This week’s focus is one that has received a great deal of attention in recent years — and not all of it terribly well-informed or constructive. It’s inequalities in education. Most of us believe we know a great deal about education because we’ve been through it. My goal this week is to get you to rethink your assumptions, and go deeper.

Inequalities in education have received a great deal of attention in recent years — but that attention rarely deals with the underlying problem or what must be done to reverse those inequalities. That’s where today’s lecture comes in.

The questions I’ll be addressing are: What are the positions in the major debate over how to fix our public schools? What reforms are necessary in early education and K-12 education to address inequality? Should it be a national goal that every child has access to higher education? How should higher education be organized to reduce inequality?

Recommended reading (just click on the link):

• Danielle Paquette, “Why your children’s day care may determine how wealthy they become,” The Washington Post, April 24, 2017

• Rucker Johnson and Sean Tanner, “Money and Freedom: The Impact of California’s School Finance Reform,” Learning Policy Institute, February 2018

• Robert Reich, “How Selective Colleges Heighten Inequality,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2000

• Nikole Hannah-Jones, “How School Segregation Divides Ferguson — and the United States,” The New York Times, December 19, 2014