Year-after-year at my family’s secular Seder, we follow the Jewish custom of retelling the ancient story of the exodus from slavery in Egypt. Because we are not religious, our tale is that of the struggles of many different peoples’ for freedom from bondage and oppression at their own hands, rather than by deliverance by God. […]
Isolation and Segregation Make Us Stupid. Integration and Belonging Make Us Smart
Mr. Casey, my high school English teacher, was fond of proclaiming,“From suffering alone comes wisdom.” There seems to be plenty of suffering around, but wisdom seems insufficiently distributed to protect our nation from the alarming triple threats to our democracy from escalating authoritarianism, inequality and divisiveness. I wonder: What is it that turns the banality of […]
The Winning Democratic Alternative to Privatization in Education
Democrats need to provide a winning alternative to privatization of America’s public schools. The outpouring of opposition to Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education provides an opening– if Democrats seize the opportunity. Suddenly, education is on the national stage where it should have been during the presidential […]
Engineer Schools for Equity and Integration
THE BLOG Engineer Schools For Equity And Integration 09/12/2016 Across the United States, students have returned to schools that are engineered to be inequitable and segregated. They are designed to protect the privileges of some at the expense of others. They have been that way for a very long time, but that is an intentional […]