Jon N. Hale is a professor of educational history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an advocate for quality public education. Hale's research in education has been published in The Atlantic, CNN.com, Education Week, the American Scholar, and the African American Intellectual History Series. His books include The Freedom Schools and To Write in the Light of Freedom.
“Supported with convincing research and illustrative detail, this
impassioned history makes a strong case that quality of
education—not variety of choice—should be the goal.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Choice We Face is a bold book that puts race and segregation
at the forefront of the educational reform movement. Hale’s writing
is persuasive, comprehensive, and important for understanding how
we fight against the school choice movement.”
—Bettina L. Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive
“Hale shines a light on the dark history behind seemingly neutral
concepts like school choice and neighborhood schools. Those
concepts weren’t a meaningful part of the national lexicon until
resistance to integration took hold. With these code words, whites
managed to paint themselves as the victims and integration as the
oppressor. Hale helps us see how this shift has haunted and
undermined equal education for half a century.”
—Derek W. Black, author of Schoolhouse Burning
“Though we fight for both as if they are guaranteed in our founding
documents, neither choice nor education is found in the
Constitution. What Hale’s The Choice We Face makes clear is that if
we are to ensure a solid future for our traditional education
system, we have to understand how communities have used the
language and history of school choice as a weapon of mass
destruction, as often as they have used those words as a battle cry
to build a democracy that ensures freedom and citizenship for all.
This book makes clear that the real choice we all face is the one
between a hopeful future or an inequitable past.”
—Noliwe Rooks, author of Cutting School
“With his skillful excavation of a history too often ignored, Hale
reminds us that the vision of public education as a shared and
common good has yet to be realized and offers a path forward for
finally getting there.”
—Jennifer C. Berkshire, author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse
Door
“Hale’s scholarship challenges us to come to grips with a reality
that we cannot turn away from. Public education will either
completely shift its direction toward justice or will forever
remain a conduit of marginalization, isolation, and white supremacy
for students of color. It is clear: reform under the cloak of
‘choice’ is not an option.”
—David Stovall, PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago and author
of Born Out of Struggle
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