Alan Singer

Zachary Karabell, writing for Time magazine, claims "One of America's favorite pastimes is to play the 'what would the Founding Fathers say' game. Just pick an issue du jour, and ask the question." Most players tend to be on the political right, including the Federalist...

The New York Times reported that school budgets in New York State were overwhelmingly approved this May. But the headline, "New York School Budgets Were Approved At A High Rate," was misleading. That is because districts were forced to make severe cuts in educational services by the Cuomo...

My friend Brian of Park Slope Pharmacy in Brooklyn complained to me that my recent posts have been too depressing. He asked me to write a more positive one about teaching and schools. I needed to write a positive one for myself as well. Fortunately I was invited to participate...

Pearson Says Its Tests Are 'Valid and Reliable'
The New York Times, May 5, 2012 A21

In a letter to the New York State Education Department, mega-test and textbook publisher Pearson Education defended a controversial reading passage and questions on the recently administered eighth grade...

In many ways the for-profit edu-corporations and their not-for-profit allies resemble a giant octopus with tentacles reaching into every facet of public education in the United States. I am reminded of the book The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris that detailed the way railroads at the start of...

When I was a teenager, Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band recorded one of my all-time favorite tunes, "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago." The band played a blend of Appalachian jug music and banjo combined with sixties psychedelic hippie. The song's lyrics told the story...

At its annual meeting held in Saratoga Springs the weekend of March 23-25, the New York State Council for the Social Studies passed five resolutions condemning the national and state common core standards for marginalizing social studies. The resolutions charged that attention to math and reading left little...

A recent post calling for the racial integration of Long Island New York schools drew a number of both supportive and negative comments. One writer was very critical of White people who want to force other White people to send their children to interracial urban schools but...

In February, I was invited to be a Black History Month speaker on the "State of School Integration on Long Island." I was invited because I am a professor of education at Hofstra University and because I am a white man and parent committed to racially integrating public schools.

The...

When Michael Bloomberg was elected Mayor of New York City in 2001, the unemployment rate was about 5%. Today it is 9%. That certainly qualifies as poor performance in office. Value decline rather than "value-added." Let's fire him.

When Andrew Cuomo was first elected to...

Forty-four faces stared out at us from a six-by-eight-foot enlargement of a black and white photograph taken in 1908. The images of young Irish immigrant women in their teens and twenties were both solemn and hopeful. These young women would become workers, mothers, and grandmothers, and would be the backbone...

It will probably take more than a billion dollars in the bank to run for President of the United States in 2016. It looks like New York State Governor is already lining up corporate support. My concern is that he will sell out the education of New York State's children...

The New York Times online indexes the article "$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies" as education. It probably should have been listed under politics. After three years of demonizing teachers as the problem with American education with its Race to the Top program, the Obama...

I hated high school English classes because teachers would not let me read what I wanted to read. My friends and I were into science fiction, especially Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Poul Anderson. I also liked John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway and after being introduced to their work I...

In a recent issue of The New Yorker (January 30, 2012), critic-at-large Adam Gopnik described what he called "The Caging of America." The size of the prison system in the United States is horrific. According to Gopnik:

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is...

Unfortunately, the "School-to-Prison Pipeline," described in an earlier post, is alive and well in New York City where I live and teach. According to a New York Civil Liberties Report, Criminalizing the Classroom, The Over-Policing of New York City Schools (2007), in 1996 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani...

Rethinking Schools is a magazine written for teachers by teachers. It is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and covers local issues, but really its concerns are national in scope. Its Winter 2011-2012 issue was a special on what they call "the school-to-prison pipeline." An opening editorial made...

The Occupy Wall Street movement brought a lot of attention to Wall Street and the New York City financial district as the center of economic inequality in the United States. The 1 percent, the bankers, brokers, and hedge fund operators who dominate the global economy and politics in the United...

On Saturday January 7, 2012 I took students from a teacher education class at Hofstra University to the New-York Historical Society exhibition "Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn!" Although I am critical of the exhibit, I thought it important that teachers and future teachers see it and...

Life sized bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass stand at the entrances to the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) greeting visitors. The Society placed the statutes there to make a statement about the focus of many of its exhibits on the history of slavery in the United...