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Charles Murray, the author of the much-discussed book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 , (and, years ago, the widely discredited volume, The Bell Curve ) has an op-ed in today's New York Times outlining some solutions to the growing class divide that he depicts in Coming Apart .  Among his ideas is to "replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action."  Murray writes: "This is a no-brainer. It is absurd, in 2012, to give the son of a black lawyer an advantage in college admissions but not do the same for the son of a white plumber." I've been a long time advocate of class-based affirmative action, going back to my 1996 book, The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action , so on the one hand I'm pleased by his article, but in other ways I am dismayed.

In 1968, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) went on strike over the involuntary transfer of 19 teachers by a newly empowered community-controlled school board in New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. The controversies at the heart of that bitter struggle live on in current debates over the methods of teacher selection, the role of seniority and due process in teacher assignment, and the appropriateness of affirmative action in the composition of urban teaching corps. Then, as now, the role of educators of color in urban school districts was an issue that sparked controversy. In recounting how rules for teacher selection evolved in New York, Christina Collins' book, "Ethnically Qualified", Race, Merit and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920-1980, illuminates the failure of the city's teachers' unions to effectively challenge the exclusion and marginalization of African American teachers.