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"How can we counter the negative narratives about what certain kids can and can't do?"

"Particularly when it comes to something like Project Based Learning, there is a whole school of thought that certain kids aren't ready. That is part of the inequity by design." This message about our education system was delivered by PBL World 2020 keynoter Zaretta Hammond this morning. It really resonated, since it's key to PBLWorks' mission to ensure all students, no matter where they live or what their background, have access to quality PBL.

Zaretta Hammond is a renowned voice for educational equity, consultant, and the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.

Today is Day 2 of the first-ever online version of our PBL World event (which btw is going very well for the 1000+ attendees!). We heard Zaretta speak for about 15 minutes, then her audience had a chance to ask several follow-up questions, moderated masterfully by Gina Olabuenaga, our director of curriculum. We'll be making a video recording of the speech public after this week, but here are some nuggets from what we heard today...

Zaretta's book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain is "very much in affinity" with PBL, as she shared.

"There's a lot of compatibility and overlap because we are talking about how do we help students expand their capacity and confidence as learners?" I was happy to see Zaretta link this point to progressive educator John Dewey, considered the "grandfather of PBL", whose writing she showed on a slide: "To prepare a student for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means to train him so that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities."

Referring to racial disparities in educational opportunity and how these issues have come to the surface with recent events, she said, "So the lenses we carry have to be around not only being anti-racist but also building a bicultural lens. It is not an either/or, it's a both/and. The question is, how do we do that through Project Based Learning?"

After showing our well-known image distinguishing "dessert projects" from "main course PBL", Zaretta likened it to "equity lite" vs. "equity at the core"-reflecting one of her main messages, that equity work has to be deep and lasting. She drew the parallel distinction between "multicultural education" (focused on social harmony, which is nice but not enough), social justice education (focused on having a critical consciousness), and culturally responsive education, which is focused on "accelerating learning so students can have independent agency."

Having high expectations is not enough; teachers have to practice "active demandingness" along with it.

Zaretta emphasizes this point, comparing it to being a personal trainer, which reminds me of the "teacher as coach" idea that Ted Sizer promoted and is part of the Project Based Teaching Practices in our model of Gold Standard PBL.

"You have to coach them around the learning how to learn processes," she said, "like a trainer builds muscles." Teachers in this role also provide "timely, corrective feedback" and "embed a meta-strategic conversation about learning moves." Great stuff, very actionable, and too much to explain here, so for more you'll have to check out the recording of her talk when we make it available soon-and get her book.

During the Q&A that followed her talk, Zaretta was asked about how to involve parents.

She offered this wisdom: "We have to give respect to parents, who are their children's first teachers... Understand the funds of knowledge that are coming out of a community... Just as we want learning partnerships with our students, we need to have dual-capacity partnerships with our parents."

Asked to elaborate on the difference between social justice education and culturally responsive education, Zaretta said, "My social justice is to leverage students' cultural funds of knowledge as a scaffold to help them accelerate. Multicultural education will never get you to close the reading gap. Just talking about Black Lives Matter is not going to close those reading gaps."

She then made a statement that struck me as the heart of her work, with a reminder of what PBL should really be about.

"If you're serious about Black Lives Matter, black brains need to read."

"We could say the same thing with math, with writing," she continued. "Your social justice mission is to help students close that reading gap... If you don't, students will not go on to college, and career, and life, ready. They need to have all these intellectual capacities at their fingertips, at their ready, so that they can map their life, they have real agency... not just, "oh, they did a project last week, that was fun."

Since she had mentioned that "collectivist work doesn't begin and end with group work" in her talk, a questioner asked what that actually looks like. Zaretta had a sharp reply: "Honestly, I'm not even going to attempt to do that. What I've found, particularly with white educators, there's not the effort made to learn about collectivist culture, and to experience it. What ends up happening is, we listen to a podcast, "oh, someone said it was that." I don't want to give a quick checklist, and have people say, "Zaretta says it's this."

"This is what we have to do collectively. And if you're a white educator, you have to get out of your own zone, you have actually experience it, to start to understand-that's the bi-cultural lens. I'm expanding my aperture. Most people of color are already bi- and tri-cultural. Most white educators do not do that."

"You have to commit to doing your work. That's really what it means to be a culturally responsive, anti-racist educator." Where do you start? Recognize it's a long journey. Don't do it alone - squad up with some folks. You can read my book, but a book study is not going to lead you to equity. Information is not experience. You have to be in your own dojo, to close the knowing-doing gap."

As people were saying after Chris Emdin's keynote yesterday ... BOOM! It's been an incredibly powerful two days, so necessary for the times we're in.
Stay tuned tomorrow for the announcement of our 2020 PBL Champion and the speech to follow. The video of the PBL World morning keynote is currently only available to virtual conference attendees. However, check back here next week for an update when the keynote presentation is made available to the public. To follow the conversation at PBL World 2020, join us on Twitter at @PBLWorks with hashtags #PBLWorld #PBLWorld20.

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What Your Social Justice Mission Needs to Be: Zaretta Hammond at PBL World 2020

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"Particularly when it comes to something like Project Based Learning, there is a whole school of thought that certain kids aren't ready. That is part of the inequity by design." This message about our education system was delivered by PBL World 2020 keynoter Zaretta Hammond this morning.

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AMLE - Association for Middle Level Education

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Martin Luther King, Jr reminds us that, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals." George Floyd's death, along with so many other individuals of color, pierced something deeper this time, with despair and anger swelling with each passing day. Those of us claiming to teach all students and seeing each of them as infinitely valuable, yet cocooned in unrecognized bias, racism, and indifference, wonder at our own role - and competence - in what comes next. It's time to do the unsafe thing, educators: To join those already doing the heavy lifting, to humble ourselves in the service of remedying injustice, to put ourselves and political expediencies on the line: to confront and dismantle racism both personal and systemic. We'll need tools to start, however. Here are a few. - Rick Wormeli, June 2020

An hour later, I had a list of all the things I should have said but didn't. My colleague had failed to notice racist elements in her comments in the department meeting. In the moment, though, I was stunned, then angry: How could she not see it? How could she perpetuate the very thing we promised to eliminate? With rising adrenaline, I knew if I spoke, I'd stammer, my eyes watering a bit, and it would be an incoherent spew creating defensiveness from the offending colleague. So, I bit my tongue, wallowed in self righteousness, and promised myself to vent with a trusted colleague in another department. I heard and processed nothing else during the meeting.

It was not a proud moment.

We navigate many constituencies in our education lives: our students, their parents, administration, public opinion, researchers, political expediency, social media, and our own moral compasses. As a result, our world is full of regretted instants of would've-could've-should've. Sometimes, or a lot of times, we succumb to self-preservation at the expense of professionalism and students' rights. T.S. Eliot captures it in, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
...But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,
and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
- Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963),poetryfoundation.org

To say the right thing at the right time, especially with something so urgent and affecting as bias and racism, is on conscientious educators' daily radar, but it can be difficult without rehearsal or versatility. So, let's rehearse our responses to expressions of bias and racism in ourselves and others so those responses are at our mental fingertips in the moment when they are needed. And let's build that wide collection of constructive responses so we are flexible and strategic in our statements. Consider the following as a starting point:

Invite Deeper Conversations

"Some people would see that as a racist comment. Is that what you intended?"

Play "innocent" and ask, "I don't get it. How is that funny?"

As needed, give people the benefit of the doubt

Maybe you heard it differently or just didn't understand: "I'm sorry. Can you say that again? I may have misheard you."

"Is this something you would have said to a white/ Asian/Black/Hispanic, impoverished/affluent, heterosexual/homosexual/transgender, able-bodied person?"

"It's been my experience that... Is this something you've experienced?"

"Tell me more about that."

Ask questions of integrity and authenticity:

"Where does that thinking come from? Is that an unrecognized, inherited narrative?"

"Does that comment come from a place of nurture and support, or something else?"

"How does that align with your school/family/ faith/beliefs?"

Paraphrase - When responding to someone who questions our ideas or believes differently than we do, it helps to start with a clarifying question, not a re-defense of our opinion:

What I hear you saying is...

Let me make sure I have this correct...

In sum, then, you are worried that...

Do I have that right?

Did I hear that correctly?

It sounds like you're saying that...

Change the frame/box/reality the biased/racist/ sexist person assumes is in play: "There are more elements here that take the issue beyond a binary classification: liberal/progressive, male/ female, black/white, Christian/Muslim, affluent/ impoverished, heterosexual/homosexual. It's an intersection of at least four factors..."

Connect the offensive comments to larger, systemic causes of racism:
"[After seeing a racial slur used by a teacher on Facebook] This behavior is linked to the increased suspension, expulsion, and detention of Hispanic youth in our schools and sets a bad example of behavior for the children witnessing the teacher's racism that will influence the way these children are treated by their peers, and how they are treated as adults," [and,] "That's racist and it contributes to false beliefs about black workers that keeps them from even being interviewed for jobs..."
- p. 34-35, Oluo

Raise bias awareness, suggest a change of wording: "How would that perspective be different if we used different words? For example, "What if we said, 'our employees,' instead of, "the Chinese in our company? How about, "retired veterans" instead of, "old geezers?" or, "our software engineer" instead of, "that autistic hire?"

Start with common ground: "Most of us want to feel like we have something to contribute, that we belong, would you agree?" "Neither one of us wants to be diminished by the other..." "What's our goal here - to be heard? To vent and move on? Our children's welfare?"

If it's easier, start with discussions of the challenges with gender and religious discrimination, then move to racial discrimination.

Ask permission:

Would you mind if I shared an idea that comes to mind?

May I ask a question that may seem off topic but that may be helpful?

Would you care to work together to solve that problem?

I'd like to ask a someone else about how she handles such situations. Would that be okay with you? (based on - Toll, p. 75)

Give testimonials about what you believe. Choose not to remain indifferent. Realize you are modeling for others how to demonstrate courage of conviction, standing up for what you believe is morally right.

Borrow from educational coaching questions as you work through a concern with a colleague:

How do you feel the conversation went?

Would you have said anything differently?

What was your goal there?

What do you mean by....?

Are we diminished or threatened in some way by the elevation of someone else's priorities/religion/ race/gender?

Is there another way to...?

How does that further your goal?

Describe a time when this was successful for you.

Let's consider the situation from his/her point of view....

What does that tell you?

Is there anything to that?

Can you give an example of....?

Can you describe that further?

Let's rehearse that moment

What do you recall about your own behavior during the conversation/lesson?

And what else?

How could we re-phrase that to better communicate your intent?

What did you do/decide that added to-or resolved-the issue?

"If this problem were solved what would it look like?" (Toll, p. 32)

What would a respected colleague do in this situation?

Let's brainstorm some possibilities together.

Challenge statements of, "I'm colorblind," and, "I don't see race." Start the conversation with, "You may not be aware of this, but such a mindset actually is a form of oppression of students of color. Could we talk about that for a moment?" Later, you may want to add, "When these statements are made by those in power, usually white teachers, they immediately diminish any student of color, declaring that their full identities and all that shapes them isn't worth perceiving. I get that you're trying to demonstrate that you see your students as individuals separate from any racial generalizations and stereotypes and thereby, you think you are not biased, but this very sentiment, let alone the act, comes from a place of privilege, being the majority race in power. It denies all that makes students of color full individuals. I wonder if we could use our privilege to confront and dismantle such thinking and practices."

In February 2020, high school teacher, author, and Education Week blogger, Larry Ferlazzo posed the question, "What are the best ways to respond to educators who say they don't see race when they teach?" He invited experts and classroom practitioners to weigh in on the constructive responses. You can find the full, five-part series of blogs with dozens of responses at Larry's Education Week blog site listed in the citing sources below. Here are a few of the compelling responses that have considerable power to spark conversation and transform thinking:

How can you (an educator) have a relationship with me (a student) if you do not acknowledge all that makes me who I am? Diverse relationships should be sought out with the intention to honor one's whole self.
- Makeda Brome, instructional math coach at Fort Pierce Westwood Academy in Fort Pierce, Florida, St. Lucie Public Schools Teacher of the Year 2019-20

The impetus to pretend that one is colorblind when it comes to race is a misguided attempt to treat all students the same, when all students, even within any racial group, are different. The impetus to pretend that one is colorblind is essentially racist. It is wielding the power to erase the identity of students. To refuse to see.
- Jamila Lyiscott, co-founder/director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom

"Not seeing race" is an easy way out because if those educators saw race, they would see how systemic racism has affected every aspect of the education system. When educators tell me that race doesn't matter, I say that they've erased an opportunity to be anti-racist. They've squandered the moment and made it about them and their so called forward way of thinking instead of actually doing what's best for their students...
- Julie Jee teaches 12 Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition and sophomore English

The statement, "I don't see race," represents the height of selfishness particularly when made by an educator. It says essentially, "I don't see your entire-life perspective as meriting my consideration. I will tell you how I think you should experience your existence." ...[It] is a selfish sentiment because it requires that students suspend their worldview in favor of vantage points that are more consistent with your own. It says, I will value your perspective given the extent to which it agrees with mine.... This is...a form of cultural imperialism.
- Adeyemi Stembridge, Ph.D., works with districts around the country to identify root causes of achievement gaps and formulate pedagogy and policy-based efforts to redress the under performance of vulnerable student populations.

[A]n important part of my response is to feel where I myself am still shaky as I engage with this person...Do I stumble or hedge when I...need to respond to an argument that blames marginalized people for their own marginalization? ...So much of what I encounter every day as a white person will lead me to think that I am what's normal, and things are essentially as they should be. In the face of that, it is hard and sometimes lonely work to acknowledge that the world is wrong.
- Sarah Norris works with educators across the country to create more equitable spaces for teaching and learning

Racial history emerges as a source of pride when seen through the lens of resistance and survival against difficult odds.... Research shows that avoiding the topic with children serves to create racist mindsets, while investigating race correlates to higher self-esteem, increased self-confidence, academic achievement, and ethical leadership... Until racism can be seen, it can't be addressed. Until it is addressed, it can't be undone.
- Martha Caldwell and Oman Frame, authors of Let's Get Real: Exploring Race, Class, and Gender Identities in the Classroom, and co founders of iChange Collaborative

Express Direct Desists

Stay silent, make steady eye contact.

Be direct: "I find that racist, and I'm not okay with that. It's inappropriate."

"You may not have meant to offend me, but you did. And this happens to people of color all the time. If you do not mean to offend, you will stop doing this." - P. 173, Oluo

"You just assumed that without evidence. Let's take a look at the evidence and correct that perspective."

Explain that your being upset at the racist/ prejudicial comment or joke is not a matter of political correctness. It's an indication that society has evolved and what was once funny or acceptable, is no longer so.

Walk away. Wait 24 hours. If possible, and no one will be harmed, wait one day, think clearly, then bring up the subject again with the offending person.

Avoid Blaming, Deflecting, Generalizing, or Being Dismissive

Examples of these unhelpful statements include:

"It's your fault because you're a racist."

"No, it's your fault because you expect something for nothing."

"If __ people weren't so self-centered..."

"If __ people weren't so crime prone..."

"They can just get used to using the bathroom associated with their birth gender. It's not the end of the world."

"I didn't intend it as a racist comment, they just took it that way."

"This is just more liberal clamoring from Political Correctness Police."

"There are already enough books on LGBTQ students. You're just pushing your social agenda."

"But these white, male authors are canon. To not teach them is not preparing them for society."

"You're such a conservative, you have no heart for the struggles of these people."

"I can't be racist: I don't hate any people of color, I'm not in a white supremacist group, I don't read those webpages, nor do I do any act of prejudice or racism with anyone I know."

Helpful Dispositions During the Conversations

Give every clue that you value time with those of other cultures/orientations/faiths/politics as well as those with whom you disagree. Honor what the other person brings to the conversation. Make that respect visible.

Avoid publicly searching for a diplomatic way to word something before saying it: "Let me put this in a way you'd understand...." "How shall I put this?" This is demeaning of the other person, like he's simplistic and incapable of understanding complexity.

If giving feedback in the moment, comment on decisions made and their outcomes: "I noticed you... As a result, we... Is that what you wanted?"

White silence in racist or biased situations or policies is consent. Say or do something if at all possible. It's the same with other situations of bias/ prejudice against certain religions, gender, sexual orientation, or socio-economic class.

Avoid backing people into a corner unless their statements were unusually egregious. People don't hear the message when they have to protect their honor or status. Help them find a road back to respect.

Speak in such a way as to continue thoughtful dialog, not prove that you are right or the problem is solved. It's not about you providing the solution, it's about the person arriving there.

Accept the fact that these conversations rarely tie up into a nice, neat bow where everyone sees the light and has come to their senses. We'll have to be tolerant, at least at first, of messy human progress, ambiguity, unseen changes in perspective, irritation/pushback as a way to sort one's thinking, and unresolved issues from the other person's past-and our own!-affecting the current conversation.

Sit or stand next to the victim of someone being attacked for his or her race, gender, politics, or socioeconomic standing to assure them that they are not alone, and to communicate clearly to the offending person where you stand on the issue.

When considering whether or not to come to the aid of a person of color receiving racist or discriminatory comments, take the lead of that person and do it only if they are already engaged in it. (based on an idea in Oluo, p. 174)

Ask yourself if you're deflecting to another topic rather than hearing and addressing the one raised by the other person.

"If you're white and being called a racist, remember that you are not the only one being hurt." p. 222, Oluo

We fight systemic racism not because we're doing people of color a favor, but because this is what decent people do. "[We] are not owed gratitude or friendship from people of color for [our] efforts. We are not thanked for cleaning our own houses." p. 210, Oluo

Not everyone in our place of employment shares our views regarding politics or race. Avoid assuming they do simply because they are members of this same group as you.

Use the first person, plural, we, not I or you as you can. It's more inclusive, like we're in this together.

Use tentative language (seems, might) and open ended questions that come across as a mutual partner in resolving the problem.

Breathe several times before responding.

Forgive yourself and others for making mistakes in these conversations, including inexact wording, unintended use of stereotypes, muddled thinking, and outright offending others.

Discuss systemic racism with people of our own color, and not just when there's an upsetting racial incident. We're able to respond more constructively when there is a racial/homophobic/religion-phobic incident when we already have the tools and perspective for the conversation.

With Prufrock, T.S Eliot had us sincerely wonder who we were to disturb the universe. Dylan Thomas admonished us to not, "go gentle into that good night," and to instead, "rage, rage against the dying of the light." Let's draw from this welling moral outrage and our all-consuming desire for a just world and find the courage to react in a timely and effective manner to bias and racism, whether it be subtle or overt. Let's care enough about our students and our colleagues to extend candor and to walk with them -and our own limitations-as we share the path ahead. This courage comes more readily when we have specific and practiced tools, so to simply read a few paragraphs of an article and promise to do better doesn't cut it. Let's say these challenging statements aloud and in front of colleagues in rehearsal and in real use, making them our own. Let's find meaning in those conversations, and with that, the stamina to dismantle our own biases, and the strength to confront that which would oppress another. No more, would've-could've-should've - we're ready to respond.

Recommended Resources

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, Second Edition by Margaret Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009

The Art of Coaching: Effective Strategies for School Transformation by Elena Aguilar, Jossey-Bass, 2013

Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction by Jim Knight, Corwin Press, 2007

Teaching Tolerance (Southern Poverty Law Center), www.splcenter.org/teaching-tolerance, www.tolerance.org/publication/chapter-1-civildiscourse- classroom-and-beyond

Mayorga, Edwin; Picower, Bree. What's Race Got to Do With It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequity, Peter Lang Publishers, 2015

Pollock, Mica; SchoolTalk: Rethinking What We Say About - And To - Students Every Day (Laying a Foundation for Equity), The New Press, New York, 2017

Stevenson, Howard C. Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences That Make a Difference, Teachers College, 2014

Tatum, Alfred W. Reading for Their Life (Re) Building the Textual Lineages of African American Adolescent Males, Heinemann, 2009

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all, Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education by Christopher Emdin, Beacon Press, 2017

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo, Beacon Press, 2018

Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap, Second Edition, by Paul C. Gorski, Teachers College Press, 2017

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Spiegel & Grau, 2015

Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It, Second Edition by Shelly Tochluk, R&L Education, 2010

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, One World, 2019

Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education by Noliwe Rooks, The New Press, 2017

Culture, Class, and Race: Constructive Conversations That Unite and Energize your School and Community by Brenda Campbell Jones, Shannon Keeny, and Franklin CampbellJones, ASCD , 2020

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race, Sue, Derald Wing, Wiley, 2016

Sources cited:

Ferlazzo, Larry - Blog, "Saying 'I Don't See Color' Denies the Racial Identity of Students, "February 2, 2020 10:34 PM, https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2020/02
/saying_i_dont_see_color_denies_the_racial_identity_of_students.html, Twitter: @Larryferlazzo.

Oluo, Ijeoma; So You Want to Talk about Race, Seal Press (Hachette Book Group), 2018

Toll, Cathy A. Educational Coaching: A Partnership for Problem Solving. ASCD. 2018.

Rick Wormeli is a long-time teacher, consultant, and author living in Herndon, Virginia. His book, The Collected Writings (So Far) of Rick Wormeli: Crazy, Good Stuff I Learned about Teaching Along the Way, is available from www.amle.org/store. His book, Fair Isn't Always Equal (second edition) (Stenhouse Publishers), was released in 2018, and his latest book, Summarization in any Subject: 60 Innovative, Tech-Infused Strategies for Deeper Student Learning, (second edition) (ASCD), co-authored with Dedra Stafford, was just released.
rick@rickwormeli.onmicrosoft.com
@rickwormeli2
rickwormeli.com

Published in AMLE Magazine, April 2020.

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Specific, Candid, and Helpful Responses to Expressions of Racism and Bias

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Martin Luther King, Jr reminds us that, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” George Floyd’s death, along with so many other individuals of color, pierced something deeper this time, with despair and anger swelling with each passing day.

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SEL tips

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This lesson has young people explore how we can use breathing to care for ourselves during times of stress - and reflect on how that works for different people.

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Data and Equity

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That's why it's important for students to understand the power of data. Discover Data - an education initiative powered by the Nielsen Foundation in collaboration with Discovery Education and the Afterschool Alliance - provides no-cost dynamic digital resources for educators, students, and families to innovate the future through data.

Integrating data science in the digital classroom is effective when lessons focus on relatable and real-world applications. Teachers, consider the following resources as a way to supplement existing 6-12 grade curriculum. Notice how each curriculum connector resource relates to each other and the world, while also applying across multiple disciplines of STEM, social studies, and more.

Understanding Election Cycles
The ability to vote for political leaders is a fundamental right in the United States. Every four years, voters enter into a new presidential election season that shapes the course of the country.

From the primary to the national election, this timely activity investigates the role of data in voting by looking at evidence from the 2016 and 2018 elections. Students dive into voting and viewership rates, the impact of demographic data on campaign advertisements, and the evolving impact of media consumption on election messaging.

Women and Gender Equity at 100
Significant strides have been made in the fight for women's equality since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which granted women the right to vote, but voting rights does not always signify true equity.

In this activity, students assess the extent of gender equality progress in 2020 by analyzing data through women's changing roles in entertainment, professional sports, and leadership.

Using the Census for a U.S. Snapshot
2020 is the year for the United States to count the nation's population. Results from the Census - which the Constitution mandates be conducted every 10 years - allow people, governments, and businesses to gain valuable information on the changing demographics of a diverse country. Participation in the Census is vital, since results not only help us understand our country, but also inform how the government allocates resources across communities.

In these activities, students use archived Census data to explore changes in U.S. population density, diversity, and voting participation, giving students first-hand experience and knowledge of the process of equality in the United States as exercised through the Census.

The students of today are already actively building the future of tomorrow. Providing timely and relevant resources for the digital classroom empowers students and educators alike to talk about and understand essential, yet complex, topics that frame society's focus on justice and equality.

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Empowering Students to Use Data in Understanding Equity and Justice

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That's why it's important for students to understand the power of data. Discover Data - an education initiative powered by the Nielsen Foundation in collaboration with Discovery Education and the Afterschool Alliance - provides no-cost dynamic digital resources for educators, students, and families to innovate the future through data.

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30 Childrens Books with LGBT Characters

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In honor of Pride Month and the wonderfully diverse students and families who come through our classrooms, here are 30 of our favorite children's books with LGBT characters.
Just a heads up, WeAreTeachers may collect a share of sales from the links on this page. We only recommend items our team loves!
Books With LGBT Characters for Grades PreK-3

Two male penguins, desperate to start a family of their own, adopt an egg to hatch. This joyful, true story of the "only penguin in the Central Park Zoo with two daddies" will remind kids of the true meaning of family.

The love and support is palpable in this portrait of family diversity with multiracial adopted kids and same-sex parents. Use this joyful and moving book as a model of inclusiveness for children in same-sex households.

Children will recognize their own families and discover many ways of being a family in this rhyming picture book. Charmingly illustrated animals represent and celebrate all the different forms a family can take.

Same-sex marriage is approached in a gentle way from the perspective of a young boy participating in his mothers' wedding. Any child curious about weddings and marriage will learn from this universal story.

This 2015 winner of the Stonewall Book Award captures the exuberance of a Pride Parade from a child's perspective. The Reading Guide at the end of the book gives context to the struggle for LGBT rights while the whimsical illustrations make this a joyful tribute to gender diversity and expression.

6. I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jenning

This true story of Jazz Jenning depicts her early childhood as a girl in a "boy body." Kids struggling with gender identity questions will find a role model, and the rest of the class will gain understanding and compassion for her experience.

This treasury depicts a wide range of traditional and non-traditional families in their daily lives. Charming text and vibrant, humorous illustrations celebrate our human diversity while reinforcing the universality of family love no matter what it looks like.

This picture book biography of the man who commissioned the rainbow flag to be a symbol of the 1970s gay rights movement addresses the ugly antagonism against homosexuals, but still resonates with hope for equality. Biographical notes include more information, time lines, suggested resources, and photographs.

Stella has two fathers but no mother, so the school Mother's Day party creates a worrying problem for her. Her loving, extended family helps her find a solution, proving that mothering happens in many ways by many people in the family.

In this rhyming fairy tale, the prince does not want to marry any of the princesses his parents choose for him. Fairy tale fans will enjoy the adventure, while the alternative ending expands the traditional genre to include non-heterosexual love.

Books With LGBT Characters for Grades 4-7

11. George by Alex Gino

George has no doubt that she is a girl but she can't get the rest of the world to accept her as she is. She hopes that playing Charlotte in the school's production of Charlotte's Web will help her cause. This personal look at one kid's struggle to be herself will resonate with anyone who has ever felt different.

Four interracial brothers, two dads, and various pets make up the realistic, loving, and sometimes hectic family Fletcher. Their family celebrations, trips,and daily adventures are laugh-out-loud funny and show readers that all families are alike in fundamental ways.

Seventh grader Joe Bunch knows he is gay, and this sequel to The Misfits optimistically chronicles his coming-out to his friends. Joe is refreshingly comfortable with himself and can help guide readers in their own journeys to self acceptance.

An introverted sixth grader courageously comes into her own as a girl, although her classmates perceive her as a boy. This is a sensitive look at the young transgender experience, and readers will be inspired by Grayson's bravery.

June just wants to hang out with her friends this summer, but a backlash against Vermont's civil union law threatens her family's security. Use this book to start a conversation about marriage equality and what it is like to be the innocent child of same-sex parents who are discriminated against.

When her mother dies, the courts don't allow Fella to remain with her "other mother," so she is sent away to live with her biological grandmother instead. This thought-provoking story will make readers question what truly constitutes a family.

Eighth grader Nate desperately wants to leave his small town to perform on Broadway, and will let nothing get in the way of his stardom. Young readers will find a hilarious, lighthearted hero in Nate.

18. Drama by Raina Telgemeier

This entertaining graphic novel portrays the questions and confusion of middle school relationships in a realistic but cheerful way, presenting a positive experience of coming out to friends.

This relatable and engaging story depicts 12-year-old Ivy's confusing feelings about her first crush. It's a moving portrait of a girl learning to accept and express her true self.

Thirteen-year-old Charlie experiences isolation resulting from racist and homophobic bullying while at an all-girls' Christian camp. This 2018 Stonewall Award Honor-winning graphic novel sensitively explores issues around race, faith, feminism, and girls' friendships.

Books With LGBT Characters for Grades 8 and Up

This detailed account of the history of LGBTQ culture and rights includes historical photos, documents, personal stories, and facts. Informative and useful to a general audience but essential to those looking for validation, this book reinforces the idea of pride in a positive way.

A diverse cast of characters rounds out this fast-paced superhero adventure where the protagonist happens to be an Asian-American lesbian teen.

A high school boy falls in love with an undocumented immigrant in this timely and thought-provoking novel. Sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity are all portrayed against a backdrop of police violence and social injustice in an inner-city Oakland setting.

Plus-sized, 15-year-old Abby is obsessed with fashion and is thrilled to get the summer internship of her dreams. Sharing the internship with artsy Jordi Perez turns out to be complicated and exciting in this sweet, teen lesbian rom-com.

Longlisted for the National Book Award and made into a feature film, this coming-of-age, coming-out story has many fans. Without being a stereotype, 16-year-old Simon is a funny, real, and relatable teen that everyone will cheer for.

Simon and Baz, two wizards at the Watford School of Magicks, fall in love in spite of themselves in this tongue-in-cheek homage to Harry Potter. Teen fantasy fans will love this wizarding mystery adventure with a gay vampire romance twist.

27. Like Water by Rebecca Podos

Loyal, dependable Vanni questions her sexual identity when she becomes friends with mischievous and daring Leigh. Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award, this book explores self-discovery in the context of Hispanic family culture.

Elizabeth knows he is a boy, and uses a gig as radio DJ to try on his new identity as Gabe. His show becomes an underground hit, but when a girl at school outs him, things become difficult and dangerous for him.

Carlos is fabulous and wants to make it as a makeup artist, but he is not just a gay stereotype. Readers will admire him for his inner strength, his loyalty to his friends and family, and for his dedication to reaching his goal.

Using details gleaned from interviews, social media, surveillance video, and public records, this Stonewall Book Award winner documents a teen hate crime and its aftermath in a complex way that inspires empathy for both victim and perpetrator.
What are your favorite books with LGBT characters? Come and share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Plus, tips for facilitating a more inclusive classroom.

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30 Children's Books with LGBT Characters

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In honor of Pride Month and the wonderfully diverse students and families who come through our classrooms, here are 30 of our favorite children's books with LGBT characters. Just a heads up, WeAreTeachers may collect a share of sales from the links on this page. We only recommend items our team loves!

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Avoiding Racial Equity Detours

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7
Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 56-61

Paul Gorski

This is a failure of equity leadership.

A Racial Equity Reckoning

If the most emphatic racial equity advocates feel silenced and less central to institutional culture than their equity-resistant colleagues, what we have from an equity point of view is a sick institution.

Any meaningful accounting of racial inequities in schools must reckon with this reality. Is our commitment real? Why do emphatic equity advocates often face harsher repercussions for their advocacy than equity heel-draggers face for their inaction? Why is taking a strong, impassioned stand on racism interpreted as deviant while refusing to take a stand on racism is interpreted as in a developmental process (Mayorga & Picower, 2018)?

Are we driven by authentic desires for racial equity? Or are we content with rearranging inequities, hiding them behind multicultural arts fairs and diversity clubs (Au, 2017)?

The disturbing reality is, in my 20 years of experience working with schools and districts on matters of equity and justice, I've found that most initiatives and strategies that pass for "racial equity" efforts in schools pose less of a threat to racism than to the possibility of racial justice. Following Olsson's (1997) accounting of the detours white people follow to protect their privilege and avoid the messy work of racial justice, I call these initiatives and strategies equity detours.

The detours vary in scope and nefariousness but share a function: They create an illusion of progress toward equity while cementing, or even exacerbating, inequity. They can be more devastating than explicit racism because they do racism's work while consuming resources ostensibly earmarked for racial equity. They are the anti-anti-racism.

For example, people who study equity initiatives in schools have tracked educational leaders' tendencies, in the name of equity, either to implement deficit-oriented strategies, such as "grit" initiatives that obscure inequity (Kohn, 2014) or, worse, to build equity efforts around debunked approaches that create more inequity, like the "mindset of poverty." Some educational leaders inexplicably continue to embrace the "mindset of poverty" even though it reinforces racialized stereotypes (Redeaux, 2011)-and despite the fact that research clarified that there is no such thing as a mindset of poverty 50 years ago (Valentine, 1968).

What all these types of initiatives and frameworks have in common is that they mask racial inequity. They relieve us of the responsibility to name and eliminate the ways racism operates in our schools (Ladson-Billings, 2017). Rather than being paths to equity, they are detours around it.

Four Racial Equity Detours

Described below are four racial equity detours commonly embraced in schools, followed by equity principles that can help educators avoid these detours and build a more transformational racial equity approach.

1. Pacing-for-Privilege Detour

This detour underlies the other detours. It speaks to the situation described earlier, wherein an equity approach coddles the hesitancies of people with the least racial equity investment while punishing people with the most investment.

In too many schools, the pace of equity progress prioritizes the comfort and interests of people who have the least interest in that progress. Professional development in these schools appears designed to accommodate the feelings and fears of white educators in "difficult" conversations about race rather than to advance equity for students of color (Swanson & Welton, 2018). A common "equity" PD framework in these contexts is cultural competence -an approach that provides a way to talk about "cultural differences" without having to name or confront racism (Gorski, 2016a; Pon, 2009). Cultural competence is important. But by itself it's no threat to racism.

The hard truth is, racial equity cannot be achieved with an obsessive commitment to "meeting people where they are" when "where they are" is fraught with racial bias and privilege. Students, families, and educators experiencing racism cannot afford to wait for us to saunter toward a more serious racial equity vision. They cannot afford to wait, in particular, for all white educators to ease into racial equity commitments at a pace of our choosing while they suffer the consequences of our casualness.

In schools committed to equity, the time is now. We must prioritize equity over the comfort of equity-reluctant educators. We move on racial justice first by honestly identifying and addressing all the ways racism operates in our schools, and then we bridge the equity hesitaters to our equity vision. We refuse to equivocate on racial justice. We find the will to implement, and hold one another accountable to, policy and practice changes today, rather than waiting for an elusive consensus.

When I make this argument to education leaders, they often emphasize the importance of staff buy-in. I appreciate consensus-based leadership-but not always when it comes to equity. The school-to-prison pipeline is flowing (Annamma, Morrison, & Jackson, 2014). Students who are disproportionately targeted with assignment to special education, harsh applications of discipline policy, unengaging pedagogy, and the sorts of "school reform" initiatives that redistribute access up the privilege continuum don't need consensus. They need justice.

Start where we need to be: Equity is neither optional nor negotiable. This is who we are as a school; these are the values to which we will be held accountable. Our best resources in these efforts are equity-minded educators-the ones accustomed to the shushing. When we make them the center of our schools' and districts' institutional identities, we are primed for equity progress.

2. Poverty of Culture Detour

Culture is one important equity consideration. However, although racial identities may inform cultural identities, racial inequities aren't predominantly cultural misunderstandings. Racism is a tangled structural mess of power, oppression, and unjust distributions of access and opportunity. This mess cannot be resolved with greater cultural awareness alone.

I call this the poverty of culture detour in honor of Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006). In "It's Not the Culture of Poverty, It's the Poverty of Culture," she describes the hazards of adopting diversity frameworks built around vague notions of "culture." "[T]he problem of culture in teaching is not merely one of exclusion," she explains. "It is also one of overdetermination.... [C]ulture is randomly and regularly used to explain everything ... from school failure to problems with behavior management and discipline" (p. 104).

The result is that we too often attribute educational disparities to students' cultures. We cannot allow racism-infused misperceptions of their cultures to justify our failure to create racially just schools. Often, we interpret racial disparities in which students are suspended or expelled, for example, not as the result of racial bias, as research shows it primarily to be (Rudd, 2014), but as a cultural defect in communities of color. So we might attempt to solve these disparities by adjusting the behaviors, mindsets, or emotions of students of color rather than by adjusting educators' racial presumptions or schools' inequitable practices.

We cannot fix a problem we refuse to name. If our equity initiatives feature the word culture more than the word racism, we're probably off track. If we adopt an approach that obscures racism behind vague nomenclature like cultural competence or the diverse kids, we might be off track.

