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By John Thompson. Part One of Two. Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools is the history of the rise and fall of corporate school reform, but it is much more. It isn’t that surprising that a scholar like Ravitch, like so many …

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By John Thompson. As we wait for Diane Ravitch’s next, comprehensive masterpiece, Slaying Goliath, a new anthology, The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch, offers a unique opportunity to assess the quality and accuracy of both Ravitch’s and the corporate school reformers’ analyses of school improvement. Of …

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By John Thompson. David Callahan’s The Givers begins with the first politicized think tanks of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the American Enterprise Institute. Callahan may be right and the AEI may have been one of the more intellectually honest of the conservative alternatives to academic research, but still it …

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By John Thompson. When Dale Russakoff conceived of The Prize, she “viewed education reform from a distance but as a movement full of promise.”  She was eager to follow the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million matching gift to the Newark schools.  The subtitle, “Who’s in Charge of …

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By John Thompson. When Dale Russakoff conceived of The Prize, she “viewed education reform from a distance but as a movement full of promise.”  She was eager to follow the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million matching gift to the Newark schools.  The subtitle of this invaluable book is, …

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By John Thompson. The famed novelist, Toni Morrison, writes: I’ve been wondering who might fill in the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. …

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By Jameson Brewer and Sarah Matsui. What are counter-narratives? And why are they significant in the conversation?     Counter-narratives are essentially “little stories” of individuals and groups of people whose knowledge and histories have been excluded from the telling of official narratives (Giroux, …

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By John Thompson. The 50th anniversary of Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age comes as we confront the horror of the Charleston, S.C. massacre and the epidemic of police killings of unarmed blacks. At a time like this, it is best to read Kozol’s masterpiece on its own, without using it as evidence for any …