Uptown Notes

Recently, I had the pleasure of appearing on “Our World with Black Enterprise” hosted by Marc Lamont Hill. The show [...]

The recent buzz around education reform is growing, but silenced in this buzz is race. The amazingly taboo yet significant social phenomena is giving way to colorblind policy makers and educational activists. Can we truly transform an educational system if we don’t take account of one of its most enduring cleavages?

For the past few years, I have been diligently working on issues of inequality in well-resourced school settings. My book [...]

This morning, another piece of my writing on education reform and “Waiting for Superman” was posted on theRoot.com. This is [...]

This week “Waiting for Superman” premiered nationally and it has reignited the conversation on the United States’ failing schools. The [...]

Nationwide, the conversation on education is increasingly dominated by teacher accountability, charter schools and test scores. While these things are [...]

Yesterday the NYTimes ran an interesting Op-Ed piece on Charter Schools by Charles Murray entitled, “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test.” I read through it quickly and thought it to be arguing two main things: standardized tests were weak measures and that school choice was a democratic right. Sounds agreeable, right? But why was this written by Charles Murray author of the thinly veiled racist polemic The Bell Curve?

On February 10th, I had the pleasure of joining an esteemed set of scholars for the 143rd Founder’s Day Symposium [...]

To me, the situation of urban education is much like the common cold, as technology advances, we find more and more options that tend to abate sickness, cover the symptoms, but still there is no cure. The biggest confusion that I see emerging around urban education is the highlight of a few successful schools in a city and mistaking that as the probable, that is what will likely happen, in the city as the whole.

This Monday July 13th I will be speaking at the NAACP Centennial Convention on Educational Advocacy.