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Analysis | America is more diverse than ever — but still segregated 

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Analysis | America is more diverse than ever — but still segregated 

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https://wapo.st/2KyC4jA?tid=ss_tw

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Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites, federal report finds

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Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites, federal report finds

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/05/implicit-racial-bias-causes-black-boys-to-be-disciplined-at-school-more-than-whites-federal-report-finds/?utm_term=.236d229314ac

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"There has been a real powerful sense ... that the future they were promised has been taken away from them."

Maybe the campus protests seemed rather isolated at first. Dissatisfaction with the administration. Outrage over bad decisions. A student altercation gone bad.

For example: The protest at Florida State University last fall, when students didn't like the idea of having the Republican state politician John Thrasher as their school's president and launched a campaign-#SlashThrasher-against his candidacy. Citing the lawmaker's corporate ties, various groups staged demonstrations, including some who organized a march to the city center.

Or the protest at the University of Michigan in September, when, amid frustrations over their football team's losses, students rallied at the home of the school's president to demand that he fire the athletic director. They had more on their minds than lost points: The director had neglected to remove the team's quarterback from a football game after he suffered a serious head injury that was later diagnosed as a concussion. (The Florida students' protest failed to change minds at FSU, but Michigan's athletic director was quickly sent packing.)

"I'm proud of our history. I'm not proud of Dave Brandon being a part of that history." pic.twitter.com/JDLSWXM7YE
- Ace Anbender (@AceAnbender) September 30, 2014

There was the confederate-flag fiasco at Bryn Mawr, which resulted in a mass demonstration by hundreds of students who, all dressed in black, called for an end to racism on the Pennsylvania campus. A week later, more than 350 students staged a similar protest further north, at New York's Colgate University. That one-dubbed #CanYouHearUsNow-likewise aimed to to end bigotry among students and faculty; it was in part prompted by a series of racist Yik Yak posts.

Just as has been happening in communities at large, campus protests against racism and bigotry-along with related types of discrimination-have become commonplace. Students at the University of Chicago hosted a #LiabilityoftheMind social-media campaign last November to raise awareness about institutional intolerance. A "Hands Up Don't Shoot" walkout was staged the same month by hundreds of Seattle high-schoolers. Roughly 600 Tufts students lay down in the middle of traffic in December for four and a half hours-the amount of time Michael Brown's body was left in the street after behind shot. Students at numerous other colleges did the same.
The "belief that you can change the world [hasn't been] beaten out of you yet."
Of course, there were other common themes, too. Early last fall, Emma Sulkowicz, then a student at Columbia, pledged to carry a mattress on campus daily to protest the school's refusal to expel her alleged rapist. Soon, hundreds of her classmates joined her, as did those at 130 other college campuses nationwide, according to reports. Anti-rape demonstrations became a frequent occurrence as colleges across the country came under scrutiny for their handling of campus sexual-assault cases. There were walkouts and sit-ins, canceled speeches and banner campaigns. Last May, the U.S. Department of Education reported that it was investigating 55 colleges and universities for possible violations of Title IX. As of this January, the number had gone up to 94.

Sulkowicz even carried her mattress-with the help of two classmates-across stage to get her diploma on Tuesday:

.@Sejal_Singh_, @ZoeRidolfiStarr & 2 others helped Emma Sulkowicz carry her mattress across stage at #ccclassday2015 pic.twitter.com/pEOqQviD0N
- Teo Armus (@teoarmus) May 19, 2015

These demonstrations were, and are, very far from isolated. "There's a renaissance of political activism going on, and it exists on every major campus," Harold Levy, a former chancellor of New York City's public schools who now oversees the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, recently told me. Levy attributed this resurgence in part to the growing inequality in educational opportunity in the country, which has contributed to great tensions between institutions and the public they're supposed to serve; even protests that don't explicitly focus on this cause, he said, are byproducts of this friction.

It's happening again-it's like when we were here! It's happening! Levy, 61, was quoting a recent remark made by a friend who's a trustee at Cornell, Levy's alma mater. "He's in a position of authority now, and he didn't know whether to celebrate it or to worry about it," Levy said. "And of course the answer is both: You want kids to be politically active precisely because you want their engagement in the world, and you want to encourage them to be free thinkers." But that activism also threatens the institutions' control.

This resurgence in campus activism necessarily a new phenomenon. After all, The New York Times wrote about " The New Student Activism " back in 2012, attributing the trend to the Occupy Movement. But observers say the activism that's since proliferated has a different feel, and this new chapter could trigger significant shifts in the way things are run.

