Wonderful Teachers Should Never Let Themselves Be

I Think A Moment Of Critical Energy Has Suddenly Emerged. But Moments Like This Come And Go Unless We Seize Them At Their Height.

The Primary Victims Of Katrina, Those Who Were Given The Least Help By The Government, Those Rescued Last Or Not At All, Were Overwhelmingly People Of Color Largely Hidden From The Mainstream Of Society.

Children, Of Course, Don't Understand At First That They Are Being Cheated. They Come To School With A Degree Of Faith And Optimism, And They Often Seem To Thrive During The First Few Years. It Is Sometimes Not Until The Third Grade That Their Teachers Start To See The Warning Signs Of Failure. By The Fourth Grade Many Children See It Too.

Placing The Burden On The Individual To Break Down Doors In Finding Better Education For A Child Is Attractive To Conservatives Because It Reaffirms Their Faith In Individual Ambition And Autonomy. But To Ask An Individual To Break Down Doors That We Have Chained And Bolted In Advance Of His Arrival Is Unfair.

But What Is Now Encompassed By The One Word (“school”) Are Two Very Different Kinds Of Institutions That, In Function, Finance And Intention, Serve Entirely Different Roles. Both Are Needed For Our Nation’s Governance. But Children In One Set Of Schools Are Educated To Be Governors; Children In The Other Set Of Schools Are Trained For Being Governed. The Former Are Given The Imaginative Range To Mobilize Ideas For Economic Growth; The Latter Are Provided With The Discipline To Do The Narrow Tasks The First Group Will Prescribe.