3. Deficit Ideology Detour

If we spend any of our equity efforts attempting to "fix" students of color-fortifying their grittiness, modifying their mindsets, adjusting their emotions-we need a reaccounting, not only of our equity understandings, but also of our equity intentions. These strategies locate the source of educational outcome disparities within communities of color while often ignoring the role of racism-the clearest sign of deficit ideology (Gorski, 2016b).

We should be instinctively suspicious of popular educational approaches that often detour us around equity with a deficit approach. For example, presuming we can resolve racial inequities by simply teaching students of color to have grit is like presuming we can resolve climate change by teaching coastal communities to swim faster. It shifts the onus of responsibility away from schools and onto the very youth who are cheated out of equitable opportunity-and who, due to this cheating, often already tend to be quite resilient. It can obscure structural conditions with which marginalized communities contend. What good is grit against curricular erasure or inequitable school policy?

As somebody who attended school having experienced the childhood trauma of sexual abuse and often found myself being punished for the implications of that abuse, I find the growing interest in mindfulness and trauma-informed practices compelling. But too often, these practices are adopted as though they are racial equity initiatives. In some cases, we offer students of color coping mechanisms rather than correcting in-school conditions-like inequitable policy or racially tinged tracking practices-that exacerbate racism's traumas. Our best strategy for minimizing the impact of racism is to eliminate racism. Trauma-informed practices as implemented in most schools don't do that.

Before we follow the deficit ideology detour, we should ask ourselves some questions. In whose image is school policy and institutional culture crafted? Which students have the most access to higher-order pedagogies, relevant curricula, and a full range of course options? Which students face grinding inequities in and out of school? What do trauma-informed practices look like for students whose primary source of trauma is the racism they experience at school?

Equity initiatives should focus on eliminating conditions that marginalize students-never on fixing students of color. If we cannot describe how our efforts are eliminating those conditions, it's time for an equity overhaul.

4. Celebrating Diversity Detour

Recently, while visiting a colleague's classroom to facilitate a conversation about race and poverty, I asked a group of African American and Latinx 10th grade students about their school's upcoming Diverse Friends Day. For one lunch period, they would be forcibly integrated, coerced into celebrating diversity by sitting with classmates racially or ethnically different from themselves-classmates with whom some of them normally wouldn't socialize.

"They mean well, but this activity is racist," Pam shared.

"I don't know about racist," Tariq responded, "but I don't want to do it."

José added, "A lot of the white students don't like us. I don't want to be forced to hang out with them."

I asked Pam to elaborate on her observation that Diverse Friends Day is racist. "There's a lot of racism in this school," she insisted. She wondered how disturbing her lunch-the only time she could relax in a predominantly white school-was going to change that. "I think Diverse Friends Day is for white people," she concluded.

Is she wrong? I don't think so, especially in the absence of more serious racial equity efforts, which these students agreed were missing from their school. In my experience, many "celebrating diversity" initiatives are crafted to help white students learn about diversity-not racism, but diversity -in ways that will be most comfortable for them.

In some cases, students of color are used essentially as props for the gentle diversity education of white students through activities like Diverse Friends Day. This allows white people to opt out of considering racial justice while deriving social and cultural benefits from diversity awareness. It creates the illusion of diversity appreciation while entrenching inequity.

Requiring students of color to participate in these diversity spectacles while failing to attend adequately to inequity can be exploitive. Pam, Tariq, and José didn't need to share lunch with white students to learn about difference, much less how racism operated around them. They developed these insights as a matter of survival. White educators were asking them to celebrate a diversity in which their experiences were invisible. This is one way white privilege persists even in the context of diversity efforts.

Five Principles of Equity Literacy

At this point, I presume readers are thinking, "So what should equity efforts look like?" I'm cautious about addressing this sort of question. It may signify a common impulse in education to grasp for simple strategies to address challenges that are more about ideology and will than strategy. I encourage us to think, instead, about principles that can guide our equity actions.

Here are five equity literacy principles (Gorski & Swalwell, 2015) that can help us avoid equity detours and maximize the impact of our equity efforts.

1. Direct Confrontation Principle

The path to racial equity requires direct confrontations with racial inequity-with racism. We start, again, by asking, "How is racism operating here?"

Gather the racial equity advocates in your school, district, and community and map the ways-big and small, implicit and explicit-that racial inequities persist. Examine policy, curricula, and discipline practices. If you struggle to identify how racism is operating, invest time to learn how to do it. When I work with educational leaders committed to acquiring an equity lens, I find simple prompts like these can provide opportunities for meaningful practice:

What is one practice in your school that focuses on fixing students of color rather than fixing the conditions that marginalize them? How can you reshape that practice for racial equity?

What policy might have harsher consequences for students of color if applied by educators who harbor racial bias even if they aren't intending to be racist? What do you need to change about that policy, or about the racial ideologies in your school or district, to make it equitable?

2. Redistribution Principle

Equity involves redistributing access and opportunity at the most basic institutional level. This includes material access to things like learning materials, technology, healthy food, and even healthcare. It also includes nonmaterial access to higher-order pedagogies, relatable curricula, and equity-conscious teachers.

The idea here is to intimately examine how institutional policies and practices provide some students more access and opportunity than others. It may mean re-examining how school practices are crafted in relation to students' lived experiences and whether institutional policy and culture are responsive to the interests of the most marginalized students.

For example, as we examine behavior policies, we might ask ourselves whether we're cognizant of the depth of racial bias associated with how educators tend to interpret behavior and dole out behavior referrals.

Policy handbooks are another good place to start. Study your school's policies line by line. Might any perpetuate racial inequity-like a dress code policy banning items associated with specific racial groups or assessment practices that could mask racial bias? Work with the equity advocates in your school and community to revise those policies and practices right now. Then attend to dynamics of institutional culture that resulted in the existence of biased policies to begin with.

3. Prioritization Principle

The only way to redistribute access and opportunity is to prioritize the interests of students of color. Every policy and practice decision should be filtered through this lens: How will this policy impact families of color? How will it improve conditions for students of color? Remember that, in inequitable contexts, equality-attending equally to everybody's interests-reproduces inequity. For example, we know that students of color are disproportionately tracked out of "upper-track" classes (Leonardo & Grubb, 2018) and that on average, students in "lower-track" classes have less access to engaging pedagogy and more exposure to control-oriented teaching practices. And because we also know these disparities are driven significantly by racial bias in referral and assessment processes (Faulkner et al., 2014), a racial equity commitment should lead us to abandon traditional tracking methods. We can prioritize the interests of students of color by trading what we perceive as the equality and efficiency of those methods- efficiency for whom? we might ask-for a process that eliminates the influence of racism.

4. Equity Ideology Principle

Equity is a lens and an ideological commitment. No strategy can help us cultivate equitable schools if we're unwilling to understand how racism operates. Professional development opportunities related to equity should emphasize the ideological work required to more deeply understand the dynamics of racism in society and schools. Then we can draw on those deeper understandings to build our practical approach for eliminating racism.

5. #FixInjusticeNotKids Principle

Effective equity efforts focus not on fixing students of color, but on eliminating racist conditions. If we find ourselves, in the name of equity, adopting initiatives meant to improve educational outcomes by adjusting mindsets or cultures in students of color, it's time to reconsider our efforts.

Do We Have the Will?

Implementing a transformative racial equity commitment is difficult, especially if we face significant resistance. Of course, it's not more difficult than navigating racism, which many students, families, and educators of color endure. I cling to hope that most of us want racial equity. The question for those of us who find the detours alluring is whether we have the will to align our actions with our philosophies. My hope is that, by considering the detours and principles discussed here, we can find ways to strengthen our equity efforts and create schools that deliver on the basic ideals of equity and justice.

References

Annamma, S., Morrison, D., & Jackson, D. (2014). Disproportionality fills the gaps: Connections between achievement, discipline and special education in the school-to-prison pipeline. Berkeley Review of Education, 5(1).

Au, W. (2017). When multicultural education is not enough. Multicultural Perspectives, 19(3), 147-150.

Faulkner, V. N., Stiff, L. V., Marshall, P. L., Nietfeld, J., & Crossland, C. L. (2014). Race and teacher evaluations as predictors of algebra placement. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 45(3), 288-311.

Gorski, P. (2016a). Rethinking the role of "culture" in educational equity: From cultural competence to equity literacy. Multicultural Perspectives, 18(4), 221-226.

Gorski, P. (2016b). Poverty and the ideology imperative: A call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42, 378-386.

Gorski, P., & Swalwell, K. (2015). Equity literacy for all. Educational Leadership, 72(6), 34-40.

Kohli, R. (2018). Behind school doors: The impact of hostile racial climates on urban teachers of color. Urban Education, 53(3), 307-333.

Kohn, A. (2014). Grit? A skeptical look at the latest educational fad. Independent School.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). It's not the culture of poverty, it's the poverty of culture: The problem with teacher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 37(2), 104-109.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2017). 'Makes me wanna holler': Refuting the 'culture of poverty' discourse in urban schooling. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 673(1), 80-90.

Leonardo, Z., & Grubb, W. N. (2018). Education and racism: A primer on issues and dilemmas. New York: Routledge.

Mayorga, E., & Picower, B. (2018). Active solidarity: Centering the demands and vision of the Black Lives Matter movement in teacher education. Urban Education, 53(2), 212-230.

Olsson, J. (1997). Detour-spotting for white anti-racists: A tool for change. Cultural Bridges to Justice.

Picower, B. (2011). Resisting compliance: Learning to teach for social justice in a neoliberal context. Teachers College Record, 113(5), 1105-1134.

Pon, G. (2009). Cultural competency as new racism: An ontology of forgetting. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 20(1), 59-71.

Redeaux, M. (2011). The culture of poverty reloaded. Monthly Review, 63(3), 96-102.

Rudd, T. (2014). Racial disproportionality in school discipline: Implicit bias is heavily implicated. Columbus, OH: Kirwan Institute.

Swanson, J., & Welton, A. (2018). When good intentions only go so far: White principals leading conversations about race. Urban Education [online].

Valentine, C. (1968). Culture and poverty: Critique and counter-proposal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Endnotes

This is not an exhaustive list, but gives a few examples.

All student names are pseudonyms.

Paul Gorski is the founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange. He helps educators across the United States and internationally strengthen their equity and justice efforts and is author, coauthor, or coeditor of more than 10 books, including Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty (Teachers College Press, 2013) and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (Routledge, 2013).

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7 Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 56-61 Paul Gorski This is a failure of equity leadership. If the most emphatic racial equity advocates feel silenced and less central to institutional culture than their equity-resistant colleagues, what we have from an equity point of view is a sick institution.

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Entire Playlist on Culture, Race, etc.

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Free, universal access to an entire suite of live and recorded EdTech resources, MasterClass sessions, and Office Hours. Stay tuned for more details!

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The Power of Protocols for Equity

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April 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 7
Deeper Discussions Pages 45-50

Zaretta Hammond

When I taught expository writing as a classroom teacher, I found the fastest path to improving my students' writing was to build their capacity to engage in deep discussions so they were able to work through their thesis or arguments-testing their claims and hearing their peers' perspectives. This pushed them to revise their own thinking. John Hattie's research around academic conversation and discussion confirms what I learned by direct experience: Academic conversation is one of the most powerful practices we can bring to our classrooms to promote higher achievement (Hattie, 2012).

So now, as a consultant, when I go into classrooms as part of an equity audit or as a coach supporting school teams to incorporate more culturally responsive practices, one of the first things I look for is who is doing most of the talking during instruction. As the old adage has it: "Whoever is doing the talking is doing the learning." This notion is supported by the growing evidence from researchers such as Aida Walqui and colleagues and their work with English learners at WestEd (2019), and Ron Ritchhart and his work around the cultures of thinking out of Harvard's Project Zero (2015). This body of research highlights that talking in all its forms- conversing, discussing, debating, and dialoguing -helps increase students' brain power so that they are able to take on more rigorous work and engage in deeper learning down the road.

But to grow students' brain power using academic conversation as a strategy, we need robust talk structures that allow more students to join in the conversation confidently, especially English learners, introverted students, disengaged students, and historically marginalized students. These are all students whose communication styles and funds of knowledge are not typically leveraged in classrooms.

For the most part, schools have limited the range of everyday talk structures and processes in our classrooms. I often see teachers only using turn and talk as a discussion strategy, sometimes alternating it with think, pair, share. These two strategies have become instructional staples. But while useful, they are not sturdy enough for deeper discussions that facilitate deep thinking or what I call "cognitive chewing."

Free-Flowing Structure

In addition to adding more robust discussion practices, we also want to make these practices more culturally responsive by centering them around the principles of youth culture and collectivist practice. I encourage teachers to find talk structures and tools that:

Honor the funds of knowledge each student brings to the conversation.

Give marginalized students greater access to the flow of the discussion.

Give students more agency in directing the conversation.

Give students a more robust cognitive workout by leveraging their everyday modes of communication.

That's why I suggest that a good starting point for facilitating deeper, more equitable discussions is to use structured protocols. Protocols are more than a fancy word for strategies. Made popular in the early 1990's by the Coalition of Essential Schools and promoted by the National School Reform Faculty, discussion protocols are rules or procedures that provide a structure and process so everyone has time to think, talk, and listen.

Protocols are now widely used in adult learning communities and a growing number of classrooms across the country. They come in a variety of formats, from techniques to gather focused feedback on a project or piece of writing before revising-like a tuning protocol-to interactive processes like the gallery walk protocol, in which students build on each other's knowledge about a topic or content to promote higher-order thinking through cooperative learning. The good thing about protocols is that they can be modified to suit multiple purposes and different types of discussions. Despite their variety, they have common features: There is structured turn taking during a discussion, and speaking and listening are usually timed so more students can participate.

The overly structured nature of protocols might seem counterintuitive to the goal of encouraging a free-flowing discussion that welcomes all students. In reality, it is just the opposite. Protocols create ways into the discussion for students typically left out. We often see the same students talking in class, namely those who are comfortable conversing in English, have mainstream background knowledge, or are more extroverted.

Five Steps to Support Protocols

The following five steps will enable you to begin creating the conditions for incorporating protocols into your classroom to increase engagement and access for all students:

1. Offer structures and time for small talk that paves the way for social-emotional safety later in academic conversations. Building a culture of academic conversation begins with building a culture of connection. Creating opportunities for students to talk to each other and get to know each other sets the social-emotional stage for them to engage collaboratively during academic discussions.

Protocols such as dyads can offer a container for a social-emotional grounding to the school day or beginning of the class period. Made popular by math equity educator Julian Weissglass and community organizer Ana Becerra (2004), a dyad is a listening and talking exchange between two people that provides a structure for constructivist listening-a process in which the speaker is listened to for a dedicated amount of time without being interrupted.

For more interactive group protocols try the tea party, which can be used with quotes and images that students help curate, or diversity rounds, which explores personal identity. Both of these protocols provide students a fun but structured way to learn more about each other and build relational trust.

2. Use protocols to shake up inequitable participation patterns during academic discussions. One of the dynamics I often see in classrooms is unequal participation. Even when we use powerful strategies and structures such as Socratic seminars, we see the same students doing much of the talking. This leads to inequitable outcomes for English learners, introverted, or struggling students who don't feel confident enough to actively engage in free-flowing class discussions.

Well-defined protocols can make discussions more egalitarian by providing time for everyone to get practice talking about their ideas about the content. For example, the typical protocol is done in "rounds" with a small group of 3-5 students. Each protocol round has three important steps that foster equitable participation. First, the process begins with 3-5 minutes of uninterrupted time for one person ("the presenter") to talk. When that person is finished, the other members of the discussion group have a set amount of time to reflect on and respond to what the presenter shared. The presenter has a final moment to respond to on the advice given by his partners. Then a new presenter from the group is invited to share his or her thinking and is given the same 3-5 minutes to talk. This process continues until everyone in the group has had time to talk.

Two protocols that should be staples in classrooms are the tuning protocol to help students revise and improve on a piece of student work in preparation for larger group discussions and the text-rendering protocol, which can help students access grade-level text by starting with noticing and naming what is familiar or what sparks one's curiosity in the text.

3. Use the elements of hip-hop culture to modify protocols and make them more responsive to students' interests and knowledge base. Many of our middle and high school students are steeped in hip-hop culture, regardless of racial background or socioeconomic status. Hip-hop has grown up and become mainstream. Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop actually refers to a complex culture organized around the values of social justice, respect, self-worth, community, and having fun.

While maintaining the integrity of the discussion protocols you choose to use, think about ways to include fun as a design principle in classroom discussion. As Chris Emdin (2013) reminds us, much of today's students' schema-the brain's network of knowledge, associations, allusions, references, and connections that give content meaning-is influenced by hip-hop culture. So why not leverage interactive hip-hop structures like the cipher and rap battles to help students access their existing funds of knowledge? These features of hip-hop culture have dialogic qualities that we can use to help students see that they are competent at deep thinking. How to do this? Consider a mash-up of a traditional protocol and one of the hip-hop structures:

Remix the fishbowl protocol as a cipher. The fishbowl protocol has a small number of students seated in an inner circle discussing a topic or text and using specific academic conversation skills the class is practicing, while the remaining students sit around them in an outer circle. The students in the outer circle listen to the discussion and take notes. At a designated point, the students in the inner circle rotate out, join the outer circle, and a new group of students comes into the inner circle. This has a lot in common with a hip-hop practice called cipher, in which a crowd of spectators and onlookers surrounds rappers engaged in "freestyling" as each rapper steps into the cipher to share their rhymes. In a remix or mash-up of these formats, you can introduce a more free-flowing type of fishbowl, building on collectivist, participatory elements common to hip-hop culture. For example, students in the outer circle can more actively engage and comment on what they're hearing from within the fishbowl with finger snaps. Or, you can make movement between the outer circle and inner circle more free flowing by letting students tap each other in.

Use a cipher-style protocol like the kiva to help students focus on "cognitive stitching" as they build on each other's ideas, In a kiva, rather than having an inner and outer circle, four students are positioned in a square, and four more seats are lined up behind each of them so that the pattern resembles a wheel spoke. The four speakers in the square discuss the topic and questions of the lesson. After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation, building on what's been said. The goal is seeing who can take the discussion deeper, make interesting text-based connections, or find real-life connections to academic concepts, depending on the subject area.

Reconfigure the chalk talk protocol as a graffiti tag billboard. Invite students to "tag" the "billboard" using elements of sketchnoting, doodling, collage, and written word to stimulate thinking before a discussion begins or to deepen it afterwards. The idea is to leverage students' comfort with multimodal expression as a way into dialogue, discussion, or debate.

4. Invoke performance elements of spoken word poetry for deeper thinking during discussions. Like hip-hop, spoken word is part of youth culture and flows out of the oral traditions of many indigenous communities and communities of color. Spoken word is a poetic performance art that is word-based, and it can center around either poetry or prose. It looks like fun, but the fluid use of word-play and metaphor makes it serious cognitive work. According to Rick Wormeli (2009), metaphor is a powerful tool for making meaningful connections and demonstrating understanding of complex concepts that changes the structure of our brain, allowing us to do more rigorous thinking as a result. The lyrical nature of spoken word techniques can give in-class discussions energy and flow, which increases engagement.

5. Give students the power to facilitate. Because culturally responsive teaching is about building student agency and brain power, it is important to train students to self-facilitate discussions. Protocols offer the needed structure and procedural "wireframe" to get them started.

Teach them to "hand off" the conversation to each other rather than have it always flow through the teacher.

Pick an MC for the discussion. In street parlance, MC stands for the "master of ceremonies." In hip-hop culture, when a number of rappers have gathered for a performance, the MC manages the energy of the crowd and the flow of the set. Help students channel their inner MC as facilitators in protocols. They need to focus not just on the procedural aspects, but also on the social-emotional climate of the discussion or debate to ensure norms are being following and a positive vibe is maintained.

Making It Work

Incorporating protocols into your classroom routines takes some planning and guided facilitation to build all students' capacity to engage in powerful discussions that lead to deeper learning. Here are a few additional tips to keep in mind:

Rethink how you use time. Discussions that go beyond the surface of a turn and talk take time. Do a time audit. How are you currently using instructional minutes? Maybe two to three days out of the week you can combine guided practice time and independent work time to make more room for academic conversations using protocols.

Be patient. Remember the rule of the first pancake. Recognize that, like the first pancake, deep discussions are going to be a bit messy in the beginning. But after making some adjustments, the pancakes will come off the griddle round and ready to eat. Similarly, over time students get used to using protocols to take their discussions deeper. This is where the design thinking principles of prototyping and iterating are important.

Teach the value of code switching. You need to have norms in place to effectively implement protocols. But resist the urge to police students' use of language, like slang, non-mainstream English like African American Vernacular English, pidgin, or creole dialects like "Spanglish."

Let students talk in the language most comfortable for thinking. Be aware of the number of different languages and dialects spoken in your classroom. As a culturally responsive educator, find ways to leverage this linguistic diversity. Early in the school year, talk with students about the positive connection between discussion, thinking, and their home languages. In addition, teach them to "code switch" across registers. A register is defined as the level of formality in language that's determined by the context in which it is spoken or written. We have three common registers-a social or community register, a "business" register, and a more formal "academic" register.

There is a big difference between moving back and forth across registers (code switching) and having to abandon one's language assets. This isn't about modulating. Rather, it is a matter of "both/and". Students should not feel like they have to abandon their home and community language when they come to school. It is actually one of their assets.

On Equal Footing

Protocols can be a powerful equity tool. Leveraging protocols in our classroom can ensure equal participation in discussions that grow understanding and brain power for all students, as well as help them access their funds of knowledge, using practices from youth culture to ignite engagement.

References

Becerra, A., & Weissglass, J. (2004). Take it up: Leading for educational equity. Santa Barbara, CA: National Coalition for Equity in Education.

Emdin, C. (2013). Pursuing the pedagogical potential of the pillars of hip-hop through sciencemindedness. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 4(3), 83-99.

Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Hattie, J. (2016). Visible learning for literacy: Implementing the practices that work best to accelerate student learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers. London: Routledge.

Ritchhart, R. (2015). Creating cultures of thinking: The eight forces we must master to truly transform our schools. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Walqui, A., Bunch, G., et al (Eds.). (2019). Amplifying the curriculum: Designing quality learning opportunities for English learners (Language and Literacy Series). San Francisco, CA: WestEd.

Wormeli, R. (2009). Metaphors & analogies: Power tools for teaching any subject. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Zaretta Hammond is a national education consultant who advises school districts and nonprofit organizations across the United States on issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive instruction. She is a former high school and community college writing instructor and the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (Corwin, 2014). Follow her on Twitter.

KEYWORDS

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April 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 7 Deeper Discussions Pages 45-50 Zaretta Hammond When I taught expository writing as a classroom teacher, I found the fastest path to improving my students' writing was to build their capacity to engage in deep discussions so they were able to work through their thesis or arguments-testing their claims and hearing their peers' perspectives.

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Q&A Collections: Race and Racism in Schools

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Education Week - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo

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During the summer, I will be sharing thematic posts bringing together responses on similar topics from the past nine years. You can see all those collections from the first eight years here.

Here are the ones I've posted so far:
This Year's Most Popular Q&A Posts
Today's theme is on Race & Racism in Schools. You can see the list following this excerpt from one of them:

Three educators discuss why teachers should not believe or act like "they don't see color" and, instead, invite students to share their experiences of how race impacts their lives.

Three educators discuss what teachers can do in response to George Floyd's death, including not stopping at conversations and instead moving to action.
* Four Ways Schools Can Support Teachers to Become 'Actively Anti-Racist'
Three educators share what schools should and should not do to support teachers to become anti-racists, such as lifting up black student voices and bypassing prepackaged "character-building" lessons that don't address racism.

Three educators offer suggestions for educators in the face of George Floyd's death, among them, going beyond social-emotional-learning skills and "know and teach the history of race."

Two educators challenge White teachers to confront "hard truths," including recognizing the role of White privilege and acknowledging their own biases.

Three educators offer lessons teachers can learn from the death of George Floyd, such as neutrality has no place in the struggle for racial justice and White educators must stop expecting their colleagues of color to do the "heavy lifting."

Two educators offer advice to White teachers, including learning more about restorative practices and focusing on their actions, not their intentions.
*What Educators Should--and Should Not Do--in Response to George Floyd's Death
Two educators offer suggestions on what to do--and not do--in the wake of George Floyd's death, such as learning about the legacy of racism before taking action and not just limiting actions to empty messages of support.

Two teachers reflect and communicate about what they think educators should learn from the death of George Floyd, including the importance of being anti-racist and challenging White teachers to acknowledge their implicit biases.

Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D., writes that Black students need to be shown love during the pandemic and that love should be demonstrated through developing "a critical consciousness in teachers and administrators."

Jamila Lyiscott, Ph.D., writes about the challenges facing Black students before and during the Coronavirus crisis and how schools must invite them to help identify their own needs.

Educator Adeyemi Stembridge, Ph.D., shares strategies to bolster African American students during our present emergency, such as inviting them to share their stories and their art.

Two educators describe how schools can directly respond to the needs of African American students during the COVID-19 crisis, including by regularly contacting their homes and developing a student-centered curriculum.

Five educators share culturally responsive teaching "tips," including the use of restorative circles and creating lessons with students' cultures in mind.

Five educators provide recommendations on how to incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy in the classroom, including offering a four-step process and encouraging teachers to start with educating themselves about their students.

Ten educators offer specific ideas on how to apply culturally responsive pedagogy in schools, including through the use of diverse literature and by inviting students to share their own life experiences.

Six educators share specific suggestions on how to make lessons more culturally responsive, including through having teachers assess their own biases and by elevating students' culture and language.

Veteran educator Dr. Karen Baptiste discusses how teachers believing they are "colorblind" contributes toward the school-to-prison pipeline for students.

Four educators offer recommendations on how to respond to teachers who say they "don't see race," including specific questions to use for deepening the conversation.

Seven educators challenge the idea of "not seeing race or color" in the the classroom and offer suggestions like considering our own implicit biases, as well as providing additional resources.

Nine educators write about possible ways to respond to teachers who say they "don't see color," including by framing the discussion around differentiation, school climate, and white privilege.

When teachers claim they "don't see race" or "don't see color, that makes it difficult for them to build relationships with students. Eight educators offer suggestions of how to respond to those teachers.

A six-part series on why educators must "see color" is wrapped up by Justin A. Coles, Dr. Chezare A. Warren, and Christopher Emdin. This series has been guest-edited by Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D.

Dr. Marcelle Mentor, Jane Bolgatz, and Dr. Akane Zusho discuss the costs of not addressing colorblindness in education. This post is Part Five in a series guest-edited by Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D.

Jia Lee, Melissa Payne, and Brady Smith write about the myth of "not seeing race." This post is Part Four in a series guest-edited by Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D.

Public school student Jehan Pitt and Professor Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, Ph.D., discuss how teachers can deal with the issue of race in the classroom. This is Part Three in a series guest-edited by Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D.

Kris DeFilippis and Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad question teachers who say they "don't see race," in this series guest-edited by Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D.

Judd Rothstein and Terri N. Watson, Ph.D., challenge the notion of teacher "colorblindness" in this series guest-edited by Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D.

Vernita Mayfield agreed to answer a few questions about her book, Cultural Competence Now: 56 Exercises to Help Educators Understand and Challenge Bias, Racism, and Privilege.

For the 100th book-related post in this blog, Gholdy Muhammad agreed to answer a few questions about her new book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.

Adeyemi Stembridge talks about his new book, Culturally Responsive Education In The Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy, including explaining the difference between "equity" and "equality."

Dr. Tracey A. Benson and Dr. Sarah E. Fiarman agreed to answer a few questions about their book, Unconscious Bias In Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism.
* Author Interview: Black Appetite. White Food.
Daisy Han and Lorena Germán agreed to answer a few questions about the new book they have edited, Speaking For Ourselves.

Jamila Lyiscott answers some questions about her new book, Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom.

Marian Dingle, Sydney Chaffee, Raquel Rios, Rinard Pugh, and Dr. Kimberly N. Parker talk about mistakes that are often made when trying to tackle race and racism in the classroom and explore what we teachers can do, instead.

Dr. Tehia Glass, Dr. Erin Miller, Eddie Moore, Jr., Ali Michael, Marguerite Penick-Parks, Dr. Chezare A. Warren, Brian L. Wright, Ph.D., and Leah Wilson share their thoughts on the biggest mistakes made when approaching race and racism in the classroom.

A three-part series approaching race and racism in schools is wrapped up by Dr. Larry J. Walker, Dr. Jaime Castellano, Dr. Mara Lee Grayson, Ashley S. Boyd, Jennifer Orr, and Kelly Wickham Hurst.

Dr. Terri N. Watson begins guest-editing a three-part series on the discipline disparities affecting black girls. Dr. Watson and Yolanda Tomlin contribute their thoughts in this first post.

Part Two of this series will feature practices schools and districts have and/or should implement to improve the schooling experiences of black girls. Gholdy Muhammad, Shannon R. Waite, Marquitta T. Speller, and Valerie Kinloch share their commentaries.

This final post in a series on school discipline and black girls includes recommendations from Venus E. Evans-Winters, Zakiyah Ansari, and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz. The entire series has been guest-edited by Dr. Terri N. Watson.

Mandy Smoker Broaddus, Gregg Castro, and Jennifer Jilot discuss the challenges faced by Native American students and ways educators can effectively respond to those issues.

Dr. Susan C. Faircloth, Kelly Sassi, and Jennifer Borgioli share their thoughts on the challenges facing Native American youths.

Timothy San Pedro, Alayna Eagle Shield, and Amanda Holmes wrap up a three-part series on Native American education.

Matthew R. Kay agreed to answer a few questions about his new book, Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom.
* Author Interview: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty and Racism
Rich Milner agreed to answer a few questions about his recent book, ' These Kids Are Out Of Control' Why We Must Reimagine 'Classroom Management' for Equity (co-authored with Heather B. Cunningham, Lori Delale-O'Connor, and Erika Gold Kestenberg).

Cia Verschelden agreed to answer a few questions about her book, Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism and Social Marginalization.

* Author Interview: Enhancing the 'Mental Bandwidth' of Students
Part Two of an interview with Cia Verschelden about her book, Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism and Social Marginalization.
* 'Fear' Should Not Stop Us From Exploring 'Controversial' Topics in School
* 'Ethnic-Studies Courses Benefit All Students'

Tony Diaz, Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, and H. Richard Milner IV write about the importance of ethnic-studies classes.

* Using Social-Emotional Learning to Challenge 'Systems of Oppression'

This post on the role of race and equity in social-emotional learning is "guest-hosted" by Mai Xi Lee, the director of social-emotional learning for the Sacramento City Unified school district. After her introduction, she brings together responses from Robert J. Jagers, Mary Hurley, Sonny Kim, Dr. Christina Arpante, Meena Srinivasan, Africa S. Fullove, and Kashia Jensen.

Carla Tantillo Philibert, DeEtta Jones, & Peggy Collings continue the discussion on the role of race and equity in social-emotional learning.

* 'White Educators Must Sharpen Their Humility' Before They Discuss Race

Matthew Kay, Martha Caldwell, Oman Frame, Debbie Silver, Sonja Cherry-Paul, Dana Johansen, Alice Mercer, and Amy Okimoto share their thoughts on engaging with race in schools.

* 'Courageous Conversations' Are Needed to Discuss Race in Schools

Karen Baptiste, Dr. Jonas Chartock, Jason Flom, Dr. Mara Lee Grayson, and Dara Naphan share their commentaries on engaging with race and implicit-bias issues in the classroom.

* Approach Race & Implicit Bias by 'Listening to Students'

Adeyemi Stembridge, Sanée Bell, Raquel Ríos, Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, and Lynell A. Powell share their counsel on approaching race and implicit bias in the classroom.

* Author Interview: Culturally Relevant Teaching

Megan Adams, Sanjuana Rodriguez, and Kate Zimmer agreed to answer a few questions about their book, Culturally Relevant Teaching: Preparing Teachers To Include All Learners.

Lorena Germán, Adeyemi Stembridge, Stephen Lazar, Jen Schwanke, and Aubrie Rojee share their ideas on how to handle so-called "controversial" topics in the classroom.

Gabriella Corales, Tom Rademacher, Martha Caldwell, Oman Frame, Danny Woo, Paul Barnwell, and Kathleen Neagle Sokolowski share their responses to the question: "How do you handle controversial issues in the classroom?"
* It's 'Vital' for Teachers to 'Integrate Controversial Topics Into Lessons'
Dominique Williams, Matthew Homrich-Knieling, Meg White, Kristina J. Doubet, Jessica A. Hockett, Vance Austin, and Stephanie Smith contribute to Part Three in a series on handling "controversial" issues in the classroom.
* Author Interview: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies
Today's answers on dealing with controversial issues in the classroom are provided by Sara Ahmed, Jennifer Borgioli, Kevin Scott, Erik M. Francis, Phil Hunsberger, Jackie Walsh, Beth Sattes, and Dave Stuart Jr.
* Author Interview: Growing Critically Conscious Teachers
A five-part series on handling "controversial" topics in the classroom series is wrapped up with commentaries by Meg Riordan, Lymaris Santana, Sarah Thomas, and Thomas Armstrong, along with many comments from readers.
* Author Interview: More Mirrors in the Classroom
Django Paris and H. Samy Alim agreed to answer a few questions about their new book, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World.

Angela Valenzuela agreed to answer a few questions about the new book she has edited, Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth.

Jane Fleming, Susan Catapano, Candace M. Thompson, and Sandy Ruvalcaba Carrillo agreed to answer a few questions about their book, More Mirrors In The Classroom.

I interview Chris Emdin about his new book.

This post is Part One of a two-part special project guest-hosted by Django Paris, Ph.D., & Travis J. Bristol, Ph.D. It has an introduction by Django Paris and contributions from Charlene Mendoza, Lorena German, David Flores, Matt Knielling, and Gabriella Corales.

Part Two consists of a short introduction by Travis Bristol and commentaries from Linda Bauld, Brian Pew, Lakisha Odlum, and Cyrene Crooms.

This is the first post in a three-part series "guest-hosted" by Travis Bristol, Ph.D., & Terrenda White, Ph.D. Part One "features examples from school districts that have implemented innovative strategies to recruit and retain teachers of color."
* Book Review: Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World & Me
Part Two in the series "features the work of universities, schools of education, and teacher-preparation programs."

Part Three "spotlights the work of alternative teacher-preparation programs and charter schools, as well as community-based efforts on the part of parents."

Educators Cornelius Minor and Bridget Wilhelm co-author a guest review of Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, Between the World and Me.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, Travis J. Bristol, and Terrenda Corisa White contribute their responses here.
* Culturally Responsive Teaching: An Interview With Zaretta Hammond
This post highlights contributions from teachers Antoine Germany, James Pale, Dominique Williams, and Evelyn Ramos and from student Jacquelin Estrada.

Teacher Ya Po Cha, teacher Elizabeth Villanueva, student-teacher Billy William Ivy, biligual aide Alma Avalos, and student Amanda Martinez provide their thoughts on the topic.

I interview Zaretta Hammond about her book.

Three educators--Ashanti Foster, Melissa Bollow Tempel, and P.L. Thomas--and a number of readers share their thoughts.

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Q&A Collections: Race & Racism in Schools

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During the summer, I will be sharing thematic posts bringing together responses on similar topics from the past nine years. You can see all those collections from the first eight years here. Here are the ones I've posted so far: This Year's Most Popular Q&A Posts Today's theme is on Race & Racism in Schools.

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Coronavirus, Racism and Kindenss...

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The pod starts gently, interweaving innocent, COVID-inspired vocabulary lessons in Mandarin - think "mask" and "sneeze" - with safety tips that needed repeating back in February and March, when the students were writing and recording: Wash your hands with soap and water "and remember to cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze into your elbow. The Mandarin word for sneeze is ... " You get the idea.

One of our favorite moments comes when the student narrators (they all take turns) drop a bit of COVID-poetry - a famous saying in Mandarin that means, 'Sickness comes in like a landslide but goes out as slow as spinning silk.'"

Our judges found the format both innovative and informative. "I was impressed that these students took on the story of the century in such a thoughtful and creative way, putting it - literally - in their own words, both in English and Mandarin," said Chuck Holmes, one of our judges and the executive director of NPR member station WBHM in Birmingham, Ala.

N'Jeri Eaton, director of programming and new audience at NPR and another of our judges, agreed. "I actually found myself sounding out the words as I went along," she said.

The entry was submitted by Karin Patterson, who teaches English as a new language at PS 126/MAT and runs the Dragon Kids Podcast Club after school. Patterson told NPR that, each year, she begins a new club. In past years, she's helped students design and sell sweatshirts with their school's logo - a dragon, of course - and create a newspaper. This year, Patterson says, she wanted to start a podcast club "because I heard about NPR's Student Podcast Challenge, and I was like, 'Hey, that would be cool!' "

Several minutes into the episode, it becomes clear the Dragon Kids have more on their minds than a few cool vocabulary lessons. Soon, they get down to the business of journalism, shining a light through the swirl of misinformation that followed COVID-19 into their community.

"There are a lot of rumors on the internet about the coronavirus," Leo Yu says. "You should only believe your doctor, or the CDC and WHO."

Before their New York City schools shut down, the Dragon Kids say those rumors led to hurtful, racist comments from classmates in the hallways and even in the classroom.

"They were basically saying how we have coronavirus because we are Chinese," Amanda Chen remembers in the podcast. "And they were saying how us Asians were joining together, trying to spread the virus."

Amanda's not alone.

"I was in my history class, and a female student asked me how to cook bat soup because it was a rumor that the coronavirus was caused through bat soup," Joyce Jiang says in the podcast, "and she was laughing through the whole thing and she was taking it as a joke."

But it wasn't a joke for Joyce, and she and her fellow Dragon Kids say it's important to call out discrimination when you hear it. As Leo says emphatically, "if [students are] experiencing harassment about the coronavirus because they are Chinese, kids should tell an adult at their school. And if that adult doesn't do anything, tell another adult!"

Which brings us full-circle to the closing words of "Masked Kids":

"Please be kind to one another."

At a time when many of us are feeling stretched and stressed by current events, the words aren't just a suggestion but a charge, to all of us, to do better.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Coronavirus, Racism And Kindness: How NYC Middle-Schoolers Built A Winning Podcast - MindShift

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The pod starts gently, interweaving innocent, COVID-inspired vocabulary lessons in Mandarin - think "mask" and "sneeze" - with safety tips that needed repeating back in February and March, when the students were writing and recording: Wash your hands with soap and water "and remember to cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze into your elbow.

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The 5 Guiding Principles to Combat Inequities

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Opinion

Alignment of policy and educational practices is critical

The pandemic shines an intense light on inequities that have long existed in our education system: long lines for food pick-up by school families, lack of devices and Wi-Fi for remote learning, and unfair funding formulas that allocate less to schools with the most students of color and those from low-income families.

These inequalities undergird the protests demanding racial justice that are convulsing our country. How we choose to respond will impact the rising generation, and the fabric of our whole society, for years to come.

Policymakers and education leaders need a shared set of principles for developing and evaluating responses to the COVID-19 crisis that advance positive change for students and reckon with systemic racism in public schools. As the director of the Education & Society Program at the Aspen Institute, I developed a framework of five principles and related actions for leading public education from recovery to renewal last month.

With the nation's focus now on achieving racial justice, these principles are even more urgent:

1. Equity & Agency: Policymakers must be cleareyed that schools reflect the inequities that plague society at-large. Every powerful driver of learning-safe and nurturing learning environments; rigorous and relevant academic content; teachers who see and value students' cultures and communities; voice and choice in important decisions-is provided to white and affluent students more than students of color and students from low-income families. Leadership in this moment must correct inequitable funding and cede decisionmaking power to those most directly affected.

Take Action: (1) Governors and legislators must prioritize funding for schools educating students of color and students from low-income families. (2) For states to receive additional federal funds, which they will need to avoid layoffs, they should be required to address inequity in education funding. (3) State leaders should seek out the most vulnerable students and families to understand what they most need to feel safe, supported, and engaged-and respond with action.

2. Coherence: Education leaders will be juggling many issues just to start the new school year, in the context of immense strain on state budgets and rising needs among vulnerable children and families. Policymakers need a holistic frame for addressing the needs of students and families so each decision is related to the whole. If every issue is treated serially, by the assumed level of urgency, decisions made by different agencies and state vs. local leaders won't be aligned, and school leaders will be left to sort out the confusion.

Take Action: (1) Governors should prioritize cross-agency coordination to address the needs of children and families, avoid duplication of efforts, and keep turf battles from slowing down delivery. (2) Within education, coherence calls for integrating social-emotional dimensions of learning into academic instruction so these reinforce each other in students' experience of school. Schooling next year in particular needs to become a place of healing and processing what's happened, or students will experience the disconnect and hypocrisy viscerally.

3. Science of Learning and Development: Breakthroughs in neuroscience, epigenetics, and research have created a new understanding about how people learn. We know student safety, belonging, and connectedness to school are foundational to resilience and engagement that then enable academic success and thriving in life. Focusing too narrowly on making up for lost instructional time will compound inequity and depress long-term achievement if done without adequately resourcing psychological safety, relationships, and a sense of belonging.

Take Action: (1) Prioritize school climate and relationships. Assigning every adult to mentor a manageable number of students and instituting advisories are two aspects of relationship-rich schools that will be especially valuable. (2) State agencies can commission appropriate online, interactive courses to provide teacher professional development and offer micro-credentials. (3) Modest investments in community service for near-peer mentors and tutors, both high school juniors and seniors and recent graduates, could imbue learning with greater purpose, while at the same time providing needed mentorship and tutoring for younger students.

4. Long-Term Success: Even before the crisis, profound questions were on the table about the role of education in society and the education outcomes that are essential for students to be ready to thrive as adults. Changes will be accelerated and intensified by the pandemic, the economic upheaval it is provoking, and the widespread political awakening on systemic racism in our society.

Take Action: (1) Policymakers must identify competencies that are needed to navigate the future of work; to build a new, anti-racist pluralism; and to support a healthy democracy. (2) Education agencies and state school boards should pilot assessments of critical skills for the modern workplace like working on teams, communicating in diverse settings, and evaluating the credibility and relevance of information from multiple sources.

5. Innovation: Many new online instruction and student-engagement practices are being rapidly designed and implemented. For instance, teachers as well as students have developed facility with digital-learning platforms. The challenge is to understand the reality of what's being tried (rather than what was planned) and to learn what worked to improve practice long term.

Take Action: (1) States should track emergency- response measures, both official decisions and emerging practice. (2) State education agencies can help organize working groups to collect data, learn quickly, and adapt policy and practice decisions. Empanel students and parents as part of these efforts, compensate them for their time, and start by asking what they experienced and what's most important to them going forward. (3) Publish and share what is learned.

The challenge-and opportunity-of returning to school calls on all of us to clarify the principles and enduring values we want to live by and to use these to build common ground where we can. Just as some work routines and home-life dynamics will be indelibly altered even when the crisis recedes, the social contract that public schools represent is overdue for renewal. We must re-envision public education to meet this emergency while also setting a course that improves on the status quo, or policies that had outlived their usefulness will be extended in a rush to "return to normal" as quickly as possible.

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The Five Guiding Principles to Combat Inequities Before Schools Reopen

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Opinion The pandemic shines an intense light on inequities that have long existed in our education system: long lines for food pick-up by school families, lack of devices and Wi-Fi for remote learning, and unfair funding formulas that allocate less to schools with the most students of color and those from low-income families.

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Antiracism in SEL

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If there's one thing Americans are doing right now, it's talking. Talking even more than usual when schools are out and many are still working from home. Every day, new stories of discrimination and violence emerge that prompt new conversations.

The moment our country faces weighs heavily on the mind of an adult. But one must wonder: What does it do to the mind of a child?

Black students around the country are faced with a reality where they are isolated due to COVID-19, of which Black Americans disproportionately account for 60 percent of deaths. Then forced to adapt to technology-based distance learning-only to watch the same technology used to spread images of people who look like them being assaulted, brutalized and killed by police.

As the harsh reality of racism in the United States is thrust to the forefront, many households, boardrooms and families are talking about it openly for the first time. Some are going further. In the last two weeks, over $250 million of corporate funding have been dedicated to diversity initiatives. Large, influential organizations that have actively avoided speaking about race such as the NFL are retracting their positions, and companies like Starbucks have completely shifted their previous stances on Black Lives Matter.

To the average observer, the current cultural focus on racism may feel like a new beginning. However, for Black people, these conversations aren't new. At a young age I vividly remember my parents sitting me down to have "The Talk." Unlike what most non-Black families associate the term with, this talk is a painful but vital set of directions to give you the best chance of returning home safely if you encounter the police. "The Talk" is different from family to family, but core tenets of it are the same.

Stay calm, don't make any sudden moves.

Even if provoked, don't get angry, be respectful.

Regardless of how they treat you, remember you have worth.

Do what it takes to get back home.

The content of these conversations feel eerily similar to some of education's favorite social-emotional learning (SEL) slogans: mindfulness, resilience and grit. Mindfulness implores students to remain calm, and take 10 deep breaths when they feel themselves getting angry. Resilience encourages students to hold their heads high despite mistreatment. Grit tells students to persevere in the face of obstacles.

Some educators believe that mastery of these traits can guarantee a student's success. But what they overlook is something that every Black parent is painfully aware of: A Black child can do every single one of these things perfectly, and still not make it home.

The tragedy of The "Talk" is that parents know no matter what they tell their kids to do, there's still a chance they won't see them again. It's an act of defense, a last resort hoping that their child will be seen as human enough to be treated with basic dignities. When Black parents use these tactics, they're doing their best to equip their kids for success in a system pitted against them.

However, when school systems use ambiguous slogans as the foundation of their social-emotional learning pedagogy, they're adopting ineffective solutions for a problem they are in part responsible for.

We can't tell Black kids to take 10 deep breaths when people who look like them are dying because they can't breathe.

There is no amount of grit that can prepare a Black girl to live in a world where she can be shot eight times while sleeping in her bed and months later no arrest will be made.

There is no amount of resilience that can prepare Black boys to live a life where they can't even bird watch without fear of the police being weaponized against them by someone who deems their existence as a threat.

To create the impact they desire, schools must face a clear reality. It is not possible for a person to be racist and socially emotionally well. If schools acknowledge the systemic bias in our country, they have a unique opportunity to use social emotional learning as a tool for social justice and racial equity.

According to CASEL, a popular provider of social-emotional learning curriculum, the five core SEL competencies are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. But it is not possible for students to master these concepts without an understanding of systemic racism and the role it plays in their everyday social interactions.

Though they are well intentioned, catch-all phrases like grit and resilience place the responsibility on students to endure an unjust system. And though the reality for Black students is that they may very well have to fight that fight their whole lives, that's even more reason for schools to take a stronger role in making that fight easier. In the words of Angela Davis: "In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist."

When my parents sat me down to have "The Talk," they knew that I still may not survive a police encounter. As people awaken to the reality Black people have lived their whole lives to condemn racism, their words are still, not enough.

Talking wasn't enough then, and it's not enough now. If the education system truly wants to serve its students, it's got a lot of work to do.

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Antiracism in Social-Emotional Learning: Why It's Not Enough to Talk the Talk - EdSurge News

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If there's one thing Americans are doing right now, it's talking. Talking even more than usual when schools are out and many are still working from home. Every day, new stories of discrimination and violence emerge that prompt new conversations. The moment our country faces weighs heavily on the mind of an adult.

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Implicit Bias

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Implicit Bias -- how it effects us and how we push through | Melanie Funchess | TEDxFlourCity

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A Class Divided (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

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The Anti-Racist Educator

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A few years ago, Tracey was observing a first-year teacher's math class. During the lesson, none of the black students raised a hand to participate, while multiple white students did. What could be the reason for this? Were the black students less prepared? Less confident or engaged in school? As the school's principal, Tracey took careful notes-and what he saw turned those questions on their head by revealing a likely cause unrelated to student attitude or aptitude.

During the post-observation conference with this teacher, Tracey shared the data he had collected. He'd seen that all the black students in this algebra class sat in the two rows along the left wall, whereas the white students occupied the four other rows. During the lesson, the teacher had positioned her body toward the white students, leaving the two rows of black students relegated to her periphery. Not a single black student had raised his or her hand or been called on during the entire lesson. The white students had raised their hands and participated more than 30 times, some multiple times.

The new teacher, whom we'll call Susan, was surprised. She didn't realize that she was unconsciously favoring the white students and overlooking the black students. She thanked Tracey for the observations, asked for advice, and requested that he observe her again the next day. When he returned, Susan was positioned on the other side of the room facing the entire class. Unlike the previous day, black students raised their hands and Susan called on them. When she could make eye contact with the students and see their faces, their participation increased.

Crucial Interactions

How many of us are unintentionally doing something similar? The fact is, considering the universality of unconscious racial bias, most of us at times probably send subtle but persistent messages that white students are more worthy of our attention and more favored in intellectual discourse. Through verbal and nonverbal communication, students receive messages about their value and worth on a minute-to-minute basis throughout the school day. And biased messages, delivered frequently over time, have a profound effect on students.

The good news is that, as Tracey's interaction with Susan illustrates, we can do something about this disturbing reality, including guiding new teachers, who may be especially unattuned to the nuances of how their behavior affects students. Knowledge of our biases gives us the power to reduce their impact. New teachers (and veterans and administrators) must continually ask: What is our impact on students of color? How can we find out? How can we do better? Strategically collecting data can point us to concrete behaviors to change and monitor-so we can be the fair, encouraging educators we strive to be.

Notice several things about the interaction between Tracey and Susan. Susan didn't get defensive. She didn't hear Tracey's feedback as an indictment of her character. Like most teachers, Susan earnestly wanted her students to do well and wanted to get rid of anything that was holding them back. For his part, Tracey didn't dismiss this teacher as a bad person because she showed biased behavior. He saw that her actions didn't align with her intentions and presumed that she would want to know. His faith in her conscious commitment to all students remained unchanged.

Such interactions are crucial in schools-but rare. Crucial because a growing body of research demonstrates that educators aren't immune to the effects of unconscious racial bias (Eberhardt, 2019; Lewis & Diamond, 2017). These biases have harmful effects on children we care about. They can lead us to view black and brown children as less capable and more culpable, or to view white children as more worthy of second chances and of being challenged. This is true for educators who are novice and veteran, white and people of color.

These conversations are rare partly because educators, like most Americans, enter the workforce unaware of the influence of unconscious racial bias on their perceptions and actions. Many educators believe that racism is essentially a character trait and that people can be sorted into two distinct categories: you're either racist or you're not. With this mindset, if you show a preference toward white students or hold Latino students to lower expectations-even if these behaviors are unconscious-you find yourself in the same category as torch-bearing Klan members. Not surprisingly, people resist this label and insist on the only other option- not racist.

Beware the Binary Mindset

Some researchers describe such sorting of people into either racist or nonracist as a product of a binary mindset (DiAngelo, 2018). As colleagues working with school administrators, the two of us have talked about racism a lot. During one such conversation, Sarah discovered how she had absorbed this binary mindset about her identity as a good white person.

Sarah was describing a time when a black student new to her class had told others that she was racist, and she'd been confident he was wrong. The student had been resisting revising his work and writing in full sentences, and Sarah assumed his comment was about this issue, guessing that he was just having a hard time adjusting to the high standards of her class. She acknowledged to Tracey that there could be times when she might act unfairly and need students to point that out to her, but she felt sure she had assessed this particular situation accurately. She believed the student was simply wrong, which she told the student in class. Tracey invited Sarah to consider that, as a white person, she might not have fully understood this student's experience. Wasn't she curious to learn how a black male student was experiencing her classroom? His comment might have stemmed from frustration at having to revise his work-or it might have been about something entirely different that Sarah wasn't aware of. When Tracey suggested that disregarding the student's perception might have had a negative impact on him, and that it would've been better for Sarah to ask this student in private what led him to that conclusion, Sarah got defensive. Didn't Tracey know that she cared about her students and treated them all fairly? That parents of all races praised her? She was a good white person, committed to equality.

Sarah eventually came to understand that unconscious biases were just that-unconscious. Her intentions, her skills as a teacher, even the respect families of color granted her, didn't eliminate the possibility that her actions or assumptions could be biased and harmful to students. Coming to accept this fact was painful, discouraging, and ultimately empowering. Painful and discouraging because Sarah had to face the fact that she harbored biases and the fact that she couldn't simply turn them off. Empowering because understanding the way bias operates is the key to reducing its impact on students. Understanding that good intentions don't protect us from acting in biased ways opens up space to examine biases without an emotional, defensive stance. It opens up space for growth.

Part of that growth, for all teachers, should be confronting the binary mindset and replacing it with a developmental mindset. A developmental mindset allows educators to talk to each other productively about possible racial biases, analyze the impact of these biases in a systematic way, and ultimately change their behaviors.

In the field of education, the concept of a growth mindset has considerable traction. Carol Dweck (2007) found that people tend to approach learning in two distinct ways: Some view intelligence as a fixed trait (you're either smart or you're not), while others view it as something you gain developmentally through ongoing effort. Those who view intelligence as fixed tend to respond defensively to criticism because they experience it as commentary on their intellectual identity, whereas those with a growth mindset embrace criticism as a way to gain more intelligence. Holding a fixed mindset can lead to shutting down when things feel hard. When people with a growth mindset face challenges, they're willing to grapple with them in order to learn.

What if educators took this same approach regarding the desire to be free of racism? Like intelligence, being anti-racist isn't a fixed trait. Rather, it's built through deliberate, repeated effort over time. With this mindset, discovering we're biased is not a character indictment. In fact, educators with a growth mindset seek out feedback about potential biases, knowing it will lead to improved practice-and ultimately more positive outcomes for learners.

Create the Conditions to Address Bias

To foster conversations like the one Susan and Tracey had, schools need to help teachers and administrators adopt a developmental mindset about becoming anti-racist. This won't happen on its own. So how do leaders create conditions for new teachers to examine their practice for signs of even subtle, unconscious racism? Key leadership moves include confronting the myth of colorblindness, building trust, and not prioritizing white people's comfort in conversations about race and racial bias.

Confronting the idea of colorblindness is especially important. Rather than embracing a "blind" approach to race, leaders should help teachers understand that race affects the life experiences of our students and ourselves. Most teachers in the United States are white, and many white people mistakenly believe that in order to achieve a future free of discrimination, they should act as though that future is already a reality. Ignoring racial discrimination doesn't make racism go away, however. We may not have separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites anymore, but research shows white people still get preferential treatment in a wide variety of ways (Staats et al., 2017). In tests of positive association, a majority of white Americans and a substantial percentage of people of color show a preference for white people (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013).

Teachers of color don't need to learn that racial discrimination exists; they experience it. In contrast, many white teachers don't think that they have a racialized experience at all. For many white educators, learning to talk about race is a new skill that requires practice. In addition, many people of color have experienced unproductive, superficial conversations about racial equity in mixed-race settings. Leaders committed to confronting racial bias in their schools must reserve time for new educators, along with veterans, to build the skills of talking about race and racism with colleagues.

At one middle school we know, during weekly team meetings, trained teacher leaders facilitate discussions of readings and TED Talks describing the experiences of people of different racial backgrounds. Protocols ensure that everyone gets "air time" and that people speak for themselves rather than making generalizations. Another school breaks into racial-affinity groups to discuss books about racial identity development such as Glenn Singleton's Courageous Conversations About Race (Corwin, 2015). Efforts like these signal to new teachers that racial identity development is professional development.

Communities tackling unconscious bias also work to become braver together -by fostering trust. Establishing and adhering to norms and protocols can go a long way here. Like mountaineers relying on colleagues to catch them when they fall, educators need to know that when they talk together about race or examine evidence of potential racial biases, their colleagues won't abandon them through disengagement, defensiveness, or disdain. Teachers of color need to know that if they share a personal experience of racism, it won't be met with skepticism. They need to see evidence that white colleagues are willing to have their sense of identity as non-racists challenged. Antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo describes the defensiveness that can come up for white people in these conversations. Reading her work can help leaders of all races anticipate patterns of response that frequently come up in conversations about race.

There's another crucial condition to this work: realizing that conversations about race don't take place on a level playing field. White people can choose to engage or not; people of color don't have that choice. When leaders worry that a conversation about racism will cause discomfort among staff members, it's helpful to ask, "Whose comfort am I prioritizing?"

Investigate, Analyze, Address

Once we release ourselves from the binary mindset of having to prove we're bias-free, we can focus our energy on making school a fairer place for all students. Since unconscious racial bias is, by definition, unintentional, we can't just decide one day to stop. However, we can commit to monitoring where and how bias affects our students-by systematically collecting and analyzing data and acting on what we learn regarding what we might need to change. The goal is to create a community determined to answer questions like, What is our impact on students of color? How will we know? What can we change in our practice to get better results?

When new teachers join colleagues guided by questions like these, they are less likely to adopt a deficit approach, placing blame on students for low performance. They'll be inducted into a school culture of inquiry, not defensiveness. They'll learn to start from the assumption that all students genuinely are capable of meeting or exceeding standards. From this vantage point, racial disparities or low performance from certain groups of students will prompt new teachers to grow more curious, not more complacent. They'll seek to understand students' experiences more specifically to realize what adults can change to improve student outcomes.

To monitor the impact of unconscious bias, it's crucial to disaggregate data by race to surface disparities that may not be apparent. For example, if 85 percent of students respond to a school climate survey saying they feel their teachers respect them, that may seem like a fairly encouraging number. However, if the school is racially diverse and the remaining 15 percent who don't feel respected are all Latino students, then the picture is quite different-and concerning.

There are countless areas to investigate. Teachers might conduct an audit of who participates in class discussions, analyze feedback on student writing, or record who receives extra credit or even who receives instruction from substitute teachers more often. Throughout the inquiry, framing makes a difference. The point isn't to determine who is to blame; this process of collecting and analyzing data should feel empowering to teachers committed to increasing their effectiveness with all students.

Once leaders and faculty identify racial discrepancies in school and classroom practices, their follow-up action plan will likely involve the following three steps: (1) design and implement clear systems or structures that increase fairness; (2) determine objective criteria for impactful decisions like who qualifies for a character award or whether to send a child to the office; and (3) increase overall teacher collaboration to identify signs of bias that individuals might not notice on their own. These three steps may be attractive because they can be checked off a list. However, it would be too easy to think that once we've checked each step off, we've ensured fair treatment of all students. It's not that simple.

Creating a system-or setting up criteria or increasing collaboration-will help but won't be sufficient to ensure that students of color receive treatment equal to that of white students. We need to accept that unconscious bias will continually seep into the school day. We address bias best not just by creating systems, but also by shedding defensiveness and adopting a developmental mindset and a willingness to inquire. In this way, we'll build a culture of continual investigation and growth to address the unconscious racial bias that lives in our schools and ourselves.

Reflect & Discuss

➛ Consider the authors' question: What impact are your practices having on students of color? Does anything in your mentoring or induction for new teachers help new teachers reflect on this question? Might you include something to help new hires think about this?

➛ Do you ever talk with fellow teachers about racism or racial identity? Do you think there is enough trust among some of your colleagues to let this happen? If not, why not?

➛ Does your school foster a growth mindset with respect to racial bias?

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A few years ago, Tracey was observing a first-year teacher's math class. During the lesson, none of the black students raised a hand to participate, while multiple white students did. What could be the reason for this? Were the black students less prepared? Less confident or engaged in school?

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Who Has the Privilege to be Empowered.?

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Vol. 77

No. 6

Abstract

Dismantling Racist Systems

We can't foster student agency without addressing racial oppression.

Abstract

Dismantling Racist Systems

From kindergarten through 8th grade, I prided myself on being a star student. At my Bronx parochial school, I received stellar marks and was always at the top of my class. I even graduated valedictorian in 8th grade. My good grades and behavior earned me a scholarship to attend boarding school in New England.

At my new school, I learned very quickly that my academic stardom had an expiration date. For the first time, schoolwork was difficult. At my Bronx school, being a good student, for the most part, had meant being a good memorizer and information regurgitator. My social studies papers had consisted of whole paragraphs copied from Encyclopedia Britannica. Language arts was listening to my teacher yell at my classmates and me to do the exercises in the textbook. Science meant memorizing the key points at the end of each chapter to ace the tests. Mostly, my classmates and I just sat, taking notes from the board.

At boarding school, however, my classmates and I discussed literature, historical events, and math theorems around a table. I had to analyze and critique what I had read in essays without the help of an encyclopedia. Ill-prepared, I struggled to keep up. I realized that, despite feeling confident at my old school, I was not an empowered student. I had not learned how to question authority, pick apart arguments, take advantage of available resources, ask for help, design my own path for learning, or speak up in class. Instead of being taught how to be empowered, I had learned how to follow rules and honor the opinions and ideas of those in authority at the expense of my own.

Too many young people from disadvantaged communities like the one I grew up in have similar experiences in school. Like me, they go through school as passive learners being told what to do and how to do it. They are forced to eat lunch silently, march in straight lines, fill in worksheets, copy notes from the board, and cram for standardized tests. They are expected to SLANT -sit up, lean forward, ask and answer questions, nod their heads, and track the teacher-to show engagement. In these ways, our students, predominantly youth of color, learn compliance and are deprived of opportunities to develop critical thinking and analytical skills that foster agency.

Though my boarding school provided me with the necessary tools, resources, and experiences to develop academic agency, I was not entirely empowered there, either. To survive, to grasp success, I had to learn and perform the language and culture of whiteness. Anytime my Blackness, my Bronxness, showed up in my behavior, speech, or mannerisms, my classmates would look at me skeptically as if there was something wrong with me, and my teachers would correct me. Interactions in the classroom and on campus routinely conveyed to me that I was viewed as inferior or not trustworthy. Despite the pedigree and academic preparation boarding school offered me, it was clear that I was not empowered-or safe-to be Black.

Later, as an educator, I would come to understand that the world is uniquely disempowering for Black children. Black youth are more likely to get stopped and frisked (New York Civil Liberties Union, ND). If they are in police custody, they are more likely to be mistreated (Jacobs, 2017). When Black youth laugh loudly in public, people often perceive them as grown-ups causing a scene, as they are too often adultified (Epstein, Blake, & González, 2017). And they are suspended and expelled from school at a rate three times higher than their white peers and are punished more harshly for the same infractions (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010).

Simply, Black children do not have the privilege of being empowered, not with the way their behavior is regarded as threatening, not with the way they are devalued, not with the limited mind-sets educators sometimes have about what Black students can and cannot do. For Black youth and other students of color in a society fraught with racial bias and inequity, being truly empowered comes with a host of risks.

Dismantling Racist Systems

No instructional paradigm, pedagogical practice, or policy will empower all students if we do not dismantle the racist systems that perpetuate the reality that Black students and youth of color are more likely to do poorly in school, to live in less resourced communities, to have worse academic and life outcomes, and to have their identities erased at school. Our education system was founded on practices that once excluded Black people from attending school and from sitting in the same classrooms as white students. To overcome this history of exclusion, we must acknowledge it and then commit to eradicating not only the racist remnants, but also its present manifestations.

We can begin by engaging in the necessary and uncomfortable work of becoming equity literate and anti-racist. This means understanding how our identity, power, and privilege play out in our instruction, classroom management, and relationships, and ensuring no harm is done. It means unlearning how we have been socialized in harmful, divisive ways. It means calling out inequity and racism when we see it-every single time-and working with colleagues and students to find solutions. It means taking on a stance of inquiry about our students, their families, and communities, and seeing them as equals-not in need of saving. It means creating classroom and school climates where all community members feel safe to be who they are without ridicule or bullying, where they can express themselves freely without being silenced.

Disrupting inequity also means having conversations with and teaching students about race and other forms of oppression. Too often, we shy away from difficult conversations about difference and conflict, fearing that our students are too young and incapable to engage meaningfully. But our students are desperate to make sense of their ever-more complex worlds, and we cannot develop empowered students by hiding from them what is happening around them-the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is a lesson I had to learn for myself after my boarding school years.

If we do not equip our young people to confront inequity, they will grow up to be adults who are unable to identify racism, bias, and their complicity in oppressive structures. They will grow up without the stamina and sensitivity to engage in race conversations with families, friends, strangers, and colleagues. They will grow up without the preparation or empowerment to disrupt the cycle of oppression in which many of us are still toiling.

References

Epstein, R., Blake, J. J., & González, T. (2017). Girlhood interrupted: The erasure of Black girls' childhood. Georgetown University Law Center - Center on Poverty and Inequality, p. 1-19.

Gregory, A., Skiba, R. J., & Noguera, P. A. (2010). The achievement gap and the discipline gap: Two sides of the same coin? Educational Researcher, 39(1), 59-68.

Jacobs, M. S. (2017). The violent state: Black women's invisible struggle against police violence. William and Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, 24(1), 39-100.

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Confronting Inequity / Who Has the Privilege to Be Empowered?

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We can't foster student agency without addressing racial oppression.

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Let's Talk about Racism in Schools

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November 2016 | Volume 74 | Number 3
Disrupting Inequity Pages 16-22

Rick Wormeli

We all build our own version of the human story and our role in it. We proceed daily, sure that our truth is the truth, then someone commits a horrific act of inhumanity that shreds our careful constructs. Then, it happens again, and again-and again, just as it did this past year with the multiple deaths of black men after interactions with police-and then the deaths of police officers.

The normal tools of interpretation and comfort seem to be gone. Who would think that in a caring, thoughtful democracy, we needed a large political movement to remind police officers-and all citizens-of the simple truth that black lives matter? Who would think that when a police officer was asked why he shot an autistic man's caretaker-who was lying with his hands in the air asking officers not to shoot-he'd answer, "I don't know" (Rabin, 2016)?

The violence among U.S. residents of different colors, cultures, religions, and political groups has heated to new levels. Social media may have exacerbated the divisive rhetoric and fanned the flames of hatred more than in past decades, but the intense distrust and contempt, and the inability to resolve these feelings in a civil manner, didn't start with social media. They are the new normal for many.

Rather than give in to the helplessness we feel to stop racism and our collective, civic hemorrhage, every institution must examine its own role in perpetuating (inadvertently and advertently) racist thinking and policies. We can't truly create equal opportunities for all until our institutions take specific actions to end that thinking and those policies. And ground zero for an equitable, nonracist society is the K-12 classroom.

Before we consider recent examples of racism and how it affects all Americans, let's be clear: No one is born racist. Racism is learned. Just as important, racism is not insurmountable.

What We're Up Against

In response to a recent Pew Research Center report that showed white and black Americans aren't on the same page about issues of poverty and racism, blogger Rob Wile (2016) noted, "While most black people think that higher levels of poverty and lower levels of economic mobility in their communities are the fault of America's legacy of systematic racism and under-investment, more white people are content to blame black people themselves."

Five years ago, I was giving a day-long presentation to a group of teachers in the United States. During a morning break, I overheard one woman say to another, "When we get that darkie out of the White House, we'll get this country back the way it should be." The other woman replied, "You got that right."

Refusal to respect other cultures isn't confined to interactions between blacks and whites. On commercial flights, passengers dressed in Muslim clothing who are texting on their phones have been asked to leave the plane because they are making other passengers uncomfortable. And some of my Hispanic students have told me their parents have been shadowed by security personnel as they shop at stores.

Imagine if, at a dinner celebrating local Cub Scouts and their achievements, the adult leader asked everyone to bow his or her head for a word of prayer before the meal. Then he prayed into the microphone, "Praise and glory be to You, O Allah. There is no God but You. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful!" If this happened in most American Cub Scout packs, people of Christian, Jewish, and other faiths or no faiths would be offended that they were forced to bow their heads and listen to something foreign to their beliefs.

My family experienced something similar at a Cub Scout dinner. The pre-dinner prayer was full of Christian references like, "Through the one and only God, Jesus, our guiding savior, we are redeemed and made whole." This was in a diverse area near Washington, D.C., with a Scout pack full of Muslims, Jews, and people of other faiths as well as Christians. Imagine those non-Christian families' reactions to such a prayer.

I asked the leader if there might be a more inclusive prayer we could offer. She dismissed the concern. As I looked around the room at the faces of many parents and children, I saw the real lesson learned: You don't belong.

Not all disrespect and conflict is purely about race. Religious, cultural, and racial differences interweave. Stark differences result in fervent debate and divisiveness among Christians as well as among Muslims and Jews. Racism, however, is among the most insidious and deepest-running challenges of our time.

Moving Beyond Silence

Clearly, Americans must begin talking candidly together about race-starting now. We don't need to justify having focused conversations about racism in schools. I'm bothered by my own silence at times as I witness racism. After I overheard the comment about "that darkie [in] the White House," I didn't confront these women. It wasn't a proud moment; in my silence, there was tacit acceptance of racist thinking.

I'm upset at my silence about racist statements and behaviors by others that I've heard about but not witnessed personally. It might seem that because the incidents are second-hand, I'm absolved from speaking out against them. Yet, how do I reconcile that silence with my belief that each of us is free only if everyone is free? As Nelson Mandela (1995) wrote, "Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me. ... The oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed" (p. 624).

Besides the stunning cruelty of racism, letting it fester serves no one, not even the predominant group. We're in this together. It's ironic, then, that we focus on labeling differences among us, particularly whether those differences are negative or positive. For example, if a teacher looks at the students before her at the beginning of the school year, it's likely she will wonder who are going to be the easiest ones to teach. Isn't the one we assume to be easy to teach the student who most reflects our own culture, or the one who looks similar to a student from last year we enjoyed teaching? We're already sorting according to built-in biases. When we wonder who'll be the hardest to teach, we often guess the students who don't look like anyone we've taught before.

Humans have built-in "other"-isms in order to protect ourselves. We categorize people in terms of ourselves and, in many cases, interpret differences from us in a negative way. ( That music they play in their homes is annoying! Can't they eat less disgusting food?) We might even think, How sad. My neighbor who worships at a different church doesn't understand the higher truth. Or for easy identification, we might resort to caricatures, versions that emphasize one or two attributes we think a cultural group has. ( All Asians are gifted mathematicians. White people who live in trailers are alcoholics.)

Principles for Brave Conversations

I sometimes question whether white educators can accept that institutionalized racism exists and whether they can do so without succumbing to paralyzing guilt about their complicity in racism's growth or becoming so overwhelmed that they give up. I sometimes question whether black teachers and parents can embrace white teachers and parents who want to do right. Can they accept whites' sincere efforts to work together to end racist practices, even if they stumble or are unintentionally offensive?

But we have to try talking with one another, because biases and quick categorizations about people who are different from us are expressions of our limited experiences with them. Such categorizations are a slippery slope into classism and racism. With more experiences with others, we flesh people out in our minds and become comfortable with them. When we spend time with quadriplegics, for instance, we come to see them as individuals first, persons with paralyzed limbs a distant second. People with a hardened stance against LGBTQ rights soften when a member of their family reveals he is homosexual.

Yet talking about racism is uncomfortable. We avoid such conversations in schools because it could stir things up that we're unprepared to handle. We might lose friends or colleagues for a while-or longer. Or we're so afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing or appearing racist that we cripple constructive opportunities to talk about race and resolve conflicts. By approaching one another with good faith and caring, we can ease these fears. As Howard Stevenson (2014) writes,

Students, teachers, parents, and educators must expect, receive, and give affection (nurturing), protection (monitoring), and correction (accountability) while they take risks to become aware of and learn to resolve racial stress and conflict in daily social interactions. Without these ingredients, the risks of racial avoidance will be too great, and the improvement of race relations and racial climates within schools too arduous to complete.

Reviewing and agreeing on the principles below can help us have candid discussions about racism with our students-or among fellow educators.

▪ Assume that, at any given moment in the conversation, the other person is doing the best he or she can. Chances are, it's true.

▪ Forgive yourself and others for making mistakes, including inexact wording, muddled thinking, or unintended use of stereotypes.

▪ Suppress hidden agendas and the urge to preach or politicize.

▪ Remain nonaccusatory when you see things differently from another. Use phrases like, "It's been my experience that ___," "Tell me more about___," or "How did faculty at your last school respond to ___?"

▪ Seek first to understand, then to be understood (Covey, 2013).

▪ If you disagree with someone, paraphrase that person's point before responding. It helps him know that his comments were heard and considered.

▪ Avoid language that blames ("If it weren't for white people. ..." "They're always speaking Spanish together, so they must not want me around." "You're blind to white privilege.") Blaming thwarts honest conversation.

▪ Don't ask anyone to speak for a whole race if there's only one student or colleague in the group from a particular culture or race.

▪ Acknowledge that candid conversation makes us all vulnerable. Teachers' inner selves are on view daily by many constituencies-students, parents, administrators, and the general public. They are also subject to self-doubts and high expectations of professionalism. As a result, they may be hesitant to open those vulnerability gates too widely.

▪ Avoid associating the quality of a colleague's teaching with exploratory comments offered in conversation about racism. A peer can be a neophyte in such conversations, but effective in the classroom.

The questions in Figure 1 can help start robust conversations in school communities. As to how to launch these discussions, I don't recommend starting conversations on racism at a large faculty meeting. This often results in side conversations, cross-talking, and "knowing" glances passed among people, and personal buttons may be pushed. In large gatherings, many voices and perspectives don't get heard (in fact, a few teachers might hijack the conversation with their own agendas). A thoughtful exploration of issues involving racism in the school is better started in groups of no more than six. Build to a larger group experience after conversation skills have developed.

Figure 1. Questions to Start Faculty Discussions About Racism

Does racism exist in our schools? What does it sound or look like?

What would it take to create a truly race-neutral society? Do we want this?

Am I racist? Why, or why not? Am I open to others' critique when it comes to how I relate to other races?

Does the rise of certain groups' influence-Latino, Jewish, white, Muslim, or whatever-mean a decline in other groups' well-being? If people say yes, discuss whether this represent a "zero sum" mindset. Is this a mindset we want to communicate to students?

How can we counter negative stereotypes?

Are we responsible for teaching students and colleagues to recognize and confront racism?

What should we do when we inadvertently do or say something racist?

What do we communicate to the parents of our minority students about our expectations for their children?

How are we battling the student opinion that academic proficiency is inherently white?

Do we have a disproportionate number of administrative referrals for our minority students?

Choose faculty to lead these conversations who are good at making sure each voice is heard and valued. Give these leaders time to brainstorm constructive responses or strategies to diffuse any (intentionally and unintentionally) incendiary comments. If a point becomes particularly contentious, for instance, participants might record their thinking on index cards and pass them to the facilitator to read aloud. Dozens of books and websites on group facilitation provide helpful tips on small-group dynamics. For conversing on racism, I particularly recommend Ali Michael's Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education (Teachers College Press, 2014) and Howard Stevenson's Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences That Make a Difference (Teachers College Press, 2013).

Informing Our Conversations

To build a climate where such discussions bear fruit, we should immerse students and ourselves in learning experiences that will positively inform conversations about race. Lack of awareness about other races rarely helps a difficult conversation; it leads to misunderstandings, limited sharing, hurt feelings, and eventually, a discussion's demise. Experiences like these will help us sustain difficult interactions-and bring equal opportunity to students from nonmainstream cultures.

▪ Use fiction and nonfiction that will open students to different worlds, help them see situations from different perspectives, and build empathy.

▪ Try simulations and role-playing in which students can approximate the perspectives of others, but be sensitive to the fact that some of us can leave the role at the end of the learning experience. Anyone from a minority race or oppressed group can't slip out of the challenges at the end of the day: They live with them 24-7.

▪ Have your class regularly think about a contentious issue from one prevailing perspective, then give them 20 minutes to argue the same issue from the opposite perspective. Working with partners can help.

▪ Practice responses to scenarios involving racism. What should a teacher or student do if someone says something that might be perceived as racist? For instance, in a class discussion about the economy of the South during the Civil War, one student blurts out, "I wouldn't mind having slaves around to help me get a lot of work done!" (Stevenson, 2014). A thoughtful teacher might say something like, "Tobey, consider how someone coming from a culture severely traumatized by slave masters would hear your words just now. How would they feel about your comment about slavery? Would you like to rephrase your statement?" By rehearsing successful responses, we can create a picture of ourselves responding to an instance of racism, which increases the likelihood that we will respond.

▪ Hold students accountable immediately for racist statements and behaviors. You can do so in ways that let the student repair damage: "Terry, I know you're not naturally a racist thinker. Check your statement again: Is there anything there that could be construed as racist?" If a student consistently makes racially insensitive comments and needs a nonhumiliating boost in executive function skills-which is where much of the filtering of impulsive, inappropriate comments resides-you might videotape class discussions from time to time. In a private moment away from classmates, cue up the video to a place showing inappropriate comments from this student and ask him or her, "What did you say here? Look at the body language, faces, and responses from your classmates. Did you read the situation correctly? How could you have made a completely different comment that would demonstrate respect for people of color?"

▪ Talk to students about what you believe about race and equity. Successful teachers aren't afraid of teaching a community's values; they are not indifferent. It's important to model for students a vision of adults standing up for what they think is morally right. With racism, there is little ambiguity; intentional or unintentional discrimination against a person or group based on race or culture is against the law.

▪ Teach skills of debate and civil discourse, using materials from Teaching Tolerance, the National Speech and Debate Association, and the National Institute for Civil Discourse.

▪ Don't just skim information on the Civil Rights movement and its leaders, and don't limit its study to Black History Month. Give it full attention throughout the school year. Study more than just the struggles of black Americans. Civil Rights isn't just about equitable treatment for one group.

▪ Share news stories that surface racism in the local community and in national politics. Have students investigate school or community racism, if appropriate.

▪ Empower students to do something about racism in the media (and social media) when they see it, such as writing letters, making presentations, or analyzing a racist's arguments.

▪ Expose students to artworks and contributions by many different cultures and races and let them respond personally to those artifacts.

▪ Teach students and teachers to recognize and control micro-aggressions-the small, seemingly nonracist things people do, say, and think that are hurtful and may betray unconscious racism or bias. Examples include: avoiding eye contact with students outside our culture; telling a student her math work is excellent for a student who comes from such a poor background; demeaning service industry jobs or any job perceived as being done primarily by minorities ("If you don't study, you might wind up as a taxi driver"); and using language like saying black youths "rioted and turned violent," whereas white youths "protested unfair treatment."

▪ Have students write personal reflections about racial tension. Discuss how much people filter their language in trying to say it just the right way.

Securing a Nonracist Future

Part of our job as educators is to secure a nonracist future, so our response to racism in our schools must be clear and compassionate. Settling for indifference exacerbates the problem. And we can't afford to leave anyone out of this conversation. For instance, I'm a white male, so some people might think, How could he possibly understand this enough to be helpful? Some might even dismiss my ideas because of my race alone. Think about that idea-that because of my race, I have nothing of value to add to the community discussion on racism-and you'll see it's misguided. Every one of us is touched by racism. We all have a stake in positive race relations.

A conversation needs only two people. Let's each identify, today, one person on our faculty with whom we're willing to initiate a conversation on racism, regardless of the make-up of our student body or faculty. Whole futures are at stake-ours. Together, we are powerful.

▪ Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

▪ Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education by Ali Michael (Teachers College Press, 2014)

▪ Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan (Picador, 2014)

▪ Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall by Carl T. Rowan (Back Bay Books, 1993)

▪ What's Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequity edited by Edwin Mayorga and Bree Picower (Peter Lang Publishers, 2015)

▪ Reading for Their Life: (Re)Building the Textual Lineages of African American Adolescent Males by Alfred W. Tatum (Heinemann, 2009)

References

Covey, S. (2013). Seven habits of highly effective people. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Mandela, N. (1995). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Back Bay Books.

Rabin, C. (2016, July 20). Cop shoots caretaker of autistic man playing in the street with toy truck. Miami Herald. Retrieved from www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article90905442.html

Stevenson, H. (2014). Promoting racial literacy in schools: Differences that make a difference. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wile, R. (2016, June 27). White people don't blame racism for black people's struggles. They blame black people. [blog post] Retrieved from Fusion at www.fusion.net/story/319381/black-white-gap-on-black-struggle/

Rick Wormeli ( www.rickwormeli.com) is a long-time teacher, consultant, and author of The Collected Writings (So Far) of Rick Wormeli: Crazy, Good Stuff I Learned about Teaching Along the Way (2013) and Summarization in Any Subject (ASCD, 2004). Follow him on Twitter.

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November 2016 | Volume 74 | Number 3 Disrupting Inequity Pages 16-22 Rick Wormeli We all build our own version of the human story and our role in it. We proceed daily, sure that our truth is the truth, then someone commits a horrific act of inhumanity that shreds our careful constructs.

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What Black Educataors Built

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7
Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 12-18

Vanessa Siddle Walker

I began teaching in a fully desegregated high school in 1980 under J.A. Freeman, one of the three black principals who survived desegregation as a high school principal in North Carolina. As a young teacher, I embodied the vision for integration. I was the product of a desegregated high school and an elite, predominantly white college. No one I knew talked about the massive firings of black teachers and principals across the South as retaliation during desegregation. I knew nothing about the activities of the black principals and teachers who worked against inequality in formerly segregated schools. In fact, from my perspective, segregation was simply dead. So I ignored the whispers about the earlier life of my principal who had led the segregated black school and instead focused on how to be a good teacher.

I learned to engage with colleagues as we reviewed major education reports at faculty meetings and discussed in small groups how we might apply the ideas in our school. It was normal for my principal to appear unsolicited in the door of my classroom and listen for a few minutes before quietly departing. I heeded his instructions that all teachers should greet students as they entered and exited class. I especially remember the academic competition with the neighboring, formerly all-white high school across town. Whenever Mr. Freeman used the school intercom to interrupt instruction and announce that we had beaten the more privileged students across town on standardized test scores, the school erupted with enthusiasm.

Looking back, I realize that I learned to teach in an extraordinary educational space. Only now have I come to see that I lived the kind of school climate that black educators across the South had envisioned for all children in their hopes for integration. Mr. Freeman was executing that vision.

A History of a Vision

Not long after that first job, I left teaching-not because I didn't enjoy it, but because I wanted to learn more-to become a scholar of African American educational history. For almost 30 years, I forgot about Mr. Freeman's school as I wrote about the segregated schooling of African American children in the pre- Brown era. With a freshly minted doctorate directing my thinking, I was surprised to hear members of a southern black school community talk about their "good" segregated school. I frowned. What could possibly have been good in a segregated school?

The answer to that question yielded my first single-authored book, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). I discovered that while scholars had already chronicled the problems with black segregated schools-the poor facilities, the inadequate resources, and the constrained education that occurred because of lack of opportunity-that history had failed to capture the resilience of a people.

I wrote about Caswell County Training School (CCTS) in North Carolina, using more than 100 interviews and archival findings from basements and attics to showcase the rich educational environments that black educators created despite the neglect of the local school board. I found many amazing stories about the professional teaching and collegial behaviors of teachers and principals and about the opportunities the school provided for teachers, including study groups and travel. CCTS also supported the aspirations of black children by creating a school climate that embodied both interpersonal and institutional care, meaning the individual messages of care between teachers and principal were reinforced by school policies. In addition, black parents ardently supported the school, both as advocates in petitioning the school board and as ongoing resources to finance school needs. The school's principal, N. L. Dillard, was a visionary and a community leader.

Whenever I'd give a lecture or presentation about my book, I'd be surprised to hear from black people in the audience who had themselves attended high-quality segregated schools. "I went to a school just like that," they'd say. They even often used the same language to describe their schools. It seemed that their teachers and administrators wanted students to reach "their highest potential." I had thought that CCTS was an anomaly, but people's stories made me wonder: How could so many segregated schools mirror those in the school about which I wrote?

That research led me to more fascinating information and, eventually, my next book, Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). In this work, I explored the accounts that teachers and students at CCTS gave that their principal had "gone to a lot of meetings," drawing on my intrigue with how little anyone was able to explain exactly what these meetings were or what the principals learned. I focused on principals of segregated schools and the extensive networks of professional support they had, including their activities at the American Teachers Association meetings and the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, when black educators met together nationally. I also looked at records of their state and local meetings.

While the structures of these black organizations mirrored those of the white professional organizations from which they were excluded, the black organizational network differed in purpose, autonomy, accountability, and commitment. Black educators focused specifically on the needs of black children in school and the ways they might solve the problems the children confronted. Among their conversations were topics such as professionalism, teaching responsibility, civics, testing, and guidance. Their ideas filtered through national meetings, state meetings, regional meetings, and small study groups and can be documented with extraordinary content consistency over decades and into the practice of individual schools. Tracing this undocumented pedagogical world was illuminating. This network, I recognized, was a major reason why CCTS was such a good school, and why the people I met all had similar experiences at their segregated schools.

A Stairwell, an Attic, and a Whole New World

As I researched the work of these quiet, steadfast black education leaders, I began to learn even more about their professional vision and activities. Horace Tate had been the executive director of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association in the decade before school desegregation. When black education records were destroyed across the South and black educators were fired after desegregation, Tate hid the records of the GTEA. Just before he died, he directed me to the hidden archival treasure up a tiny stairwell into the attic of an old home-a full collection of the records of a black educational organization, unveiling activities from World War I to 1970.

In these records was another facet of the segregated school world. Black educators did not merely use their intricate networks to disseminate pedagogical ideas that would inspire black children to succeed in a challenging and inequitable school climate, but they also used those networks to create advocacy structures to undermine segregation. Through their educational organizations and networks, these educators generated the invisible collaborative activity that supplied money, data, and plaintiffs for the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In quiet, collaborative spaces, the leaders of these organizations-along with brilliant lawyers and courageous parents-created a mechanism of advocacy for African American school children that stretched through the U.S. South. I tell this story of generational struggle and vision in my latest book, The Lost Education of Horace Tate (The New Press, 2018).

"We Want It All!"

My collective 30 years of writing and research about the segregated schooling of African American children have led to a simple conclusion that helps explain the world in which I came of age as a student and teacher: Black educators believed desegregation should be an additive model. More specifically, they wanted desegregated schools to provide for students all the structures they had created to sustain those students in segregated schools plus providing them the equality and resources they had been denied in the segregated schools.

In segregated school environments, schools encouraged black students to aspire, to believe they could be anything they wanted to be-even though the children lived in a segregated world. Black educators were building resilience to overcome the challenges the children confronted daily while also preparing them for a world that did not exist. Likewise, black educators already had elaborate networks to advocate for their students. These intergenerational, nationally connected networks provided a way to translate the needs of individual school communities into an advocacy structure linking legislators and lawyers and other stakeholders.

In integration, the black educational networks sought to retain these aspiring climates and educational advocacy networks while also obtaining for their students the access they had been denied. They wanted the books, materials, science equipment, facilities, buses, and other forms of education support that white children took for granted. They did not imagine having to sacrifice their educational practices to gain access. As Martin Luther King, Jr. thundered in a state meeting with thousands of black educators in Georgia in 1967 while affirming their integration vision, "We want it alllllll...."

However, events unfolded differently in 1970 and beyond. America settled for a quiet kind of desegregation compromise between advocates for integration and defenders of segregation that allowed black bodies into white schools, but failed to fully address the actual educational interests of black children. Unreprimanded by a federal government that was no longer committed to full equality but just needed the language of equality for international standing, southern school boards that were opposed to integration fired black teachers and hired white teachers in their place. They closed black schools or demoted them to middle or elementary schools. Because white school boards seemed to believe that black principals did not have the educational capacity to run a school, especially a school in which they would supervise white teachers and oversee the education of white children, black principals were often forced to forfeit their leadership positions.

The result was that 30,000-50,000 of the teachers and principals who understood how to build aspirational climates for all children never entered the desegregated world.

Likewise, the merger of black educational organizations with white educational organizations through the National Education Association meant that the legacy of white educational organizations dominated the newly integrated associations. Even in the best mergers, the agenda of advocacy to protect the needs of black children diminished.

In the climate of massive southern desegregation, black educators discovered that they were the victims of an exchange model through which they traded the aspiration and advocacy that had defined black education for the slim hope of access without support or even their own involvement. To many of these educators, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, designed to protect the interests of black children, actually protected the interests of white children.

Black educators voiced their concerns as the effects of desegregation became clear. Limited access was not enough. In publications and in forgotten speeches, black educators in Georgia argued that school boards were still 99 percent white. These administrative bodies had no history of protecting the interest of black children, so how could they be expected to create a desegregation that was fair and equitable? Moreover, with black educators fired, who would teach the children they could be anything they wanted to be? Who would advocate when new structures did not protect them? But their concerns about ways to implement a more visionary desegregation went unheeded.

What Makes a "Good" School?

I did not know any of this history back when I taught under Mr. Freeman. All I knew was that we had a good school-one where educators were expected to teach all our students to aspire and where educators intervened, as necessary, to protect students' interests. What I understand now is that Mr. Freeman simply brought with him to our desegregated school the vision black educators had for all desegregated schools. I have also since learned that his professional mentor during segregation was N. L. Dillard himself, the principal who I had researched for Their Highest Potential. How ironic. As a student and teacher, I had lived the hopes of those whose stories I would later write.

Sometimes people ask if the history of black educators under segregation is just, well, old and irrelevant in today's complex educational world. I might think so, except that I sometimes see parts of the aspiration, advocacy, access formula work successfully in current schools. For example, over five years, I watched Pamela Benford, a former principal of Cedar Grove High School in Atlanta, who had been mentored by another black principal from the segregation era, foster aspiration in an urban school environment and advocate for her students. Her teachers developed into professional leaders in content-driven faculty meetings. The faculty worked individually and institutionally to create a caring climate for students. Benford stretched herself through external professional networks. And the students respected and loved their school leader. When I remember Ms. Benford at her school-and her awards and her school's continually rising test scores-I am reminded of Mr. Freeman. And of Mr. Dillard at CCTS.

I believe in integration. I am its product, one of the many in that first desegregation generation who succeeded when the doors were thrust open for us. But an ongoing, successful vision for integration cannot stop with the 1970 version we experienced if America is to support a democratic principle for all children. We must continue to harness effective legal strategies in an era when the country is fast retreating in its commitment to access for all children.

We must also resurrect the original vision for integration sought by those who fought the longest and sacrificed the most. In addition to creating schools that meet all state curricular requirements, we must commit ourselves to stronger professional preparation and professional learning opportunities so all educators can embrace strategies to allow schools to become places where the aspirations of children can soar. We need renewed organizational collaborations that cross disciplinary areas and that connect higher education and school communities, partnerships that allow a collective advocacy for the needs of all children.

About a decade ago, I went back to visit the high school where I first taught, even though Mr. Freeman had long since retired. I walked into the building expecting wonderful memories to flood me. Instead, I balked at the entrance and walked the halls with dismay. The school looked almost completely foreign to me. By every measurement variable I could observe, it appeared to have adopted the characteristics associated with any other struggling urban high school. Sadly, the vision for aspiration, advocacy, and access appeared to have departed with Mr. Freeman.

Endnotes

See The Lost Education of Horace Tate (The New Press, 2018), p. 8.

Walker, V. (2018). The lost education of Horace Tate. New York: The New Press.

Vanessa Siddle Walker is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University.

KEYWORDS

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7 Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 12-18 Vanessa Siddle Walker I began teaching in a fully desegregated high school in 1980 under J.A. Freeman, one of the three black principals who survived desegregation as a high school principal in North Carolina.

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Why School Integration Matters

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7
Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 20-28

Pedro A. Noguera

Yet, even as we acknowledge the historic significance of Brown, we must also acknowledge its decreasing impact on public education. Any objective appraisal of where we stand as a nation today with respect to progress in racial integration in schools reveals that Brown-and the Court's call for it to be implemented with "all deliberate speed" -clearly has not lived up to its promise or potential (Jung, Costa Vargas, & Bonilla-Silva, 2011). This is due in part to subsequent court rulings that weakened and undermined Brown's power and to the persistence of residential segregation. But it is also attributable to continued racism in our society, a lack of civic will, and the absence of political courage.

We should all be concerned. At a time when our nation is becoming irreversibly more diverse, our lack of commitment to racial integration poses a major threat to the cohesiveness and stability of American society.

Double Segregation

In recent years, several scholars and commentators, many of whom happen to be Black, have openly questioned the value and importance of racial integration in schools. Some point to the benefits that prior generations experienced from attending schools staffed and led by Black educators who cared for their students, challenged them academically, and never doubted their ability to excel (Siddle Walker, 2000). But while this narrative is clearly part of the history of Jim Crow schooling, it is only one part of it. Other scholars remind us that the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson-which called for schools to be "separate but equal" -was never realized. Prior to Brown, systemic discrimination and inadequate resource provisions relegated students of color to inferior schools and profoundly unequal education experiences (Gamoran & An, 2016).

For 20 to 30 years after Brown, many communities across the country took Brown's mandate seriously and attempted to integrate schools to undo the legacy of separate and unequal schools, sometimes compelled to do so by court mandates. However, the period of aggressive court enforcement was largely short-lived, and in many cases, the progress that had been achieved has been reversed.

Today, the average Black student is most likely to attend a school where 49 percent of the students are Black. For Latino students, the patterns are even more extreme, with 57 percent of Latino students attending schools where the majority of students are Latino (UCLA Civil Rights Project, 2014). But these averages fail to capture the hyper-segregation by race and class that is common in most urban areas. On the whole, Black and Latino students throughout the United States are most likely to attend schools where the majority of students are poor and the resources available to serve them are inadequate (UCLA Civil Rights Project, 2014; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2018).

Throughout the country, most children of color are experiencing what might be termed "double segregation" - separation by race and class (Boschma & Brownstein, 2016). Typically, increased racial isolation is accompanied by a concentration of the poorest and most disadvantaged students in certain schools. Because their achievement indicators are consistently low, many of these schools have been labelled as failing by state bureaucracies that theoretically are supposed to help them.

Even though it is widely known that many of these schools struggle because they are overwhelmed by the wide variety of problems that frequently afflict poor families and communities (including violence, homelessness, hunger, and trauma), education policymakers often ignore and fail to address these issues or the academic challenges that accompany them. Instead, under the guise of accountability, education policy has more often been designed to apply pressure and impose sanctions on underperforming schools and districts. Thus, not only is segregation no longer acknowledged as an obstacle to educational advancement, but neither is poverty, or what we might call the "accumulation of disadvantage."

The evidence, at this point, is clear: Not only have we failed to live up to the promise of Brown, we have failed even to deliver on the promise of Plessy. Poor children of color across America not only increasingly attend schools that are separated by race and class, but they are also most likely to be assigned to schools that are profoundly unequal (Boschma & Brownstein, 2016).

An Integrated Education: My Story

Aside from the legal and policy setbacks, the lack of will to address the issue of growing racial segregation in education might also be explained in part by our failure to draw attention to the benefits associated with integrated schooling. It is important to recall that while, in many communities, racial integration was fiercely and at times violently resisted, in other places there was greater openness and support. During the 1970s and '80s, the number of students attending racially integrated schools steadily and dramatically increased.

I was one of those students. I was raised in New York City in the 1960s and '70s, at a time when school busing was common. As a result, like many others of my generation, I know both the costs and the very real benefits of integrated schooling.

For my first few years in school, I attended racially segregated schools in New York City. However, in 1968, when I was in 3rd grade, my family moved from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to Long Island in search of better housing and better schools. We moved first to Bay Shore, a relatively affluent community located on the south shore, and then, when I was in 7th grade, to Brentwood, a working-class community now notorious for the presence of Central American gangs like MS-13. Both communities were in the midst of significant demographic change, which was reflected in their schools.

Despite my parents' hopes, we learned shortly after our arrival that access to a good education was not guaranteed by our move to suburbia. Because of our Spanish surname, my older brother and I were initially placed in special education. Our placement was not based on an assessment of our academic abilities but on the assumption that we couldn't speak English, even though we were fluent (English was our first language). As was true in many other school systems, students who did not speak English in Bay Shore were treated as though they suffered from a learning disability.

Since I was only in 3rd grade at the time, I didn't object to spending the day coloring and making paper airplanes. However, my elder brother, Felipe, immediately knew that something was wrong. He told my parents that we had been placed in the wrong classes and that we weren't learning anything. Like many immigrant parents, mine tended to be deferential toward school officials, so they initially reacted with disbelief. After all, this was a well-regarded school system located in a predominantly white, suburban community. Surely, my parents felt, the schools could be trusted to provide us with a quality education.

Nevertheless, after repeated entreaties from my brother, my father relented and made a trip to the school to inquire about our placement. A New York City police officer at the time, he decided to make the visit wearing his uniform. After hearing school officials explain that our placement in special education was appropriate, my father insisted that he be allowed to visit the classes we had been placed in. Upon seeing that nothing that could be described as academic work was occurring there, he demanded that we be removed and placed in new classes. Flustered and unsure of how to deal with this angry policeman, the school administrator explained that before we could be moved, we would have to be assessed. After a short, standardized exam confirmed what my family knew all along, my brother and I were immediately taken out of special education and placed in gifted classes.

That change in categorization, made possible by my father's intervention, resulted in my brother and me being tracked into rigorous courses with middle-class, high-achieving students (most of whom were white) for the rest of our school years. This completely changed our academic trajectory. Ultimately, my elder brother went to Harvard and I went to Brown. I often wonder what might have happened had my parents not intervened to get us out of special education, and how many children experience a similar sorting but have parents who are unable to advocate for them.

Throughout my primary and secondary school years, I was one of few students of color in my classes. In middle and high school, the majority of Black and Latino students at my school were in lower-tracked and vocational classes. I knew and socialized with them, but I also became friends with some of my white classmates. I even became friendly with some of those who I knew were racists.

On my very first day at West Middle School in Brentwood, I got into a fight with a white student who made a joke about me and called me a "n___." The incident occurred in my social studies class in the presence of my teacher while we were watching a film that had something to do with Africa.

This was not to be my last fight over racism. I quickly learned the importance of standing up to racist name-calling from other students, and even teachers. I also had clashes with other Black students who questioned my loyalty because I was different and not in classes with them. Over time, I figured out how to navigate these conflicts on both sides and avoid fights. I came to realize that despite their racism and outward hostility, some of my white classmates and teachers were decent people. I learned how to connect with them, as well as with my Black and Latino peers who were not in class with me. It helped that I played sports (soccer, basketball, and track), which provided me with a social arena where I could form relationships with all kinds of students.

Unique Preparation for College

When I got to Brown, I was initially intimidated because many of my classmates, both white and non-white, were from affluent families. Many had attended elite prep schools that I didn't even know existed. I felt like an imposter and doubted my ability to compete academically. However, after a few months on campus, I began to realize that unlike many of my affluent classmates, I knew how to work hard in the face of challenges, and how to work with people from different backgrounds. Additionally, though I was only 18, I also had a clear sense of my identity from a cultural/racial standpoint. In Brentwood, I had been forced to defend myself, physically and intellectually. That experience prepared me to be unafraid of taking on people who attempted to make me feel inferior.

After a short period of adjustment, I was excelling both academically and socially. I now realize that my experiences in Brentwood helped prepare me for the Ivy League. With more than 5,000 students, my high school was only slightly smaller than Brown, and in many ways, far more intimidating. In Brentwood, I had learned to study hard to meet the demands of rigorous academic work. One of my strategies, especially for challenging courses like chemistry, calculus, and physics, had been to study with groups of other students outside of class, including some of my white classmates. This experience helped me to avoid feeling intimidated by my peers at Brown and to recognize that I could form bonds even with people who were very different than me with respect to race and class. In fact, one of the people I became friends with at Brown was John F. Kennedy Jr., son of the former president. He and I got to know each other because we both played on the rugby team and we were both involved in protests against apartheid in South Africa.

In my classes at Brown, I was not afraid of speaking up to ask questions or even challenge professors, most of whom seemed to welcome my comments and interventions. Despite my working-class background, attending racially integrated schools had provided me with a valuable form of social capital that made it possible for me to advocate for myself and others, navigate rules and barriers to pursue my goals, and form strategic alliances with mentors, friends, and associates based on recognition of our common interests.

Aside from my friends, one of my most important sources of support at Brown came from my mentor, Professor Martin Martel. A chain-smoking sociologist, Martel, who was white, took an interest in me and became my mentor during my sophomore year. Over time, our relationship developed, and he proceeded to open doors of opportunity that I never knew existed. I realize now that because I had formed close ties to some of my white teachers in Brentwood, I was willing to embrace Martel as a mentor. Even though he was long-winded and I had to endure his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit (back then, professors could smoke in their offices), the relationship was invaluable to me. Martel let me know about available fellowships (I was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship), hired me as a teaching assistant for lower-division courses, and encouraged me to enroll in graduate-level courses, and ultimately, to pursue a doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Making the Case for Integration

My experience was unique but not an anomaly. Researchers who have studied school integration have documented similar benefits for both students of color and white students (Kahlenberg, 2012-2013; Wells et al., 2016). In this respect, I think it is essential that those of us who went to integrated schools let people know about the benefits of our education. Of course, even as I say this, I also readily acknowledge that my experience with racially integrated schooling, like that of many other Black and Latino students, was not entirely positive. The prejudice and bigotry I encountered were very real, and without considerable support from my family, my school experiences might have left me academically and psychologically damaged. I also readily acknowledge that I was privileged in some ways. Had I been tracked into English as a second language or remedial classes, the fact that I attended a school that was nominally integrated would undoubtedly have resulted in little benefit to me at all.

But too often, we only hear about the pain many communities endured during the nation's push for racially integrated schooling in the 1960s and '70s. Even as we acknowledge the tensions and conflicts of those ugly years, we must also call attention to the positive experiences and outcomes for many Black and Latino children who attended racially integrated schools. For example, we now have a vast body of empirical evidence that many of the Black and Latino children who participated in the METCO program-a voluntary desegregation effort that made it possible for a significant number of children of color from Boston to be bused to affluent schools in the suburbs-benefited significantly, especially when compared to their counterparts who remained in Boston's racially isolated schools (Eaton & Chirichingo, 2011).

Sadly, research of this type is neither widely known nor particularly influential in current debates over school integration, such as those taking place in New York City. At the same time, many highly sought-after private schools boast of their commitment to diversity and equity, even when most of the students they serve are white and affluent (Reardon & Yun, 2003). The same is true of many public magnet schools and charter schools, which research shows are more likely to be segregated than traditional public schools (Camera, 2017; Perry, 2017). Given the demographic changes occurring in our society, it is essential that support for integration be far more than tokenism and lip service.

On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Brown decision, it is important to remember that civil rights and educational opportunity are deeply intertwined. Though many politicians, including several of our most recent presidents, have stated that education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, they have seldom elaborated or acted on this principle. Unlike President Lyndon B. Johnson, who connected the two issues directly with the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, and who understood that pursuing equality in educational opportunity was essential for advancing civil rights, most political leaders since-both Democrats and Republicans-have pretended that we could pursue one without the other.

We have clear evidence that we cannot. Despite its flaws and limitations, the effort to racially integrate our nation's schools continues to be important to the health of the diverse nation we are becoming. Imagine what might have happened if instead of erecting additional barriers to make racial integration more difficult, the courts had built upon the legacy of Brown to tear such barriers down. Would the United States be as racially polarized and divided as it is now if more individuals had had the experience of learning together? What if our society had gone even further than merely placing children from different racial and ethnic backgrounds in schools together, but had also committed to equality of opportunity in accessing the curriculum and the supports needed to be successful? What if we had made a concerted effort to integrate the teaching force, and were more intentional about the need to prepare teachers to work in racially diverse classrooms and build learning communities rooted in respect, trust, and empathy?

In our current political climate, these ideas may sound like pipe dreams and fantasies. The Trump Administration has not named the pursuit of racial integration as a priority, nor has it directed resources to communities with the greatest needs. However, there are still a small but significant number of communities across the country that remain committed to the pursuit of schools that are racially integrated and equitable. Many of these are in university towns like Evanston, Illinois; Durham, North Carolina; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I spent nearly 20 years living and working in one of them-Berkeley, California-where I also served on the school board, taught classes, and enrolled four of my five children. While the experience wasn't always entirely positive, I know that my children benefited from the integrated schools they attended, and I believe that other children deserve this opportunity, too.

Renewing the Commitment

Throughout the country, we are dealing with a significant rise in racism and hate crimes. We are also reminded regularly of the consequences of allowing racially isolated school communities that are overwhelmed by the effects of concentrated poverty, to languish without the support they need. We live in a prosperous, multiracial society and we must redouble our commitment to integrated educational opportunities for all.

Moreover, because of our lack of will to enforce Brown, too many of our children are growing up unprepared to participate in our increasingly diverse society. Many have inadequate knowledge about the diverse racial and ethnic groups that now make up our country, and they are not gaining experience in how to live and work successfully in a society where soon no racial or ethnic group will constitute the majority.

It is time to regenerate our commitment to the promise of the Brown decision and remind all who doubt its importance why it still matters. There is no doubt that what happens in our nation's schools will play a major role in determining the type of nation we become. Given the current state of affairs in our nation and our schools, we have good reason to be concerned. Let's not take this issue lightly.

References

Boschma, J., & Brownstein, R. (2016, Feb. 28). The concentration of poverty in American schools. The Atlantic.

Camera, L. (2017, Nov. 3). New culprit in racial segregation? Private schools. U.S News & World Report.

Eaton, S., & Chirichingo, G. (2011). METCO merits more: The history and status of METCO. Boston, MA: The Pioneer Institute.

Gamoran, A., & An, B. (2016). Effects of school segregation and school resources in a changing policy context. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(1), 43-64.

Grant-Thomas, A., & Orfield, G., eds. (2009). Twenty-first century color lines. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Jung, M., Costa Vargas, J. H., & Bonilla-Silva, E., eds. (2011). State of white supremacy: Racism, governance and the United States. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kahlenberg, R. (2012-2013). From all walks of life. New hope for school integration. American Educator, 36(4), 2-7, 10-14, 40.

Perry, A. (2017). How charter schools are prolonging segregation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute.

Reardon, S., & Yun, J. (2003). Private school racial enrollments and segregation. In R. Kahlenberg (Ed.), Public School Choice and Private School Vouchers. New York: Century Foundation Press.

Siddle Walker, V. (2000). Their highest potential: An African American school community in the segregated south. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

UCLA Civil Rights Project. (2014). Brown at 60: Great progress, a long retreat and an uncertain future.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (2018). Public education funding inequity in an era of increasing concentration of poverty and resegregation. Washington, DC. Retrieved from www.usccr.gov/pubs/2018/2018-01-10-Education-Inequity.pdf

Wells, A., Fox, L., & Cordoba Cox, D. (2016). How racially integrated schools and classrooms can benefit all students. New York: Century Foundation.

Endnote

"Black," in reference to an ethnic group, is capitalized in this article in accordance with the author's preference.

Pedro A. Noguera is distinguished professor of education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA and the director of the Center for the Transformation of Schools. He is the author of numerous books on race and education.

KEYWORDS

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7 Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 20-28 Pedro A. Noguera Yet, even as we acknowledge the historic significance of Brown, we must also acknowledge its decreasing impact on public education.

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White Fragility

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ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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MENSA for Kids

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Sponsored by the Mensa Foundation, Mensa for Kids provides free resources for teachers and parents of gifted youth.

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Empathy

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100 Ways to Promote Character Ed

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(This list of successful strategies was collected from numerous teachers and administrators, compiled by the staff of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University.

1.Hang character education posters in halls and classrooms. Refer to traits throughout the day in different subjects as appropriate.

2.Promote a project for each class that contributes positively to the school or neighborhood/community environment.

3.Be vigilant to prevent and stop scapegoating of one student by others.

4.Modify current recognition programs to include character achievement.

5.Encourage students to identify a charity, collect donations and help administer the distribution of goods or funds.

6.Consistently prohibit gossip and, when appropriate, address/discuss its damaging consequences.

7.Enforce a zero-tolerance policy on swearing. Prohibit vulgar and obscene language in the classroom, on school grounds, and at school-sponsored activities.

8.Don't allow unkindness of any kind in your classroom; no "put-downs."

9.Help students to see that the "good" in others is more than academic success.

10.Use morning announcements, school/classroom bulletin boards, and/or the school newsletter to highlight various accomplishments - particularly character oriented ones - of students and faculty members.

