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In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Are Flush With Public Money

New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from government funding but are unaccountable to outside oversight. A months-long investigation reveals that these schools are “failing by design”: The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them […]

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Slave Money Paved the Streets. Now This Posh RI City Strives to Teach Its Past.

Between 1700-1850, the city of Newport in tiny Rhode Island launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere in North America. And in a time when conservative school boards and state leaders around the U.S. are banning lessons about race and racism in schools, Newport is confronting its past: teaching students local Black history, African heritage, […]

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‘State-Sanctioned Violence:’ Inside One of the Thousands of Schools That Still Paddle Students

According to an analysis by The Hechinger Report, 150 schools in eight states across the U.S. used corporal punishment, or a form of physical pain, on 20% or more of their students that year. Sixty-nine of those schools, such as Collins Elementary School, are in Mississippi. Tara Garcia Mathewson investigates how and why this practice […]

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Against Winning

“What I am qualified to say—what I am saying: what links the evils of the modern Olympics to literary criticism, to literary prizes and to A-to-F classroom grades—is that I’m tired of losing and tired of winning, and that we all lose when we focus so often on prizes, grades, and final scores.”