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The most impactful part of the article, came from the Michigan school shooter's cry for help: "The thoughts won't stop. Help me." I was unsure before reading this article if the school should bear responsibility for this tragedy. No one wants to think this will happen to them, or that a student in their school is capable of this level of violence. However, it is their responsibility, especially after such blatant cries for help.
Personally I believe they need to create strict policies for how schools hand mental health issues. A school will not keep a student in class if they have a fever, they should not send a student back to class displaying warning sign of violence to themselves or others. I agree that there is no one person to blame in this situation, but if we don't take dramatic action at a school level, policy changes won't solve the problem of gun violence at schools.

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Oxford High School let Ethan Crumbley back into a classroom despite concerns about his behavior. Now, legal experts are asking why - and whether officials should be held accountable.

Law enforcement outside of Oxford High School a day after the shooting. Credit... Nick Hagen for The New York Times

First, a teacher found Ethan Crumbley searching online for ammunition. The next day, there was an alarming note on his desk: "The thoughts won't stop. Help me."

School officials met with Mr. Crumbley, 15, and his parents, informing them that he needed to begin counseling within 48 hours. After his parents resisted bringing him home, administrators allowed him to stay in school.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Crumbley fatally shot four students, according to the prosecutor in Oakland County, Mich., who laid out that stunning series of events on Friday while announcing involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents.

Now, Oxford High School's actions are also under a microscope, prompting questions about the school's responsibility, and whether there could be legal repercussions for administrators. Asked if her office was looking into the conduct of school officials, Karen M. McDonald, the prosecutor, said, "The investigation is ongoing."

Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school's reaction "truly astounding."

It was well within the school's rights to require Mr. Crumbley, who has since pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges, to leave campus, Professor Ross said.

If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to "remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place - safe for other people and safe for themselves."

School officials have defended their actions. In a videotaped statement posted online on Thursday, the superintendent of Oxford Community Schools, Tim Throne, said that Mr. Crumbley had no disciplinary history. "No discipline was warranted," Mr. Throne said. "There are no discipline records at the high school."

But Ms. McDonald suggested there were unanswered questions.

When asked whether the school staff should have reported Mr. Crumbley right away to law enforcement, she said: "Any individual who had the opportunity to stop this tragedy should have done so. The question is what did they know and when did they know it."

A spokeswoman for the district did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Experts have questioned why the suspect was not removed from school. Credit... Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times

Chris Dorn, a school safety consultant with the nonprofit Safe Havens International, said it was advisable for schools to call law enforcement if there was suspicion that a student might be armed.

Mr. Dorn has conducted investigations into lapses that led to past school shootings, finding that administrators sometimes worry that calling the police will violate a student's rights. Other times, they have simply failed to take a threat seriously enough.

"Part of it is that people are just generally nonconfrontational," Mr. Dorn said. "School staff are often slow to recognize danger because it's not part of their everyday."

While Oxford High School conducted active shooter drills several times per year, "There is a lot of focus on responding to the active shooter, but not necessarily on the prevention for them," he added.

It is historically very challenging to hold a school district legally responsible for a shooting, said Chuck Vergon, a professor of education law at Youngstown State University.

A majority of past school shooting cases featured some kind of warning in advance of potential violence, he said. But it is difficult in most state courts to meet the required standard of proving gross negligence on the part of school officials - that they acted in "wanton and willful disregard" for the safety or well-being of others, he said. "That standard has usually shielded school officials in most school shooting cases from civil liability."

But the Oxford school system will most likely face years of litigation over the shooting, if recent history is any guide.

"I definitely think that there's going to be a lawsuit," said Mike Kelly, a lawyer in Northville, Mich., who specializes in representing students who face school expulsion - including one student who recently faced expulsion by another Michigan district for having a hunting rifle in the car he parked on school grounds.

"There is some culpability and responsibility here on the part of the school," Mr. Kelly said.

In one notable case, when a substitute teacher was told of a threat but failed to take action, the insurance company for Marysville School District in Washington paid $18 million to the families of four dead students, as well as to one student who was injured.

While school district settlements are not rare, victims' families face obstacles.

In 2018, a judge in Connecticut threw out claims filed by the parents of two victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 first graders and six adults were killed. The judge concluded the school district was immune from such lawsuits.

This year, schools in Broward County, Fla., reached a $25 million settlement with both survivors and families of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, which left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded. The settlement followed a court decision capping the school system's liability at $300,000 had the victims won at trial.

Oxford Community Schools could face litigation over its role in the shooting. Credit... Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times

In the Michigan shooting, a potential lawsuit would probably turn on the question of whether the school took strong enough action to protect students after a teacher happened to see Mr. Crumbley's disturbing drawing, which included a gun, a person who had been shot and a plea for help.

The fact that Mr. Crumbley was said to have no disciplinary record creates what Mr. Kelly called "a gray area" and could become pivotal in any lawsuit claiming the school was culpable because it failed to remove him from campus.

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said school officials should have searched Mr. Crumbley's bag for weapons.

But she said that the steps to prevent gun violence begin far before someone brings a weapon onto school grounds. Ultimately it is lawmakers, not school officials, she argued, who have the power to prevent shootings by passing secure gun storage laws or red flag laws, which allow the police to temporarily confiscate firearms from people who are deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others.

"You're putting educators in an impossible position because they don't really have the tools to proactively prevent guns from coming into the school," Ms. Watts said.

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In the Michigan Shooting, What Is the School's Responsibility?

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Oxford High School let Ethan Crumbley back into a classroom despite concerns about his behavior. Now, legal experts are asking why - and whether officials should be held accountable. First, a teacher found Ethan Crumbley searching online for ammunition. The next day, there was an alarming note on his desk: "The thoughts won't stop.

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Big Steps Forward for Early Childhood Education

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Big Steps Forward for Early Childhood Education

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As a mother of a two year old, this article by Lauren Camera, added facts to concerns I have already about the access to early childhood education in America. Compared to other developed countries, we do not do well. Less then half of four year old's are enrolled in PreK with only seventeen percent of three year old's are enrolled. We know that the first five years of a child's life are crucial to their development, so to me it only makes sense that we are pushing for more access and options for early childhood education. Not only will it hopefully help bridge achievement gaps between high and low income students, but this bill passing will also help working parents. Finding quality childcare is a major concern for working parents, and if we provide not only child care, but education for our 3-4 year old's then I believe it will allow more parents to enter the workforce, rather then feeling the need to stay home with the kids. It will also help decrease the amount parents have to spend on child care, which will financially help millions of low income families. This bill also addresses the need to pay early childhood education teachers, the same rate as elementary school teachers. Just because children are younger, does not mean their teacher should make less. We can't find quality teachers for children when they are making a poverty wage. I hope that this bill will pass, and be the beginning of putting children, and their education, before the bottom line.

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With the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package of education, health care, workforce and other social benefits passing the House and headed to the Senate, the U.S. stands poised to make a seismic improvement in increasing access to early childhood education.

"I dont think it's hyperbolic to say this would be a game-changer in early education," says Albert Wat, senior policy director of Alliance for Early Success. "If this passes, this would be a major chapter in the history book of early education."

Of course, any significant federal investment would be noteworthy for a service long considered a blight on the country's education system. When it comes to early education - both child care and pre-kindergarten - the U.S. is dwarfed by the types of services and access other industrialized countries provide for families.

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In fact, out of 41 industrialized nations, the U.S. ranked fourth to last in the percentage of 3- to 5-year-olds enrolled in early childhood education, according to a report released last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Only Costa Rica, Switzerland, Turkey and Saudi Arabia trail the U.S., which has an enrollment rate of 65%. More than half of the countries in the analysis enroll upward of 90% of their 3- to 5-year-olds.

But in the U.S., more than half of families live in so-called child care deserts, lacking access to high-quality early education programs that research shows have a long-term impact on student achievement, including by closing academic and social and emotional achievement gaps, lowering rates of special education placement and increasing graduation rates.

Perhaps most pressing: Just 18% of children from low-income families - those who often start kindergarten behind their peers and stand to benefit the most from early education - are enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs. Those who do have access are often enrolled in lower-quality programs.

And beyond academics, child care and preschool have proven essential to a thriving economy - something the country saw first-hand when the pandemic shuttered child care centers and pre-kindergarten programs across the country, forced millions of mothers out of the workforce and shined a spotlight on the country's fractured early education system.

But all that could soon change if Congress sends the social spending package to the president's desk. The House approved the package Friday, and the Senate - where the package faces steeper hurdles - is eyeing a vote before the holidays.

Though Republicans in Congress have characterized the package as a "spending spree" - or worse, a "death knell to prosperity and opportunity in our country" - the issue of increasing access to child care and preschool has long garnered bipartisan support.

In fact, Republican-led states in the South have made some of the most progress on the issue in the country. Even in the face of the pandemic, Alabama secured an additional $6 million increase in pre-K funding and Florida increased pre-K funding for the 2020-2021 school year by $9.9 million.

"To this point, our country has never really had a coherent approach to early childhood education," Wat says. "We don't invest in it to cover even those who we think should be eligible for child care or pre-K. We vacillate between viewing early care in education as a work support versus early learning or early childhood development. And because they are both in this bill in a pretty significant way - both pre-K and child care - this is really an opportunity for the country, for states to build a more coherent 0 to 5 system that's more equitable, that works better for kids, families, providers and educators."

As it stands, the package includes $400 billion for both child care and pre-kindergarten, which policy experts say underscores the importance of the two systems working in tandem.

The lion's share of the aid would be directed to child care, with $100 billion spanning the first three years of the program. And then from fiscal 2025 through fiscal 2027, the federal government would reimburse states at 90% of what it costs to provide child care. States that opt to receive the federal funding must spend half of it directly on child care services and a quarter of it on improving the quality and supply of child care. The remaining funds are flexible and can be used to cover the costs of child care services, improve quality of care or go toward improvements in facilities and administration of child care programs.

States must also commit to, at a minimum, providing a living wage for child care workers and establishing wages equivalent to elementary educators with equivalent credentials.

Meanwhile, $18 billion would be available over the first three years to states that wish to establish or expand their pre-kindergarten offerings for 4- and 5-year-olds who are not yet in kindergarten. Beginning in fiscal 2025, states that participate in the pre-kindergarten program would be required to provide a 10% match, which increases over three years to a 40% match by fiscal 2027.

While the funding is aimed at providing "universal" pre-kindergarten - meaning every 4- and 5-year-old would be eligible, regardless of income status - states must prioritize communities and ZIP codes where there is the highest unmet need for early education programs. Notably, the federal aid must build on - not replace - other federal, state and local funds already in place for early childhood care and education programs and must be used to support what early education experts call a "mixed delivery system," which allows families to choose between various types of programs, including those run by school districts, for example, or those organized by Head Start or even a home-based program.

Unlike K-12 education, how states provide access to child care and pre-kindergarten - if they do at all - varies widely, with some states opting to run the programs through school districts that then offer the services themselves or contract them out, and others delivering grants directly to private providers or leaning primarily on Head Start.

"How the funds get administered and how they are used will vary state to state, as education in general does," says Ellen Frede, senior co-director at the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University and professor at the Graduate School of Education. "If you really care about this system working, it needs to be a mixed delivery system and a thoughtful one."

Frede would know - she oversaw the implementation of the pre-kindergarten program in New Jersey, which currently serves 3- and 4-year-olds in 35 of the state's highest poverty school districts - about 25% of the districts in the state.

Frede says the way states choose to use their funds - if they opt into the programs - will largely depend on what type of services and access they already provide. Oklahoma, for example, offers a half-day program for 4-year-olds, but at the moment they only serve 3-year-olds with disabilities. Florida oversees a pre-kindergarten program for 4-year-olds, but one that's known for its low standards. And it subsidizes only about $2,000 per child. Meanwhile, Wyoming doesn't have a pre-kindergarten program.

As it stands, the District of Columbia operates the most universal pre-kindergarten program in the country, with almost 80% of the city's 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled.

To be sure, such a large amount of funding comes with concerns, too - chief among them, a state's capacity to oversee the addition of such services and how to ensure that the pipeline of new teachers is highly qualified while also preserving and building on the diversity of a workforce that already reflects the children they serve more accurately than the K-12 system.

"Places need to take the time to figure these things out because otherwise we're not going to meet the promise of changing children's educational trajectory, which is what the purpose of this funding is," Frede says.

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Build Back Better Act a 'Game-Changer' for Early Childhood Education

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With the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package of education, health care, workforce and other social benefits passing the House and headed to the Senate, the U.S. stands poised to make a seismic improvement in increasing access to early childhood education.

