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In the years since the publication of "Silenced Dialogue" and the 1995 book it inspired, Other People's Children, the standards-and-accountability school reform movement rose to prominence. Its focus on closing the achievement gap through skills building echoed many of Delpit's commitments, but she found herself troubled by the movement's discontents. Many low-income schools canceled field trips and classes in the arts, sciences and social studies, for example, in order to focus on raising math and reading standardized test scores. Now Delpit is responding in a new book, "Multiplication is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children. (The title quote comes from an African-American boy who, bored and discouraged by the difficulty of his math assignment, proclaimed the subject out-of-reach for kids like himself.) "I am angry that the conversation about educating our children has become so restricted," Delpit writes in the introduction. "What has happened to the societal desire to instill character? To develop creativity? To cultivate courage and kindness?" Here, in an interview with The Nation, Delpit discusses the intelligence of poor children, how she would reform Teach for America, and why college professors should be as focused on closing the achievement gap as K-12 educators are. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Usually when you visit a school you walk down a quiet hallway and peer in the little windows in the classroom doors. You see one teacher talking to a bunch of students. Every 50 minutes or so a chime goes off and the students fill the hallway and march off to their next class, which is probably unrelated to the one they just left. When you visit The New American Academy, an elementary school serving poor minority kids in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you see big open rooms with 60 students and four teachers. The students are generally in three clumps in different areas working on different activities. The teachers, especially the master teacher who is floating between the clumps, are on the move, hovering over one student, then the next. It is less like a factory for learning and more like a postindustrial workshop, or even an extended family compound.

American teachers deal with a lot: low pay, growing class sizes and escalating teacher-bashing from politicians and pundits. Federal testing and accountability mandates under No Child Left Behind and, more recently, Race to the Top, have added layers of bureaucracy while eliminating much of the creativity and authentic learning that makes teaching enjoyable. Tack on the recession's massive teacher layoffs and other school cuts, plus the challenges of trying to compensate for increasing child poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity, and you get a trifecta of disincentives to become, or remain, a teacher.

Many of us who have strongly opposed what has been happening in public education is because we see its thrust precisely as creating a compliant work force dependent upon others for their income.  While middle class schools can continue to offer art and music and other "soft" subjects inner city and some rural schools are being deskilled, forced to concentrate on preparation for those subjects that are being tested.  At the same time, by cutting back on history and civics we do not provide those students with the knowledge that these battles have been fought before, and there was pushback then.

There comes a time when you look at the rug on the floor, the one you've seen many times, and you see a pattern that you had never noticed before. You may have seen this squiggle or that flower, but you did not see the pattern into which the squiggles and flowers and trails of ivy combined. In American education, we can now discern the pattern on the rug. Consider the budget cuts to schools in the past four years. From the budget cuts come layoffs, rising class sizes, less time for the arts and physical education, less time for history, civics, foreign languages, and other non-tested subjects. Add on the mandates of No Child Left Behind, which demands 100 percent proficiency in math and reading and stigmatizes more than half the public schools in the nation as "failing" for not reaching an unattainable goal. Along comes the Obama administration with the Race to the Top, and the pattern on the rug gets clearer.

Some parents at a top middle school are fighting to stop special education students from "taking seats" from students whose test scores may be higher. The parents at Brooklyn's IS 187/Christa McAuliffe, where students must ace standardized exams to be admitted, fear that combining special and general education students in the same classrooms will reduce the level of education. "No parent is going to want their kid in those classes," said IS 187 PTA co-vice president Virginia Cantone. "The truth of the matter is that the wide spectrum of challenges is too great for any of the children to learn, it's too great of a difference."

Journalists play an essential role in our society. They are charged with informing the public, a vital function in a representative democracy. Yet, year after year, large pockets of the electorate remain poorly-informed on both foreign and domestic affairs. For a long time, commentators have blamed any number of different culprits for this problem, including poverty, education, increasing work hours and the rapid proliferation of entertainment media. There is no doubt that these and other factors matter a great deal. Recently, however, there is growing evidence that the factors shaping the degree to which people are informed about current events include not only social and economic conditions, but journalist quality as well. Put simply, better journalists produce better stories, which in turn attract more readers. On the whole, the U.S. journalist community is world class. But there is, as always, a tremendous amount of underlying variation. It's likely that improving the overall quality of reporters would not only result in higher quality information, but it would also bring in more readers. Both outcomes would contribute to a better-informed, more active electorate. We at the Shanker Institute feel that it is time to start a public conversation about this issue. We have requested and received datasets documenting the story-by-story readership of the websites of U.S. newspapers, large and small. We are using these data in statistical models that we call "Readers-Added Models," or "RAMs."

In the '60s it was an ambitious experiment in progressive education. Today John Dewey High graduates its final class after being closed as a failing high school. What led the Gravesend facility from success to shut-down?

When the Richmond and Louisville metro areas reached a school desegregation crossroads in the 1970s, they went in different directions. After the Supreme Court prevented a plan to consolidate Richmond's schools with those in Henrico and Chesterfield counties, the city was left to pursue a futile desegregation plan on its own. White and middle-class flight continued unabated. Meanwhile, a court-ordered consolidation of the Louisville-Jefferson County, Ky., schools produced Ku Klux Klan opposition. But the fuss eventually died down and the region took ownership of its desegregation policy without court supervision. Metro Louisville ultimately implemented a voluntary student assignment plan based on the geographic distribution of students by race and poverty. The benefits have extended beyond education. From 1990 to 2010, black-white residential segregation in Louisville-Jefferson County fell at nearly twice the rate as in metro Richmond, according to research by Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an assistant professor in the Department of Education Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University.

