The producer of the hit podcast talks about how race and power shape public education, and what it will take to create a more equitable system.

Photo: Alexia Webster.

“They’re on strike against an institution which has subordinated them, underestimated them, and undereducated them.”

Image Credit to Ira Shor

“Kids with more resources are adjusting well. Others have collapsed into themselves.”

Image Credit: Seth Sawyers via Flickr.

A series of children’s books can help start conversations about deeply uncomfortable subjects.

Image Credit to Anastasia Higginbotham.

A first-time principal in the South Bronx paired wraparound services with academic rigor to create a thriving community school. Educators now worry what will happen to its students, some of the neediest in the city.

This story also appeared in Mind/Shift

An “intentionally integrated” charter school in Harlem that was planning to welcome its inaugural class this fall will instead postpone its opening a full year due to the coronavirus.

Image: Creative Commons

The behind-the-scenes player in New York’s progressive wave says the state should be “a lesson to national Democrats.”

Image credit to Luke Hayes

Maryland becomes the first state to consider recommendations for addressing its legacy of lynching.

Finding love and making peace with impermanence, with a little help from some sunflowers.

Image: Detail from Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ, Podsolnechnik (1910). The Library of Congress.

On a late summer morning in Athens, Georgia, Shannon Foley Martinez sits barefoot on her back patio, still in her pajamas, and clicks “follow” on the Twitter profile of a White nationalist named Adrian. He has almost no followers, so he notices her within minutes. “Hello,” he types via direct message. “Hello!!!!!” she responds as her 3-year-old son plays nearby…

Image Credit to Sara Wise/Yes! Magazine

On the way to his asylum hearing at 26 Federal Plaza this morning, Marco Saavedra first stopped across the street at the African Burial Ground National Monument. The site is the final resting place of an estimated 15,000 Africans, many of them enslaved. He “took a moment of silence to breathe in the place that we’re in,” he later told journalists. It was a characteristic moment for Saavedra: using the spotlight cast on him to point to other injustices, and remaining distinctly aware that the land upon which we live has a complex history…

I Like to Watch is the first book by Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s TV critic. It combines nearly two dozen of her Pulitzer-Prize-winning reviews with essays on subjects ranging from product placement to Joan Rivers, profiles of showrunners like Kenya Barris and Jenji Kohan, and a new 17,000-word essay on the question of separating the art from the artist in the age of #MeToo…

“To label this kind of trauma as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ is perhaps a little dangerous, because there's nothing ‘post’ about it.”

Author photo: Kathy Richland. Cover image: Penguin Random House.

On a trip to Alabama, reckoning with monuments, myths, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Image credit to Ansellia Kulikku for Guernica

Harper Lee’s novel is the closest thing America has had to required reading. But the book’s failings in confronting racism are more apparent than ever to White educators — and Black ones wonder what took so long.

Image credit to Tracy Matsue Loeffelholz for Yes! Magazine

“I was guilty as soon as I was accused,” says Tom Robinson to Atticus Finch.

PROSPECT HEIGHTS – “We are here today because we are tired of this conversation being one-sided. It’s always been about what the adults think the students need. But where are the students when they’re having these conversations?” asked Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye, a student from Brooklyn College Academy High School. “We have a voice, too, you know! We’re not just good for taking orders. We are constantly being left behind and ignored.

“Strap yourselves in and get ready,” said State Senator Michael Gianaris of Queens. “We are not giving up until we scuttle this deal: scrap it, throw it in the garbage, and start the conversation all over again.”

Corey Johnson began yesterday’s hearing with an elegy…

On October 22, small businesses in New York City may or may not get a lifeline they’ve been waiting on for 30 years.