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I was beyond excited when I came across this article written by Anthony White. I have tried to find the book series I read as a young teenager that first inspired me about the potential of virtual reality in the classroom. I haven't had any luck, but hope to find the series one day. Anyways, this series is about a futuristic world where robots/artificial intelligence help with every aspect of our lives. Cooking, cleaning, babysitting, menial jobs etc. But these robots, these intelligent beings didn't have a choice. They were programmed and designed to look different, easy to segregate, but if they 'broke' or acted out they would be destroyed. However, that is not what drew me to the potential of virtual reality.
What inspired me was the introduction to the very first book. A little girl, running through the woods with Harriet Tubman, desperately trying to escape the barking dogs and yelling men, running and running, until they reached their next house of safety. Then, this little girl was transported back into her virtual classroom to discuss what they had just endured. Some students were the slave owners, chasing these innocent people. One was Harriet Tubman, others slaves, and so on and so forth. They all got to live what out what we imagine so many did on their way to freedom through the underground railroad, and with that experience I imagined the endless possibilities of virtual reality as a teaching tool.
I think we can all agree that history should not be forgotten if we do not wish to repeat it, and what better way to learn history then to live it. While we can not yet travel in time to truly live history, we do have virtual reality which I hope one day can transport us back into the past so that we can see from multiple perspectives how history unfolded.
I also understand that this can lead to dangerous misinformation if used in the wrong way with the wrong intentions. But so can text books, lesson plans, and curriculum. This could be a beautiful tool to give students first person insight not only for social simulations, to be able to solve problems in a safe environment, as called out by Anthony White in this article, we can teach history, transport students into novels, and do so much more with this technology. Anthony White brings much more to the table then I thought of, as someone who is no where near technologically talented. He has used VR to allow students to create their own worlds and simulation, giving them valuable experience for this age of technology. Classroom teachings could be designed for students by students! With close supervision of course.
This article truly inspired me. Through the midst of a pandemic Anthony White found a way to engage his students in new and exciting ways, while giving them valuable skills to put toward their careers. I truly believe this will be the start of some amazing changes to how we teach.

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A new immersive learning experience for the 21st century classroom

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We are transitioning from a world of passive technology to a world full of active learning experiences. There is a wealth of opportunity for students to become creators of content, as opposed to si…

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Book Banning: Does it Protect Students Or Hinder Education?

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Book Banning: Does it Protect Students Or Hinder Education?

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Michelle Goldberg explains in this article that there is a wave of book banning occurring in school boards, mainly in Texas and South Carolina. While districts banning books is nothing new, and is necessary for certain books such as an 50 Shades of Grey which clearly contains erotic material. I think that book banning in many cases is morally and constitutionally wrong. Freedom of speech and press, I believe also gives people the freedom to consume the content they relate to. Especially for students to develop a love for learning that lasts a life time, they need access to material that intrigues, inspires and excites them. I think my library had a lot of books that may not have been allowed in some districts, some including drug abuse, sexual abuse or sexually situations etc. But those were the books I was interested in and related to. I obviously enjoyed others, but my favorite author writes book on very hard to handle topics for some people. But her writing inspired me and touched me in a way that I hadn't felt from reading in years. Reading is a treasure, and every book banned or burned, is a treasure lost to a students a mind.

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Credit... Andrew Mangum for The New York Times

Virginia's Spotsylvania County School Board this week voted unanimously to have books with "sexually explicit" material removed from school library shelves. For two members of the school board, this didn't go far enough; they wanted to see the books incinerated. "I'm sure we've got hundreds of people out there that would like to see those books before we burn them," said one of the members, Kirk Twigg. "Just so we can identify, within our community, that we are eradicating this bad stuff."

This was just one example of an aggressive new censoriousness tearing through America, as the campaign against critical race theory expands into a broader push to purge school libraries of books that affront conservative sensibilities regarding race and gender. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, told me that during her 20 years with the organization, "there's always been a steady hum of censorship, and the reasons have shifted over time. But I've never seen the number of challenges we've seen this year."

In Texas and South Carolina, Republican governors have called for action on "obscene" content in school libraries. Public schools in Virginia Beach have pulled books including Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" out of their libraries pending the results of a challenge by conservative school board members. Schools in North Kansas City, Mo., have done the same with books including the acclaimed memoir "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel and "All Boys Aren't Blue," a book of essays about growing up gay and Black by George M. Johnson. In Flagler County, Fla., a member of the school board filed a criminal report over the presence of "All Boys Aren't Blue" in her district's school libraries, claiming it violated state obscenity laws.

With the rush to ban critical race theory, conservatives already gave up posturing as defenders of free speech. Still, this sudden mania for book banning is striking. It's part of a broader attack on public schools, one that draws on anger over critical race theory, mask mandates and sometimes even QAnon-inflected fears about pedophile conspiracies.

"What I've started to call more and more frequently the war on books, it's getting wrapped up in all kinds of anti-school activities," said Richard Price, an associate professor of political science at Weber State University who runs the blog Adventures in Censorship.

It's important to acknowledge that some amount of parental shock at envelope-pushing young adult literature is understandable. As in the days when the Christian right tried to rid libraries of Judy Blume, books whose frankness about taboo subjects intrigue teenagers can horrify their elders.

One frequently targeted book is the 2019 graphic memoir "Gender Queer." Its author, Maia Kobabe, wrote an illustrated column about the uproar over the book in The Washington Post, with a thought bubble saying, "Why are they mad about the book? Because I said nonbinary and trans people exist?" Perhaps, but I'd guess that some parents are also mad about the images of fellatio. It's easy to imagine "Gender Queer" being a great comfort to a confused and lonely 16-year-old, but it's just as easy to see why conservatives would find it outrageous.

The transgressive nature of some recent young adult literature, however, isn't enough to explain the current nationwide campaign to cleanse libraries of works seen as unwholesome. For one thing, at most schools, parents can already block their own kids' access to books they object to. And many of the works the right is now up in arms about have been out for years. The Texas lawmaker Matt Krause recently sent school districts a list of around 850 books that he wants information on. Among the titles to be investigated are William Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex."

Ashley Hope Pérez's award-winning " Out of Darkness," about a romance between a Mexican American girl and a Black boy set against Texas' 1937 New London school explosion, came out in 2015. Until this year Pérez, a former high school English teacher who is now an assistant professor at Ohio State University, hadn't heard of any controversy around it. But now her book is regularly denounced by school culture warriors. The group No Left Turn in Education, which was founded last year to fight critical race theory in schools, has it on a list of books that are "indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology."

In September, a Texas anti-mask activist named Kara Bell read a passage from "Out of Darkness" at a school board meeting. The scene she chose was one in which a gang of racist white students sexually demean the Mexican heroine.

Bell quoted the characters making a slang reference to anal sex, words that left her appalled. "I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school!" she cried. "I've never had anal sex! I don't want to have anal sex! I don't want my kids having anal sex!"

Video of Bell went viral, and Pérez was deluged with furious and sometimes violent messages, often accusing her of promoting pedophilia. Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, told me he was accused of being a pedophile simply for defending the presence of "Out of Darkness" in school libraries. "There's definitely some kind of QAnon element taking place here," he said. After all, the paranoid belief that liberalism is a front for pedophile cabals is a staple of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

This spreading moral panic demonstrates, yet again, why the left needs the First Amendment, even if the veneration of free speech has fallen out fashion among some progressives. Absent a societal commitment to free expression, the question of who can speak becomes purely a question of power, and in much of this country, power belongs to the right.

"What we're seeing is really this idea that marginalized communities, marginalized groups, don't have a place in public school libraries, or public libraries, and that libraries should be institutions that only serve the needs of a certain group of people in the community," said Caldwell-Stone. The fight about who controls school libraries is a microcosm of the fight about who controls America, and the right is on the offense.

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Virginia's Spotsylvania County School Board this week voted unanimously to have books with "sexually explicit" material removed from school library shelves. For two members of the school board, this didn't go far enough; they wanted to see the books incinerated.

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I would have to agree with the author of this article, Jay Caspian Kay about many things. First of all, accurate and full representation of history, such as housing segregation, Japanese internment camps in the United States, systemic racism etc., should be taught to students. I very strongly agree with final few paragraphs Kay wrote. I don't believe that having a separate 'ethnic studies' course is the right way to incorporate these teachings into the curriculum. I believe the best way would be to simply teach them as part of history, because they are part of our American history. I also agree that it is important to let students think for themselves and come to conclusions on their own.
This article made me think of something Morgan Freeman said in an interview: "Would you want a white history month?" when the white interviewer replied no Morgan Freeman responded, "Well I don't either. Black history in America can't be consolidated to one month, it IS American history ." And we should teach it that way.

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Opinion | How Should We Teach Students About Inequality?

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A look at California’s ethnic studies requirement.

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This article by Sarah Mervosh, takes a look at the impacts of the change to school district lines that took place in Minneapolis, one of the most segregated school districts in America. At first I was hesitant, and disheartened that in order to better the schools of predominantly minority students, this district needed to 'force' families of all race to change districts. Upon reading further, I believe that it might just make perfect sense. The change in the financial makeup of families in school districts, will allow for the underfunded schools in urban, predominantly minority school districts, to get consistent access to the same funding and resources as the more affluent predominately white schools. Khulia Pringle said it best, as quoted by Sarah Mervosh, "It's the reality that wherever white people are comes with resources."
The schools in their district offer very different opportunities for students, but I am hopeful this will begin to allow schools the resources necessary to provide all students the same access to quality education. I know sudden change is hard for parents and students alike, but Minneapolis allows students to transfer school districts, granted they have to provide their own transportation.
This will not suddenly solve the achievement gaps that come with de facto segregation, but by using the system designed to segregate schools to reach more financial and racial equality, I hope Minneapolis can begin to serve all of it students equitably.

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As part of the changes, North Community High was rezoned. Citywide, about 33 percent of public school students were assigned new schools this year. Credit... Andrea Ellen Reed for The New York Times

In a citywide overhaul, a beloved Black high school was rezoned to include white students from a richer neighborhood. It has been hard for everyone.

As part of the changes, North Community High was rezoned. Citywide, about 33 percent of public school students were assigned new schools this year. Credit... Andrea Ellen Reed for The New York Times

MINNEAPOLIS - When Mauri Friestleben learned that Minneapolis was rolling out a new school integration plan - and that the school she led, a predominantly Black, low-income high school, would soon include white students from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in town - she looked around and proudly considered all that her school had to offer.

The hallways at North Community High are a tapestry of blue and white, the school colors, and the mascot, a polar bear, seems to roar around every corner. The curriculum had been updated to expand access to advanced placement courses: U.S. history, physics, art and design. The school had a new athletic field, and on the first floor, a radio studio.

But in some phone conversations with potential new families, Ms. Friestleben, the principal, sensed deep skepticism.

Parents peppered her with questions. Exactly how many A.P. courses did her school offer? Was Spanish the only language option? Would their children be safe walking from the bus? Some even wondered how she had gotten their number and asked her not to call again.

Ms. Friestleben, a mixed-race woman who identifies as Black, knew that her school had its challenges, including a history of struggling enrollment and low test scores. But she was working hard to serve the needs of her students and had little interest in adjusting her focus to woo white families.

"At times," she said, "it was demeaning and humiliating."

Minneapolis, among the most segregated school districts in the country, with one of the widest racial academic gaps, is in the midst of a sweeping plan to overhaul and integrate its schools. And unlike previous desegregation efforts, which typically required children of color to travel to white schools, Minneapolis officials are asking white families to help do the integrating - a newer approach being embraced by a small group of urban districts across the country.

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"Everyone wants equity as long as it doesn't inconvenience them," said Eric Moore, senior officer for accountability, research and equity for Minneapolis Public Schools, where about a third of students - some 10,000 children of different races - were assigned to new schools this year.

The changes included redrawing school zones, including for North. "This plan is saying, everyone is going to be equally inconvenienced because we need to collectively address the underachievement of our students of color," Mr. Moore added.

Research shows that de facto school segregation is one major reason that America's education system is so unequal, and that racially and socioeconomically diverse schools can benefit all students.

But decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the dream of integration has remained just that - a dream.

Today, two in five Black and Latino students in the United States attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are children of color, while one in five white students goes to a school where more than 90 percent of students look like them, according to the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

If there is anywhere white families might embrace an integration plan, a likely candidate would be Minneapolis, which became the epicenter of the nation's reckoning with racism after George Floyd's murder last year. The city is 60 percent white and a bastion of liberalism, with a voting population that supported President Biden by 80 percentage points or more in some areas. In majority white neighborhoods, where homes can sell for $500,000 to $1 million, lawn signs proclaim "Black Lives Matter" and "All Are Welcome Here."

But an up close look at one school, North High, and the cross section of families who traverse the new attendance zone, shows the complicated realities of school integration, even in a city with the political willpower to make it happen.

For students, parents and educators, the push to integrate was not just a policy decision, but a deeply personal challenge: What would white families do, when forced to wrestle with their own progressive values? Would the plan bring positive changes for Black families at North High, or as some feared, would they lose claim over the school that they loved?

What does the promise of school integration look like today?

Since arriving at North High in 2019, Ms. Friestleben had not thought much about integration.

Her philosophy was grounded in affirming the students who already walked her halls: children from mostly low-income and working-class backgrounds; about 90 percent Black and nearly 100 percent students of color.

"I make a commitment that every child that walks into any doors that I'm leading, that they will feel like royalty," said Ms. Friestleben, who personally greets students at the doors each morning. At 8:30 a.m., she delivers announcements, reminding students that they are brave, beautiful, strong and loved.

"As a society," she added, "we have subconsciously rolled the red carpet out for white children for generations upon generations. So it's my challenge and my honor to do that for Black children, to give Black children the same experience of, 'you are the center of my world.'"

Research has shown that integration can deliver benefits for all children.

