Writer

My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy.

President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.

Now, I don't expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted.

My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.

As a matter of record, New York City spends a higher portion of its budget on instruction and associated costs within the schools themselves than any of the other 100 largest districts in the nation.

Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

No matter what happens in a child's home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there's no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything.

I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.

The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know.

But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.

It's sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it.

In many of the high schools in the South Bronx, more children will end up in prison than will go to college.

The inequalities are greater now than in '92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the 'equal level' very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.