Schoolhouse Rock

For the month of September, Slate has invited me to blog about schools, education reform, parenting, and poverty. I’m an editor at the New York Times Magazine , where I’ve written cover stories, in recent years, on school reform in New Orleans , on the achievement gap and charter schools , and on the Harlem Children’s Zone . I’m also the author of a new book , Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America , that will be published next week.

I fell into these subjects more or less by accident—I started reporting on Geoff and his project simply because I found his ideas on poverty so intriguing. But as I worked on this book over the last five years, I came to appreciate that I had stumbled into a particularly fertile moment in education, with heated political debates, surprising scholarship, and promising initiatives underway around the country.

I’m hoping to use this blog over the month as a place to explore some of those ideas and developments, as well as news from the presidential campaign and elsewhere. If you’ve got comments or suggestions for me along the way, please send them to me at slateschoolhouserock@gmail.com . Thanks for reading.