With much fanfare, Chicago has moved to decentralize control of what some have called the worst public school system in America. But reform has been financially and politically crippled from the start.
Features
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Gangs in the Post-Industrial Ghetto
Though hardly a new phenomenon, gangs of poor youth are once again in the news and movies. There is one new factor: the vanishing prospect of industrial jobs that lead out of poverty.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Is There a Democratic Economics?
The real issue is not the current downturn, but the fifteen-year decline in living standards. That should be the focus of a reframed debate—and different remedies.
Posted inLaw and Justice
Race, Gender and the Supreme Court
In a parody of affirmative action, the Senate failed to assess seriously Clarence Thomas’s fitness for the Supreme Court. Casualties include blacks, women, Democrads, and the Court’s own moral authority.
Posted inLaw and Justice
Invisible Woman
When Clarence Thomas called the Senate hearings a “high-tech lynching,” he turned his confirmation into a race-loyalty test for blacks. Once again, the concerns of black women were obscured.
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
The Limits of Legalization
Advocates of legalization confuse the effects of criminalizing drugs with the effects of social deprivation. They’re also blithely unrealistic about the impact of legalization on drug consumption and its social costs.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Confessions of an Airline Deregulator
They were sure deregulation would unleash fierce competition, produce better service, and result in lower prices. Five of six assumptions turned out to be wrong.
Posted inLaw and Justice
Civil Reconstruction: What to Do Without Affirmative Action
The time is approaching when we will have no alternative but to find a new road to equal opportunity in America. With the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court now will likely have a black justice among the majority when it votes to overturn Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 […]
Posted inBooks
Domestic Urges, Foreign Obsessions
Constructive engagement with the post-Cold War world requires both a stronger America and clearer global goals. Domestic reconstruction must be a priority—but beware isolationism.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Suite Greed
But for the fact that Democrats are now drinking from the same campaign-finance trough as Republicans, the scandal of executive salaries would be a major issue in the 1992 campaign. The scandal has been growing for years, of course, even before the Reagan-Bush greed decade. In 1960, the chief executive of one of America’s 100 […]
