Everyone Progresses With a Progressive Platform, Except for Black and Brown Children.

I’ve had the chance to travel a lot in my work as an educator and activist, and frequently I find myself in what I call…

Progressives, If We Really Care About Education, Then Let’s Act Like It

In the hallway of my apartment growing up in Brooklyn, there was a poster of a cover from the New Yorker Magazine entitled “View of…

Black Families Haven’t Been Hoodwinked, We Come From a Legacy of School Choice

The Democratic party once embraced charter schools as a tool for equity and opportunity. Now, as Andre Perry points out in his recent op-ed, “Support…

Black Kids Don’t Need to Sit Next to White Kids to Learn

WHAT WE GOT WRONG: Over the last decade, and indeed for longer than that, those fighting for justice, many of them White, have largely looked to integration as the panacea for educational inequity.…

Democrats Are Finally Talking Public Education, But You Probably Won’t Be Invited to the Table

I couldn’t believe it. Finally, education was going to take center stage at the 2020 Public Education Forum. All the major Democratic candidates (and some…

We Need Native American Lit in High Schools Every Day, Not Just Around Thanksgiving

The romanticized narrative of Thanksgiving continues to thrive in many schools, but “Native Americans have been speaking out and writing back against the colonialist narrative…

Stop Spreading Lies About Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is upon us—in the air, in the trees, in the longer nights and anticipation of a long weekend. But also, in the grocery stores…

School Choice Is Progressive

“Progressive” is a slippery word. The very term denotes improvement, progress, and thus is by nature a desirable term with which to self-apply. But “progress”…

We Need to Learn About Trauma to Help Kids Who Need Us Most

Everywhere you look, our schools are filled with traumatized children; children struggling not just to learn and succeed, but to survive. Too often, we think…

‘Leveling’ Teachers Doesn’t Always Level the Playing Field for Kids

Imagine you’re a new teacher in a traditional public school district. You have spent the summer planning for and worrying about the upcoming year. You…