By GEORGE PACKER Thirty years ago, the old deal that held US society together started to unwind, with social cohesion sacrificed to greed. Was it an inevitable process – or was it engineered by self-interested elites? In or around 1978, America’s character changed. For almost half a century, the United States had been a relatively […]

By REBECCA STRAUSS Averages can be misleading. The familiar, one-dimensional story told about American education is that it was once the best system in the world but that now it’s headed down the drain, with piles of money thrown down after it. The truth is that there are two very different education stories in America. […]