...
Since then, the idea that there had ever been a post-racial moment has come to seem naive, even desperately so. Once the embodiment of hope, Obama leaves office publicly regretting his inability to reconcile the country’s polarization. At the same time, Donald Trump focuses the anxieties loosed by white vulnerability—an inchoate, inescapable sense that the social and...
The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and...
Typically, I offer just a short review at the end of my Seven Essential Quotes reviews of books, but this book was so infuriating and so interesting that I thought I’d offer some context for the quotes I’ve selected. Hillbilly Elegy has become one of those books that’s used to explain poverty in America because it fits convenient conservative...
Yet today, the “acting white” criticism that was once occasionally used by racist whites has been adopted by some black schoolchildren. That is the central mystery that this book addresses: what happened between the nineteenth century and today? The answer, I believe, springs from the complex history of desegregation. Although desegregation arose from noble and...
Critics charged that Bloomberg was overstating the numbers of teachers who scored low on tests. Michael Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute looked for the sources of this assertion and found that about 30 percent of teachers who graduated from college in 1992– 1993 were in the bottom quartile, and only 40.9 percent were from the top half of those taking SAT/ ACT...
Mark Twain, who knew William Clark personally, said that “by his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.” With diabolical brilliance, Fritz married his knowledge of Butte’s geology with a pernicious mining law known as the Apex Rule. According to the Apex Rule, rights to underground mineral holdings...
In spite of the professional pretense to neutrality, academics need to do more pedagogically than simply teach students how to be adept at forms of argumentation. Students need to argue and question, but they need much more from their educational experience. The pedagogy of argumentation in and of itself guarantees nothing but it is an essential step towards opening...