Articles

As a child I knew my grandfather was different. Grandpapa had been a sharecropper in southern Indiana. He had worked most of his adult life raising corn and pigs. His hands were big and callused. He stooped when he walked and the skin on his neck and face was scarred. His earlobes were long, stretched and fused down low at the back of his jawbone. His eyes seemed to be a bit elongated in their sockets. He was different because he looked different. You see, when he was a young child he had played with matches and caught his clothes on fire. His facial disfigurement was the price he paid for the bad judgment of a toddler.

Are charter schools helping to resegregate public schools? A just-released study states flatly that they are.

A couple of years ago, an acquaintance who worked at the local college where I was teaching had trouble sending and receiving emails. She couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out why. Then an IT administrator clued her in: Her first name—Gay—triggered the school’s Internet filters. They were set to block any references to homosexuality, gender identity, etc.

As a young newspaper reporter in Texas, I covered my fair share of speeches. The thrill of hearing an important person give carefully prepared remarks wore off quickly. So I got in the habit of turning away from the speaker and watching the crowd.

Texas is in the throes of rewriting the curriculum standards for its K-12 textbooks. And that is something to be very, very worried about.

Every year around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the news media start quoting his “I Have A Dream” speech. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great speech – certainly one of the best ever given in the cause of civil rights.

In third grade, Julia Horsman’s entire science project consisted of being herded outside with the other kids with disabilities and rolling soda cans down a ramp.

America’s schools are more segregated now than they were in the late 1960s.

Let students ‘do’ history for themselves.

As a kid, I remember listening wide-eyed to my grandmother tell me about the “Dummy Room.” The Dummy Room was one of her first assignments as a young teacher in small-town Iowa in the 1930s. Like other Dummy Rooms across the country, it was the dumping ground for the school district’s hard cases.