Richard D. Kahlenberg

Conservative education scholar Diane Ravitch returns to her liberal roots.

Economic integration may be the key to fixing America’s schools, but Washington is scared to even talk about it.

or four decades, American liberalism has had an ambivalent relationship with organized labor. On the one hand, liberals and Democrats rely on unions to help fund campaigns, man phone banks, and deliver their members’ votes each election cycle. Moreover, most liberals are in broad agreement with labor’s core agenda: better health care, a more generous […]

For more than a decade, Ive been appearing at forums on affirmative action and playing a strange role. Panels typically include a proponent of affirmative action, an opponent of affirmative action, and then there is mea supporter of affirmative action based on class rather than race. In these discussions I ask my fellow liberals, Why […]

That was then, this is now. Today, the current president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, has essentially repudiated Bok’s position and devised an innovative program to reach out to, admit, and pay the tuitions of qualified, low-income students. Summers calls the growing divide between the children of the rich and the children of the poor the […]

Jerald Podair’s new book does an admirable job of telling all sides of the story itself in a clear and compelling fashion. Understandably frustrated with virulent white resistance to school integration, local black leaders in New York sought to establish “community control” over the schools, with the help of the city’s white elite, most notably […]

For Mann, it was axiomatic that in order for public schools to serve their function of preparing productive workers, enlightened citizens, and loyal Americans, those schools had to be common schools in which “the children of all classes, rich and poor, should partake as equally as possible in the privileges” of the enterprise. In terms […]