Richard Rothstein

Richard Rothstein is an American academic, historian, an emeritus senior fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and the University of California’s Haas Institute. He is best known as the author of the socio-historical book “The Color of Law,” which is an analysis of the way the American government through housing policies segregated the United States. He tells of the history of local, state, and federal levels created policies that segregated metropolitan areas across the United States and in doing so created racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that require remediation since they violate the Constitution. While it was the novel “The Color of Law” that made him a household name, he had written other novels before. “Grading Education” take s a look at how accountability is flawed and needs to be looked at afresh while “Class and Schools” analyzes policies that could be put in place to reform the economic social and educational policies towards closing the White-Black achievement gap. His book “The Way We Were” was his earliest attempt at busting the realities and myths that inform student achievement in the United States, which he further analyzes in “The Charter School Dust-Up” and “All Else Equal.”