Educator Mike Rose and historian Michael B. Katz describe the greatest problem for public education in America: “Throughout American history, inequality—refracted most notably through poverty and race—has impinged on the ability of children to learn and of teachers to do their jobs.”
Try this experiment at home: take the ratings your state gives school districts and rank them according to the percentage of students in each school district who qualify for the federal free and reduced price school lunch program. What do you see?
Earlier this week the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz offered a personal and sober view of American society and the economy fifty years after the March on Washington: “Dr. King realized that the struggle for social justice had to be conceived broadly: it was a battle not just against racial segregation and discrimination, but for greater economic equality and justice for all Americans. It was not for nothing that the march’s organizers, Bayard Rustin and A.
As we approach 60 years since U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and stand in the wake of a 50-year anniversary of the March on Washington, Richard Rothstein...
During three decades of accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing at the state level and another decade-plus of federal oversight of that accountability, the overwhelming evidence has exposed accountability as a failed network of policies in education reform.
They don’t do much better, on average, than non-public schools, and a few of the public schools outperform all of them.
Should first-graders really be expected to know how to explain why Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization? Kudos to the Vorheeseville Central School District superintendent in New York for speaking up--and explaining to the community how test scores are manipulated.
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Background: |
The Progressive is a monthly leftwing magazine of investigative reporting, political commentary, cultural coverage, activism, interviews, poetry, and humor. The Progressive Magazine is particularly well situated to provide such a platform. A national political magazine founded in 1909 by Fighting Bob La Follette, it has been a voice for democracy and social justice for over 100 years. From our base in Madison, Wisconsin, we have made the attack on public schools a particular focus of our reporting. |
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