2023-05-22

etc

Taught For America - Year Zero

The author learned what everyone who has spent time in one of those schools knows: that “non-school factors,” as they are called, establish the horizon of possibility of what happens within them, and that the prospect thus created by those conditions as they manifest in the lives of students in places like Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and St. Louis have generated a prospect bleaker than anyone who hasn’t lived in their midst can quite bring themselves to fathom, or that those who have witnessed them up close can quite bring themselves to say. For the tenderhearted motives that put them in a situation where they could witness this world in the first place make telling others what they have seen feel like another cruelty heaped atop all the rest.