Today we’ve got a special post from an old friend of mine, Charles L. Glenn, who was my colleague 30 years ago at Boston University. As you’ll read below, Charles participated in the civil rights struggle in the ‘60s, traveling to the South to protest and organize. Like many of his generation, he put his body on the front line to help secure the rights of black Americans living under Jim Crow. And he has continued to work for social justice throughout his life, especially in the realm of education.
But while Charles’s dedication to social justice has remained constant, his ideas about how best to achieve it have changed. And why shouldn’t they? Anyone who spends a lifetime thinking about and studying a problem will almost certainly change their mind about the best ways to address it. The problem of ensuring equality of educational opportunity under conditions of differing socioeconomic status within a democracy is extraordinarily complex. It would have been shocking if we had found the right solutions in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement.
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