Author: Jerry Leger

For nearly forty years, Garcelle Beauvais has quietly lived the kind of American success story that doesn’t start in a classroom or end with a diploma on the wall. The actress, who is currently in her late fifties and continues to land television roles that keep her in the spotlight, followed a path that most modern parents would advise their kids to avoid. No degree from the Ivy League. No background in drama school. She swiftly completed a number of schools and developed an early intuition that her true education would take place somewhere else. Her mother Marie-Claire enrolled her…

You most likely remember the bus if you grew up anywhere close to a television in the 1990s or a school library filled with colorful, large picture books. You recall the dresses covered in planets, dinosaurs, or blood cells, the lizard on the shoulder, and the frizzy red hair. The name of the woman who came up with all of this is something you may not recall or may never have known. The Magic School Bus was written by a woman named Joanna Cole. Cole, who passed away in July 2020 at the age of 75, was a writer who…

When you drive into Claiborne County, Mississippi, you get a sense of the area before you see any signs. The occasional gas station with a hand-painted price board, long stretches of cracked road, and nearby pine trees. The only high school in the entire county, Port Gibson High School, is located somewhere along that peaceful path. As you pass it, you get the impression that the building has witnessed too much to need an explanation. When the school first opened in 1924, segregation lines in Mississippi were so rigidly established that no one dared to challenge them. Only white students…

The fact that it occurred on the final day of classes is the kind of detail that sticks in your memory. Just before one o’clock on Friday afternoon, Will County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrived at a home in the 2400 block of Helmar Lane in Plainfield Township, a section of the southwest Chicago suburbs with expansive lawns and seemingly normal streets. A teenage boy was being pinned to the ground by a relative inside. The family member had already called 911. Investigators claim that the boy was traveling to Grand Prairie Elementary School with a Glock handgun and a backpack…

After ten minutes or so inside the Clinical Academic Building in New Brunswick, you lose awareness of its mid-1990s institutional vibe. lengthy hallways. light that is fluorescent. With their laptops tucked under their arms, students in short white coats move in small groups, giving off the half-wired, half-tired look that results from taking in too much information too quickly. Given what’s really going on inside, it’s difficult to ignore how unremarkable the scene is. Because Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School has been quietly operating one of the more ambitious experiments in American medical education, despite its modest New Jersey…

She held a folder containing her acceptance letter while she sat in the back row of a freshman orientation at a midsize public university in Massachusetts. That morning, her mother had ironed her shirt. Because he couldn’t afford to miss his shift, her father had driven her for three hours before turning around. She was looking up the definition of a syllabus on Google by the second week. By the sixth, she was considering returning home. Since no one in the school asked, nobody knew. In this country, we have a narrative about higher education that frequently includes the word…

Like most underfunded American schools, Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side has a hallway that smells slightly of old paper and floor polish. The building, which bears the name of a renowned jazz educator, no longer has a band class. Nor is there a chorus. When they are offered, Advanced Placement courses are presented on a laptop screen. Seventeen-year-old Diamond McCullough is more aware of the irony than the legislators who planned her schooling. The majority of the students at her school are Black. The curriculum opens up like a foreign land twenty blocks away. This is…

The idea sounds simple enough until you start running the numbers. Double what America pays its teachers. Lift the floor, narrow the gap, end the slow bleed of talent out of the classroom. On a bumper sticker, it’s almost poetic. In a state budget meeting, it’s something else entirely — closer to a migraine. Walk into almost any public school in the country on a Tuesday morning and you notice the same things. A first-year teacher hauling a plastic crate of books down a hallway that smells faintly of floor wax. A veteran in her fifties grading papers during what’s…

Before anyone uttered the word “hantavirus,” the hallway had an unpleasant odor. Later, in the cautious, half-embarrassed manner that adults speak when they realize they’ve noticed something and dismissed it, that was the part that teachers kept bringing up. There was a slight, dry, almost dusty smell close to a second-floor storage closet. Not very dramatic. Between the cafeteria fryer and the mildew in the locker rooms, it’s exactly the kind of thing that a busy school building absorbs into its everyday noise. Then droppings were discovered by a custodian. Then more excrement. The word “rodent” was then used in…

There’s a good chance that the ground beneath the players’ feet isn’t ground at all if you walk into practically any high school stadium in America today. Thermoplastic fiber, rubber crumble, and synthetic backing make up this manufactured surface, which costs about $1 million to install and contains enough corporate fingerprints to give a school board lawyer the creeps. Although there has been a simmering debate about artificial turf since the 1960s, things have changed recently. The voice of the money has grown louder. Josh Murnane, the district’s activities director, was open about the situation when Neenah High School in…