Education reformers and public school advocates will find a powerful ally here.
A polemic against the ongoing dismantling of public education.
Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, boasts an unusual background. Though he grew up in a pious, politically conservative, and overwhelmingly White community—“the three categories were so intertwined that I never thought to distinguish them”—he elected to major as an undergraduate in African American studies. If, as Black writes, it was public education that gave him access to the American promise of upward mobility, so should public education serve the same purpose for all Americans. The assault on the system by private individuals, to say nothing of ideological enemies such as Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers, serves the interest of inequality and has clear racial and anti-democratic components. Arguing that public education may provide the glue necessary to put the country back together after the Trump era, Black embarks on an insistent, sometimes repetitive consideration of its constitutional foundations, noting that education is enshrined as a right in every state constitution—an elevated role that, indeed, was a sine qua non for formal admission into the federal system. It is precisely in the states of the former Confederacy and its satellites that the war against public education has been most pitched, areas in which there are high concentrations of African American students. Black’s argument is persuasive, though too often themes and bits of data are repeated to no real purpose. Still, the author makes a solid and well-founded case for considering public education to be a pillar of American democratic governance and not a commodity to be cheapened, bargained away, and privatized, the apparent goal of the current presidential administration. Instead, Black writes, “states do not need to experiment with public education; they need to fund it.”
Education reformers and public school advocates will find a powerful ally here.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-8844-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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