American Student Activism, Fall 2014

At least 160 student protests took place in the U.S. over the course of the 2014 fall semester alone, according Angus Johnston, a history professor at the City University of New York who specializes in student activism. "There's certainly something of a movement moment happening right now," he said, pointing in part to the news media, which fuels activism by putting protests on the public's radar. "The campus environment right now has, for the past couple of years, reminded me a lot of the early- to mid-60s moment, where there was a lot of stuff happening, a lot of energy-but also a tremendous amount of disillusionment and frustration with the way that things were going in the country as a whole and on the campuses themselves." And this sentiment has been taking hold in other parts of the world, too: Thousands of students (and teachers) have been demonstrating in Chile this month in the name of education reform, including two students who were killed last week.

For younger generations, Johnston added, the "belief that you can change the world [hasn't been] beaten out of you yet."

Johnston runs a blog-ish website featuring a resource that's oddly hard to find on the Internet today: a modern timeline of student protests, including color-coded maps illustrating the location and theme of these demonstrations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the map (which has yet to be updated with data from the spring semester) reveals that most of the recent student uprisings during the fall of 2014 focused on racism and police violence, all but a few of them in the eastern half of the country. Many of these demonstrations used hashtags to mobilize, some of which are still in use today. Meanwhile, according to Johnston's analysis, about half of the 160 protests were evenly split between two main themes: sexism/sexual assault and university governance/student rights. The remainder called for improvements to tuition and funding-about half of them at University of California schools.
"One of the thing that ties (the campus movements) all together is a sense that the future doesn't look as rosy as it might have a few years ago."
But they don't always have to do with issues specific to students. Just take the divestment campaigns, which are becoming a popular form of political activism at college campuses across the country, including Harvard, Boston University, and Princeton. These efforts are aimed at convincing university administrations to drop their investments in controversial industries (such as guns or fossil fuels) or corporations (such as those that side with Israel) and have little to do with on-campus issues.

"A lot of the protests ... embrace national issues through the lens of campus policies," Johnston said. "The university is big enough to matter but small enough to have an influence on. It becomes a site of organizing because there are opportunities to organize on campus that a lot of times you don't have in an off-campus community."

Young Americans are often characterized as politically apathetic and ignorant. It's true that they vote at exceptionally low rates, but some say that's because they don't believe going to the polls makes much of a difference. Perhaps they see activism as a more effective means of inciting change-particularly when the change they seek has little to do with politics. Just last week, the entire graduate class of 2016 at the University of Southern California's art and design simply school dropped out of the program in protest of faculty and curriculum changes.

Entire Class Of USC MFA Art Students Dropped Out Over 'Unethical Treatment' http://t.co/wWlgfd1miS pic.twitter.com/h4uGskMh4Q
- LAist (@LAist) May 16, 2015

Sometimes students demonstrate precisely because they don't have political power. A group of Kentucky teens recently spent months campaigning for a state bill that would've given them the opportunity to have a say in the selection of district superintendents. The high-schoolers testified before lawmakers, wrote op-eds, consulted attorneys, and collected piles of research. The legislature didn't pass the bill.

Indeed, despite the uptick in activism, those in power-from lawmakers to school administrators-don't appear to be any more sympathetic student activists. Though graduate-student employees across the country have for years struggled to unionize in pursuit of tuition relief and better wages, for example, only a number of groups have succeeded in that effort.

Perhaps school officials are even less sympathetic now than in the past. According to Johnston, as Occupy spread, student activists were faced with increasingly violent punishment. One of the most egregious examples involved the University of California, Davis, in 2011, when a campus police officer, with the backing of his superiors, pepper-sprayed a group of seated students involved in an Occupy protest. Though that's an extreme example, Johnson added, "we are seeing a less transparent, less responsive, less democratic university than we've seen in the past."
"The university is big enough to matter but small enough to have an influence on. It becomes a site of organizing because there are opportunities to organize on campus that a lot of times you don't have in an off-campus community."
Recently, a group of students at Tufts refused to eat for five days-more than 120 hours-in protest of the administration's decision to lay off 20 janitors. For health and safety reasons, the students ended the hunger strike ended without arriving at a deal with the administration. But students have continued to rally, including at Sunday's commencement:

.@MonacoAnthony speaks again and signs go back up pic.twitter.com/vlhUTNVcHy
- Nick Pfosi (@npfosi) May 17, 2015

And earlier this semester, the University of California, Santa Cruz-a school founded during the civil-rights movement that still markets itself as a mecca of radical politics-delivered one-and-a-half year suspensions to a group of students who blocked a major highway in protest of tuition hikes. (The students each face sentences of 30 days in jail and restitution, too.) Critics accused the school of capitulating to community members, who were furious over the gridlock caused by the protesters. Undergraduate tuition at UC schools has more than doubled in the last decade to its current level of $12,192-increasing at an even higher rate than has the national average.

"There has been a real powerful sense among a lot of student activists that the future they were promised has been taken away from them," Johnston said. "One of the thing that ties (the campus movements) all together is a sense that the future doesn't look as rosy as it might have a few years ago."

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ldquo; There has been a real powerful sense ... that the future they were promised has been taken away from them.”

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A 2012 paper on youth and social movements, a collaboration between Lady Gaga's Born this Way Foundation and Harvard University's Berkman Center, found young people to be powerful agents for social change, crediting undocumented-youth sit-ins for convincing President Obama to grant DREAMers a reprieve from deportation in 2012. The paper's author writes of youth activists primed to "call out or identify systems of oppression, speak up, and mobilize their peers."

When a message referencing the Ku Klux Klan and a public lynching was left on a school computer at Berkeley High in Northern California, about 1,500 students walked out of classes in solidarity with the school's Black Student Union. The computer posting, to which a Berkeley High student later confessed, was the third in a string of racist incidents on the campus since 2014, according to school officials. Natalie Bettendorf, an editor with Berkeley High School's student newspaper, spoke to KPFA's Youth Radio on the unifying power of student-led action: "Their whole idea of getting the whole school together would have seemed so ambitious to one person, but once I walked in on that quad and saw the entire school gathered together, listening, chanting ... to see all the students lined up and getting their voices heard and crying, it was so powerful."

While youth activism is now on the rise it is not without its critics, namely adults unable to view young people as equal partners in decision-making. Hints of this are seen in the reaction to student activists at Yale and University of Missouri, chastised to just "grow up." The Harvard paper's top recommendation to support youth organizers is respect and recognition, emphasizing "young people's autonomy, opinions, desires, and actual capacity to take part in and lead" movements for equity and justice. Upholding this critical value of student voice, a coalition of Asian and Pacific Islander students in Portland, Oregon, earned accolades from school-board members for their preparation and powerful anecdotes in a campaign to add ethnic-studies classes to the city's public schools. The group is working with district leaders to bring Asian, black, Latino, Pacific Islander, Arab, Native, and Queer-Trans-People-of-Color studies to all of Portland's high schools within the next four years.

At the root of student organizing is the demand for fair and equal treatment, says Jose Sanchez, the safe schools coordinator for Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, an alliance of mostly high-school students of color. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the area of school discipline. For years Chicago has had gaping racial disparities in suspension rates for black and white children, and a new study from University of Chicago finds the most frequently suspended students are concentrated in schools serving the most vulnerable student populations. Examining this data, VOYCE set out to address the impact of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions on their peers and schools. Illinois Senate Bill 100 was created in 2012 by VOYCE activists who traveled regularly to the state capitol in Springfield to lobby and educate lawmakers.

"When we were advocating for [SB 100] we sometimes weren't taken seriously and faced adultism," says Sanchez, adding that VOYCE students overcame the challenges by sharing their personal stories, combined with data and research aimed at eliminating the school-to-prison pipeline and "structural racism in our education system." In August the VOYCE-drafted bill was signed by Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, ending a bipartisan, hard-fought effort. Starting in the 2016 school year, districts throughout Illinois will be required to eliminate zero-tolerance punishment, minimize out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, and adopt other discipline-related policies.

Brennen, the Student Voice leader, reiterates the critical role that youth serve in bridging education policy and practice-and the historical legacy that lingers over this work. "The Little Rock Nine, Freedom Riders, Children's Crusade of 1963 ... young people put their lives on the line for quality schools," he stresses. "Organizations working to improve education that aren't including student voice are doing it wrong ... [We're] not presuming to be policy experts, but we are experts on how many policies play out at the classroom level. We're a reality check."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Melinda D. Anderson is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and is based in Washington, D.C.

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How the Surge of Student Activism Is Spreading to High-School Campuses-Again

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A 2012 paper on youth and social movements, a collaboration between Lady Gaga's Born this Way Foundation and Harvard University's Berkman Center, found young people to be powerful agents for social change, crediting undocumented-youth sit-ins for convincing President Obama to grant DREAMers a reprieve from deportation in 2012.

