What Arne Duncan’s comments on racial integration reveal
Education Secretary Arne Duncan (By Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Earlier this week Education Secretary Arne Duncan was on a radio show panel and made some remarks on racial integration that the author of this post finds illustrative of the problems with the way Americans now look at the issue. This was written by Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit organization created to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. From 1999 to 2002, he was the national education columnist of The New York Times, and he is the author of several books, including “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right” and “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.” This appeared on the institute’s website.
By Richard Rothstein
The nation has made great progress in race relations in the last 50 years. But in some respects, we’ve gone backwards, and we continue to do so.
A case in point is a Wednesday interview with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncanon