Category: APF Best

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Darryll Vann is in a shrinking minority group--African-American men who teach youngsters. Only 11 percent of elementary school teachers are male and a much smaller percentage of them are African-American. Photo by David Snider

True Heroes

Of the 27 faculty members teaching 549 minority students at Garrison Elementary School in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington D.C., two are black males. Darryll Vann has 26 boys and girls in his kindergarten class, Hassan Abdullah 21 in his first-grade class. Darryll Vann is

Colman McCarthy December 6, 1998
Bruce C. Vladeck, the outgoing administrator of the U.S. Health Care Financing Administration.

The Medical Gold Rush for Poor Patients

Just a few short months ago, a New York medical insurance plan called AssureCare, Inc. hoped to reap hearty profits caring for thousands of society’s poorest people. Bankrolled by a Florida entrepreneur with a $480 million personal fortune, the HMO seemed likely to snatch up

Fred Schulte November 14, 1997
The plaque at the old high school in Summerton, S.C. states, with no irony, "Together Let us Sweetly Live."

Education’s Cast-Offs: How Whites Avoid Integration and Leave Blacks Adrift

SUMMERTON, South Carolina – The orange-and-blue cover on the yearbook at Scott’s Branch High School here proclaims this sleepy Southern town as “the birth place of equal education,” but a look inside the town’s gleaming new $8 million school building belies that promise. Scott’s Branch,

Don Baker February 4, 1997
Betty Jo Dulaney has been running the Tunica County Literacy Center since 1985.

Gamblers’ Needs Focus a Town on its Reading Failures

TUNICA, MS. June, 1996 – A teacher stands before a blackboard in an otherwise barren room. Eleven faces stare back passively. Most are in their twenties, a few in their forties. They are newly hired cashiers at the Sheraton Casino. On Monday, they start work.

Laura Parker June 30, 1996
Rose and Isak Arbuz, from New York, stand in front of the Warsaw grave commemorating his brother, his brother's girlfriend and another couple who were part of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. Their skeletons were recovered from a basement and were buried together. The Jews fought from April 19 to May 16, longer than France and Poland fought against the Germans. There were only 220 insurgents against 2,090 Germans, Ukranians and Latvians. "All it was about, finally, was that we not just let them slaughter us when our turn came," wrote Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the uprising. "It was only a choice as to the manner of dying."

Survivors

Text and photos by Jill Freedman In the Lublin region of Poland, on November 2, 1943, an operation, given the code name “Harvest Festival” by the Germans, was begun. Its object was the murder of those survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising who had been

Jill Freedman February 16, 1996