For example, Black children exposed to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education experienced higher educational achievement, higher annual earnings as adults, a lower likelihood of incarceration and better health outcomes, according to longitudinal work by the economist Rucker Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley. The gains came at no cost to the educational achievement of white students.

Other research has documented how racially and economically diverse schools can benefit all students, including white children, by reducing biases and promoting skills like critical thinking.

Racially segregated schools, on the other hand, are associated with larger gaps in student performance, because they tend to concentrate students of color in high poverty environments, according to a recent paper analyzing all public school districts.

"There is not a single school district in the U.S. that is even moderately segregated that does not have a large achievement gap," said Sean Reardon, the lead author on the paper and the director of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.

The situation is especially stark in Minneapolis, a deeply segregated city. The district of 30,500 students is diverse: about 41 percent white, 35 percent Black, 14 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Asian American and 4 percent Native American.

But white students test four to five grade levels ahead of Black, Hispanic and Native students, and two and a half grade levels ahead of Asian students, making the district's disparities one of the worst in the country, according to the Educational Opportunity Project. A large gap also exists between poor and nonpoor students.

North High is a reflection of those inequalities.

More than half of 10th graders who completed testing did not meet state standards in reading in 2019, and performance in math was worse, with more than 80 percent of 11th graders failing proficiency standards. About 65 percent of students graduate within four years, compared with 84 percent statewide.

Enrollment has also been a problem. Over the years, many families have disenrolled from Minneapolis Public Schools, including families of color on the north side.

Some chose charter schools. Others went to the suburbs, as part of an unusual option in Minnesota. Families do not need to live in the school district and can enroll elsewhere if they are accepted and provide their own transportation. Statewide, 10 percent of students use this policy.

Facing these cascading challenges, Minneapolis school officials decided on an overhaul. They assigned families to new school zones, redrawing boundaries to take socioeconomic diversity - and as a consequence, racial diversity - into account. North High, for instance, now dips farther south, encapsulating a swath of wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

The plan also moved magnet schools from whiter neighborhoods to more diverse, centralized locations.

The changes were projected to minimize high poverty and highly segregated schools, while redistributing resources. For example, district officials say $11 million in transportation savings annually was reinvested to pay for elementary school literacy coaches, music for fifth graders and other services. At North High, the changes are intended to bring more students - and more funding.

This, activists and researchers say, is perhaps the most powerful promise of integration: shared resources.

"I don't think a Black kid sitting next to a white kid means that all of a sudden a Black kid is going to have higher academic outcomes," said Khulia Pringle, a local education activist who is Black. She said she was initially skeptical of the plan but was persuaded, in part, because of what she saw as an investment in communities of color.

"It's the reality that wherever white people are comes with resources," she said.

At North High, though, integration was not something that most students and families had been asking for. By and large, they liked their school, which is known for serving multiple generations of north side families. At football games, fans wear sweatshirts that say "Polar for Life."

"North High is the pride of north side," said Lynne Crockett, a 1962 graduate and president of the alumni association, who keeps two polar bear stuffed animals on display in her living room. Ms. Crockett, who is Black, is among those who worry that the changes could threaten North High's identity.

That sentiment was echoed in research by the Black Education Research Collective at Teachers College, Columbia University, which surveyed hundreds of Black families and educators nationally this year.

"Integration never comes up," said the group's founding director, Sonya Douglass Horsford. Instead, she said, Black families often express other priorities: "I want my child to be safe. I don't want them to be harassed. I don't want them to be discriminated against. I'd like the curriculum to reflect them."

What families at North High have long wanted is more investment.

The school's sprawling, brick building is decades old. There have been reports of rodents and problems with the drinking water. Low enrollment led to cutbacks, and at one point, threatened closure.

But in recent years, there have been positive changes.

The school has a dynamic principal in Ms. Friestleben, who is working hard to boost enrollment. Now, the offerings include nine advanced placement courses and new sports, including soccer. There is even talk about a multimillion dollar renovation; architectural renderings show a trim quad and soaring windows.

Kelly Jackson wants all of this and more for the students.

The president of the parent-teacher association and a frequent presence at the school who is known as "Mama Jackson," she has sent all three of her children to North, including her daughter, Ramiyah, 16, who is busy taking A.P. classes in English and U.S. history, acting as a football team manager and serving on the student council.

But Ms. Jackson couldn't help but ask: Why now?

To her, some changes, like the planned renovation, signaled gentrification. Even as North High opened up to white families, some Black families, like hers, were reassigned to a different school, though North's low enrollment meant that, for now, they could apply to stay.

"I feel like they want to start implementing these things because they are getting white students," Ms. Jackson said. "A lot of white families, when they say it, they fight for it, they want it, and they get it. But why does it take us 15 years?"

For white and more affluent parents, the new school plan also landed with a thud.

In southern neighborhoods newly rezoned to North, real estate agents began to hear from families selling their homes. At one point, images circulated on social media of a sign outside a coveted elementary school, where the students, 60 percent white, would eventually be assigned to North.

The sign depicted a tombstone. "R.I.P.," it read. "This will destroy our community."

One big challenge for the district was that families could still choose charter or suburban schools. In one part of the new zone, which includes some of the more affluent neighborhoods, just 15 percent of new families assigned to North decided to attend, according to district figures.

Parents evaluating the school at a glance would have seen some concerning statistics: High crime rates in the area, low test scores, a 1 out of 10 rating on GreatSchools.org.

At the same time, the view of places like North is complicated by research that indicates white, advantaged parents may use the number of other white, advantaged families attending as an indicator of school quality. And while test scores are one important measure, they are also closely tied to income and can be imperfect windows into a student's full experience.

"We aren't as bad as people make us seem," said Alexandria McNeill, a 17-year-old senior at North, who is Black. Through the rezoning, she said she hoped other families would come to view her community more like she did: a place of home and belonging, a launching pad for college, and what she hopes will be a career in communications.

But for some new families, attending North felt like a gamble.

Heather Wulfsberg, who is white, had intended to send her daughter, Isabella, 14, to Southwest High, a racially diverse but majority white public school that is a 10-minute bus ride from their home.

The school offers an international baccalaureate program, as well as Japanese, which Isabella studied in middle school. Isabella's older brother, 18, is a senior there, and Ms. Wulfsberg envisioned her children attending together, her son helping Isabella navigate freshman year.

So Ms. Wulfsberg appealed the reassignment to North, citing her son's attendance at Southwest, and her daughter's interest in Japanese. (North offers one language, Spanish.)

She was also concerned about transportation. There was no direct bus, and Isabella's commute could take up to 55 minutes. She would also have to walk from the bus stop to school through an area where frequent gun shots are a problem.

But Ms. Wulfsberg, who described herself as a lifelong Democrat, felt there was little room to explore her concerns without being misinterpreted or offending other families.Conversations on a Facebook page for parents turned tense.

One comment, in particular, stuck with her.

"They were like, 'Your cover is, you want academics for your kids, and underneath this all, you really are racist,'" she recalled. "It's a very scary feeling to do a self-examination of yourself and think, 'Am I?'"

She paused, reflecting. "But I don't believe I am. I really don't."

The family decided to send Isabella to a suburban school with top academic ratings. Students are about 80 percent white and about 4 percent economically disadvantaged.

The school, 25 minutes away, has no bus route - Ms. Wulfsberg drives her daughter - and there is no Japanese program. But the school is international baccalaureate certified, offers 29 A.P. courses and has American sign language, which excited Isabella. And Isabella knew at least a few other students there.

Ultimately, Ms. Wulfsberg deemed her daughter's high school years too high stakes to experiment with. "My motivation," she said, "is to get the best education I can for my kid and have her launch into the world as successfully as she can."

Christine Conner, another white mother who considers herself progressive, also wrestled with her choice. When she sent her daughter to a suburban school for similar reasons, she had trouble meeting the eye of a neighbor, who she knew supported sending students to North.

"It was like 25 percent trying to follow your own ideals as a citizen," she said, "and 75 percent doing what was best for your kid."

By the start of the school year, Minneapolis had moved closer to its ambitions: It decreased the number of racially isolated schools - defined by the district as 86 percent or more students of color - to 13 from 21.

But North High was not among them. Of 440 students, 30 are white.

Still, 13 of the white students - nearly half - are in the freshman class, the cohort affected by the new boundary. Overall, the school serves 93 percent students of color, down from 98 percent.

"I expected better," Mr. Moore, the district official, said. "But I am also being pragmatic." The changes came during a pandemic, and he hopes to see more buy-in over time. The long-term projection for North is 70 percent students of color and 30 percent white.

The plan has no shortage of critics. Some have argued that the district did not really put the onus on white families, and that most students forced to change schools were children of color, disrupting their lives further amid a traumatic pandemic. (Officials said the burden was shared proportionally.)

Another criticism is that the district bungled communication, alienating families.

And, critics say, district officials created controversy while not doing enough to truly improve and integrate schools. While some schools grew more diverse, others, like Southwest, are expected to become less so.

"They are not heroes," said Myron Orfield, a civil rights professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, who criticized the district for doing too little, too late.

For years, the district has been a central figure in lawsuit that accuses the state of allowing school segregation, including in Minneapolis.

A tentative settlement, reached this year, could set the stage for broader change. The agreement would loop in suburban districts, which tend to be whiter and wealthier, and some of those districts would be required to work with districts like Minneapolis on a regional integration plan. Wealthier districts would accept disadvantaged students and vice versa, and the state would pay for transportation. The agreement would also create magnet schools to draw diverse students together.

The plan is designed to get at the crux of de facto segregation in metropolitan areas: the divide among school districts, including between cities and the suburbs.

"To really have a viable long-term plan, you need a metropolitan approach," said Mr. Orfield, who has served as a volunteer witness for the plaintiffs.

For now, Leah Harp is among the few new white parents at North. She decided to send her son after touring the school, where she noticed clean hallways, a culture of high expectations and students who seemed happy and relaxed.

"It's like a family," she said. "That's the kind of environment that I want for my children."

She thought her son, a freshman, and eventually, his younger brother, would benefit from being around children of other backgrounds. She did share concerns about crime in the neighborhood, but has been driving her son back and forth. While at school, he's quite safe, she believes.

The transition has not been flawless.

At P.T.A. meetings, where she was elected treasurer, Ms. Harp asks questions (Do parents typically do anything at the school for Halloween?) and makes suggestions (Should they hold a voter-registration drive?).She's wary of overstepping and tries to stay quiet more than is natural for her.

Still, she can't help but speak up sometimes, like after a shooting near the school this fall. She wondered why the district hadn't contacted parents directly.

The P.T.A. president, Ms. Jackson, explained: This is what we live with every day.

Almost three months into the school year, integration at North High remains a slow, tentative dance.

In south Minneapolis, Ms. Harp has a blue and white "Polar" lawn sign outside her Tudor-style home. It is the only one she knows of in her area.

To the north, some, like Ms. Crockett, of the alumni association, are on the lookout for signs of gentrification. She described the addition of lacrosse - popular among affluent, white families - as a red flag.

And Ms. Friestleben remains focused on what has been her goal all along: building a school that centers and uplifts children of color.

If white families want to be a part of that environment, they are welcome, she said. But if they cannot see all that she sees in her school - teenagers laughing and fist bumping, advanced classes filled with students of color - she is undeterred.

"We are not going to let anyone else be our validators or invalidators," she said.

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In Minneapolis Schools, White Families Are Asked to Help Do the Integrating

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In a citywide overhaul, a beloved Black high school was rezoned to include white students from a richer neighborhood. It has been hard for everyone. As part of the changes, North Community High was rezoned. Citywide, about 33 percent of public school students were assigned new schools this year. Credit...

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School Shooting Drills: Are We Putting Our Children In The Line Of Fire?

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School Shooting Drills: Are We Putting Our Children In The Line Of Fire?

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In my opinion, this article did not go far enough to call out the flaws of active shooter drills at this school. I watched in heartbreak, with the rest of the Nation, as the details of this senseless act were repeated on the news. These students were taught ALICE. Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Escape. I watched a short clip on the news play of the training they watched, a student running up to the door, shutting it on the gun man with his pistol wielding hand still inside the classroom. One of these children, Tate Myre, lost his life trying to fight-or counter- the gunman. While, heroic, and he likely saved many other children's lives in that moment, I can't imagine the pain of his family. His mother, is she questioning if he had ran would he be alive? Teaching our children to fight back may be the smart thing to do, to arm them, but if that is the case they need to know how to de-arm someone as safe as possible.  Not simply how to wrestle them, or use their body as a shield.
However, as this article called out it is true that all of our students will at sometime be faced with the threat of gun violence. Some of them already live with it daily just outside of school. How do we change this, while protecting our second amendment rights? Do we start by not allowing children to have guns in their possession unless directly supervised by a licensed gun owning parent, or instructor? I believe we setting that precedent by indicting the shooters parents.
Finally, we need to address the mental health crisis facing our nation. Addiction, violence, suicide, etc. can all be symptoms of our underlying unhappiness as a nation. There is not a lot of support for many communities when people are struggling. There is no excuse for what happened, yet we all want to know why. There will never be a blanket fix, but if we simply leave it up to gun control or training, the weapon of choice will change but the problems, the tragedies will remain.

