By Monty Neill. I came to FairTest in October 1987 as a movement activist and an educator. Over the years I’d worked in anti-war and black liberation support campaigns, wrote for underground newspapers, engaged in community organizing, edited the newspaper of the New England Prisoners Association, and for …
By John Thompson. A first post described Oklahoma Christian University’s Complex Dialogues with Bryan Stevenson, and Stevenson’s passionate call for ending mass incarceration. His keynote address followed a series of panel discussionson the criminal justice system that appealed to both our emotions and …
By John Thompson. Former President Barack Obama recently recommended his short 2019 Black History Month reading list: It included classics by and about James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Frederick Douglass; and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The overflow crowd at Oklahoma …
By Paul Horton. Because I have been asked to comment on problems facing public schools in the United States, I would like to begin by saying that there are a great many things right with public education. Two friends, Ellen Allensworth, Director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, and Chris Lubienski, …
By Craig Gordon. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967 In 2017, we find the danger to be even greater [than at any time …
By Paul Horton. During the last year the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported an increase in hate crimes and hate groups. As political discourse in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has become increasingly focused on identity politics, ethnic, cultural, and racial …
By Ruth Rodriguez-Fey. Governor Charlie Baker has intensified his campaign to lift the cap on Charter Schools with the help of his wealthy investors from New York, I am re posting this letter to remind our Governor that his job is to ensure quality public schools for all the children of the Commonwealth, not just …
By John Thompson. Most of the chapters in Learning from the Federal Market-based Reforms: Lessons for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), edited by William Mathis and Tina Trujillo, place the last 15 years of test-driven, competition-driven reforms in the context of the previous decade and a half. For …
By John Thompson. The contemporary school reform movement was rooted in the Michael Deaver, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Dick Morris era of public relations spin. Being able to hire the best possible public relations expertise, reformers borrowed from Deaver’s success in using photos of Ronald Reagan getting …
By John Thompson. Although I wouldn’t spend too much time eavesdropping on the civil war between liberal and conservative reformers, it is fun to periodically check it out. The first of the loudest shots in their internecine conflict was issued by Fordham’s Robert Pondiscio in the aptly titled post “The …
