# data[].attributes.headline
Six Maps That Reveal America's Expanding Diversity

# data[].attributes.subject
Six Maps That Reveal America's Expanding Diversity

# data[].attributes.headline
Belonging: the Missing Equity Ingredient 

# data[].attributes.subject
Belonging: the Missing Equity Ingredient 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By John Krownapple

We might not want to admit it, name it or claim it, but if we look around honestly, we can see that many educational equity initiatives are failing.

Sure, some have resulted in positive changes, but taken as a whole, "equity" remains more of an aspirational platitude than a reality. All too often, the fairness and quality of a student's experience in school is still predictable by demographic categories and identity groupings.

The problem isn't theories such as cultural responsiveness or restorative justice. The problem definitely isn't "equity" in and of itself. (After all, abandoning equity would be like saying, "Maybe fairness isn't the direction we should go after all.") The problem is clearly one of implementation.

Mistakes and challenges with equity implementation abound. For instance, shows that focusing professional development on diversity or relying exclusively on anti-bias trainings don't in sustainable change for the better. In fact, many initiatives have had the opposite : further inequity, hardened attitudes against equity, disappointed expectations, damaged relational trust among adults, and even a backlash toward colleagues with marginalized identities.

Nevertheless, all of these initiatives were designed with the goal of equity. What's gone wrong? This cake we've tried to bake -- did we use the wrong recipe? Did we leave out some essential ingredients? Leave it in the oven too long? Not long enough? What do we need to make this right?

Dr. Floyd Cobb and I have described a predictable pattern of failure in our , Belonging through a Culture of Dignity: The Keys to Successful Equity Implementation. We call this phenomenon the Dysfunctional Cycle of Equity Work. From studying this cycle, we can uniquivacably say this: most equity implementation lacks the key ingredients: inclusion, dignity, and belonging. The most vital of these is belonging.

But instead of inspiring a vision of a culture and climate of belonging, common equity implementation results in trying strategies and techniques within the existing school and classroom culture.

Brilliant approaches such as culturally relevant pedagogy and restorative justice become reduced to "just good teaching" or episodic relational activities/events, such as periodic community circles. Ultimately, techniques and strategies alone do not bring about sustainable change due to the fact that the prevailing environment remains less than inclusive. It lacks the requisite conditions: a culture of dignity and a climate of belonging.

Instead of belonging, equity initiatives remain focused on the concept of access (e.g., resources, advanced programming, highly-qualified teachers). While absolutely necessary, access alone won't get us to our goal.

As john a. powell of UC Berkeley puts it, "Belonging, or being fully human, means more than having access. Belonging entails being respected at a basic level that includes the right to both co-create and make demands on society." To bring about educational equity, every student must experience .

Why is belonging essential? Decades of shows that belonging leads to engagement, which leads to performance and achievement. So, beneath any so-called achievement gap is a gap in belonging. That gap can be a chasm, a dangerous one. When belonging is missing or uncertain for people, their self-efficacy takes a hit; they are susceptible to myriad perils.

One of the most well-known perils is the , a affecting students from stigmatized identity groups who underperform due to the pressure of possibly confirming negative stereotypes.

Additionally, belonging uncertainty yields results that are unhealthy to people, community, and democracy: anxiety, dropping out, conformity, exhaustion, negativity, emotional numbing, self-segregation, lowered life expectancy, and gangs, cults, and radicalization.

Belonging is also essential for adults in the workplace. One found that employees with a sense of belonging take 75% fewer sick days, have a 50% lower rate of turnover, and have 56% better job performance than employees who feel excluded.

How can we help our students and colleagues feel like they belong? There is sound research on the subject, pointing to specific belonging interventions and programs.

Although these strategies are effective, we can't fall into the trap of relying on techniques alone. We must also address the culture. The truth of the matter is, the sole reason these strategies work is because they honor dignity. Thus, if we learn to honor dignity (the human worth and value of every person) and center it in everything we do, we can create and maintain a culture of dignity. In doing so, we will foster belonging through each and every policy, practice, and behavior.

In Belonging through a Culture of Dignity, we offer this Dignity Framework for Educational Equity to help our fellow educators do just that. With the vital ingredients of dignity and belonging, we have a recipe for success. That's why we wrote this book: to offer research, language, and concepts to help us move forward in making educational equity our reality.

How could a focus on belonging ease challenges of implementing real equity work in your school?

Bezrukova, K., Jehn, K. A., & Spell, C. S. (2012). Reviewing diversity training: Where we have been and where we should go. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11(2), 207-227.

Cobb, F., & Krownapple, J. (2019). Belonging through a culture of dignity: The keys to successful equity implementation. San Diego, CA: Mimi & Todd Press.

Cohen, E. G., & Lotan, R. A. (2014). Designing groupwork: Strategies for the heterogeneous classroom (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Cook, C. R., Fiat, A., Larson, M., Daikos, C., Slemrod, T., Holland, E. A., & Renshaw, T. (2018). Positive greetings at the door: Evaluation of a low-cost, high-yield proactive classroom management strategy. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 20(3), 149-159.

Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2017). Are diversity programs merely ceremonial? Evidence-free institutionalization. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, & R. E. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 808-828). London, England: Sage.

Fraser-Thill, R. (2019, September 9). Belonging at work is essential--Here are 4 ways to foster it. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafraserthill/2019/09/16/belonging-at-work/#373a5ce14ab8

Harter, J. (2018, August 26). Employee engagement on the rise in the U.S. Gallup. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx

Hicks, D. (2018). Leading with dignity: How to create a culture that brings out the best in people. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ladson‐Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.

powell, j., & Menendian, S. (2016). The problem with othering: Towards inclusiveness and belonging. Othering and Belonging, 1(1), 14-39.

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797-811.

Todd, A. R., & Simpson, A. J. (2017). Perspective taking and member-to-group generalization of implicit racial attitudes: e role of target prototypicality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 47, 105-112.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 82.

Walton, G. M., Logel, C., Peach, J. M., Spencer, S. J., & Zanna, M. P. (2015). Two brief interventions to mitigate a "chilly climate" transform women's experience, relation- ships, and achievement in engineering. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(2), 468-485.

By John Krownapple

We might not want to admit it, name it or claim it, but if we look around honestly, we can see that many educational equity initiatives are failing.

Sure, some have resulted in positive changes, but taken as a whole, "equity" remains more of an aspirational platitude than a reality. All too often, the fairness and quality of a student's experience in school is still predictable by demographic categories and identity groupings.

The problem isn't theories such as cultural responsiveness or restorative justice. The problem definitely isn't "equity" in and of itself. (After all, abandoning equity would be like saying, "Maybe fairness isn't the direction we should go after all.") The problem is clearly one of implementation.

Mistakes and challenges with equity implementation abound. For instance, shows that focusing professional development on diversity or relying exclusively on anti-bias trainings don't in sustainable change for the better. In fact, many initiatives have had the opposite : further inequity, hardened attitudes against equity, disappointed expectations, damaged relational trust among adults, and even a backlash toward colleagues with marginalized identities.

Nevertheless, all of these initiatives were designed with the goal of equity. What's gone wrong? This cake we've tried to bake -- did we use the wrong recipe? Did we leave out some essential ingredients? Leave it in the oven too long? Not long enough? What do we need to make this right?

Dr. Floyd Cobb and I have described a predictable pattern of failure in our , Belonging through a Culture of Dignity: The Keys to Successful Equity Implementation. We call this phenomenon the Dysfunctional Cycle of Equity Work. From studying this cycle, we can uniquivacably say this: most equity implementation lacks the key ingredients: inclusion, dignity, and belonging. The most vital of these is belonging.

But instead of inspiring a vision of a culture and climate of belonging, common equity implementation results in trying strategies and techniques within the existing school and classroom culture.

Brilliant approaches such as culturally relevant pedagogy and restorative justice become reduced to "just good teaching" or episodic relational activities/events, such as periodic community circles. Ultimately, techniques and strategies alone do not bring about sustainable change due to the fact that the prevailing environment remains less than inclusive. It lacks the requisite conditions: a culture of dignity and a climate of belonging.

Instead of belonging, equity initiatives remain focused on the concept of access (e.g., resources, advanced programming, highly-qualified teachers). While absolutely necessary, access alone won't get us to our goal.

As john a. powell of UC Berkeley puts it, "Belonging, or being fully human, means more than having access. Belonging entails being respected at a basic level that includes the right to both co-create and make demands on society." To bring about educational equity, every student must experience .

Why is belonging essential? Decades of shows that belonging leads to engagement, which leads to performance and achievement. So, beneath any so-called achievement gap is a gap in belonging. That gap can be a chasm, a dangerous one. When belonging is missing or uncertain for people, their self-efficacy takes a hit; they are susceptible to myriad perils.

