I am privileged to live in a district with superb public schools. But, despite its proximity to some of the most affluent suburbs of Philadelphia and access to significant tax revenues, this is also a school system, like so many others in the nation, with a documented achievement gap between African American students and those [...]
|
|
|||
|
December 8th, 2010 Be Afraid: China’s “stellar” performance on recent standardized tests, described in yesterday’s New York Times (“Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators,” by Sam Dillon), is apparently another sign that America is being “out-educated.” We are at our very own “Sputnik” moment, President Obama tells us, our nation once again threatened by the academic attainments [...] November 24th, 2010 From "H.R. Pufnstuf," Gold Key Comics, April 1971 A page from a kids’ comic book, 1971…a single, marvelous page illustrated in a way that brings home the gendered nature of American work in that era. For boys, a future in drafting. For girls, jobs as librarians. Interesting, too, that we can tell at a glance that this [...] September 12th, 2010 At an academic workshop a few years ago, I saw a bumper sticker on a Volvo that said “Life is Too Short to Drink Bad Wine.” I fretted. This is just the kind of thing that makes people assume that all professors spend their summers swilling sauvignon on Martha’s Vineyard (the bumper sticker on the [...] May 4th, 2010 An immigrant family works at home, in 1909, but do they work hard enough for David Brooks? from http://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/cigaretterollers.jpg Do you supposed David Brooks’ wristwatch runs counter-clockwise? His column in today’s New York Times, “The Limits of Policy,” certainly seems to try to set the clock back on our understanding of ethnicity and economic [...] January 18th, 2010 MIT has just issued a lengthy report on its hiring and promotion of underrepresented minority faculty, a document several years in the making. I will be writing more about this report in the next few days, trying to put it in historical perspective. MIT may be one-of-a-kind, sitting well above almost every other technical institution in the country, [...] December 1st, 2009 The content of an article in today’s New York Times, In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap, by Michael Luo, will surprise no one who has thought about the role of race in American hiring; only a handful of the hundreds of comments posted online in response to the piece today fail to corroborate its [...] |
 |
|
|
Copyright © 2012 by Amy E. Slaton - All Rights Reserved. Built and maintained by The Outside Reader |
|||