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After Michigan Killings, Students Praised Shooter Drills. But Do They Really Work? (Published 2021)

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Oxford High School held repeated trainings on how to handle a gunman in school. But some critics are questioning their purpose.

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Critical Race Theory Shows How Racism Is Very Much Alive In America Today

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Critical Race Theory Shows How Racism Is Very Much Alive In America Today

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This article about Andrea Kane's experience in Queen Ann's County, Maryland, instantly transported me back to the horrible summer of June 2020. I watched, as much of the country did, in terror, shock, and disbelief as George Floyd was murdered under the knee of a police officer. I was already in tears, but when he cried out for his mom my heart broke. My daughter was supposed to turn one in just over a month, and this mans mother had now cruelly lost her son. I cried out for my mom in the worst parts of my labor, and I could only imagine what this grown man was feeling as he cried out for his mom one last time. Andrea Kane, as much of our country, felt compelled to speak up and take action to address the systematic racism that led to George Floyd's death. Kane was a super intendent and addressed the entire community with a letter to all parents about the death of George Floyd, and the simple statement that black lives matter.
Many other school districts took similar actions in addressing the heart breaking events that we saw across all media platforms. And while some in her district supported miss Kane, other powerful citizens were determined to extinguish her fire. The comments that were made to her and about her, as well as the heartless 'jokes' made about George Floyds death and Black Americans in general were almost more shocking then George Floyds murder. In the age of social media, I have seen too many unarmed black men be killed by the police, and the heartbreaking reality of that statement: so many more men, women, and children have been murdered, wrongfully incarcerated, and treated as subhuman(as Ms. Kane said), then I can probably comprehend. The fact that people made jokes about a man's death to me shows there is very dangerous racism very much alive in America. Not only systematic or subconscious, but also chosen, ignorant hate.
Ms. Kane's critics not only blasted her on social media, but formulated a plan to take over the school board. Their success in this eventually forced Ms. Kane to make an impossible decision-leave the district. The black students in her district, that she directly supported and inspired, are arguably the most hurt by the critics actions. They witnessed, in a very racist county, someone that looked like them "come in and be so powerful and then be taken away." Tynay Wright. Ms. Wright went on to say the mental tole it took on her, and so many other students.
Ms. Kane's strongest critics husband is now on the board and works for a Senator. The board undid all of the work Ms. Kane did to better the education of the counties youth when it came to race. Unfortunately, for this county it seems that they will be stuck in Jim Crow era racism for too many more years to come. This is a glimpse into the America some of us are fortunate enough not to know, but too many live in daily.

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Andrea Kane on her last day as superintendent of schools in Queen Anne's County, Md. Credit... Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

A Black superintendent's email to parents after the killing of George Floyd engulfed a small, predominantly white Maryland community in a yearlong firestorm.

Andrea Kane on her last day as superintendent of schools in Queen Anne's County, Md. Credit... Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

CENTREVILLE, Md. - When Andrea Kane sat down to write a letter to parents in her school district days after George Floyd's death in 2020, images of the Black man pleading for his life under the knee of a white Minnesota police officer were haunting her.

Dr. Kane, the superintendent, saw him in the faces of Black students in her district and heard him crying out for his mother when she spoke to her own sons. So she started her letter with a warning that it would bear not just "good news," but "a bit of a reality check."

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the high-performing district on the Eastern Shore of Maryland had closed out the year with much to be proud of. But like the rest of the country, Dr. Kane said, the community had another crisis to confront.

"Racism is alive in our country, our state, in Queen Anne's County, and our schools," she wrote in the letter, emailed to the parents of all 7,700 students in the district.

Her statement mirrored hundreds that superintendents across the country had issued in the wake of Mr. Floyd's death and the mass protests that followed. Many of the educators took the opportunity to renew their commitment to racial justice in their schools.

But the message from Dr. Kane, the first Black superintendent of Queen Anne's County Public Schools, would engulf the small, predominantly white community tucked along the Chesapeake Bay in a yearlong firestorm.

"When I hit send," Dr. Kane recalled recently, "everything just imploded."

Over the last year, the protests and reflection prompted by Mr. Floyd's death reverberated in school districts throughout the country, as school boards and legislatures reconsidered how and what students should learn about race and racism, from the history of slavery and segregation to the Black Lives Matter movement.

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The debate has sometimes focused on K-12 curriculums after conservative activists began branding a range of topics including history lessons and diversity initiatives as "critical race theory," an academic framework that views racism as ingrained in law and other modern institutions. The term is now often deployed to attack any discussion of race and racism in American classrooms - pitting educators who feel obligated to teach the realities of racism against predominantly white parents and politicians who believe that schools are forcing white children to feel ashamed of their race and country.

Superintendents are feeling the brunt of the backlash. Some have been threatened, harassed and fired over accusations they are seeking to "indoctrinate" children through books, history lessons and equity policies, said Daniel A. Domenech, president of the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, which represents nearly 14,000 district leaders across the country.

For Black educators in particular, the opposition has felt personal and poignant. Only 2 percent of the nation's superintendents are Black, according to the AASA's latest count, and many are expecting that number to shrink.

Michael D. McFarland, president of the National Alliance of Black School Educators, said that many African American school administrators are already unfairly branded as activists, and scrutinized for any perceived misstep.

Particularly in majority-white communities, Dr. McFarland said, "it's harder for you to do the work that you were hired to do" as a superintendent, "let alone take stances on equity and social justice issues."

"To take those stances comes at an enormous cost," he added.

Dr. Kane thought long and hard about the cost of staying silent.

She knew the Black Lives Matter movement was divisive - even in the Black community - but it didn't make the mantra any less true. She felt she would have been negligent in her role had she not addressed the images her students were seeing on television. "How could I not help them make sense of a Black body being destroyed in the street?" she said.

With all of this in mind, she agonized over every word of the letter she wrote on June 5, 2020.

"When I say 'Black Lives Matter,' it is not meant to disparage any other race," she wrote. "It is an acknowledgment of the disparate brutality and overt racism that is only experienced by Black people in America, including me."

Dr. Kane's inbox swelled in the days that followed, overwhelmingly with responses of gratitude and support. But a month later, an email appeared with the subject line "Urgent Attention Required."

Dr. Kane recognized the name of the parent who had sent it: Gordana Schifanelli. A few weeks before, someone had alerted the superintendent to Kent Island Patriots, a new Facebook group that Ms. Schifanelli had created, its name a reference to a part of the county. Members of the group had been raging about her letter.

In a June 16 post to the group, according to a screenshot provided to The New York Times, Ms. Schifanelli declared: "Dr. Kane in QAC needs to end her contract and go! People in this group must call and make it loud and clear that the school must remain apolitical and her letter to parents promoting Black Lives Matter is not going to be tolerated."

The post went on: "The children must know that those individuals who died in police custody were criminals - not heroes! Our children will not be indoctrinated by anyone's political opinion in the school and our children must NEVER feel that their white skin color make them guilty of slavery or racism!"

By the time Ms. Schifanelli wrote directly to Dr. Kane on July 6, the Facebook group had grown to 2,000 members.

In her letter, Ms. Schifanelli said she had lost confidence in Dr. Kane's ability to lead the district. Describing herself as "an immigrant to this country," Ms. Schifanelli added, "I am a living example of the very American dream you managed to tarnish by your racist comments."

But Dr. Kane would not bend.

Over nearly three years on the job, she had collected evidence of systemic and overt racism in the semirural, conservative county, where only 6 percent of the student body is Black. She knew that Black students regularly heard the N-word used in the county's schools, that they were underserved and overdisciplined.

Under her leadership, the district began breaking down data to scrutinize gaping achievement gaps between Black and white students. It also contracted with firms focused on equity work, including helping school staff build positive relationships within diverse student populations and increasing students' access to academic opportunities like advanced courses.

Tynay Wright, then a senior at Kent Island High School, was encouraged by the parts of Dr. Kane's end-of-school-year letter that praised "white and Black people for coming together in nonviolent protests" and that urged the community to "listen more and pass judgment less."

Ms. Wright asked for Dr. Kane's support after Mr. Floyd's death in organizing events that would bring the national reckoning to Queen Anne's County.

The superintendent attended a protest that Ms. Wright organized in early July. She also granted the young woman's request to invite a local organization called Students Talking About Race, or STAR, to facilitate voluntary discussions over the summer. The group had been conducting similar events in neighboring counties.

Ms. Wright said Dr. Kane's support gave her an opportunity rarely afforded to Black students in Queen Anne's County: "I got to use my voice."

Through the rest of the summer, tensions escalated. The Kent Island Patriots, incensed by Dr. Kane's support of the events Ms. Wright had planned, circulated a petition to have Dr. Kane fired. A quasi-governmental community group called the Sunday Supper Committee - a predominantly white group of county residents that had been holding conversations about racism and equity since 2016 - created a petition in support of Dr. Kane.

"We very proudly stood behind her when she said Black Lives Matter, because that's something that we had believed in," Mary Ella Jourdak, a member of the Sunday Supper Committee, said of Dr. Kane. "And we thought it was important coming from a Black community leader."

In August, a rally in support of Dr. Kane drew more than 100 residents and supporters, including members of civil rights groups from across the state.

Dr. Kane thought the show of support would drown out the furor - until she saw more posts from the Kent Island Patriots Facebook group that summer. According to screen shots made public on social media, and others provided to The Times, commenters used the N-word. One post called Black people "animals." A meme mocked Black men who had been killed by the police with the words: "I caint breave." One commenter posted a picture of a cotton field with the words "Free BLM shirts. Some assembly required."

Ms. Schifanelli declined to be interviewed for this article. In an emailed statement, she said: "As an immigrant to this country who found love and peace among people of all races, backgrounds and beliefs, I found political activism in public schools abhorrent and contrary to the best interest of the children in my community, state and the entire nation."

Her lawyer and husband, Marc Schifanelli, sent a screenshot of a Facebook post in which Ms. Schifanelli said she was "horrified" by racist comments on the Kent Island Patriots page and threatened to remove the group members who wrote them.

Mr. Schifanelli also denied that Ms. Schifanelli's protests of Dr. Kane had anything to do with her race. In interviews with conservative media outlets, Ms. Schifanelli, who is a lawyer and an adjunct professor at the United States Naval Academy, has pointed to her experience growing up in Yugoslavia as a motivating force.

"I was one of those children who grew up in a communist country," she told the host of a conservative podcast, "and I had the communists coming to my high school and pulling me out of the classroom to join their Marxist organization, and I didn't want to go."

She said the Kent Island Patriots' movementwas spreading to neighboring counties. "We just want common sense back, and we're taking our country back," she said.

Christine Betley was among the first teachers in the district to speak up when she saw the growing discord in the community, sending a letter to the school board in support of Dr. Kane's efforts. She had moved to the county in 2019, and was blindsided by the hostility toward the superintendent.

Known as the passageway to Maryland's beaches, the county has a history steeped in the fishing and agriculture industries. It is one of the state's last conservative strongholds: More than 60 percent of its voters supported Donald J. Trump in the last two presidential elections. But the idyllic, laid-back life on the water has increasingly drawn progressives.

Ms. Betley said last summer was a "real eye-opener" to how "the depth of the disparity between white and Black and brown students was concealed in predominant culture."

"I didn't realize there was a structure that intended to keep it that way," she added.

A Facebook group that Ms. Betley and other teachers had joined to communicate about the pandemic quickly became a platform for defending Dr. Kane's support of the STAR discussions.

The teachers' posts, which expressed alarm that maybe an outside white supremacist group had infiltrated the county, caught the attention of the Kent Island Patriots. On the group's page, Ms. Schifanelli posted the teachers' names and discussions, accusing them of supporting "political brainwashing of our children by using race."

What followed - weeks of online harassment - was devastating for Gina Crook, a fifth-grade teacher. She was a Queen Anne's County native, the daughter of a Chesapeake Bay waterman. She had attended the county's schools and had become a popular educator, even a 2020 finalist for teacher of the year.

"I saw some of the names in the group, and thought, 'There are people whose children I have loved and guided and given my best to on here attacking me,'" she said of the Kent Island Patriots. "It was just heartbreaking."

By fall 2020, Ms. Schifanelli had been banned from Facebook. She sued both Ms. Jourdak and Ms. Betley, accusing them of defaming her in their support for Dr. Kane.

Around that time, Dr. Kane received word that the Patriots were planning a write-in campaign to take three of the five seats on the school board in November. Included in their slate of "Patriot candidates" was Marc Schifanelli, Ms. Schifanelli's husband.

"That's when I knew there was a long game," Dr. Kane said, "one I didn't want to play and could not win."

Dr. Kane never dwelled much on being the county's first Black superintendent. She did, however, worry about the possibility of being the last.

"I knew as a Black woman, it wasn't enough to be good at my job," she said. "I had to be excellent."

Born and raised in West Baltimore, Dr. Kane, 56, had wanted to be a teacher ever since she served as a teacher's assistant in Sunday school. But she wanted to make her parents proud by securing a job that paid as much as they had for her college education. She majored in economics and did well for herself as a bank manager but wanted to pursue what she loved. In 1996, she took a job as a substitute in the Anne Arundel County Public Schools, a district adjacent to Queen Anne's, while she pursued her teaching certificate.

Over the next couple of decades, Dr. Kane worked her way through the ranks of the school system, from teacher to principal to assistant superintendent, and earned her doctorate in 2016. She took the top job in Queen Anne's County after spending several years as an associate superintendent in Richmond, Va. She, and the board that hired her, believed her track record overseeing hundreds of schools and raising achievement for students from all backgrounds had prepared her.

"I understood what some of the needs were, and one of them was that equity needed to be solidly introduced and carried through," she said. "I went there because I felt like there was work for me to do."

She knew the Eastern Shore's history: It was where the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were born into slavery.

She also knew the district had struggled with racism in schools. Her predecessor, Gregory J. Pilewski, wrote to parents in May 2017 - just weeks before her arrival - about a string of what he called "racially motivated incidents."

Dr. Pilewski outlined a series of efforts the district was taking to address race and equity issues, including contracting with cultural proficiency experts and hosting a series of "conversations on race" with the Sunday Supper Committee.

"I didn't get any pushback," Dr. Pilewski, who is white and is now a superintendent in Arkansas, said in an interview. "I got feedback from people saying, 'It's about time somebody started drawing attention to this.'"

Dr. Kane was never naïve enough to think her job would be easy. On the day she signed her contract in 2017, a white school board member refused to speak to her.

It was one of many hostile interactions she had with white board members during her tenure. In January, she filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the Queen Anne's County school board detailing incidents dating back to 2018, saying she had been subjected to a hostile and discriminatory work environment.

In one instance, a former board president, a white woman, sent her a profane text message using the F-word when she asked to set up a time to go over paperwork, the complaint said. Months later, the same board member admitted to defacing a photograph of a Black teacher of the year in the district headquarters by drawing horns, a mustache and a goatee on it.

And last September, when Dr. Kane moved to fire a high-ranking central office administrator who was overheard on a voice mail message, obtained by The Times, repeating disparaging remarks about Black people, the board balked, the complaint said. The administrator was also heard discussing whether the board could buy out Dr. Kane's contract and replace her with another Black administrator to avoid criticism.

Richard A. Smith, who was appointed to an open seat on the school board in 2019 and is currently its president, declined to comment on the complaint, which also claimed that he and other board members failed to support her after her June 2020 letter.

In an interview, he said the board had not sought to "derail" Dr. Kane. He called her a "professional," and her race "irrelevant."

But Mr. Smith, a Queen Anne's County native and local business owner, said he was offended by Dr. Kane's characterization of the county. He has devoted more than a decade to public service, including a previous stint on the school board in the 1990s, and takes deep pride in his community - especially its school system, which attracts families from across the state and which his grandchildren attend. It has educated several generations of his family, starting with his grandparents, who graduated from high school there in the early 1900s; he recently attended his 50th high school reunion.

"We do not have a racist county," Mr. Smith said. "We do not have a racist board."

Richard A. Smith, now the president of the Queen Anne's County school board, at a meeting in January. "We do not have a racist county," he said. "We do not have a racist board."

He noted that the board issued a statement in August 2020 expressing support for Dr. Kane's efforts. But he also agreed with some of the criticism leveled against her.

He described what happened to Mr. Floyd as "appalling," but said that he was also surprised by Dr. Kane's email. She was within her right to send it without the board's permission, he added, but the community was already on edge over school closures during the pandemic.

"I'm oriented to what's going on in the nation, but like a lot of people here, I care about Queen Anne's County," Mr. Smith said. "I just don't know if it was the appropriate time to put that in, with everything else like Covid going on. It was very disruptive."

A few weeks into the 2020-21 school year, the controversy was taking its toll on Dr. Kane.

During a tense board meeting in October, in which the members sought to limit her authority to spend coronavirus relief funding, she walked out.

It was the first time many had seen the superintendent lose her composure. "I could tell at that moment that she had completely cut ties with the community," recalled Ms. Crook, who was watching the meeting virtually. "And who could blame her?"

Two days later, Dr. Kane went on sick leave.

To this day, it is difficult for her to describe her mental and physical state at the time. Sleep eluded her, and she found herself looking over her shoulder at the gas station and the grocery store. Fearing for her safety, she moved out of the county.

She compares it to stepping outside her body, and back centuries to a time when the county's residents sold enslaved people outside the courthouse.

"Talk about vulnerable - they made me feel subhuman," she said of the board and the Kent Island Patriots. "They hung me out and stripped me bare."

When she returned to work in December, the Patriots' slate had won election and controlled the five-member school board. Mr. Schifanelli would be elected vice president.

At her first meeting with the new board, on Jan. 6, Dr. Kane delivered a fiery speech, proclaiming that her "resolve to fight racism in Queen Anne's County Public Schools is stronger than ever."

She announced that she had restored contracts the board had moved to dissolve in her absence, including one with the equity firm the district had hired to help close achievement gaps. The county schools, she said, would "once again engage in practices centered on diversity, equity and antiracism."

It was seconds after she uttered three words in her remarks - Black Lives Matter - that Dr. Kane had her first public face-off with Mr. Schifanelli, who interrupted her.

"I'm willing to listen to your diatribe here," he said, "but I do not like the fact that you're bringing in a political organization into this public hearing, and I would ask you kindly to stop."

"Thank you," she said, and continued.

For many, it was a moment that demonstrated the power of Dr. Kane's presence in the district.

Several Black natives of the county can describe in vivid terms how racism has touched every generation of their families. Many point to it as the reason that the Black population withered to 6.3 percent in 2010 from 26.9 percent in 1960.

"What we have pretty much taught most of our children is you do everything you can do to graduate and go elsewhere," said Tory Brown, a Black Queen Anne's County native, who is an instructional assistant in the school system, a community advocate and a supporter of Dr. Kane.

The first time Mr. Brown experienced racism in the Queen Anne's County school district was 25 years ago when he was in sixth grade, he said. He was called "a slave" and told to "go back to Africa." In 2006, his parents received a death threat and found a noose in their mailbox. Ten years later, his young niece was called the N-word as she walked down the street.

"For anybody to say there's no racism in Queen Anne's County, when I've been here and have experienced and seen it, just goes to show what we're dealing with," he said. " People had been suffering for years; we just never had anyone to speak up."

Ms. Wright, the student whose efforts Dr. Kane championed in the summer of 2020, vividly remembers when Dr. Kane, the first administrator with her complexion, walked into her class in ninth grade. It was as powerful a memory as when, as a kindergartner, she was told by her white classmates that she couldn't play on a certain part of the playground "because she looked like Martin Luther King Jr."

"She made me feel like I could do anything," Ms. Wright said. "If her presence can move a room, and shake an atmosphere, imagine what her power could cause. I think they were scared of the change that was going to happen just from her being here."

By this spring, Dr. Kane had announced she was leaving the district, and the search for a new superintendent was underway.

But Ms. Schifanelli took her message to Fox News, representing a point of view that was resonating across the country as a backlash against critical race theory ramped up.

"There is no systemic racism against anyone in our public schools, and we cannot make one up just because it is politically fashionable at the moment," she told the host.

Immediately after the appearance, hate mail began pouring into Dr. Kane's inbox from near and far.

"As long as there are woke Democrats such as yourself in our society, there will be racism," wrote a resident of Centreville, the county seat, who said his children attended local schools.

An all-caps email - traced by the sheriff's office to a 64-year-old white man from Kansas - used a racist slur against Dr. Kane.

And for the next several weeks, Dr. Kane watched as the Kent Island Patriots' platform began to transform policy.

At a board meeting in early May, Mr. Schifanelli proposed last-minute changes to an equity policy - the district was required to have one under state law - that had been in the works for two years.

He proposed to eliminate definitions such as "social identifiers," "cultural responsiveness" and "implicit bias," and to scrub the policy of words such as "systemic" and "institutional." In the same meeting, Mr. Schifanelli, an immigration lawyer, also garnered enough votes to remove a book from the middle school curriculum because it was sympathetic to a boy whose father faced deportation.

"They wanted to erase everything but the white experience," Dr. Kane said, "and that's what they did."

Mr. Smith supported the changes. He was one of the three candidates supported by the Kent Island Patriots, but maintained that he backed Mr. Schifanelli's measures based on his own beliefs.

"I don't look at Black students or African American students any different than I look at Latinos, mixed race, Asians or whatever," he said. "Everybody needs to be treated fairly and equally."

Asked if he had ever talked to Black students about whether they were treated equally in school, he sighed. "Probably not as much as I could," he said.

One day in June, almost exactly a year after Dr. Kane had written the email, her voice rose above a rumble of thunder as she addressed a crowd outside the Kennard African American Cultural Heritage Center, named for Lucretia Kennard, the county's first "supervisor of colored schools."

One of the first events held at the center, which had educated the county's Black students during segregation, had been to welcome Dr. Kane. On this day, she was saying goodbye.

"There's some noise out there, and it's an evil noise," Dr. Kane told the group. "Give it some time; evil will consume itself. Any time we let children express who they are, and set examples for them about what is right, we can't go wrong."

Despite her challenges, the district had celebrated its first National Blue Ribbon school during her tenure, maintained its top ranking in graduation rates for two years and had offered its first African American studies course.

The event was billed as a celebration of her accomplishments but felt more like a funeral - with a program, prayers, dinner, tearful testimonies, gospel hymnals and an overwhelming sense of loss.

"It's not fair for little Black girls to see people like us come in and be so powerful, and see them taken away - it does something to us, mentally," said Ms. Wright, who recently started college at Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in Pennsylvania.

Ms. Betley was preparing to start a new job in the district: equity teacher specialist. "This whole thing has made my role even more important," she said, "but on a personal level, I'm terrified."

Over the summer, the board moved to reverse Dr. Kane's actions. The administrator she had fired for making racist statements was rehired, and the watered-down equity policy passed unanimously.

This summer, Ms. Schifanelli spoke at events recounting her yearlong battle with Dr. Kane and her supporters. At an August rally for a Republican candidate in the Maryland governor's race, she boasted about how the Kent Island Patriots' school board write-in campaign "had 12,000 people standing strong against critical race theory in public schools." Last month, that candidate, a Maryland state lawmaker, chose Ms. Schifanelli as his running mate. The following week, Facebook banned the Kent Island Patriots group, citing its standards on "dangerous individuals and organizations."

Dr. Kane is now a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, training the next generation of superintendents.

As she prepared to leave the county's central office for the last time in June, she held a vase of flowers in one arm and embraced her successor with the other. She told the new superintendent, a white woman the board hired from another Eastern Shore district, that she was a phone call away. Before walking out of the building, she adjusted the mask on her face, which was emblazoned with the words Black Lives Matter.

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Black Lives Matter, She Wrote. Then 'Everything Just Imploded.'

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A Black superintendent's email to parents after the killing of George Floyd engulfed a small, predominantly white Maryland community in a yearlong firestorm. Andrea Kane on her last day as superintendent of schools in Queen Anne's County, Md. Credit... Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times CENTREVILLE, Md.

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How Nebraska's First Health State Standard is impacting the 'status-quo'. 

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How Nebraska's First Health State Standard is impacting the 'status-quo'. 

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This article explains how Nebraska's first ever State Standard Curriculum for Health has sparked debate across the entire state. It may be shocking that Nebraska has previously had no previous health standard, but districts were required to have their own individual health curriculum standard. Many based this off of the National standard, or simply created their own. Upon first hearing health standard you may think nutrition, exercise, sex education, or maybe even mental health. However the first draft of Nebraska's state standard included health education on sexual identity and stereotypes, family composition, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Many people in Nebraska, especially those who identify as LGBTQ+, are strongly in favor of this new standard of curriculum. I would have to agree because of a few reasons, while I know that many Nebraskans strongly oppose due to perhaps religious beliefs, simply being uninformed(or maybe better put, unexposed), or even fear of how this new form of education could impact their children. I would like to focus on why I believe this standard should have largely passed, because the outrage from those against it was largely heard by the district(at large thanks to our Governor, Pete Rickets).
I would like to begin with what I believe to be the least controversial. Seventh and Eighth grader should be taught about safe sex and sexually transmitted diseases. I understand the want for abstinent based teaching. In an ideal world young children and teens would not be sexually active, therefore not be transmitting STDs or resulting in teen pregnancy. However, as many of us can contest, either from personal or heard experiences, teenagers are having sex. Children I heard as young as 12 and those children deserve to know the risks and how to protect themselves.

Secondly, I personally do not see any harm in teaching first graders that all families come in different makeups and can look different. To me, teaching a child that families can have 2 mommies and 2 daddies, or maybe just one mommy or one daddy, or maybe some kids get a mom and a step-mom, dad and step-dad, or loving guardian's, is no different from teaching a first grader that families come in lots of different colors too. I personally believe that children are much more understanding then we sometimes give them credit for. They are very curious, and can ask some bold questions no adult would ask, but that is why it is the perfect time to learn. Children are so perceptive and open to new ideas I think this curriculum would only create a inclusive environment for students without 'traditional' families', not harm or confuse students.

However, as this article states Nebraska still as written in our state constitution that a marriage is between a man and a woman. Even with the supreme court giving same sex couples the right to marry, Nebraska refuses to change the wording out of fear of retaliation from it's citizens. It's no wonder that we are so afraid of students learning about the things they are bound to see as they grow up. We learn about the ocean, something some Nebraskans may never see because it exists and it is important. So are nontraditional families.
The first draft also included curriculum for second graders to learn about self-identity, gender expression, and stereotypes. I truly understand some parents concern about confusing a child when it comes to gender identity, but I don't believe that would be the main focus in the classroom. I believe it should focus on breaking stereotypes, saying it is ok to be a boy and like what is assigned as 'girly things' and for a girl to like what is typically assigned as a 'boy thing'. Liking those things doesn't change who you are, but does make up who you are as a person. However, it is equally important for children to learn (maybe a bit older?) that not everyone assigned as boy or girl at birth, identifies or feels that they are that gender. And the struggles that inherently go along with feeling out of place in your own body, and that if someone feels that way they need more love and support from friends, not less. Just as you may teach older students about anorexia or bulimia and the body dysmorphia that accompanies those kinds of disorders. This again, will only create a more inclusive and welcoming environment for all students. Which we know, improves the learning capacity for all students.
In the end, I hope that one day Nebraska can grow to be loving and inclusive to all of our citizens. I am beginning to understand just how tricky that is because all citizens includes a very wide range of beliefs, ideology, religion, culture etc. I would like to think it starts by teaching children as much as we can about all different kinds of people, religion and culture, and that most importantly we are all human-all different but yet somehow the same- and that no matter what, everyone deserves love, compassion and respect.

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OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - Nebraska education officials announced Thursday that they have largely scrapped plans for gender identity lessons in public school curriculum after an uproar from conservatives who argued that the topics weren't appropriate for children.

The new draft of the proposed sexual standards from the Nebraska Department of Education came after agency officials faced intense criticism from parents, school boards, state lawmakers and Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who held town hall events to blast the proposal. Opponents flooded a meeting of the Nebraska State Board of Education, an elected board that oversees the agency.

"What we're really trying to do is understand what Nebraskans as a whole accept as a standard and an expectation of what our students learn in school," Matthew Blomstedt, Nebraska's education commissioner, said Thursday at a press conference. "There's always going to be a little bit of tensions over those types of issues, especially in this sense."

Nebraska currently has no statewide sex education standards. Even if adopted, the proposal would just be recommendations that school districts could use or ignore.

The original draft would have suggested lessons about family structures, including same-gender families, for kindergartners, and a discussion about gender identity and stereotypes for first-graders. Sixth graders would have learned about a range of gender identities, and seventh graders would have been taught about different types of sex and how diseases are transmitted.

Most of those lessons were removed from the new draft, although seventh graders would still be taught that biological sex and gender identity may differ, raising concerns from social conservatives.

Blomstedt said school officials tried to balance the wishes of concerned parents and those of the LGBTQ community, whose members have argued that schools need to educate students about groups that feel excluded because of how they identify. He said the department also wanted to defer to local schools.

"Standards and structure will not solve all of those issues," he said. He went on to add, "We're going to have those challenges whether we adopted those standards or not."

Still, advocates for the LGBTQ community blasted the decision to gut major parts of the first draft.

"Nebraska schools need to be welcome, safe spaces for all students," said Abbi Swatsworth, executive director of OutNebraska. "This erasure does nothing to protect LGBTQ+ students. The fact that LGBTQ+ people exist should not be controversial. We will continue to advocate for medically accurate, inclusive standards for our community."

Swatsworth said the new draft "largely omitted the reality of LGBTQ+ youth and families."

State Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks, of Lincoln, said she was "completely disappointed" with the board's decision and believes members "caved in" to political pressures. She said she understands the board's situation but hopes state officials write another draft.

"We have to trust educators and mental health experts to make the best decisions for Nebraska children, not by putting our heads in the sand and acting like LGBTQ students don't exist," said Pansing Brooks, a leading advocate for the community.

Jo Giles, executive director for the Women's Fund of Omaha, said her group was also concerned that lessons on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease were removed from the original draft.

Giles said it's important to teach students about the issues before high school, when some become sexually active. She said it's unrealistic to rely solely on parents, because some students are in abusive households.

The decision didn't satisfy social conservatives, either, who expressed anger that the department even introduced the proposal in the first place.

"The trust just isn't there right now," said Sen. Joni Albrecht, of Thurston, who helped organize opposition to the measure among a majority of Nebraska lawmakers. "The public doesn't believe that they're really, truly going to do what's right."

In a statement, Ricketts said the new proposed standards "still need improvement" because they teach the concept of gender identity. Ricketts said sex education and similar topics should be addressed at home, not in schools.

"The continued presence of gender ideology in the standards leaves the door open for this material to be expanded either before these draft standards are approved or in future years when these standards are revisited," Ricketts said.

The debate has stirred strong emotions in Nebraska, a state that has maintained socially conservative policies for decades.

Nebraska still has a one-man, one-woman marriage requirement in the state constitution that voters approved in 2000, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has declared such measures unenforceable. Some state lawmakers have discussed a constitutional amendment to remove that language, but quietly dropped the issue out of concern that voters would reject that effort and put Nebraska in the national spotlight.

The state education board will meet next week to hear public input on the new standards.

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Follow Grant Schulte on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrantSchulte

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Nebraska largely scraps gender identity lessons after uproar

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OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - Nebraska education officials announced Thursday that they have largely scrapped plans for gender identity lessons in public school curriculum after an uproar from conservatives who argued that the topics weren't appropriate for children.

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How are School Districts Easing Transitions for Afghan Students?

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How are School Districts Easing Transitions for Afghan Students?

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This article, written by Naaz Modan gives insight into the necessary steps being taken by American school districts to address the influx of immigrant students, specifically students and families seeking refuge from the tragic situation unfolding in Afghanistan. While many could and perhaps should argue that there is more we need to be doing to assist these children with the drastic change in lifestyle, culture, and community they will be experiencing, I believe it is equally important to identify what is currently being done to help both students and their families.

Modan sites multiple people who work in and for the Austin, Texas school district who are expecting a large influx in Afghan students this coming school year due to America's withdraw from Afghanistan. Modan begins with a very important truth: these children have been through a lot. Within the past few weeks alone these children have likely seen, and been through more then what some of us, including myself can only imagine. These families need multi-faceted support, from school supplies, counseling and expedited school enrollment. I think a major aspect needed not mentioned here is that these children need empathy and support not only from teachers and staff, but from the other children in their school and community.

Modan brings up this need by saying, "They need to feel welcomed." She also brings up that many of these students may speak multiple languages already and be ahead of the academic curve, but in order to thrive and do well anywhere-especially in school-children need to feel a sense of belonging. We know that based off of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs a sense of belonging is necessary in order to move forward in life and build your feeling of self worth. If these incoming students and families, who have just been through a struggle most of us will hopefully never know, feel ostracized, bullied, or neglected, simply from where they are from, it is easy to see how hard it could be to succeed in that environment. I believe it is necessary to educate our children before their new classmates arrive on what Afghan culture is like, the struggles these families have been through, and why it is so important to welcome them with open arms. As Modan states, building a culturally responsive classroom is necessary in these students success, I hope if teachers can build this environment long before these students arrive, then they have a better chance of being accepted by the existing students in the school.

Finally, Modan touches on the importance of helping both students and families navigate the different technology required to enroll and participate in school. Especially with the pandemic, this has been new for lots of families, but compounded with all of the other changes the refugee families are facing, without assistance this new form of education can potentially feel insurmountable.

I believe that by training teachers and staff on Afghan culture, and building a culturally responsive classroom and school culture we can start doing the best for our new Afghan students. I hope this training can be spread to all teachers, which can then be passed down to their students. We can't fault children for what they don't know, but I think schools need to take a strong stance on bullying and discrimination. By facing these problems before the influx of Afghan students I hope it could help not only these students as they begin enrollment, but all children. It is shown that schools that embrace and respect all cultures have higher success rates across all students.

In conclusion, the trauma these families have been through is heartbreaking. But allowing them to take refuge in America is not enough. We need to make America, primarily American schools a place where people not only want to take refuge, but a place that can eventually become a second home. A safe haven, a warm and welcoming environment that not only encourages them to learn about our culture, but shows that we are excited to learn about theirs.

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As President Joe Biden announced the end of the longest war in U.S. history, schools across the nation prepared for an influx of refugees, who were among the more than 120,000 people that were evacuated from Afghanistan.

"So many of our students bring their cultural perspective, and they really add diversity to the classroom," said Salimah Shamsuddin, refugee family support coordinator for Austin Independent School District in Texas. The district has been receiving refugees for over 14 years, and has so far enrolled 11 Afghan students from the 100-200 expected families estimated by Refugee Services of Texas. "We're not really sure how many of those families are just couples, and how many are families with kids."

In absence of this knowledge, districts are still partnering with community organizations to offer arriving students and families a host of services, including language support, academic assessments and culturally responsive instruction, drives and donations from families, and housing and healthcare.

'They've seen a lot'

"What's happened just in the past couple of weeks, they've seen a lot," Shamsuddin said. "And so how do we respond to that in the classroom?"

Community and in-house mental health providers are part of the answer.

A smooth registration process "means not only getting them the classes, but also getting them the social-emotional supports that they need to get settled," said Meredith Hedrick, chair of the English for Speakers of Other Languages Department at Annandale High School in Virginia's Fairfax County Public Schools.

The district expects students who have been evacuated from Afghanistan to arrive in the surrounding county, and school staff are helping to expedite enrollment, a district spokesperson said in an email. "It could be therapy or social services. It can be anything as simple as a backpack or other things they need at home, like school supplies," Hedrick added.

In Austin's International High School, where all of the teachers are certified in ESL, and which serves a handful of Afghan students already, a social worker closely working with students was able to apply for and secure housing through the city's rental assistance program. "So just working with families in that capacity, not just in the classroom, but also helping with other needs," Shamsuddin said.

'They need to feel welcomed'

In addition to wraparound services like housing and health care, districts are also preparing to provide academic support. "One thing we do with our refugee families is recognize their strengths and all the efforts that they bring. Often, the work with refugee students is framed as 'needs and deficits and challenges,'" said David Kauffman, executive director of multilingual education at AISD.

In reality, Afghan students and families may speak multiple languages and already be ahead of the academic curve, but just need to feelaccepted in order to excel.

"I think especially in this situation, just really knowing who these students are and learning more about their background is really important for them to move forward academically," said Sarah Eqab, assistant principal at Annandale High School. "In order for them to learn, they need to feel welcomed and need to feel like they belong."

Sometimes that requires training teachers to be culturally responsive. "I think we're going to be really in tune to the needs of the Afghan community, and so I think that's going to be an adjustment that we're going to want to learn about - what's culturally appropriate given the circumstances the Afghan community has been through," said Hedrick.

In Austin, the district is training teachers, mental health professionals and counselors. "If you have a father that you're speaking to, there might be some cultural consideration like hand-shaking," said Shamsuddin. "A lot of our dads put their hand over their chests as a 'hello,' and [we have to let] teachers know that that's normal and they do that."

Trainings also emphasize differentiating between Afghan families and those from the Middle East.

In another effort to make environments inclusive for Afghan families, schools are setting up peer or mentor systems with students who speak Pashto or Dari. "Not only do they have adults, but they immediately have another student in the building that can help them," Eqab said.

Technology could be a challenge

Although some districts have been welcoming refugees for years, this year's enrollment and acclimation could be challenging amid the ongoing pandemic and periodic school shutdowns.

"In the past, if a kid needed to go into vision testing, they would take them to the eye doctor, and it was an easy process," said Eqab. "But because of the pandemic, a lot of things have shifted where parents have to access technology, and they need that support sometimes if they're not familiar with it."

And once families are familiar with district technology, newly enrolled students will have to get the hang of the different programs and platforms schools use, added Hedrick.

"It's just an additional layer for us to help them work through," Eqab said.

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How are school districts easing transitions for Afghan students?

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As President Joe Biden announced the end of the longest war in U.S. history, schools across the nation prepared for an influx of refugees, who were among the more than 120,000 people that were evacuated from Afghanistan.

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This article by Kevin M McIntosh is eloquently written and puts into words the 'it' factor that teachers need to go from good to great. McIntosh explains that at the beginning of his teaching career, he would watch the experienced teachers trying desperately to find what made all of these great teachers have command over their classes. Eventually McIntosh came to realize that the thing he was missing, was something he would have to earn over time. What he was missing was a 'rep'.

Teachers that develop a rep, have students excited and ready to learn on the first day of school simply because of the things they have heard from other students and classmates. But building a rep isn't as simple as showing up and teaching your curriculum for a few a years. McIntosh explains that you have to have the ability to not only reflect on yourself-your skills and downfalls- but also on your students and what they need day to day. For example, cramming knowledge down a students throat when they have other things in their lives distracting them, preventing them from learning to their fullest is only going to create resentment in the class room. A great teacher has the ability to read their class, and has lesson plan a,b,c, and d lined up so that you can meet students where they are at.
I agree that all my great teachers did more then teach. They inspired, they comforted students, their classes were both fun and challenging, not only with how they taught but how they related the material to our lives. I think McIntosh did a tremendous job writing this to new or aspiring teachers. He makes it clear that we won't be great teachers right away, and that just like parenting no one is perfect and you are always growing to be better. But he also lays the foundation of thought on how to build your reputation, to become the best teacher you can be for each individual student.
It gives me hope, and this is an article I want to look back on my first years of teaching, when I will probably feel like I'm failing my students, or that I'm not doing enough to build a relationship with them. This article should inspire me to take a deep breath, know I'm not alone with these struggles, and move forward with better teaching strategies for my students. To remember that the teacher learning process, just like any other learning, should never stop. I hope this article is doing the same for our current new teachers in the work force.

