JL: Yes. Some programs, I was listening to one on MPR, don’t even mention race, though they’re addressing the achievement gap. The definition of the achievement gap is the gap between students of color and white students.
MP: What led you to write ‘A White Teacher Talks About Race?’
JL: “Basic Needs: A Year With Street Kids in a City School” is about teaching in Minneapolis in a program for kids in trouble. I got the reader right in the middle of it all. Poverty came into it. I describe a breakfast program and a kid eating three or four breakfasts in a row. I worked with teen prostitutes there. They were only 14. It was nitty-gritty, experiential type of book. When it came out, let’s see, in 1993, I started tossing out ideas of what I did.