11.When conflicts arise, teach about self-discipline, respect, integrity and the responsibility to discreetly inform appropriate adults.

12.Have students take turns caring for class pets during the week, on weekends, over holidays and vacations. Discuss and demonstrate the responsibility to care for living creatures.

13.Invite student volunteers to clean up the neighborhood or community.

14.Create a code of behavior for your classroom/school to which students and teachers agree.

15.Add character traits to your parent/student/school compact.

16.Share a personal hero and tell the students why he/she is your hero.

17.Regularly weave character into your discussion of literature, history and other subjects, asking "What's the right thing to do?" and follow up with a discussion.

18.Lead by example. Address students respectfully; clean the chalkboard for the next teacher; pick up litter on the playground or in hallways; admit when you have made a mistake.

19.Treat ethical issues like other intellectual issues - get the facts, gather evidence, weigh consequences and options, make a decision and follow through.

20.Write, call or visit parents to praise their child.

21.Include the study of "local heroes" or "heroes in the news" in your classes.

22.Institute an honor system for test-taking and homework assignments.

23.Use the language of character traits: "I have a responsibility to...," "It demonstrates integrity when...," "Picking up litter shows responsibility and respect for our school..."

24.Reinforce the moral authority of parents, urging students to take their problems to their parents. Discuss why this is sometimes difficult.

25.Create a character education bulletin board or section in your classroom; post sayings on the wall that encourage good character.

26.Have students write their own sayings of significance or create a personal motto; display on walls.

27.Share stories of ethical conflict from literature, current subjects, in the news or movies/TV shows.

28.Encourage students to bring in articles about moral issues.

29.Discuss campus "issues of character" on a regular basis (vandalism, good deeds, etc.).

30.Make classroom expectations clear and hold students accountable for them.

31.Strive to be consistent in dealings with students; avoid allowing personal feelings to interfere with fairness.

32.Require students to behave responsibly and respectfully when watching athletic competitions. Have students identify what such behavior "looks like" and "sounds like."

33.In physical education and sports programs, place a premium on good sportsmanship. Again, what does good sportsmanship "look like" and "sound like."

34.Teach students about competition, helping them to see when it is valuable and when it is not.

35.Read aloud a "Two-Minute Story" every day to begin or end the school day. Choose stories that are brief, yet value-centered. (The Chicken Soup for the Young/Teenage Soul series is a good resource.)

36.Explain the reasons for a particular school or classroom policy, action or decision. Help students understand the "why" not just "what."

37.Have students discuss the ethical and character-developing elements of being a good student.

38.Talk with your students about why you're a teacher. Explain how you understand the responsibility and integrity of your profession.

39.Let students know about your community service. Tell them about volunteering in a food bank, coaching Little League or teaching at your temple or church.

40.Teach students to analyze the media critically. To what extent do their messages encourage living a life of character?

41.Bring recent high school graduates back to talk about their successful transition to college, work or the military. Ask them how good moral habits have helped in their adjustment.

42.Invite local adults to talk about how they have integrated character traits into their lives.

43.Help reinforce students' empathy. Ask questions like, "How would you feel if no one would play with you?" or "How would you feel if someone made fun of your name because they thought it was different?" Follow up with "What choice can you make to show integrity (self-discipline, respect, responsibility, etc.)?"

44.Overtly teach respect and courtesy. Model and ask students to identify what respect "looks like" and "sounds like."

45.Teach students how to listen attentively to other students and adults and to avoid interrupting people. Again, what does it "look like" when you are listening respectfully to someone.

46.Read and discuss biographies of accomplished individuals. In upper grades, encourage students to be discerning, seeing that an individual may have flaws but still be capable of much admirable action.

47.Assign older students to assist younger ones to show them the school.

48.Emphasize from the first day of class the importance of working hard and striving for certain standards of achievement.

49.Encourage high school students to become more active in their community by performing service or attending city council or school board meetings.

50.During elections, encourage students to research candidates' positions.

51.Have older students sponsor a potluck supper for their parents. Have students cook, decorate, serve and clean up.

52.Work together as a class or school to clean up classrooms or school grounds on a regular basis.

53.Have the entire school identify campus beautification as an annual theme. Have each club contribute to the project.

54.Encourage high school students to volunteer for voter registration drives, and, if eligible, to vote.

55.Teach students how to write thank-you notes. As a class, write thank-you notes to people who have done thoughtful things.

56.Insist that quality matters. Homework that stimulates and challenges students should be handed in on time, neat and complete. Details do count.

57.Help students form friendships. When forming cooperative learning groups, keep in mind both the academic and emotional needs of the students. Use this as an opportunity to group students who might not otherwise interact.

58.Teach responsibility by instituting a student tutoring program.

59.Have students memorize poetry and important prose selections such as the Preamble or parts of the Gettysburg Address. In the process, make sure they understand the ideas that make these works worthy of committing to memory.

60.In science, address when appropriate the ethical considerations of that field of study.

61.In math classes, specifically address traits such as perseverance, hard work, self-discipline and responsibility required to be successful math students.

62.In social studies, continuously examine the responsibilities of the citizen. Help students identify what they can do right now to build the habits of responsible citizenship.

63.Follow through. Do what you say you will do. For example, administer tests when they are scheduled with thorough preparation and adequate notice; don't cancel at the last minute after students have prepared.

64.Model integrity; let students observe that you live the expectations of hard work, responsibility, gratitude and perseverance that you place upon them.

65.Teach justice and compassion by helping students separate the doer from the deed.

66.Ensure students have a firm understanding of what constitutes plagiarism and of the school's policy against it. More importantly, help them to understand why it is wrong and teach them how to use an author's work as a reference, a direct quote or paraphrase.

67.As a staff, agree schoolwide on format and criteria for research papers, footnotes and bibliography. Teach students how to use footnotes and bibliography as a regular part of any research assignment in any subject area.

68.Never underestimate the power of stories to build a child's moral imagination. Read aloud daily.

69.Stand up for the "underdog" when he or she is being treated unfairly. Use this as a teaching moment.

70.Start or expand a class or school recycling program. Talk about the general principles of carefully using what you have and not wasting as part of our obligation as citizens of the world and caretakers of the environment.

71.Use programs already in place such as DARE, Impact or the National Honor Society, to reinforce character traits.

72.Have students create songs, acrostic poems or skits illustrating character traits. Let them perform at monthly assemblies.

73.Emphasize the significance of school traditions and rituals. Discuss the importance of recognizing certain customs as a community.

74.Start a pen pal exchange between your students and students from another school. Share ideas about what your class is doing to develop character.

75.When making school policy, allow student participation and responsibility in some decisions.

76.Collect interesting thought-provoking quotes worthy of reflection, discussion and writing such as, "You cannot embrace victory unless you have tasted defeat" (Michael Jordan) or "The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe, " (Thomas Merton). Ask students to do the same.

77.Identify excellent literature selections for your grade level that address specific character traits; share ideas regularly at staff/grade level meetings.

78.Develop a school motto.

79.Institute a "Character Honor Roll."

80.Include discussions of the school's "moral climate" and the desired goals for the moral life of the school at staff meetings.

81.Create a bulletin board where teachers and administrators can share their own "100 Ways to Promote Character Education."

82.Include references to the character traits in school newsletters.

83.Create/revise school brochure to include a reference to "Building Good Citizenship through Character Education."

84.Include anecdotes of commendable student behavior in the school newsletter.

85.Develop with students a "School Code of Ethics" that reflects the character traits. Distribute copies to all school members for display.

86.Publicly recognize the work and achievements of the school's "unsung heroes" - custodians, maintenance workers, secretaries, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and volunteers - and connect to character traits.

87.Seek ways to involve local businesses in the life of the school, perhaps through mentoring opportunities or partnerships with student groups.

88.Establish a Newcomers' Club for newly hired personnel and entering students.

89.Have athletes and coaches collaborate to develop a code of ethics for athletics.

90.Communicate with parents appropriate ways they can help their children develop responsibility with their schoolwork.

91.Encourage teachers to send out monthly newsletters to parents that include references to ongoing character development in the classroom.

92.Have students write in their journals about character traits.

93.Designate a section in the school library that contains books with stories depicting respect, responsibility, honesty, integrity, self-worth and self-discipline and other moral lessons.

94.Add books on character and moral development to your parent resource center.

95.Make the discussion of moral development and current school projects a regular part of parent meetings.

96.Label the behavior of students using the vocabulary of character development: "You demonstrated integrity when you turned in the money you found on the playground." Teach students to use this language.

97.Include character traits on spelling lists.

98.Involve the entire school community (advisors, counselors, yard duty, bus drivers, volunteers, custodians) in reinforcing character traits and using the vocabulary.

99.Use Newspapers in Education as a resource to discuss issues of character.

100.Remind students - and yourself - that building good citizenship through character education is not an easy or one-time project. Fashioning our character is the work of a lifetime.
605 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215(617).353.3262
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Integration into the life of a school

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100 Ways to Promote Character Education in Schools

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(This list of successful strategies was collected from numerous teachers and administrators, compiled by the staff of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University. 1.Hang character education posters in halls and classrooms. Refer to traits throughout the day in different subjects as appropriate.

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Summer 2020: Screenshots & Catalogued Research

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Dr. Christopher Emdin is the Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education and Professor of Science Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also the Director of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship At the STEAM DREAM and Ideal Lab.

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150 Students Go From "Unteachable" to Best Sellers

The Freedom Writers journey began in 1994 when Erin Gruwell taught English to 150 at-risk students in Long Beach, CA. With the use of Gruwell's engaging teaching techniques, 100% of her students, affectionately known as the Freedom Writers, graduated from high school, became co-authors of the New York Times bestselling book, The Freedom Writers Diary, and exceeded expectations by pursuing higher education and advanced degrees. In order to replicate the success she had with her students, Gruwell founded the Freedom Writers Foundation.

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150 Students Go From "Unteachable" to Best Sellers The Freedom Writers journey began in 1994 when Erin Gruwell taught English to 150 at-risk students in Long Beach, CA.

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Facing History and Ourselves

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Our collection of educator resources includes a wide range of flexible materials. You will find resources that support teaching a complex moment in history or addressing today's breaking news.

Facing History students are 94% more likely than other students to report that their class motivated them to learn.

93% of Facing History students agreed that it is important to work for positive social change.

Current Events in the Classroom

Our current events resources help teachers lead effective and engaging discussions on today's news.
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"I can trust the materials to be easy to access, implement, and provide a way to engage students on sensitive topics."

Teaching Strategies

Our student-centered teaching strategies improve literacy skills, nurture critical thinking, and create a respectful classroom climate. You can implement these strategies with any academic content.
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Collections, Units, & Toolkits

Our collections, units, and toolkits provide you with a range of options to introduce students to themes that are relevant to their lives.
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Lessons & Mini-Lessons

Our lessons and mini-lessons include primary sources and news sources to support their head, heart, and conscience.
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- Facing History Educator Reflecting on Our Reconstruction Unit

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Find compelling classroom resources, learn new teaching methods, meet standards, and make a difference in the lives of your students.

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Teaching Tolerance Website

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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.

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Learning for Justice | Education Resources

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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.

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There's a lot of misunderstanding about learning and thinking differences like dyslexia and ADHD . Here are some of the most common myths - and facts to debunk them.

Myth #1: Learning and thinking differences aren't real.

Myth #2: Learning and thinking differences aren't common.

Myth #3: People who learn and think differently aren't smart.

Myth #4: People who learn and think differently are "just being lazy."

Myth #5: Kids grow out of learning and thinking differently.

Myth #6: People who learn and think differently can't do well in school or at work.

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6 common myths about learning and thinking differences

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There's a lot of misunderstanding about learning and thinking differences like dyslexia and ADHD . Here are some of the most common myths - and facts to debunk them. Myth #1: Learning and thinking differences aren't real. Myth #2: Learning and thinking differences aren't common. Myth #3: People who learn and think differently aren't smart.

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Talking with Kids About Racial Injustices

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Kids across the country are seeing and feeling pain over the killing of George Floyd. Some are witnessing the impact of racism for the first time. Others have lived with it their whole lives. But all kids need to be able to talk about what's happening around them and express what they're thinking and feeling. And they need to be heard and understood.

Taking in the events that are unfolding is especially hard for kids who struggle with emotions, anxiety, language, and processing information. It's also often not easy for the people who care for them-parents, caregivers, and educators.

We've reached out to members of our Understood team, our experts, educators, and young adults to share their perspectives, experiences, and advice as a way to talk about racism and current events with kids who learn and think differently.

Even if kids have difficulty with emotions or processing information, parents must engage in discussion. Give children information in a way they can hear it. Check the response to make sure you're not giving too much.

Acknowledge that the country is going through a traumatic time. Certain communities have been impacted by COVID-19 more than other communities and treated unfairly by police and other systems. This is real. It's not a perception.

For preschool kids you can say, "There are lots of people who are very hurt because they haven't been treated kindly. They are trying to tell people that in a way that's calm, but they haven't been listened to."

With school-age kids, take your cue from them. Answer their questions, and if you don't have the information, tell them you will find the answer. Parents need to be aware of their own emotions and deal with their own bias or emotions.

Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers get much of their information through social media. Ask what they've seen and heard. Let them lead the conversation, and listen to what they say. But supplement what they're hearing. You can do this work as a family. Watch PBS's Eyes on the Prize together. Read NPR or the newspaper.

Give kids a way to express what they're hearing and feeling-through writing, art, or any other way they feel comfortable doing it. As a family, support a cause like Blackout Tuesday. Explain that it's another way to make our voices heard.

You don't have to have all the answers, but don't avoid the conversation. It's OK to not be sure and to share how you're feeling, too.
Kristin Carothers is a clinical child psychologist.

The death of yet another unarmed black man, George Floyd, has sent an excruciatingly painful shock wave through our country. Black people in America are hurting-and have been for hundreds of years because of the systemic racism that we face.

Right now, we as people of color are looking around trying to figure out where we go from here. We're past the point of saying enough is enough. Change needs to happen, and it needs to happen now.

Teachers and families may be asking, "What part do we play in this situation?"

Speaking as a black student, my response is that you all should be taking time with your students and your children to make sure they feel heard. Have purposeful discussions, even if painful, about what's going on right now.

Don't think that just because a child is young, learns differently, or has a disability that they don't understand what's going on. They're aware of more than you think they are. Make sure you let them know that what and how they feel is valid-because it really is.

No one expects that one or even a few conversations will solve what's going on right now. But we're obligated to initiate purposeful discussions to start figuring out how to make a change and take action, because this can't happen anymore.
Atira Roberson is a student in grad school.

In light of the situations that are occurring around the country, I urge parents to be as transparent as possible with their children. I encourage them to sit down and have open and honest conversations about the state of our country. Transparency and vulnerability are powerful and can be brought to the table to start healing.

There are a group of individuals in this country who are fighting to be heard, seen, understood, and respected. Parents with children who learn differently are also fighting for their child to be heard, seen, understood, and respected in the educational space. This could be a parallel that you draw for an example [when you talk with your child].
Khalil Munir is a dancer, actor, writer, and teaching artist.

If I'm not fully prepared to present to students when things like this happen in the black community or in any marginalized community, Teaching Tolerance is a good resource. I usually join conversations with educators and become more intentional in how I communicate the way this affects our students of color during this time.
Shaquala Butler is a fourth-grade general education teacher.

We're out of school, but I have virtual meetings twice a week with my social justice club, so we talked about it on Saturday. I kind of approached it in a real/raw way. We do check-ins before starting our lessons, and almost everyone chimed in with their thoughts on the murder of Mr. Floyd.

Perhaps because it's a social justice club, they focused more on his death than on the protests. It really turned into a conversation about how the student leaders in my club should talk to their black friends (my school and club are approximately 93% Latina/Chicano).
Kareem Neal is a special education teacher.

As a mom to two young boys, it has always been important to teach them to respect everyone no matter their skin color. Go into things with open hearts and minds. It's my job to show them how to lead with love in the face of hate.
Vanessa Bertone is the community manager for Understood.

I spent so much time thinking about the best way to approach the topic in my diverse classroom. Our morning meeting theme was that avoiding the topic is not a solution.

Racism continues because many people avoid difficult conversations about it. I also mentioned that we don't have all the answers-and that's OK. But we have a safe place to express our thoughts, fears, and concerns, and to ask questions.
Shira Moskovitz is a special education teacher.

I'm an educator. I'm also the mom of a 2-year-old son. For my students and for him, I've always believed that an important part of education is learning from mistakes to do things differently the next time.

I look around now, and I'm heartbroken, appalled, and, sadly, not surprised. But I also have hope. More than ever, it's clear that education and action are crucial for making lasting social change.

We have to learn from this moment. We need to educate ourselves on the histories and lived experiences of our communities. We have to do the work of taking apart systems of oppression and build an anti-racist society.

But knowing and understanding isn't enough. We have to translate what we learn first into empathy, and then into action for change. It's not going to happen without a shared commitment to equity. Our students and our children deserve that effort from us.
Shivohn García is senior director of the Impact team at Understood.

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Perspectives: Talking With Kids About Racial Injustice

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Kids across the country are seeing and feeling pain over the killing of George Floyd. Some are witnessing the impact of racism for the first time. Others have lived with it their whole lives. But all kids need to be able to talk about what's happening around them and express what they're thinking and feeling.

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Dissent Is Patriotic

50 Books About Girls & Women Who Fought for Change

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A Mighty Girl's top picks of books for children and teens about real-life girls and women who fought for a more just, equal, and peaceful world.

When people think about what it means to love their country, some assume patriotism requires unwavering support, and that questioning or disagreeing with their government's choices is unpatriotic, disruptive, and even dangerous. But the truth is that dissent makes countries stronger: when citizens demand the best from their leaders and their countries - justice, accountability in government, and equal rights for all - everyone benefits. In fact, throughout history, progress for every country has come from people's willingness to stand up for what they believe in and insist on being heard, even if their beliefs counter those of the people in power. In other words, dissent isn't distracting or divisive: it's patriotic!

To explore this topic with children and teens, we've showcased 40 of our favorite books about girls and women who resisted - who dared to stand up against the laws and social norms of their day to fight for societies that were more just, tolerant, and equal. These people, from all walks of life, fought hard for causes they believed in, including women's suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, environmental protection, and more. They argued, they disagreed, and they protested - and today, we hail them as heroes whose courage and determination led to positive change and helped create a better future for everyone.

Books About Girls and Women Who Fought For Change

Additional Recommended Resources

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Dissent Is Patriotic: 40 Books About Girls & Women Who Fought for Change

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A Mighty Girl's top picks of books for children and teens about real-life girls and women who fought for a more just, equal, and peaceful world. When people think about what it means to love their country, some assume patriotism requires unwavering support, and that questioning or disagreeing with their government's choices is unpatriotic, disruptive, and even dangerous.

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James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil

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"Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time." So opens "A Talk to Teachers," which James Baldwin delivered to a group of educators in October, 1963. (He published it in the Saturday Review the following December.) That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and N.A.A.C.P. state field director, was murdered in his driveway by a white supremacist in Jackson, Mississippi. That year, four young girls-Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley-were killed when Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. That year, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in his motorcade through downtown Dallas.

I make a point of revisiting this essay at the beginning of each school year, and while Baldwin's words have always felt relevant, this year they feel particularly so. Students have returned to school after a summer of political and social tumult. In August, white supremacists and neo-Nazis brazenly marched across the campus of the University of Virginia; one shot at a counter-protester, and another mowed down a crowd with a car, killing a woman who had showed up to oppose their hate. A few weeks later, the White House announced that it would be rescinding the protections set in place by President Barack Obama's DACA program-a move that left eight hundred thousand undocumented immigrants uncertain about their futures. Many teachers are wondering how to address these events in their classrooms. Should they incorporate potentially contentious issues into their lessons? Should lessons be pushed aside to tackle the urgent matters of the day?

Recently, I was chatting with a friend who teaches at an elementary school in Washington, D.C., where I live, and he shared with me how confused and disillusioned his students were by what they had seen on television. He sat them in a circle and gave them space to ask questions. "Why was somebody so angry that they wanted to drive a car through people who were asking for their rights?" one student wondered. My friend shared with me another story from a community meeting that he had just attended. A mother stood up and said, "I'm tired of having to teach my two-year-old how to duck; I'm tired of having to teach my two-year-old that certain nights when we get home from school we have to sit on the floor."

"Yet we send them to school and we're not allowing them to be a part of an opportunity to address that," my friend said, hurt and perplexed. The next evening, he brought his students to a local candlelight vigil, where hundreds of people showed up to honor Heather Heyer-the demonstrator who had been killed in Charlottesville-and to protest the hateful actions that led to her death. Throughout the evening, people talked about what had transpired. Some of the students chimed in, too. Later, my friend recalled, the kids told him that doing so made them feel important. "People wanted to listen to me," one student said.

Baldwin's talk offers a way to think about this. I first read it when I was a high-school English teacher, in the winter of 2012. I was sitting at my desk one day, after the bell had rung, staring at a clouded chalkboard, leaning back in my chair, its beige foam crawling out from beneath red cloth. I had just struggled through a lesson on the different types of sentence structure-not the most riveting topic for most fifteen-year-olds, I realize-and I had seen my students stare blankly past me, disengaged. I wondered how preoccupied they might be by what was happening outside school walls. A string of senseless murders had taken the lives of some of their friends. In Florida, a boy named Trayvon Martin had just been killed, too, and his killer had yet to face charges. But that day, like most days, I stuck to the book, keeping politics on the periphery.

My decision was based, in part, on Maryland's educational standards. The state had recently adopted Common Core and PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) assessments; there was little incentive to teach beyond the bounds of the new curriculum. This wasn't why I had signed up to be a teacher, but job security and paychecks were directly linked to student test scores. I found myself becoming a part of a system of incentive-based learning that I opposed. That day, a friend, who had been a teacher for many years, gave me a copy of "A Talk to Teachers." The essay might quell some of my frustration, she said.

Baldwin delivered the talk on the heels of the March on Washington, where he was famously pulled from the list of speakers because organizers-who knew the writer's habit for speaking extemporaneously-were unsure if he would stay on message. "A Talk to Teachers" is emblematic of Baldwin's proclivity for candor over political appeasement, and, like much of his work, focusses on history and the American consciousness. "It is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history," he writes. Young people are constantly absorbing-through media, textbooks, and policy-the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily. "On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the Stars and Stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war," Baldwin continues. "But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization-that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured."

A more honest reckoning with history is necessary, Baldwin insists. Of slavery, he says, "it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn't understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble."

It's this focus on history that rearranged my thinking. In Baldwin's view, it is the only thing that can help disabuse black children of the stereotypes that have been projected onto their community-and it is necessary for white children, too, who oftentimes serve as the purveyors of these myths, and who do not know the truth about their history, either.

Baldwin understands that learning this history can leave students in a state of cognitive dissonance and frustration. Imagining his own hypothetical students, he writes, "I would try to teach them-I would try to make them know, that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal." Here, Baldwin, with literary sleight of hand, adopts the terminology used to pathologize black people and applies it to the system in which they operate. What follows is a medley of lessons that is disquieting in its contemporary applicability. "I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger-and that it belongs to him," he writes, adding, "I would teach him that he doesn't have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality, that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything."

After reading "A Talk to Teachers," I altered my approach, placing less emphasis on the standardized tests and using literature to help my students examine their world. I realized that rigorous lessons were not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically relevant ones. Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" did not have to be sacrificed in order to make room for a discussion on community violence. Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" did not have to be abandoned in order to tackle immigration. "A Talk to Teachers" showed me that a teacher's work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical, and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students' lives.

The most quoted line from "A Talk to Teachers" may be this one: "The paradox of education is precisely this-that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated." A teacher, Baldwin believed, should push students to understand that the world was molded by people who came before, and that it can be remolded into something new.

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James Baldwin's Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil

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"Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time." So opens "A Talk to Teachers," which James Baldwin delivered to a group of educators in October, 1963. (He published it in the Saturday Review the following December.) That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and N.A.A.C.P.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture Releases “Talking About Race” Web Portal

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Research shows that many people feel they do not have the information needed to discuss race in a way that is candid, safe and respectful of other viewpoints and experiences.

"The portal offers a wealth of resources to inform and guide discussions-videos, role-playing exercises, targeted questions and more, said Crew." "We hope that people will use this site to become more comfortable about engaging in honest dialogue and self-reflection."

Talking About Race builds upon decades of work by the museum's educators. It is the result of extensive research, studies, consultations, and educational resources from these fields: history, education, psychology and human development. It includes published research from leading experts, activists, historians, and thought leaders on race, equity, and inclusion, including Brené Brown, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Robin DiAngelo, Julie Olsen Edwards, Jerry Kang, Ibram X Kendi, Enid Lee, Audre Lorde, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Tim Wise.

Phase one of the portal features eight foundational subjects including:

Being Anti-Racist: a conscious decision to make frequent, consistent, equitable choices daily.

Bias: the inclination or prejudice toward or against something or someone.

Community Building: connecting and engaging with others doing anti-racism work and exploring issues of race.

Historical Foundations of Race: how race, white privilege, and anti-blackness are woven into the very fabric of American society.

Race and Racial Identity: how societies use race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression.

Self-Care: caring for one's mental, emotional, and physical health to sustain the work of dismantling racism.

Social Identities and Systems of Oppression: systems built around the ideology that some groups are superior to others.

Whiteness: an ideology that reinforces power at the expense of others.

Explore Talking About Race at nmaahc.si.edu/talkingaboutrace. The portal is free and does not require a registration or sign-up to use. Talking About Race is generously supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies.
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About the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Since opening September 24, 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has welcomed more than 7 million visitors. Occupying a prominent location next to the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the nearly 400,000 square-foot museum is the nation's largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history. For more information about the museum, visit, follow @NMAAHC on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or call Smithsonian information at (202) 633-1000.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture Releases "Talking About Race" Web Portal

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The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture today launched Talking About Race, a new online portal designed to help individuals, families, and communities talk about racism, racial identity and the way these forces shape every aspect of society, from the economy and politics to the broader American culture.

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2. Latinos and discrimination

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Pew Research Center's Hispanic Trends Project

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Overall, four-in-ten Latinos say they have experienced discrimination in the past year, such as being criticized for speaking Spanish or being told to go back to their home country. These experiences are more likely among those who say others see them as Latino, black or another non-white group than among Latinos who say others see them as white. At the same time, just as many Latinos say someone in the past year had expressed support for them because they are Latino.

Many Hispanics say others see them as Hispanic

About two-thirds of U.S. Hispanics (68%) say that if people passed them on the street they would describe them as Hispanic or Latino. Hispanics who are foreign born (79%) and second generation (68%) are more likely than the third or higher generation (50%) to say this.

Meanwhile, about one-in-five Hispanics (18%) say people passing them on the street would describe them as white. This share increases as immigrant connections grow distant. About 10% of Hispanic immigrants say a person would describe them as white, while 16% of the second generation and 33% of the third or higher generation say the same.

Many Hispanics with lower levels of education also say those passing them on the street would see them as Hispanic or Latino. About three-quarters of Hispanics with a high school diploma or less (77%) say this, compared with 56% of those with some college education or higher. By contrast, about a quarter of Hispanics with some college education or higher (27%) say people passing them on the street would describe them as white, compared with 12% of those with a high school education or less.

Latino experiences with discrimination in the past year

Nearly four-in-10 Latinos (37%) say that during the past 12 months, someone has expressed support for them because they are Hispanic or Latino. Yet about the same share (38%) also say they have recently experienced one of four incidents - being called offensive names, being told to go back to their home country, being criticized for speaking Spanish in public, or experiencing discrimination or unfair treatment because they are Hispanic.

Overall, about a quarter of Latinos (24%) say someone has discriminated against them or treated them unfairly because of their background, while 22% say someone has criticized them for speaking Spanish in public. About 20% say they have been told to go back to their home country, and about 16% say they have been called offensive names.

Hispanic immigrants and second-generation Hispanics (those born in the U.S. to at least one immigrant parent) report more often than third or higher generation Hispanics being subjected to three of the four incidents asked about in the survey - being criticized for speaking Spanish, being told to go back to their home country and experiencing discrimination or unfair treatment.

The share of Latinos who say they have received an expression of support over the past year is higher among Spanish-dominant (44%) and bilingual speakers (39%) than among English-dominant speakers (27%). The bilingual and Spanish dominant also reported more discrimination. About a quarter of Latinos who are bilingual (28%) and Spanish dominant (25%) say they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly, compared with 19% of English-dominant Latinos.

For Hispanics, the way the world views their race or ethnicity is linked to how often people express support for them and how often they experience discrimination.

Latinos who say people walking past them on the street would see them as Hispanic or Latino or as black are more likely to say someone expressed support for them in the past year because they are Latino. Those who say others see them as white are less likely to say this has happened. A similar pattern is true when it comes to experiencing discrimination: Those who say others see them as white are less likely than other groups of Latinos to report experiencing one of the four incidents asked about in the survey.

Differences also exist by party affiliation among Hispanics - more Democrats (43%) than Republicans (24%) say they have experienced at least one of the four incidents.

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Overall, four-in-ten Latinos say they have experienced discrimination in the past year, such as being criticized for speaking Spanish or being told to go back to their home country. At the same time, just as many Latinos say someone in the past year had expressed support for them because they are Latino.

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Looking for Excellent “Diverse” Books for Children? Start Here!

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In 8 tips for choosing 'good' picture books featuring Black and Indigenous people and People of Color (BIPOC), our colleagues at Diverse BookFinder offer recommendations about how to evaluate "diverse" and "multicultural" children's books to find great books the children in your life will love.

In this piece, we identify promising starting points, in addition to the Diverse BookFinder, for your search for children's books to which you might apply the criteria described in 8 tips. The blogs and sites named below by no means exhaust the list of sites that highlight excellent children's books. Nor do all the books featured on those sites meet each of the 8 tips criteria. However, a search that begins with the sites on this list is likely to bear quality fruit!

EmbraceRace is not affiliated with any of these sites.

Where to get ebooks for kids online

Major hubs for discovering diverse children's books

Children's book sites and blogs we like

Creating an anti-bias children's book collection

Looking to create an anti-bias library or evaluate/review books yourself? These articles and frameworks about evaluating representation in children's literature can help you think about bias in children's books and other media.

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Looking for Excellent "Diverse" Books for Children? Start Here!

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In 8 tips for choosing 'good' picture books featuring Black and Indigenous people and People of Color (BIPOC), our colleagues at Diverse BookFinder offer recommendations about how to evaluate "diverse" and "multicultural" children's books to find great books the children in your life will love.

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40+ Books for AntiRacist Teachers – White Fragiles Beware!

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Culturally Responsive Leadership - Joe Truss

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Ok, so you want to start a book club and you want to talk about race. And it's a pandemic so you have plenty of time. But which books do you read? And how do you make sure you aren't falling victim to white fragility? Check out these 24 books for anti-racist educators!

Inspired by White Fragility

I was inspired by a recent teacher book list (there are so many), that was supposed to "change your life." But that shit was whiter than the Andy Griffith show.

Sorry, but that will NOT change your world.

Lots of books will make you feel comfortable with your whiteness and whiteness in general, even for people of color. Authors have been sparing your feelings and treating you like porcelain, but it's time to let the bull loose in the proverbial china shop. White fragility needs to take a back seat. Fall back Karen. It's time to talk about dismantling white supremacy culture and bringing folks of color (the global majority) to the center.

Check out my next training on dismantling White Supremacy Culture - June 27th-28th

Culturally responsive leaders, we are trying to change your mindset, so your actions change. If that happens, we might actually change the world for students of color and finally close the opportunity gap.

With hate crimes on the rise, police murders of black people, and Karen's on the attack, not to mention mass shootings and our current conservative politics, there is NO time to waste.

Scholar Chris Emdin, in his dope book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, writes, "The work for white folks who teach in urban schools, then, is to unpack their privilege and excavate the institutional, societal, and personal histories they bring with them when they come to the Hood." People of Color have to decolonize their minds as well, because we have been socialized to dehumanize as well. Change starts with the right books.

Check these out!

40 AntiRacist Books for Educators

1. We Want to Do More Than Survive by Bettina Love

2. Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond (here's what I learned about leading CRT)

3. Born Out Of Struggle by David Stovall

4. How We Fight White Supremacy by Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin

5. How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram Kendi

6. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (here's my 4 part review)

7. Between the World and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates

Reflection Questions

Regardless of what you read, there are some critical questions to consider while you read and as you think about taking action:

What does this have to do with me?

How could I explain these concepts to my students?

What emotions are conjured up as I ready? What's that about?

What can I change about my practice, curricula, relationships, policies?

How can I use this to center my teaching on my most marginalized students?

How do I take this past the grad school pontification and theorizing?

How does this connect with last things that I've learned?

How much more is there to learn?

Who can I share this with?

Can I form a racial affinity group?

How can I lead my colleagues in taking up this work?

Conclusions - Book Clubs are Like Free Grad School

Educators want to be treated as professionals, up to date with the latest research. We want to be in control of our continued learning, and we want to connect with others. This is why book clubs are so powerful. By the way, leaders, they can and should be teacher-led. It helps to have someone who is remotely familiar with the topic, but you can get by if everyone is exploring too.

Book Clubs are collaborative, help to co-construct knowledge, and build community.

Oxytocin, collectivism, and lots of chew time.

Sounds like they are culturally responsive teaching too. It's good practice for kids too! The groups can be big or small. Teacher Librarians are great at spearheading these. Your districts might even give educators extra hours for attending a book club. The point of the book club is to talk, and you can either make it comfortable or be comfortable with discomfort. You will need some norms, protocols, and some sort of an agenda.

Good luck culturally responsive (anti-racist) leaders!

Other Lists:

Here's my list from last last summer and my leadership starter list.

Ibram Kendi's Book List Cult of Pedagogy List
(Visited 99,200 times, 57 visits today)

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40+ Books for AntiRacist Teachers - White Fragiles Beware! (summer 2020 update) | Culturally Responsive Leadership - Joe Truss

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Ok, so you want to start a book club and you want to talk about race. And it's a pandemic so you have plenty of time. But which books do you read? And how do you make sure you aren't falling victim to white fragility? Check out these 24 books for anti-racist educators!

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How you can be an ally in the fight for racial justice

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Many people want to help in the ongoing struggle for equality and equity, but they don't know what to do. Activist DeRay Mckesson explains how we can all show up and stand up.

1. Own your privilege.

"Acknowledge that there is a privilege you have [if you're white], and use the privilege to disrupt that privilege itself. I've had people say to me, 'Well, I didn't benefit from white privilege.' [You need to realize] every Band-Aid in this country looks like your skin and not mine, baby dolls look like you, and the color 'nude' is your skin color. That's what the privilege of whiteness looks like - it's not about what you've done; it's about what society does when it treats white as normal. It's about you saying, 'I have privilege, I have power, and I will seek out how I can use that privilege and those resources. I'll ask marginalized people, 'What is the help you need?', as opposed to just saying, 'I think this is what you should do'."

2. Talk about what's uncomfortable and what's important.

"There's no winning in silence. If we allow white supremacist ideology to spread without being challenged, people continue to replicate it. And the question is: what do you do? You need to talk about it - you can't change what you don't talk about. And while we've had a great conversation [in the last year] about the symbols and about Confederate monuments, there is still so much work to be done that we actually don't talk about - like what to do about police violence, or bail, or rehabilitation for people who are coming out of prison, or the opioid crisis. You don't always see the trauma - it doesn't show up in the same way as a man running a car through a crowd of people - but the impact on people's lives is as disastrous as anything else."

3. Be strategic in what you say and how you say it.

"People don't respond well to being shouted down at the dining room table. If your goal is to change somebody's mind, that isn't the most effective strategy; if your goal is to make a point, then that isn't an effective strategy. Try to show people what you mean, as opposed to just saying, 'I'm right.' It's a long-game solution. Rarely do people come out of one conversation and say, 'You know, my whole worldview has changed.' It's about setting a foundation, so that people over time can change. This isn't everybody's work - some people are much better at having conversations than other people."

4. Activism isn't just about protests and marches - it means voting, too.

"Many of the things that will change people's lives are structural, so it's about voting where you are and pushing for or against legislation in your city and town. Use your institutional power to change structures and systems. Who shows up to the hearings about police violence? Who is working on welfare reform? Who is working on bail reform? Are you willing to come out for three weeks of hearings, sit, and say, 'This is an issue that is important to me, too'? Even when it may not be convenient? That's what it means to show up."

5. Figure out where and how you can do the most good.

"I think there's a role for everybody. The things I care about might not be the things you care about, and vice versa, which doesn't mean they aren't all important. For some people, their space is being on Twitter and on Facebook and pushing out messages. There are some people who are better in the street than I am, and some people who need to skip the street because they can just go to the governor's mansion. If the governor is your friend and you can talk to him in his dining room, do that. We don't all need to play the same role. The cacophony of all of us doing work together will actually lead to systemic change."

"Harriet Tubman knew that something could be done. She started where she was and started small, and it turned into the Underground Railroad. It can often start with you and another person, or you and two people, having a conversation about what the world can be and here are the steps you can take. You need to take concrete steps - small ones, like steps on a ladder - to get to systemic change. Ask people what they need, stand in concert with those who've been doing the work longer than you, listen, ask more questions than talk. Those are all the hallmarks of the people I've seen who are the most effective."

7. Ask yourself: what do I want the future to look like?

"When we think about resistance, we focus almost exclusively on the absence of oppression. We think: How do we end mass incarceration? How do we stop the disparities with regard to police killings? How do we stop police killings altogether? But when we tear down these repressive, oppressive systems and structures, something has to replace them, something that's better. For example, we know there will always be rules, there will always be people who break the rules, and there will always need to be consequences. Do the people who enforce those consequences have to be the police? No. Does that enforcement have to mean prison? Absolutely not. We need to spend more time now talking about potential solutions. How do we help people imagine a conception of safety that doesn't center on the police? How do we help them imagine a world where every adult can read? How do you help people dream in a big way that will actually change lives? It's hard because we haven't lived in that world before. But it doesn't mean that world's not possible."

8. Feel the fear - and act anyway.

"Martin Luther King said, 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' It bends, because people bend it. There are so many people who understand the power they have. They're standing up across the country when the odds look like they're against them, and they've learned to make sure fear doesn't overpower everything else even if fear is still present. There are just so many incredible people who are willing to put something on the line to make the world a different place. That gives me hope."
These remarks were taken from a Facebook Live conversation conducted with DeRay Mckesson at TED headquarters in New York City. To learn more, watch the video.

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How you can be an ally in the fight for racial justice

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"Acknowledge that there is a privilege you have [if you're white], and use the privilege to disrupt that privilege itself. I've had people say to me, 'Well, I didn't benefit from white privilege.' [You need to realize] every Band-Aid in this country looks like your skin and not mine, baby dolls look like you, and the color 'nude' is your skin color.

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White Fragility: The Conscious Kid

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Entitlement vs Gratitude

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If one has a sense of entitlement, they usually believe they deserve certain privileges - and they're usually arrogant about it. The term "culture of entitlement" suggests that many people now have highly unreasonable expectations about what they are entitled to. Entitlement blinds us. It separates us. Entitlement forces us indirectly from taking responsibility and instead gives rise to pointing fingers and blaming others for our own insecurities.

Gratitude on the other hand means being thankful and having appreciation. Gratitude makes us open to possibilities. When you feel gratitude, you're pleased by what someone did for you and also pleased by the results. Unlike indebtedness, you're not anxious about having to pay it back.

I've thought about these two words quite a bit lately. There are divine forces at play - personally and professionally.

When I think about the struggles people go through ... to find the right job, the right communities to live in, the right environment to raise their children, the right relationships to foster, the right amount of finances for the future... I see every emotion inside of them pressed to the limits in some capacity.

It's no wonder people suffer from physical, mental, work, social, parental and health stressors.

When joining the police service years ago, I knew going in I would be challenged by the "O.P.P." (other people's problems). But that didn't prevent me from wanting to serve my community. Don't take this the wrong way, but in times of trouble most individuals call out to GOD or a Higher Power. And when that being doesn't come running ... the police are sometimes the next best thing.

Being a servant leader, I try to put the needs of my neighbour ahead of my own. It's a daunting task and sometimes I fail miserably. But I keep trying - because it's worth it.

Everything could be better. Yes.

Not because I deserve it, rather, if I work at it, invest in it, and align with others around it, I can make it better. Therefore, it's on me.

In reality, I'm not grateful because I'm happy - I'm happy because I'm grateful.

In general, when we invest our time - in education (self and from subject matter experts) - in seeking out individuals you trust to help you - in giving our best effort, then we are actively adding to our growth in becoming a better person.

Present these actions in your daily walk and somewhere along the line others will be appreciative and grateful:

Care a little more (about each other)

Show up (on time)

Say 'NO' to hate and discrimination (in all forms)

Tell the truth

Ask questions

Lend a hand

Play the long game

Embrace possibilities

Work with your partner not against

Offer a personal insight

Keep your promises

Lead by example

Be generous for no reason

Give the benefit of the doubt

Develop empathy

Take responsibility

Give credit

Learn the rules of your game

Choose your reputation

Don't compromise yourself

Thank your partner

Reward patience

It really is up to us. Which is great, because we're capable of changing everything if we choose.

By giving a little more of ourselves and in every step we take, we become more human and open to gratitude.

#YouShowUpYouWin

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If one has a sense of entitlement, they usually believe they deserve certain privileges - and they're usually arrogant about it. The term "culture of entitlement" suggests that many people now have highly unreasonable expectations about what they are entitled to. Entitlement blinds us. It separates us.

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How to recognize your white privilege — and use it to fight inequality

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How to recognize your white privilege - and use it to fight inequality

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Many of us believe that we're living in a meritocracy, deserving of what we have and compassionate toward those with less. But that's not true: white people have been given a headstart and ongoing advantages due to the color of their skin, while people of color suffer from equally arbitrary disadvantages, says scholar and activist Peggy McIntosh.

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Getting White People to Talk About Racism

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Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections and community in 1969 New York City. Download Deacon King Kong on Apple Books at apple.co/obc, then explore millions of other books and audio books on the Apple Books app.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

David Remnick:
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. Over the last week we've seen some remarkable headlines about cities and states promising real action on police violence and racial justice. Promises that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. At George Floyd's funeral in Houston, the Reverend Al Sharpton said that he was encouraged by how white people have responded with demands for change.

Al Sharpton:
Floyd could have been anybody. But then the reaction was not anything because somewhere I read in the Bible that God said he would pour out his spirit among all flesh. And that's why when I heard them talking about, they never thought they'd see young whites marching like they marching now. All over the world I've seen grandchildren of slave masters, tearing down slave master's statue over in England and put it in the river. I pour out my spirit among all flesh. I've seen whites walking past curfews, saying, "Black Lives Matter, no justice, no peace." I pour out my spirit among all flesh.

David Remnick:
It may be that the shock and horror of Floyd's death before our eyes on video has finally shaken millions of white people from years of drift and complacency. For a long time, Suzanne Plihcik has been talking to white people about the reality of entrenched racism. She's a trainer with the Racial Equity Institute, and a co-founder of that group. Suzanne Plihcik spoke with the New Yorker's Dorothy Wickenden.

Dorothy Wickenden:
We have to put our cards on the table right away and point out that you're a white woman from the South and I'm a white woman from the North and that will inform our discussion. How did you become engaged with this kind of work?

Suzanne Plihcik:
It's very difficult to really capture what all the touch points were but to be a little white and linear, I can tell you essentially, I found early in my life, a real sadness for people who were hurt, who were harmed, who were living in poverty. After the birth of my children that came into sharper focus. And as they enter school, it came into still sharper focus as I saw the contrast between what was available to my children and what was not available to children of color, often, not always, often.

Suzanne Plihcik:
So it seemed to me at that time that the way we dealt with the child who came to school in flip-flops in January was to provide shoes. And it seemed to me at the time, that provision of needs was very, very important. And it is important, it's not unimportant. But as you do that, you soon realize that you have done nothing to prevent those needs from occurring again. So I move from that very charity approach into policy needs to be changed. We've got to do something in a larger way to get at the root causes. Of course, you don't do that very long before you realize that even when policy changes, that there is something in our culture, a narrative that continues to pull back those successes that you have. And I had the great gift of coming to a training that explained to me, this one was by the People's Institute at the time, that that thing was racism. And then we decided to form the Racial Equity Institute, and to do the work of bringing an analysis to people that would make them more effective in the work they do.

Dorothy Wickenden:
Many companies offer diversity training. But those sessions have almost no effect, if any, on how white Americans go about their lives. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what makes the tactics and mission of the Racial Equity Institute different.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Yeah, we don't do diversity training. We don't do prejudice reduction, all those things have their values I'm sure. But even if you were able to make people more sensitive and reduce prejudice and bigotry and certain racial prejudice, you then send them out into a world that is operating from a structure that promotes the supremacy of white people. That ensures that whatever you do, is going to disproportionately advantage white people, even when that's not your intent. And that division, it continues to work well, because we don't understand it. We don't understand where it's coming from. And we continue to put it in the context of mean-spirited, racially charged people, and statements and acts. Those things are bad. They're incredibly bad and wrong.

Suzanne Plihcik:
But it's important to understand that racism happens and this is the biggest lesson of my life, without my intent, that we are set up for it to happen. And so I have to understand that I benefit from that, whether I want to as a white person or not. I have to further understand it doesn't make me a bad immoral person. It makes me a beneficiary of a system set up hundreds of years ago to benefit people who have come to be called white.

Dorothy Wickenden:
Can you give us an example of how a well-meaning organization you've worked with, determined to pursue racial diversity and all of the best values, has been taken aback by what you have to tell them?

Suzanne Plihcik:
Well, I think most of them are taken aback. But we were called some years ago to a public private partnership, a school actually that had been created to be a multicultural school, they had all the very best intents. They however, we`re having a very difficult time recruiting and retaining students and faculty of color. So the night before we did our training, the core of the school, all white, took us out to dinner and they began to tell us all the things they had done to become multicultural. And it was a long list.

Suzanne Plihcik:
One of their favorite things was to have what we call the International Day, to bring in people from many cultures and have them share their culture and their cultural ways and they brought in everybody. In addition to that, they did many things that they thought would be appealing to people of color. They would do spoken word, they would do stepping, you name it, they did it. And our very wise director, Deena Hayes-Greene, said to them at the end of this litany, "So what did you do for white people?" And their jaw dropped.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Because you see the culture that was keeping them from attracting and retaining students and faculty of color was the one culture they had not examined, it's white culture. It's our way of being in the world, our set of values. And the invitation they issued is very much like the invitation we as white people have issued since the Civil Rights Act, which is, come be like us. Don't bring your ways of being, don't bring your ways of knowing, come be like us.

Dorothy Wickenden:
So how should groups like that go about what they're doing? That's a huge project. It involves changing the deepest preconceptions that everyone has about him and herself.

Suzanne Plihcik:
We believe it starts with an understanding of how we got here. Then we need an understanding of how white organizational culture operates, how it is different from more relational cultures. We need an understanding that we are in fact as white people, not wrong and bad, but operating out of a culture that we impose on other people. It's okay to have your culture, it's okay to be who you are in the world based on your history. It's not okay to impose your way of being on everybody else. And to make laws and build structures and build institutions based on that. And that's hard, that's hard. But that study, that understanding's got to be the first step.

Dorothy Wickenden:
So much of this problem, I think, derives from Americans ignorance of our actual history as it played out. You argue that the origins of the concept of whiteness, which is an artificial concept, stretches back hundreds of years. The story of John Punch really brings this home. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Well, John Punch was an African indentured servant. He was not kidnapped and enslaved. Although, it's a pretty fine line. This is early in the 1600s. John Punch was an African indentured servant who ran away with a Dutchman and a Scotsman. They ran away together but they got caught. The Dutchman and Scotsman are sentenced to four additional years of servitude one to the master to whom they were already indentured and three to the colony. But John Punch is sentenced to perpetual servitude.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Now that was done, not because he was the leader or had some special part, although, I'm sure there were all kinds of explanations in the time, but to ensure the allegiance of the white indentured servants to the white people at the top. It was important to ensure that people of color who are either indentured servants or kidnapped and enslaved and white people who were largely indentured servants did not come together and challenge the system oppressing them. Your allegiance now is not to the black African you've been running away with, it is to the people who gave you this little thing. And we have done that as white people knowingly and unknowingly, for the subsequent 300 years.

Dorothy Wickenden:
It's just extraordinary. So the protests following the killing of George Floyd do seem to have had some clear effect.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Yes.

Dorothy Wickenden:
It looks to me like this could be an inflection point. Does it look that way to you?

Suzanne Plihcik:
It absolutely does. I mean, the question is sustaining the momentum, showing up, not just for the protests, but when the protests are over. Showing up again the next day, and the next and the next for all the things that we need to continue to fight for. What we teach is that the things that we face in this world, the injustice that we face in this world, organizing is essentially the answer. That we need to learn to organize outside of institutions and inside of institutions. That building a base of power to challenge power at those grassroots levels and then beyond that is what we need to be doing. I mean, it is the work and that means you've got to show up again the next day.

Dorothy Wickenden:
So there is a tendency after incidents of racially motivated violence in white culture, and you can see it right now playing out in the media, to ask people of color for their insights about racism. But scholars and activists, and even some of our recent presidential candidates have been pointing out what you're pointing out that systemic racism is really a white problem. So what role do conversations among white communities, or conversations between white people like you and I are having play in confronting and addressing the problem of systemic racism?

Suzanne Plihcik:
Well, I think that they can play a very big role, the potential, I would say is absolutely there. I have been somewhat heartened by the number of statements that companies and organization and individuals have come out with condemning these recent acts of brutal, unconscionable violence. So to speak out against such things is always an important thing to do. We had a mentor years ago who said, "If you can get three white people with no people of color present to speak out against racism, you've done revolutionary work." I didn't believe it until I tried.

Dorothy Wickenden:
Wow.

Suzanne Plihcik:
But that that speaking is important and to stop at that will be the tragedy compounding the tragedy. I mean, one of the things that should be respectfully and compassionately asked of all of these statements, all of these speakers, is where have you been? There have been opportunities every day to speak out against, to stand against institutional racism. Where have you been in the racial health disparities horror, the achievement gap, the disparities in lending, in the justice system? We've got to ask ourselves, where have we been? As this problem, this institutional structural problem, continued to take stronger and stronger hold of our country.

David Remnick:
Suzanne Plihcik is a co-founder of the Racial Equity Institute, and she spoke with Dorothy Wickenden, our executive editor and the host of The New Yorker's, podcast, Politics and More. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, more to come.

Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections, community and love in 1969 New York City. It's a social novel with a heart of gold and characters that will crack you up and make you cry. Download Deacon King Kong at apple.co/obc. You can also experience millions of other books and audio books on the Apple Books app already on your iPhone and iPad. There you'll find bestsellers, classics, up and coming authors and more. Get started today and read with us.

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Jill Lepore:
A question was nagging me, who killed truth. This truth problem, it isn't just bad, it's deadly. I'm Jill Lepore, and I'm a historian at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker. I spend a lot of time trying to solve mysteries like this one. So I decided to start a podcast, it's called The Last Archive. I'll tell 10 stories from the last 100 years. A history of America and of our arguments about true and evidence. The Last Archive, brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

David Remnick:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 8:
Good evening and welcome to the New York Congressional District 17 Democratic primary candidate's forum.

Speaker 9:
Can you hear me?

Speaker 10:
There we go.

Speaker 8:
There you go. Do you want to mute that microphone?

Speaker 11:
Sorry.

Speaker 8:
You're good.

David Remnick:
With everything that is going on in the world, it's a very tough time to run for office. A presidential nominee can always get some airtime. But what about all the down ballot candidates whose names you can't quite recall? How are they supposed to run for office in the middle of a pandemic? Think about it. You can't go door to door shaking hands. The county fair is probably canceled. And you really shouldn't be kissing any babies. And by the way, good luck fundraising. And now you're stuck debating your opponents on Zoom.

Speaker 8:
I don't know that my voice is going in and out.

Speaker 9:
Can you repeat the question? I was so busy looking for my unmute button.

Speaker 8:
You're good, you're good.

Speaker 11:
No, I'm not moving it. I think someone else is.

Speaker 8:
No worries.

Speaker 12:
[inaudible 00:18:21] try to maybe position my computer a little closer our WiFi. Maybe that will help?

Speaker 8:
Okay, so let's get back to the question. Would anybody like a rebuttal?

David Remnick:
The New Yorker's Eric Lach has been taking a close look at the primary election in one congressional district, the 17th District of New York, and he's looking to see how the candidates are adapting to seemingly impossible conditions.

Eric Lach:
I started following the Democratic primary race in New York's 17th congressional district. That's the suburbs north of the city. And this was a race that was in full swing when the pandemic hit. The primary day is June 23rd. It's an open race with many candidates running and no clear favorite. One of the first people in district I called up is Barrett Seaman.

Barrett Seaman:
Morning, Eric.

Eric Lach:
How you doing? Seaman is a former Time magazine correspondent and editor. He covered the Reagan White House in the 1980s. And he now writes about politics for a local newspaper in the 17th district, named the Hudson Independent.

Barrett Seaman:
You know, all of the traditional measures that we used to winnow out large fields like we have up here, they're not all gone, but they're just about all gone.

Eric Lach:
Like what?

Barrett Seaman:
Well, the ability to hold a town meeting and draw an audience and have people like you and me go and see how many people actually show up. So the inability to hold a public meeting has an enormous impact on elections.

Eric Lach:
Even before the pandemic hit, the race in the 17th could charitably be described as a clown car. More than a dozen people either launched campaigns or expressed interest in running in the 17th. But as the campaign winds down here, we're down to a field of seven. The district has been represented in Congress since the late '80s by Nita Lowey, and it's a reliably democratic area. So the Democratic primary race essentially is the election. The winner on June 23rd, is all but assured to be the next representative of the 17th in Congress. When the pandemic hit, and New York State went into lockdown, do it the race in the 17th. And functionally what that meant is that the kinds of events that make up the bulk of campaigning in a congressional race, town halls, meet and greets, fundraisers, debates. They all migrated onto video platforms like Zoom and Facebook Live.

Eric Lach:
David Carlucci is the state senator from Rockland County, which is the west side of the 17th district. He has a reputation as a consummate retail politician. But in the last few months, he's had to go from shaking hands and meeting people to essentially creating programming.

David Carlucci:
Well, one of the things I'm doing regularly now, is I do Facebook Live, like a town hall. Every week, I do two of them a week. And I have special guests on, actually, today at 4:00 o'clock, I have the head of the Humane Society here in the Hudson Valley.

Eric Lach:
Oh cool.

David Carlucci:
And yeah, she's going to be talking about the pets and what's going on with the adoptions and all that. I know the last time I visited Humane Society, Hudson Valley Humane Society, you had so many different animals there. What are some of the unique animals that you have there now?

Speaker 16:
So we have this little bunny who's looking for adoption.

David Carlucci:
You know, for me, I'm kind of learning on that space. To see hey, okay, we got some likes here or I have this many views.

Speaker 16:
And today we just adopted a Moluccan cockatoo. She only has one leg on but she was adopted and she actually went to live near Buffalo, New York.

David Carlucci:
And seeing, oh, okay, I had this guest on and people really reacted well to that. And then sometimes I'll have a guest on and I think they're great and we have a dynamic conversation and there's only like 20 people watching.

Eric Lach:
There is no textbook for lockdown campaigning and the transition to online happened so fast and was so new that it left several of the candidates in the race vulnerable to people who wanted to mess with them. Evelyn Farkas is the former Department of Defense official who's running. And during a Zoom event she held in April, she got Zoom bombed, which is when people take over a Zoom event and do horrible gross things on the screen.

Evelyn Farkas:
The irony was that we were talking about disinformation. And we had been talking for awhile and we have noticed a couple of weird things like a Trump face and then somebody typed in an offensive word and then we-

Eric Lach:
In the chat.

Evelyn Farkas:
Yeah, in the chat, exactly. And then in the windows, the squares on the Zoom box we see somebody, this young man seemed to be putting his hand in the elastic of his trousers. And so we tossed the person out and that was that. I also heard subsequently, I didn't notice it, that there was some adult porn being shown in a window. I'm not sure if was that window or another one. So having the open system, we realized right away, oh, we need to upgrade. So we upgraded and then immediately our problem disappeared, we had control.

Eric Lach:
Zoom bombing can be horrible. Two days after Farkas experienced her Zoom bombing, another candidate in the race, Mondaire Jones, who's running on a kind of Bernie Sanders Medicare for All, forgiving student debt platform, who would be the first black gay man in Congress had his own event hijacked. This time by a participant who used the app's screenshare function to display child pornography to everybody who was logged on. The campaign managed to kick that person out and reported the incident to the F.B.I. and felt compelled to tell the people who had attended that a therapist had volunteered to host a separate Zoom call for anybody who needed to talk about what they had seen.

Eric Lach:
Zoom is a new platform with new challenges. Some of the candidates in the race have turned to slightly older ways to reach voters. Allison Fine, who's the former board chair of NARAL, has also written a number of books about online organizing. In some ways, she's been the candidate in the race who's dived most enthusiastically into the new reality. She announced early on that she was dismissing her field team and making her campaign all digital, including and up to the old-fashioned email newsletter.

Allison Fine:
And I'll tell you something about that morning email. When I first did it, I had somebody say to me, "No, no, [inaudible 00:25:34] make it pretty, right?" And I sat down and I thought, you know what, Eric, no, I actually want this to look like I'm sitting at a Smith Corona typewriter. And I stripped it down to its essence. Being empathetic to what's going on, to being at times funny, and to getting people real useful information.

Eric Lach:
And in a crisis, it works. One of the things about this election is that it seems like a difficult moment to get people to engage. I mean, this is a district that hasn't had to think about a congressional race in three decades. And it's a particularly distracted moment right now.

Allison Fine:
There's no question that people are in pain, and they're worried and they're distracted. So we're not going to be able to break through all of that noise. But all the metrics of engagement are going up online. And I'm starting to get constituent calls. I'm not in office [crosstalk 00:26:39].

Eric Lach:
People calling you up?

Allison Fine:
Yeah. So last Monday, a young Latina woman called me up, and she said she personally has been getting food and essential supplies to undocumented people and families in the river towns because they were immediately cut off. And she called me up and she said, "I heard that you help people solve problems. Can you help me?" And so I got her connected to a local nonprofit called Neighbor's Link to at least give her some fundraising infrastructure for what she's doing and connect with their volunteers.

Eric Lach:
Fine has made that 5,000 person newsletter the centerpiece of her campaign. Barrett Seaman, the local reporter, isn't totally sold on this approach, he's looking for evidence that it's going to move the needle on election day.

Barrett Seaman:
I mean, she's sending out these very practical, useful, intelligent emails, two or three times a week we get these things, they're pretty good stuff, and they're useful information. But so what if the same 5,000 people are seeing it and nobody else?

Eric Lach:
And this is a question in many kinds of races these days. It's like a following is not necessarily constituency, right? Are those 5,000 people who get that newsletter are those voters, are those voters in the district?

Barrett Seaman:
Exactly, yeah, that's exactly right. It's that you don't know that those 5,000 people are going to vote for you come June 23rd. It's just that they're receiving your emails.

Eric Lach:
What's going to give candidates the edge in this race? It's an unprecedented situation, no question. But money is still money. Adam Schleifer is the heir to a local pharmaceutical fortune, and thanks in large part to his in his family's money, he's been able to blanket the district with television ads for the past few months.

Adam Schleifer:
While our essential workers and healthcare heroes risked their lives, Trump led us down by ignoring science and giving us toxic advice. I learned how to lead working for Governor Cuomo as a consumer protection ...

Eric Lach:
There are two candidates in the race who currently hold state level office in New York, and that sets them apart from the field. One of them is David Carlucci, the state senator.

David Carlucci:
So I think given this crisis that we're in, in a way it's been on the political side somewhat beneficial, because I can really prove my worth. And my phone in the Senate has been ringing off the hook.

Eric Lach:
And can you give some examples of what that's meant?

David Carlucci:
Well, you mean like what type of cases?

Eric Lach:
Yeah, yeah.

David Carlucci:
Well, the number one is overwhelmingly, is helping people with the unemployment insurance claims. We have gotten literally, like thousands of inquiries about that. So obviously, I can't ask people for their vote when I'm working in that capacity. But it does just help prove the worth and I've realized that as a senator, as a state senator, at least, people don't seek me out when things are going great. They come find me when stuff has hit the fan.

Eric Lach:
The challenge of campaigning in a pandemic is how to connect with people at a time of social distancing. It's how to engage people at a time of maximum distraction. And it's how to talk about the issues during a crisis. In the 17th, with just days to go before election day, nobody can say which way this election is going to turn. They've all sort of got a shot here. And the challenge that they're facing, if COVID-19 stays with us over the summer and through the fall, is going to be faced by candidates and races across the country.

Barrett Seaman:
So they're in the blind. They're just sort of like a bunch of people with blindfolds on wandering through a room wondering when they're going to hit a wall. And not knowing where the wall is. And the same is true for both the candidates and the voters, is that we don't have the normal hooks to hang things on that we expect in making decisions about elections.

David Remnick:
Barrett Seaman writes for the Hudson Independent and he spoke with The New Yorker's Eric Lach. The primary in New York State is coming up on June 23rd. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, stick around.

Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections, community and love in 1969 New York City. It's a social novel with a heart of gold and characters that will crack you up and make you cry. Download Deacon King Kong at apple.co/obc. You can also experience millions of other books and audio books on the Apple Books app already on your iPhone and iPad. There you'll find bestsellers, classics, up and coming authors and more. Get started today and read with us.

David Remnick:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. This month, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision that will affect hundreds of thousands of Americans, undocumented immigrants protected under DACA, the people known as Dreamers. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. President Obama issued the policy as an executive order after an immigration bill, the Dream Act, repeatedly failed to pass Congress. The Trump administration ordered DACA canceled, a lawsuit was filed to prevent it from doing so, which reached the Supreme Court in pretty short order. If the court rules in favor of the Trump administration, all the undocumented people who have been living with relative freedom under DACA could be subject to deportation. Most of these people grew up in this country and some have no memories of any other.

David Remnick:
In November, Jonathan Blitzer spoke to two of the lawyers making the case for the Dreamers, right as they were going before the Supreme Court. I want to play that story again now, to remind us of what's at stake. Here's Jonathan Blitzer.

Jonathan Blitzer:
I first met Luis Cortes in February of 2017, because I was writing a story about a DACA recipient, and I needed to get in touch with that person's lawyer. Luis was his lawyer. In the course of the conversation, it starts to come out that Luis himself is a DACA recipient, and so his own fate is bound up in the fates of all of the clients he's representing who also have DACA.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Luis was born in Morelia, Michoacan in Mexico and came to the U.S. with his parents when he was barely a year old. He had no sense growing up that he didn't have legal status.

Luis Cortes:
The first time I think I really realized what being undocumented meant was when I was in eighth grade. And there was a trip to Europe that the eighth grade class was taking. And in order to offset some of the cost, we were going to sell See's Candies chocolate in order to fundraise. And I sold a ton of chocolate, I was hustling that chocolate hardcore. And I had raised enough money to go and it wasn't until after where I let my parents know I've made it and I have all this money that they let me know you can't go because you weren't born here. And that's all I knew at that time. I couldn't go because I wasn't born here. But I didn't really know much more of the mechanics in eighth grade. I remember being very pissed that I wasn't able to go.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Yeah, yeah. And you go to college, from college you go straight to law school. So when you started in law school, it's 2010. DACA wasn't a thought on anyone's mind yet, as such. And so there were questions too, about what your working life would look like, even after law school, right? Because you didn't have necessarily a legal avenue to be employable at that time.

Luis Cortes:
That's right, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jonathan Blitzer:
What was your sense of what DACA was? Did it immediately seem like a lifeline to you, was it something you were suspicious of? How did you understand it?

Luis Cortes:
Yeah. I had just finished my second year of law school, and it was during the summer. So I was going into my last year. And then DACA is announced, as I'm about to start my last year of law school. And it almost seemed too good to be true. It seemed like it fell from the sky.

Barack Obama:
Let's be clear, this is not amnesty. This is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship. It's not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people. It is the right thing to do.

Luis Cortes:
I decided to apply. In a very nervous way, I submitted my application. The scariest part was going into the DHS offices to get fingerprinted, because those DHS offices are the same offices that ICE is located. So you have the sense of like, what if I get fingerprinted and I don't come out. But I remember when my work permit came in, and I got my social security number. It was life changing.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Yeah. So you go on, thanks in large part to having this lawful status conferred through DACA, you go on to practice immigration law.

Luis Cortes:
Yeah.

Jonathan Blitzer:
You're living your life, you have your clients. You're working in Seattle.

Luis Cortes:
Yeah.

Jonathan Blitzer:
And then 2016 happens. And President Trump takes office and not entirely out of the blue because there had been murmurings of this but still somewhat suddenly, the administration comes out and cancels DACA just outright.

Speaker 23:
Good morning. I'm here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded. The DACA program ...

Luis Cortes:
My reaction was both out of frustration and disappointment. And part of my frustration was that this is the fear realized by hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients when they first applied. What happens if they do away with this program and now they have all of our information.

Jonathan Blitzer:
And this is 700,000 people.

Luis Cortes:
Yes, yeah, hundreds of thousands of people. And their communities and their employers, their spouses, their children. We're talking about millions of people now. So it was a very confusing and kind of chaotic time. We were flooded with phone calls that day, that week, about whether DACA is done away with all together. What now? And interestingly enough, as we're having this conversation, I'm almost having this conversation with myself too, about if DACA does end, what then? And I must explaining it to them, I'm hearing myself saying it out loud, me realizing like what then?

Jonathan Blitzer:
And what were you saying? What were you hearing yourself say?

Luis Cortes:
That there really isn't any other way. That there is no other way to get status and that we're going to be back to what we were before, hiding.

Jonathan Blitzer:
A number of different groups in a number of different venues challenged the legality of how the administration ended DACA in the first place, and you are going to be one of, is it three people?

Luis Cortes:
Four.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Four people sitting at the plaintiff's table in front of the Justices. Who else is going to be at the table?

Luis Cortes:
Right. There was a lot of discussions about who would represent this case and representing the individual DACA recipients, it's going to be myself and Ted Olson, who was formerly the solicitor general under George W. Bush.

Jonathan Blitzer:
And so Ted Olson is not someone just on its face who would be aligned with this cause, I mean, a sort of legendary conservative Supreme Court litigator.

Luis Cortes:
Ted is a very skilled Supreme Court litigator and knows the pace of the arguments and how to ... there's a special art and a science to argue the Supreme Court. So we feel very lucky to have someone like that around.

Ted Olson:
Hello.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Hi, Mr. Olsen.

Ted Olson:
Yes.

Jonathan Blitzer:
How are you? This is Jonathan Blitzer from The New Yorker. Thanks for making the time.

Ted Olson:
We're happy to do it.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Could you talk a bit about what you see is the central issue of this case?

Ted Olson:
It all boils down to whether or not the termination of DACA was legal, and what the reasons for doing so are and what the consequences are. When the government of the United States announces a policy that has an immediate impact on very substantial numbers of persons. The impact on those individuals requires the government to announce reasons for its decision to explain what it is considered in making that decision, explaining why that decision is lawful, so that there will be accountability for those decisions. And this administration announcing the rescission of this program, gave no reasons for the decision, and no explanation for it.

Luis Cortes:
There's this phrase under the Administrative Procedures Act called arbitrary and capricious, an agency can't act arbitrarily or capriciously. And one of the ways that it does that, is that it goes through the rationale and it goes through the consequences of all of a sudden sharply changing a policy. And again, it could consider everything as, yeah, it's worth it, fine. That's fine. As long as it does its homework. And there doesn't seem to be any kind of considerations that were made here.

Jonathan Blitzer:
In terms of your specific strategy now coming before the Justices, are there particular Justices on the court you're targeting your arguments to? How are you thinking about the composition of the court? And how does that impact the way in which you frame your case?

Ted Olson:
Well, what we do is that we attempt to convince all of them. We're not saying what about how any Justice will vote on a particular issue in a particular case or anything like that. But we want to make arguments that are focused on the way the Justices have decided cases in the past. And in this area where all we're asking is for the court to recognize that this administration and by the way, not for the first time, this administration has acted in an arbitrary fashion of ready, fire, aim. And we want the Justices, whichever end of the political spectrum their backgrounds might be to understand that this is a rule of law case. It isn't a liberal or conservative case. It's a rule of law case.

Ted Olson:
But it's a rule of law case involving hundreds of thousands of individuals who will be hurt by an abrupt and unexplained and unjustified change in policy. The human face on this is very, very real to all of these individuals who are going to school, raising families, serving in our armed forces, forming businesses, becoming a part of the community and then having to live with this Sword of Damocles hanging over them all of the time and the uncertainty that that causes. You can imagine how difficult it would be to live a life in the shadow of that doom so to speak. This is a very, very serious thing.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Luis, you're going to be one of the few people in the courtroom, but certainly the only person sitting at one of the litigator's tables before the Justices whose personal life is at stake, given what the arguments are and how these arguments play out. What does that feel like? Does it feel like a burden? Does it feel like an opportunity? Does it make you nervous? Does it make you, I don't know.

Luis Cortes:
Yeah, it kind of depends what hat I'm wearing. As a lawyer, I am very stoked about it. I didn't think that I would have a Supreme Court case this early on in my career. And so I'm very excited to be, not just in the court but at the litigator's table. So it's very daunting. The nine people who are going to be hearing the case and who I'll be looking at them, and they'll be looking at me is, they're going to have a tremendous impact on my life. And they're the ones who get to decide whether my clients are deported and me with them.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Do you have faith in those nine faces you'll be staring at?

Luis Cortes:
I have to. One of the things that I have learned as a lawyer is that in what makes I think the U.S. significantly different from any other country, is its court system and its ability to do the right thing, the just thing when there's injustice done. And this, although it's imperfect, this country has an amazing history of doing that.

David Remnick:
Staff writer Jonathan Blitzer spoke with Luis Cortes and Ted Olson. The Supreme Court's decision on the cancellation of DACA is expected this month. We're going to close the show with the writer Bryan Washington. Brian is a fiction writer and an essayist. And you can also find some of his food videos at newyorker.com. He's a hell of a cook. Recently, Bryan has been writing about living through the pandemic in his hometown of Houston. Here's Bryan Washington.

Bryan Washington:
On my last trip to a gay bar for the foreseeable future, my boyfriend and I played Jenga on a sofa outside. I pulled a piece from a nook, he slid one from a cranny. A bachelor party was next to us and eventually someone ran into our tower of blocks. Immediately, 15 pairs of hands, all of them various shades, stooped to gather the pieces. Our fingers touch from time to time, grazing wrists, and we laughed about the touching, didn't think twice.

Bryan Washington:
Another time in Austin, we found a gay bar on nothing Saturday night. There was no reason for the place to be packed from wall to wall with people breathing all over one another. Sweating and pulsing and winding and shoving but it was, we were. We were a blob of gas and air. At one point I elbowed the guy shaking beside me and after I apologized, he touched my ear and said it was fine.

Bryan Washington:
One night, at a gay bar in Houston, I watched a group of guys huddled around a man who was flailing his hands, tickling the Christmas lights hanging above him. He looked maybe 40, he'd just come out. His friend stood beside him reigning the guy in, asking passersby to give him a kiss on the cheek to celebrate. A loose line formed beside them, ebbing and flowing with the music, congratulating and patting and chanting as though we'd all just won some championship.

Bryan Washington:
One night a few days after the Pulse shooting, I sat in an Atlanta gay bar where nobody said anything at all. Instead, we touched the small of one another's back in passing and gently squeezed every neighboring shoulder.

Bryan Washington:
One night in New Orleans, I sat with a straight friend who had never been to a gay bar before. We vaped on the balcony, and he noted the physical proximity of the space. "Everyone stands so fucking close," he said. Just then, a man slipped between us, cupping our elbows, not even looking at us.

Bryan Washington:
It's worth wondering how a space largely free of threats evolves when every space becomes a threat. It's worth wondering what the function of these spaces is and whether they'll survive and what their survival will mean as the nature of physical space continues to change. Some of us waited a long time for those spaces, some might not mind waiting a bit longer. Some of us don't have time to wait. You miss it when it's gone.

Bryan Washington:
But before everything changed, there was one night walking back to our car from a gay bar in Houston, when we skipped along the broken sidewalk, buzzed on proximity and beer and chilaquiles. Turning the corner we ran into a guy staggering back to his own car with his own people. We hugged in the street. Apologized, kissed one another's cheeks. We said, "Sorry, thank you, love you, be safe, goodbye."

David Remnick:
Bryan Washington in Houston, his novel Memorial is coming out later this year. And you can find a lot more of his work at newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick. And that's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. You can subscribe to the podcast of the show. And you could always find us at newyorkerradio.org. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

Speaker 3:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botein, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, KalaLea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Ngofeen Mputubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michele Moses and Steven Valentino. With help from Alison MacAdam, Morgan Flannery, Mengfei Chen and Emily Mann.

Speaker 26:
With additional help from Kylie Warner.

Speaker 3:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections, community and love in 1969 New York City. It's a social novel with a heart of gold and characters that will crack you up and make you cry. Download Deacon King Kong at apple.co/obc. You can also experience millions of other books and audio books on the Apple Books app already on your iPhone and iPad. There you'll find bestsellers, classics, up and coming authors and more. Get started today and read with us.

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Getting White People to Talk About Racism | The New Yorker Radio Hour | WNYC Studios

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Speaker 1:The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections and community in 1969 New York City.

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Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy

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DOJ - SPIRIT

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The School-SPIRIT is a one-day, student-focused program which engages students, school administrators, teachers, school resource officers, and other school and community members in identifying issues impacting their school and developing and implementing solutions to resolve those issues.

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Preliminary Information

On the next page you'll be asked to select an Implicit Association Test (IAT) from a list of possible topics . We will also ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes or beliefs about these topics and provide some information about yourself.

We ask these questions because the IAT can be more valuable if you also describe your own self-understanding of the attitude or stereotype that the IAT measures. We would also like to compare differences between people and groups.

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Note: This site is designed for adults, aged 18 or older.

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Important disclaimer: In reporting to you results of any IAT test that you take, we will mention possible interpretations that have a basis in research done (at the University of Washington, University of Virginia, Harvard University, and Yale University) with these tests. However, these Universities, as well as the individual researchers who have contributed to this site, make no claim for the validity of these suggested interpretations. If you are unprepared to encounter interpretations that you might find objectionable, please do not proceed further. You may prefer to examine general information about the IAT before deciding whether or not to proceed.

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On the next page you'll be asked to select an Implicit Association Test (IAT) from a list of possible topics . We will also ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes or beliefs about these topics and provide some information about yourself.

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Debunking The Most Common Myths White People Tell About Race

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Debunking The Most Common Myths White People Tell About Race | Think | NBC News

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Courageous Conversation

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Courageous Conversation - Providing Training, Coaching and Consulting for Millions of Racial Equity Leaders Around the World

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Founded in 1992 by Glenn E. Singleton, Pacific Educational Group provides services to help you facilitate courageous conversations about race in your organization, community or city.

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We Got This

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Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools

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-- S. Dallas Dance, Superintendent Published On: 2014-09-23

"All students, especially white students, need to read, think, converse and write about issues of race, racism and whiteness if teachers are to help move society into a more racially aware and just place for all. The work of Glenn Singleton and Pacific Educational Group gives educators the tools they need to have those Courageous Conversations."

-- Jackie Roehl, 2012 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Published On: 2014-09-23

"Brave and grounded, patient but pointed, Courageous Conversations About Race delivers a rare combination of critical information, illuminating perspective, and truly useful tools to get and keep us all engaged in the most important work of our time. A great nation is not defined by its ability to assimilate all of its citizens, but by its ability to provide equitable opportunities for all of them. This book shows us how."

-- Dr. Anton Treuer, Author, Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask; Executive Director, American Indian Resource Center Published On: 2014-09-23

"When I finished reading this book, I immediately wanted to share it with others. Glenn Singleton provides strategies and tools to help one examine one′s own racial identity. His curriculum and modes of inquiry promote self-discovery and self-awareness. The racial autobiographies allowed me to deepen my racial consciousness and become a more effective Courageous Conversation practitioner. Mr. Singleton is the best equity practitioner I have worked with―provocative, stimulating, mindful of the sensitivities of this topic, and devoted to fulfilling our racial equity mandate."

-- Ellen C. Stein, Head of School Published On: 2014-09-23

"In the first edition of his groundbreaking book, Courageous Conversations, Glenn Singleton made a powerful case that, in order to dismantle racism, it is first necessary to talk about and understand how power and privilege are related to race. In this second edition, he takes it one step further, adding racial autobiographies and supplements to make it even more accessible to diverse audiences. This work is sorely needed if we are ever to reach educational and social equity in our nation."

-- Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita - Language, Literacy, and Culture Published On: 2014-09-23

"The City's leadership team has used Pacific Educational Group's training and the Courageous Conversation protocol effectively to launch our racial equity work. Sharing these concepts and approaches with our partners, Saint Paul Public Schools, has created a level of trust and understanding around racial equity we didn't have before."

-- Christopher B. Coleman, Mayor Published On: 2014-09-23

"Aotearoa New Zealand and especially Auckland, is becoming increasingly diverse. Our learner population reflects that diversity, including Maori, Pacific and over 100 other ethnic groups. We are striving to create an environment that enables equity of success for all. That involves learning how to engage with these learners on their terms, and confronting how people of different racial backgrounds understand and interact with each other. Courageous Conversations provides vital insights that guide our journey."

-- Rick Ede, Chief Executive

"Courageous Conversations About Race has guided our cultural transformation at Portland Public Schools toward becoming a more racially aware and culturally responsive institution - from our classroom instruction to our business and hiring practices. This protocol not only provides a way in to difficult conversations, it gives each of us the tools to see, own and act upon our role in perpetuating the status quo and understanding the urgency to reframe the paradigm for the success of all students."

-- Carole Smith, Superintendent

"Courageous Conversations About Race came across my desk at a time that I had almost given up on engaging in discussions of race and equity. I was exhausted from countless painful and unproductive conversations on this sensitive topic. I quickly learned why so many people choose not to engage in these conversations - because it is hard. This book not only inspires educators and system level leaders to courageously address what we have all become comfortable with ignoring, but also gives us concrete tools for productively entering a conversation about race."

-- Veronica Benavides, Doctoral Candidate
"In a nation that too often eschews either real dialogue or courage when it comes to issues like race and inequality, and particularly in regard to education, Glenn Singleton has demonstrated over many years just how important fearlessness can be in transforming schools and communities into places where justice is possible. The Courageous Conversation approach to enhancing equity is invaluable to the struggle for a more fair-minded and truly just America."
-- Tim Wise, Antiracism educator
"The 'so what' and 'what now' options this guide presents for self and institutional learning are clear. The 'so what' describes the necessary work in addressing the under education of 'children of color' and the 'mis-education' of white students and many current educators. The 'what now' is framed by the important message that 'this is not easy work' and it is fraught with the unaddressed dangers for those who undertake to do it. It is those dangers that allow racism to persist in our country."
-- Randall Lindsey, Emeritus Professor
"Glenn E. Singleton has provided yet another powerful and still relevant book in this useful revision. If you are serious about engaging in exercises that can truly interrogate race and unearth privilege for the purpose of obtaining equity in our schools, read this book. Indeed, this book inspired me to do my own racial autobiography, and also inspired my principalship students to start the journey to become more racially aware leaders who can skillfully lead courageous conversations. Since then they have taken action through practice, often using this volume, to make impactful changes to eradicate inequities in their schools in meaningful, life-altering ways."
-- Mark Anthony Gooden, Associate Editor
"Courageous Conversation About Race (CCAR) protocol has provided significant depth to my diversity and inclusion practice at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Since the inception of our work in 2008, CCAR has provided a robust and comprehensive framework to embed cultural competence across all facets of university life. CCAR is now a regular feature on the annual UWA staff development calendar and this programming is now being emulated in fifteen universities across Australia and New Zealand."
-- Malcolm Fialho, Associate Director
"The protocols of Courageous Conversation have changed my life as a leader, an educator, and fellow citizen of our forever-changing world. As a white woman, I have deepened not only my racial consciousness but also my ability to engage, both personally and professionally, in richer and truer capacities. I once heard Cornell West say that the heart of a strong, liberal education rests within the ability "to be prepared for the conversation and to be prepared to be changed by it. Courageous Conversations have allowed me that sort of preparation."
-- Ellanor N. Brizendine, Head of School

"The work Glenn is doing through Courageous Conversations About Race will stir you intellectually and move your personal beliefs beyond what you knew possible. This is the first approach I've seen that moves everyone along on their journey based on where they are personally first. The application is Glenn's work goes beyond education and into many sectors of our society and industries. I am excited to see how his work can impact the advertising industry. Writing mission statements, policies and coming up with programs are all boxes many companies check. That part is too easy. And I think many companies will admit to feeling stuck. Glenn's approach takes true courage to get real about one major obstacle which is - the belief system I have that may block my perspectives on diversity. Cheers to Glenn for challenging the conversation!"

-- Keesha Jean-Baptiste, Director of Human Resources

Glenn Singleton has devoted over thirty years to constructing racial equity worldwide and developing leaders to do the same. Author, thought leader, and strategist, he is the creator of Courageous Conversation a protocol and framework for sustained, deepened dialogue, and Beyond Diversity, the curriculum that has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to use it. Glenn is the Founder and President of Courageous Conversation TM, an agency that guides leadership development in education, government, corporation, law enforcement, and community organizing. He is the award-winning author of Courageous Conversations About Race; A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, Second Edition; and of MORE Courageous Conversations About Race.

Glenn has consulted executives at Wieden + Kennedy (W+K) Advertising, Google, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, the New York Department of Education, the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the Stavros Niarchos, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundations. Along with W+K, he received the 2017 Most Valuable Partnership (MVP) Award by AdColor. He is the recipient of the George A. Coleman Excellence in Equity Award by the Connecticut State Education Resource Center. Cited in the June 2018 edition of the Hollywood Reporter for his work with 21st Century Fox Animation, most recently, Glenn was awarded the AdWeek/AdColor 2020 Champion Award, and the 2020 National Speech and Debate Association Communicator of the Year Award. In 1995, Glenn founded the Foundation for A College Education and continues to serve on its Board of Advisors. He is also the founder and Board Chair of the Courageous Conversation Global Foundation, which develops partnerships to promote racial justice, interracial understanding and human healing worldwide.

Glenn has trained law enforcement leaders with the U.S. Embassy in Western Australia, and established the Courageous Conversation South Pacific Institute in Auckland, New Zealand. For eight years, he served as an adjunct professor of educational leadership at San Jose State University. Glenn has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University and has instructed faculty, students and administrators at the University of Minnesota, New York University School of Medicine, and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, Glenn Singleton is a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. and 100 Black Men. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

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Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools

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Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools [Singleton, Glenn E.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools

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Culturally Relevant Lesson Plan

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Teaching Tolerance 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.

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Every Kid Needs a Champion

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Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, “They don’t pay me to like the kids.” Her response: “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.’” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

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Bringing Cultural Context and Self-Identity into Education: Brian Lozenski at TEDxUMN

TEDx Talks

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Bringing Cultural Context and Self-Identity into Education: Brian Lozenski at TEDxUMN

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Racial Stereotyping: You see a black guy, white guy, pretty girl committing a crime. What you do?

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Racial Stereotyping: You see a black guy, white guy, pretty girl committing a crime. What you do?

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SELE Teaching Strategies

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15 Culturally-Responsive Teaching Strategies

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All Posts

No single teaching approach will engage each student at once, but building a strategy to consistently deliver culturally-responsive teaching lessons will help you appeal to diverse learners with distinct backgrounds.

Rooted in differentiated instruction principles, culturally-responsive pedagogy aims to link content - from delivery to assessment - with students' ancestral and contemporary cultures.

To augment their understanding and responsiveness, this involves:

Empowering students to share thoughts

Integrating diverse work and study practices

Understanding student learning needs and styles

Emulating culturally-significant instruction styles, such as oral storytelling

To help you plan and deliver lessons that resonate with a diverse classroom, we'll explain what culturally responsive teaching is and how it is implemented.

We also put together 15 culturally-responsive teaching strategies and examples that will resonate with diverse students and foster an inclusive classroom environment.

These strategies are available as a downloadable list below for quick reference so you can reference them during classroom instruction.

Let's start with some simple explanation of what culturally responsive teaching actually means.

What is culturally responsive teaching?

Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is a pedagogy that acknowledges and embraces students' cultures, languages and experiences - and relates them to classroom learning.

Culturally responsive teachers are actively aware of the various cultural backgrounds present in their classrooms, and act as a facilitator of lessons that can resonate with each.

It is not an easy task - creating this learning environment requires not only a high level of cultural competence, but also an intentional effort to learn about students' backgrounds and cultures.

It can be majorly beneficial to closing achievement gaps between students of different backgrounds and addressing inequities in the classroom. You can also create stronger partnerships with your students by fostering a learning environment where they are represented clearly.

Conditions for creating a culturally-responsive classroom

Reflected in the 15 strategies and examples in the next section, there are four conditions any teacher must fulfill to establish a culturally-responsive classroom, according to an authoritative academic book about the subject called Diversity and Motivation.

As you prepare and deliver any lesson, strive to:

Establish inclusion

This starts by highlighting how the topic you're teaching may relate or apply to students. For example, many societies and cultures have fireworks festivals.

While such a festival runs, you could teach how to calculate speed using fireworks in sample questions. Establishing inclusion also involves regularly grouping students with different classmates, encouraging discussion to solve problems. In doing so, they can share unique perspectives and diverse background knowledge.

Develop positive attitudes

This further focuses on relating content to students. A popular method is allowing them to choose between activities and assessments that let them showcase their values, strengths and experiences.

For example, while providing clear learning goals and evaluation criteria, encourage students to submit their own project ideas.

Enhance meaning

You can bolster lesson content by drawing connections with real-world issues, asking students to use opinions and existing knowledge to address them.

For example, when teaching about government, you could contextualize concepts through municipal political issues. When appropriate, use student jargon to clarify these issues or improve communication in general.

Foster confidence

Make the assessment process less intimidating by offering different ways to demonstrate skills and understanding. For example, avoid handing out quizzes that are purely multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank.

Among other question types, mix in problems that involve writing short- and long-form answers. After, give students time to assess their own progress and performance, helping them focus on growth.

Meeting these four conditions largely relies on using specific approaches, such as the 15 explored below.

15 Culturally-responsive teaching strategies and examples

1. Learn about your students

At the start of the year or semester, demonstrating a desire to adapt your teaching style to students can help them feel valued. Because open communication should uncover their learning needs and preferences, try:

Distributing questionnaires, asking about interests

Handing out surveys, gathering information about learning styles

Holding open discussions, allowing students to talk about positive experiences from past classes

Once you've gathered enough information, tell the class you'll focus on adjusting your teaching approach to help them learn as best as they can. Students should quickly warm up to you.

2. Interview students

You'll build a stronger understanding of students' values and habits - as well as strengths and weaknesses - by individually asking them questions. While running a large-group exercise, pull each student aside for a few minutes. Ask about:

Hobbies

Their favourite lessons and activities

Which kinds of exercises help them remember lessons and improve skills

Note what each student says to identify themes and different preferences. Then, when possible, relate content to their interests and deliver lessons that appeal to shared strengths.

3. Integrate relevant word problems

Many students will take a greater interest in math if you use word problems to contextualize equations. Working with 41 7th grade students throughout an academic year, a study published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education used such contextual learning strategies to increase test scores by more than 44%. Create culturally-relevant word problems by:

Including student names to make subject matter relatable

Linking to student interests, such as by measuring the shot distance of a famous soccer player

Referencing diverse cultures, such as by determining the diameter of a specific ethnic food platter

Using these word problem tips will not only help you establish a culturally-responsive classroom, but engage students more than by using abstract questions.

4. Present new concepts by using student vocabulary

Delivering relatable content goes beyond math class. In any subject, you can grab and keep student attention by using their vocabulary to build understanding before moving to academic diction. Let's say many of your students are sports fans with family from soccer-crazed nations. Use a soccer example to demonstrate metaphors in language arts class:
Andrea Pirlo is an eagle on the pitch, armed with vision sharp enough to detect the smallest openings and recognize opportunities his opposition can't.
This kind of culturally-responsive language should open the door to presenting challenging skills and concepts, engaging students while doing so.

5. Bring in guest speakers

Guest speakers can bring context and passion to history, geography and social studies lessons, capturing student interest.

A war veteran could deliver a vivid narrative of his or her experiences. A mountaineer could give a striking recount of scaling Lhotse. Both could answer questions many teachers would struggle with, while engaging students much more effectively than a slideshow.

Plus, according to a study by the Economics of Education Review, students are often encouraged to work harder when they share a background with an educator. So, diverse guest speakers may inherently engage and motivate students who share a culture with them.

6. Deliver different forms of content through learning stations

Whether due to culture, socialization, preference or learning needs, students respond differently to different types of content. You can provide a range of material to each student by setting up learning stations. Each station should use a unique method of teaching a skill or concept related to your lesson.

For example, students can rotate between stations that involve:

Playing a game

Creating artwork

Watching a video

Reading an article

Completing puzzles

Listening to you teach

After going through each station, you can help students further process the material by holding a class discussion or assigning questions to answer.

7. Gamify lessons

Want another way to consistently diversify content and its delivery, appealing to different learning styles? Gamify some lesson elements. Easy-to-implement practices include:

Offering rewards, such as badges, for completing specific tasks or achieving certain scores

Setting a clear learning goal for the lesson, charting progress throughout the class to motivate students

Creating an "instruction manual" for a project, which contains the rubric and best practices for earning a high grade

Plus, gamifying your lessons is a way of making connections with contemporary gaming culture - helping students within this culture process and demonstrate understanding of content.

8. Call on each student

Call-and-response - the practice of asking students frequent questions while giving lessons - usually keeps them engaged, but also enables them to share thoughts and opinions. Involve everyone by:

Encouraging the sharing of personal perspectives, when a question allows for it

Calling on students without their hands up, acclimatizing them to speaking amongst peers

Asking a question after each new point or thought, having a student teach back the concept you just spoke about

By lesson's end, this call-and-response approach should allow each student to speak at least once.

9. Use media that positively depict a range of cultures

Children process content more effectively when their cultures and languages have places in the curriculum, according to an oft-cited academic book about teaching in multiracial schools.

Using media, such as books and movies, that positively depict a range of cultures and are relevant to your syllabus can partially address this need. Finding options through databases such as IMDB or American Literature isn't a tough task.

As a bonus, using different media should boost engagement levels.

10. Offer different types of free study time

Free study time typically appeals to students who prefer solo learning, but many cultures prioritize learning in group settings. You can meet both preferences by dividing your class into clearly-sectioned team and individual activities, such as the following:

Provide audiobooks, which play material relevant to your lessons

Create a station for group games that teach curriculum-aligned skills

Keep a dedicated quiet space for students to take notes and complete work

Allow some students to work in groups while taking notes and completing work, away from the dedicated quiet space

Presented with these options, free study time should appeal to a wider range of learners.

11. Encourage students to propose ideas for projects

By asking students to submit ideas for their own projects, the benefits of choice extend beyond free study time. Specifically, they should build confidence by showcasing their strengths and existing background knowledge.

So, encourage them to pitch ideas for taking a project from concept to completion. A student must show how the product will meet academic standards in his or her pitch. If the idea falls short, give the student ideas to refine it. If the student can't refine the idea, he or she can choose a project from a list of options you provide.

Not only will you be pleasantly surprised by some pitches, but you may generate ideas for future culturally-responsive exercises and assessments.

12. Experiment with peer teaching

There'll almost always be some student vocabulary and communal practices you never pick up on. But you can fill these gaps through peer teaching. Relatively-simple exercises include:

Students who read and discuss story passages with peers recall more content and score higher on assessments, according an Ohio University pilot study. And, according to a science education study, students who work in pairs and groups typically perform better on tests that involve reasoning and critical thinking.

Such results are largely achieved due to students discussing and rationalizing concepts in their own words, many of which belong to contemporary cultural lexicon and are not academic.

13. Establish cooperative base groups

Cooperative base groups - which come from collaborative learning pedagogy - allow students to regularly learn and process content together.

Your role consists of creating groups of three or four, scheduling meeting times and detailing agendas for them. Filling knowledge gaps and encouraging communication is also involved. Students' roles focus on supporting each other while striving to meet learning goals over the year.

While working in base groups, students can:

Review lessons

Take on guided research

Address each other's questions

Complete in-class assessments

The connection to culturally-responsive teaching is the same as peer learning: cooperative base groups encourage students to make sense of concepts you've taught by using their own words and thoughts.

14. Run problem-based learning scenarios

The flexibility of problem-based learning lends itself to culturally-responsive teaching. This is because, when presenting a relatable real-world problem for your students to solve, two cultural connections will typically occur.

1. First, there will likely be a cultural link in the question, whether it's explicit or students make it themselves.

2. Second, because they can apply different approaches toward problem-solving, they may use unique cultural perspectives.

But if you want to create a scenario with explicit cultural ties, consider:

Encouraging students to take historical, sociological and anthropological viewpoints

Framing the problem using ethnic events - for instance, solving logistical challenges of running a heritage festival - in the area

Regardless, the student-centred nature of problem-based learning will allow your class to use culturally-relevant examples and information when appropriate.

15. Involve parents by using take-home letters

Involving parents in their child's learning is a core part of almost any culturally-responsive teaching approach -- they act as the main educators in many societies and can provide cultural context. When starting a new unit or trying out an education tool for the first time, consider sending a letter home to parents.

For reference, here's the letter Prodigy provides to its teachers. This opens the door to parent participation. While not all parents will be subject matter experts, most should be able to provide guidance.

Downloadable list of culturally-responsive teaching strategies and examples

Click here to download and print a simplified list of the 15 culturally-responsive teaching strategies and examples to keep at your desk.

Interested in other teaching strategies to deploy in your classroom?

Culturally-responsive teaching strategies overlap in important ways with many other pedagogical approaches. Consider researching other teaching and instructional strategies to help bolster your approach, or combine different elements of each strategy!

Active learning strategies empower, engage, and stimulate your students as they put them at the center of the learning process.

Experiential learning activities, in contrast to traditional learning activities,aim to develop knowledge and skills through direct, firsthand experience.

Project-based learning involves an open-ended approach that sees students work alone or collectively to work on engaging, intricate curriculum-related questions or challenges..

Inquiry-based learning is broken down into four categories, all of which emphasize student questions, ideas and analyses.

Adaptive learning focuses on changing - or "adapting" - content for each student on an individual basis, especially with the help of technology.

Social emotional learning activities help students build social skills, establish healthy relationships and manage their emotions.

Final thoughts about culturally-relevant pedagogy

Delivering culturally-responsive lessons can not only help you engage students, but allow them to make personal connections with content.

Student populations across your school district are comprised of different races, backgrounds, cultural identities and socioeconomic statuses - it's important that teaching practices reflect and embrace these differences.

Greater student investment should lead to other benefits, such as more rigor and motivation. A happier, focused classroom is the ideal outcome.

Prodigy is a digital game-based learning platform that delivers a range of culturally-relevant math content through engaging word and scenario-based problems. Standards-aligned, it's used by millions of teachers and students across the world.

Create your free teacher account

Create your free teacher account

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Culturally Responsive Teaching: Examples, Strategies & Activities for Success

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All Posts No single teaching approach will engage each student at once, but building a strategy to consistently deliver culturally-responsive teaching lessons will help you appeal to diverse learners with distinct backgrounds. Rooted in differentiated instruction principles, culturally-responsive pedagogy aims to link content - from delivery to assessment - with students' ancestral and contemporary cultures.

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3 Tips to make any lesson more culturally responsive

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Last month, I reviewed Zaretta Hammond's fantastic book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Now I'm proud to have Zaretta here as a guest writer to share some specific strategies with us.

Culturally responsive teaching. Everybody is talking about it. The big question is: How do you actually make lessons culturally responsive? That comes up regularly when I am working with groups of teachers to improve outcomes for diverse students who are struggling. I remember working with a group of sixth grade teachers on improving learning for their at-risk students. These teachers were frustrated that their students, 95 percent of them students of color and English language learners, were not applying themselves to learning.

I suggested that we explore making lessons more culturally relevant in order to accelerate student learning. I remember the reaction of Janice, the science teacher. "I am not going to be rappin' about the periodic table," she said defiantly as she crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.

I couldn't blame her. Google "culturally responsive teaching" and you can find a dozen videos of well-meaning teachers leading some call-and-response chant about exponents or rapping about the Boston Tea Party while students sit back and giggle. That's because we usually talk about culturally responsive teaching only as an engagement strategy designed to motivate at-risk students to take learning seriously. Or we try to find a race-based connection to the content to make it "relevant" to minority students.

One of the biggest misconceptions about culturally responsive teaching is thinking you have to tie the lesson's content to African American or Latino students' racial background. The common belief is if you mention Africa, Mexico, or famous black and brown high achievers, it will spark students' attention. Then they will be motivated to participate.

In reality, culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students' cultural learning styles and tools. These are the strategies their moms, dads, grandmas, and other community folks use to teach them life skills and basic concepts long before they come to school and during out-of-school time.

Culturally responsive teaching leverages the brain's memory systems and information processing structures. Why? Many diverse students come from oral cultural traditions. This means their primary ways of knowledge transfer and meaning-making are oral and active. It's a common cultural tradition that cuts across racial groups: African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander communities all have strong oral cultures. Each of these cultural groups uses the brain's memory systems for turning inert information into useable knowledge. They use memory strategies to make learning sticky, like connecting what needs to be remembered to a rhythm or music (that's why we still know the ABC song) or by reciting it in fun ways like a poem, riddle, or limerick.

I asked Janice what area of learning she wanted to help her kids improve. She said science vocabulary; they weren't learning the weekly words and it was getting in the way of their understanding of key concepts. She was frustrated and at the end of her rope. I asked how she was teaching it. She used the typical approach: On Monday, she listed the words on the board. Students copied them down and were required to look each word up and use it in a sentence. On Wednesday, there was a vocabulary test.

I suggested that we design word study to be more culturally responsive by making it more like the students' own cultural learning process. She was open for trying something different.

I offered her these three tips for transforming any lesson into something that looked and felt more culturally responsive to diverse students, something that would allow them to engage more and process the content effectively.

Games are the power strategy for culturally-grounded learning because they get the brain's attention and require active processing. Attention is the first step in learning. We cannot learn, remember, or understand what we don't first pay attention to. Call and response is just a way to get the brain's attention. Most games employ a lot of the cultural tools you'd find in oral traditions - repetition, solving a puzzle, making connections between things that don't seem to be related (Ever play Taboo or Apples to Apples?).

Organizing learning so that students rely on each other will build on diverse students' communal orientation. This communal orientation can be summed up in the African proverb, "I am because we are." Even making learning slightly competitive in a good-natured way increases students' level of attention and engagement. It's why the T.V. show Survivor has been around for so many years; it's a social-based game.

The brain is wired to remember stories and to use the story structure to make sense of the world. That's why every culture has creation stories. In oral traditions, stories play a bigger role in teaching lessons about manners, morality, or simply what plants to eat or not eat in the wilderness because it's the way content is remembered. Diverse students (and all students, really) learn content more effectively if they can create a coherent narrative about the topic or process presented. That's the brain's way of weaving it all together. (Bonus: It also offers a great way to check for understanding and correct misconceptions.)

So Janice took her weekly list of science vocabulary and created a variety of sorting and matching games for students. She built a set of simple card games based on Go Fish or Old Maid. In addition she created some team games. Each week students had different active ways to learn the vocabulary. For 10-15 minutes a couple of times during the week, students got to play these learning games rather than look up words in a dictionary. She gave them instructions for making the games at home if they wanted to.

Instead of the traditional weekly vocab test, she asked them to "storify" their understanding of key concept words like metamorphosis, using vocabulary from past weeks.

When I checked in with the group a few weeks later, she was the first one to share. She said student engagement was like night and day. Now all students were participating. She said she knew they were learning the vocabulary at a deeper level because they were actually using the new science terms during discussions and in their writing with no prompting from her.

The big A-ha's for the group that day were that (1) Culturally responsive teaching doesn't have to be some performance the teacher does to entertain students and (2) It doesn't have to mention race or reference culture at all. Instead, what makes a practice culturally responsive is that it mimics students' own cultural learning tools. They all realized that these practices are helpful for all students, not targeted at minority students.

The real trick is to use these strategies regularly as part of your instructional routine rather than doing them randomly every now and then. Consistency is the key. ♦

Learn more about how to improve diverse students' information processing skills and actually grow their brains in Zaretta Hammond's book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students .

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3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive

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Google "culturally responsive teaching" and you can find a dozen videos of well-meaning teachers leading some call-and-response chant about exponents or rapping about the Boston Tea Party while students sit back and giggle.

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Reality Pedagogy

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Reality Pedagogy: Christopher Emdin at TEDxTeachersCollege

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Avoiding Racial Equity Detours

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7
Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 56-61

Paul Gorski

This is a failure of equity leadership.

A Racial Equity Reckoning

If the most emphatic racial equity advocates feel silenced and less central to institutional culture than their equity-resistant colleagues, what we have from an equity point of view is a sick institution.

Any meaningful accounting of racial inequities in schools must reckon with this reality. Is our commitment real? Why do emphatic equity advocates often face harsher repercussions for their advocacy than equity heel-draggers face for their inaction? Why is taking a strong, impassioned stand on racism interpreted as deviant while refusing to take a stand on racism is interpreted as in a developmental process (Mayorga & Picower, 2018)?

Are we driven by authentic desires for racial equity? Or are we content with rearranging inequities, hiding them behind multicultural arts fairs and diversity clubs (Au, 2017)?

The disturbing reality is, in my 20 years of experience working with schools and districts on matters of equity and justice, I've found that most initiatives and strategies that pass for "racial equity" efforts in schools pose less of a threat to racism than to the possibility of racial justice. Following Olsson's (1997) accounting of the detours white people follow to protect their privilege and avoid the messy work of racial justice, I call these initiatives and strategies equity detours.

The detours vary in scope and nefariousness but share a function: They create an illusion of progress toward equity while cementing, or even exacerbating, inequity. They can be more devastating than explicit racism because they do racism's work while consuming resources ostensibly earmarked for racial equity. They are the anti-anti-racism.

For example, people who study equity initiatives in schools have tracked educational leaders' tendencies, in the name of equity, either to implement deficit-oriented strategies, such as "grit" initiatives that obscure inequity (Kohn, 2014) or, worse, to build equity efforts around debunked approaches that create more inequity, like the "mindset of poverty." Some educational leaders inexplicably continue to embrace the "mindset of poverty" even though it reinforces racialized stereotypes (Redeaux, 2011)-and despite the fact that research clarified that there is no such thing as a mindset of poverty 50 years ago (Valentine, 1968).

What all these types of initiatives and frameworks have in common is that they mask racial inequity. They relieve us of the responsibility to name and eliminate the ways racism operates in our schools (Ladson-Billings, 2017). Rather than being paths to equity, they are detours around it.

Four Racial Equity Detours

Described below are four racial equity detours commonly embraced in schools, followed by equity principles that can help educators avoid these detours and build a more transformational racial equity approach.

1. Pacing-for-Privilege Detour

This detour underlies the other detours. It speaks to the situation described earlier, wherein an equity approach coddles the hesitancies of people with the least racial equity investment while punishing people with the most investment.

In too many schools, the pace of equity progress prioritizes the comfort and interests of people who have the least interest in that progress. Professional development in these schools appears designed to accommodate the feelings and fears of white educators in "difficult" conversations about race rather than to advance equity for students of color (Swanson & Welton, 2018). A common "equity" PD framework in these contexts is cultural competence -an approach that provides a way to talk about "cultural differences" without having to name or confront racism (Gorski, 2016a; Pon, 2009). Cultural competence is important. But by itself it's no threat to racism.

The hard truth is, racial equity cannot be achieved with an obsessive commitment to "meeting people where they are" when "where they are" is fraught with racial bias and privilege. Students, families, and educators experiencing racism cannot afford to wait for us to saunter toward a more serious racial equity vision. They cannot afford to wait, in particular, for all white educators to ease into racial equity commitments at a pace of our choosing while they suffer the consequences of our casualness.

In schools committed to equity, the time is now. We must prioritize equity over the comfort of equity-reluctant educators. We move on racial justice first by honestly identifying and addressing all the ways racism operates in our schools, and then we bridge the equity hesitaters to our equity vision. We refuse to equivocate on racial justice. We find the will to implement, and hold one another accountable to, policy and practice changes today, rather than waiting for an elusive consensus.

When I make this argument to education leaders, they often emphasize the importance of staff buy-in. I appreciate consensus-based leadership-but not always when it comes to equity. The school-to-prison pipeline is flowing (Annamma, Morrison, & Jackson, 2014). Students who are disproportionately targeted with assignment to special education, harsh applications of discipline policy, unengaging pedagogy, and the sorts of "school reform" initiatives that redistribute access up the privilege continuum don't need consensus. They need justice.

Start where we need to be: Equity is neither optional nor negotiable. This is who we are as a school; these are the values to which we will be held accountable. Our best resources in these efforts are equity-minded educators-the ones accustomed to the shushing. When we make them the center of our schools' and districts' institutional identities, we are primed for equity progress.

2. Poverty of Culture Detour

Culture is one important equity consideration. However, although racial identities may inform cultural identities, racial inequities aren't predominantly cultural misunderstandings. Racism is a tangled structural mess of power, oppression, and unjust distributions of access and opportunity. This mess cannot be resolved with greater cultural awareness alone.

I call this the poverty of culture detour in honor of Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006). In "It's Not the Culture of Poverty, It's the Poverty of Culture," she describes the hazards of adopting diversity frameworks built around vague notions of "culture." "[T]he problem of culture in teaching is not merely one of exclusion," she explains. "It is also one of overdetermination.... [C]ulture is randomly and regularly used to explain everything ... from school failure to problems with behavior management and discipline" (p. 104).

The result is that we too often attribute educational disparities to students' cultures. We cannot allow racism-infused misperceptions of their cultures to justify our failure to create racially just schools. Often, we interpret racial disparities in which students are suspended or expelled, for example, not as the result of racial bias, as research shows it primarily to be (Rudd, 2014), but as a cultural defect in communities of color. So we might attempt to solve these disparities by adjusting the behaviors, mindsets, or emotions of students of color rather than by adjusting educators' racial presumptions or schools' inequitable practices.

We cannot fix a problem we refuse to name. If our equity initiatives feature the word culture more than the word racism, we're probably off track. If we adopt an approach that obscures racism behind vague nomenclature like cultural competence or the diverse kids, we might be off track.

3. Deficit Ideology Detour

If we spend any of our equity efforts attempting to "fix" students of color-fortifying their grittiness, modifying their mindsets, adjusting their emotions-we need a reaccounting, not only of our equity understandings, but also of our equity intentions. These strategies locate the source of educational outcome disparities within communities of color while often ignoring the role of racism-the clearest sign of deficit ideology (Gorski, 2016b).

We should be instinctively suspicious of popular educational approaches that often detour us around equity with a deficit approach. For example, presuming we can resolve racial inequities by simply teaching students of color to have grit is like presuming we can resolve climate change by teaching coastal communities to swim faster. It shifts the onus of responsibility away from schools and onto the very youth who are cheated out of equitable opportunity-and who, due to this cheating, often already tend to be quite resilient. It can obscure structural conditions with which marginalized communities contend. What good is grit against curricular erasure or inequitable school policy?

As somebody who attended school having experienced the childhood trauma of sexual abuse and often found myself being punished for the implications of that abuse, I find the growing interest in mindfulness and trauma-informed practices compelling. But too often, these practices are adopted as though they are racial equity initiatives. In some cases, we offer students of color coping mechanisms rather than correcting in-school conditions-like inequitable policy or racially tinged tracking practices-that exacerbate racism's traumas. Our best strategy for minimizing the impact of racism is to eliminate racism. Trauma-informed practices as implemented in most schools don't do that.