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Kevin M. McIntosh's short stories have appeared in the American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Potomac Review, Chicago Tribune and have been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. He has had fellowships at the Ragdale Foundation and Blue Mountain Center. His novel Class Dismissed (Regal House Publishing, July 2021) is informed by his thirty years of teaching English in New York City, Oakland, and Greater Boston. Visit him at kevinmmcintosh.com.
Teaching is a humbling profession. The occupation that it comes closest to is parenting. And, like parenting, you never master it; it's never a done deal. Sure, there are books on how to do these things, but they never cover the hard stuff, the real stuff--the survival stuff. So much our parents never taught us, that our professors never taught us in education school.

As a new teacher, I spent many prep periods observing experienced faculty members at work. They came in all shapes, sizes, genders, orientations, colors, ages.

But, unlike me, they all had command of their classes. What was their secret sauce, I wanted to know. They were all so different in the presentation: Marty, the former wrestler--a gentle giant--who never spoke above the level of conversation, made kids lean in; Shelly, a tiny woman, brash New Yorker, flip but demanding, made kids laugh; Judy, formal, intense, unafraid to use endless wait time following a question, made her students want to learn. they taught was so distinctive, yet, in every case, so effective. What was their mojo? And, more importantly, where could I get mine?

Turned out they all had one thing in common, they had a Teacher Rep. When students entered their classrooms, they knew something worthwhile was about to happen. Students entered alert but relaxed in the knowledge that their time was not about to be wasted. They were ready to learn. Unfortunately, as I discovered, you can't begin your teaching career with a Rep. It has to be earned--it has to be built.

Two decades later, a younger colleague was grading papers in the back of the room we shared. When the bell rang and my class trickled out, she looked up from her papers, disgruntled.

"What's wrong, Jennifer?"

"I begin every class shouting my kids to attention. And you . . . you just say, 'Welcome writers and lovers of literature.' And--boom!--out come their notebooks, they're all listening."

"Well," I smiled, "I paid for this gravitas. me." I had a Rep. And the scars to prove my point. Then I realized: I had become that teacher I envied.

Welcome, writers and lovers of literature : a mantra I stumbled on midway through my career. Every class from then on began with this greeting, this invocation. Some of my eighth graders, dubious at the proposition, giggled nervously on first hearing it. But they soon expected and cherished this greeting. It was inclusive and held out the possibility--the expectation--that all could be writers, that there was literature all could embrace, with passion. We were embarked on a special mission: when you entered room 224, you were standing on holy ground, not just the next classroom on your schedule. In my writing workshop we spent many hours writing--that's what writers do--but we once spent part of a class period watching a squirrel find creative ways to assault a bird feeder because writers do that too. The mundane and the magical--that's a writer's life, and a teacher's.

And finding your place on that mundane-magical scale is key to building Rep. When I was a new teacher--in the Reagan Era--they told us in Ed School, be the Guide on the Side, not the Sage on the Stage. But this is a false choice: to succeed over the long haul, to build Rep that lasts a career, you need to be both, alternating modes depending on what, when, and whom you are teaching. This is where self-awareness comes in, taking a clear hard look in the mirror: are you a natural magician or logician? How can you make the most of your in-born gift, how to shore up your weak side?

Before I became an educator, I worked in the theater. And, unsurprisingly, as a struggling new teacher, I fell back, hard, into my performing comfort zone. The bell would ring and Mr. McIntosh would be off on his--sometimes literal--song and dance. And my students loved it. One mother showed up after school to pick up her sick daughter's homework and said she had to talk her girl into staying home because she didn't want to miss my class. I was worth the price of admission. But I was only two years in and could feel myself burning out. And, though I was only dimly aware of it, I was also taking up all the oxygen in the room, leaving my students less space for creativity and risk-taking. I was doing that for them.

Then Nancie Atwell--God bless her--saved me. An older, wiser English teacher plopped Atwell's In the Middle on my desk, and-- --a writing workshop instructor was born. Ms. Atwell's book helped me get out of the middle and turn much of my class time over to my students, sparing Mr. McIntosh from a future as a chalk-and-talk drone or performing seal, an aging, Rep-less pedagogue. Over time I found a balance, often leading with a zippy mini-lesson followed by a half-hour of writing accompanied by conferences with individual students. Sage and Guide, in one class period.

But, vital to Rep-formation as self-awareness is, so too is an awareness of your students. Who are they, what's going on for them at the moment? Sounds pretty basic, I know, but un-Repped teachers--and they are legion--plunge ahead with their preordained lesson plan, heedless of who they're teaching and what's happening in their lives. And I'm not just speaking of paying attention to the special needs of particular students--there's already a very serious law regarding that.

I'm speaking of the time the young Mr. Mac spent an entire weekend polishing a multi-cultural, multi-modal, interdisciplinary gem of cooperative learning, only to show up to an uncooperative eighth grade Monday morning. Excited about my brilliant lesson plan, I ignored the more excited buzzing in my suburban homeroom. Friday night the grade's alpha couple had had a spat at the Valentine's Day Dance--Alpha Boy had slow-danced with the wrong girl--and the social hierarchy exploded. I grew angry as my carefully curated small groups refused to discuss anything else. Take out your textbooks, I finally barked at my kids, read chapter 17, answer the questions at the end. Shocked and sullen, my students did my bidding, working quietly for the rest of the period. But my victory was pyrrhic: I won the battle, damaged my Rep.

It didn't have to go that way. The older me would have read the room, asked kids a few questions, and made a new plan. As an experienced teacher, I call more audibles than Tom Brady. Now I would save my masterpiece for later in the week and pull out a stack of practice sheets on dependent clauses. No problem with kicking it Old School on occasion. You have 180 days to work with, 900 classes; every play doesn't have to end with a touchdown, just keep moving the ball downfield. And force-feeding an unwilling class is the worst possible Rep management. Students feel unseen and unheard and eventually, lose respect for their teacher. And getting angry helps no one.

I learned this first and best when I taught in Oakland and NYC, where my students had problems far more pressing than what had happened at the school dance. If your family has been evicted from your apartment or the grandmother who's raising you is hospitalized, discussing chapter three of Of Mice and Men may be a non-starter. Some mornings, a quarter of a class showed up with problems on that scale. I didn't become an effective teacher for these children until I learned to pay attention, ask questions, and have Plans B, C, and D ready for action.

Creating a Rep is about building a bigger, better classroom for you. Teaching isn't just a performance, but it does require performing. The teacher with Rep is an authentic person in front of her class, but a persona too. The teachers we remember, the ones with lasting impact, were creative, quirky, in-the-moment presences. They were knowledgeable and prepared--that is the stuff of competence--but they had that x-factor that separates the good from the great. They could be counted on to present a solid, interesting lesson, but their moves were unpredictable, shaped by the needs of their students. And, as I learned from my masterful colleagues early on, Rep doesn't have to come in a Robin Williams package; an exquisitely attuned introvert can be that teacher. Rep has a thousand faces. Young teacher, start building yours.

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Building a Teacher Rep-utation - The Educators Room

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Kevin M. McIntosh's short stories have appeared in the American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Potomac Review, Chicago Tribune and have been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. He has had fellowships at the Ragdale Foundation and Blue Mountain Center. His novel Class Dismissed (Regal House Publishing, July 2021) is informed...

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Four Reading Strategies to Retire This Year(Plus Six to Try Out!)

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Four Reading Strategies to Retire This Year(Plus Six to Try Out!)

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In this article, Sarah Gonser took a deep dive into the common tools we use to teach and encourage reading in students. Sarah compiled research and first hand testimony to see which teaching practices we should implement, as well as four strategies that may not be promoting the love for learning we wish to give our students. Two of the practices Sarah suggested we should retire stood out to me the most because of my personal experiences with them. The first being reading logs. According to a study included in this article, reading logs can actually cause students to loose interest in both academic and recreational reading. From personal experience these logs may bring excitement at first, typically students will simply fill in these logs and can also add a feeling of requirement to a time where reading should be done out of fun or desire. Ultimately resulting in a decreased desire to read, and even a feeling of inadequacy when you aren't the one winning the reading awards. Which is another strategy, Sarah says, that does not actually encourage students to read the way we initially believed. The second strategy that stuck out to me most was popcorn or round robin reading. This article highlights how this reading strategy can cause less proficient students to feel embarrassed about reading aloud and even begin to dread reading. I was lucky enough to have reading come easy to me so I did not realize until high school how this effected my peers. However, because reading aloud is an essential part of learning, Sarah provides two other oral reading practices that are shown to promote a desire to read, as well as better proficiency. Reading accountability partners allow students to collaborate and challenge each other on reading material, while building their relationships and communication skills. Reading buddies is another excellent strategy that allows older and younger students to come together and strengthen both their reading skills and desire to read. This allows older struggling students to read aloud without the same social pressure and anxiety that can come with other oral reading strategies such as popcorn reading. I believe that by taking the knowledge Sarah Gonser's provided in this article, and by continuing to strive for better, we can not only teach our students to be great at reading, but to be learners who yearn for it.

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It's not uncommon for classroom literacy practices to stick around in spite of, as in the case of round robin, well-established research and readily available resources offering a variety of research-based alternatives for improving reading fluency and deepening comprehension and engagement. In fact, when literacy specialists Gwynne Ellen Ash, Melanie R. Kuhn, and Sharon Walpole surveyed teachers and literacy coaches to more deeply understand "the persistence of Round Robin Reading in public schools in the United States," they found that close to half of the 80 teachers they surveyed admitted to using some variation of round robin, and more than 30 percent "acknowledged that the research said Round Robin Reading was not best practice but they used it anyway."

As students return to school and educators begin to plan for instruction that adequately challenges kids but also catches them up after a year of uneven pandemic learning, there's a valuable opportunity to reconsider-and ultimately retire-some of the stale literacy practices that research suggests aren't the best use of limited instructional time. We combed through our Edutopia archives to find practices that shouldn't make the cut and selected more effective alternatives that come recommended by literacy experts and experienced educators.

4 LITERACY PRACTICES TO RETIRE

Reading logs (and other rote accountability tasks): Like many teachers, Allie Thrower had her fifth-grade students fill out daily reading logs as part of their homework. But after some time, Thrower, now an elementary school continuous improvement coach, noticed that her students' log entries looked the same each day. "It was always 20 [minutes]," Thrower writes. "My students seemed to be reading merely because they had to-not because it opened up windows to the world, because reading about a character who looked like them brought them a sense of belonging and hope, or because they wanted to learn how to change the world for the better."

After discussing the topic with colleagues and digging into the research, she realized that "many parents and educators had strong negative feelings about reading logs," Thrower writes. And a 2012 study of the practice found that "students with mandatory logs expressed declines in both interest and attitudes towards recreational reading in comparison to peers with voluntary logs, and attitudes towards academic reading decreased significantly."

Turn-taking oral reading practices: In this type of practice-round robin reading is probably the most common; similar approaches include popcorn reading, combat reading, and Popsicle stick reading-students "read orally from a common text, one child after another, while the other students follow along in their copies of the text," writes Todd Finley, a professor of English education at East Carolina University. Finley surveyed more than 30 studies and articles about this close-knit family of reading strategies and concluded that oral turn-taking reading practices like round robin stigmatize poor readers, weaken comprehension, and sabotage fluency and pronunciation.

"To be clear, oral reading in other formats does improve students' fluency, comprehension, and word recognition, though silent or independent reading should occur far more frequently as students advance into the later grades," Finley notes.

Awarding prizes for reading: In a well-intentioned effort to motivate students to read more, schools and teachers sometimes offer prizes for meeting reading goals-rewards might range from small items like stickers or bracelets to movie or amusement park tickets, gaming tokens, and fast food coupons. But research shows that extrinsic motivators like these don't do much to build reading habits and, especially among students who already enjoy reading, may actually decrease motivation to read, say literacy experts Barbara A. Marinak and Linda B. Gambrell, authors of No More Reading for Junk: Best Practices for Motivating Readers, in an interview for Education Week. Instead, offer rewards that are closely aligned with reading, like books they can keep and extra reading time, for example.

Overemphasis on reading as a discrete skill: Traditional ELA reading curriculum tends to focus on exposing students to unfamiliar subjects while teaching them ostensibly transferable skills like summarizing and finding the main idea. But a growing group of educators, writes journalist Holly Korbey, are shifting away from this approach, based on research indicating that predominantly skills-based instruction does little to improve overall reading proficiency for many students.

In the landmark baseball study, for example, Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie found that "struggling readers who knew a lot about baseball did better on a reading comprehension test about the topic than strong readers who knew nothing about the sport," Korbey writes. Similarly, high school students who "met a basic knowledge threshold on a dense topic like ecosystems had much stronger performance on a reading test about ecosystems than those who didn't," she notes. "For low-income students and students of color, these disparities were particularly pronounced."

