Class Warfare

cheerful faces in these photos is a bitter reality. The life and death of Roots International Academy are in many ways the story of how Oakland, California, reached what education historian Diane Ravitch calls its “inflection point,” a moment when its school system hovers between a vision of education as a public good and one of education as a commodity. “It’s either going to be destroyed by charters,” Ravitch told me, “or the parents and teachers there are going to recover a public school