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The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was originally created by queer Black women activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi as a call to action after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013. Their battle cry went viral and then turned into a national uprising when Darren Wilson, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager. The movement exploded when Staten Island police officer Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for choking to death Eric Garner.

As the Black Lives Matter movement has grown, Black students have played a pivotal role. For example, at Seattle's Garfield High School, some 1,000 students, led by the Black Student Union (BSU), walked out the day after the non-indictment of Wilson was announced. As 17-year-old Issa George, vice president of the Garfield BSU, told the Seattle Times: "This is our time, as youth, to speak. . . . The waking up that America has done in the past couple of months-something that us as youth get to witness and get to be a part of-has been extremely powerful."

College, high school, and even middle school students have staged protests and school walkouts in cities around the country. According to reporting by the Nation 's George Joseph and others, student activists of the Baltimore Algebra Project held a die-in when their local school board voted to shut down the first of five schools. The board fled, and the students took over their chairs to lead a community forum on the closures.

Black students take these risks because they know their lives and futures are at stake-from police violence on the street; from the dismantling of their communities through foreclosures, gentrification, and unemployment; and from the destruction of their schools through corporate reform.

The School-to-Grave Pipeline

For the past decade, social justice educators have decried the school-to-prison pipeline: a series of interlocking policies-whitewashed, often scripted curriculum that neglects the contributions and struggles of people of color; zero tolerance and racist suspension and expulsion policies; and high-stakes tests-that funnel kids from the classroom to the cellblock. But, with the recent high-profile deaths of young African Americans, a "school-to-grave pipeline" is coming into focus. Mike Brown had just graduated from high school and was preparing to go to college when police killed him. According to a 2012 investigation by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a Black person is killed by law enforcement, security guards, or vigilantes every 28 hours. A recent ProPublica report found that "Blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police."

The Black Lives Matter movement inspires us to fight the school-to-grave pipeline as an example of structural racism, after decades in which anti-racism has been defined in excessively personal terms through anti-bias or diversity training. Anti-bias work focuses primarily, and often exclusively, on internal and interpersonal racism. In other words, if you strive to not be racist in your personal relationships, that's good enough.

There is definitely a place for personal reflection and discussion of racist attitudes and beliefs. And there is no doubt that many individual police officers need anti-bias training and to be held responsible for their actions. But that's not enough, as the statistics on police violence, incarceration, school suspension and dropout rates, inequitable school financing, and school closures make clear. These are all sharp indicators of structural racism. When Michelle Alexander says mass incarceration is "the new Jim Crow," she insists that the racist structures that have existed since slavery have mutated and changed, but they have not been eradicated. We can't understand, teach about, or change what's happening in this country if we don't face this fact. And our students know that. Being an effective teacher in today's society means taking the Black Lives Matter movement seriously.

For all the "students first" rhetoric of the corporate education reformers-who claim their policies are directed at closing the "achievement gap"-they are conspicuously absent from the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the corporate reform agenda is in direct conflict with the goals of the movement. In city after city, Black students are those most affected by the decimation of neighborhood schools, the "no excuses" discipline and rote teaching of charters like KIPP, the substitution of endless test prep for meaningful curriculum, and the imposition of two-years-and-I'm-gone Teach For America corps members on our highest needs students.

Black Lives Matter doesn't just mean Black people don't want to be shot down in the streets by unaccountable police. As anti-racist teachers and students, we need to expand the slogan to include:

Stop closing schools in Black neighborhoods.

Fund schools equitably.

Support African American studies programs and substantive multicultural curriculum.

When activists staged a Black Lives Matter die-in in Detroit last December, Will Daniels, from United Students Against Sweatshops, told the Nation: "As a Black student, my rationale for doing the die-in was that structural racism causes not only police brutality, but also the starving of majority Black schools. This is a subtler form of violence."

Let Black Children Be Children

The murder of Tamir Rice exposes a connection between individual racism and structural racism with important implications for teachers. Tamir was only 12 years old when police showed up at the Cleveland park where he was playing with a toy gun and shot him down within two seconds of their arrival. When his 14-year-old sister ran over, she was tackled to the ground and handcuffed. The officer who called in the shooting described Tamir to the dispatcher as a "Black male, maybe 20."

