Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews is author most recently of Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America (Algonquin).
For Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the worst year of their long effort to help inner-city children was probably 1997. They had created the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in a Houston elementary school three years before.
continue readingFor Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the worst year of their long effort to help inner-city children was probably 1997. They had created the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in a Houston elementary school three years before. It had gone well at first. But by early 1997 Feinberg’s KIPP middle school in Houston and Levin’s KIPP middle school in the south Bronx were being strangled by bureaucrats and skeptics, and it looked like they would both have to give up their dream.
continue readingThere is a shirt in my closet that can change from sweetly modest to suggestively immodest in just a second. It has a high neck, short puckered sleeves, and a demure sort of look. The black silk fabric is printed with tiny dots and cute little cherries. It’s made by Marc Jacobs, and when I spotted it in a thrift shop – hanging sloppily with its little row of buttons down the front – I nearly danced a jig in the aisle. I wore it out that night. And I planned to wear it to work the next day.
continue readingNoneconomists imagine that God has so poorly designed the world that a lack of thrift, even tending to avarice is, alas, necessary to keep the wheels of commerce turning, to "create jobs" or "keep the money circulating." They imagine that people must buy, buy, buy, or else capitalism will collapse and all of us will be impoverished. It's the alleged paradox of thrift. Thriftiness, a Good Thing in Christianity and most certainly in Buddhism and the rest, seems able to impoverish us. We will do poorly by doing good. If we do well, we are damned. Choose: God or Mammon.
continue readingThe wide-collared, blue polyester shirt I was wearing required serious mending, given the rip at the collar and the various colored threads that I'd used to reattach its buttons. But with my girlfriend's parents waiting for me at a fancy Manhattan bistro, I hardly had time to stop at a tailor. So, with $20 in my pocket, I headed for the thrift store where I originally found the shirt five years ago, Andy's Chee-Pees on West Broadway in Greenwich Village.
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