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that students cheat more in online than in face-to-face classes. The article tells the story of Bob Smith (not his real name, obviously), who was a student in an online science course.  Bob logged in once a week for half an hour in order to take a quiz. He didn't read a word of his textbook, didn't participate in discussions, and still he got an A. Bob pulled this off, he explained, with the help of a collaborative cheating effort. Interestingly, Bob is enrolled at a public university in the U.S., and claims to work diligently in all his other (classroom) courses. He doesn't cheat in those courses, he explains, but with a busy work and school schedule, the easy A is too tempting to pass up. Bob's online cheating methods deserve some attention. He is representative of a population of students that have striven to keep up with their instructor's efforts to prevent cheating online. The tests were designed in a way that made cheating more difficult, including limited time to take the test, and randomized questions from a large test bank (so that no two students took the exact same test). But the design of the test had two potential flaws

"I must wonder how my public commentary and scholarship have come to be seen as "hostile rhetoric," how the working poor and working class in the U.S. have come to be characterized as lazy, and how we justify telling children trapped in poverty to suck it up, work twice as hard, and above all else, do as you are told."

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

"Chicago teachers are fighting not just for fair pay and decent health care but for a host of things that will improve education for Chicago kids-smaller classes, needed books and teaching materials, comfortable and well-maintained schools. But they're running into a buzz saw of well-organized, well-funded opposition from the massive anti-teacher, pro-corporate education policy world. Teachers don't have the money or the media platform that Wall Street billions and Mayor Rahm Emanuel will get you, which is why they need our help and support. What we're seeing in Chicago is the fallout from Jonah Edelman's hedge fund backed campaign to elect Illinois state legislators who supported an anti-collective bargaining, testing based education proposal giving Edelman the "clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down [the teachers unions'] throats," political capability he used as leverage to jam an only slightly less awful proposal down their throats. It's a political deal that explicitly targeted Chicago teachers, while trying to make it impossible that they would strike by requiring a 75 percent vote of all teachers, not just those voting, for a strike to be legal. But more than 90 percent of Chicago teachers voted to strike. It's not just Jonah Edelman, though. Rahm Emanuel worked with a tea party group to promote Chicago charter schools and denigrate traditional public school teachers and their unions."

"I received my 'growth score' today from the New York State Education Department. I know,  I really shouldn't care what my score is. I know 100% of my students tested at or above grade level in Math and English Language Arts.  I know my class' scores were near or at the very top of my district's scores. I know my district is also at or nearly at the top of the region's and states' scores. I know I work my heart out and push my students to excel. My students always, ALWAYS  succeed. Yet according to the NYSED my growth score is so so. I'm rated effective with a growth score of 14 out of 20. Keep in mind, my student's mean scale in math  is 708.4 and ELA it is 678.  I'm confident both scores are well above that state mean. So why did I get a mediocre growth score? The state's explanation of it's calculation should be a eye opener for all  of us."

Quick.  What comes to mind when you hear "Democratic Education?"  Pause… Okay, years ago the first thing coming to mind would be that there was at least a Civics class being taught in the school.  Later, I would add that there should be a student government.  Then I would have thought that an experiential piece should be included, like a mock presidential election or town hall meeting. Much later I came to understand that teaching about how our democracy works (even including a "mock" event or a student council with limited decision making) is a pale imitation of the lived experience of democracy.  And therein lies the rub.

As Jefferson Parish public school officials consider opening more charter schools, they are questioning whether the system's first charter is doing enough to help at-risk students. Jefferson Community School now has seven teachers but just eight students, a ratio that would be the envy of many schools with much larger classes. It has a budget of almost $700,000 this year -- $87,500 per student, if the current enrollment doesn't change, and more than seven times the parish average. In light of such disparities, interim Superintendent James Meza said he has asked Jefferson Community officials to rewrite the school's mission in order to serve a larger segment of the parish's at-risk population.

Education advocacy organizations (EAOs) come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some focus on specific issues (e.g. human capital decisions, forms of school choice, class size) while others approach policy more broadly (e.g. changing policy environments, membership decisions). Proponents of these organizations claim they exist, at least in part, to provide a counterbalance to various other powerful interest groups.

Thanks to Darren Marelli, here are highlights from the hearing that occurred on Tuesday about the controversial proposal to co-locate another branch of the Success Academy charter chain in Cobble Hill, District 15, in Brooklyn.  Passionate and articulate parents, teachers, elected officials, students and community members spoke out against this damaging, deceptive and most probably illegal proposal, and pointed out how the co-location will likely wreck the schools that now inhabit the building, one of which is in transformation, by overcrowding them, forcing them to increase class size and lose valuable programs.  Does the DOE care?  You be the judge.

Charter schools were developed, in part, to serve as an R&D engine for traditional public schools, resulting in a wide variety of school strategies and outcomes. In this paper, we collect unparalleled data on the inner-workings of 35 charter schools and correlate these data with credible estimates of each school's effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input measures -- class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree -- are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research -- frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations -- explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness. Our results are robust to controls for three alternative theories of schooling: a model emphasizing the provision of wrap-around services, a model focused on teacher selection and retention, and the "No Excuses'' model of education. We conclude by showing that our index provides similar results in a separate sample of charter schools.

How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class. Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal.