# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Week of Action centers 13 guiding principles and 4 demands of Black Lives Matter at School. From double dutch parties to rallies in front of the department of education, students, educators, families, unions, and community organizations participate both in and outside of the classroom.

This year's theme is Collective Value. The Black Lives Matter at School guiding principle of Collective Values states, "We are guided by the fact that all Black lives, regardless of sex assigned at birth, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, economic status, ability, disability, education, location, age, immigration status, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, matter. None of us are free until we are all free. "

We encourage all to participate in the Week of Action. Individuals can sign up here. Organizations can sign up ​here. Learn more about how to get involved in the 2024 Week of Action below. Find our updated starter kit, now guide, What We Do & How We Done It: A Guide for BLM at School, which includes the story of how BLM at School started and grew, teaching and planning resources, Week of action ideas for in and out of the classroom, frequently asked questions, photos, and more!

Get on the map!

Group Planning Sessions

November 16, 2023, Thursday, 7-845pm ET/4-545pm PT
Topic - Planning Session: Organizing Around Current Events

December 16, 2023, Saturday, 1-245pm ET/10-1145am PT
Topic - Planning Session: Outreach and Safety

January 8, 2024, Tuesday, 7-8pm ET/4-5pm PT

January 11, 2024, Thursday, 7-845pm ET/4-545pm PT
​Topic - Planning Session: Media​

January 25, 2024, Thursday, 7-845pm ET/4-545pm PT

​"Prep Rally": Final Group Check In

An invitation for all those who have pledged and committed to participating in the Week of Action to join us. We will be discussing plans, activities, and events scheduled in our network. If your state is on the Week of Action map, please plan to attend or send a representative. We want to hear from you!

Register

Virtual Curriculum Fair

​Virtual Curriculum Fair with DC Area Educators For Social Justice
Date: January 20, Saturday, 1130am-230pm ET/830-1130am PT

DC Area Educators for Social Justice host an annual, virtual Black Lives Matter at School Curriculum Fair. Connect with others and prepare curriculum ideas for the Week of Action. Invite and partner with teachers in your school to plan and teach lessons.

Activity Support

We would like to support six regions in their Week of Action or Year of Purpose planning. Please fill out this form by Friday, January 19, to be considered for a $100 grant to support your local Black Lives Matter at School organizing. Funds can be used for any process of organizing. Some ideas include: local design contest winner prize, the printing of curriculum materials or posters, books, supplies (markers, masks, hand sanitizer, and water bottles), Zoom webinar upgrades, etc. The National Steering Committee will review and send notice to recipients within a week after applications are due.

Student Creative Challenge

Leading up to the Week of Action, educators develop and pose a prompt to students about what it means to be seen, honored, and safe in their schools and communities. We invite creative responses including but not limited to drawing, painting, collage, poetry, song/rap, or any other type of expression. If you work with students, please use this as an opportunity for a class lesson and submit their designs for the video showcase. This year the Student Creative Challenge prompt is: What can collective liberation mean or look like?

2024 Design

Congratulations to our 2024 design contest artist Zorah, from Portsmouth, Virginia! T-shirts for the Week of Action will be available soon! This year, groups can order shirts in bulk with the opportunity to include their school or organization name on them. Please fill out this form if you are ordering for a group. Individuals can shop in our store. Brown shirts with white ink. Adult and youth sizes available. Shipping included.

Logo Design Contest

and The winner of this contest will have their design featured as the 2024 BLM at School logo on programming graphics and apparel such as T-shirts, and be recognized in a newsletter publication, on social media, and will receive a t-shirt with their design on it, as well as a cash prize. A CALL FOR STUDENT DESIGNS! National Black Lives Matter at School is seeking student designs for our annual Week of Action. The design will be used around the country to support organizing around our four core demands 13 guiding principles.

DEADLINE EXTENDED to Friday, December 1 (midnight, your time zone)

Previous Week of Action

Monday, February 6 - Friday, February 10

MONDAY
Write Night with Free Minds Book Club, 7pm ET/6pm CT/5pm MT/4pm PT

Writing workshop exploring the poetry of incarcerated youth, as part of our commitment to attend to systems and networks of care to make the domination, erasure, and dehumanization of Black life obsolete. ASL Interpretation.

TUESDAY
Celebrating Globalism and Collective Value Panel, 7:30pm ET/6:30pm CT/5:30pm MT/4:30pm PT
Speakers from different countries will talk about the importance of valuing Black life and how it relates to us collectively, building authentic partnerships with all who support creating equitable school communities across the nation and around the globe . ASL and Spanish<->English Interpretation.

​WEDNESDAY
HBCU Fair Youth Support, 7:30pm ET/6:30pm CT/5:30pm MT/4:30pm PT
Learn a bit about the unapologetically Black history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and hear why they were created, ask about people's experiences and discuss they have to offer. ASL Interpretation.

THURSDAY
Imagination Lab Listening Project, 7:30pm ET/6:30pm CT/5:30pm MT/4:30pm PT

A collective imagination exercise in which we open-heartedly dream up safe schools, communities, and futures. ASL Interpretation.

Optional Pre-Reading: A Grassroots-Driven Quality of Life Platform ( Full | 2 pager )

FRIDAY
Black Joy Party Connection Space, 7:30pm ET/6:30pm CT/5:30pm MT/4:30pm PT
A space to be your authentic self, celebrate, and be in community! To collectively love and care for one another as extended intergenerational families. ASL Interpretation.

#BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2023 #BLMAtSchool2023 #BLMAS2023 #BlackLivesMatterAtSchool #BLMAtSchool #BLMASYearOfPurpose #TeachTruth #BlackJoy
Curriculum Resource Guide 2.0

We re-launched! Use our NEW resource guide to help prepare for the Week of Action.

Student Creative Challenge

How can a school community support you in being unapologetically Black?

Our unapologetically Black principles states, "We are unapologetically Black in our positioning. In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. to love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a necessary prerequisite for wanting the same for others."

We invite you to submit a creative response including but not limited to drawing, painting, collage, poetry, song/rap, or any other type of expression. Please submit your response by Sunday, February 12th, to bit.ly/BLMAS23Challenge or bit.ly/BLMAS23ChallengeGF .

By submitting your response, you are granting us permission to include your response in a video showcase on February 18th as part of Unapologetically Black Day. Please include any information you want us to share publicly, such as your name, grade, state, and title or description of the work.

2023 T-Shirts!

Image Description: Graphic of front and back of 2023 designed T-shirt. Word cloud and art image on front of white T-shirt. Text of artist statement on back of white T-shirt.

Purchase a student-designed T-shirt for the 2023 Week of Action. 100% cotton and includes shipping! Order yours in time (ships in 2-5 days) for the Week of Action from February 6-10. Congratulation to artist Niles!

Profits support National BLM at School activities and goes directly into the hands of persons living with HIV/AIDS in the form of a paycheck, thanks to our partner Nightsweats.

Fundraiser: Poster Giveaway

Image Description: Graphic of 2023 student-designed A3 size (11.7 in x 16.5 in) poster hanging on gray wall.

We are giving away 13 posters in celebration of our 13 principles and Week of Action (February 6-10). Folks who donate $13, $130, or $1,300 to our Activity Support Fund during our Week of Action will be in the running for a chance to receive a print of this year's student-designed poster. All funds raised will benefit local BLM at School organizing groups. Congratulations to artist Tasneem!
SUPPORT OUR MOVEMENT TO RECLAIM OUR CLASSROOMS
​AS INCUBATORS FOR INCLUSIVITY, EQUITY, & JUSTICE!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
National coalition organizing for racial justice in education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black History is American History | Okalani Dawkins | TEDxYouth@MVHS

# data[].attributes.headline
Whose Version of History Is Taught? Arizona Law Bans Ethnic Studies Classes

# data[].attributes.subject
Whose Version of History Is Taught? Arizona Law Bans Ethnic Studies Classes

# data[].attributes.body
[Video 6:35]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Whose Version of History Is Taught? Arizona Law Bans Ethnic Studies Classes

# data[].attributes.headline
California Plans to Make Ethnic Studies a Requirement for Public-School Students. Here’s the History Behind the Idea

# data[].attributes.subject
California Plans to Make Ethnic Studies a Requirement for Public-School Students. Here’s the History Behind the Idea

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
California Plans to Make Ethnic Studies a Requirement for Public-School Students. Here's the History Behind the Idea

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for California public-school students is expected to be signed by Governor Newsom

# data[].attributes.headline
High school students are demanding schools teach more Black history, include more Black authors

# data[].attributes.subject
High school students are demanding schools teach more Black history, include more Black authors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Students in Omaha - pictured here at a recent rally for curriculum changes - want to see more Black history taught in the school system. (Abiola Demo Kosoko)

As he watched the protests over George Floyd's killing sweep across America, 17-year-old Hussein Amuri thought about how most of the authors he read in English class - like most of the teachers at his high school in Winooski, Vt. - are White. In Belmont, Mass., Ikenna Ugbaja, also 17, recalled the large bell on the campus of his private, all-boys school - a bell once used to summon enslaved people on a Cuban sugar plantation.

And in Omaha, 18-year-old Vanessa Amoah thought about how her high school taught Black history like it was "a different thing" than American history. She - like Amuri, like Ugbaja - decided it was time for change. All three teenagers, although strangers, unaware of each other and separated by thousands of miles, launched campaigns demanding their schools teach more Black history, among several initiatives meant to promote racial equity.

"The education system is where people form values other than what their parents have," Amoah said. "George Floyd, Philando Castile - none of it would have happened if this country worked on proactively teaching anti-racist values."

Chaos coast to coast as a school year like no other launches

"It is a chain," she said. "It starts with a racist joke, and not teaching kids about this in class, and it escalates. We have to start at the base."

They are among a wave of young people throughout the country who are banding together to demand change wherever they attend school: at large public systems, elite private schools or small parochial institutions. Teenagers and recent graduates are publishing online petitions, sending letters to their alma maters and testifying at virtual board meetings. They are asking for the inclusion of more Black history in curriculums, a more thorough teaching of events such as the Civil War and a more diverse range of authors in English syllabuses.

Their demands extend beyond the classroom: Many are also calling for the removal of armed police in school hallways, the hiring of more Black and Hispanic teachers, and anti-racist training for students and staff.

Students have advocated for curriculum changes before in American history. But this moment is unique in several ways: For one thing, it's taking place in the midst of a pandemic that has plunged the nation into crisis. Still, the shifting of human interaction online has actually played into students' hands. More adept at social media than adults, teens are making canny use of sites such as Facebook and Instagram to plan their demands, put pressure on school officials and draw inspiration from other activists.

This effort is also being led by a younger cohort than previous pushes, many of which took place on college campuses. But what's most striking, historians said, is the scope of the movement. While past advocacy focused on a particular high school or district, today groups of students are popping up everywhere. Although no one is tracking exact numbers, #DiversifyOurNarrative, a California-based initiative that helps students push for curriculum changes by offering them email templates and suggestions for anti-racist texts, said it has signed up more than 3,500 students in 250 U.S. school districts since its founding in June.

"It's this sort of - how to put it? - national constellation," said George Mason University assistant professor Mark Helmsing, who teaches a class on the history of education reform.

Inside the George Floyd protests: Why people are taking a stand

It is too soon to tell if students' activism will see wide success, partly because administrators have been focused on deciding if and how to reopen schools. Under the decentralized American education system, local officials have wide latitude to determine what goes into their curriculums, and some school districts have already vowed to make changes. But bureaucratic red tape and resistance are common, and many teens are realizing that change may not come during their short high school careers - although they vow they will keep fighting post-graduation.

Karen Murphy, director of international strategy for Facing History and Ourselves, said she feels optimistic. Facing History, a nonprofit group that helps schools and teachers examine societal racism and prejudice, saw a large spike in interest this summer, Murphy said: Its online courses, workshops and two "equity summits" were all oversubscribed, with more than 9,400 total attendees. She attributes the sudden popularity partly to student advocacy, partly to the ongoing national reckoning over racism and the role of police.

But really what it means is that a lot of teachers want change, too, she said.

"I think young people have a real opportunity right now to engage the adults in their school community in a serious conversation," Murphy said. "So - if you see books or authors or histories or historical events that are missing, ask for them!"

'We existed before slavery'

The need for improved education on America's racist past and a more thoughtful consideration of its present, experts agree, is very real. This is especially true when it comes to slavery: What American children learn depends almost entirely on where they live, because every state has different requirements. Many teachers say they feel ill-prepared to teach about the subject, and textbooks often provide scant - or skewed - information.

Just five years ago, a ninth-grade geography textbook described the millions transported from Africa to America between the 1500s and 1800s as "workers," not men, women and children enslaved and brutally oppressed. (After an African American mother's complaint went viral, McGraw-Hill Education updated the language.)

It is also well established that White authors and White characters are overrepresented in American K-12 English classes. The problem first got mainstream attention in 2014, when a social media campaign - #WeNeedDiverseBooks - went viral, spurring the formation of a nonprofit devoted to providing schoolchildren with books written by, and featuring, people from diverse backgrounds.

Schools struggle to teach the history of slavery in America

Black students interviewed for this article agreed that slavery should be better taught, with more emphasis placed on the ways in which enslaved people resisted and thwarted their oppressors. But they'd also like to see Black history go beyond slavery - for once.

"The only thing we hear about African American history is slavery and the civil rights movement," said Amoah, who is Black and graduated this year from Central High School. "We existed before slavery."

Amoah joined with a small group of students and alumni to found What YOUth Can Do (WYCD), the group that is pushing Omaha Public Schools for change. They want a rich, full account of Black history integrated into the required curriculum. But that's just one of five demands WYCD has submitted to school administrators, including requests to diversify the overwhelmingly White honors and AP classes, invest more in mental health resources and remove armed police officers from school hallways.

Omaha, like most American school districts, has the power to comply with the students' requests. Unlike with subjects such as math and science, there is no nationally agreed-upon set of standards for teaching social studies and history - each state is allowed to craft its own requirements (although states that have adopted Common Core standards must ensure that students are able to meet them). Within states, districts take guidance from state officials but exercise significant discretion in developing coursework.

"This country has an extremely decentralized system of education," Helmsing said. "Different regions of the country have different contextualizing effects on the subjects that are taught - for example, California teaches history in a much more progressive and LGBTQ-focused way than, say, Louisiana."

What history do students learn? It depends where they live.

In Winooski, Amuri has joined a small group of students and young alumni - dubbed "Winooski Students for Anti-Racism" - to petition the school board for an ethnic studies program. The group, formed just after the nationwide protests began, is also asking that the school system overhaul the curriculum so it conforms with "anti-racism standards, expectations, and pedagogy."

But switching up the curriculum will have little effect if the school doesn't hire more teachers of color, Amuri said. He is frustrated that Winooski - Vermont's only majority-minority school district, with a large immigrant population - has a faculty that is almost completely White.

Amuri, who moved from Tanzania in 2015 with his family, said he found it difficult, during his first few years in America, to attend a school with an almost entirely White staff. He sought in vain for a mentor, someone who understood why he was confused and who could explain the strange culture of his new home.

When he finally found one of the only Black staffers, a man who had emigrated from Rwanda, Amuri felt saved.

"Having someone who is also Black, from Africa, who went through that transition - just talking to him was liberating," he said. "I can't tell you how many kids in our school could use that kind of help."

'I have a lot more to say than I did before'

Whether school officials are listening is an open question.

In Winooski, students and recent graduates haggled for months with administrators over the language of their demands, which - after several rounds of revisions - the school board voted unanimously to adopt Wednesday night. In a statement, board chair Tori Cleiland said the vote means Winooski can better "[combat] racism in all its forms," and ensure that all students "are truly afforded life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Indra Acharya, a Bhutanese American alumnus who helped craft the demands, said change is long overdue.

"I'm beyond happy that the board passed our demands last night, [although] approval of our demands is just the beginning," he said. "There's a lot of work that needs to be done."

Asked about the changes, a school spokeswoman emailed a copy of a public letter, authored by Winooski's top school officials, that thanked Acharya and his colleagues.

Winooski "is incredibly proud of the student voice and activism that has emerged these past two months," the letter read. "We applaud the passion, collaboration, advocacy and strength demonstrated by students . . . to ensure that we as a community move quickly to become an anti-racist school district."

But Winooski is a bright spot.

In Omaha, top school officials, including the superintendent, agreed to meet with members of WYCD - and allowed them to hold a socially distanced rally at a high school - but have done little else, said Amoah and Mekhi Mitchell, 18, another Central graduate and WYCD founder.

The two teenagers said they came away from most meetings feeling the adults weren't really listening. Every request for change was met with insistence, Mitchell said, that the school system was already tackling the issue.

"They pretty much claim they already have this stuff, or they're working for it," Mitchell said.

"Well, where is it?" Amoah interrupted. "And where was it when I was in school?"

Omaha Public Schools did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Although Amoah and Mitchell are both slated to head to college soon, they plan to keep demanding change until they get it. "I think they think we'll forget about this," Amoah said. "But we won't."

Schools across the country are dropping Confederate names after student, parent protests

At Belmont Hill School in Massachusetts, Ugbaja said, officials' response was a mixed bag. After he and two friends penned a public "Call to Action" - which asked for the removal of the bell, as well as more Black authors and Black history taught in classrooms - the head of school requested a meeting.

During the get-together, the head of school seemed passionate, "like he wanted to fix this," Ugbaja said. Still, the head of school also warned that not all of the requested changes could happen right away, according to Ugbaja. A curriculum renovation, for example, is underway but will not be finished in time for Ugbaja's senior year.

A Belmont Hill spokesman said in a statement that student and alumni voices "have accelerated progress on our Diversity Action plan, which includes commitments to improving multicultural curriculum," examining the school's history and hiring a more diverse staff.

The bell, at least, is on its way out.

Donated by a wealthy family in the "early days of Belmont Hill," according to a recent letter to families, the bell has been a fixture of campus for decades. In July, Belmont Hill's school board voted unanimously to remove it because of its "direct ties to slavery" and because "the lessons from our history are eclipsed by the need to make our environment more comfortable and inclusive for all of our students," according to the letter.

Ugbaja will be glad to see it go. Sometimes, he said, White classmates rang the bell. As the chimes died away, they turned and stared at him, the only Black person nearby.

That used to feel intimidating.

"But after all this, I feel - no, I know - I have a lot more to say than I did before," Ugbaja said. "Being one of the only Black kids at the school is not a hindrance now. It is a power."

Get updates on your area delivered via email

Local newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.)

Like PostLocal on Facebook | Follow @postlocal on Twitter | Latest local news

Updated January 17, 2021

America's Racial Reckoning: What you need to know
The Tulsa Massacre: A century later, the city's historic Black Wall Street faces erasure by White developers
Kamala Harris: The Black women who paved the way
Resources: Understanding racism and inequality in America
George Floyd's America: Examining systemic racism through the lens of his life

Full coverage: Race & Reckoning | Newsletter: Subscribe to About US to read the latest on race and identity
Show More Show Less
Today's Headlines

The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
High school students are demanding schools teach more Black history, include more Black authors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As he watched the protests over George Floyd's killing sweep across America, 17-year-old Hussein Amuri thought about how most of the authors he read in English class - like most of the teachers at his high school in Winooski, Vt. - are White.

# data[].attributes.headline
Black History is American History. We Should Teach It That Way.

# data[].attributes.subject
Black History is American History. We Should Teach It That Way.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Back to blog overview

Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year where we as a nation check off the proverbial box of honoring the impact and contributions of African Americans in the United States. For a whole 28 days, we see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and countless others surrounded by red, green, yellow and black flooding our timelines, tv screens , classrooms, and communities. But how genuine is the honor, if it lasts for one very short month and doesn't tell the whole story ?

They did this because knew what much of America still hasn't quite learned: African Americans have made far too many contributions to squeeze into one month. Unfortunately, this isn't the message most students get. With 80% of teachers being white and 40% of all public schools not having a single teacher of color, Black students across the country are being robbed of the opportunity to see themselves in what they're studying and experience the richness of Black history. Instead, they're bombarded with negative narratives based on biases, prejudices , and stereotype s- forcing them to settle for raggedy and distorted views of who they are and what their culture represents.

Top
Bring TNTP to your school system

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black History is American History. We Should Teach It That Way.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Back to blog overview Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year where we as a nation check off the proverbial box of honoring the impact and contributions of African Americans in the United States.

# data[].attributes.headline
Teaching Black History in Culturally Responsive Ways

# data[].attributes.subject
Teaching Black History in Culturally Responsive Ways

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As Black History Month kicked off, I was reflecting on my time as a student. My experience all those years ago was similar to that of most Black children today: mostly White teachers teaching Black history primarily in February.

I was told of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass. I heard very little of Malcolm X, the FBI's campaign against civil rights leaders, the Rainbow Coalition put together by the Black Panther Party's Fred Hampton, or Hampton's assassination. I learned about the struggles of my enslaved ancestors, but not about Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, or Nat Turner.

I was taught about the marches and firehoses in Alabama, but I had to teach myself about the acts of terrorism committed against Black people in Rosewood, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Wilmington, North Carolina.

Today, teachers continue that tradition, telling students about Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, and LeBron James, as well as King, Tubman, Douglass, and other inspirational figures. These folks are to be honored for their accomplishments-but we should not ignore lessons that explore the impact of racism in the Black experience. It's imperative that teachers not reinforce a milquetoast version of Black history that is anti-Black because of its erasure of painful truths.

No matter what subject you teach, there are ways you can infuse Black history into your daily lessons in a way that is prophetic and purposeful.

Black History Is American History

Infuse Black history into the curriculum year-round: Tom Joyner, the recently retired syndicated radio host, used the phrase "Black history 365 days a year" to mean that Black history isn't a gimmick meant for one month out of the year, with a student assembly or a potluck dinner with traditional Black foods. Black history is American history. Students should learn throughout the year and throughout all disciplines about the accomplishments, experiences, and perspectives of Black people.

How can teachers infuse Black history into their teaching? Here are some simple examples for core content areas:

English: Provide students with texts-poetry and fiction, and nonfiction as well-written by Black people. Teach students about the Africanisms in American English when discussing or teaching grammar.

Mathematics and science: Refer students to famous Black scientists and mathematicians throughout your course. Discuss how Black people showed an understanding of agricultural science in how they used soil in both West Africa and South Carolina to grow rice. Also, you can study the mathematical patterns of African art, and reference the rich history of math in sub-Saharan Africa in the areas of geometry, graphs, and numerical systems-you can engage students by playing African games like mancala that have a strong math component.

Social studies: Incorporate primary and secondary source documents by or about Black people into student reading lists. Create an assignment in which students interview Black history scholars to discuss the Black experience in America throughout a social studies course.

Use texts by Black authors, in every discipline: In history class, I learned from textbooks written by White scholars. I read the works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare in English class, but never Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, or Toni Morrison. According to a recent report, more than eight of every 10 books that New York City students are likely to see in class from preschool to eighth grade are written by White authors. Students should be introduced to texts by Black authors that speak to Black experiences, Black perspectives, and Black accomplishments. These authors remind children and adults that Black excellence is not confined to athletics and entertainment. How can we promote the academic excellence of Black children without introducing them to Black intellectuals-individuals they can see themselves someday becoming?

Teach students about important Black figures-especially local ones: Teaching about Obama and King is a good start, but you can introduce students to hidden figures as you work through your content during the school year.

If you're a middle school science teacher and your students are interested in cultivating a community food garden, teach them about scientists like George Washington Carver, who developed methods to prevent soil depletion. If you're an elementary teacher teaching students how to tell time, introduce them to Benjamin Banneker, who created the first American clock. Teaching students about important people is a great thing-even better is doing it in the context of your lessons, rather than in a set-aside month.

And if you teach students about the history of slavery in America, remember to include two topics in particular: the economics of slavery, and acts of resistance and rebellion by Black people. The enslavement of Africans built this nation's economic foundation, and the entire nation benefited, so resistance and rebellion were met with brute force. Nevertheless, enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants resisted through sabotage, running away, and outright rebellion and revolt- hundreds of revolts happened during African enslavement. Communities of formerly enslaved Black people along the East Coast fought to maintain their freedom and to free other enslaved people.

One task of teachers in the classroom is to acknowledge and honor students' humanity-and that means acknowledging and honoring Black humanity. That starts with acknowledging the good, the bad, and the ugly of our history as a nation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching Black History in Culturally Responsive Ways

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Black history is American history and should be taught throughout the year across the curriculum-not confined to a single month.

# data[].attributes.headline
Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve

# data[].attributes.subject
Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Want to read the PDF version instead? Click here.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress-commonly called "The Nation's Report Card"-tells a dismal story: Only 2% of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple question about the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. And it's no surprise. Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history.

Generally speaking, the farther away from the South-and the smaller the African-American population-the less attention paid to the civil rights movement. Sixteen states do not require any instruction whatsoever about the movement. In another 19, coverage is minimal. In almost all states, there is tremendous room for improvement.

As the nation prepared this year to dedicate a monument to its greatest civil rights champion, the Southern Poverty Law Center undertook a comprehensive review-the first of its kind-of the coverage accorded the civil rights movement in state educational standards and curriculum frameworks. This report sets out the results of that review. It provides a national report card on the state of civil rights education in our country. Most states, unfortunately, get a failing grade.

Dedicating a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall is of great symbolic importance. But if we, as a nation, are to move beyond symbolism, teaching our children about the great movement that Dr. King led is a national imperative.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The National Assessment of Educational Progress-commonly called "The Nation's Report Card"-tells a dismal story: Only 2% of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple question about the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. And it's no surprise. Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history.

# data[].attributes.headline
Nikole Hannah-Jones: The erasure of history “is how you veer towards fascism“

# data[].attributes.subject
Nikole Hannah-Jones: The erasure of history “is how you veer towards fascism“

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nikole Hannah-Jones: The erasure of history "is how you veer towards fascism"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's attack on multiculturalism, Nikole Hannah Jones joined Ali Velshi to discuss. She said" in a country that has been multi-racial since 1619, this is exactly who we are." Forgetting America's complicated and controversial history would instead be a turn "towards fascism"

# data[].attributes.headline
Black History Month: Teaching the Complete History

# data[].attributes.subject
Black History Month: Teaching the Complete History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 2019, LFJ (then Teaching Tolerance) rolled out a series of articles challenging teachers to go beyond overused and whitewashed historical narratives when observing Black History Month. In 2020, we expanded that call by recommending that teachers widen their exploration of Black lives while also providing historical context so students will make meaningful connections to current issues.

It's not uncommon for educators to focus on slavery, segregation and other forms of oppression during Black History Month.

But only teaching a Black history steeped in trauma and struggle provides a very narrow view of Blackness and perpetuates the false notion of Black people's inferiority. This limited teaching of history can actually be violent.

Stephanie P. Jones, founder of Mapping Racial Trauma in Schools and an assistant professor of education at Grinnell College, examines the severity of such approaches in " Ending Curriculum Violence."

Jones' research shows that, too often, "the transatlantic slave trade and its resulting horror within the American slavery system are essentialized as all Black history itself."

She found that the hard histories of slavery, the civil rights movement and other traumatic events in Black history are frequently mistaught or introduced with little context. Curriculum violence occurs when, as too often happens, educators ask students to act out this history or empathize with enslavers' and other oppressors' perspectives.

As a result, students come away with a warped understanding of how racial inequity manifests today. And repeated instances of curriculum violence contribute to a larger traumatic experience at school-experiences that can affect Black students' mental health.

This doesn't mean you should skip teaching hard histories for fear of inflicting curriculum violence. Instead, you can take care to teach the truth and avoid harm in the process. Jones' article offers guidance on how to accomplish that. One way to start right away is to tell the whole story-not just a small part-of Black history. A first step is to commit to decentering racial trauma during Black History Month.

We will share some of our favorite resources focusing on aspects of Black history and culture that aren't centered on violence, trauma and struggle. We hope you'll use them to help your students recognize the many ways in which Black people have contributed to, inspired and created American culture while also leading the way in advocating for civic participation, inclusion and equitable spaces.

Teach the History of Liberation Movements

The fight for Black liberation has always been an integral part of U.S. history, but too often we don't explore that narrative. Black liberation in the United States is much more than a fight to defeat slavery or Jim Crow. It's also exemplified in efforts to reject anti-Blackness: the refusal of Black people's humanity, dignity, agency and voice. People perpetuate anti-Blackness in the degradation of Black aesthetics, denial of Black people's grievances and pain, and the erasure or discrediting of Black culture.

There are numerous ways to tell the story of Black liberation movements. In addition to revolts by enslaved people in the U.S. and beyond, educators can learn and teach more about the everyday and revolutionary ways in which enslaved people fought for liberation. You can start with the episode " Resistance Means More Than Rebellion" on the Teaching Hard History: American Slavery podcast. And students can watch historian Tera Hunter describe the life and escape of Henry "Box" Brown here.

You can also work with students to examine other efforts and movements in which Black people resisted subjugation. These efforts include the work of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power and "Black Is Beautiful" movements. Students can learn more about Black queer liberation and womanism movements, which provided a template for activism today, such as Black Lives Matter.

Honor Black Civic Engagement

The civil rights movement is perhaps the example of Black activism that is most commonly taught in schools. Students should see that advocacy for Black civic engagement-although often attributed to individual figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-was a collective effort that required the sacrifices of everyday people. For example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was successful because Black communities united and pooled resources for a common cause and attacked segregated busing from multiple angles. This campaign required information sharing, volunteering and political engagement.

From the fierce activism and organizing of Ida B. Wells to the creation of the NAACP, Black people and organizations have a long history of uplifting their communities through civic engagement.

This Black History Month, educators can introduce students to those who aren't always highlighted, such as Francis Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. Show students how their intersectional identities both helped and hindered their causes.

Recognize Intersectional Black Identity

Students must understand that, like other marginalized groups, Black people have identities that intersect, creating complex lived experiences and compounding the effects of oppressive systems.

Scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 to study the social, economic and political ways in which identity-based systems of oppression and privilege connect, overlap and influence one another.

But recognizing intersectionality doesn't mean educators have to focus only on oppression when acknowledging intersecting identities. Show students that the overlapping of identities helps inspire and influence culture, activism and the consciousness of our society. Intersecting identities lend empathy and an appreciation for all human experiences, as shown in the activism of James Baldwin and Maya Angelou.

To start, some resources you can share with your students might be those that amplify the perspectives of the Black LGBTQ community, Afro-Latinx people and Black Muslims.

Celebrating Black Literature

Because literature is so central to the ways in which children learn about the world, Black History Month is a great time to recommit yourself to studying and teaching works by Black authors who can offer authentic depictions of what it means to be Black in the U.S. and beyond-as opposed to canonical texts that either ignore these perspectives altogether or tell them from the outside looking in. Works by authors like Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor can provide more accurate pictures of Black life and perspectives, even in the science fiction worlds of Butler's work.

Students can also delve into the biographies of authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni to explore how their activism influenced their work and vice versa.

This exploration doesn't have to be limited to older literature. Examine the works of contemporary writers such as Elizabeth Acevedo's " Hair," which delves into the politics of Black hair. Eve Ewing's " Electric Arches" provides a magical look into Black girlhood while Ta-Nehisi Coates' body of work -from essays to graphic novels-offers a Black male perspective on topics such as history, politics and fatherhood.

This exploration also shouldn't be limited to U.S.-born writers. Help students connect the common threads among Black people across the globe. The works of writers such as Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid and Wayétu Moore center Black lives throughout the African diaspora in historical narratives.

There is plenty of history to uncover. Studying these four areas of Black life-liberation, civic engagement, intersectional identities and Black literature-can help move classroom discussions past trauma toward enlightenment and empowerment. This doesn't suggest that the realities of racism and racialized violence aren't worthy of discussion. However, students deserve to learn more accurate, balanced and humanizing accounts of Black experiences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black History Month: Teaching the Complete History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2019, LFJ (then Teaching Tolerance) rolled out a series of articles challenging teachers to go beyond overused and whitewashed historical narratives when observing Black History Month. In 2020, we expanded that call by recommending that teachers widen their exploration of Black lives while also providing historical context so students will make meaningful connections to current issues.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why we remember: Black history is America’s story — terrible and triumphant

# data[].attributes.subject
Why we remember: Black history is America’s story — terrible and triumphant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A student at Humes Preparatory Academy sits in the audience during a Black History Month program in February 2017. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Black lives matter.

So, isn't it about time - past time, really - that the threads of Black history are acknowledged as part of the American history tapestry - part of every American day, every American week, every American month of every American year?

If Black history is indeed American history, what of Black History Month? What of February - the 28 or 29 days of learning about and focusing on Black Americans' contributions to society?

We need Black History Month to mend what's broken, said Charles McKinney, professor of history and director of Africana Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis. Black History Month has been "a powerful corrective to a history that has excluded Black people, diminishing all of the American history; diminishing the truth," he said.

What is being put right is history that has excluded Black Americans' contributions, McKinney said. "When you don't think seriously about Black folks, when you take Black people out of the equation, you aren't thinking seriously about democracy and about freedom."

It would be as much a mistake to erase Black History Month as it would be to erase the entire story of a people, said Dr. Lionel Kimble, associate professor of history at Chicago State University. Kimble is also vice president of programs for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the 106-year-old organization founded by Dr. Carter G. Woodson.

If Black History Month could have a father, Woodson was at the apex of that family tree.

"Cynics ask, 'Why did they give us the shortest month of the year?' " Kimble said.

Truth is, "they" didn't "give us" anything.

Woodson, whose parents were formerly enslaved, himself named the second week of February "Negro History Week" in 1926, to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. "Woodson chose that month specifically," Kimble said. It became Black History Month in 1976, during America's bicentennial year, signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford.

Woodson, born in 1875, did not even start his formal education until he was in his 20s. But with an insatiable appetite for books, he was drawn to history. Once exposed to the riches of learning, he got his bachelor's and master's degrees in short order. He was one of the first African Americans to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Kimble explained that ASALH has been like the West African griot, the traditional keeper of a people's story, that has kept Black history alive for more than a century - during February at least, even when it wasn't being recognized at other times.

"Woodson was a seminal character for good reason," McKinney said. He wanted to "create an infrastructure for Black people to learn both inside and outside the schoolroom." Thus, the precursor to ASALH had chapters that were not based at universities, but in communities, with memberships of ordinary people as well as scholars. That "every person a historian" tradition continues today.

"Black folks in this country are Americans, but are also the stepchild of America," McKinney said. "That has to be reckoned with." Incorporating Black history seamlessly into American history is part of that reckoning. Leaving it out diminishes the whole.

Woodson knew that, Kimble said. Woodson was fortunate to be in Chicago when the "Black spaces" he was occupying there were vibrant and plentiful - "a community of go-getters," he said. "There, the stars aligned for Woodson." He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the precursor of ASALH, in 1915. The Journal of Negro History and the Negro History Bulletin followed as printed repositories for scholarship.

Woodson died in 1950, but the organization he founded survives and thrives. "We are actually growing," Kimble said. "We have 50 branches; 10 chartered just last year." So, the evolved Black History Month is far from outdated or obsolete, he said. (There also is a branch in Memphis.)

Lessons in history

The teaching of Black history in the nation's schools is another, not-so-positive matter. Both historians said that is another reason Black History Month should carry on.

Woodson, once a high school principal, would be "vastly disappointed" in the way history and social studies are taught in American schools today, Kimble said. The current low quality of instruction in history dates back to No Child Left Behind programs beginning in 2002 that de-emphasized the humanities in favor of the sciences and mathematics.

"Good history tells the story of how similar we are to each other," Kimble said. "Those stories are missing" in the teaching of history in public schools. That kind of omission results in misunderstandings, such as "the meaning of ' Black Lives Matter'," which is misinterpreted to mean that other lives don't matter, Kimble said.

Students hold song books during a musical performance for Black History Month at Humes Preparatory Academy. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Substandard history lessons have taken on political allies, as embodied in "The 1776 Report" from the Trump administration's President's Advisory 1776 Commission last month. The narrative report, with no attribution, footnotes or citations, scattered with gratuitous photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass and released adjacent to MLK Day, suggested that teaching history in inclusive ways is "...melodramatic, in which all that can be learned from studying the past is that groups victimize and oppress each other."

Instead, the report asserted, the main goal of history education should be to encourage "love of country."

"... being American is more than a pride we inherit,/it's the past we step into/and how we repair it."- Amanda Gorman, 2021 Inaugural poet, excerpt from "The Hill We Climb"

Both Kimble and McKinney dismissed the report as irrelevant and ridiculous. Noted Douglass biographer David W. Blight tweeted, "I have read as much as I can stomach of the 1776 report. It is the product of allowing an array of viciously right-wing, willfully ignorant people to have way too much power. Beliefs devoid of history. I feel so uncomfortable even bringing attention to this mess."

The report was summarily discarded by the incoming Biden-Harris administration.

"In some ways, it is easy to laugh it off," said journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, in a Jan. 23 interview on MSNBC. "But it is also dangerous." Hannah-Jones is a New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary last year for an essay written for " The 1619 Project." The extensive series of stories traced the roots of 400 years of slavery in America.

The Pulitzer Center created a school curriculum to coincide with the reporting in the project. In response to Hannah-Jones's reporting and the curriculum, a Republican lawmaker has introduced legislation to prohibit the teaching of the project in schools.

Hannah-Jones responded in the interview: This is happening "in one of the most racially diverse countries in the world, that has been multiracial since 1619, when English people came to a land that was already occupied by indigenous people..." She added that such moves create the environment for the type of violence seen on Jan. 6 in Washington, when Trump supporters attempted to violently overturn the results of the election. "It is more than rhetoric," she said.

In the piece, Hannah-Jones wrote what could be an argument for Black History Month as a preserver of democracy:

"...Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country's history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy. ...Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different - it might not be a democracy at all. ..."

Teaching the teachers

Historians Kimble and McKinney agree that the denial of Black people's contributions to American history is dangerous. Their personal histories and views of education inform their opinions about Black history and the month during which it is celebrated.

An enthusiastic lover of history, Kimble, 47, was himself descended from grandparents who were "New Deal Democrats" and parents who were part of the Black Power struggle. The University of Iowa graduate lives in Bronzeville, the Black cultural center of Chicago. He regularly points out to students Woodson's haunts and places trod by icons of Black history, such as Ida B. Wells, who made Chicago home after leaving Memphis.

Dr. Charles McKinney speaks during an action calling for the removal of the Confederate statues in Memphis in August 2017. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50.

McKinney, 53, cultivated a love of history from family members, many of whom attended historically Black colleges. The California native chose Morehouse, a historically Black university in Atlanta, then Duke University for his graduate work. First thinking he wanted to become a lawyer, the study of African American history drew him in and has informed his scholarship since. He requires his students to be "vocal and engaged."

Both historians decry the state of teaching history in schools.

One of the ways ASALH tries to remedy this is through teacher workshops around the country. Mandates for the teaching of Black history are useless, Kimble said, if the teachers - many times ignorant of facts about Black history themselves - do not know how to teach it.

That context and nuance are missing from the teaching of history in schools, where each state devises its own standards and textbooks, McKinney said. Examining and changing state curriculum standards is one possible remedy. "We have been seeing some movement on state levels for a while," he said.

"I would love to see national standards. But that gets complicated. All schools are not created equal."

In Tennessee, the teaching of civil rights history is mandated by law in several courses, including in the fifth grade where standards include requiring students to analyze key people and events. Civil rights history is also a part of the required U.S. History course in high school, and is taught in elective courses on African American History and Tennessee History, according to a statement from the staff of the state Board of Education.

But there are no specific standards on how the subject should be taught. "In terms of the question on how to teach the standards, we specifically don't get into that level of detail on the standards," the statement said. "Standards represent what students should know and be able to do at the end of a grade/course. Districts then adopt curricular materials, such as textbooks, that set out how and when each standard is taught."

Studies in 2011 and 2014 by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the teaching of American civil rights history found that universally, state history standards "routinely ignored or over-simplified the struggle for African-American civil rights." The smaller the Black population in a city or town, the lower the standards, it found.

"Too often, we found, the movement, when it is given classroom time, is reduced to lessons about two heroic figures - Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks - and four words, 'I have a dream,'" the SPLC study said.

Kimble said there is an obligation to young people to teach history correctly. "We need to train the babies in the correct way, so they know where they fit in the narrative," he said. He did find a measure of optimism in the multi-racial demonstrations following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others: "The 'woke' babies give me hope."

McKinney said he is cautious about reading too much into the overwhelming response to last summer's murders of Black people. "It is not hard to be mad at what happened to George Floyd. The same thing with Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. It is easy to organize around that.

"So, 'Thank you, everybody, who were out in the street'; but how does this moment get translated into substantive changes that improve the lives of Black people? It's going to be interesting how this moment plays out," McKinney said.

Kimble is looking to the future, too. "When we look back in 25 years, hella stories are going to come out of this period. I just hope it isn't the story of a civil war. I'll be staying in the trenches, trying to tell the stories of our people. If we don't tell them, the world won't know."

Amanda Gorman, 22, the youngest Inaugural poet in U.S. history, said as much, as she recited " The Hill We Climb " at the Biden-Harris inauguration on Jan. 20.

"... while we have our eyes on the future / history has its eyes on us."

Students hold their fists up while presenting a Black History Month program at Humes Preparatory Academy. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Celeste Williams is a writer and playwright living in Indianapolis. She was a journalist for more than 25 years, having worked at daily newspapers in Alabama, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Indiana. She has won national awards, including recognition for reporting on extreme poverty in Tunica, Mississippi. Her play, "More Light: Douglass Returns," about abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, was produced in 2017 and 2018 in Indiana. This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism Want to help us keep reporting on poverty, power and policy? Support journalism that continues the legacies of Ida B. Wells and Martin Luther King Jr. Donate to MLK50 today. , a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.
Got a story idea, a tip or feedback? Send an email to mlk50@mlk50.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why we remember: Black history is America's story - terrible and triumphant - MLK50: Justice Through Journalism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Black lives matter. So, isn't it about time - past time, really - that the threads of Black history are acknowledged as part of the American history tapestry - part of every American day, every American week, every American month of every American year? If Black history is indeed American history, what of Black History Month?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
These examples reveal some of the policies that result in pushing kids out of school, making it difficult to graduate, then difficult to get a job, and finally more likely that they will end up in jail. This school-to-prison-pipeline begins with a curriculum that conceals the struggles and contributions of Black people and other people of color. It is a curriculum that fails to respect young Black people as intellectuals, and ignores their cultures, communities, and concerns. In the majority of textbooks, African Americans struggles and contributions are minimalized, portrayed as blatant stereotypes, or confined to a few roles that are acceptable to mainstream white society. This absence (or destructive presence) begins in elementary and continues throughout a Black student's schooling.

Teaching for Black lives means that we can't relegate Black history to certain historical time periods or events and we must include Black lives in all aspects of curriculum including science, math, literature, and the arts. Teaching for Black lives also means considering the loneliness of learning about one's history when you might be one of a few students in class (or few teachers in a school) that this history represents.

Teaching for Black Lives grows directly out of the movement for Black lives. We recognize that anti-Black racism constructs Black people, and Blackness generally, as not counting as human life. The chapters here in Teaching for Black Lives push back directly against this construction by not only providing educators with critical perspectives on the role of schools in perpetuating anti-Blackness, but also by offering educators concrete examples of what it looks like to humanize Black people in curriculum, teaching, and policy. Throughout the book, we demonstrate how teachers can connect the curriculum to young people's lives and root their concerns and daily experiences in what is taught and how classrooms are set up. We also highlight the hope and beauty of student activism and collective action.

The first section of Teaching for Black Lives, "Making Black Lives Matter in Our Schools," frames how police violence and the movement for Black lives can explicitly be brought to schools and classrooms by educators through organizing mass action and through curriculum. The pairing of these is purposeful: Not only is it critical that we teach about the systemic violence against Black people and the travesty of Black deaths, it is also important for students and teachers to understand their roles in organizing in support of Black life and Black communities, and against anti-Black racism.

In Section II, "Enslavement, Civil Rights, and Black Liberation," Teaching for Black Lives takes a historical turn. Here the chapters focus on how Black history is taught in the classroom. We recognize for instance, that the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement are all regularly taught in schools, but, as we alluded to at the beginning of this introduction, we also know that these subjects are too often taught in ways that further dehumanize Black people and perpetuate anti-Black racism. Thus the chapters we include in this section reframe the teaching of these histories in ways that challenge white supremacy and reject many of the popular, yet racist, myths that all too often paint Black people as non-actors in their own liberation. To that end, through textbook critique, role plays, and other classroom-based activities, several chapters in this section focus on how racism and white supremacy have operated historically, and highlight how Black people organized in the interest of their own freedom.

We do not expect Teaching for Black Lives to end police violence against Black communities, stop anti-Black racism in schools, or end the school-to-prison pipeline. We do, however, see this collection as playing an important role in highlighting the ways educators can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as well as sites for knowing the hope and beauty in Blackness. The ferocity of racism in the United States against black minds and black bodies demands that teachers fight back. We must organize against anti-blackness amongst our colleagues and in our communities; we must march against police brutality in the streets; and we must teach for Black lives in our classrooms. We call on others to join us in this fight.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These examples reveal some of the policies that result in pushing kids out of school, making it difficult to graduate, then difficult to get a job, and finally more likely that they will end up in jail. This school-to-prison-pipeline begins with a curriculum that conceals the struggles and contributions of Black people and other people of color.

# data[].attributes.headline
New Jersey moves to strengthen Black history education mandates

# data[].attributes.subject
New Jersey moves to strengthen Black history education mandates

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

When Cherry Hill seventh grader Ebele Azikiwe told her mother about a Black history lesson, she was surprised by the response. It was virtually the same lesson her mother learned 20 years ago at the same school.

Ebele, 12, like many of her peers across the region, has been on a mission to change how Black history is taught. She wrote a letter to her principal and last month testified via Zoom at the Statehouse about a bill that would make sweeping changes to the curriculum.

"I hope that it will catch on in other districts and states," said Ebele, who attends Beck Middle School in Cherry Hill. "Black history is history and it's a history that everybody should know."

New Jersey lawmakers approved a bill last month to change how public schools teach Black history and hold them more accountable. If signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy it would require lessons about racism and social justice and contributions made by prominent African Americans from the past to the present like Kamala Harris, the first woman, and person of Black and South Asian descent elected vice president.

"Our children will learn about Black history and not just being a slave," said Assemblywoman Angela McKnight (D., Hudson), one of the bill's sponsors. "We will know the contributions that Black people continue to do."

Get the news you need to start your day

The new law will complement the state's Amistad law, which requires public schools to incorporate African American history. Her bill will put the Amistad Commission under the state Department of Education, tighten regulations and oversight, and mandate professional development for teachers.

Students in high schools across the region have been pushing for changes this year after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. They want schools to address systemic racism and implicit bias among staff and students.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania require history to be taught, but districts decide the content of their courses.

"With this legislation, there is no excuse," McKnight said.

Meanwhile, the Cherry Hill School District is moving forward with a plan to become the first in New Jersey to mandate that students take an African American history course in order to graduate. Students proposed the course after organizing a Black Lives Matter protest in the spring.

The predominantly white school system would be the first in the state with such a requirement, according to the New Jersey Department of Education. Many schools teach Black history, but not as a prerequisite for graduation. In Philadelphia, a course in African American history, including the civil rights movement, is a graduation requirement.

Farrah Mahan, Cherry Hill's curriculum director, said the district has hired history professors from Stockton University and the University of Pennsylvania to help develop the course. Students "need to see themselves in the curriculum," she said.

It has not yet been determined what year students would be expected to take the class. The district is also reviewing its Black history curriculum and textbooks used for lower grades, she said.

"We are evolving with the times," Mahan said. "This is just another example of where we are. It's everyone's history"

Cherry Hill, the 11th-largest public school district in the state, enrolls about 11,000 students. The district is 57% white, 18% Asian, 13% Hispanic, and 8% Black.

Mahan said the new course would be offered for the 2021-22 school year. Cherry Hill already has an elective African American studies class that is offered for dual credit through Stockton University.

Younger students also should be taught more comprehensive Black history to help dispel stereotypes about African Americans, said Ebele, who heads the youth division of the New Jersey Chapter of Rise Against Hate, an advocacy group. She said she was partly motivated to advocate for changes after her stepfather was stopped by police because of mistaken identity.

"There is so much to share, to help awaken people," she told lawmakers. "If people were taught early we aren't a threat but simply human it will make a huge difference."

State officials have said it is unclear how many of the state's 600 public school districts are complying with the 2002 Amistad law. The law honors the enslaved Africans who gained their freedom after overthrowing the crew of the slave ship Amistad in 1839.

Pleasantville first-grade teacher Tamar LaSure-Owens, who has been leading a charge to infuse Black history into everyday lessons, believes the latest legislation would help teachers better present historically accurate and culturally sensitive information about all races.

"We need training,' said LaSure-Owens, who has helped develop a model Black history curriculum at the Leeds Avenue School. "We need a curriculum that we can put our hands on."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Jersey moves to strengthen Black history education mandates

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When Cherry Hill seventh grader Ebele Azikiwe told her mother about a Black history lesson, she was surprised by the response. It was virtually the same lesson her mother learned 20 years ago at the same school. Ebele, 12, like many of her peers across the region, has been on a mission to change how Black history is taught.

# data[].attributes.headline
Residents say ethnic studies class, textbook give ‘voice to people of color’

# data[].attributes.subject
Residents say ethnic studies class, textbook give ‘voice to people of color’

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A relative, Fallon Feliz, said she is concerned her 7-year-old son will only be taught a short version of Black history including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barak Obama and little else. She said the book is the first step toward bringing an understanding to American history that isn't taught in required history classes.

"There is so much more to our history than the edited versions of the text of our history," she said. "My son deserves the facts of our history and not a fabricated truth based on white privilege."

Sanisa Machado said she believed in full transparency, not matter how uncomfortable it might make people. She called the controversy over the class an "attempt at censorship" and ignores the work put in by students and parents who fought for the course to be offered in the district.

"Don't let the fragility of others compromise the education of our youth," Machado said.

Pedro Gonzalez, who has a master's in multicultural and multilingual education, said the class will help foster an understanding of all people who form the imperfect, yet unfinished union of the United States. He said understanding is the only way to break out of the national discourse of an "us versus them mentality." He concluded, "We have a social contract to take care of each other, and more importantly listen to each other. Students are learning they are more alike than they are different."

The speakers were referring to Jerrold Jensen's comments at the Jan. 12 school board meeting. Jensen has been critical of the course for being pushed through without community involvement and, more importantly, the textbook for failing to present students the idea that Americans have supported correcting the wrongs of previous generations in order to create equal opportunity, regardless of race, color or creed.

Visalia resident Mark Fulmer, a former VUSD employee who has spent an entire career in education, said the book was one-sided, something that could have been addressed with community input. He said the board did not follow its own policy when approving the course and materials. Under Board Policy 6161.1(a) "Selection and Evaluation of Instructional Materials," the board must adopt instructional materials for grades 9-12 to meet requirements set by law or the Department of Education. The policy requires "substantial" participation by teachers and include participation of parents and community members and that feedback from teachers piloting the materials be made available to the board prior to voting on them.

"This class is not coming from education professionals, teachers and principals, or to meet a mandate, as in the case for sex ed or drug and alcohol awareness," Fulmer said. "This process should have a lot of parent involvement and discussion."

Ravalin argues the process for electives is different than graduation requirements or courses required by law. Ethnic studies was officially added for grades 7-12 on Feb. 12, 2018, the last time the district updated its Administrative Regulations 6143(a) on "Courses of Study", and two years before the course was approved. The idea of an ethnic studies course originated in 2017 when the district was responding to claims of racial bias and discrimination on campuses. In an effort to give students a greater voice in the district, then Superintendent Todd Oto created the Inclusivity Task Forces. On May 20, 2019, representatives from each of the task forces jointly presented their recommendations to the school board on a variety of topics, including increasing multicultural activities by offering more inclusive curriculum for all grade levels, more events and activities promoting awareness of diverse cultures, a concerted effort to have more student clubs and mentoring, and social skill development.

"The task force is comprised of three groups, teachers, parents and students, all of which reviewed the course and the textbook prior to it going before the board," Ravalin said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Residents say ethnic studies class, textbook give 'voice to people of color' - The Sun-Gazette Newspaper

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A relative, Fallon Feliz, said she is concerned her 7-year-old son will only be taught a short version of Black history including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barak Obama and little else. She said the book is the first step toward bringing an understanding to American history that isn't taught in required history classes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Niya Kenny pulled out her cell phone and began recording.

It happened in 2015, after a classmate had refused to hand over her own cell phone during class and was being pulled from her chair by a police officer based at their school, Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C. When Kenny loudly protested and, like her classmate, refused to hand over her phone, she too was arrested.

The charge: disturbing a school.

Kenny's story is one of several featured in a new investigation from Education Week, " Policing America's Schools," exploring the debate over school discipline, the role of police officers in schools, and why it is that black students are arrested at disproportionately high rates in much of the country.

Education Week will roll out the results of its investigation over the next few weeks, including the tool below that allows users to explore their state and school-level data more closely.

In the 2013-2014 school year, according to a new analysis of federal data by the Education Week Research Center, black students accounted for 16 percent of students enrolled in public schools but 33 percent of arrests in those schools. In 10 states, black students' share of arrests in schools with at least one arrest exceeded their share of enrollment by at least 20 percentage points.

NPR Ed spoke with Education Week staff writer Evie Blad about the project. The interview below has been edited for clarity.
What stood out to you from the investigation's findings?
That the disparities we see in arrests and discipline referral rates are most persistent for black students across a majority of states.

Just looking at arrests in 43 states and Washington D.C., black students made up a larger share of students arrested than they did the population in schools that had at least one arrest. So, they're more heavily represented in the group of students that face contact with law enforcement in schools.

In most states, there are a couple hundred arrests. In some, the number is small enough that it doesn't take a lot to move a percentage point. But we found that, in 28 states, the share of arrested students who are black is at least 10 percentage points higher than their enrollment in schools that arrested students. And in 10 states, the gap is at least 20 percentage points. There's a pretty big difference between their representation and their share of arrested students. And the same is true for referrals to law enforcement.
What did you find in terms of a student's likelihood of being in a school with a law enforcement officer?
At both the middle school and high school level, black students are most likely to be in a school with a school-based law enforcement officer.

At the high school level, in general, officers are more common. So, 74 percent of all black students were in schools with an on-site officer, followed by 71 percent of both Hispanic and multi-racial students, 65 percent of Asian students, and 65 percent of white students.

In a middle school, it's about 59 percent of black students, and the next lowest group is Hispanic students at 49 percent, followed by white students at 47 percent. So, the disparity is a little more severe. Elementary school police officers are far less common so there's a little bit of a closer clustering of races.
Do we know whether a student who attends a school with a law enforcement officer is, for that fact alone, more likely to be arrested?
It would be hard to look at this one piece of federal data and draw that conclusion definitively because there are so many differences between schools. But other researchers have explored this. There's some research that came out in the last year that compared student arrests based on specific offenses, like vandalism, fights without a weapon - things like that - at schools that were demographically similar. They found that the rates were higher if a school had a school-based officer.

In theory, schools that have officers should be treating them like the officers you would call in off the street. So, if I have an officer and a student is doing something wrong, would I call 9-1-1 for this student's behavior? But, civil rights groups feel that schools aren't setting clear enough boundaries for officers and some of them are getting involved in routine discipline. Some [groups] also feel that the hiring of law enforcement and the push for school security are driving resources away from student supports like counselors and social workers who might be able to remedy some of these issues before they escalate.
One of the things that interested me about your reporting is the fact that some states have codified tougher penalties for being disruptive in class, which may lead to higher arrest rates for students doing things that, in many places, would not justify a call to 9-1-1.

Right. So, that's been a big focus in recent years. In 2015, one video that got a lot of headlines was of a girl being arrested in South Carolina. A school-based officer pulled her out of her chair and dragged her across the floor before arresting her. The charge that she and her classmate [Niya Kenny] were arrested under was disturbing a school, which is a South Carolina law. A lot of folks argue that it was originally written to apply to people who came in from the outside and disrupted public schools but that it's often applied to students. That law specifically limits things like obnoxious behavior.
Interesting. Can you think of other states that have laws like this?
[Kenny] is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the disrupting a school law in South Carolina. In other states, folks argue that laws against disorderly conduct are applied pretty broadly and subjectively - both in schools and on the street and that, if you have any kind of an implicit bias, that's where it will come into play.
Where do we stand now on practices being used in schools to not only minimize arrests but suspensions too?
It's a little difficult to spell out because the laws have different names. But they're pretty broadly spread throughout the country. Some states have done a better job of issuing guidance through their departments of education to help schools put boundaries around how those laws are applied. But in many states, the complaint is that, if things are too subjective and too broad, then there's not enough consistency in how they're applied.

People tend to think of arrests as a safety issue and suspensions as a discipline issue. But I think a lot of folks would tell you that this is all kind of on a continuum of how schools a.) deal with student behavior and b.) approach their climate. How do they support students and remedy their behavior so that it doesn't continue if they do something wrong?

There's been a big push in recent years to explore how schools handle things like classroom removals - if there's a way to reduce suspensions and expulsions. Rather than sending a student home for misbehavior, doing things like restorative practices. That means asking students to sit with their peers to discuss the Why behind their behavior and how it affected them and to find a way to stop doing it in the future. That is hard work for schools. It requires buy-in from administrators and teachers. It requires a lot of training and a lot of thought and a lot of work. But some researchers argue that it's a more effective way of ensuring that students behave better in the future and that discipline is fair in resolving these situations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Niya Kenny pulled out her cell phone and began recording. It happened in 2015, after a classmate had refused to hand over her own cell phone during class and was being pulled from her chair by a police officer based at their school, Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C.

# data[].attributes.body
How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff Is Harming Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the wake of high-profile school shootings, many schools over the past decade have invested scarce educational funds into putting more police in schools. School districts have shown a near obsession with "hardening" schools despite federal data revealing that the real crisis of schools isn't violence, but a broad failure to hire enough support staff to serve students' mental health needs.

Today's students are experiencing record levels of depression and anxiety and many forms of trauma. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate among children ages 10 to 17 increased by 70 percent between 2006 and 2016. Approximately 72 percent of children in the United States will have experienced at least one major stressful event - such as witnessing violence, experiencing abuse, or experiencing the loss of a loved one - before the age of 18.

School counselors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists are frequently the first to see children who are sick, stressed, or traumatized - especially in low-income districts. The benefits of investing in mental health services are clear: Schools with such services see improved attendance rates, better academic achievement, and higher graduation rates as well as lower rates of suspension, expulsion, and other disciplinary incidents. Data shows that the presence of school-based mental health providers not only improves outcomes for students, but can also improve overall school safety.

By contrast, there is no evidence that increased police presence in schools improves school safety. Indeed, in many cases, it causes harm. When in schools, police officers do what they are trained to do, which is detain, handcuff, and arrest. This leads to greater student alienation and a more threatening school climate.

The glaring deficit of mental health staff in schools is inexcusable, especially given the growing use of law enforcement in schools. This dangerous combination is a central reason the most vulnerable students are being funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the wake of high-profile school shootings, many schools over the past decade have invested scarce educational funds into putting more police in schools. School districts have shown a near obsession with "hardening" schools despite federal data revealing that the real crisis of schools isn't violence, but a broad failure to hire enough support staff to serve students' mental health needs.

# data[].attributes.headline
Black Parents, Teachers and Students See a Need for More Black Teachers

# data[].attributes.subject
Black Parents, Teachers and Students See a Need for More Black Teachers

# data[].attributes.body
[Video: 1:44]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Parents, Teachers and Students See a Need for More Black Teachers

# data[].attributes.body
[Video 4:12]

# data[].attributes.headline
Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids In School

# data[].attributes.subject
Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids In School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How important is it to have a role model?

A new working paper puts some numbers to that question.

Having just one black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced low-income black boys' probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent, the study found.

And by high school, African-American students, both boys and girls, who had one African-American teacher had much stronger expectations of going to college. Keep in mind, this effect was observed seven to ten years after the experience of having just one black teacher.

The study is big. The authors, Seth Gershenson and Constance A. Lindsay of American University, Cassandra M.D. Hart of U.C. Davis and Nicholas Papageorge at Johns Hopkins, looked at long-term records for more than 100,000 black elementary school students in North Carolina.

Then the researchers checked their conclusions by looking at students in a second state, Tennessee, who were randomly assigned to certain classes.

There they found that not only did the black students assigned to black teachers graduate high school at higher rates, they also were more likely to take a college entrance exam. "The results line up strikingly well," says Papageorge.

This paper is another piece of social science evidence reinforcing the case for having more teachers of color and for training teachers to be more culturally responsive. We've reported on instances of implicit bias by white teachers, even toward preschool students, that black students are more often recommended for gifted programs by teachers of color and that students of all races prefer teachers of color.

And this isn't news to many African-American families who already feel strongly that their children need role models in their education. Khalilah Harris has experienced the issue both as a policymaker and as a mother of three daughters. She was the Deputy Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under the Obama administration. She recently transferred her two older daughters, 12 and 14, to a progressive private school to expose them to more diverse teachers and curriculum.

"My youngest, who is 7, goes to supposedly the best public school in Baltimore City, but there is not any teacher of color there, and that is deplorable," she says. "If you grow up in a world that does not reflect your essence as valuable from birth, the fact that you don't have a teacher ... who looks like you, will cause cognitive dissonance."

Papageorge says the "role model effect" that Harris describes is quantifiable. "Sometimes when I talk about expectations, people think I'm talking about magic fairy dust," he says, "but in economics, it's one of the biggest things that determine the kinds of investments people make." In other words, whether it's money you put toward a mutual fund, or time and energy you spend on your education, how much you expect to get out can determine how much you put in.

If a low-income black boy never sees anyone in the classroom who looks like him, Papageorge says he might conclude, "'Hey, college is just not for me'. And then why would you work hard in school?"

Yolanda Coles Jones of Charlottesville, Va., says she and her husband avoided the school system altogether. They homeschool their four children, two girls who are 9 and 7, and 4-year-old twin boys. She says they didn't see their local public or private schools "understanding the needed emphasis on black children seeing black faces." The family is part of a homeschooling co-op called Community Roots, that, Coles Jones says, was founded "to have an atmosphere that is safe for children of color to be in."

In future research, Papageorge hopes to replicate the study and unpack the powerful and long-lasting effects observed. But based on the evidence he already has, he has an immediate policy recommendation. Having just one black teacher in his study made all the difference to students; having two or three didn't increase the effect significantly. Therefore, schools could work to change student groupings so that every black student gets at least one black teacher by the end of elementary school.

"Should we hire more black teachers?" he asks. "Yeah, probably, but it requires more black college graduates ... We could push around rosters tomorrow, change the way we assign kids, and have some effects next school year, not 10 years from now."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids In School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How important is it to have a role model? A new working paper puts some numbers to that question. Having just one black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced low-income black boys' probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent, the study found.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

One spring morning this year, Darlene Lomax was driving to her father's house in northwest Philadelphia. She took a right onto Germantown Avenue, one of the city's oldest streets, and pulled up to Germantown High School, a stately brick-and-stone building. Empty whiskey bottles and candy cartons were piled around the benches in the school's front yard. Posters of the mascot, a green and white bear, had browned and curled. In what was once the teachers' parking lot, spindly weeds shot up through the concrete. Across the street, above the front door of the also-shuttered Robert Fulton Elementary School, a banner read, "Welcome, President Barack Obama, October 10, 2010."

It had been almost three years since the Philadelphia school district closed Germantown High, and 35 years since Lomax was a student there. But the sight of the dead building, stretching over an entire city block, still pained her. She looked at her old classroom windows, tinted in greasy brown dust, and thought about Dr. Grabert, the philosophy teacher who pushed her to think critically and consider becoming the first in her family to go to college. She thought of Ms. Stoeckle, the English teacher, whose red-pen corrections and encouraging comments convinced her to enroll in a program for gifted students. Lomax remembers the predominantly black school-she had only one white and one Asian American classmate-as a rigorous place, with college preparatory honors courses and arts and sports programs. Ten years after taking Ms. Stoeckle's class, Lomax had dropped by Germantown High to tell her that she was planning to become a teacher herself.

A historic Georgian Revival building, Germantown High opened its doors in 1915 as a vocational training ground for the industrial era, with the children of blue-collar European immigrants populating its classrooms. In the late 1950s, the district added a wing to provide capacity for the growing population of a rapidly integrating neighborhood.

By 1972, Lomax's father, a factory worker, had saved up enough to move his family of eight from a two-bedroom apartment in one of the poorest parts of Philadelphia into a four-bedroom brick house near Germantown. Each month, Darlene and her older sister would walk 15 blocks to the mortgage company's gray stucco building, climb up to the second floor, and press a big envelope with money orders into the receptionist's hand. The new house had a dining room and a living room, sparkling glass doorknobs, French doors that opened into a large sunroom, an herb garden, and a backyard with soft grass and big trees. Darlene and her father planted tomatoes and made salads with the sweet, juicy fruit every Friday, all summer long.

To the Lomax children, the fenceless backyard was ripe for exploration, and it funneled them right to the yards of their neighbors. One yard belonged to two sisters who worked as special-education teachers-the first black people Darlene had met who had college degrees. As Lomax got to know these sisters, she began to think that perhaps her philosophy teacher was right: She, too, could go to college and someday buy a house of her own with glass doorknobs and a garden. She graduated from Rosemont College in 1985, and after a stint as a social worker, she enrolled at Temple University and got her teaching credential.

In Philadelphia, the number of black teachers fell 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012. In Chicago, it dropped 40 percent.

On February 19, 2013, Lomax was in the weekly faculty leadership meeting at Fairhill Elementary, a 126-year-old school in a historic Puerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia where she served as principal. A counselor was giving her report, but Lomax couldn't hear what she said. She just stared at her computer screen, frozen, as she read a letter from the school superintendent. She read it again and again to make sure she understood what it said.

Then, slowly, she turned to Robert Harris, Fairhill's special-education teacher for 20 years, and his wife, the counselor and gym teacher. "They are closing our school," she said quietly. They all broke down weeping. Then they walked to the front of the building in silence and unlocked the doors to open the school for the day.

Five miles away, as Germantown High School prepared for its 100th anniversary, its principal was digesting the same letter. In all, 24 Philadelphia schools would be closed that year. These days, when Lomax visits her father in the house with the glass doorknobs, she drives by four shuttered school buildings, each with a "Property Available for Sale" sign.

Back when Lomax was a student in Philadelphia in the 1970s, local, state, and federal governments poured extra resources into these racially isolated schools-grand, elegant buildings that might look like palaces or city halls-to compensate for a long history of segregation. And they invested in the staff inside those schools, pushing to expand the teaching workforce and bring in more black and Latino teachers with roots in the community. Teaching was an essential path into the middle class, especially for African American women; it was also a nexus of organizing. During the civil rights movement, black educators were leaders in fighting for increased opportunity, including more equitable school funding and a greater voice for communities in running schools and districts.

But today, as buildings like Germantown High stand shuttered, these changes are slowly being rolled back. In Philadelphia and across the country, scores of schools have been closed, radically restructured, or replaced by charter schools. And in the process, the face of the teaching workforce has changed. In one of the most far-reaching consequences of the past decade's wave of education reform, the nation has lost tens of thousands of experienced black teachers and principals.

According to the Albert Shanker Institute, which is funded in part by the American Federation of Teachers, the number of black educators has declined sharply in some of the largest urban school districts in the nation. In Philadelphia, the number of black teachers declined by 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012. In Chicago, the black teacher population dropped by nearly 40 percent. And in New Orleans, there was a 62 percent drop in the number of black teachers.
Percentage Change in Teacher Population by Race and Ethnicity, 2002-2012
Many of these departures came as part of mass layoffs and closings in schools with low test scores, a policy promoted with federal and state dollars since 2002. In Chicago, 49 out of about 500 schools were closed in 2013, and in Washington, DC, 38 out of 111 schools have been shuttered since 2008. And since 2002, 140 out of roughly 1,800 New York City schools have closed. In each of the nine cities the Albert Shanker Institute studied, a higher percentage of black teachers were laid off or quit than Latino or white educators. Nationwide, according to the federal Department of Education, African Americans made up 6.8 percent of the teaching workforce in the 2011-12 school year, down from 8.3 percent in 1990. (Nearly 83 percent of the teaching workforce in 2011 was white, down slightly from 1990.)

In all, that means 26,000 African American teachers have disappeared from the nation's public schools-even as the overall teaching workforce has increased by 134,000. Countless black principals, coaches, cafeteria workers, nurses, and counselors have also been displaced-all in the name of raising achievement among black students. While white Americans are slowly waking up to the issue of police harassment and violence in black communities, many are unaware of the quiet but broad damage the loss of African American educators inflicts on the same communities.

"You have to expel him," said the teacher who marched into Darlene Lomax's office, a small, windowless room in the back of Fairhill Elementary, one morning in 2011. She set a red Swiss Army knife on the dark brown linoleum desk, next to the pictures of Lomax's children. The teacher had taken the knife from a fifth grader who was showing it to a classmate. "I never want to see him in my class again," the teacher, who is white, told Lomax.

Soon afterward, Lomax sat down with the 12-year-old. He told her that on his way to school, an older and more popular boy had shown him the knife and chosen him to carry it for a few days. Lomax had known the student, who was African American, for two years. She knew he struggled academically and socially, that he yearned for ways to raise his status among peers.

After talking to the parents, Lomax decided that the boy, who hadn't had any previous discipline problems, wasn't a threat. She suspended him and filed a report with the district. The teacher, as Lomax recalls it, argued that the district's code of conduct required expulsion for any student who brought a weapon to school, but Lomax told her, "We have to judge each case on its merits. My judgment and common sense tells me these rules don't apply in this case." She added, "This child made a mistake, but he deserves a second chance."

Within the next two years, the student turned out to be one of the higher-achieving kids in the school.

It's well documented that black students are disciplined and punished in school at a disproportionate rate. In a 2015 study, Adam Wright, a researcher at the University of California-Santa Barbara, identified a key factor in that disparity: White teachers are much more likely than black teachers to find behavior problems with black students. (This difference did not show up when teachers evaluated white or Latino students.) Wright estimated that if schools doubled the number of black teachers, the black-white suspension disparity would be cut in half.

Other research points in the same direction. A 2008 study by the London School of Economics found that white teachers graded black and Latino students more harshly for the same performance, accounting for as much as 22 percent of the achievement gap between white students and students of color. Earlier this year, Johns Hopkins researchers found that black teachers are much more likely than white teachers to think a black student will graduate from high school or get a college degree-especially if the kid is a black boy. A 2016 Vanderbilt study showed that black students are about half as likely as white students to be put on "gifted" tracks, even when they have comparable test scores-but the disparity was erased when black students were evaluated by black teachers.

Yet, though 16 percent of America's students are black, only 7 percent of teachers are. And even at the schools where black and Latino students are concentrated-71 percent of these students attend high-poverty, mostly urban schools-only 15 percent of teachers are black and 16 percent are Latino.

Like Darlene Lomax, Gloria Ladson-Billings grew up in Philadelphia. In the '60s, she was a teacher there, and later a district coach working with new or struggling teachers. During that time, she remembers coming across many veteran educators who were successfully teaching kids of all backgrounds. By the early '90s, Ladson-Billings had become an education researcher at Santa Clara University, at a time of growing concern in the field about how schools were failing children of color, especially African Americans. Ladson-Billings decided to document the teaching practices she'd seen-many of which were not in the standard education canon. She asked black parents in Philadelphia to identify teachers they considered most effective with their children and then spent two years observing those teachers in the classroom. She wrote about it in a book, : Successful Teachers of African American Children.

Ladson-Billings noticed that instead of mentally sorting kids into "teachable" or "problem student" categories, as researchers have found many teachers do, these educators set a high bar for all students and then helped individual kids to meet it. And instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, they used different techniques with kids of varying skills and interests.

The successful teachers Ladson-Billings studied also created bonds that resemble family. That was what Lomax did when she first became an assistant principal: She invited parents, teachers, and students to come to school on a Friday evening with sleeping bags and blow-up mattresses. Teachers and parents set up a movie room in the library. Parents brought a potluck dinner, and kids, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and teachers chatted into the wee hours. Lomax's mother and two daughters spent the night too. "People just got to know each other better, and the overall climate of the school changed," Lomax recalls.

Researchers like Ladson-Billings argue that teachers are more effective when they get to know their students' backgrounds, including cultural rules for engagement and different ways of expressing knowledge. For example, instead of pushing children to stop using African American vernacular, they might encourage students to translate their favorite hip-hop lyrics into formal English-treating them as bilingual rather than as poor speakers.

Another habit of successful teachers, Ladson-Billings observed, was giving students agency and authority. When Lomax became a principal, she created "administration jobs" for students: They worked as counselors, nurses, teaching assistants, and security guards, and they used credits they earned to bid on computers, bicycles, and skateboards that Lomax would purchase with her own funds and donations. Students worked alongside the staff and advised Lomax and her colleagues on how to improve everything from lunch hour to after-school activities. The program helped build better relationships between students and staff, and it even reduced suspensions.

A focus on inclusion must go beyond classroom changes, Ladson-Billings argues, to school staffing (so students don't see a workforce where, for example, teachers and administrators are mostly white and custodians and cafeteria workers are mostly black) and student opportunities-so that advanced classrooms aren't dominated by white and Asian American students while remedial classes are filled with black and Latino kids. Ultimately, researchers have found, for schools to raise achievement, they have to push back against damaging racial prejudices in every aspect of what they do. Personal humiliation and discrimination are daily realities for most black students, they point out, but teachers can counteract this with inclusion, knowledge, and skills that help kids persevere.

Many of the historically segregated schools that successfully educated black students long before the civil rights era were focused on countering racial stereotypes and instilling pride, according to Theresa Perry, a professor of Africana studies and education at Simmons College. This crucial function was rolled back during desegregation, Perry writes, when researchers estimate that nearly 40,000 black teachers and principals (close to half the African American teaching force) lost their jobs. This happened even though they often had more credentials and teaching experience than white educators, according to new research from Jim Crow's Pink Slip, a forthcoming book by Leslie Fenwick, dean emerita of Howard University's School of Education. In the South, in particular, the consolidation of black and white schools typically meant that white school boards and superintendents had more control than black principals over individual schools' staffing.

Lomax knows from experience how just one teacher can encourage a student to use her voice and overcome challenges. After Lomax graduated from Germantown High in 1981, she enrolled at Rosemont College, a small liberal-arts school outside Philadelphia. Of roughly 600 students, fewer than 10 were black. All the professors were white.

During her first week at Rosemont, Lomax recalls, she was standing in line in the cafeteria when she overheard a white girl say to her friend, "I didn't know they allowed niggers in here."

"Who are they talking about like that?" Lomax thought to herself as she looked around. "I never heard racial epithets living in Germantown, and it took me a minute to realize: They are talking about me."

Weeks later, one of her English professors asked her, "Where did you learn to write so well?" The professor added that black students didn't usually know how to write research papers.

The person who helped Lomax persevere was another English professor she turned to, crying, one day after an insulting comment in the classroom. "What would you like to see changed?" the teacher said. Lomax replied that she wanted to recruit more black students and professors, and perhaps launch a black student union. The teacher, who was white, helped Lomax write a proposal that Lomax delivered to the dean herself. The number of black students at Rosemont increased over time, and Lomax told me the experience left her committed to becoming a teacher and helping make schools more inclusive.

It was a little before 10 a.m. on November 17, 1967, when about 200 students walked out of Germantown High, wearing the school's green and white colors along with gold Black Power buttons, and started marching down Germantown Avenue. A few miles up the street they met up with other marchers, and by noon the crowd had swelled to more than 3,500 students and teachers from a dozen high schools, all marching toward the Board of Education building.

By then, the student body of Germantown High-once home to mostly white immigrant students-had become more than two-thirds black. Migration from the South had increased Philadelphia's black population from 5 percent in 1910 to 34 percent in 1970. Many black families had moved to Germantown and neighboring Mount Airy, the city's only two integrated neighborhoods. Yet most teachers at Germantown were white, as were all the district administrators, and dropout rates were three times higher for black students than for whites.

Schools like Germantown High, historian Matthew J. Countryman writes in his book on the civil rights struggle in Philadelphia, , offered a unique space for organizing because they blurred the class lines in the black community. "Corner kids," nerds, cheerleaders, civil rights advocates, and black teachers came together to push for political power and economic opportunity.

When the student protesters reached the towering art deco Board of Education building, Superintendent Mark Shedd-a strong advocate of integration who had enrolled his own white children in majority-black schools in Germantown-invited a delegation of them into a room overlooking the crowd below. They presented their demands: black-studies classes, more black teachers and principals, a bigger voice for black parents in school governance, recognition of black student unions, and no more police officers in schools. After hours of negotiations, a student opened the window to yell to the marchers that the district had agreed to 24 of their 25 demands.

Following the march, the number of black teachers in Philadelphia's public schools slowly increased. Gloria Ladson-Billings came home to Philadelphia the next year, after the district sent a recruiter to her college in an effort to attract more black teachers with community roots. She was first placed in a predominantly white school where, she recalls, some white parents told the principal they would not tolerate black teachers for their kids. The principal refused to transfer the kids-taking a stand that, Ladson-Billings recalls, was still controversial at the time.

Shedd created the first black-studies department in the district, called for black-history classes in all high schools (an order that wasn't implemented until 2005), and hired black district administrators. It was a heady time, Ladson-Billings recalls, when teachers were treated as intellectuals rather than testing proctors following a script. "That environment doesn't exist anymore," she reflected.

Like many black educators, Ladson-Billings viewed teaching as a way to help her community. But the profession also served as a critical avenue into the middle class. In the '50s, about half of all college-educated African Americans went into teaching-one of the few fields open to black professionals, especially women. And through the second half of the 20th century, public-sector jobs in education, social work, transportation, and the Postal Service formed the backbone of the black middle class. As Mary Pattillo, a professor of African American studies at Northwestern University, explains, affirmative action was applied most vigorously in the public sector, and to this day public jobs remain the single most important source of employment for black workers. (Not coincidentally, black workers have the highest percentage of union membership of any group.) The public sector employs a higher proportion of black workers in higher-paying jobs. And when public-sector jobs are shifted to the private sector, they typically result in longer, irregular hours and more unstable pay, reducing the assets of the black community, Pattillo explained.

Access to these middle-class jobs has a big ripple effect in black communities, Pattillo documents in her book Black Picket Fences, because African American professionals are more likely than other groups to also support family members and friends in poverty. One study in the '90s found that black middle-class women reported a greater sense of responsibility for people outside their nuclear families than white middle-class women did. Black middle-class families are much more likely than white families to live near poor black families, and they are often key to supporting community institutions. And, research shows, black teachers contribute to communities in myriad crucial but less visible ways-as role models of college-educated professionals, resources for parents on how to navigate the school system and demand improvements from local politicians, and mentors for neighborhood kids long after the school day ends.

As Ladson-Billings left Philadelphia once more to pursue her Ph.D. at Stanford University in the early 1980s, the political winds were changing. Ronald Reagan had been elected president, and one of his first education policy initiatives was to commission a report on K-12 schools. Titled " A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform," it documented a growing unease with public schools among the business community and blamed lagging student performance for America's troubles in the global market. The report called for more data-driven teacher evaluations and an emphasis on standardized testing-postulating (though with scant evidence) that test scores in reading and math would predict workplace performance.

The ideas set forth in "A Nation at Risk" would prove deeply influential, inspiring reform efforts all the way to the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, President Barack Obama's Race to the Top initiative, and the Common Core guidelines now being rolled out. The policies influenced by the report-including mass layoffs in schools that fail to raise their scores fast enough-have had a disproportionate impact on large urban districts like Philadelphia where most black teachers work. These reforms also laid the groundwork for the explosion in charter schools, which have attracted a less diverse teaching corps in some large urban districts (though nationwide, charters employ more African American teachers than traditional schools).

And while this wave of reformers has emphasized reducing the "achievement gap" between white students and those of color, it did not push as hard for integration and equitable funding. As a result, urban school administrators found themselves increasingly chasing scarce state and federal dollars tied to standardized test scores. In 2014, the Center for American Progress found that students in urban elementary schools spent 75 percent more time on average taking district-mandated tests than their suburban counterparts did-in large part because the stakes for their schools were so high. Multiple-choice questions became a major part of the daily curriculum.

With public sentiment increasingly critical of schools and teachers, many states rolled back education funding. In 1992, Pennsylvania began to decrease its share of district funding in Philadelphia, ultimately prompting David Hornbeck, then the city's superintendent of schools, to file a lawsuit arguing that the state had discriminated against students of color. The state's Republican-controlled Legislature responded in 2001 by authorizing a state takeover of the Philadelphia schools and barring the city's teachers from striking. Hornbeck resigned-because, he told NPR in 2013, lawmakers falsely assumed that the budget crisis was a result of waste and inefficiency, not chronic underfunding and segregation.

The state created a five-member School Reform Commission-three members were appointed by the governor and two by the mayor-to fix the schools. In 2010, Republican Tom Corbett became governor, bringing with him a political network full of private-sector reform advocates. He cut the state education budget by another $860 million, and the following year Philadelphia lost $105 million more in state funding, plus $200 million in federal dollars.

By the 2013-14 school year, the Philadelphia district had 3,885 fewer staff members-teachers, nurses, aides-than it had two years before.

To solve the budget crisis, the School Reform Commission hired the Boston Consulting Group, a private consultancy that advised the district to close 64 schools, continue expanding charters, and gut the central office. The group's $2.6 million consulting fee was paid with private donations, including more than half from charter and voucher advocates.

By the 2013-14 school year, the Philadelphia district had 3,885 fewer staff members-teachers, nurses, counselors, secretaries, and aides-than it had at the end of 2011, a decrease of 16 percent. About 1,486 of these departed employees were teachers, and close to a quarter of them were black. Germantown High and Fairhill had to cut art, music, and physical education classes, and full-time nurses. Fairhill lost a nurse who had worked in the community for 20 years. "She was so important to our middle school students, going through a lot of physical and emotional changes, or some dealing with sexual abuse or parents' drug addiction, all kinds of pain," Lomax told me. "And she was just extraordinary in knowing when to intervene beyond her job duty."

A few months before Germantown High's closure, two seniors decided to make a video documenting the reactions of students and staff. They pointed their camera at Ismael Jimenez, who taught black history and lived in Germantown with his wife and children. In middle school, Jimenez had briefly attended a mostly white school in the suburbs, but after several racially charged incidents his parents moved him back to Philadelphia schools. He'd become a teacher, he said, to help black kids feel more at home in school. Jimenez was in the process of buying a house in Germantown and told me he had hoped to teach and live in the neighborhood for the rest of his life.

"How do you feel about the closing of Germantown?" a student asked.

"I think the closing of Germantown is a reflection of the overall destruction of public education that is occurring all over our nation in almost every inner city-from Detroit to Atlanta to Chicago to New Orleans," Jimenez said before pausing to hold back tears.

The students turned off the camera and then turned it on again.

"The closing will affect the feeling of the community with such a large, empty building in the middle of the neighborhood," Jimenez continued. "Parents might send their child to a charter school that may not produce better results, but on image, it looks better. And the parent says, 'It doesn't matter that kids around my way don't have a local public school to go to as long as my child is okay.' That individualism is destroying this community-and all communities-that once was the very foundation of what we needed to get by."

"There are so many layers to this pattern of destruction," Robin Roberts, the parent of three children in Philadelphia's public schools and a physical therapist for the district, told me. "Germantown is such a tight-knit, established community. There is old blood. Collected history. Gorgeous brownstones. And you rip that school out, leaving a huge open lot. No security. It's dead energy, and it invites people and events that you have no control over. Property values of folks living there go down. When a community has a vibrant, living, interactive school, property values increase. Houses look better. All of these closures-it's erasure of history of these established communities."

For reform proponents like Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite, restructuring was the only possible way to close a $304 million budget hole decades in the making. And he wasn't alone: Superintendents across the country have faced similar budget holes, exacerbated by the recession of 2008 and 2009. Between 2010 and 2015, federal aid to high-poverty schools shrank by 11 percent. And in 2014, 31 states were still giving out less education funding per student than they had the year before the recession.

The Philadelphia School District spends less per student-$12,570 in all -than most of its big-city peers in the country, including Detroit, Baltimore, and Milwaukee. And until this year, Pennsylvania was one of three states that didn't have a "weighted" formula to send extra funding for students who live in poverty, struggle in school, or are learning English. Meanwhile, child poverty rates in Philadelphia are some of the highest in the nation.

Hite is part of a cadre of superintendents in large urban districts-including Antwan Wilson in Oakland, California, and former Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy-who have been trained in an academy financed by the philanthropist Eli Broad, whose foundation in 2009 issued a handbook on how to "rightsize" school districts. Like other Broad-trained superintendents, Hite has closed traditional schools and expanded charters. "We are making these changes because we believe they will result in a system that better serves all students, families and stakeholders," Hite wrote in his email to Lomax and other principals announcing the school closures.

"Closing schools is always hard, but we are making those decisions because there are no children in those schools," Hite told me. "You can't operate buildings that are designed for students when there are no students there. Given our fiscal challenges, we had to do everything within our control to ensure that we were impacting classrooms the least. You can't operate an infrastructure designed for 200,000 students when you only have 137,000 students." (In Philadelphia, the number of kids in traditional schools has shrunk by 50,000 since 2003, while enrollment in charters has gone up by 40,000.)

A former teacher and principal, Hite, who is black, grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and went to a school much like Germantown High. Such schools did enough to prepare students to make a living back in the '70s, when manufacturing jobs were plentiful, Hite told Philadelphia magazine earlier this year. "Reading, writing and arithmetic-you may not have needed more than that to sweep floors in a tobacco warehouse. And it would pay you $18 an hour...Now those jobs aren't available."

In Hite's view, the new economy requires schools that are much more rigorous, but the government doesn't want to fund them. The answer, he and other reformers have argued, is a "portfolio model": a menu of publicly and privately run schools, including charters that can attract private funding and are unconstrained by district and teachers' union rules.

This is not an uncommon view: Even Derrick Bell, the legendary former NAACP lawyer who handled hundreds of desegregation cases in the '60s, described charters as a promising alternative in his 2004 book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform. Bell came across many nominally integrated districts where black and Latino students attended the same schools as whites but were placed into separate and less challenging classes. He viewed charter schools as one remedy for that, in addition to a continued push for integration and more equitable funding. Many black educators such as Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, opened charter schools as a way to break free from the constraints of the traditional school system.

But the way this push played out in Philadelphia and many other large urban districts wasn't quite as these advocates had envisioned. First, when the state of Pennsylvania took over Philadelphia's schools in 2002, it embarked on what was then the nation's biggest experiment in private management of public schools: It contracted out 46 schools with low test scores to seven private for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Four years later, when this venture had failed to produce better results, the state ended the experiment and doubled down on the expansion of charter schools instead. Last year, 35 percent of kids in the city went to charter schools.

The growth of charters, though, put even more stress on the strained district budget. In Philadelphia, 30 percent of all charter students now come from outside the district, and while per-student public money follows them, the city has extra costs (such as transportation) that aren't offset. Meanwhile, costs in traditional schools-building expenses, salaries for teachers and principals-don't go away when a student leaves for a charter school. In all, the Boston Consulting Group estimated that each new student in a charter school creates as much as $7,000 in additional costs for the district.

But the challenges are more than financial. A growing number of educators argue that charters can't replace what traditional schools provided, including a teaching corps with the experience and community connections to help students from every background. For one thing, charters tend to attract the students most equipped to succeed: One study found that students with severe needs-those who have been in foster care or involved with the juvenile justice system, or whose families are on welfare-are concentrated in traditional public schools in Philadelphia. Traditional schools also educate 10 percent more students living in poverty, 4 percent more English learners, and 2 percent more students with special needs. Some charter schools have even been found to practice "skimming"-illegally screening out potentially challenging students, including those with special needs, according to a 2013 investigation.

Hite argues that the concentration of students with special needs and those living in deep poverty requires schools to reorient what they do, adding that the savings from closing buildings helps the district do that. "Next year, for the first time all of our schools will have at least one counselor, no matter the size," he told me. "They will have a school nurse. And we will be making a $440 million investment into neighborhood community schools with an attempt to address [poverty] factors."

But many black parents and teachers in Philadelphia and elsewhere remain concerned that these changes don't reverse the broader trend of underfunding at a time of growing need. And the increasing role of state government, and of the companies and foundations that have promoted private management and charter schools, represents to them an erosion of the civil rights movement's gains in political power for black communities.

"The current language of educational reform emphasizes racial 'achievement gaps' and 'underperforming schools' but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened," author Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorkerwhen the historic Jamaica High School in Queens, where he had been a student, was closed in 2014. Looking back at an era when busing students across neighborhood boundaries was the primary tool for integration, he noted, "Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates. But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility-of blame, really-run inward. It's not society that has failed, in this perspective. It's the schools."

Or, as Ladson-Billings writes in her book about successful teachers, "The way a problem is defined frames the universe of possible public actions." When the problem of racial disparities in education is defined primarily in quantitative data like test scores, other factors-cultural pride, confidence, the presence of intellectual authority figures like teachers and principals in the community, the ecosystem of economically integrated neighborhoods, and access to political power-are often overlooked.

"Church used to be the center of the black community," Roberts, the physical therapist in Philadelphia, told me, "but now as less people go to churches, school is the only remaining hub where the people in poor communities self-organize.

"We don't want a Walmart to be the only place where we can come together. We want a public space that is run by the community."

In May 2015, nearly 800 students, parents, and teachers came to a reunion in front of the shuttered Fairhill school building. Lomax was there-by then she had a job as a principal in another Philadelphia school, which had no administrators except for her and a secretary, and no full-time counselors or nurses or art, music, or physical education programs. Lomax spent an hour each morning filling in as a nurse, dispensing medications to dozens of students. She also doubled as a counselor and took care of administrative tasks that had been handled by assistant principals in her previous jobs. Meanwhile, more of her students were living in deep poverty. And even though she often worked late into the night, Lomax felt increasingly hopeless about her chances of succeeding in the new school.

During her 25 years in the district, Lomax felt that she'd earned the trust of her colleagues and developed relationships to get things done. But in recent years it had felt to her as if, even as her experience and skill grew, her power to control what happened in her work diminished. If test scores didn't go up fast enough, her school closed or she was transferred to another one. After Fairhill, Lomax said, she was placed in a different school each year, with fewer and fewer resources to do the job. Eventually, she decided to leave-seven years before her official retirement date, even though that meant that her income and pension were cut by more than 50 percent. At 53, Lomax is now living off her savings and not certain if she will ever return to teaching.

"When I read that letter about Fairhill closing, I felt like someone shot me," Lomax told me. "It's very hard to explain just how much emotional energy it takes to improve a school. After six years of hard work together, I really felt like we were finally on the cusp of something great: Students were engaged, parents were volunteering more, teachers' hearts were into it, and then it was shut down. I never want to go through something like this again."

After Germantown High closed, Ismael Jimenez was unemployed for three months and then took a job in a local Afrocentric charter school. "The curriculum was very scripted, and I had to be more of a disciplinarian," Jimenez told me. "I like to structure my classrooms around a dialogue." The pay was lower and the hours were longer. He quit after six weeks, when he got an offer from another school.

Jimenez now drives across town to predominantly Latino Kensington High, a commute that leads him past shuttered Germantown High. Student projects and posters from the old school cover the walls in his new classroom. At Kensington, many more students live in deep poverty and have special needs, he told me. When the kids with the strongest financial or family resources leave for private or charter schools, he said, it becomes harder to teach.

Between 2001 and 2012, the share of black teachers in the district steadily declined-from 34 percent to 26 percent-and fewer new black teachers were hired, according to the Shanker Institute report. The institute also found that teachers who left the district were more senior than those who stayed. And while experience doesn't guarantee success, research indicates that veteran teachers are more effective than rookies and key for coaching the next generation of educators.

Superintendent Hite told me his office has been focused on recruiting teachers of color since his arrival in 2012. Last year, 25 percent of teachers in Philadelphia public schools were black-well above the national average, Hite points out.

Data compiled by Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, indicates that across the country, the turnover rate for white teachers has been relatively stable at 15 percent since the 2008-09 academic year. But the departure rate for black teachers has been increasing, from 19 percent in 2008 to 22 percent in 2013-a higher turnover rate than in any other demographic.

The biggest factors teachers of color cite for leaving, Ingersoll says, are micromanagement and lack of autonomy in the classroom. Policymakers often emphasize recruitment as a way to solve teacher shortages, he told me, but retention is a much bigger issue. From 1987 to 2011, the share of teachers of color grew from 12 percent nationwide to 17 percent (though the share of black teachers has decreased in recent years). But during the same period, turnover increased among all teachers of color. This revolving door makes it hard for students to form bonds, and for administrators to solve teacher shortages. At the beginning of the 2003-04 school year, about 47,600 educators of color entered teaching; the following year, 20 percent more-about 56,000-had left teaching. "We are pouring water into a bucket with holes in the bottom," Ingersoll says.

"There is this myth out there that black teachers leave because of our kids," Peggy Savage, an award-winning science and math teacher with 35 years of experience in Philadelphia schools, told me. "No, it's the adults and the lack of voice and respect that push black teachers out. Before the School Reform Commission took over, I remember having conversations with our superintendent. We felt heard. Now, all we do is testify, but no one listens."

"At every turn they are being told that they can't do what they know in their spirit and heart and soul is the right thing to do."

José Luis Vilson is a veteran math teacher in New York and the author of a book about his experience called This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education. "I would venture to say that the stereotype of the 'failing' teacher often conjures up black teachers who stick by the union rules," Vilson says. "Whenever reformers go into communities of color, they often seek images of failure, and if a black teacher has been in this underserved 'failing' school for a few decades, they are viewed as a part of the problem."

Chris Emdin, an associate professor of education at Columbia University and the author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too, told me that many black educators leave because they are forced to become the kind of teachers they resented when they went to urban schools. "They want to teach in urban spaces because they want to undo that damage that they've experienced," Emdin, a former teacher, told me. "They say, 'I hated school. I want to teach math, English, science in an engaging way.' And the minute you try to be more creative, the principal says, 'Nope. You gotta do more test prep. You gotta follow the curriculum.' At every turn they are being told that they can't do what they know in their spirit and heart and soul is the right thing to do. It's causing teachers to leave, students to fail, and it's making these schools factories of dysfunction."

After leaving the school system, Lomax had to give up her apartment, about 30 miles from her father's house, with its own glass doorknobs and small garden, and move into a cheaper place in New Jersey. Her daughter had to switch from a state university to a community college because Lomax could no longer afford to pay her tuition. "Our savings and assets are dwindling," she told me earlier this year. "It will seriously impact our opportunities to provide for the next generation."

Her daughter, she said, had been interested in becoming a special-education teacher. "She is a natural," Lomax said. "But she won't do it anymore after she saw what happened to me. She works at a nursing home now."

Looking for news you can trust?

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Close

Thank you for subscribing!

FACT:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and the wealthy wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2021 demands.
Donate

FACT:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and the wealthy wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2021 demands.
Donate

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We're losing tens of thousands of black teachers. Here's why that's bad for everyone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters. One spring morning this year, Darlene Lomax was driving to her father's house in northwest Philadelphia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The significance of what they gave us is being driven home in a growing body of research showing that black children - particularly those from impoverished families - benefit from having black teachers.

Important studies show, for example, that children who encounter African-American teachers are more likely to be recognized as bright enough for gifted and talented programs, more likely to be viewed as capable of success and more likely to graduate from high school and aim for college.

These studies suggest that black teachers are powerful role models, particularly for black boys; that they are more likely than white teachers to recognize competence in their black students; and that subjective judgments by teachers play a vital role in determining success at school. All the more reason for public schools across the country to do more to recruit and retain teachers of color.

I continued in all-black schools until the first day of fifth grade, when the spirit of Brown finally reached out for me. Out of the blue, I was summoned to the principal's office, handed my records held together with rubber bands and given directions to a school I had never heard of at the far end of town.

Within a few hours, I was surrounded by white classmates at the William Penn School, a handsome new brick-and-glass building that had been built to accommodate nearby housing developments that excluded African-Americans and would continue to do so for years to come. I was surprised to find that the lone black teacher was an aunt who had recently graduated from college.

Integration, of course, did not guarantee a great education. Districts that technically integrated their schools post-Brown often practiced Jim Crow lite, by labeling African-Americans deficient and shunting them into low-level and nonacademic tracks. But William Penn was a welcoming place and my former teachers had prepared me well. I arrived an eager reader and scribbler.

The black schools I left behind continued on as black for decades, because the area was mainly black. That was not the case in parts of the country that had maintained dual, racially distinct school systems that were at least partly combined after the Supreme Court outlawed deliberate segregation.

When black schools were shuttered or absorbed, celebrated black principals were demoted or fired. By some estimates, nearly a third of African-American teachers lost their jobs. Those who survived the purge were sometimes selected on the basis of a lighter skin color that made them more palatable to white communities.

In a 50th anniversary reappraisal of Brown published in The Journal of Negro Education, a researcher familiar with that period spoke of how white communities regarded the arrival of even a few black teachers as an attack on their schools. Not surprisingly, these horror stories deterred black students from pursuing teaching careers.

States and localities with significant black populations are beginning to recognize the whiteness of the teacher corps as an obstacle to student achievement. At the same time, statistics show that districts are doing a miserable job of retaining teachers of color and that more leave the field each year than enter it. A 2016 report by the Education Trust shows why. Among other things, African-Americans interested in teaching black students find they are steered into positions where they teach only black students. The same teachers complain of being pigeonholed as disciplinarians, their other talents rendered invisible.

The forces that are driving African-American teachers out of the classroom are taking a toll not just on black children but on the educational system as a whole. The country will never overcome this problem unless it begins to treat it with urgency.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
brown v board of education (supreme court decision)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Where Did All the Black Teachers Go?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The significance of what they gave us is being driven home in a growing body of research showing that black children - particularly those from impoverished families - benefit from having black teachers.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Real Reason Black Kids Benefit From Black Teachers

# data[].attributes.subject
The Real Reason Black Kids Benefit From Black Teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Opinion

Image

Credit Credit K. L. Ricks

For black students, having even one black teacher can make a huge difference. That's the conclusion of a new study, which found that that black boys who had a black teacher during their elementary school years were less likely to drop out of high school. It also linked the presence of black teachers to kids' expectations of attending college.

I wasn't surprised to hear this. I'm one of a small fraction of black teachers in my district. I know that, as much as many would like to think that good intentions and talent are the only important qualities for educators, students respond differently to teachers whom they can relate to.

The week before the study was released, I showed my ninth graders a film about Kalief Browder, a black teenager who was arrested at age 16 for allegedly stealing a backpack, spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime and died by suicide after his release. I was moved by the impassioned mini-essays about police brutality and stop-and-frisk my students produced and the honest experiences they shared. I realized it's not just that my students live these topics every day. It's also that they are teenagers who have seen me interact with law enforcement during our trips off campus. They trusted me because they knew I lived them as well.

The fact that my skin color matches that of my students doesn't give me any superpowers as an educator. But it does give me the ability to see them in a way that's untarnished by the stereotypes, biases and cultural disconnects that fuel inequality and injustice - like the outlook that made Trayvon Martin, carrying Skittles, appear dangerously suspicious to the man who took his life. Like the assumptions that studies show make people see black boys as less innocent than their white peers.

I'm connected to them because of our shared racial identity. But it's more than that: I'm familiar with the world they inhabit. I can see their charms and challenges, without the filters of "minority" or "urban" or "at risk." And I show them, through the pizza I order for their birthdays. Through the full days without schoolwork that I offer them from time to time because life is hard and we all need a break. Through teenage comedy that I laugh at with them, before reminding them not to make said jokes in certain settings. Through the pictures of my wife I show them - my wife, who looks like us.

To be clear, many of my nonblack colleagues see our kids' incredible potential just as I do and are powerful advocates for them. The ability to treat students like people and love the mess out of them doesn't rely directly on race.

Still, we live in a world of zero-tolerance policies, where students are kicked out of class for the "insubordination" of refusing to move to a different desk or for drinking juice, and where everyday misbehavior can elicit a call to the authorities. I find myself wondering, have the adults responsible never wanted to sit near their friends? Did they not drink juice in high school? Can they not see younger versions of themselves in our kids?

Black students need teachers who understand that they're capable of the full range of anxieties and insecurities, greatness and success, hilarious moments and generous surprises. The amount of melanin in my skin is neither necessary nor sufficient for this: It's not a magic formula. But I can remember a time when I looked and sounded like my students. That helps me see myself in them, and all they're capable of. I hope they can see themselves in me.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
David Jackson, a ninth-grade teacher, has worked for 10 years in high schools and middle schools in the New York City area.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | The Real Reason Black Kids Benefit From Black Teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Opinion For black students, having even one black teacher can make a huge difference. That's the conclusion of a new study, which found that that black boys who had a black teacher during their elementary school years were less likely to drop out of high school.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Current working conditions for teachers in schools are "extremely racialized," Griffin said, and schools "need to understand the nuances of these experiences to retain teachers."

Consider discipline. Many of the teachers said they felt more able than colleagues to manage their classrooms. As one teacher (the report does not include names so that teachers would feel comfortable sharing their experiences) said:

I didn't have to get loud or do anything. It was just, I had a no- nonsense kind of attitude, where it's a lot of nonverbal cues. 'I expect more from you.' You know, it was just, it's a different vibe than other teachers, where they kind of make excuses, and 'Oh, I can't handle you. I'm afraid of you. I want you to be my friend.' No. They're going to respect me.

Yet black teachers said that very ability to manage a classroom meant they were then viewed primarily as disciplinarians and not as educators-as the report notes, "a reductive stereotype that we heard throughout the focus groups. These teachers were assumed to be tough and strict instead of being able to connect to their students and use that connection to establish order and create a classroom environment conducive to learning."

In other words, the strengths that many black teachers possess and would like to use to benefit children of all backgrounds are the very traits used to limit their professional growth. (The report doesn't say so directly, but that pigeonholing seems to have as much to do with white teachers feeling unprepared or unwilling to handle certain scenarios as it does with believing black teachers are capable of only certain tasks.)

It's also worth noting a fact that black teachers indicate is widely overlooked by schools: Just because a teacher is black does not mean that he or she is going to relate to every black student's experience. No one would assume that a white teacher relates to every white student, but the absurdity doesn't necessarily register with school officials who may be blinded by stereotypes. As one teacher said, "We become the representative for every child of color, I mean, whether we relate to them, whether our culture is the same or not. We become the representative for all of those children."

That's exhausting, particularly when black teachers feel that their colleagues are unwilling to recognize their ability to also be subject-matter experts with valuable ideas about pedagogy and curriculum. One teacher said:

I've put in a lot of work, and there are a lot of things that I've implemented and have shared with other people and other teachers, and then they get the credit. And I told one of my co-workers - it's been recently, and she is a white coworker, and she recognized it, too - and I told her, 'It's starting to piss me off, because I'm putting in this work, and someone else is getting recognized for something that they really didn't do, or someone else is looking to be more qualified with less years and less time in the position.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many African American educators say they don't feel respected or empowered at their schools.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Root Cause of the Teacher-Diversity Problem

# data[].attributes.subject
A Root Cause of the Teacher-Diversity Problem

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Until now, much of the policy debate on teacher diversity has centered on filling the pipeline- expanding the pool of black students graduating from college and entering the teaching profession. But a new working paper from researchers at Northwestern University suggests the presence of an overlooked and particularly troubling obstacle to boosting the number of black educators: racial discrimination and bias in school-district hiring practices.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a professor of social policy and economics, and her co-author Cynthia DuBois, used the ruling in and outcome of a decades-old desegregation lawsuit in Louisiana- Moore v. Tangipahoa Parish School Board- as a case study to evaluate whether certain changes to hiring practices can substantially increase a school district's share of black teachers. "This was a pretty stringent court order [and] we wanted to understand what happened as a result," Schanzenbach explained, referring to a directive that the Louisiana district adopt new, affirmative-action hiring practices. "How quickly was it able to change? And, ultimately, how did that impact student achievement?"

In 1975, the U.S. District Court of Louisiana in New Orleans issued a consent decree meant to desegregate faculty in Tangipahoa Parish, instructing the school board to fill vacant teaching positions with qualified black applicants until the share of black teachers in the district aligned with that of black students. But for 35 years, that court order had sat dormant, "largely ignored by the district and unenforced by the court," the authors write. It wasn't until 2010 that the court issued a ruling reaffirming the consent decree. Under the new plan, not only did Tangipahoa Parish have to ensure its teaching force was racially representative-it also had to explain its rationale every time a qualified black applicant wasn't chosen for an open position.

The court had good reason to reinforce this long-standing desegregation order. Over a 10-year period prior to the new court-ordered mandate (1998 to 2008), Tangipahoa had, on average, hired a smaller portion of black teachers (19.8 percent) than had other school districts in Louisiana (24.1 percent). What's more, its overall teacher workforce included fewer black educators (17.1 percent) than the rest of the state (23.2 percent.)

After the court-ordered criteria went into effect in 2010, the number of black teachers hired in Tangipahoa spiked dramatically. And by 2014, new hires in the district were significantly more likely to be black (32.2. percent) than new teachers hired statewide (21.7 percent). In turn, the difference between the district and state in the share of the total teacher workforce identified as black closed to within 2 percentage points (19.9 percent vs. 22 percent)-a shift that the researchers attributed not, say, to white teachers retiring but rather to the surge in new black teachers spurred by the hiring policy.

The influx of African American educators was able to shrink the black-student-to-black-teacher ratio even as the share of black students slowly increased over the same timeframe. In fact, the new policy reduced the "representation gap"-defined by the authors as the difference between the share of students that are black and the share of teachers that are black-by between 3 and 4 percentage points. The policy also resulted in a greater share of black teachers employed at predominately white schools, which tended to have few black teachers before the court intervened.

And the value of this policy, it seems, wasn't just a matter of optics. Since the paper was released, Schanzenbach has obtained additional race-specific data that reflect notable achievements for black students. After the court order was implemented, the black-white achievement disparity in test scores narrowed by 5 percent. While it's difficult to assess causation, this improvement, Schanzenbach theorized, happened "just from hiring different teachers within the pool of applicants."

DuBois, a native of Tangipahoa Parish and an emerging scholar who co-authored the study but passed away earlier this month, surveyed teachers in the district to provide more context on the quantitative data. Some 81 percent of participants reported that they heard about job openings through word-of-mouth, describing a "decentralized, accelerated, and insular hiring process" that resulted in uneven access to employment opportunities for black and white teacher applicants in the rural-Louisiana school system.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Root Cause of the Teacher-Diversity Problem

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Until now, much of the policy debate on teacher diversity has centered on filling the pipeline- expanding the pool of black students graduating from college and entering the teaching profession. But a new working paper from researchers at Northwestern University suggests the presence of an overlooked and particularly troubling obstacle to boosting the number of black educators: racial discrimination and bias in school-district hiring practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A recent article from New Jersey news outlet NJ.com provided fresh evidence for something we've known for years: black students nationwide are disciplined more often than other kids.

During the 2013-2014 school year (the most recent for which state data are available), black students made up only 16% of New Jersey's student population but represented 44% of all students suspended. Black students also accounted for much higher rates of school expulsions.

Past inquiries into this phenomenon have found that black children are disciplined more than others because of zero-tolerance policies, a lack of school counselors and an increase in police presence at schools. They have also identified an underutilized solution: Hire more black teachers.

Black students who have one or more black teacher have much better outcomes. They are more likely to graduate from high school, attend college and are less likely to drop out of school. Black students are also less likely to receive exclusionary discipline at the hands of a black teacher.

As a black man and former classroom teacher of black and Latinx students in the high-poverty city of Camden, New Jersey, I rarely gave a child a detention and never recommended that a student be suspended. Like all teachers, there were times when I disciplined my students - but I had a rapport with them. My brand of discipline involved a stern look, a firm word, or a phone call home.

Yet many white colleagues of mine had trouble connecting with students of color. They often assumed behaviors exhibited by black students - speaking loudly or questioning authority - were disrespectful. Without an awareness of cultural differences (what educators call cultural competency), teachers have a hard time building the relationships necessary to connect with and educate their students.

A journal article I wrote in 2017 explored the exclusionary discipline of black students in New Jersey. My study found that the higher the percentage of black teachers in a school district, the less likely black students were to be suspended in that school district, whether the suspension was in-school or out of school.

Sign up for The Point

Go inside New York politics.

By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.

Hiring black teachers is an immediately tangible way to address the disproportionate exclusionary discipline of black students. But the work of removing systemic racism in public schooling doesn't end there.

School administrators and governing boards must make it a priority to remove racist (and specifically anti-black) policies in schools, such as the zero-tolerance policies responsible for maintaining the school-to-prison pipeline, and replace them with anti-racist policies such as restorative justice.

Public schools are white institutional spaces where the demographics and cultural norms privilege whites. Schools devoid of cultural inclusivity reflected within the policies, procedures, curriculum, professional staff, and around the building, are schools where knowing better doesn't translate into doing better.

And public schools are also anti-black spaces. Black students are at times violently beaten and even tased by police in schools. They are told their hairstyles are "distracting" and for this reason barred from athletic competitions. In addition, last year the Trump administration scrapped the Obama-era discipline policies that attempted to address the disproportionate disciplining of black children.

Anti-racist work in schools isn't as simple as only hiring black teachers, but doing so is one concrete way to move this work forward.
Rann Miller directs the 21st Century Community Learning Center, a federally funded after-school program located in southern New Jersey. This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A recent article from New Jersey news outlet NJ.com provided fresh evidence for something we've known for years: black students nationwide are disciplined more often than other kids. During the 2013-2014 school year (the most recent for which state data are available), black students made up only 16% of New Jersey's student population but represented 44% of all students suspended.

# data[].attributes.headline
For better student outcomes, hire more black teachers

# data[].attributes.subject
For better student outcomes, hire more black teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are 60,000 fewer public education jobs than there were before the recession began in 2007, according to an analysis of the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report by the think tank Economic Policy Institute. States and districts haven't moved on from the austerity measures imposed by most states more than a decade ago when the recession hit. "If we include the number of jobs that should have been created just to keep up with growing student enrollment," the EPI report states, "we are currently experiencing a 307,000 job shortfall in public education."

A shortfall of more than 300,000 jobs in public education. Think about that the next time news of a teacher strike hits the headlines. Maybe severe budget cuts made sense to folks in 2007, but the underlying rationale behind firing teachers has never made sense to me.

In the Obama years, Republicans and Democrats alike were delighted to find common cause against teachers. Students weren't doing so well, they argued, because their teachers simply weren't good enough. Education reform was the name of the game, and everyone who wasn't a quality teacher just had to go.

Problem was, that was a myopic view of the world. Neither students nor teachers exist in a vacuum. As I like to say, students don't live in schools - they live in communities. And when their communities are negatively affected, that has a negative impact on them. So if you fire a whole bunch of black teachers, as education reformers did, with devastating effect, in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J., around the time of the recession, that's going to have ripple effects on their families and communities.

Related: Making elite colleges white again

The charter school era was predicated on the notion of breaking up the monopoly that unions have on schools. Collective bargaining agreements, aka union contracts, had a stranglehold on schools, reformers cried. It was impossible to get rid of bad teachers, they argued. They linked student outcomes solely to teacher performance, and got rid of the teachers they deemed ineffective.

But isolating one factor didn't do the trick. Most of the teachers fired were black, and most of the charter schools were concentrated in districts that were majority-black, causing upheaval in black communities, which are disproportionately represented in public sector union jobs. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of black workers in unions, at 12.5 percent, is the highest among the major racial groups. Education services professions represent the second-highest unionization rate among all occupations.)

"If we include the number of jobs that should have been created just to keep up with growing student enrollment, we are currently experiencing a 307,000 job shortfall in public education."

With the firings, reformers ignored the correlation between poverty and student performance. Solidly middle-class neighborhoods tend to boast strong educational outcomes. That's not because teachers magically perform better in some zip codes as compared to others. Instead, much of the educational gap can be attributed to higher teacher workload, inadequate salaries, paucity of classroom supplies and school resources. When teachers are too overworked to sit down with a struggling student, who suffers? When schools don't have enough money to purchase updated textbooks, who has to make do?

Look, black people have few enough avenues of income security, and education jobs are one of them. It's not the salaries that are attractive - those are usually inadequate - but the security net of retirement benefits. If there's a medical emergency, a divorce, any unexpected big expense, there's a 401k to turn to.

This layer of protection became even more apparent when the subprime mortgage crisis hit, because black people, of all racial groups, had the greatest proportion of their wealth tied up in their homes. Black Americans had already been hit by housing devaluation due to racism, which extracted wealth from homeowners in majority black neighborhoods, and hit again by predatory lending that disproportionately affects black and brown families. The housing crisis was the final straw, devastating the financial reserves of black people. According to another EPI report, the median net worth of black households dropped by 53 percent between 2005 and 2009, while the net worth of white households dropped by only 17 percent.
Related: A private school resets its tuition
As a former manager of a charter school network in post-Katrina New Orleans, I saw Democratic and Republican reformers together erode labor protections. I regularly heard the complaint that public schools were glorified human resource offices, meaning that schools were more about the adults than the kids. But the fact is that a lot of teaching is about the adults. Kids can't teach themselves. Problems that the adults in their school face are critical to student outcomes. Reformers wax poetic about caring for children, which is important, but to do that holistically, you have to also care for teachers and students' families and the lunch lady in the cafeteria. Trying to fix education just by firing teachers - which, by the way, is directly related to teacher overload and therefore quality of education - doesn't reflect the way people live.

Because of the backlash that reformers faced when scores of black educators lost their jobs, and because of the realization that replacing them with younger white hires didn't solve the problem, the same folks who were on the warpath for black teaching jobs are now looking to hire more black teachers. Better late than never, I say.

Research shows that having a black teacher, in particular, does a lot of good for students, especially minority students. Black students who have one teacher by third grade are 7 percent more likely to graduate high school and 13 percent more likely to enroll in college. After having two black teachers, black students' likelihood of enrolling in college increases by 32 percent.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger's newsletter.
There's a relevant correlation for you: Hire more black teachers, and educational outcomes of black students will improve on their own. This simple action comes with all sorts of attendant benefits for students and the communities they live in. Hire more black teachers and also fund schools in poor and black districts, and then see how a rising tide lifts all ships. But all of this requires a trust of black people and their institutions - something that education reform has yet to try at scale.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For better student outcomes, hire more black teachers - The Hechinger Report

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are 60,000 fewer public education jobs than there were before the recession began in 2007, according to an analysis of the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report by the think tank Economic Policy Institute. States and districts haven't moved on from the austerity measures imposed by most states more than a decade ago when the recession hit.

# data[].attributes.body
[video: 2:51]
content note: police violence

# data[].attributes.body
[Video: 4:29]
content note: offensive language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2020 BLM Week at Schools Video - Fund Counselors Not Cops

# data[].attributes.headline
Counselors, Not Cops: Creating Safe and Supportive Environments in America’s Schools

# data[].attributes.subject
Counselors, Not Cops: Creating Safe and Supportive Environments in America’s Schools

# data[].attributes.body
[Video 10:35]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Counselors, Not Cops: Creating Safe and Supportive Environments in America’s Schools

# data[].attributes.body
[Video 5:02]

# data[].attributes.body
[Video 1:39]

# data[].attributes.headline
Zero-Tolerance Policies and the School to Prison Pipeline — Shared Justice

# data[].attributes.subject
Zero-Tolerance Policies and the School to Prison Pipeline — Shared Justice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 2010, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez wrote "I love my friends Abby and Faith" and "Lex was here 2/1/10" on her desk in Spanish class with erasable marker. The school deemed these markings as vandalism, and as a result, Alexa was handcuffed, arrested, and detained at a New York City Police Department precinct in Queens. Several hours passed before she was released. While extreme, cases like Alexa's are not rare; students all over the country face disciplinary procedures that deliver harsh predetermined punishments, rather than focusing on restorative practices.

Ultimately, this disproportionate way of looking at school discipline plays a major role in perpetuating the school to prison pipeline. The "school to prison pipeline" refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are directly and indirectly pushing students out of school and on a pathway to prison. Often zero-tolerance policies in schools funnel students into this pipeline. Zero-tolerance policies require school officials to give students a specific, consistent, and harsh punishment, usually suspension or expulsion, when certain rules are broken. The punishment applies regardless of the circumstances, the reasons for the behavior (such as self-defense), or the student's history of disciplinary problems.

To prevent this streamline of students, many of them minorities, from entering the juvenile justice system, schools need to reevaluate their zero-tolerance policies by adding discretion and alternative forms of punishments.

Zero-tolerance policies were written into school handbooks in the 1990s, created originally to be a deterrent for bringing weapons into schools. These policies stemmed from law enforcement's adoption of the " broken windows" theory and the Gun-Free Schools Act. The "broken windows" theory, proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, claims that crime is a disorder that, if not eliminated or controlled early on, increases like likelihood of committing a more serious crime later in life. For instance, the police would stop and arrest people for panhandling, disorderly conduct, and public drinking in order to prevent and decrease the number of rapes, robberies, and murders. With this theory in mind, school districts and states began cracking down on minor violations to prevent serious crimes from occurring in the future. The Gun-Free Schools Act states that,

Each State receiving Federal funds under any title of this Act shall have in effect a State law requiring local educational agencies to expel from school for a period of not less than 1 year a student who is determined to have brought a firearm to a school, or to have possessed a firearm at a school, under the jurisdiction of local educational agencies in that State, except that such State law shall allow the chief administering officer of a local educational agency to modify such expulsion requirement for a student on a case-by-case basis if such modification is in writing.

Each state and school system vary in their approach and language surrounding zero-tolerance policies, but the common punishments of suspension and expulsion from school come from the following offenses: bringing any weapon to school, including seemingly innocent items like butter knives and toy swords, having any alcohol or drugs on campus, including tobacco and over-the-counter medications like Aspirin or Midol, fighting, including minor scuffles, threatening other students or teachers, or saying anything that could be perceived as a threat, insubordination, which could include talking back to a teacher or swearing in the principal's office, and any behavior considered disruptive, such as cutting in a lunch line.

Many students under strict zero-tolerance policies are punished without a second thought. This type of disciplinary procedure has been proven in research to have an overall negative effect on students, and a disproportionately negative effect on minorities. In an American Psychological Association report,a task force gathered data related to certain assumptions that coincided with zero-tolerance policies. One of the assumptions, similar to the broken-window theory, was that only with swift, strict, and uniform zero-tolerance punishments would students be deterred from breaking the rules. Further, the assumption was that this would in turn improve the overall behavior of the student and decrease disciplinary infractions in the school. However, the task force's research found that assumption to be false:

The notion of deterring future misbehavior is central to the philosophy of zero-tolerance, and the impact of any consequence on future behavior is the defining characteristic of effective punishment. Rather than reducing the likelihood of disruption, however, school suspension in general appears to predict higher future rates of misbehavior and suspension among those students who are suspended. In the long term, school suspension and expulsion are moderately associated with a higher likelihood of school dropout and failure to graduate on time.

Many studies have also shown that zero-tolerance policies disproportionately affect minority students and play a major role in the school to prison pipeline. Along with addressing the assumptions of zero-tolerance policies, the previously mentioned task force also researched how these policies impact students of color. School administrators thought that removing subjective influences from the disciplinary process and following a blind-justice approach would make it more fair to students. This was part of the appeal of zero-tolerance policies - that the only factor for consideration was whether or not the rule was broken. However, the task force found that this can result in a disproportionate number of students of color being disciplined, reporting an overrepresentation in suspension and expulsion for African American students, and less consistently for Latino students. The task force presented a conclusion on why African American students are disciplined at higher rates than their classmates, stating:

The evidence shows that such disproportionality is not due entirely to economic disadvantage nor are there any data supporting the assumption that African American students exhibit higher rates of disruption or violence that would warrant higher rates of discipline. Rather, African American students may be disciplined more severely for less serious or more subjective reasons. Emerging professional opinion, qualitative research findings, and a substantive empirical literature from social psychology suggest that the disproportionate discipline of students of color may be due to lack of teacher preparation in classroom management, lack of training in culturally competent practices, or racial stereotypes.

Students of color, particularly African American students, received the opposite of the intended outcome of the "blind justice" that zero-tolerance policies advocated for and claimed to uphold. Further research has shown that these policies can put students at risk for dropping out of school and/or entering the juvenile justice system. Punishments like out-of-school suspensions can severely disrupt a student's academic progress. The Center on Youth Justice at the Vera Institute of Justice found that "for similar students attending similar schools, a single suspension or expulsion doubles the risk that a student will repeat a grade. Being retained a grade, especially while in middle or high school, is one of the strongest predictors of dropping out." In a national longitudinal study, it was reported that youth with a prior suspension were 68% more likely to dropout of school.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Zero-Tolerance Policies and the School to Prison Pipeline - Shared Justice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2010, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez wrote "I love my friends Abby and Faith" and "Lex was here 2/1/10" on her desk in Spanish class with erasable marker. The school deemed these markings as vandalism, and as a result, Alexa was handcuffed, arrested, and detained at a New York City Police Department precinct in Queens.

# data[].attributes.headline
Restorative Justice Programs Take Root in Schools

# data[].attributes.subject
Restorative Justice Programs Take Root in Schools

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mr. Butler with a student at Ralph J. Bunche High School in Oakland. Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times

OAKLAND, Calif. - There is little down time in Eric Butler's classroom.

"My daddy got arrested this morning," Mercedes Morgan, a distraught senior, told the students gathered there.

Mr. Butler's mission is to help defuse grenades of conflict at Ralph J. Bunche High School, the end of the line for students with a history of getting into trouble. He is the school's coordinator for restorative justice, a program increasingly offered in schools seeking an alternative to "zero tolerance" policies like suspension and expulsion.

The approach now taking root in 21 Oakland schools, and in Chicago, Denver and Portland, Ore., tries to nip problems and violence in the bud by forging closer, franker relationships among students, teachers and administrators. It encourages young people to come up with meaningful reparations for their wrongdoing while challenging them to develop empathy for one another through "talking circles" led by facilitators like Mr. Butler.

Even before her father's arrest on a charge of shooting at a car, Mercedes was prone to anger. "When I get angry, I blank out," she said. She listed some reasons on a white board - the names of friends and classmates who lost their lives to Oakland's escalating violence. Among them was Kiante Campbell, a senior shot and killed during a downtown arts festival in February. His photocopied image was plastered around Mr. Butler's room, along with white roses left from a restorative "grief circle."

Restorative justice adopts some techniques of the circle practice that is a way of life for indigenous cultures, fostering collaboration. Students speak without interruption, for example, to show mutual respect.

"A lot of these young people don't have adults to cry to," said Be-Naiah Williams, an after-school coordinator at Bunche whose 21-year-old brother was gunned down two years ago in a nightclub. "So whatever emotion they feel, they go do."

Oakland expanded the program after an initial success six years ago. Since then, the need for an alternative discipline has become more urgent: Last year, the district faced a Department of Education civil rights investigation into high suspension and expulsion rates, particularly among African-American boys.

A report by the Urban Strategies Council, a research and policy organization in Oakland, showed that African-American boys made up 17 percent of the district's enrollment but 42 percent of all suspensions, and were six times more likely to be suspended than their white male classmates. Many disciplinary actions were for "defiance" - nonviolent infractions like texting in class or using profanity with a teacher.

Jameelah Garry, 18, wiped tears from her eyes as she talked with Mr. Butler about the shooting death of her 16-year old brother, Charles. Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A body of research indicates that lost class time due to suspension and expulsion results in alienation and often early involvement with the juvenile justice system, said Nancy Riestenberg, of the Minnesota Department of Education, an early adopter of restorative justice. Being on "high alert" for violence is not conducive to learning, she added.

Many studies have concluded that zero-tolerance policies do not make schools safer.

"We're a terribly violent community," said Junious Williams, the chief executive of the Urban Strategies Council. "We have not done very much around teaching kids alternatives to conflict that escalates into violence."

Among the lost youngsters was Damon Smith, now an A student at Bunche, who said he had been suspended more than 15 times. "You start thinking it's cool," he said. "You think you're going to come back to school and catch up, but unless you're a genius you won't. It made me want to mess up even more."

Damon, 18, said restorative justice sessions helped him view his behavior through a different lens. "I didn't know how to express emotions with my mouth. I knew how to hit people," he said. "I feel I can go to someone now."

Eight of Oakland's participating schools have full-time coordinators like Mr. Butler, whose work is financed by the nonprofit Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. He is often called on to handle delicate situations: 90 percent of the 250 students at Bunche have had run-ins with the juvenile system or lived in foster homes.

In one circle, students discussed racism. In another, a girl confided that she had been molested as a child. "Those boys who looked scary wrapped their arms around this girl," Mr. Butler said. "That's what's missing for our kids. It's harder to fight people you feel a closeness to."

Recently, it appeared that jealousy had triggered a fight between two classmates. Ebony Monroe, a new student, was wearing short shorts. Jameelah Garry, who recently had a baby, was wearing a baggy flannel shirt. Jameelah slugged her. "I don't like her," she explained.

"If your kid was in this situation, what advice would you give her?" Mr. Butler asked gently.

Jameelah went silent, then said, "I got an anger problem, I'll be honest with you." She started to cry, tears welling up on glue-on eyelashes. "I lost my brother last year," she said. "Charles. He was shot in the head after an altercation in East Oakland."

She took off a sleeve to reveal a teal tattoo in his memory. No one at the school had known.

Betsye Steele, the principal, said that without the circle, and the trust it developed, the major source of Jameelah's bad behavior would not have been discovered and might have escalated.

Since the program started, the school reduced its overall suspension rate to 8 percent in 2012 from 12 percent in 2011.

But restorative justice is not a quick fix, teachers' union officials and legal experts warn. "You're changing a culture that has been in place for a long time," said Mary Louise Frampton, an adjunct law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's a multiyear process."

It is also not a treatment for mental illness or ideal for situations with major power imbalances, like bullying, said Barbara McClung, the district's coordinator for behavior health initiatives. "Not every student will acknowledge they caused harm," she added.

Approaches to restorative justice vary nationwide. Some districts allow suspensions and expulsions but now require stricter justification. Others, under pressure to reduce suspensions, put students on "administrative leave" instead. Some schools focus on formal mediation and reparation while others, like Bunche, are more spontaneous.

A recent circle at Bunche for Jeffrey, who was on the verge of expulsion for habitual vandalism, included an Oakland police officer, and the conversation turned to the probability that Jeffrey would wind up incarcerated or on the streets. The student had told Mr. Butler that he was being pressured to join a gang.

"Cat, you got five people right now invested in your well-being," Mr. Butler told him. "This is a matter of life or death." Jeffrey agreed to go to Mr. Butler's classroom every day at third period to do his schoolwork.

Mr. Butler, who grew up in a vast segregated housing project in New Orleans, knows the urge for retribution: Two years ago, his sister was murdered by her boyfriend. "I wanted my quart of blood," he told students disturbed by Kiante Campbell's death.

Then the boyfriend's mother showed up, seeking forgiveness. "This brave little woman knocked on the door in her robe and flip-flops," he told his classroom. "The want for revenge in my stomach lifted."

Keeping students in school, focused on the future, is at the core of his work. So every Friday afternoon he tells them: "Y'all gotta come back Monday. Come back. I gotta see you."

"We're all we've got," he said. "And we need to start thinking that way."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opening Up, Students Transform a Vicious Circle (Published 2013)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
OAKLAND, Calif. - There is little down time in Eric Butler's classroom. "My daddy got arrested this morning," Mercedes Morgan, a distraught senior, told the students gathered there. Mr. Butler's mission is to help defuse grenades of conflict at Ralph J. Bunche High School, the end of the line for students with a history of getting into trouble.

# data[].attributes.headline
Suspensions Are Down In U.S. Schools But Large Racial Gaps Remain 

# data[].attributes.subject
Suspensions Are Down In U.S. Schools But Large Racial Gaps Remain 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Students in U.S. schools were less likely to be suspended in 2016 than they were in 2012. But the progress is incremental, and large gaps - by race and by special education status - remain.

This data comes from an analysis of federal data for NPR in partnership with the nonprofit organization Child Trends. And it comes as the Trump administration is preparing the final report from a school safety commission that is expected to back away from or rescind Obama-era guidance intended to reduce racial disparities in school discipline.

The commission, led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is expected to release its final report in the coming days.

The Child Trends analysis highlights findings that when a student disrupts class, a school can disrupt that student's education - and his or her entire life. Research suggests suspension and expulsion, arrests and referrals to law enforcement, is associated with dropping out of school and going to jail. All of these consequences happen more frequently to black students, even in preschool. Sometimes they are punished more harshly for the same behavior as white students; often for nonviolent offenses. Students with disabilities are also punished more often and more harshly.

In 2014, with this body of evidence growing, the U.S. Department of Education issued detailed guidance on "how to identify, avoid, and remedy" what they called "discriminatory discipline." They promoted alternatives to suspension and expulsion, and opened investigations into school districts that had severely racially skewed numbers.

In the wake of that guidance, more than 50 of America's largest school districts instituted discipline reform. More than half the states revised their laws to try and reduce suspensions and expulsions. And, our indicators are, they succeeded.

At NPR's request, the nonprofit Child Trends analyzed the federal Civil Rights Data Collection, which includes reports from every public school in the nation, over three years - the 2011-2012, 2013-2014, and 2015-2016 school year. They caution that this analysis, which is based on numbers self-reported by schools, can't cover every possibility - for example, if schools are calling parents to pick students up instead of putting an official suspension on the books. Or if they are suspending fewer students, but suspending them for longer periods of time.

Still, they documented some heartening changes between 2012 and 2016.

The proportion of all students suspended from school at least once during the year fell from 5.6 percent to 4.7 percent.

Among high school students, the percentage suspended fell even more, from 9.6 to 7.6 percent.

Suspension rates fell around the country, in each of the biggest-population states. Only one state, Mississippi, saw a persistent increase year by year.

Hispanic students experienced the largest decrease --a 30 percent drop in suspensions.

Suspension rates fell faster for those most often suspended - Black students and students with a disability.

But, on the flip side:

Black high school students are still twice as likely (12.8 percent) to be suspended as white (6.1 percent) or Hispanic (6.3 percent) high school students.

And students with a disability are also twice as likely (12.8 percent) to be suspended as those without a disability (6.9 percent).

"This progress is incremental and large gaps by race and disability still remain," says Kristen Harper, who directs policy development for Child Trends. She says there's "a long way to go" and a continuing need for federal leadership. "Any efforts that could suggest that these issues are not important could undermine the work of states and districts."

We should note that NPR previously collaborated with Child Trends on a look at the Civil Rights Data Collection's school shooting indicator. That analysis found serious problems with the data reported. But Harper says that the out of school suspensions indicator is far more robust and reliable, partly because the data has been collected for longer, and also because suspensions are more common than shootings, so a few data entry errors are less likely to skew the overall trend.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Suspensions Are Down In U.S. Schools But Large Racial Gaps Remain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Students in U.S. schools were less likely to be suspended in 2016 than they were in 2012. But the progress is incremental, and large gaps - by race and by special education status - remain. This data comes from an analysis of federal data for NPR in partnership with the nonprofit organization Child Trends.

# data[].attributes.body
[slideshow]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Defusing Conflict in Schools

Restorative justice is a program taking root in schools in Oakland, Calif., that seek an alternative to punitive policies like suspension and expulsion.

Slideshow controls
Previous slide Next slide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Defusing Conflict in Schools (Published 2013)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Restorative justice is a program taking root in schools in Oakland, Calif., that seek an alternative to punitive policies like suspension and expulsion. Previous slide Next slide

# data[].attributes.headline
Amid evidence zero tolerance doesn't work, schools reverse themselves

# data[].attributes.subject
Amid evidence zero tolerance doesn't work, schools reverse themselves

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The president of the American Federation of Teachers recently issued a remarkable mea culpa.

Related Stories

* St. Paul: New discipline policy sows dissatisfaction
* Using new approach, Denver cuts suspensions by half
* Restorative justice: A new approach to discipline
* What exactly should school cops do?
* Two centuries of school discipline

For years, Randi Weingarten supported "zero-tolerance" policies in schools. Under zero tolerance, students who break certain school rules face mandatory penalties, including suspension and referral to law enforcement. The approach gained popularity during the 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, most school districts in the United States had adopted some form of zero tolerance.

But at the end of 2015, Randi Weingarten wrote an editorial in American Educator saying those policies had been a failure.

"When you see that you're wrong, you have to say that you're wrong and apologize for it," Weingarten said in an interview.

Zero-tolerance policies were supposed to make schools safer and make discipline fair. But in practice, the policies "didn't help us get to the safe and welcoming school environments that every parent wants for his or her child," Weingarten said.

Across the country, schools are moving away from zero tolerance and trying to reduce the number of students they're suspending. The turnaround is a response to a growing body of research showing that zero-tolerance policies resulted in a disproportionate number of kids of color suspended, expelled, and referred to law enforcement.
School suspension rates, 2011-2012

Schools have little choice but to change.

In 2014, the federal Departments of Education and Justice issued a letter to state education commissioners warning that districts continuing to have a pattern of disproportional discipline risk a federal civil rights action. Already, a number of districts around the country are facing complaints or have entered into settlements with the DOE's Office of Civil Rights.

Many districts are struggling to figure out how to reduce suspensions and still maintain order in classrooms.

In some places, teachers have been frustrated by new discipline policies that they say don't allow them to suspend students in many cases, but don't offer them other options for dealing with disruptive students. Weingarten said changes in discipline policies need to be accompanied by training and support for teachers.

"We can't go from zero tolerance to zero discipline," she said.

Some school districts are finding some success in reducing racial gaps in discipline and maintaining order by taking different approaches to discipline, such as restorative justice.

In Denver, Tim Turley teaches teachers how to use restorative practices rather than removing kids from the classroom. He said he often meets with skepticism from teachers in his workshops. He reminds them that suspension is a temporary solution. They can remove a student, but "they always come back," Turley said.

Turley said suspension is a hollow threat for most kids. "Kids who are suspended don't sit home and read the Bible to learn the errors of their ways," he said. "To them a suspension is a legal three- to five-day holiday."

Research bears out Turley's observation. Recent studies show that suspension is ineffective at changing students' behavior and has serious long-term repercussions.

"When you deny kids learning time they fall behind academically because they're not in school," said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA. "Many times there's no provision to make up work you missed because you were in trouble. But, secondly, the longer you've been put out the more discouraged you become."

A student who is suspended in the ninth grade - even just once - is twice as likely to drop out of school later. Students who are suspended are also more likely to wind up in the juvenile corrections system.
Connection between suspensions and graduation

"School disengagement is one of the strongest correlates of juvenile delinquency," said Russell Skiba, professor of counseling and educational psychology at Indiana University.

Skiba said it's not just that kids who were headed for juvenile detention happen to get suspended on the way. It's that suspension itself appears to contribute to later trouble with the law. Take similar kids at similar schools who commit similar offenses. Suspend some but not others. The ones who are suspended are more likely to get suspended again, to drop out, and to get arrested.

Skiba began looking into the effects of zero tolerance soon after President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act in 1994. The act required states that get federal education money to pass zero-tolerance laws requiring the expulsion of any student who brought a weapon to school. But many states passed laws that went further, requiring suspension or expulsion for other offenses, too. Some school districts created zero-tolerance policies calling for suspension or expulsion for fighting, drugs, smoking, defiant behavior, tardiness and even truancy.

"The theory was that by providing severe consequences to even minor infractions, it would send a message to students that disruptive behavior was unacceptable," Skiba said.

But that thinking didn't make sense to Skiba. A tenet of behavioral psychology is that punishment alone can't shape appropriate behavior, he said.

He and other researchers started looking at data from a large Midwestern school district, "and began to see some troubling patterns in that data," Skiba said. "Suspensions were being used for relatively minor behavior. The majority of suspensions were not for the most serious offenses but rather for more minor behaviors. And we began to see a huge racial gap."

Kids of color were more likely to be suspended than white children. Skiba looked at other studies and found the same result.

And Skiba said it wasn't because African American kids are more likely to act up in school.

"We have not seen any evidence that African American students are engaged in higher rates of more serious behavior than other students in the same schools, in the same districts," Skiba said. "In fact what we found was that they seemed to be referred to the office more for subjective reasons than more objective reasons."

Skiba says there's not much difference between black and white students when it comes to concrete offenses, such as bringing a weapon to school. But when the infraction is something that's in the eye of the beholder - something like loitering, disrespect, or threatening behavior - black students are more likely than white students to be suspended.
Racial change among students, teachers, 1993-2011

Other researchers have found similar results. One study demonstrated that teachers' preconceptions about black and white students may be one reason for the disproportionate discipline.

Researchers Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua at Stanford University gave teachers a series of anecdotes about student misbehavior and asked whether the students should be punished. Different teachers got the same anecdotes, but the names were changed: Some teachers got a name that suggested that the child was white, like Greg or Jake. Others got a name that suggested that the child was African American, like DeShawn or Darnell. The teachers who got names like DeShawn and Darnell were more likely to suggest harsh discipline on a second offense and more likely to say they could imagine suspending the child in the future.

When zero-tolerance policies were first gaining popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, many people thought that strict, inflexible policies would result in fairer discipline. But the racial discipline gap got wider. In the 1970s, a black child was twice as likely to be suspended as a white child. Today, a black child is nearly four times as likely to be suspended - even a preschool child.

The other hope was that zero tolerance would make schools calmer and safer, but researchers say that didn't happen, either.

An American Psychological Association task force issued a report on zero tolerance in 2008 that said, "Rather than reducing the likelihood of disruption ... school suspension in general appears to predict higher future rates of misbehavior and suspension among students who are suspended."

The report also looked at the assumption that removing disruptive students would lead to a safer climate at school. "Although the assumption is strongly intuitive," the report said, "data on a number of indicators of school climate have shown the opposite effect, that is, that schools with higher rates of suspension and expulsion appear to have less satisfactory ratings of school climate."
Connection between jail time and suspensions

Weingarten said it was data like this that changed her thinking about school discipline.

She argues that it will likely never be possible to get away from suspension and expulsion entirely. Students who are dangerous will always have to be removed from schools. But she says less serious misbehavior should be dealt with in other ways.

"If we're only talking about suspension in discipline, we've lost our way," she said.

Producers: Catherine Winter, Laurie Stern, Suzanne Pekow and Ryan Katz
Editor: Stephen Smith
Web Editor: Dave Peters
Web Producer: Andy Kruse
Technical Director: Craig Thorson
Associate Producer: Suzanne Pekow
Research and Production Fellows: Alex Baumhardt and Lila Cherneff
Project Manager: Ellen Guettler
Senior Producer, Education Projects: Emily Hanford
Executive Editor and Host: Stephen Smith
Managing Director, Editor-in-Chief: Chris Worthington
Special thanks: Liz Lyon, Sasha Aslanian, Samara Freemark

Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's American Graduate project.

A note of disclosure: The Spencer and Lumina Foundations supported some of the research that was referred to in this program. But the foundations had no influence on our coverage.

Feedback

We're interested in hearing what impact APM Reports programs have on you. Has one of our documentaries or podcasts changed how you think about an issue? Has it led you to do something, like start a conversation or try to do something new in your community? Share your impact story.

Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amid evidence zero tolerance doesn't work, schools reverse themselves

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A get-tough attitude prevailed among educators in the 1980s and 1990s, but research shows that zero-tolerance policies don't make schools safer and lead to disproportionate discipline for students of color.

# data[].attributes.headline
Bullies in Blue: The Problem with School Policing [Infographic]

# data[].attributes.subject
Bullies in Blue: The Problem with School Policing [Infographic]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Over the past 50 years, our schools have become sites of increased criminalization of young people-a disturbing fact that is even truer for poor Black and Latino communities. Today, police officers assigned to patrol schools can legally use physical force on students, arrest and handcuff them, and bring the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear on kids who are simply misbehaving. The primary role of police in schools is to enforce criminal laws, and virtually every violation of a school rule can be considered a criminal act if viewed through this police-first lens. Though these police are often referred to as "school resource officers," their legal power and attending actions reveal that this designation only serves to mask that their presence has transformed schools into another site of concentrated policing. Such policing marks the start of the school-to-prison pipeline-the entry point to the criminal justice system for too many kids-and fuels mass incarceration.

Bullies in Blue: The Problem with School Policing

Philadelphia, PA
Chokehold
2016
Brian, an 11th grader had an argument with a school police officer over using the restroom without a pass. The officer reportedly punched him in the face simultaneously with both fists and threw him to the ground in a chokehold. Brian, who is asthmatic, says that, "I felt like I was going to die that day."

Kissimmee, Florida
Arm Bar
2015
A Florida police school resource officer at Kissimmee Middle School slammed a 13-year-old boy to the ground and twisted his arm for over 40 seconds in a "torque hold." The middle-schooler, who weighed 84 pounds, ended up with a sprained wrist and ankle after the officer's takedown. The officer's employment was terminated.

Stone Mountain, GA
Handcuffs
2014
A school resource officer at Pine Ridge Elementary handcuffed Patrick, a 6-year-old special needs student, after the boy ran away from his classroom. The cuffs left visible bruises on the boy's wrists. "It hurts when I touch it," said the first grader.

Louisville, KY
Choke/Punch/Kick
2015 When a 13-year-old pushed a Louisville Metro Police officer in the hallway of Olmsted Academy North, the officer picked the boy up by his neck and choked him, rendering him unconscious for 20 seconds.

Arlington, Texas
Takedown
2014
Ixel, a 16-year-old at Sam Houston High School, was pinned to the floor by three officers, two of whom pinned her face to the floor. She had been caught using a cell phone in class and declined to relinquish it because she was talking to her mother who suffers from serious medical conditions.

Murfreesboro, TN
Handcuffs
2016
Police handcuffed and arrested ten students, ages 6 to 11, at Hobgood Elementary School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The arrests were made because the students did not stop an off-campus fight days earlier. The children were charged with "criminal responsibility for conduct of another" which according to Tennessee criminal offense code includes incidents when a "person fails to make a reasonable effort to prevent" an offense.

Learn more, visit aclu.org/bullies-in-blue

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bullies in Blue: The Problem with School Policing [Infographic]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Over the past 50 years, our schools have become sites of increased criminalization of young people-a disturbing fact that is even truer for poor Black and Latino communities. Today, police officers assigned to patrol schools can legally use physical force on students, arrest and handcuff them, and bring the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear on kids who are simply misbehaving.

# data[].attributes.headline
These Black Students Have Fought Over-Policing In Schools for Years

# data[].attributes.subject
These Black Students Have Fought Over-Policing In Schools for Years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Alliyah Logan just wanted to feel safe at school. Every morning, her older brother, Matthew, was herded through metal detectors and into his public high school in the Bronx. The school was a hostile environment, Alliyah told Teen Vogue, where students were excessively and unnecessarily exposed to the "prison industrial complex." Students at the school, like her brother, felt as though they were being treated like criminals.

"When I saw my brother's experiences, I didn't want to be in that environment," Alliyah said.

Instead, she spent her high school years commuting to the SoHo neighborhood in Manhattan, about an hour and a half by train from her home. The daily trip was worth it, though, because it meant nicer School Resource Officers (SROs) and no metal detectors. Now a graduating senior at NYC iSchool and an operational manager for the New York Civil Liberties Union's Teen Activist Project, Alliyah is working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. She's one of a myriad of Black students protesting both the recent killings of Black Americans at the hands of police, and the growing police presence in school districts across the country.

The student-led movement for police-free schools is nothing new. For years, Black students in particular have been at the vanguard of efforts to stop over-policing and to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline: a term that describes the ways in which predominantly Black students become trapped in the criminal justice system from an early age. In recent years, highly publicized incidents of over-policing against Black students have illustrated the levels of physical aggression, harassment, and discrimination faced by Black students in school hallways every day. But with the threat of school shootings omnipresent, bipartisan calls for heightened school security have overpowered calls to reassess the presence of police on campuses. Students and activists say this moment feels different.

The looming financial crisis in education triggered by the coronavirus pandemic will be a chance for districts to reevaluate their priorities and values, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights group that advocates for police-free schools.

"By the very nature of the system of policing in this country, there is a culture clash between policing and schools," she told Teen Vogue. "Police enforce the criminal codes; schools are supposed to be there to nurture young people."

The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May sparked not only worldwide outrage over police brutality, but unprecedented momentum in the police-free schools movement. Citing a difference in values, the Minneapolis school board unanimously voted soon after the tragedy to sever ties with the Minneapolis police department. Evidence that Black students in Minneapolis schools face disproportionate disciplinary action had been apparent for years. Data has long shown that Black students in Minneapolis public schools are suspended much more often than their white peers, despite making up less of the overall student population. Nationwide, Black students are three times more likely to be expelled than white students, according to a 2014 report from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. Floyd's murder drew renewed ire to a flawed culture, Dianis said.

"The most important thing in this moment is for us to realize that what we see happening to Black people on the streets is what's happening to Black students in their school hallways," Dianis said. "It's not the killing, but it is the criminalization. It's the racial profiling. It's the stop-and-frisk. It's the excessive use of force and it's happening right in our schools."

In an email to Teen Vogue, Minneapolis school board member Josh Pauly confirmed that representatives from about 30 districts - including in "Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, North Carolina, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, New York, [and] California" - have reached out to him privately for advice on implementing similar measures. Portland school officials already took a cue from the move out of Minneapolis, terminating the district's $1.6 million SRO program. Nathaniel Greene, a senior at Washburn High School in Minneapolis and the student representative to the Minneapolis Board of Education, said the decision was a question about building the right school culture.

"Overall, the biggest reasons for students leaving the district is because of culture and climate," he told Teen Vogue. "And the use of school resource officers definitely has a negative impact on a school's climate."

Beatrix Del Carmen, a student organizer who grew up in Minneapolis, has been working on over-policing since 2017 as part of the Young People's Action Coalition. Her group was one of several laying the groundwork on the issue, she says, alongside the Black Liberation Project, Youth Out Loud, and the Young Muslim Collective. They showed up to "countless school board meetings" and organized rallies to pressure the school board to cut ties with the police department and reinvest the over $1 million into restorative justice programs and mental health professionals.

"I remember hearing about an officer throwing a student into a locker," she told Teen Vogue. "Some of my close friends who deal with police and gun violence in their personal lives felt triggered seeing a cop walking through their hallways. This hostile environment that disproportionately criminalizes students of color is the root of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Although the debate over whether SROs actually make schools safer has raged for years, research in the space appears to be limited. A 2009 University of Tennessee study suggests that having police in schools predicted more arrests for disorderly conduct while decreasing the arrest rate for assault and weapons charges. A 2011 report from Justice Quarterly cited in a 2013 Congressional Research Service document written in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings similarly found that children in schools with SROs are more likely to be arrested for minor infractions. Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers Association, told Teen Vogue that his organization offers a 40-hour training program to districts around the country that advises officers not to get involved with school discipline and includes implicit bias training. He did not offer specific data on the training's effectiveness but said the association's specific training was not utilized by Minneapolis public schools.

Converging research on policing in schools arrives at two conclusions: Black students have more encounters with SROs as compared to white students, and Black students often feel less safe in school as a result of police being present. Zion Brooks, a high school junior in Philadelphia at Student Leadership Academy (SLA) at Beeber, is one of those students. Like Alliyah, Zion couldn't bear the thought of going to a heavily policed school. She transferred to SLA from another institution by the second week of her freshman year.

"They had metal detectors like crazy," she told Teen Vogue. "You had to sign in and there were like three cops when you came in, and I couldn't stay there. So then I switched to SLA, and the policemen there are very different because there are more non-Black students at that school."

Zion is a member of the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU), an advocacy group that is fully committed to the fight for police-free schools after an altercation between a PSU member and student and an officer in May 2016, which the union has insisted was an assault. An SRO at Benjamin Franklin High School can be seen restraining Brian Burney, then a senior and PSU member, in video footage of the incident recorded by other PSU students. Soon after the incident, a spokesperson for the district told Philadelphia magazine that after a preliminary inquiry they didn't believe the officer did anything wrong, though a full investigation was announced and the officer was transferred. According to the union, Brian suffered a concussion as a result of the altercation, which drew widespread media attention. ( Teen Vogue reached out to the school for comment).

"That moment was what really sparked our organization's full commitment to getting police out of schools, and also thinking about how we get rid of metal detectors and surveillance cameras," Saudia Durrant, a PSU organizer, told Teen Vogue. "It's all the same and it's creating a prison-like environment in schools."

In the aftermath of the 2016 incident, PSU students successfully lobbied the superintendent to create a districtwide system for students and parents to file complaints against security staff. The demand was similar to a complaint system that the Black Organizing Project (BOP), a restorative justice group in Oakland, pioneered after an SRO fatally shot a Black high school student in Oakland outside a school dance in 2011.

"When reality sinks in, these incidents only prove further that the presence of police do not prevent these tragedies from happening," BOP organizer-in-training Indigo Byers wrote in an email to Teen Vogue.

For almost a decade, BOP has made steady progress on the issue of over-policing. The group restricted the definition of "suspendable infractions" in Oakland schools and worked to clarify the ground rules between police and school administrators through updated memorandums of understanding ( a tactic also adopted by activists in New York). The district now joins the chorus of others severing ties with police and is poised to eliminate its entire $2.8 million police department. Byers thinks that money should be reinvested in "alternative safety supports, like mental health and other services to begin to address the root of issues seen on campuses."

Some researchers say Black students could see George Floyd's death take a toll on their GPAs, graduation rates, and emotional well-being, and some students hope that a renewed commitment to school psychologists, counselors, social workers and nurses could help them face those challenges. If the past is any indication, student groups, and particularly those that elevate Black students across the country, have the patience and organization to make just about anything happen.

"The best movements are the movements that are spearheaded by impacted people," Dianis said. "Students are taking the risk ... and they are winning."

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: How Black Student Unions are Fighting for Black Lives

Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
These Black Students Have Fought Over-Policing In Schools for Years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alliyah Logan just wanted to feel safe at school. Every morning, her older brother, Matthew, was herded through metal detectors and into his public high school in the Bronx. The school was a hostile environment, Alliyah told Teen Vogue, where students were excessively and unnecessarily exposed to the "prison industrial complex."

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Black Lives Matter Wants Police Out of Schools [Podcast - 4 min]

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Black Lives Matter Wants Police Out of Schools [Podcast - 4 min]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At least two-thirds of American high school students attend a school with a police officer, according to the Urban Institute, and that proportion is higher for students of color. Now, the national uprising for racial justice has led to a push to remove police officers from security positions inside schools. School systems in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Denver, Portland, Ore., and two districts in the Bay Area have all moved in recent weeks to suspend or phase out ties with police.

Jesse Hagopian, a teacher and activist in Seattle, says removing police from schools has been a key demand of the Black Lives Matter movement for years.

"There's just so much research that shows that they aren't making our kids safe."

Data show that schools with cops are more likely to refer children to law enforcement, including for non-serious violent behaviors. In 43 states and the District of Columbia, Black students are more likely to be arrested than other students while at school, according to an analysis by the Education Week Research Center.

"And there's been horrific acts of police violence in schools," Hagopian adds.

He points to two separate incidents captured on body cameras in the fall semester of 2019. One officer in Florida put a 6-year-old girl in handcuffs as she sobbed. Another in New Mexico was shown shoving an 11-year-old girl against a wall. Both students were Black.

"And what is happening in schools around the country," says Hagopian, "is, instead of figuring out how to help that [student] who's having a difficult time by having counselors, we meet these kids with force."

This all adds up to what Monique Morris calls the criminalization of Black students.

"The presence of police in schools, I believe, is fueled by a dehumanization of children of color, which suggests that there needs to be a constant surveillance of these children in schools."

Morris is the author of the books and Sing A Rhythm, Dance a Blues about Black girls' educational experiences. She says new research shows that police in majority white and affluent schools are more likely to think of their job as protecting the school from outside threats, such as shootings. But in schools that were lower-income and majority students of color, they are instead looking at the students themselves as threats.

"For children of color, we see that this leads to a hyper-criminalization and a way that people perceive them to be criminal, even if they are just being children," Morris explains.

School resource officer programs began in the 1950s in Flint, Mich., as a form of community policing and to strengthen ties between young people and police, says Mo Canady of the National Association of School Resource Officers. They grew quickly starting in the 1990s amid fear about school shootings. The U.S. Department of Justice has funded these programs to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, expanding its support after the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in 2018.

Federal data analyzed by the American Civil Liberties Union shows millions of students, especially students of color, attend schools that have police officers, but no nurse or school psychologist.

In the past, parents have largely supported the presence of armed officers in schools, and until recently so have teacher unions. That changed on June 18, when the American Federation of Teachers, one of the country's largest teacher unions, passed a resolution calling for the separation of school safety and policing.

"There isn't much evidence indicating that police officers in schools make schools safer," says Dominique Parris of the research organization Child Trends. "What they do do is increase the likelihood that Black and brown children are going to be involved in the legal system early and often."

There are dozens of documented incidents in the past decade where a resource officer tasered, pepper sprayed, injured or otherwise used force on a student.

Mo Canady of NASRO argues this is a problem of training. When properly trained by his organization, he says SROs can prevent violence and juvenile arrests while building positive relationships. "When these relationships are built the way they should be, then we wind up with students sharing information with SROs. We wind up with parents of students sharing information. And sometimes that information helps us to stop a potential act of violence before it ever, ever occurs."

A 2018 Washington Post analysis of nearly 200 incidents of gun violence on campus found only two times where a school resource officer successfully intervened in a shooting. Canady says there are many more. "In several ... incidents SROs responded and stopped the shootings before more lives were lost. In some cases, they stopped the shooting before any lives were lost."

He cites as a success story a 2018 incident in Maryland where a high school student killed an ex-girlfriend, injured another boy and then shot himself fatally as he was fired on by an SRO.

Still, research doesn't definitively show SROs are effective at improving school safety. The good news, say Morris and Parris, is that there are evidence-based alternatives. These include restorative justice programs, a program called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and having mental health counselors and other support staff available when students are acting out.

"If there is conflict, rather than calling in law enforcement, [the student] can take a breath and go into meditation or they can watch a video and learn how to reset their emotions," says Morris.

Research by the U.S. Secret Service shows these interventions - designed to build trust between students and adults - can also prevent gun violence and mass shootings by making "bystander" students more likely to speak up if a classmate is making threats to others, or is suicidal.

Morris says these alternative strategies can make schools safer and more welcoming for all students, without police.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why There's A Push To Get Police Out Of Schools

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At least two-thirds of American high school students attend a school with a police officer, according to the Urban Institute, and that proportion is higher for students of color. Now, the national uprising for racial justice has led to a push to remove police officers from security positions inside schools.

# data[].attributes.headline
Do Police Officers Make Schools Safer or More Dangerous?

# data[].attributes.subject
Do Police Officers Make Schools Safer or More Dangerous?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
School resource officers were supposed to prevent mass shootings and juvenile crime. But some schools are eliminating them amid a clamor from students after George Floyd's death.

Nadera Powell, 17, said seeing officers in the hallways at her school in Los Angeles sent a clear message to black students: "We have you on watch. We are able to take legal or even physical action against you." Credit... Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times

The national reckoning over police violence has spread to schools, with several districts choosing in recent days to sever their relationships with local police departments out of concern that the officers patrolling their hallways represent more of a threat than a form of protection.

School districts in Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Ore., have all promised to remove officers, with the Seattle superintendent saying the presence of armed police officers "prohibits many students and staff from feeling fully safe." In Oakland, Calif., leaders expressed support on Wednesday for eliminating the district's internal police force, while the Denver Board of Education voted unanimously on Thursday to end its police contract.

In Los Angeles and Chicago, two of the country's three largest school districts, teachers' unions are pushing to get the police out, showing a willingness to confront another politically powerful, heavily unionized profession.

Some teachers and students, African-Americans in particular, say they consider officers on campus a danger, rather than a bulwark against everything from fights to drug use to mass shootings.

There has been no shortage of episodes to back up their concerns. In Orange County, Fla., in November, a school resource officer was fired after a video showed him grasping a middle school student's hair and yanking her head back during an arrest after students fought near school grounds. A few weeks later, an officer assigned to a school in Vance County, N.C., lost his job after he repeatedly slammed an 11-year-old boy to the ground.

Nadera Powell, 17, said seeing officers in the hallways at Venice High School in Los Angeles sent a clear message to black students like her: "Don't get too comfortable, regardless of whether this school is your second home. We have you on watch. We are able to take legal or even physical action against you."

During student walkouts to protest gun violence and push for climate action over the past two years, some officers blocked students from leaving school grounds or clashed verbally with protesters, she recalled. At Fremont High School in another part of Los Angeles, where the student body is about 90 percent Latino, the police used pepper spray in November to break up a fight.

"All people who are of color here are looked at as a threat," Ms. Powell said.

For years, activists have called on districts to rein in campus police. They cite data showing that mass shootings like those in Parkland, Fla., or Newtown, Conn., are rare, and that crime on school grounds has generally declined in recent years.

The presence of officers in hallways has a profound impact on students of color and those with disabilities, who, according to several analyses and studies, are more likely to be harshly punished for ordinary misbehavior.

Still, efforts to remove school resource officers face the same pushback as a broader national effort to reduce funding for police departments: resistance from the police themselves, who are often politically powerful, and concern from some parents and school officials that removing officers could leave schools and students vulnerable.

In Oakland, Jumoke Hinton Hodge, a school board member, said that although she strongly supported the Black Lives Matter movement, she opposed the effort to eliminate district police officers. Those officers are better equipped to work with teenagers than are the city police, who could be called to schools more often if the district no longer had its own force, she said.

The district's officers train to prevent school shootings, Ms. Hinton Hodge said, and they respond to students who have reported sexual abuse or are at risk of suicide. The proposal to eliminate the force felt rushed, she said, and would leave the district without an adequate safety plan.

"Are you here for the long haul, about a movement?" she asked. "Or are you in a moment?"

In New York City last weekend, hundreds of teachers and students marched in a protest calling for the police to be removed from schools and replaced by a new crop of guidance counselors and social workers. Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to diverting some of the Police Department's funding to social services for children, but has so far not shown a willingness to significantly reduce police presence in hallways.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago has rejected calls from the teachers' union and others to remove officers from schools, saying they are needed to provide security.

Both mayors control their city's school systems. It is districts with elected school boards, which are more independent from other local government agencies, that are currently driving the wave of change.

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said he was disappointed by attempts to link school policing to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He called Mr. Floyd's death during an arrest "the most horrific police abuse situation I've seen in my career."

Well-trained school resource officers operate more like counselors and educators, Mr. Canady said, working with students to defuse peer conflict and address issues such as drug and alcohol use. He suggested that disproportionate discipline and arrest rates for students of color and those with disabilities could be driven by the actions of police officers coming off the street to respond to one-off calls from schools, or by campus officers who lack adequate training in concepts such as implicit bias.

"The message to the districts has to be, 'Don't throw the baby out with the bath water,'" Mr. Canady said.

But as schools face significant budget cuts brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, some students, educators and policymakers say it would be wiser to hire psychologists to provide counseling and nurses to advise students on drugs and alcohol, instead of training police officers to do such tasks.

In Prince George's County, Md., outside of Washington, Joshua Omolola, 18, has marched to protest the killing of Mr. Floyd. Now, as the student member of the Board of Education, he is supporting a proposal to remove police officers from the county's schools, whose students are predominantly black and Hispanic.

The millions the county spends annually on school policing should be reallocated to mental health services, Mr. Omolola argued, to treat the root causes of student behavioral problems.

Image

Joshua Omolola, 18, has marched to protest the killing of George Floyd. Now, as the student member of the Board of Education, he is supporting a proposal to remove police officers from schools in Prince George's County, Md. Credit... Nate Palmer for The New York Times

Police departments have typically responded to calls from school employees, but the everyday presence of officers in hallways did not become widespread until the 1990s. That was when concern over mass shootings, drug abuse and juvenile crime led federal and state officials to offer local districts money to hire officers and purchase law enforcement equipment, such as metal detectors.

By the 2013-14 school year, two-thirds of high school students, 45 percent of middle schoolers and 19 percent of elementary school students attended a school with a police officer, according to a 2018 report from the Urban Institute. Majority black and Hispanic schools are more likely to have officers on campus than majority white schools.

But when the Congressional Research Service reported on the effectiveness of school resource officers in 2013, it concluded that there was little rigorous research showing a connection between the presence of police officers in schools and changes in crime or student discipline rates.

Activists who have worked for years to remove officers from hallways said they were shocked at the speed with which school districts were promising significant change after Mr. Floyd's death. The coming weeks may equal the impact of a decade's worth of incremental reforms, according to Jasmine Dellafosse, an organizer in Stockton, Calif., east of San Francisco, with the Gathering for Justice, a nonprofit group.

After the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Northern California and the state Department of Justice investigated harsh discipline practices in Stockton schools, the district police force agreed last year to establish new restrictions on the use of force and on when to arrest students.

Now the school board plans to consider, later this month, a resolution to remove police officers entirely from schools and to reallocate their budget to programs such as ethnic studies, counseling and restorative justice.

"There won't be real change," Ms. Dellafosse said, "until police are out of the schools."

Eliza Shapiro and Erica L. Green contributed reporting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do Police Officers Make Schools Safer or More Dangerous?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
School resource officers were supposed to prevent mass shootings and juvenile crime. But some schools are eliminating them amid a clamor from students after George Floyd's death. The national reckoning over police violence has spread to schools, with several districts choosing in recent days to sever their relationships with local police departments out of concern that the officers patrolling their hallways represent more of a threat than a form of protection.