From the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, a special issue on the Coleman Report and Educational Inequality Fifty Years Later, including Stephen L. Morgan and Sol Bee Jung (Johns Hopkins): Still No Effect of Resources, Even in the New Gilded Age?; and Prudence L. Carter (UC-Berkeley): Educational Equality Is a Multifaceted Issue: Why We Must Understand the School's Sociocultural Context for Student Achievement. Why American schools are even more unequal than we thought. How the systemic segregation of schools is maintained by "individual choices". Why the racist history of school vouchers matters today. Kristina Rizga interviews Jonathan Kozol, author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, on his plan to stop bigotry in Trump's America.
Kristi L. Bowman (Michigan State): The Failure of Education Federalism ("The present reality of public education in Michigan foreshadows a dystopic future likely to occur in a growing number of states unless one or more branches of the federal government embrace a different model of federalism, cooperative federalism".) Lisa Miller on Laurene Powell Jobs's $100 million mission to disrupt American high school. Chicago's Fountainhead: Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool has spent his career putting free-market ideology over the needs of the public. When public goes private, as Trump wants, what happens? Diane Ravitch reviews Education and the Commercial Mindset by Samuel E. Abrams and School Choice: The End of Public Education? by Mercedes K. Schneider. Don't believe the charter school hype — in the end, it's about profits.
Michael S. Merry (Amsterdam) and William S. New (Beloit): Is the Liberal Defense of Public Schools a Fantasy? From TNR, can Democrats save public schools from Trump and DeVos? It's really hard to destroy public schools from Washington. Free market for education? Economists generally don't buy it. David Leonhardt on vouchers, charters and DeVos's blind spot. How Trump's education nominee bent Detroit to her will on charter schools. Betsy DeVos is not a mainstream school reformer: Trump's pick for secretary of education represents the worst of the "school choice" movement. The real Betsy DeVos: Donald Trump's pick for secretary of education tried to sound like a moderate — and revealed that she's either underprepared or a zealot.
Betsy DeVos wants to use America's schools to build "God's Kingdom". Stephen Henderson on Betsy DeVos and the twilight of public education.