Overestimating the age, size, and culpability of Black children is a widespread phenomenon, according to The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children, based on research led by Phillip Atiba Goff and Matthew Christian Jackson of UCLA. One of their studies involved 264 mostly white female undergraduates who were asked to assess the age and innocence of white, Black, and Latino boys. The students saw the Black boys as more culpable and overestimated their age by 4.5 years. "Perceptions of the essential nature of children can be affected by race and, for Black children, this can mean they lose the protection afforded by assumed childhood innocence well before they become adults," said Jackson. "Black children may be viewed as adults when they're just 13 years old."

It's not much of a stretch to see how this affects Black children in schools where the majority of their teachers are not African American. Any time teachers or administrators see Black children as older than they are, "just being teenagers" (or pre-teens, or little kids) becomes something threatening that has to be controlled or disciplined. How can children grow and learn if the adults around them see them as older and "guiltier" than they are? What will it take for school communities to eradicate this deeply embedded prejudice?

Why Not "All Lives Matter?"

As the Black Lives Matter movement has grown, some participants have questioned whether "All Lives Matter" is a more inclusive slogan. Although we recognize the serious impact of racism and other forms of oppression on many groups of people in the United States, we think it's important to understand and talk with others about the historical and current realities behind this specific demand. As Alicia Garza, one of the movement's originators, explains:

When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. . . . It is an acknowledgment that one million Black people are locked in cages in this country. . . . It is an acknowledgment that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families. . . . #BlackLivesMatter doesn't mean your life isn't important-it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide-reaching and transformative for society as a whole.

A civil disobedience demonstration that closed down the federal building in Oakland during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend highlighted the connections. Behind a banner reading "Third World for Black Power," protesters identified themselves as Arabs, Filipinas/os, Latinas/os, Koreans, Chinese, Palestinians, and South Asians "for Black resistance." As Filipina activist Rhonda Ramiro said: "The wealth accumulated through the enslavement of Black people in the United States enabled the United States to go around the world and colonize countries like the Philippines. We see our struggle for independence as linked 100 percent."

Within that framework, how teachers apply this understanding will obviously vary from classroom to classroom, depending on how old the children are, their experience and knowledge about the issues involved, and the level of community that has been built in the classroom.

How to Make Black Lives Matter in Our Schools

So what does all this mean in individual classrooms and schools? Here are a few ideas for bringing Black Lives Matter into our teaching:

1. Provide a social justice, anti-racist curriculum that gives students the historical grounding, literacy skills, and space to explore the emotional intensity of feelings around the murder of Black youth by police. At the same time, deep discussion of these heavy issues needs to build on strong classroom community. Students can't launch into discussions of racism without a basis of trust and sharing among students and between students and teacher. That is the slow, steady work of meaningful classroom conversation, purposeful group work, reading and writing about critical social and personal issues, shared writing, and more. Teachers need to nurture communities of mutual respect and empathy.

2. Support students who want to have conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement outside the classroom, in school forums or school clubs. Educators supporting the work of BSUs in schools across the country have helped transform the school climate. Black students' sense of pride and self-worth have helped ignite this new civil rights movement.

3. Raise the Black Lives Matter movement with other teachers at our schools and in our unions. It's not enough to provide students with historical lessons. History is being made today by teachers planning Black Student Lives Matter forums and die-ins, advocating for hiring more Black teachers, and participating in many other actions around the country.

This is the moment social justice educators have been waiting for. When pro football players ran onto the field with their hands up in a demonstration of solidarity with the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" protests that followed Michael Brown's murder, some people in the audience supported them; others were opposed. But everyone knew what they meant. This is a sea change. The topic of police violence against Black people and systemic racism is on the table in a way it hasn't been for a generation. It's time to put aside the test prep and build a school-to-justice pipeline.

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From Rethinking Schools: Black Students' Lives Matter

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The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was originally created by queer Black women activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi as a call to action after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013.

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Mandisa ft. TobyMac, Kirk Franklin - Bleed The Same (Official Lyric Video)

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Jordan Peterson on The Misuse of Unconscious Bias Theory

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The grass is greener ... if you're a student in Detroit, looking across your school district's boundary with the neighboring Grosse Pointe public schools.

Nearly half of Detroit's students live in poverty; that means a family of four lives on roughly $24,000 a year - or less.

In Grosse Pointe, a narrow stretch of real estate nestled between Detroit and Lake St. Clair, just 7 percent of students live at or below the poverty line.

To recap, that's 49 percent vs. 7 percent. Neighbors.

Which is why a new report from the nonprofit EdBuild ranks the Detroit-Grosse Pointe boundary as "the most segregating school district border in the country."

The report, called "Fault Lines," doesn't stop there.

"What we did is built an algorithm that identified all 33,500 school district borders in the country ... and compared their school-aged child poverty rates," says Rebecca Sibilia, the founder and CEO of EdBuild.

From this comparison Sibilia's team compiled a list of the 50 most segregating school boundaries in the nation - in short, the district borders with the largest difference in child poverty rates from one side to the other. In this case, "segregating" is being used to talk specifically about class, not race, though the two often overlap, especially in America's large urban school systems.

Rounding out the top three on the Fault Lines list are the Birmingham City School District in Alabama and ... the Birmingham City School District in Alabama.

In fact, of Birmingham's 13 school district boundaries, six landed on EdBuild's list of the 50 most segregating. That's because the poverty rate of Birmingham's students is 49 percent, while the district is surrounded by several far smaller, far more affluent districts: Vestavia Hills (6 percent child poverty), Mountain Brook (7 percent), Trussville (10 percent), to name a few.

Birmingham's district lines weren't always a story of haves and have nots, at least not this glaring. Most of the affluent districts now bordering the city's schools were once part of the larger Jefferson County School District. But over the years, they have seceded, using their considerable property tax wealth to create new minidistricts.

Interestingly, Birmingham stands out not only because of its multiple appearances but because Alabama is the only Southern state on the list (unless you count Kentucky or Missouri). One reason for this, says Sibilia, is that in much of the South, county borders do double duty as school district borders, "and so there is less opportunity for intentional segregation."

In fact, Sibilia says, she and her team "were shocked. We honestly believed we were going to see a lot of this in the South and very little in the North."

Instead, the vast majority of states on EdBuild's list were Northern, with segregating school lines heavily concentrated in the Rust Belt, particularly Ohio. Dayton's schools have two borders on the list. Ditto Youngstown. Cleveland has four. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, so too did families that could afford to move, creating intense pockets of student poverty.

What can be done about it?

There are no easy fixes, owing in part to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1970, the NAACP sued the state of Michigan; its lawyers argued that Detroit's schools were still unofficially segregated more than 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education because of discriminatory housing policies meant to keep African-Americans out of the suburbs. The proposed remedy: a forced desegregation plan involving dozens of surrounding school districts.

But in one of its most controversial decisions, Milliken v. Bradley in 1974, the court ruled that these largely white, affluent suburban districts could not be forced to desegregate because their boundaries were not deliberately discriminatory. Or had not been proved so.

"The court said that the school district as a concept is basically untouchable," says Ben Justice, an education historian at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education.

Justice calls the Milliken decision "ridiculous" because, he says, "to argue that where people live, particularly by the 1960s, was not the result of racist government policy was simply a lie. Public policy and private industry conspired to create neighborhoods where people could or could not live." And, Justice says, school district lines were (and remain) an extension of that discrimination.

Fast-forward more than 40 years after that ruling. One of the school borders at the heart of that case tops EdBuild's new list: the jagged curve that today separates Detroit's schools, where half of all students live in poverty, from those of Grosse Pointe, where poverty is blissfully uncommon.

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The 50 Most Segregating School Borders In America

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The grass is greener ... if you're a student in Detroit, looking across your school district's boundary with the neighboring Grosse Pointe public schools. Nearly half of Detroit's students live in poverty; that means a family of four lives on roughly $24,000 a year - or less.

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To mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, we explore what race means in the 21st century.

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Why We’re Devoting an Entire Issue of National Geographic to Race

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Why We’re Devoting an Entire Issue of National Geographic to Race

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There is no scientific basis for race. It’s largely a made-up label. And you can't understand 21st-century America without it.

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This story is part of The Race Issue, a special issue ofNational Geographic that explores how race defines, separates, and unites us. Tell us your story with#IDefineMe.

National Geographic strives to deepen our understanding of the world and our role in it. It's difficult to understand 21st-century America without exploring the issue of race. It's the elephant in the room, permeating every aspect of our culture, neighborhoods, schools, businesses, politics, sports, arts, and relationships.

While science tells us that there is no such thing as race, society uses racial distinctions to divide us. Throughout history, groups of people have classified those who were different from them as the "other." On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., we decided to look deeply into these issues with a distinct National Geographic lens. Our stories reflect a view that is global, scientific, and cultural.

What are some of the stories in the issue?

A science story explains that genetically we are not that different. There is no genetic or scientific basis for race. It's largely a made-up label, used to distinguish and divide us. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes, race is not a biological construct but a social one. " So many of the horrors of the past few centuries can be traced to the idea that one race is inferior to another." Even today, she writes, "racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense of self."

Another story explores the anxiety of some white Americans as demographics shift and they see their culture threatened. In just two years the majority of the country's children will be racial or ethnic minorities.

We also examine rising enrollment and increased student activism at historically black colleges and universities; turn a camera to interracial marriages 50 years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which made interracial marriage legal; and document streets around the world that are named after Martin Luther King, Jr., as a testament to his legacy.

Why is this important now?

The story of race in America is topical, relevant, and newsworthy now. Monuments across the country that celebrate a racist past-but that some say also represent an important part of American history-are being toppled. Protests that support and reject white supremacists are being held. The number of people, particularly black men, being killed at the hands of police is being officially counted for the first time. Everyone from professional athletes to high school students are protesting police violence against unarmed black people. A cultural wave in the United States has put race at the forefront of the national discourse.

But is this really a National Geographic story?

National Geographic is committed to chronicling the human journey. That includes exploring the past, present and future of humankind through archaeology, anthropology, global migration and major societal trends-including the evolving role of gender and race, and the political, economic, demographic and geographic ways that race manifests globally.

Many people tell us that National Geographic was their first experience with the world beyond their own community. We take seriously our responsibility to present an accurate and authentic picture of the world. We know we have not always excelled when covering stories of racial difference. Editor Susan Goldberg writes about National Geographic's complicated history in an essay, " For Decades, National Geographic's Coverage Was Racist. It's Time We Acknowledged It."

"It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine's past," she writes. "But it's important to examine our own history before reporting on others."

Why wasn't my community included in this special issue? Is there more coming after the April issue?

Yes. The April issue of the magazine is the first part of a broader series that will explore diversity in America. We will offer multimedia coverage of racial, ethnic, and religious groups and examine their changing roles in 21st-century life. Next month we will tell the stories of the 3.45 million Muslim Americans from more than 75 countries who have been deeply embedded in communities across the country for more than a hundred years. Later we will explore Latinos' growing political and cultural influence as they've become the largest minority group in the United States. We will examine the role of South Asians in medicine, technology, and business as well as American culture at large, and we'll revisit some of the 120,000 Japanese U.S. citizens who were incarcerated during World War II. We also will explore how culture is being redefined in Native American life.

What do you expect to happen by publishing these stories?

Science defines you by your DNA. Society defines you by the color of your skin. Using #IDefineMe, we want people to share their stories with us. We hope to spark a global conversation about how race defines, separates, and unites us.

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Why We're Devoting an Entire Issue of National Geographic to Race

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This story is part of The Race Issue, a special issue ofNational Geographic that explores how race defines, separates, and unites us. Tell us your story with#IDefineMe. National Geographic strives to deepen our understanding of the world and our role in it. It's difficult to understand 21st-century America without exploring the issue of race.

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podcast: The Problem We All Live With (Part 1)

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podcast: The Problem We All Live With (Part 1)

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Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program.

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Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," depicting Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South.

Artwork approved by The Norman Rockwell Family Agency.

More in this Series

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Favorite stories by our longtime contributor and friend David Rakoff.

We spent five months at a high school in Chicago where in the last year 29 current and recent students were shot.

Ira speaks with New York Times Magazine Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones about her years reporting on education and the various kinds of school reforms administrators have tried to close the achievement gap that never seem to work. Nikole says there's one reform that people have pretty much given up on, despite a lot of evidence that it works - school integration. (11 minutes)

Nikole Hannah-Jones reports on a school district that accidentally stumbled on an integration program in recent years. It's the Normandy School District in Normandy, Missouri. Normandy is on the border of Ferguson, Missouri, and the district includes the high school that Michael Brown attended. (30 minutes)

Nikole Hannah-Jones' story on the Normandy school district from the first part of the show continues. (14 minutes)

Nikole also wrote about Normandy for ProPublica, and she wrote an incredibly memorable story about choosing a school for her own daughter for The New York Times.

And Elisa Crouch's article in St Louis Dispatch that documented the day in the life of one Normandy senior is here.

Favorite stories by our longtime contributor and friend David Rakoff.

We spent five months at a high school in Chicago where in the last year 29 current and recent students were shot.