One of the most well-known perils is the , a affecting students from stigmatized identity groups who underperform due to the pressure of possibly confirming negative stereotypes.

Additionally, belonging uncertainty yields results that are unhealthy to people, community, and democracy: anxiety, dropping out, conformity, exhaustion, negativity, emotional numbing, self-segregation, lowered life expectancy, and gangs, cults, and radicalization.

Belonging is also essential for adults in the workplace. One found that employees with a sense of belonging take 75% fewer sick days, have a 50% lower rate of turnover, and have 56% better job performance than employees who feel excluded.

How can we help our students and colleagues feel like they belong? There is sound research on the subject, pointing to specific belonging interventions and programs.

Although these strategies are effective, we can't fall into the trap of relying on techniques alone. We must also address the culture. The truth of the matter is, the sole reason these strategies work is because they honor dignity. Thus, if we learn to honor dignity (the human worth and value of every person) and center it in everything we do, we can create and maintain a culture of dignity. In doing so, we will foster belonging through each and every policy, practice, and behavior.

In Belonging through a Culture of Dignity, we offer this Dignity Framework for Educational Equity to help our fellow educators do just that. With the vital ingredients of dignity and belonging, we have a recipe for success. That's why we wrote this book: to offer research, language, and concepts to help us move forward in making educational equity our reality.

How could a focus on belonging ease challenges of implementing real equity work in your school?

Bezrukova, K., Jehn, K. A., & Spell, C. S. (2012). Reviewing diversity training: Where we have been and where we should go. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11(2), 207-227.

Cobb, F., & Krownapple, J. (2019). Belonging through a culture of dignity: The keys to successful equity implementation. San Diego, CA: Mimi & Todd Press.

Cohen, E. G., & Lotan, R. A. (2014). Designing groupwork: Strategies for the heterogeneous classroom (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Cook, C. R., Fiat, A., Larson, M., Daikos, C., Slemrod, T., Holland, E. A., & Renshaw, T. (2018). Positive greetings at the door: Evaluation of a low-cost, high-yield proactive classroom management strategy. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 20(3), 149-159.

Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2017). Are diversity programs merely ceremonial? Evidence-free institutionalization. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, & R. E. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 808-828). London, England: Sage.

Fraser-Thill, R. (2019, September 9). Belonging at work is essential--Here are 4 ways to foster it. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafraserthill/2019/09/16/belonging-at-work/#373a5ce14ab8

Harter, J. (2018, August 26). Employee engagement on the rise in the U.S. Gallup. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx

Hicks, D. (2018). Leading with dignity: How to create a culture that brings out the best in people. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ladson‐Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.

powell, j., & Menendian, S. (2016). The problem with othering: Towards inclusiveness and belonging. Othering and Belonging, 1(1), 14-39.

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797-811.

Todd, A. R., & Simpson, A. J. (2017). Perspective taking and member-to-group generalization of implicit racial attitudes: e role of target prototypicality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 47, 105-112.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 82.

Walton, G. M., Logel, C., Peach, J. M., Spencer, S. J., & Zanna, M. P. (2015). Two brief interventions to mitigate a "chilly climate" transform women's experience, relation- ships, and achievement in engineering. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(2), 468-485.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Belonging: the Missing Equity Ingredient

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By John Krownapple We might not want to admit it, name it or claim it, but if we look around honestly, we can see that many educational equity initiatives are failing. Sure, some have resulted in positive changes, but taken as a whole, "equity" remains more of an aspirational platitude than a reality.

# data[].attributes.headline
Daring to Dream in Public by Gloria Ladson-Billings

# data[].attributes.subject
Daring to Dream in Public by Gloria Ladson-Billings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Gloria Ladson-Billings didn't grow up a dreamer.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" wasn't a question kids in her Philadelphia neighborhood were asked. The goals for children were pretty simple: Graduate from high school and stay out of trouble. Maybe, just maybe, go to community college.

"Black working-class residents of West Philadelphia did not have the luxury of dreams," Ladson-Billings says.

And yet, she has become a renowned scholar who has helped change the way teachers teach with her groundbreaking 1994 book "The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children." She was the first black woman to become a tenured professor in UW-Madison's School of Education in 1995.

This was never her dream. She didn't even think to dream it. Not only does she dare to dream in public now, but she encourages, practically insists, others do as well.

Ladson-Billings formally retired from her position as the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education in 2018 after being on the UW-Madison faculty for more than 26 years. She had hoped to retire without giving a speech but that just isn't possible when you've impacted so many - and when you're the kind of speaker who takes the stage to "Hypnotize" by The Notorious B.I.G. as she did at a recent reception honoring her at Gordon Dining and Event Center.

Her talk, "Dreaming in Public: Renewing the Commitment to Education for Democracy," walked the audience through her scholarship and the less likely road where it all began.

Dreams came at a cost. They made you vulnerable, to the laughter of others and the disappointment of wanting more than seemed possible.

"We were reluctant to share dreams because we saw so much disappointment," she says.

It wasn't that she and her friends weren't smart; they were realists. They saw the common path of those around them, entering the work force, often in the same place their parents worked, rather than continuing their education. Many others joined the military. But a four-year college? That was for the children of parents who had gone to college, not the children of those with parents who may not have graduated from high school.

"New" clothes came from pawn shops or siblings and cousins who had outgrown them. Dreams were a nice idea, but the more immediate realities of paying rent and having food on the table were immediate and constant.

Her brother joined the Air Force. Ladson-Billings wasn't sure what she should do but she knew she wanted something more than what was expected. She considered being a medical technician, mainly because it sounded "fancy" and you didn't have to go to medical school. But she knew she loved writing.

"I couldn't figure out how to get paid to do it, and my family could not afford the luxury of me finding my writing voice," she says.

Being a writer seemed like fiction. So she set out to become a teacher, earning her bachelor's degree in education from Morgan State University in Baltimore in 1968 and master's in curriculum and instruction from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1972.

While teaching wasn't what she thought she'd end up doing, something changed after walking into a classroom and meeting students.

"It helped me understand that one of the most effective ways to affect democracy was through the classroom," she says.

After a decade teaching in Philadelphia public schools and several years in California, she wondered why black students were not successful in school.

"I knew too many smart black people and their school outcomes just didn't make sense," she said.

For so long, the question was: What's wrong with black children? Did their parents not read to them enough? Was it their community? Their culture?

She went back to school, pursuing a Ph.D. in curriculum and teacher education from Stanford University, earning her degree in 1984.

In her research, she saw black children viewed as deficient and deviant. They weren't seen as children with problems. They were the problem.

None of this made sense to her and it wasn't helping improve learning outcomes.

So she decided to flip the question. Instead of asking what is wrong with black children, she began to ask what is right.

That meant asking questions about their teachers and their classrooms. It meant taking a hard look at how children were taught. What could be done to help teachers succeed and help their students?

"I had two hunches. One was that black students in classrooms with skilled teachers could be academically, culturally, socially and civically successful," she says. "My second hunch was that African American teachers, whose numbers were dwindling, were key to black student success."

In 1989, she was giving a talk in New York on culturally relevant teaching and effective instruction for black students. It was a chance meeting after her talk that brought her to UW-Madison, as told in an issue of the School of Education's Learning Connections.

"When I first heard Gloria speak, I could tell she had absolute clarity and a heightened consciousness about the problems and challenges facing students of color, and I believed that UW-Madison would be the ideal place for her to do this work," said Carl Grant, who today is UW-Madison's Hoefs-Bascom Professor of Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

When the talk was nearly over, Grant ran out of the room. And as Ladson-Billings was wrapping up with a Q & A, he was standing in the hall, gesturing to her. The two met a few moments later and Grant told Ladson-Billings she needed to come work at UW-Madison.

"I'm not going to Wisconsin," Ladson-Billings replied.

Grant was able to persuade Ladson-Billings to take a campus visit and deliver a presentation as part of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research's Minority Visiting Scholars Program. After a long day on the UW-Madison campus - meeting School of Education faculty members, dropping in on classes and giving presentations - Grant took Ladson-Billings to a dinner at then-Chancellor Donna Shalala's residence. Upon arrival, Shalala asked Ladson-Billings: "What do we have to do to get you here?" "I was caught so off guard," says Ladson-Billings. "I said, awkwardly, 'I already have a job.'

"And she said, 'That's not the question I asked you.' I'm like, 'Oh my God, who is this little lady?'"

She came to campus as an assistant professor specializing in social studies and multicultural education in the fall of 1991. She remembers fondly her time under Shalala's tutelage, referring to herself and a group of black women faculty members at UW-Madison as "the Class of Shalala."

The winters haven't exactly grown on her, but the community has.

She has helped the Madison Metropolitan School District with various projects while constantly traveling the country, and the world, speaking to rapt audiences about applying critical race theory to the field of education.

You don't have to stay if you don't like it, she kept telling herself. And she certainly had opportunities to leave.

Harvard and Vanderbilt tried to lure her away for faculty positions, while Stanford and Michigan State considered her for dean posts.

"I never went out job hunting but got offers and calls," Ladson-Billings says. "Every once in a while, if I'm down, I'll pull out the letters Harvard was sending me and think, 'They liked me. They really liked me!'"

For School of Education Dean Diana Hess, it's hard to imagine campus without her.

"This institution would have been a very different place if she hadn't been part of it," Hess says. "She's mentored and supported faculty, and worked to make school and campus more inclusive, more welcoming and more diverse."

Her many efforts have led to new models for examining ways to reduce academic disparity between mainstream and minority students. Research linked to culturally relevant pedagogy has been used by scholars around the world as a framework, with her work cited more than 40,000 times, according to Google Scholar.

During her time at UW-Madison, she has edited 12 books, published 49 journal articles and 65 book chapters. She has served as an advisor for 53 doctoral students, including 21 African American women.

Many of her former students have gone on to become professors or teachers, passing her lessons on. Hess thinks about the students who are impacted by Ladson-Billings even though they've never met her or maybe don't even know her name.

"I think we all hope to leave some kind of legacy, whether it's through our work, or our family or our activism or relationship with others. We want to have an impact that lasts," Hess says.

"Very few of us can match Gloria's legacy. We are different, we are better because of Gloria and that is part of her legacy."

Appreciative words were shared on a screen before her recent campus talk, illustrating how she has inspired:
"While in undergrad at Morehouse College, all these aspiring black men were given a copy of 'Dreamkeepers' by Dr. Billings. Her book reshaped our vision of education and ignited a drive for using education to build bridges into the American dream. Now as a judge, her leadership continues to ignite my passion and believe in every child's endless capacity for learning the need for cultural innovation so systems can meet the diverse educational dreams of our now generation. She is truly a divine light." "Gloria: Your voice of reason, inclusiveness and humanity resonates in my mind and hopefully has been passed on to my own students." "We need more Gloria Ladson-Billings in our lives. In our state and nation today, there are some toxic forces at work persuading us to position our schools as broken, our teachers as incompetent, our families as neglectful, and our children as criminals. GLB has provided us with perspectives that dismiss those fallacies and effective strategies for addressing those areas in desperate need of growth. Our children need to feel love, belonging, and recognition of their individual and collective gifts in order for them to thrive. We can do this better in our schools and communities. Let's get to work ya'll." "As the first African-American woman to be tenured in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at UW-Madison, Gloria has taught me that hard work and dedication pays off." "She has changed my life. Her love, friendship and support are immeasurable." "I want to be just like you when I grow up!"
Even though she's officially retired, her work isn't stopping. In November, Ladson-Billings began serving a four-year term as president of the National Academy of Education, which supports research for the advancement of education policy and practice in the United States. Its members are a select group of education experts from around the world.

Her accolades are numerous. In 2018, she was ranked No. 3 in Education Week blogger Rick Hess' annual ratings of the most influential education scholars in the U.S. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected Ladson-Billings to its 2018 class of members.

It's not the books or awards that she thinks about.

"They mean nothing to the everyday realities of black children who are abused and violated in our schools," Ladson-Billings says.

It's about the students. And it's about all of the people who will continue asking what is right with black children instead of what is wrong.

"They all represent my real legacy," she says. "They are the dream I had in public and they are our best hope for a true democracy."
This story is part of the UW Women at 150 series marking the 150th anniversary of the first women receiving undergraduate degrees at the university. Over the course of this academic year, University Communications will feature stories that celebrate the accomplishments of women at UW-Madison through the decades and recognize the challenges that remain, as well as the ways our views of gender have evolved and expanded.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gloria Ladson-Billings: Daring to dream in public

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The renowned scholar, who has helped change the way teachers teach African American children, was the first black woman to become a tenured professor in UW-Madison's School of Education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CASEL CASES: Let’s Listen to Our Young People: What Support Do They Need?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kawania Wooten's voice tightens when she describes the struggle she's having at the school her son attends. When his class created a timeline of civilization, Wooten saw the Greeks, the Romans and the Incas. But nothing was said about Africa, even though the class has several African American students.

Wooten, who is black, spoke to the school's director, a white woman - who insisted that the omission wasn't racially biased.

"Her first comment was, 'you know, we've just been following the curriculum. We're not talking about whether people are white or black,'" recalls Wooten, who lives in Bowie, Md. "I said that the children have eyes and they can see. And I'd like them to see that our culture was a strong, viable culture."

That kind of story brings a groan from Mark Benn, a psychologist and adjunct professor at Colorado State University. He hears similar tales whenever he delivers lectures about race relations.

Such incidents are examples of racial "colorblindness" - the idea that ignoring or overlooking racial and ethnic differences promotes racial harmony.

Trainers and facilitators say colorblindness does just the opposite: folks who enjoy racial privilege are closing their eyes to the experiences of others.

"It benefits me not to pay attention," says Benn, who is white. "I never have to question whether or not my race is being held in question when I apply for a job. It benefits me not to question that (because) it makes it look like I got here on my own."

Paying attention to the cultural experience of students is becoming increasingly important, given the differences between the demographics of American students and their teachers.

According to reports from the National Center for Education Statistics, roughly 80 percent of American teachers are white, while children of color make up more than 40 percent of the student body.

As the nation's demographics shift, the sight of a white teacher leaning over the desk of a brown or black student is likely become more and more common. In order to be effective, teachers will have to learn about the cultural experiences of their students, while using these experiences as a foundation for teaching. The approach is called culturally relevant pedagogy.

But that is hard to do if a teacher doesn't see differences as valuable. That means the blinders have to come off, says Randy Ross, a senior equity specialist at the New England Equity Assistance Center, a program of Brown University's Education Alliance. Ross facilitates workshops on racism and culturally responsive teaching. And in her experience, white people have the hardest time opening their eyes.

"I have never heard a teacher of color say 'I don't see color," Ross says. "There may be issues of cultural competence [among teachers of color], but colorblindness is not one of them. The core of 'I don't see color,' is 'I don't see my own color, I don't see difference because my race and culture is the center of the universe.'"

Such tunnel vision is the reason a teacher can omit Africa from a timeline of world civilizations, Ross says. Still, she cautions, the flaws of the colorblind approach run deeper than curriculum.

Failure to see and acknowledge racial differences makes it difficult to recognize the unconscious biases everyone has. Those biases can taint a teacher's expectations of a student's ability and negatively influence a student's performance. Study after study has shown that low teacher expectations are harmful to students from socially stigmatized groups.

In her article "Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for the Nineties and Beyond", Ana Maria Villegas pointed out that ignorance of cultural differences could lead teachers to "underestimate the true academic potential" of minority students.

"Teachers' judgments on students' potential have profound and long-lasting effects on students' lives," Villegas wrote. "For minority children in particular, such judgments or misjudgments may prove costly...

"The evidence is overwhelming. When compared to their 'high-ability' peers, 'low-ability' students are called on less often in class, given less time to respond, praised less frequently...and prompted less often in the case of incorrect responses."

Ross says a teacher who professes to be "colorblind" is not going to understand how unconscious biases can influence expectations, actions, and even the way a teacher addresses students of color.

After talking to her son's teacher, Kawania Wooten wondered whether her son was being harmed in just that way.

She'd asked for advice on helping the youngster complete a difficult project. Instead, the teacher immediately offered to give him easier work. Just as quickly, Wooten refused. Then she explained the racial subtext of the exchange: the white teacher doubted the intelligence of an African American child.

"I heard that expectations of my son were low," Wooten says.

Such misunderstandings could be avoided, she believes, if the teacher learned some things about African American culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kawania Wooten's voice tightens when she describes the struggle she's having at the school her son attends. When his class created a timeline of civilization, Wooten saw the Greeks, the Romans and the Incas. But nothing was said about Africa, even though the class has several African American students.

# data[].attributes.headline
Rubric for Recovery: How schools are educating marginalized students during COVID-19

# data[].attributes.subject
Rubric for Recovery: How schools are educating marginalized students during COVID-19

# data[].attributes.headline
Advancing Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) as a lever for Equity & Excellence

# data[].attributes.subject
Advancing Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) as a lever for Equity & Excellence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At Collaborative Classroom, we're dedicated to transforming the school experience, developing students, and empowering educators by deepening their teaching practices. Board member Zaretta Hammond is one of our best thought partners in this work, consistently pushing our thinking and challenging us to do better.

A national education consultant for the past 25 years and the author of the best-selling book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, Ms. Hammond joined the Collaborative Classroom Board of Trustees in 2018. In February 2020, we had the privilege of discussing instructional equity-both the big picture and classroom practice-with Ms. Hammond. We're delighted to share excerpts from this rich, wide-ranging conversation with you.

Collaborative Classroom: Equity has become a prominent topic in conversations about education reform. The term equity itself is worth taking the time to unpack and define before entering into discussion, especially since people use it in a variety of ways, with subtle but important distinctions. How do you sort through the various components of the equity question?

Zaretta Hammond: There are a couple of important but separate things in this question. The first is the definition of equity, and the other is the "equity question."

People talk about equity as if it had just one dimension, in an either-or way: it's this, or it's that. In reality, equity is a multifaceted and complex issue. I like the National Equity Project 's definition of educational, or instructional, equity: reducing the predictability of who succeeds and who fails, interrupting reproductive practices that negatively impact students, and cultivating the gifts and talents of every student.

When people define equity as if it had only one dimension, it's akin to the parable of the six blind men describing an elephant. As each man describes the one part of the animal that he is touching-a tail, an ear, a trunk, a leg, and so on-each arrives at a significantly different description of what an elephant is. Each man is accurately describing the part he's touching, and yet each description on its own is incomplete and even misleading. To make progress in educational equity, we need leaders, teachers, and other stakeholders to understand the different aspects of equity and how, when put together, they create more equitable outcomes for children.

To make progress in educational equity, we need leaders, teachers, and other stakeholders to understand the different aspects of equity and how, when put together, they create more equitable outcomes for children.

Once we get clear on our definitions and different aspects of equity work, we have to figure out how we enter into conversations that prepare us to transform instruction. Too often, we reduce equity to "courageous conversations" about implicit bias. This path into equity has its limits because there's typically no pivot to instruction. That said, the adult community in a school should engage in this work to become aware of the messages rooted in deficit thinking about the capacity and motivation of diverse students and families. But this type of equity conversation by itself is insufficient in improving outcomes of diverse students.

Then there is the "equity question" related to instruction. That's where conversations about instructional equity and culturally responsive teaching will come in. This facet of equity work requires us to remember that we are trying to improve instruction for diverse students who have historically been marginalized.

Here the equity conversation has to re-focus on helping underperforming students of color, immigrant students, and poor students of any color build their skills and become powerful learners. Here is where things get a little tricky. Most educators will agree there are gaps, but many believe the root of the "problem" is motivating children of color or increasing engagement, when, in fact, our public school systems were designed from the beginning to under-develop these students' cognitive resources.

What I call "inequity by design" was historically the brick and mortar of our school systems. Even today, these design elements are hardwired into our public school systems, resistant to superficial changes. But we often don't look at those institutional elements as part of our equity inquiry and conversations. Instead, we keep thinking schools that once worked got broken at some point, and now we need to fix them.

The reality: These systems are doing exactly what they were designed to do from the beginning, which is to churn out inequitable outcomes that create racial stratification in terms of who is college- and career-ready. This is a hard truth that many people don't want to acknowledge when we start having the "equity conversation."

Let's take the case of literacy development. When it comes to literacy, the research has told us how learning to read happens: learning sound/spelling correspondence accurately, then building fluency while simultaneously engaging in word study and comprehension.

But across the nation, too many minority children are more than one grade level behind in their reading, and it isn't due to a lack of student "motivation." It isn't solely because there are no books in the home. There is a historical pattern of putting the least prepared teachers with neediest students. That's an extension of our country's history of "anti-literacy" laws that penalized those who taught people of color to read. "Separate, but equal" continued this practice de facto. Jonathan Kozol in Savage Inequalities documented the same patterns well into the 1990s. This is a critical element to bring into equity conversations.

What I have seen out in the field in my 25-plus years as an educator, a teacher educator, and coach is that once a school team agrees that equity is important, they are challenged to get clear on the best approach when it comes to instruction. They are confronted with a new dilemma: distinguishing between multicultural education, social justice education, and culturally responsive education so they understand how each approach will (or won't) get them to instructional equity and the closing of the achievement gap. The biggest problem is they treat these three as if they are interchangeable, do the same things for student learning, and have the same impact on student outcomes. But they are not interchangeable and not all will get you to educational equity. (See Figure 1: "Distinctions of Equity")

Let's first look at multicultural education. When people believe multiculturalism leads to equity, they're usually envisioning a chain reaction: exposure to diverse books will encourage and inspire students, and therefore they'll acquire more self-esteem, and that self-esteem will cause students to lean in and achieve.

Many people think, "If we have lots of multicultural books, that will create conditions for equity and learning." It's the belief that diverse, multicultural texts create some kind of motivation that gets diverse students to engage and pay attention to the instruction offered. Many think having a multicultural classroom library makes them culturally responsive educators.

It's magical thinking to believe that despite not knowing how long vowels work, when students see a brown face in a book, somehow that will be a catalyst, and students will begin reading with greater fluency and comprehension.

In general, educators, especially at the elementary level, don't interrupt this wishful thinking around multicultural books because it's easy and appealing, especially when grappling with institutional equity around reading practices feels too complex.

Other educators have come to understand that multicultural education has its limits when it comes to instruction. Instead they focus on social justice education. But the misunderstanding that some educators have is, "If I simply discuss issues of oppression, read books about civil rights, their leaders, and people who worked against oppression, then my students' cultural identity will be affirmed."

Here's a thought to consider: Second graders don't want to talk about oppression, and when we as educators make that our sole focus, we're doing students a disservice.

Instead we must build their background knowledge across a wide array of topics. To comprehend texts with critical literacy and critical consciousness, students must be equipped with that deep background knowledge. The social justice paradigm would have us only talking about issues of inequity, bias, or how we become non-racist.

But we know that's not enough; the tendency is for that to get reduced into diverse books about boycotts and basketball or injustice topics of the day. Many social justice educators push back on the teaching of phonics and word study as oppressive when in fact, those elements of reading development are liberatory.

Keep in mind that social justice and multicultural education are useful and necessary in the equity conversation, but they play supporting roles. On their own they are not sufficient for effectively promoting instructional equity.

I believe that culturally responsive teaching as Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings framed it is the heart of instructional equity. This instructional approach leverages the science of learning by exploiting (for good) the cultural schema-or funds of knowledge-students come in with to make learning "sticky." When we build instructional practices around opportunities to process information in ways that make learning sticky, then students become able to carry more of the cognitive load that leads to doing more rigorous work. We focus on the cognitive development of underserved students and teach them how to be literate, competent readers and writers.

This is the vital equity work: students must comprehend what they're reading, possess advanced decoding skills, have word wealth, and be able to command all of these literacy skills. Our social justice frame should prompt us to ask these questions: How are students code breakers, how are they text users, how are they text critics, and how are they meaning-makers? Our culturally responsive pedagogies arm us to build these dispositions and skills in our most vulnerable kids.

This is the vital equity work: students must comprehend what they're reading, possess advanced decoding skills, have word wealth, and be able to command all of these literacy skills. Our social justice frame should prompt us to ask these questions: How are students code breakers, how are they text users, how are they text critics, and how are they meaning-makers? Our culturally responsive pedagogies arm us to build these dispositions and skills in our most vulnerable kids.

Collaborative Classroom: We've been speaking about the equity big picture and clarifying what equity means. Let's change the focus: what does instructional equity look like in a classroom? And when instructional equity is absent from a classroom, what might we notice?

Zaretta Hammond: Instructional equity happens when the teacher is scaffolding learning to the point that the scaffold at some moment falls away, so that the student becomes independent. Unfortunately, what I often see instead is over-scaffolding and permanent instructional crutches. Students remain dependent learners; they never internalize cognitive routines and procedures. In contrast, an independent learner knows the mental operations that she needs to use.

Instructional equity happens when the teacher is scaffolding learning to the point that the scaffold at some moment falls away, so that the student becomes independent. Unfortunately, what I often see instead is over-scaffolding and permanent instructional crutches. Students remain dependent learners; they never internalize cognitive routines and procedures.

If white or affluent parents see their child is not doing the work, they won't wait for the school to address the issue. They will get a tutor until the student learns to advance his literacy skills and internalize the cognitive structures he needs. Meanwhile school-dependent students are being conditioned to rely on the teacher to carry the cognitive load since the teacher never allows the scaffolding to fall away.

Teachers have been trained to shepherd these dependent learners through those procedures: We're going to get in groups and decide who's going to be the summarizer; can you be the visualizer now? We've taught reading and literacy well before mosaic of thought.

Teachers and leaders must ask themselves what the reproductive practices of inequity are. Frequently, the use of strategies, best practices, and summarizing practice dispossess the students of actually becoming independent. When educators defend their methods by characterizing them as "best practices," that is not sufficient justification. A "best practice" is often simply a popular practice. Just because many people use it does not mean it's effective. We still have children in our schools who are not reading at grade level. When we call these practices "best," is the unspoken message that these children can't learn to read?

Collaborative Classroom: In your experience, where are we more likely to see teachers consistently coaching their students toward becoming independent learners? Do you think that in wealthier schools, on average, teachers tend to shift the cognitive load more onto students?

Zaretta Hammond: First, let's not forget about inequity by design. For more affluent populations, especially White communities, schools were designed to develop student capacity to "learn how to learn," which builds cognitive structures. These structures, like strong muscles, allow one to carry the weight of heavy thinking, comprehending and reading of complex text. So, yes: the expectation is that in wealthier schools, students learn the skills earlier on and get the practice necessary to carry that cognitive load.

This isn't the blueprint for most schools in lower income or rural communities, especially those with larger numbers of children of color and emergent English learners. We see just the opposite happening. There's a tendency to underestimate the intellectual capacity of diverse students and give them low-level tasks, while the teacher carries most of the cognitive load. In practice, this means that the teacher over-scaffolds the lesson, and the over-scaffolding becomes a crutch. The students may get through the lesson, but they haven't internalized the learning because of the over-scaffolding and the lack of productive struggle.

Having students carry more of the cognitive load and allowing the scaffolding to fall away over time is what stimulates brain growth, so that cognitively your brain says, 'Oh, I need to step up. I need to get stronger. I need to figure that out.'

We have to make the brain work. This is [psychologist Lev] Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development," commonly called the "ZPD." When is that brain going to work a little bit? It has to be the right amount of work. It can't be too much, or the brain just shuts down. This is the work of teachers: they must understand how to move students into their ZPD, and recognize that their students won't go into it spontaneously or willingly, and that's natural. They need to be coached (not coaxed), like an athlete. Without coaching and the right level of support, students can't get into the learning zone.

Instead, we postpone more challenging, interesting work until we believe they have mastered "the basics," which are often low level. All the emerging cognitive neuroscience tells us to do just the opposite: you have to "water up" instruction to get kids into the learning zone. Teachers must give students tasks during the day in which they have to stretch themselves, and it should feel a little cognitively confusing by design. Let's use military boot camp as an analogy. Boot camp prepares soldiers by making them go through grueling training, and that at the end of that eight weeks, they are like, oh, snap! I can do new things. I can do hard things. They've trained, they've been stretched, and they're now stronger.

Just as the science of fitness informs us that building our body's physical capacity occurs via stretching ourselves-which in turn triggers the body to grow stronger-the science of learning informs us of the same in building powerful reading brains: The more productive struggle, the more the brain grows.

Just as the science of fitness informs us that building our body's physical capacity occurs via stretching ourselves-which in turn triggers the body to grow stronger-the science of learning informs us of the same in building powerful reading brains: The more productive struggle, the more the brain grows.

How are we reversing the systemic underdevelopment of these students? Reversing is taking students from being dependent learners who rely on over-scaffolding and helping them become independent learners. How do students become code breakers, text users, text critics? How do they engage in critical literacy? How do they think about text? Are students asking, Who is writing this text? What's the author's point of view? Do I believe him as a reliable narrator? What is he trying to say to me? Or, if it's nonfiction, are they asking, What has been left out of this? Whose story is this? Students need that ability. That is ultimately where we want them, but we know those areas have to be cultivated. Then by the time they get to fourth, fifth, ideally sixth grade, we can just focus on deepening those abilities.

Collaborative Classroom: You've mentioned teachers needing to "water up" offerings and instruction to give students work that makes them stretch. What do you think of the current trend of providing material at grade level or higher?

Zaretta Hammond: Let's put this into historical context. Districts have gotten dinged during No Child Left Behind for not providing access to high-quality materials at grade level. So, in many ways we have over-corrected. Now the mandate is to provide only grade-level text, even if students are well below grade level. It's an equity issue. The solution is not simply to provide all text at grade level.

Grade-level texts need to be accompanied by focused instruction using responsive pedagogies that focus on advanced decoding, building word wealth, and deepening background knowledge. Why? In face of such mandates, we have a tendency to fall back on over-scaffolding so students get through the text with a bunch of workarounds-like just asking them to summarize or visualize as simple comprehension strategies when their fluency is low and decoding slow. Under those conditions, these once-helpful strategies become negative reproductive practices leading to inequity.

Here's the reality: These teacher workarounds can't go with the child to the next class or into a testing situation. That's why teachers need to "water up" instruction to give students the deliberate practice to strengthen their skills before they have to work through texts in a unit.

As educators we must ask ourselves: Are the children in our care coming through our programs reading at grade level? Are they feeling competent and confident as readers and writers? This is our goal in defining equity so that it's more than a buzz word.
***
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from our interview with Collaborative Classroom Board of Trustees member Zaretta Hammond. We also invite you to watch the recording of our recent Facebook Live conversation with Ms. Hammond.

Zaretta Hammond is a national education consultant and author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. She joined the Collaborative Classroom Board of Trustees in November of 2018.
She holds a Master's in Secondary English Education, with a concentration in Writing Instruction, from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is a former high school and community college expository writing instructor. Ms. Hammond has also served as an adjunct instructor at St. Mary's College School of Education in Moraga, California, where she taught The Foundations of Adolescent Literacy. As a consultant, she has advised and provided professional development to school districts and non-profit organizations across the country around issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive teaching for the past 25 years.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Conversation About Instructional Equity with Zaretta Hammond | Center for the Collaborative Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At Collaborative Classroom, we're dedicated to transforming the school experience, developing students, and empowering educators by deepening their teaching practices. Board member Zaretta Hammond is one of our best thought partners in this work, consistently pushing our thinking and challenging us to do better.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Pieces of Stress & Anxiety by Elford Rawls-Dill, PhD

# data[].attributes.subject
The Pieces of Stress & Anxiety by Elford Rawls-Dill, PhD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
So, I have been stressed the hell out lately. Like, really stressed out. I know, we all have been experiencing so much collective trauma and anxiety lately but I'm here to speak about my own stress. Empathy is important but right now, I need to be selfish. Sorry, I know that doesn't sound quite right; me, a husband, father, son, brother, educator, friend, and all of that... being selfish. When the world closes in and the walls begin to tighten, where does one turn? We all have our escapes, or do we? Sometimes, like now sometimes, I feel trapped and helpless. Yes, with all of my knowledge of emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and positive affirmation, I still feel trapped and squeezed by the world.

As I write this, I can hear my son in the background laughing and enjoying his free-time with friends. His laughter, although jovial, does not quell the wrenching feeling of not being "in control" of anxiety and stress. So, where does your stress and anxiety take you? The popular answer might be "the gym" or "yoga", or even "long walks." But, what are the unpopular answers? You know, the answers we all have but never actually "give". Well, I think it's important to "keep it real". The harsh truth is better than falsehood, right? So, rather than hiding behind the mask, I need to talk to my community about the importance of being vulnerable.

Feelings of inadequacy. Maybe you never get this feeling, but I will tell you, I have been feeling so inadequate lately. During the last 8 months, my confidence level and overall sense of efficacy has nearly all but diminished. As a husband, father, son, brother, friend, and professional, I have simply felt useless and underwhelming. There was a time that I felt pretty accomplished in these areas but now, I don't even think myself to be average. Finding moments of feeling "good enough" have been fleeting; I have searched and searched but at this moment, I just can't seem to find that "feeling" of worth and accomplishment in these areas of my life. Is it ok for me to feel like this? Or, more importantly, is it alright for me to speak on these feelings? I know, I know, I have to be resilient, right? That's what we all have to be, right?
Resilient Gritty Strong
Sometimes, I hate those words. They are always showing up when you least want to see them; they show up in all of those conversations we have with ourselves in the mirror and they usually talk like this: "You got this!" or "God hasn't brought you this far to allow you to fail." And then there's the infamous, "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger."

Well, I'm talking about a different approach at his point. An approach of telling the truth about how I feel and why I feel the way I feel. It sounds like the normal thing we all should do, right? But telling the truth about our innermost feelings of self-doubt and emotional weakness is usually the last horse to leave the barn. If you're like me, you hold onto those thoughts until they fight themselves out into the open like they are doing to me right now.

People love me, I have support systems, I love myself, and I love those back who love me. But, that does not always excuse or release the feelings of anxiety and stress. So, don't be so fast to look at a situation from the outside and think you have it figured out and solved. The complexities of our human experiences are not to be underestimated or undervalued. These feelings are things and we must treat them as such. This is not a ploy for anyone to "reach out" but it is a message to all to say, "it's ok to not be ok."

So, let's start by being real about how stressed and afraid we might be. Let us be honest about not being "in control" and "good". It is alright to be vulnerable and insecure. In fact, it is important to let those feelings find spaces to occupy outside of your mind; the only way to do so, is by being real and not keeping these feelings as prisoners.
- Elford Rawls-Dill, Ph.D. We Wear the Mask We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, - This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
- Paul Laurence Dunbar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
So, I have been stressed the hell out lately. Like, really stressed out. I know, we all have been experiencing so much collective trauma and anxiety lately but I'm here to speak about my own stress. Empathy is important but right now, I need to be selfish.

# data[].attributes.headline
Most superintendents say they're not 'very well prepared' to lead race, equity conversations

# data[].attributes.subject
Most superintendents say they're not 'very well prepared' to lead race, equity conversations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dive Brief:

Dive Insight:

The 2020 survey results, centered on the roles and demographics of school and district leaders, comes at a time when schools across the nation are attempting comprehensive approaches for addressing diversity and antiracist practices .

The AASA study also shows student populations are becoming increasingly diverse, although several groups say much more work is needed to . According to the survey, 34% of respondents worked in districts where less than 5% of students were non-White, compared to improve racial and socioeconomic integration almost 50% in 2010, said Tienken, who offered a sneak-peek at the 2020 study results.

The preliminary findings also show women are filing into school superintendent roles but still represent only one-fourth of the top district leadership positions nationwide.

Even though the increase in women superintendents from 24.1% in 2010 to 26.68% in 2020 represents only a 2.5 percentage point increase, it is more than double the 13.1% documented in 2000, said Tienken, an associate professor of education leadership, management and policy at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

Tienken predicts there will be a higher percentage of female superintendents in the 2030 study because data shows the percentage of female principals is growing. The 2020 study shows women now account for 67% of elementary school principals, 40% of middle school principals and 33% of high school principals. A typical pathway to superintendent roles is through a principalship, said Tienken.

"A majority of educators are females," Tienken said. "We're interested that females are represented in superintendent roles."

However, people of color are still underrepresented in the superintendency. The 2020 study shows women of color represent almost 13% of all female superintendents, and men of color represent 7% of all male superintendents. The results may help educators understand the national context as they work to diversify the superintendency through policy, professional development, superintendent preparation programs and more, Tienken said.

Among other highlights Tienken shared from the 2020 study's preliminary findings, based on survey answers from 1,218 superintendents across the country from April to June 2019:

The complete survey results will be available in January, Tienken said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Most superintendents say they're not 'very well prepared' to lead race, equity conversations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 2020 survey results, centered on the roles and demographics of school and district leaders, comes at a time when schools across the nation are attempting comprehensive approaches for addressing diversity and antiracist practices . The AASA study also shows student populations are becoming increasingly diverse, although several groups say much more work is needed to .

# data[].attributes.headline
Teaching Tolerance, Diversity, Equity, and Justice

# data[].attributes.subject
Teaching Tolerance, Diversity, Equity, and Justice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Understanding how school discipline policies can contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline is essential for educators and families. Harsh punishments, automatic out-of-class time and police involvement for discipline can push young people out of classrooms and into the criminal legal system. But educators, parents and caregivers can help to change this harmful system by advocating for and implementing practices that prioritize mental health and well-being.

We offer this new resource page that highlights LFJ articles and content to open dialogue, shift practices and foster change to benefit all young people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning for Justice | Education Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The List - From Slavery to George Floyd (Detailed w Sources)

# data[].attributes.headline
High school SEL requires approach geared to teens' changes

# data[].attributes.subject
High school SEL requires approach geared to teens' changes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dive Brief:

While social-emotional learning lessons are commonly found in elementary school, they are less likely to be in high school curriculum, writes , citing a 2019 survey, "Support for Social and Emotional Learning is Widespread," from the . Yet teens still have a need for these tools, as they make the shift into adulthood.

There are ways for educators to work SEL lessons into existing classes for teens. One way is to designate the first few minutes at the start of class to ask high school students to mention what they're grateful for. Another is to have teenagers play simple games, such as passing a ball to one another, designed to connect them together - and perhaps even laugh.

Educators may also want to scale back homework, which can relieve stress for not just students but teachers as well. And schools can consider assigning an adult to each teen, someone who regularly checks in with them - separate from their academic needs - to make sure they feel someone is connecting to them on a personal level.

Dive Insight:

Pressures and life changes are different for teens than for children at theelementary and middle school level - from physical hormone adjustments, to social pressure from peer groups, as well as facing the transition into adulthood that could mean leaving home for college, living on their own, or finding work.

There are often classes devoted to some of these needs, from job training courses to those that focus on health and wellness . But SEL skills can just as equally be woven into existing courses, whether that's or English, politics or literature, where human emotions and communication are explored and studied, and can be used to help students examine these in themselves as well.

Empathy and social awareness, core SEL skills, can be interwoven into English language arts classes, for example, by having high school students examine texts they're reading for different perspectives, as suggests in its high school guidelines. Then there's active listening skills , which can even be taught online, a key SEL lesson that can help teens learn how to listen to each other. This is not only useful in defusing peer issues, but also in how they support each other as they collaborate on school work.

Politics courses, where subject matter and discussions can be polarizing, can also be harnessed to teach self-management skills. The nonprofit Common Sense hosts a free online lesson, designed specifically for high schoolers, that teaches strategies for managing civil discourse, and how to apply them when and if tempers start to flare.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
High school SEL requires approach geared to teens' changes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While social-emotional learning lessons are commonly found in elementary school, they are less likely to be in high school curriculum, writes , citing a 2019 survey, "Support for Social and Emotional Learning is Widespread," from the . Yet teens still have a need for these tools, as they make the shift into adulthood.

# data[].attributes.headline
Brown University's Teaching Diverse Learners 

# data[].attributes.subject
Brown University's Teaching Diverse Learners 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges. Its mission was to enhance learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students and focused on district and school improvement with special attention to underperformance and issues of equity and diversity. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/7eez-dz04

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brown Digital Repository | Collection | The Education ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges.

# data[].attributes.headline
Courageous Conversations About Race by Glenn E. Singleton

# data[].attributes.subject
Courageous Conversations About Race by Glenn E. Singleton

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
COURAGEOUS CONVERSATION® is our award-winning protocol for effectively engaging, sustaining and deepening interracial dialogue. Through our Framework for Systemic Racial Equity Transformation, we help individuals and organizations address persistent racial disparities intentionally, explicitly, and comprehensively.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
COURAGEOUS CONVERSATION® is our award-winning protocol for effectively engaging, sustaining and deepening interracial dialogue. Through our Framework for Systemic Racial Equity Transformation, we help individuals and organizations address persistent racial disparities intentionally, explicitly, and comprehensively.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit 

# data[].attributes.subject
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When the first edition of Hope in the Dark was published in mid-2004 it gained an instant cult audience. Many readers were so inspired by Solnit's book that they bought multiple copies to give to friends. This new, significantly expanded edition covers, among other things, the political territory of America and the world after George Bush's re-election.

Acclaimed author Rebecca Solnit draws on her life as a writer and activist, on the events of our moment, on our deepest past, to argue for hope?hope even in the dark. Solnit reminds us of how changed the world has been by the activism of the past five decades. Offering a dazzling account of some of the least expected of those changes, she proposes a vision of cause-and-effect relations that provides new grounds for political engagement in the present. Counting historic victories?from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising to Seattle in 1999 to the worldwide marches against war in Iraq to Cancun in September 2003?she traces the rise of a sophisticated, supple, nonviolent new movement that unites all the diverse and fragmentary issues of the eighties and nineties in our new century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When the first edition of Hope in the Dark was published in mid-2004 it gained an instant cult audience. Many readers were so inspired by Solnit's book that they bought multiple copies to give to friends. This new, significantly expanded edition covers, among other things, the political territory of America and the world after George Bush's re-election.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Description

"After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

"To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is therecord of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.

Reviews

"After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire

"Passionately defines the Black feminist point of view that needs to be reflected upon in classroom discussions." -- Contemporary Education

" Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks is a book that I not only love, but assign every semester to my Introduction to Women's Studies class. It is one of the best descriptions of the purpose and function of education and the educator that I've ever read. And students love it. So if you know any professors or students who aren't familiar with it, recommend it highly." -- Feminist Bookstore News

" Teaching to Transgress is useful as a platform for a critique of current notions and practices of teaching and learning." -- Canadian Home Economics Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom.

# data[].attributes.body
A great website of curated materials grounded in themes of social justice, gender identity, racial injustice, etc.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Zinn Education Project is my compass in a sea of corporate textbooks, packaged common core curriculum and standardized testing. My entire curriculum is based on lessons that can be found on the Zinn Education Project.

High School Social Studies Teacher, Portland, Ore.

Your support is needed to help more students learn people's history. 100% of Zinn Education Project funding comes from individuals like you. Donate today.

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

From voter ID laws to voter-roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures to the deadly in-person voting conditions during a pandemic, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high. It is critical that students learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present.

Nov. 30, 1924: Shirley Chisholm Born...

Teaching About the Violence in Palestine and Israel...

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

-Howard Zinn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn's best-selling book A People's History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

# data[].attributes.headline
Pedagogy of The Oppressed by Paulo Friere 

# data[].attributes.subject
Pedagogy of The Oppressed by Paulo Friere 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the foundational texts in the field of critical pedagogy, which attempts to help students question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that dominate.

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.

This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor and interviews with Marina Aparicio Barberán, Noam Chomsky, Ramón Flecha, Gustavo Fischman, Ronald David Glass, Valerie Kinloch, Peter Mayo, Peter McLaren and Margo Okazawa-Rey to inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come. [Publisher's description.]

ISBN: 9781501314131 | Bloomsbury

Excerpt from Pedagogy of the Oppressed

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.

. . . .A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals itself its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration - contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Pará is Belém." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Pará is Belém," that is, what Belém means for Pará and what Pará means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence-but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.

The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

About Paulo Freire - A brief biography from the Freire Institute

Paulo Freire was born on September 19, 1921 in Recife, Brazil. In 1947 he began work with illiterate adults in North-East Brazil and gradually evolved a method of work with which the word conscientization has been associated.

Until 1964 he was professor of history and philosophy of education in the University of Recife and in the 1960s he was involved with a popular education movement to deal with massive illiteracy. From 1962 there were widespread experiments with his method and the movement was extended under the patronage of the federal government. In 1963 - 64 there were courses for coordinators in all Brazilian states and a plan was drawn up for the establishment of 2000 cultural circles to reach 2,000,000 illiterates.

Freire was imprisoned following the 1964 coup d'etat for what the new regime considered to be subversive elements in his teaching. He next appeared in exile in Chile where his method was used and the UN School of Political Sciences held seminars on his work. In 1969-70 he was visiting professor at the Centre for the Study of Development and Social Change at Harvard University.

He then went to the World Council of Churches in Geneva where, in 1970, he took up a post as special consultant in the Office of Education. Over the next nine years in that post he advised on education reform and initiated popular education activities with a range of groups.

Paulo Freire was able to return to Brazil by 1979. Freire joined the Workers' Party in Sao Paulo and headed up its adult literacy project for six years. When the party took control of Sao Paulo municipality following elections in 1988, Paulo Freire was appointed as Sao Paulo's Secretary of Education.

Freire died in 1997.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Zinn Education Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Book - Non-fiction. By Paulo Freire. 1968; republished in 2000, 2018. 192 pages. Classic text on critical pedagogy.

# data[].attributes.headline
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros 

# data[].attributes.subject
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)

"A classic. . . . This little book has made a great space for itself on the shelf of American literature." - Julia Alvarez

" Afortunado! Lucky! Lucky the generation who grew up with Esperanza andThe House on Mango Street. And lucky future readers. This funny, beautiful book will always be with us." - Maxine Hong Kingston

"Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage . . . and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one." -The New York Times Book Review

"Marvelous . . . spare yet luminous. The subtle power of Cisneros's storytelling is evident. She communicates all the rapture and rage of growing up in a modern world." -San Francisco Chronicle

"A deeply moving novel...delightful and poignant. . . . Like the best of poetry, it opens the windows of the heart without a wasted word." -Miami Herald

"Sandra Cisneros is one of the most brillant of today's young writers. Her work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful . . . rich with music and picture." - Gwendolyn Brooks

Just for joining you'll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

Success!

Your account has been created. Upload book purchases, access your personalized book recommendations, and more from here. GOT IT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: 9780679433354 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago * Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers...

# data[].attributes.headline
Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes 

# data[].attributes.subject
Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes 

# data[].attributes.body
This poem was written in 1935 by the brilliant Langston Hughes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

O, let America be America again- And yet must be-the land where
The land that never has been yet-

every man is free. The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain-
All, all the stretch of these great green states-
And make America again!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let America Be America Again - Let America be America again.

# data[].attributes.body
Understanding the importance of feeling "worth" and "belonging".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dena Simmons: How students of color confront impostor syndrome

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As a black woman from a tough part of the Bronx who grew up to attain all the markers of academic prestige, Dena Simmons knows that for students of color, success in school sometimes comes at the cost of living authentically.

# data[].attributes.headline
Oakland Is Leading the Fight for Our Kids’ Literacy

# data[].attributes.subject
Oakland Is Leading the Fight for Our Kids’ Literacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The world looks very different right now. From the COVID-19 pandemic and wildfires that have destroyed parts of the West Coast to growing social unrest, we're facing a lot of uncertainties. But one thing has unfortunately stayed the same - the abysmal literacy rates for Black and Brown children in Oakland.

In the midst of fear, scarcity, and uncertainty, those who are the closest to the pain are often the most creative and resourceful. So, before the school year began, I asked myself, - what would happen if underserved communities had some slight relief? What would happen if we bet on our community and placed our faith Oaklanders?

In September, my organization Energy Convertors, which focuses on building the agency of the end-users of public education, partnered with Educate78 to create a fund that builds on that bet. The People's Literacy Fund is a $100,000 initiative that will provide mini-grants between $500 - $5,000 to Oaklanders to improve literacy in our community. We want to lift up the voices of people from our community that are finding innovative ways to ensure more kids are reading at grade level while offering some type of relief during a global pandemic. It is an opportunity for all of us to get a lesson in creativity and resilience, while being a good neighbor during these challenging times.

The People's Literacy Fund is very personal for me. When I moved to the Bay Area, I was 10 years old and had an uncertain future ahead of me. My family and I would eventually live in four shelters - two in Oakland and two in San Francisco. My parents did the best that they could and even through rehab and jail stints, they were still able to raise a Black boy that never left the honor roll and would someday become a doctor, author, and entrepreneur. Here's the thing, though -no one ever asked how they did it. No one ever asked just how they made it work for me. What people miss is that Black and Brown families teach their kids to thrive academically despite all of the barriers we're up against.

We are not blessing these families by offering relief through this money - they are blessing us with ingenuity, resilience, and a brilliance most people will never possess. Again, the people of Oakland are our biggest asset. Any person that is figuring out how to live in an ever-changing Oakland with red skies, insanely expensive rent, a crazy homeless problem, massive gentrification, and schools failing Black and Brown children while still teaching their kids how to read are true innovators that we can learn from. Creating a more equitable public education system is more than just about funding. It's about shifting our perspective on what and who we value.

I expect nothing less from the land of the Black Panthers.

Dr. Charles Cole, III​ is an educator focused on the advancement of youth of color, but more specifically Black males. This passion comes from his experiences growing up without proper support, including being homeless and attending more than ten elementary schools across the country while his parents battled addiction and incarceration. Throughout that experience, no adult, no group, no organization ever asked him how he was achieving success nor how he was surviving. Schools were not a place where students in similar predicaments were learning. This experience helped lead to the publication of his first book, ​ Beyond Grit and Resilience ​ . As founder of ​ Energy Convertors​ , Charles comes from the community and has shared many of the students' experiences. Previously Charles served as a social worker, a Director for Teach for America, the Vice Chair of the California Young Democrats, Black Caucus and at a director's level with various youth-focused nonprofits. n addition to founding Energy Convertors, Charles is a national speaker and a writer, and he can be found in Oakland and around the country working with youth on how to equip themselves appropriately to lay the groundwork for a bright future. Charles is currently a board member of ​ UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital​ , and co-host of the ​ 8 Black Hands Podcast . ​ Charles' life goal is to better the communities he grew up in, which include Chicago, Paducah, KY, and Oakland.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Oakland Is Leading the Fight for Our Kids' Literacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world looks very different right now. From the COVID-19 pandemic and wildfires that have destroyed parts of the West Coast to growing social unrest, we're facing a lot of uncertainties. But one thing has unfortunately stayed the same - the abysmal literacy rates for Black and Brown children in Oakland.

# data[].attributes.headline
For Black educators when school systems aren't doing enuf

# data[].attributes.subject
For Black educators when school systems aren't doing enuf

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Dena Simmons

I write these words a week after the Breonna Taylor verdict and two days after the first presidential debate, where I watched President Trump uphold white supremacy. I wish I could let these events slide off me, but they haunt, they nag, and they remind me yet again that Black lives do not matter. Other wounds of 2020 already fester-George Floyd's public execution, Ahmaud Arbery's last run, the disproportionate number of Black people impacted by COVID-19, and on and on.

Last week, a white man wrote me an email starting with, "I trust you are well." I responded, "These days, I don't think we can trust that anyone is well, especially Black women. I am not well. We are not well."

When schools shut down last spring, Black educators not only worried about how we would become virtual instructors overnight, but we also mourned Black death and police brutality. We agonized over our safety in a country that seems to care only about Black productivity and labor. Still, we tucked our pain into our pockets and pushed through like we always do. We smiled during video meetings with colleagues and students when all we wanted to do was cry. We served on antiracism committees. We stayed up late to learn new virtual engagement programs. We wrote lessons. We recommended books to white colleagues, who had recently discovered racism. We bit our tongues. We taught. We led schools and districts. We fumbled. We failed. We succeeded.

This fall, already battered and broken by constant reminders of anti-Blackness, we showed up again-this time to virtual and hybrid-modeled schools, even after antiracist instruction was deemed "unpatriotic" by some, even after some families complained that saying "Black Lives Matter" was "too political." Despite it all, we showed up. We always show up. Because we know our work is critical to Black youth in white-dominated school systems. Because we want a better, antiracist future. Because we know the power of teaching and learning in creating that future-even if it comes at a cost.

But we are exhausted.
The right to self-care
Black scholar and poet Audre Lorde once said, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." She wrote these words after being diagnosed with cancer twice and denied medical leave from the academic institution where she worked. The context of her words, coupled with the health disparities heightened recently by COVID-19, highlights that care has not been equitably distributed. As it pertains to Black educators, this itself is an equity issue for schools.

There is a paucity of research that explores the unique well-being of Black educators, but what I can tell you from my experience is that when I returned home to the Bronx to become a teacher, I carried my own traumas into my classroom. Then I inherited those of my students. I spent nights tossing and turning about what more I could do for my students. I never once wondered what more I could do for myself. I was perpetually tired and often sick from trying to do too much, from trying to be someone else's savior.

Back then, I did not know the dangers of saviorism or the importance of self-care, and I burned out. I now know that none of us can do anything well if we are unwell. If we have nothing left of ourselves, what do we have to offer?

After experiencing a traumatic event recently, I had no choice but to focus on my self-care no matter how self-indulgent it felt. As part of my healing journey, I incorporated exercise, journaling, therapy, and meditation back into my life. I connected with friends and family virtually and committed to getting more sleep. I also started setting boundaries to protect my time, energy, and spirit. And I am healing, but I still have a long way to go before I feel whole again.

This pandemic has cemented for me that self-care must be part of our Black liberation, especially in a world where, as Black poet Lucille Clifton writes, we have to "celebrate / with that everyday / something has tried to kill [her] / and has failed." Indeed, every day, something is trying to kill us-the microaggressions, the discrimination, the harassment, the anti-Black racism, the police, and, and, and. To counteract these daily injuries, we must honor our minds, bodies, and spirits so that we can nurture those of our students, especially our Black students who are struggling, too. We have to stop believing that our work, our exertion, is our only worth-a lie told to us by an economic system founded on whiteness, founded on Black stolen labor.
Better working environments
Yet while self-care is necessary and recommended, it is not enough. We could set all the boundaries in the world, take all the exercise classes, sleep for all the hours, eat all the right foods, see the best therapists, and still be unwell. Why? Because many of us work in school systems and environments that undo all our good self-work with performative antiracism racism, toxicity, and hostility.

In the absence of literature on Black teachers' mental health specifically, I want to share the findings of a 2019 Teach Plus and Education Trust report, which revealed that teachers of color: 1) experience antagonistic school cultures; 2) feel undervalued; 3) are deprived of agency and autonomy; 4) navigate unfavorable work conditions; and 5) bear the high cost of being a teacher of color.

As a result of these obstacles, Black educators are always having to heal new wounds, getting caught up in a vicious cycle of obsessive self-care strategies to treat systemic problems. We need school systems to take better care of us so that we are not always in desperate need of repair at the end of each school day. We need school systems that do not spirit-murder us. We need school systems to give us the time and resources to learn, plan, create, and reflect for superior instruction and relationship-building with students. We need the space to heal when the world reminds us yet again of its disregard for Black life. We need practices, policies, and structures that build in care for educators, especially Black educators, who already carry the burden of living in an anti-Black world. We need to be valued, respected, heard, and affirmed.

Above all, we need school systems to start this work by asking us what we need to thrive, to feel safe, and to be whole.

School systems cannot solve for antiracism if they continue to be traumatic places for Black educators and if Black educators are only valued and asked to lead when antiracism is trendy. Now is the time for school systems to look within themselves, to live out the equity in their mission statements, and to make actionable plans for community and collective care, for the honoring of Black lives, and for the antiracist future we all deserve.
About the author
Dena Simmons is a lifelong learner, educator, and activist who supports schools throughout the nation in implementing social and emotional learning and culturally responsive and equitable practices. She is the author of the forthcoming book, White Rules for Black People (St. Martin's Press, 2021). Follow her on .
This post is adapted from a forthcoming article in Educational Leadership. For more Educational Leadership stories, become an ASCD member.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For Black educators when school systems aren't doing enuf - ASCD Inservice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Dena Simmons I write these words a week after the Breonna Taylor verdict and two days after the first presidential debate, where I watched President Trump uphold white supremacy. I wish I could let these events slide off me, but they haunt, they nag, and they remind me yet again that Black lives do [...]

# data[].attributes.body
Website for CASEL describing the framework for SEL

# data[].attributes.body
This is an awesome article on Dr. Dena Simmons's work on SEL and Equity!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1. Engage in Vigilant Self-Awareness

People who are white or perceived as white have more privilege and fewer barriers to resources than Black people and other people of color. If we do not know our power, we can abuse it unintentionally or fail to leverage it toward antiracism. Constant self-reflection enhances our ability to disrupt white privilege when we see or enact it. Some questions to ask yourself include

How does your identity provide or prevent access to necessary resources?

How does your power and privilege show up in your work with students, take up space, or silence others?

What single narratives are you telling yourself about students, and how does that affect grading, behavior management, and other interactions?

Do you and the academic materials you use uphold whiteness or lift up the voices and experiences of people of color?

2. Acknowledge Racism and the Ideology of White Supremacy

Acknowledging the social construct of race and racism and the ideology of white supremacy recognizes the problem so that we are not harmful in our ignorance and so that, together, we can strive for solutions. For educators of color, the work means continuing to call out racism and recruiting white coconspirators to join in antiracist work.

3. Study and Teach Representative History

No matter what subject you teach, history (including African American history, which is U.S. history) is important. Knowing our country's whole history helps us make sense of how our current education system perpetuates inequity.

For too long, we have taught U.S. history devoid of a true depiction of Black excellence and have focused on erasing the truth of racial oppression and uplifting whiteness. Our curriculum superficially talks about slavery and civil rights (notably, textbook provider McGraw-Hill called enslaved Africans "immigrants" and "workers" ), and teaching practices risk traumatizing Black students by enacting mock slave auctions, slave games, and underground railroad games. Alternately, resources such as Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS documentary series on Reconstruction or The New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project provide a comprehensive opportunity to learn and discuss history and race with colleagues and students. The Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools also have teaching materials that explore topics like the Tulsa race riots and colonization.

4. Talk About Race with Students

To open up conversations with young people, use stories from history and literature as a starting point, and ask students to take on the perspective of a character about whom they are reading. Reading literature and role-playing enhance empathy and other social cognitive skills. Teaching Tolerance's resource, " Let's Talk: Discussing Race, Racism, and Other Difficult Topics," includes suggestions for working through discomfort. The Educational Leadership article " Helping Students Discuss Race Openly " also has a great list of steps to begin the conversation. (And the September 2019 issue of this newsletter includes guidance from educator Liz Kleinrock on how to lead students through challenging topics like race .)

5. When You See Racism, Do Something

Most important, when we see racism-whether at the individual or policy level-we must have the courage to act. White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo provides guidance for engaging in gentle but firm conversations with offenders that prevents the defensiveness that race conversations inspire. Share data on specific practices and use stories to humanize the data. Build partnerships with racial-justice organizations in your communities to integrate their work in teaching and learning. Form a taskforce to assess data, policies, and practices with an antiracist lens to disrupt systemic decisions that historically have disenfranchised people of color. Be mindful that these efforts should not be carried solely by the people of color in your school, who are living and struggling with racism on a daily basis.

Shape an Antiracist Future

In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes, "The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' ... One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist'" (p. 9). Teaching for an antiracist future starts with us, the educators. An antiracist educator actively works to dismantle the structures, policies, institutions, and systems that create barriers and perpetuate race-based inequities for people of color. Educating students to see and respect the humanity and dignity of all people should be a national imperative, especially if we want to heal-and have a future-as a nation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Educators have an obligation to confront the harm of racism, says one social-emotional learning expert.