A powerful argument against the “virtual segregation” of schoolchildren enabled by vouchers, credits, and other instruments.
A civil rights activist and attorney convincingly demonstrates that Brown v. Board of Education barely put a dent in unequal public schooling.
As Suitts (Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution, 2005), the founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, notes, the Deep South was the epicenter of resistance to school desegregation in the 1950s and ’60s. Politicians such as Orval Faubus, Jesse Helms, and George Wallace may have stood in schoolhouse doors and filed flurries of lawsuits, but, in the end, more sophisticated adherents to the segregationist cause found a subtle workaround: They would create a parallel system of private schools that could maintain racial separation while also benefiting from public dollars in the form of tax credits, vouchers, and even direct payments. There were countless faux declarations of “freedom of choice,” so long as black parents did not choose to send their children to white schools, while at the same time eliminating “any suggestion from the state constitution that there is a right of education or an obligation of the state to fund public schoolchildren.” Those schemes have since spread nationwide and are now ardently promoted by the likes of Betsy DeVos, the sitting secretary of education, part of whose considerable fortune comes from investments in private schools. “Freedom of choice” was subsequently enshrined by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, whose utterances are held sacred by the right. As Suitts shows, although the cast of segregationist leaders of the past has been narrowed to “a small rogues’ gallery,” their legacy is widespread and their followers are legion while “contemporary private school patterns and practices…appear for what they are: legacies of class-based southern segregation used to evade Brown and multi-dimensional segregation of non-southern states before Brown.” Indeed, writes the author, more than half of American states now use vouchers to support private schools with public funds, making it likely that inequality will continue for a long time to come.
A powerful argument against the “virtual segregation” of schoolchildren enabled by vouchers, credits, and other instruments.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-58838-420-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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