New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:
Like so much literature on the topic, the book sadly focuses exclusively on how to mop up a tiny bit of the disaster that is caused by enormous socioeconomic inequality. We have some of our country’s greatest minds and researchers trying to figure out how to slightly ameliorate the damage of inequality and poverty without ever tackling those topics themselves. Were an alien to land in this country, they would be utterly bewildered by this odd social ritual. At step one, we install economic institutions that create extraordinary levels of inequality and poverty, and then at step two, we spend ungodly sums of money and time trying to figure out how to make the system we create at step one less horrific. In large part, step two is the domain of the education researcher in this society.