School Stories

When the Harlem Children’s Zone opened a charter school in a housing project, it set out to raise test scores. While grades haven’t improved dramatically, the school has helped to create a community and is slowly changing the culture of the neighborhood.

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Matt Bruenig writes for Salon that “fixation on education as a solution to poverty, inequality or any other distributional problem is totally wrongheaded.”

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For the better part of the last decade New York Times reporter Paul Tough has written about education, poverty and the obstacles to success students both in New York and across America face.

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There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz, tells the heartbreaking story about two boys growing up in a Chicago housing project in the late 1980s.

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In her book “Random Family,” journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc chronicles the lives of two young women and their families as they struggle to navigate poverty, crime, drugs and life in the Bronx.

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New York is a city of contrasts. The richest families live only a subway ride away from the poorest, but the income gap is the largest in the country.

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Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen explains how and why poverty is cyclical in this country.  More importantly, the book shows (not tells) why it is so difficult, nearly impossible, for impoverished Americans to break that cycle and “make it out.” The main character in the book, Cedric, finds himself in a position all too typical of young African […]

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America treats public schools like shoe stores, said Diane Ravitch at Tuesday night’s lecture at Barnard College on the topic of “For the Public Good.”

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