6 READING APPROACHES THAT WORK BETTER

Reading accountability partners: After quitting reading logs, Thrower tried several alternatives before settling on reading accountability partners, a strategy where partners meet daily for 10 minutes to discuss the previous day's reading. "The practice may seem simple, but the results have been impressive," Thrower says, noting that pairings work best with students who will challenge each other academically and encourage each other emotionally.

Via mini-lessons, she helps students understand their roles, discusses how to hold peers accountable and how to be receptive to feedback, sets kids up with guiding questions, and circulates among the groups to make sure everyone's on task.

Choral reading: In this oral reading activity, the teacher and class read a passage aloud together, reducing "struggling readers' public exposure" and extending the length of the passages that kids are exposed to, writes Finley. Or try a variation on choral reading in which "every time the instructor omits a word during oral reading, students say the word all together," Finley suggests. Lowering the stakes for all students in this way allows everyone to practice reading for longer chunks of time and smooths out modeling hiccups and individual fluency issues. The research, meanwhile, shows that the practice results in marked improvements in decoding and fluency.

Scaffolded silent reading: Silent reading is important, but before sending kids off with a book, consider scaffolding the activity by pre-teaching vocabulary, providing a plot overview, and maybe introducing a K-W-L activity.

"Many of us, myself included, are guilty of sending students all alone down the bumpy, muddy path known as Challenging Text-a road booby-trapped with difficult vocabulary," writes Rebecca Alber, an instructor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education. "We send them ill-prepared and then are often shocked when they lose interest, create a ruckus, or fall asleep." When pre-teaching vocabulary, "introduce the words to kids in photos or in context with things they know and are interested in," Alber suggests. "Give time for small-group and whole-class discussion of the words."

Teacher read-aloud and modeling: It's tough to find time in the school day for read-alouds; however, "reading aloud to students each day is not only a productive investment; it also has powerful benefits for learners of all ages," writes educator Christie Rodgers, who routinely alloted five to seven minutes to the task every day with her fourth- and fifth-grade students. It's a practice that's rewarding and beneficial for middle and high school students as well.

"Throughout my 25 years in education, the read-aloud was my way of getting the most stubborn students to fall in love with reading," says Rodgers. Besides being enjoyable-a 2019 report from Scholastic found that 83 percent of students ages 6 all the way to age 17 surveyed said that being read to was something they either loved or liked a lot-it's also a powerful opportunity to model reading strategies, stopping frequently to wonder out loud and thus showing students "what good readers do when they don't know a word, understand a plot twist, or agree with a character in the story," Rodgers writes.

Reading buddies: For this practice, pair upper-grade classes with lower-grade ones-third graders with pre-K students, for example-and plan to set aside at least one 30-minute session per month for students to read together. Kids can work in pairs, but groups of three work too. "Let the younger students pick the books at first so they get hooked with an interesting read," says Ryan Wheeler, a behavior specialist in Houston, Texas.

The practice builds community, but it's also a powerful literacy tool. "Reading buddies allows younger readers to see what being fluent looks like as they have a peer model demonstrating reading skills," notes Wheeler. "For upper elementary students who are struggling with grade-level reading, the opportunity to access easier reading material without stigma or shame while sharing with a novice reader can create a positive experience with an activity that may otherwise be less than enjoyable."

Building background knowledge: Background knowledge-about the topic and about the world in general-"plays an important role in helping students make sense of a text because the things readers already know work like a scaffold on which to build a more complete, and nuanced, mental model of the subject matter," writes Holly Korbey. Try pre-teaching key vocabulary and concepts, and reduce the cognitive load by linking the new, unfamiliar material to material they've already learned.

In order to teach the kind of knowledge-rich lessons that will effectively boost students' reading comprehension, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, author of The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, tells Korbey, "teachers should emphasize a cohesive, well-sequenced curriculum with lots of background information on different topics embedded within it so that no students are left hanging when they read."

Ultimately, beyond abandoning ineffective practices, the deeper work of motivating kids to read starts with connecting them to books that genuinely reflect their own interests-and giving them some choice in the matter. This may require being flexible about reading levels so kids are exposed to texts that provide them with an abundance of cultural, racial, and socioeconomic perspectives and cater to a wide variety of reading tastes across a broad range of reading levels-from books that are easy to read to ones that pull them into unfamiliar and demanding territory.

When we provide young readers with a rich mix of books, Melanie Hundley, a former English teacher and now professor at Vanderbilt University, tells Korbey, it primes students to feel more engaged and excited to take on tougher texts. "If kids will read and you can build their reading stamina, they can get to a place where they're reading complex texts," says Hundley. "Choice helps develop a willingness to read... [and] I want kids to choose to read."

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4 Reading Strategies to Retire This Year (Plus 6 to Try Out!)

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It's not uncommon for classroom literacy practices to stick around in spite of, as in the case of round robin, well-established research and readily available resources offering a variety of research-based alternatives for improving reading fluency and deepening comprehension and engagement. In fact, when literacy specialists Gwynne Ellen Ash, Melanie R.

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This article by Cora Goldston beautifully defines what culturally responsive instruction is, and the profound impacts it has on all students. The purpose of this article is to compile research and first hand accounts of findings by the Regional Education Laboratory Program Midwest.

According to Dr. Seena Skelton, quoted by Cora Goldston, "...the system is not performing in a way that enables all students to access robust learning opportunities, which are needed in order to have positive out comes for all students. So it is a system issue as opposed to an issue with the students." As someone who wants to teach in middle school, this article peaked my interest because I want to ensure that no matter what biases I may have or develop, I have the knowledge on how to overcome them. This quote by Dr. Skelton highlights the need for all teachers to invest fully in culturally responsive instruction because otherwise, we are failing our students. Rather then questioning why students are failing, we should be asking how we are failing our students.

So how do we create culturally responsive instruction? What does it look like? Cora Goldston provides examples from two different studies, that are more simple then you may think. However, sometimes it is the most obvious answers that are overlooked, especially when people are not wanting to look. We can fix this by actively thinking of and doing these following things on a daily basis in our classrooms. Acknowledge the input of all students, from all backgrounds. Make curriculum relatable to students in their world, and have students work in diverse groups to expand their understanding of the world. Possibly the most important factor of a culturally inclusive class room is to use consistent body language. While it may seem obvious, Goldston reminds us of the fact that everyone has subconscious body language and behaviors. However, it is our responsibility as teachers to be aware of this, and not allow differentiated treatment, no matter what the reason.

As mentioned earlier, building a culturally inclusive classroom does not stop in the classroom. Goldston states that by reaching out and building relationships with parents, parts of the community and having open communication with teachers all builds a relationship and context for students lives. Using this knowledge, or context, we are able to adapt our curriculum in ways that can better relate to different students.

Finally Cora Goldston offers a resource, Map center for teachers in Nebraska and other states to get assistance in building cultural responsiveness in themselves and their classrooms. With all of the resources we have to make sure students of all backgrounds and cultures receive a just, quality education that is at the bare minimum, our responsibility as teachers.

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By Cora Goldston
September 19, 2017

This is the second article in a three-part blog series. In this series, Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest takes an up-close look at cultural competency in education. This topic is important to the Midwest Achievement Gap Research Alliance's (MAGRA's) efforts to increase understanding and use of research to close stark and persistent academic achievement gaps-particularly the gap between Black and White students.

What is culturally responsive instruction and why does it matter for students? Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings defined culturally responsive instruction as "a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes" in her book The Dreamkeepers ( 1994). Research suggests that culturally responsive instruction allows educators to address social barriers that cause disparities in student achievement; by tailoring instruction to be mindful of these barriers, educators can help students overcome obstacles and succeed ( Rodriguez, Jones, Pang, & Park, 2004). Responsive classrooms also mitigate the effects of negative cultural stereotypes on student performance ( Cohen & Garcia, 2008).

In the classroom, teachers can take several steps to encourage success for all students. Research indicates the following practices support students of all cultures ( Krasnoff, 2016; Trumbull & Pacheco, 2005):

Acknowledging the contributions of all students. Students of certain cultural backgrounds may be accustomed to having their questions or input dismissed. Each response is an opportunity for teachers to build deeper understanding.

Connecting the classroom to the real world. Students are more likely to engage if they are interested in the material and can relate to it. Teachers can incorporate more familiar touchstones into lesson plans and ask students to reflect on the connections between their schoolwork and their everyday lives.

Using consistent body language with all students. Teachers unconsciously exhibit more favorable body language towards students that remind them of themselves. For students who have felt marginalized because of their cultural backgrounds, positive nonverbal communication can have an important effect on engagement.

Having students work together in diverse groups. Collaborative activities can promote equality among peers, encourage students to participate, and open up opportunities for learning.

Welcoming student feedback throughout the year. Although teachers try to be vigilant, it can be difficult to know if you are meeting each student's needs. Opening the lines of communication directly with students can provide vital information to better support students.

Cultural responsiveness doesn't just happen in the classroom. By building connections with families, both teachers and administrators can learn more about the cultural contexts that students are bringing to their classrooms ( Trumbull & Pacheco, 2005; Bertani et. al, 2010). This context can be used to tailor instruction and reach a mutual teacher-student understanding of classroom norms ( Bertani et. al, 2010). Collaboration between school staff is also crucial to supporting all students. For example, teachers can better address a student's behavioral needs by connecting with colleagues, conducting a well-rounded behavior analysis, and creating a plan to proactively respond ( Bertani et al., 2010).

Support for Midwestern educators: The Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center

States and districts need a variety of supports to provide students of all cultural backgrounds with equitable opportunities. The Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center (MAP Center) offers resources on culturally responsive education for PK-12 administrators at the district and state levels. The MAP Center is one of four regional Equity Assistance Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education. In addition to REL Midwest's seven states, the MAP Center serves Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. That's more than 7,000 public school districts and almost 12 million public school students.

Dr. Seena Skelton

To support culturally responsive education efforts, the MAP Center offers a variety of resources, including free online tools, professional learning events, and individual partnerships with states and districts to address more comprehensive needs. Dr. Skelton explains, "The technical assistance varies from school system to school system, and it's designed to be responsive to each system's needs." Tailoring assistance to the state or district is a crucial piece of the MAP Center's work; the MAP Center sees school systems as equal partners in the work. Hear more about the MAP Center's relationship with its partners. ( transcript below)

This year, one of the MAP Center's professional learning events will focus on school improvement initiatives that go beyond "closing the achievement gap." As Dr. Skelton notes, current conversation around improving academic achievement can put undue responsibility on students, when there are several factors that affect a student's academic success. Hear Dr. Skelton describe shifting conversations around academic achievement. ( transcript below)

"One of the byproducts of the discourse in education around achievement gaps, and even the way achievement data is depicted, is that it puts the onus on students-students are not performing," Dr. Skelton says.

In reality, other critical points in the educational system have a profound effect on students.

"We're examining barriers, whether they are produced and replicated because of policies we have in place, because of ways in which teachers are practicing and making instructional decisions, or because of the way our classrooms, schools, districts, and SEAs are structured," Dr. Skelton says.

Across the region, the MAP Center is seeing changes at the state, district, and educator levels.

Dr. Skelton notes, "Some of the impact that we're seeing is a shift in educator knowledge, awareness, and understanding of issues of inequity-what does systemic inequity look like?"

And she says administrators in the region are taking a hard look at school structures that might disproportionately affect some students: "We're seeing some policy changes among our partners to more equitable policies about how curriculum decisions are being made and how discipline and behavior management are occurring."

To learn more about the MAP Center, visit the center's website. You can also find a list of curated resources from the Center below.

MAP Center library resources related to cultural competency

Equity By Design Briefs: Briefs that provide strategies to implement research evidence on cultural competency and equity into educational practice.

Becoming Culturally Responsive Educators: Rethinking Teacher Education Pedagogy (National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems): A rationale for culturally responsive teacher education pedagogy, with guidelines for its use.

Cultural Competence Assessment Tools (New York State Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence): Tools to help organizations and providers evaluate their cultural competence.

Culturally Responsive Classroom Management Strategies (Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, New York University): The merits of cultural responsiveness in management of diverse classrooms, with guidelines on how teachers can become more culturally responsive.

Stay tuned for one more blog post in the Bringing Cultural Awareness to the Classroom series, on Minnesota's American Indian students.

Transcript of first audio clip from Dr. Seena Skelton: We frame the way we approach technical assistance in a very specific way. We value and understand that our partners bring to bear expertise, experience, and information about their systems that we don't necessarily have. We could never really know their system as well as they know their own system, and we value what they bring to the table, in terms of their understanding of their own system. So we do not position ourselves as "external experts" who come in and fix or correct what's wrong in a system. Rather, we position ourselves as collaborative partners. We bring to bear specific expertise related to educational equity, related to culturally responsive practices, related to issues of civil rights.

Transcript of second audio clip from Dr. Seena Skelton: Where we are seeing some impact is from conceptualizing the gap as "students are not performing" to really conceptualizing the gap as the system is not performing in a way that enables all students to access robust learning opportunities, which are needed in order to have positive outcomes for all students. So it's a systems issue as opposed to an issue with the students.

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Culturally responsive instruction: Best practices | REL Midwest

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By Cora Goldston September 19, 2017 This is the second article in a three-part blog series. In this series, Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest takes an up-close look at cultural competency in education.