Photo-illustrations by Gabriela Pesqueira Chugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack. A young ensign—“real eager to get off that ship and get into action,” in the recollection of an enlisted Navy man who encountered him—sat down and wrote a letter to his younger brother, who one day would be my father. Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthda ..read more

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee’s face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee’s severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears beneath his eyes. Lee’s face was once part of a larger statue of the Confederate general that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was at the c ..read more

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment. Before the Civil War, America had few institutions like Antioch College. Founded in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1850, Antioch was coed and unaffiliated with any religious sect; it was also the first college in the nation to hire a woman to serve on its faculty as an equal with her male colleagues. It was unquestionably progressive, and would not have been that way without its first president: Horace Mann. Mann, the politician and education reformer from Massachusetts, sought to mold a ce ..read more

Parent diplomacy has always been a dicey endeavor for educators. The war stories teachers swap about nightmare parents are the stuff of legend. But in the decade since I started teaching in a public school outside of Boston—and particularly during the pandemic—strained conversations have become the norm. Expectations about how much teachers communicate with parents are changing, burnout is getting worse, and I’m worried about what this might mean for the profession. More parent involvement is, on its face, a good thing. Research shows that kids whose par­ents stay involved in school tend to do ..read more

Photographs by Evan Jenkins This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       When the 40-something reader in the kippah at my book event in Michigan approached the signing table, I already knew what he was going to say, if not the humiliating specifics. Readers like him always tell me these things. He hovered until most people had dispersed, and then described his supermarket trip that morning. Another shopper had rammed him with a cart, h ..read more

In the fall of 2020, as my son and his neighborhood friends started to trickle back out into the world, my daughter, Izzy, stayed home. At the time, Izzy was 3 years old, ripe for the natural learning that comes from being with other kids. I knew by the way she hummed and flapped her hands around children at the playground—and by her frustration with me at home—that she yearned to be among them. The question of where Izzy would attend school had been vexing me for two years. Izzy had been a happy infant, but she was small for her age and missed every developmental milestone. When she was eight ..read more

When Ojeya Cruz Banks moved to Ohio from New Zealand several years ago, she was overwhelmed by the logistics of uprooting her life. But Cruz Banks, a Denison University professor and a single mom, who is also my neighbor and friend, was relieved to find a house next to a public elementary school. She assumed that she would be able to walk to pick up her daughter—a needed convenience given that she didn’t yet have a car. Unfortunately, when she went to register her daughter for kindergarten, she was met with an unpleasant surprise: The only available option was a half-day program that would bus ..read more

Many American schools are failing to provide all students with a quality education, and policy makers don’t seem to know what to do about it. Even before schools closed during the pandemic, 30 percent of graduating seniors failed to reach a basic level of competency in reading, and 40 percent failed to do so in math, according to national data. Performance gaps across race and socioeconomic status in both subjects have persisted to some degree for decades. Meanwhile, teachers are among the most stressed-out workers in America, and though concerns about educators leaving in droves have yet to m ..read more

I have a recurring dream. Actually, I have a few—one is about dismembering a body (I’d rather not get into it), but the more pertinent one is about college. It’s the end of the semester, and I suddenly realize that there is a class I forgot to attend, ever, and now I have to sit for the final exam. I wake up panicked, my GPA in peril. How could I have done this? Why do I so consistently self-sabota—oh. Then I remember I haven’t been in college in more than a decade. Someone with intimate knowledge of my academic career might point out that this nightmare scenario is not that far removed from m ..read more

It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive. Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and ..read more