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Current Education Reform Perpetuating, Not Curbing, Inequity
A half century seems to be a significant amount of time for change, but Minnijean Brown Trickey’s visit to Little Rock Central High School fifty years after the federal government had to monitor her...
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Recommended: Hope Against Hope, Sarah Carr
I just read and reviewed Hope against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children by Sarah Carr, to be released February 26, 2013. I urge you to pre-order it. Books on...
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“A Separate and Unequal Education System” 2013
The Education Trust-West has released “At a Crossroads: A Comprehensive Picture of How African-American Youth Fare in Los Angeles County Schools“ (February 2013), highlighting: Nearly 60 years after...
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“The Poor Are Too Free”?: Unlocking the Middle-Class Code
Walking outside the Commander’s compound in the “heart of Gilead,” Offred (June) is reminded of her past now swept away by the rise of Gilead, the theocracy at the center of Margaret Atwood’s The...
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To Jimmy (and Jose), with Love: I Walk Freely among Racism
When Jose Vilson posts a blog, I read carefully, and I don’t multitask. Why? I am a privileged, white male who has lived his entire 52 years in the South where racism clings to our region like the...
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Post-Katrina New Orleans: Disatser Capitalism Feeds on Poverty and Racism
Drawing from her Hope Against Hope, Sarah Carr asks, Can school reform hurt communities?—focusing on New Orleans: New Orleans may be the extreme test case, but reforms like these are reshaping public...
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“The Deliberately Silenced, or the Preferably Unheard”
No rhetorical sleight of words should mask that Trayvon Martin was a son. He had parents. No rhetorical sleight of words should allow us to ignore that any child is everyone’s child. Trayvon Martin was...
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Made in America: Segregation by Design
“The woman in the gold bracelets tells her friend:,” begins a poem by Barbara Kingsolver from her collection Another America/Otra America. A careful reading notices “gold bracelets,” suggesting more...
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What We Know Now (and How It Doesn’t Matter)
Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos (2006) explores the evolution and Intelligent Design (ID) debate that represents the newest attack on teaching evolution in U.S. public schools. The documentary is...
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Racial Inequity Undeniable in U.S.
About the historical approaches to addressing poverty, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1967: In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another...
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The Lingering Legacy of Segregation
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 details: Today,...
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Ali: “You must listen to me”
1972 James Baldwin declared in his No Name in the Street: The truth is that the country does not know what to do with its black population now that the blacks are no longer a source of wealth, are no...
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The U.S. Formula for Children and the Choices We Refuse to Make
The formula for children in the U.S. can be summed up in one word, I think: “harsh.” And the response we should have to this formula is “inexcusable.” Let’s consider the U.S. formula for children:...
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Segregation and Charter Schools: A Reader
In The link between charter school expansion and increasing segregation, Iris C. Rotberg highlights that problems exist in both re-segregation of schools in the U.S. and the rise of charter schools as...
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The Conversation: Racial segregation returns to US schools, 60 years after...
Racial segregation returns to US schools, 60 years after the Supreme Court banned it
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Segregation not about Proximity, but Equity
For several years, I have been showing Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later in both my introductory education course and an interim educational documentaries course at the selective private university...
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James Baldwin at 90: “‘I can’t believe what you say,’ the song goes, ‘because...
January 1, 2000, exposed a truly baffling phenomenon about most humans: A silly fascination with numbers that end in zero that completely renders those humans irrational. In the land of the arbitrary...
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“Other People’s Children” v. “They’re All Our Children”
Optimism, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel—these are not my proclivities. And while I wallow in the self-delusion that I am a Skeptic, the truth is that I have long ago slipped over into the...
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Proposal: Invisible Young Men: 21st Century Reports from Occupied Territory
Below is a draft proposal for an edited volume. I am seeking possible co-editor(s) as well as potential contributors. Please contact me at paul.thomas@furman.edu if you are interested in either...
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UPDATED: Mainstream Media in (Perpetual) Crisis: More Education Meat Grinder
UPDATE: Note Holly Yettick’s One Small Droplet: News Media Coverage of Peer-Reviewed and University-Based Education Research and Academic Expertise; see abstract: Most members of the American public...
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