Before we follow the deficit ideology detour, we should ask ourselves some questions. In whose image is school policy and institutional culture crafted? Which students have the most access to higher-order pedagogies, relevant curricula, and a full range of course options? Which students face grinding inequities in and out of school? What do trauma-informed practices look like for students whose primary source of trauma is the racism they experience at school?

Equity initiatives should focus on eliminating conditions that marginalize students-never on fixing students of color. If we cannot describe how our efforts are eliminating those conditions, it's time for an equity overhaul.

4. Celebrating Diversity Detour

Recently, while visiting a colleague's classroom to facilitate a conversation about race and poverty, I asked a group of African American and Latinx 10th grade students about their school's upcoming Diverse Friends Day. For one lunch period, they would be forcibly integrated, coerced into celebrating diversity by sitting with classmates racially or ethnically different from themselves-classmates with whom some of them normally wouldn't socialize.

"They mean well, but this activity is racist," Pam shared.

"I don't know about racist," Tariq responded, "but I don't want to do it."

José added, "A lot of the white students don't like us. I don't want to be forced to hang out with them."

I asked Pam to elaborate on her observation that Diverse Friends Day is racist. "There's a lot of racism in this school," she insisted. She wondered how disturbing her lunch-the only time she could relax in a predominantly white school-was going to change that. "I think Diverse Friends Day is for white people," she concluded.

Is she wrong? I don't think so, especially in the absence of more serious racial equity efforts, which these students agreed were missing from their school. In my experience, many "celebrating diversity" initiatives are crafted to help white students learn about diversity-not racism, but diversity -in ways that will be most comfortable for them.

In some cases, students of color are used essentially as props for the gentle diversity education of white students through activities like Diverse Friends Day. This allows white people to opt out of considering racial justice while deriving social and cultural benefits from diversity awareness. It creates the illusion of diversity appreciation while entrenching inequity.

Requiring students of color to participate in these diversity spectacles while failing to attend adequately to inequity can be exploitive. Pam, Tariq, and José didn't need to share lunch with white students to learn about difference, much less how racism operated around them. They developed these insights as a matter of survival. White educators were asking them to celebrate a diversity in which their experiences were invisible. This is one way white privilege persists even in the context of diversity efforts.

Five Principles of Equity Literacy

At this point, I presume readers are thinking, "So what should equity efforts look like?" I'm cautious about addressing this sort of question. It may signify a common impulse in education to grasp for simple strategies to address challenges that are more about ideology and will than strategy. I encourage us to think, instead, about principles that can guide our equity actions.

Here are five equity literacy principles (Gorski & Swalwell, 2015) that can help us avoid equity detours and maximize the impact of our equity efforts.

1. Direct Confrontation Principle

The path to racial equity requires direct confrontations with racial inequity-with racism. We start, again, by asking, "How is racism operating here?"

Gather the racial equity advocates in your school, district, and community and map the ways-big and small, implicit and explicit-that racial inequities persist. Examine policy, curricula, and discipline practices. If you struggle to identify how racism is operating, invest time to learn how to do it. When I work with educational leaders committed to acquiring an equity lens, I find simple prompts like these can provide opportunities for meaningful practice:

What is one practice in your school that focuses on fixing students of color rather than fixing the conditions that marginalize them? How can you reshape that practice for racial equity?

What policy might have harsher consequences for students of color if applied by educators who harbor racial bias even if they aren't intending to be racist? What do you need to change about that policy, or about the racial ideologies in your school or district, to make it equitable?

2. Redistribution Principle

Equity involves redistributing access and opportunity at the most basic institutional level. This includes material access to things like learning materials, technology, healthy food, and even healthcare. It also includes nonmaterial access to higher-order pedagogies, relatable curricula, and equity-conscious teachers.

The idea here is to intimately examine how institutional policies and practices provide some students more access and opportunity than others. It may mean re-examining how school practices are crafted in relation to students' lived experiences and whether institutional policy and culture are responsive to the interests of the most marginalized students.

For example, as we examine behavior policies, we might ask ourselves whether we're cognizant of the depth of racial bias associated with how educators tend to interpret behavior and dole out behavior referrals.

Policy handbooks are another good place to start. Study your school's policies line by line. Might any perpetuate racial inequity-like a dress code policy banning items associated with specific racial groups or assessment practices that could mask racial bias? Work with the equity advocates in your school and community to revise those policies and practices right now. Then attend to dynamics of institutional culture that resulted in the existence of biased policies to begin with.

3. Prioritization Principle

The only way to redistribute access and opportunity is to prioritize the interests of students of color. Every policy and practice decision should be filtered through this lens: How will this policy impact families of color? How will it improve conditions for students of color? Remember that, in inequitable contexts, equality-attending equally to everybody's interests-reproduces inequity. For example, we know that students of color are disproportionately tracked out of "upper-track" classes (Leonardo & Grubb, 2018) and that on average, students in "lower-track" classes have less access to engaging pedagogy and more exposure to control-oriented teaching practices. And because we also know these disparities are driven significantly by racial bias in referral and assessment processes (Faulkner et al., 2014), a racial equity commitment should lead us to abandon traditional tracking methods. We can prioritize the interests of students of color by trading what we perceive as the equality and efficiency of those methods- efficiency for whom? we might ask-for a process that eliminates the influence of racism.

4. Equity Ideology Principle

Equity is a lens and an ideological commitment. No strategy can help us cultivate equitable schools if we're unwilling to understand how racism operates. Professional development opportunities related to equity should emphasize the ideological work required to more deeply understand the dynamics of racism in society and schools. Then we can draw on those deeper understandings to build our practical approach for eliminating racism.

5. #FixInjusticeNotKids Principle

Effective equity efforts focus not on fixing students of color, but on eliminating racist conditions. If we find ourselves, in the name of equity, adopting initiatives meant to improve educational outcomes by adjusting mindsets or cultures in students of color, it's time to reconsider our efforts.

Do We Have the Will?

Implementing a transformative racial equity commitment is difficult, especially if we face significant resistance. Of course, it's not more difficult than navigating racism, which many students, families, and educators of color endure. I cling to hope that most of us want racial equity. The question for those of us who find the detours alluring is whether we have the will to align our actions with our philosophies. My hope is that, by considering the detours and principles discussed here, we can find ways to strengthen our equity efforts and create schools that deliver on the basic ideals of equity and justice.

References

Annamma, S., Morrison, D., & Jackson, D. (2014). Disproportionality fills the gaps: Connections between achievement, discipline and special education in the school-to-prison pipeline. Berkeley Review of Education, 5(1).

Au, W. (2017). When multicultural education is not enough. Multicultural Perspectives, 19(3), 147-150.

Faulkner, V. N., Stiff, L. V., Marshall, P. L., Nietfeld, J., & Crossland, C. L. (2014). Race and teacher evaluations as predictors of algebra placement. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 45(3), 288-311.

Gorski, P. (2016a). Rethinking the role of "culture" in educational equity: From cultural competence to equity literacy. Multicultural Perspectives, 18(4), 221-226.

Gorski, P. (2016b). Poverty and the ideology imperative: A call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42, 378-386.

Gorski, P., & Swalwell, K. (2015). Equity literacy for all. Educational Leadership, 72(6), 34-40.

Kohli, R. (2018). Behind school doors: The impact of hostile racial climates on urban teachers of color. Urban Education, 53(3), 307-333.

Kohn, A. (2014). Grit? A skeptical look at the latest educational fad. Independent School.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). It's not the culture of poverty, it's the poverty of culture: The problem with teacher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 37(2), 104-109.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2017). 'Makes me wanna holler': Refuting the 'culture of poverty' discourse in urban schooling. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 673(1), 80-90.

Leonardo, Z., & Grubb, W. N. (2018). Education and racism: A primer on issues and dilemmas. New York: Routledge.

Mayorga, E., & Picower, B. (2018). Active solidarity: Centering the demands and vision of the Black Lives Matter movement in teacher education. Urban Education, 53(2), 212-230.

Olsson, J. (1997). Detour-spotting for white anti-racists: A tool for change. Cultural Bridges to Justice.

Picower, B. (2011). Resisting compliance: Learning to teach for social justice in a neoliberal context. Teachers College Record, 113(5), 1105-1134.

Pon, G. (2009). Cultural competency as new racism: An ontology of forgetting. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 20(1), 59-71.

Redeaux, M. (2011). The culture of poverty reloaded. Monthly Review, 63(3), 96-102.

Rudd, T. (2014). Racial disproportionality in school discipline: Implicit bias is heavily implicated. Columbus, OH: Kirwan Institute.

Swanson, J., & Welton, A. (2018). When good intentions only go so far: White principals leading conversations about race. Urban Education [online].

Valentine, C. (1968). Culture and poverty: Critique and counter-proposal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Endnotes

This is not an exhaustive list, but gives a few examples.

All student names are pseudonyms.

Paul Gorski is the founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange. He helps educators across the United States and internationally strengthen their equity and justice efforts and is author, coauthor, or coeditor of more than 10 books, including Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty (Teachers College Press, 2013) and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (Routledge, 2013).

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April 2019 | Volume 76 | Number 7 Separate and Still Unequal: Race in America's Schools Pages 56-61 Paul Gorski This is a failure of equity leadership. If the most emphatic racial equity advocates feel silenced and less central to institutional culture than their equity-resistant colleagues, what we have from an equity point of view is a sick institution.

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February 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 5
Rooted in Reading Pages 73-76

Callie Ryan Brimberry

There is something about the margins of a book that has always fascinated me. They are where the words begin, and where they end. I've always thought that these small, empty spaces are left bare and open for more words. For students-and any writer-an unwritten page is typically more daunting than inspiring. Margins, however, are the opposite of that abyss. They are welcoming, inviting any writer to contribute, draw their own conclusions, and make their own choices.

As a high school English teacher who works in alternative school settings, I am a firm believer in writing margin comments, a firm believer in encouraging students to fill in the blank spaces with their own voices, experiences, and truths. During my teaching career working with at-promise youth in an alternative high school setting, I have observed that many students often felt stifled by the rigid conventions of school systems. Standard multiple-choice questions, prompts that direct singular responses, and teachers who expect automated discussions are not enough to ignite students' spark for learning. They deserve more space, time, and acceptance in order to feel safe enough to express their opinions.

For the better half of my teaching career, I have encouraged students to write within the pages of the novels we read as a means of privately engaging with the text. However, in recent years I have realized the powerful impact such discourse can have both in and beyond the classroom. Allowing students to create marginalia within socially relevant novels has sparked engagement in thoughtful discourse on issues of diversity, equity, and justice-not only for my students, but also for their families and community members.

Conversations in the Book

In 2018, I introduced my latest crop of students to the concept of having an unfiltered conversation with the text by writing notes in the margins. They were instantly curious and cautious. They wanted to know what was really allowed. Could they really write in the book? (Yes, they could, although sticky notes were a great alternative if they wanted their conversations to feel less permanent.) I told them to use the method they felt most comfortable with. I encouraged them to talk to the text the way they would talk to a friend-ask questions, write comments, note shared experiences-and to always do so with integrity and respect.

During the school year, student notes initially ranged from, "Why wouldn't he [the character] just be honest? Totally causing his own problems" to "Use this for essay-don't forget to draw comparisons." While the margins served as a space for students to write, I realized the notes were isolated observational comments or reminders on how they could utilize the text for future tests and essay composition. This, of course, was fine, and not detrimental to their learning process, but the students weren't having the meaningful conversations with texts that I'd envisioned. It then occurred to me that I hadn't given them a relevant text worth conversing with.

The students who come into my classroom are often facing the harsh realities of racial discrimination and generational poverty, on top of having been marginalized in previous school settings. I had given them a novel about a teenager who had never been exposed to the issues that they faced daily. There were plenty of notes and observations, but there were no conversations that breeched the surface of the text because there was nothing they had in common with the characters. They deserved novels and conversations that were richer and that sparked discussions around the social chaos compounding their daily lives.

Hoping for inspiration, I looked to my own bookshelf. At the time, I was reading The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (HarperCollins, 2017), and my own margin conversations were constantly flooding my thoughts. The novel's focus on the impact police brutality has on youth is socially relevant, considering the turmoil the country is currently facing as a result of racial issues. Nearly every newscast, periodical, and social media outlet is brimming with coverage of police brutality and the constant and terminal impact it leaves on communities of color. And if students were being forced to witness such acts of injustice, they deserved a safe space-be it within the pages of a novel or the walls of a classroom-to discuss them.

I was right-the book provoked intense conversations, both in the margins and in the classroom. Margin comments evolved into margin conversations. During one protocol, students had the option of exchanging their copy of the novel with another student's in order to engage in a silent discussion on the assigned reading (students who wished for their margin comments to remain private were able to opt for a different writing assignment). Once the books were exchanged, students reviewed their partner's "conversations" with the text before responding with their own comments on a sticky note. The margin notes were no longer simple observations, but critical dialogue that sparked engagement.

For example, during this protocol, one student questioned in the margin: "At what point is our silence not enough? At what point are our raised voices too much? When are we enough? Why can't we simply exist?" Part of another student's response included the following: "We can't. We're black, so we have to do more (than exist). We have to fight. We have to struggle. All that to breathe. They want us to have to focus on breathing so we can't focus on our voices coming out."

In our daily classroom discussions, as a result of their reading and writing, my students were more focused on current news and more engaged and attentive in class. Most important, they weren't just talking. They were crafting their words with intention, speaking with authority and experience, and engaging with power. They were finding their voices.

Better yet, others were listening.

Conversations in the Classroom

As the school year continued, a parent approached me, asking if I had an extra copy of The Hate U Give. She'd never seen her son so engrossed in a book, much less a school assignment, and wanted to be able to talk to him about it. I had never had such a request, and I didn't have an extra copy, but I promised to get her one as soon as I could. Fortunately, we didn't have to wait long. Her son finished the novel early and passed the book to her.

From there, our reading project took on a life of its own. Word spread among parents, books were passed back and forth within households, and the margin notes began to read like collaborative memoirs.

Often, when I'd take a peek in the students' books, I'd feel like I was witnessing something sacred, private, historical-and in many ways I was. This forum for dialogue found between the pages was one I helped create and curate, but it wasn't necessarily mine. When I read margin notes from a parent to a student that began, "Remind me to tell you about your Uncle Mike and the docks," I knew there was a shared significance taking place. There was an opening occurring in these families' daily lives-lives that didn't routinely allow the comfort or time needed for such discussions, especially ones that may refresh pain and injustices.

I still don't know the context behind the parent's notation about Uncle Mike and the docks, or why another student scribbled a note to their dad that they needed to talk about what happened on page 67, and while I know why one student added additional names to the list of people who were killed by police on the last page of the novel, I never interjected myself into those conversations because they were clearly not directed toward me, but to their family members or themselves. I always offered open journal time in which students could invite me into those conversations, but I respected the discourse that remained between the pages. Additionally, as part of our writing instruction time, students could opt to share those margin notes in the form of a letter-writing assignment to and from family members. Honestly, the best part of the entire project was seeing the writing in the margins and encouraging conversations that weren't mine.

Conversations in the Community

While students were having robust written "conversations" with each other and their families in the margins of their books, transitioning to a classroom discussion was a bit trickier at first. The sensitive and controversial topic of the text initially made for forced and stagnant discussions, as many of the students expected a quick discussion before the teacher lectured. They were unfamiliar with the nuances of having a back-and-forth conversation in which there was not a singular right answer.

Respectful dialogue about disrespect can be difficult. We had to muddle through some basic issues, like taking turns to speak respectfully without raising hands. Inside the classroom, we used a give-and-take protocol, where two students held a ribbon tied with six knots. Each knot represented a talking point; ideally each student was allotted three talking points per conversation. The student speaking gently pulled the ribbon toward them with each point they made, and once they passed a knot, they turned the conversation to their partner. If they reached the middle of the ribbon, the speaker had dominated the conversation. Students soon learned that conversations should be give-and-take.

Once we navigated the nuances of having respectful conversations about issues of racism and injustice, the students flourished in our classroom discussions. They spoke up without prompting, they questioned opinions that lacked critical thinking, and they created a space to encourage each other to traverse difficult, yet important, conversations that are often marginalized.

At one point, a student was adamant that systematic violence by the police was only a fictional aspect of the novel and cited their personal inexperience with police violence as evidence. This proclamation did not sit well with many students, who passionately and extensively noted unjust experiences with police they had endured themselves or witnessed. These disagreements left us uncomfortable, rattled, and with more questions than answers, but they also allowed students to be true to themselves and their emotions.

To bring the discussions to an even wider audience, the students, a few other teachers, and I hosted a community book club as part of the students' community service elective. Parents and teachers attended, but so did the retired Naval officer who volunteered at the local recreation center and the manager at the Burger King the students frequented across the street. These family and community members came in with respect and curiosity, as well as opinions of their own, to engage in civil dialogue about the novel and current political issues in our society.

As the school year continued, we explored different novels, and our evening book club meetings became biweekly and wide-ranging. Conversations shifted between the novel at hand and issues of injustice that students and community members felt daily. The conversations were always, always, focused on student voices. I, as a facilitator, never had to discuss this with the other adults in the room. We all wanted the students to be able to articulate their thoughts and experiences with power and authority. We all wanted them to be prepared to use their voices outside of the safety of the classroom.

By the end of the school year, students were engaging in meaningful and detailed conversations with texts, each other, and the community. We had begun the year dictating observational notes within pages of texts that did not represent my students' lives, but we ended the year having dissected and conversed with many student-selected novels, articles, and lyrics that did resonate with them. Once students saw the power their voices held within the school and community, they began searching for ways in which they could be agents of change. From organizing community petitions to presenting and facilitating similar book clubs for younger students, students learned the power that conversations in the margins can have when expanded to include marginalized voices within the community.

Voices Outside the Margins

As I make plans to continue this practice within future classrooms, I reflect on how the previous year has reshaped my pedagogy. If I were to itemize the successes of allowing students to have conversations in the margins of novels that are relevant to their lives, it would be quite a long list. From improved annotating and engagement with texts, to more thoughtful and comprehensive essay and letter writing, to increased classroom participation among students, parents, and the community-the successes were numerous. But more meaningful than all of the quantifiable achievements was the knowledge that the students felt safe using their voices inside of the classroom because our curriculum taught them that their voices deserve to be heard everywhere else-in their homes, in their communities, and in their futures.

Editor's Note: A version of this article was previously published in the San Diego-area newsletter Dialogue.

Callie Ryan Brimberry is an educator working with at-promise youth in the alternative high school setting. She is an editor for Dialogue, a San Diego-area writing project periodical that prompts readers to examine the way classroom pedagogy acknowledges and supports students' cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, religions, and sexual orientations.

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February 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 5 Rooted in Reading Pages 73-76 Callie Ryan Brimberry There is something about the margins of a book that has always fascinated me. They are where the words begin, and where they end. I've always thought that these small, empty spaces are left bare and open for more words.

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Teach Teachers how to create magic

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Christopher Emdin: Teach teachers how to create magic

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What do rap shows, barbershop banter and Sunday services have in common? As Christopher Emdin says, they all hold the secret magic to enthrall and teach at the same time - and it's a skill we often don't teach to educators. A longtime teacher himself, now a science advocate and cofounder of Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S.

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Article: Why We Can't Afford Whitewashed Social Emotional Learning 

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Article: Why We Can't Afford Whitewashed Social Emotional Learning 

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Article: How to talk Taboo Topics with Young Students 

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Article: How to talk Taboo Topics with Young Students 

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How to Be an Antiracist Educator

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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.

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Educators have an obligation to confront the harm of racism, says one social-emotional learning expert.

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Teaching and Being Rachetdemic: Ted Talk 

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Teaching and Being Rachetdemic: Ted Talk 

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Christopher Emdin: Teaching & Being Rachetdemic

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Christopher Emdin reveals how he aims to bridge the seemingly disparate worlds of the ivory tower and the hood in his talk, "Teaching & Being Ratchetdemic." Highlighting the major inequities in urban education, Dr. Emdin argues in favor of a simple solution: that being "ratchetdemic," or both ratchet and academic (like having rap battles about science) can empower students to embrace themselves, their background, and their education.

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Confronting Inequity / Fighting the Jeffersonian Dismissal   

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Confronting Inequity / Fighting the Jeffersonian Dismissal   

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February 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 5
Rooted in Reading Pages 90-91

Matthew R. Kay

A founding father's views on race challenge teachers to change course.

A few months ago, the faint sound of piano chords drew me out of a staff meeting and into our school's hallway. Following it, I eventually found Anna, a colleague of mine, stooped over the keys, eyebrows furrowed in concentration. When she finally looked up, she waved me over and said, "Want to hear something cool? Serenity [one of our students] wrote a new Hamilton song from Peggy's perspective ... it's called 'And Peggy.' I'm just trying to help her get the music down." Anna immediately launched into a beautifully written piece that warmed my teacher's heart-just as when I've heard freshmen softly crooning to themselves, " How do you write like tomorrow won't arrive / How do you write like you need it to survive ..." as they grind out one of my bluebook essays.

Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton has sparked a generational wave of creativity and curiosity about the era of the Founding Fathers, and I am so here for it.

The views of one particular founding father, Thomas Jefferson, have sparked some of my own recent thinking about curriculum and equity. Jefferson emerges from Miranda's play with a few unexpected-though well-deserved-wounds to his legacy. He is Hamilton's antagonist in both of the musical's rap battles. One of these battles has him famously slain by one of the show's most audience-pleasing lines: " They keep ranting / We know who's really doing the planting." This passing reference to slavery is the only time that Hamilton directly highlights Jefferson's career as a slaver. (Miranda chose not to include his draft of a third battle depicting the Founding Fathers' debate over slavery, but he included it in the 2016 Hamilton Mixtape album. In that rap battle, the protagonist launches an even more personal salvo against Jefferson: " How will the South find labor for its businesses? / How will Jefferson find his next mistresses?") But even this light treatment exposes the often papered-over violence that characterized Thomas Jefferson's relationships with people of color.

Jefferson was in fact one of the preeminent race scholars of his day. The ideas in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, did much to pseudo-scientifically validate 18th-century racism. At one point in his book, for instance, he points to a strangely aesthetic reason to colonize all freed blacks outside of America-our "ugly" skin color. He writes: "Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarfskin, or in the scarfskin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature ...." And after mentioning the beautiful ways in which white skin blushes, he winces at the "eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race." He even goes so far as to claim that black men prefer "beautiful" white women as much as "the Oran ootan [orangutan]" prefers "the black woman over those of his own species." He goes on in this manner, as much a founding father to American racism as to the American system of government.

This rarely discussed legacy has particular relevance to teachers interested in confronting the inequities in their curriculum. Most obviously, we should teach Jefferson's generation of leaders-and leaders of all generations-in all their complexity, capable of both brilliance and foolishness, kindness and cruelty. There's enough time for complexity. But Jefferson's writing also points to another lesson, one that teachers like me should continually find humbling. It's about the legacy of perceptions and the ways people of color are routinely characterized in history.

A few lines after his skin-color diatribe, Jefferson moves on to black people's purportedly limited intellectual and artistic capacity:

But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites, with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.

Thomas Jefferson's thesis is plain: black people are inferior because, with all we've gone through, we don't have the wherewithal, creativity, or intelligence necessary to craft anything beautiful.

As a writer, I find this thesis particularly jarring. It's safe to assume that 18th-century poets of color like Phyllis Wheatley would have found it infinitely more so.

Questioning the Curriculum

Yet, as an educator, I have been pushed to an even more personal challenge by Jefferson's racism: How often, in my teaching, do I unintentionally send a Jeffersonian message that black stories are limited to struggle stories? How often does my curriculum make space for the celebration of black culture? How often do we unpack, analyze, and ultimately appreciate minority narratives without needlessly highlighting the influence of white people? Most important, how often am I asking black students the annoying question that W.E.B. Du Bois described so well in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903: "How does it feel to be a problem?"

This is not to suggest that stories of oppression and resistance shouldn't be discussed. Rather, the point is to question whether my curriculum, at its most basic level, shows students that people of color are also poets and philosophers; that we are funny; that we are both pious and irreverent; that we create, not just out of resilience, but because of our shared authentic humanity.

The great beauty of Hamilton is that through its powerful writing and depictions, Lin-Manuel Miranda has convinced a generation of students that the American Revolution doesn't need to be a predictable snooze-fest. He accomplished this by presenting as many of Alexander Hamilton's real-life complexities as would fit in a play, by leaning into the roundness of his character.

As anti-racist educators, we must have similar goals. We must work to expose our students as much to people of color's poetry as we do to their misery, so that we might inspire a generation to finally recognize the fullness of each other's character.

Matthew R. Kay is a founding English teacher at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia and author of Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom (Stenhouse, 2018). Follow him on Twitter.

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Fighting the Jeffersonian Dismissal - Educational Leadership

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February 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 5 Rooted in Reading Pages 90-91 Matthew R. Kay A founding father's views on race challenge teachers to change course. A few months ago, the faint sound of piano chords drew me out of a staff meeting and into our school's hallway.

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For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy)

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For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy)

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For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy) [Emdin, Christopher] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and…

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February 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 5
Rooted in Reading Pages 57-61

Kimberly N. Parker

I grew up working class on a farm in Kentucky, raised by my grandparents, who always found money for books and time to take me to the local library or used bookstore. We were a house of readers, with my grandfather and uncles reading for their work on the farm and beyond, while my grandmother had a penchant for large-print mysteries, her Bible, and the steady stream of magazines she brought home from her job in healthcare. I was free to read as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted, grounded in the literary traditions of black folks.

As a new high school teacher, I found that many of my black students did not have similar experiences. Maybe they'd read one book by an author of color, or maybe not. Consistently, what emerged was that the young people with whom I shared a classroom were not reading mainly because their past literacy struggles resulted in a general dislike of reading. They did not self-identify as readers.

At the time, I thought it would be easy to build a literacy community with my students; because I loved reading, I thought I could ignite a magical love of reading in them. But now, nearly 20 years later, I understand that optimism was some combination of new teacher naiveté and the beginnings of what is now a more nuanced, continually evolving belief in the right for young people to practice all their literacies in classrooms.

Many of my students read below grade level. Before I could build community, I had to explicitly teach them reading strategies that were vital to comprehension. I had to assure that foundational grounding and fill in those gaps first, then work to build an intentional literacy community that helped connect them to their reading identities.

Part of building that connection to their reading identities was cultivating their ability to see themselves as deserving of literacy and the freedom that being literate brings. As educators, we must insist on the right of black youth to their reading lives. Here, I offer a few practices that can both reconnect them to texts and help a school community provide the necessary supports to keep them reading.

Understanding Our Reading Identities

First, we as educators must understand our own reader identity. I am constantly reflecting on how my past school-based literacy experiences influenced my curricular and personal reading choices. While, during my youth, I read a number of books at home written by African American writers, in school I read all white, canonical texts. In college I read more texts by BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) authors, but for too many years, my teaching centered on whiteness.

Currently, one resource I use to make sure I'm featuring inclusive texts in my personal reading life, in my work with preservice educators, and in my continued work with young people is Tricia Ebarvia's "How Inclusive Is Your Literacy Classroom Really?" (2017). As Ebarvia states in a tweet: "You cannot understand how systems of oppression work until you come to terms with how they have worked on you."

Working toward representation and inclusion is an everyday, ongoing practice. However, it's malpractice if I-an educator whom young people are entrusting with their reading lives-don't first model the life of a reader authentically, and don't then foreground my own biases and blind spots. For instance, my past reading life did not include nearly enough LGBTQ+ BIPOC voices, especially young adult voices. This blind spot was silencing and erasing many of the young people I taught. So, I started intentionally finding, featuring, and focusing on LGBTQ+ BIPOC literature in my classrooms. Then I started doing regular audits to account for other groups I might be overlooking in my reading practices. This critical excavation of my own reading life enabled me to think about how books have influenced me, and the decisions I make about text selection and implementation.

The logical next step is to get to know the readers with whom we hope to develop a literacy community. We must learn about their past reading encounters-good and bad-to determine what conversations we need to have with them and what questions we need to ask to elicit interest in texts. One sophomore, for example, explained to me how a teacher spent weeks on a whole-class novel that was above the student's level of reading comprehension and "old and boring." The student was required to complete nightly reading logs, which pushed her further away from the text, leaving a lasting impression that reading was neither enjoyable nor something she felt proficient in doing.

Simply because I love a text, and maybe even enjoy teaching it, does not mean that the young people showing up daily in my classroom will, too. For that reason, I talk about texts in my classes all the time-young adult, nonfiction, graphic novels, historical fiction, poetry, and many other genres. If a text doesn't resonate with a reader, that's OK. As I explain to my classes, many texts I read don't always resonate with me, and readers have the right to decide what to read and to stop reading something if it's not working for them (a right that is generally not exercised with assigned reading). The only hard and fast rule I have is that not reading anything is impermissible.

Sharing aspects of our own reading lives is important for black youth, who are often hungry for clues and resources about what those with robust reading lives do. As they add more of these understandings to their reading repertoires, they build their capacity and ability to become lifelong readers.

Mirrors, Windows, and Doors

Once you understand the reading experiences that shape your students' perspectives, make sure you know your history, particularly as related to African Americans and literacy in the United States. A fantastic primer is Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students (Perry, Steele, & Hilliard III, 2003). Perry's chapter, specifically, details the African American ethos of "freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom" and provides examples of African Americans who have pursued literacy, even under the threat of death. As Perry writes, "Education was how you claimed your humanity, struck a blow for freedom, worked for racial uplift, and prepared yourself for leadership" (p. 25).

Thus, we must connect our own thinking about black students and literacy to the importance that being black and literate has always had in this country-and we must work diligently to help black youth understand that importance. There is power in sharing narratives of black people who've spoken about their literacy experiences, like Malcom X, Jacqueline Woodson, Jason Reynolds, and Darnell Moore.

Such narratives can help students take pride in and extend their literacy identities. I'm grateful for the work of Professor Rudine Sims Bishop, whose essay "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors" (1990) provides the language for centering literary texts that both reflect and extend the experiences of BIPOC young people. Bishop asserts that all children, and especially children of color, need to see themselves reflected in a range of texts. Current statistics from the Cooperative Children's Book Center (2019) remind us that this is generally not the case, however, as most of the books published for children and youth feature white youth or animals rather than BIPOC youth.

Personally, I am moved by reading texts written by an author who shares my own cultural background. Similarly, we need to open windows for our black youth, beyond Black History Month or the additive "multicultural texts." They need consistent, ongoing exposure to a range of stories that affirm who they are, that extend their possibilities, and that open up to them worlds which they have not yet imagined.

Fortunately, we are gifted with an abundance of writers of African descent whose perspectives challenge and complicate notions of blackness in important ways. Black youth are complex and multifaceted; they deserve literature and literary experiences that are equally complex. I've found that if black students can see themselves depicted in a range of texts they read, they are generally more likely to read. Black youth I've worked with have consistently been moved by Angie Thomas, Renee Watson, Sharon Draper, and Jason Reynolds. Recently, the work of Ben Philippe, Ibi Zoboi, Maika and Maritza Moulite, and many others has provided diasporic representation that invites affirmation, discussion, and understanding of ethnicity and also conversations about anti-blackness. The works of these authors should be featured in classrooms, used for read-alouds, whole-class texts, independent reading, mentor texts-and centered in ways these voices often are not in secondary classrooms.

Black youth need texts that help them unpack the complexity of blackness. Fortunately, black writers and #ownvoices-a hashtag movement started by Corinne Duyvis to denote texts written by authors and illustrators who share the same identities as their characters-provide rich possibilities, as does the work of #DisruptTexts, a group I cofounded that aims to push educators toward more intentional, inclusive, and anti-racist literacy practices.

Students also need the freedom and resources to shape their own literary pathways. Often, black youth, especially those regarded as in need of remediation, have the least amount of choice in text selection. They are given regimented reading instruction, an abundance of standardized test preparation, and little, if any, time to read works that resonate with them (Allington, 2013). We know, however, that choice drives reading engagement (Kittle, 2013), and black youth need to be able to choose what they want to read. I always insist on having a classroom library that reflects young people's interests, and I work with our school librarians to provide even more options. Once young people have a text they want to read, a regular time to read it, and a teacher to assist and guide their growth, they are able to develop their reading identities. This understanding-of the need for choice, time, and a competent teacher-has been the case in my own research and practice. With few exceptions, nearly every student I've taught concludes our time together with positive associations with reading.

Committing to a daily reading practice of at least 20 minutes in our classrooms is important; young people, especially ones we are concerned about because they read below grade level, need time to practice. They are much more likely to do this reading work if we give them a choice about what they read.

A Collaborative Practice

As a new teacher, I also underestimated the importance of building a team of educators to extend the literary trajectories of BIPOC young people and keep them reading. My students would see me months after leaving my classroom and report not having read anything since our class. Their ELA teachers either didn't incorporate independent reading or taught canonical, core texts for what seemed like months on end. If schools are serious about connecting black students to reading beyond one teacher and one semester or school year, educators must have time to work together to examine their own understandings of literacy and to build a continuity of practices to reinforce and develop students' abilities. That work has to be done by teachers and administrators together. If educator teams focus on the high-leverage practices of reading conferences, book talks, and dedicated time for reading-and eliminate barriers like reading logs-they can build the continuity black youth need.

Reading conferences, in particular, have changed my practice (Miller, 2009). These regular, informal conversations during daily independent reading time allow me to determine what reading experience a young person is having, what supports they need (which varies from a new book recommendation to affirming their reader identity), and what steps we both need to take next. I've learned that young people who are reconnecting to their reading lives are fragile: They need nurturing in the form of regular text suggestions to keep making progress.

In addition to the conferences, I conduct daily book talks. These quick presentations provide just enough information about a text to entice readers: an overview of the plot, juicy moments, characters that share traits with students, and a culminating cliffhanger. Because the expectation in my classroom is that everyone has something to share as part of the literacy community, students eventually assume responsibility for the book talks, a strategy that increases interest even more because the recommendations come from peers rather than the teacher. This shared responsibility communicates that, in our classroom, we are all responsible for making sure options abound for what to read next.

The Reading Lives They Deserve

Black youth do read. The problem is that they often read in ways not validated in schools. As the National Council of Teachers of English (2018) reminds us, "Their texts range from digital texts to classic literature including gaming endeavors, interactions with popular music, and social media."

We can no longer choose to ignore the multiliteracies black youth bring with them into our classrooms; we must leverage their knowledge in ways that support their ongoing literacy development. For far too long, we've simply made choices for young people that were not in their best interests. In this moment, though, we can make a different choice. We can ask black youth what they want to read, we can get those texts into their hands, and we can carve out-daily-dedicated time for that reading to happen. We can choose to be the person working in community with them to reconnect black youth to the reading lives they deserve.

References

Allington, R. (2013). What really matters when working with struggling readers. The Reading Teacher, 66(7), 520-530.

Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives, 6(3).

Cooperative Children's Book Center. (2019, October 8). Data on books by and about people of color and from First/Native Nations published for children and teens compiled by the Cooperative Children's Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. [Webpage]. Retrieved from http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp

Ebarvia, T. (2017, December 12). Tricia Ebarvia: How inclusive is your literacy classroom really?" [Blog post] Heinemann Blog.

Ebarvia, T. [@TriciaEbarvia]. (2019, November 9). Yes, slides aren't public though, but here ... [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/triciaebarvia/status/1193322335538950144

Kittle, P. (2013). Book love: Developing depth, stamina, and passion in adolescent readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Miller, D. (2009). The book whisperer: Awakening the inner child in every reader. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2018). A call to action: What we know about adolescent literacy instruction. [Position statement].

Perry, T., Steele, C., & Hilliard, A. (2003). Young, gifted, and black: Promoting high achievement among African-American students. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Kimberly N. Parker is assistant director of the Shady Hill Teacher Training Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She taught in public school classrooms for 18 years and is a cofounder of #DisruptTexts. Follow her on Twitter.

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February 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 5 Rooted in Reading Pages 57-61 Kimberly N. Parker I grew up working class on a farm in Kentucky, raised by my grandparents, who always found money for books and time to take me to the local library or used bookstore.