A cogent and cleareyed analysis of a persistent problem.
A study of the importance of school integration to the improvement of prospects for black and Hispanic children.
With the goal of inspiring action among parents, educators, and policymakers, Johnson (Public Policy/Univ. of California, Berkeley; co-author: Mother’s Work and Children’s Lives: Low-Income Families after Welfare Reform, 2010) draws on persuasive longitudinal studies to advocate a three-tiered strategy to counter racism and social inequality: integrated schools, school finance reform, and high-quality preschool. “If mediocre education is a malign force threatening the nation,” he writes, then achieving integrated classrooms is nothing less than “a fight for our collective future that we can and must win.” Himself a “third-generation benefactor” of school reform policies, he has a personal as well as professional stake in reversing segregation. He warns, however, that no single reform offers a silver bullet for improving education, and none should be assessed too quickly. “We implement some new whiz-bang reform,” he writes, “let it run its course for a little while, but then become impatient because things haven’t improved as much as we wanted them to.” Johnson advises patience and a commitment to examining long-term impacts of such changes as equitable school funding and pre-kindergarten programs. Looking at data to determine children’s later-life success, the author asserts that Head Start, for example, when funded adequately, leads to positive educational outcomes for low-income children; but outcomes are poor when funding is low. Similarly, he correlates children’s access to health care as crucial when evaluating school reforms: “Healthier children,” he asserts, “are better learners,” underscoring “the interrelationship between early childhood investments in health and public school spending.” Integration, of course, has been at the center of much debate, and Johnson recounts the violent reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, efforts by school districts to undermine integration once their legislative mandate was lifted, and white communities’ creation of “charter districts” for their own residents. Racially and economically diverse neighborhoods, argues the author persuasively, are crucial to successful school reform.
A cogent and cleareyed analysis of a persistent problem.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7270-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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