It's hard reading about the lockstep curriculum set out by Common Core with its emphasis on "informational readings," and seeing all the hoops students and teachers have to jump through to meet its standards. Quite frankly, it makes me sad.

"Why sad?" you might wonder. Frustrated, maybe, or for that...

It's an optimistic headline: "Prison Rape: Obama's Program to Stop It." It leads into a comprehensive New York Review of Books article on three recently released Federal government publications. Two of these documents examine sexual abuse in the nation's detention centers while the other outlines the Department of...

I met Amber at a tutoring program for inner city children. It was 1966, my senior year in high school, and the war on poverty was on, a war we've failed to win.

At nine-years-old Amber looked like a scarecrow, an old scarecrow at that, bird-picked, weather beaten. She...

When most Americans hear the familiar constitutional phrase "cruel and unusual punishment" they can tell you what it means, at least to them. Hanging. Flogging. Chopping a hand off. Chain gangs.

Putting juvenile offenders in solitary confinement is high on my list of "cruel and unusual punishment." What else...

"You don't care about the victims. All you care about are those kids."

It was a comment I've heard in one form or another at book events, at juvenile justice talks I've given, or in response to pieces I'd written about our national policy of retribution towards troubled kids. I...

I didn't expect my talk to a class of criminal justice majors at a local community college to be any different from the other workshops, presentations and classes I'd done. The students had read my book for class. I figured I'd talk about the book, about my 10 years teaching...

Like most teachers I've gotten some praise from my high school students over my 26 years of teaching -- a lesson "wasn't bad," or a particular class was "sorta interesting." I've even been told that I was a "pretty good teacher." High praise coming from teenagers.

But...

Arizona's legislature recently passed a law charging prison visitors a onetime $25 fee as a way to help close the state's $1.6 billion budget deficit. Middle Ground Prison Reform, a prison advocacy group, challenged the law in court as a discriminatory tax, but a county judge upheld its...

If anyone doubts that the young people locked up in our jails are children they should spend some time in one of those prisons around holiday time.

I did just that for the 10 years I taught high school students, some as young as 15, in an adult county jail,...

It was like a giant switchboard, the kind you see in 30s and 40s movies, a bevy of operators plugging in a crisscross of wires, taking calls, making connections, a cacophony of chatter.

That image came to me recently as I walked into the lobby of the MassMutual Center in...

There's been some good news in the media lately for anyone who cares about kids and justice. Federal statistics show that the number of juvenile offenders in jail has dropped by at least 25%. Along those same lines, the New York Times recently reported that New York Chief...

She was pretty upfront about it: she didn't want me there.

"It's not you personally," Marge explained. "It's the book."

Marge was the moderator, researcher, engine, really, of a local reading group. She was good at what she did, I was told, and I believed it. She was pretty thorough...

In a six-by-eight-foot jail cell, there's barely room for a bunk, a seatless toilet, and a postage-sized sink. The only other space you have in jail is in your head, and even that gets crowded with all the people you carry around in there who you resent for the things...

Now that all the high school graduations are over and the backyard barbecues celebrated, I'm finally coming down from the contact high of all that youthful exuberance and optimism.

It's easy to get swept up into those good feelings. But now as I move into summer's quieter months, I...

The only people who think it's fun to do book promotion and events are the ones who haven't written a book, at least in my experience. I hear it all the time from friends and family. "How exciting!" "I wish I could do something like that."

A writer friend...

It was a busman's holiday. Thirty people in a room, all teachers in high school and GED programs in various prisons from across New York State, listening to me talk about teaching locked up kids. The conference was in Saratoga Springs with lots of other things to do. Yet there...

When people hear that I taught language arts for 10 years in a New York county penitentiary, they assume it was a tough job because kids in jail are uninterested in learning. If that were the case, it would be easier to explain the tragedy of their lives. The majority...

No matter how tough politicians and education pundits talk the obstacles remain. Massachusetts is a good example. The Boston Globe reports that among third graders last year, minority and low income students were twice as likely as white students to score lowest in the state's standardized tests. These are discouraging...

I've worked with "slow" learners all of my 26 years as a teacher. But nothing matches the lack of understanding, insight and plain common sense that many of our politicians and their constituents show when it comes to the treatment of ex-offenders, people who by the law of the land...

The statistics are grim, but the reality behind those numbers is even grimmer for the many young people locked up in US adult prisons. Since publishing I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, about my years teaching in a New York...