There's a nastiness to conversations about U.S. education reform, which are characterized by the kind of stark taking-of-sides that's usually reserved for debates over guns or abortion rights.
Laura Moser
My husband and I were married in May 2007 on a sprawling rent-a-ranch in the Texas Hill Country. On the drive from Houston, we'd stopped off for our marriage license in the former produce aisle of a Winn Dixie-turned-courthouse in San Marcos and from there drove off the grid.
I've always wanted to walk the whole of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which winds 184.5 miles from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland.
Houston's one of the most diverse urban areas in the entire country, and most people here are really proud of that.
You have to follow that next step.
My grandfather arrived in Houston in 1942 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had lost everything - his profession, his language, his money - but the city welcomed him, as it has hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years.
In my career as a writer, I preferred to avoid current events: I wrote young adult novels and book reviews and lifestyle journalism about health and parenting and other such evergreens.
Wishy-washy equivocations - and not just on abortion, but on immigration, on civil rights, on income inequality - weaken all of us.
As more and more minority groups fill our nation's classrooms, what can we do to even the separate-but-forever-unequal playing field? Now that's a question many very smart people have spent decades trying to answer.
Don't most of us agree that providing school meals to kids who need them is an overwhelmingly good thing? After all, nutrition is essential to proper cognitive development.
I married a man whose Hindu father grew up in the rural north of India and whose Jewish mother grew up in the Bronx.
I was a campaign widow.
Grit can't be measured on pop quizzes, but it can often predict long-term success more than mere intelligence.
As President Trump quickly moved to limit immigration, civil rights, and environmental protections, I felt fear for my young children, and guilt, too - as if I'd somehow betrayed the unspoken contract all parents make to give our children a better life than ourselves.
In middle school, I had a teacher who regularly reminded students of the Monday night Young Life meetings he sponsored; on Tuesdays, he'd spend the first few minutes of class palling around with the chosen ones about all the fun and fellowship they'd experienced together.
The only lottery I've ever won was a $100 scratch-off card at age 16, and the 7-Eleven clerk who sold it to me said I was too young to claim my winnings.
A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.
If we all band together against extremism and spend a few minutes a day using tools that have been proven to work, we can make a big difference in defending those values we share as Americans.
I have one idea of how to get more Democratic women to polling stations: Stand up for them.
Becoming a tutor was among the many attractive post-collegiate side careers I failed to pursue while devoting the bulk of my days to writing fiction.
With our growing attachment to the online universe comes a refined ability to keep tabs on several things at once, to watch stories unfold on parallel planes.
Campaign widowhood totally suited me, and I soon began to suspect that our setup beat the bill-paying and bickering of an actual marriage.
I've basically worked as a journalist and a writer.
Very few of us can stop our lives and become activists.
If I'm not happy with what's going on, I try to change it myself.
The beauty of kids is they don't care who you are, which is why people like the Obamas like them so much - they treat them like normal people.
I had to work up the courage to even imagine myself running for Congress. But I eventually decided that our country had a moral problem in only letting white men - even the right-minded ones - have a seat at the table.
I believe in following opportunities.
Calling representatives every single day, arranging local community meetings, and marching in the streets every Sunday. It's not the path to glory, but it's absolutely essential to maintaining a democracy under threat.
I don't claim any great experience or expertise.
I believe that if Democrats - not any one Democrat, and certainly not just me - want to start winning races again, Lujan's statement that the DCCC would fund candidates who oppose abortion rights puts our country in danger and makes it all the more likely that the Republicans will continue to defeat us in election after election.
It's a truism to say that my state, Texas, isn't a red state: It's a nonvoting state.
Ohio has long been an embarrassment to charter-school supporters nationwide, with its trail of scandal and graft and abysmal student performance.
New York City has an integration problem.
The friends I knew who tutored were well paid for work that seemed far less grueling than waitressing or late-night newspaper copy editing or all the other side gigs I attempted in my early twenties.
We can all get behind feeding the poorest kids in school, right?
Diversity isn't just a hallmark of big cities anymore.
The celebrity's desire to shape the next generation of young minds by opening a school is by no means unique to Diddy.
I never experienced much outright anti-Semitism. While we learned about the Holocaust - endlessly, it felt like - no spray-painted swastika ever appeared on my childhood landscape. Jewish persecution was an ever-looming reality, but always an abstract one.
What role should religion play in the American public school classroom? My own knee-jerk response would be, 'none whatsoever,' but the Constitution isn't quite so direct on the subject.