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The Problem We All Live With - Part One - This American Life

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There's one thing that has been proven to cut the achievement gap between black and white students by half: integration.

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Teaching SNCC: The Organization at the Heart of the Civil Rights Revolution

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Teaching SNCC: The Organization at the Heart of the Civil Rights Revolution

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From Rethinking Schools: Teaching SNCC: The Organization at the Heart of the Civil Rights Revolution

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A community dedicated to creating a world that works for all.

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From Rethinking Schools: Inclusivity is Not a Guessing Game

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A community dedicated to creating a world that works for all.

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Editorial: Defending Immigrant Students — in the Streets and in Our Classrooms

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Editorial: Defending Immigrant Students — in the Streets and in Our Classrooms

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In a recent New York Times opinion piece, "'Dreamers' Put Their Trust in DACA.What Now?" journalist Jose Antonio Vargas recounts the story of the first adult he ever told that he was in the United States without papers - Mrs. Denny, his high school choir teacher:

After she announced to our class that we were going to Japan for spring break, I pulled her aside and said that I couldn't go. "I don't have the right passport," I said. Confused, Mrs. Denny replied: "Oh, it's OK, Jose. We'll get you the right passport." I told her it was more complicated than that, that I didn't have any piece of legal document that I could show, that I wasn't supposed to be here. Her eyes widened, her lips pursed, and she didn't say another thing. A couple of days later, to my surprise, she told the class that we were going to Hawaii instead. Years later, she told me: "You were my kid. I wasn't going to leave any of my kids behind."

Vargas' answer to the article's headline question about who Dreamers can trust? Teachers - "the ones who see up close the injustice of life as an undocumented immigrant in this country."

We need to live up to that trust. It has always been an educator's responsibility to act in solidarity with vulnerable students. But with President Donald Trump's September declaration that he will end DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, we are called on to be more audacious, more resolute, and more imaginative in our solidarity with the 800,000 undocumented young people who now face a frightening uncertainty about their future in the United States. Some of these individuals are our students, but some are our colleagues; the Houston Chronicle estimates that 20,000 teachers are covered by DACA. We need to stand with them, too.

And, of course, the hate and fear that Trump's tirades - and policies - are sowing are not limited to the 800,000 Dreamers; Trump hurls his xenophobic bile at all immigrants and their communities. Whether it's the high school student in upstate New York who was taken into custody hours before his senior prom, or the father in Los Angeles snatched immediately after dropping his 12-year-old daughter off at school, Trump's deportation machine is destroying families and communities and making schools a site of struggle.

Following the September announcement on DACA, high school students demonstrated their opposition across the country. Hundreds poured out of their classrooms in protest in Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Seattle, Berkeley, Huntington Beach, and other communities. Educators need to stand with our students, as a reported 80 percent of Berkeley High School teachers did when students, organized by the Berkeley High School Chicano Latino United Voices, linked arms, formed a human chain around the school, and chanted, "No ban, no wall, education for all!"

Now is a good time to ask ourselves: What would a school district look like that acts in solidarity with our immigrant students? What would a school look like? What would our curriculum look like?

Milwaukee is one of many school districts where students, teachers, community members, and progressive school board members - including Rethinking Schools editor Larry Miller and Rethinking Schools contributor Tony Báez - organized to pass a resolution to establish Milwaukee Public Schools as a "safe haven," which will not "allow any individual or organization to enter a school site if the educational setting would be disrupted by that visit." The resolution provides for strict limits on the access of ICE agents to Milwaukee schools and students in order to "provide for the emotional and physical safety of students and staff." Other pieces of the resolution call for school district-sponsored "Know Your Rights" forums for students and family members, designated resource people for immigrant students in every school, and districtwide professional development on "pathways to citizenship, opportunities available for college and training, financial aid, rights, and opportunities for immigrant and refugee students."

Our schools need to be fortresses of safety, warmth, and determination, effecting the protections and affirmative actions like those called for in the Milwaukee resolution. And we need to call on immigrant communities to teach us how we can support them - "Nothing about us without us," in the spirit of the expression coined by disability rights activists in the 1990s.

We need to press school districts to initiate measures to support our immigrant students and their communities. But we needn't wait for them to act. At a teacher-community forum on immigration rights in Philadelphia following Trump's election, organized by the Caucus of Working Educators' Immigration Justice Committee, a Mexican mother of a 4th grader told participants through an interpreter: "I don't know what to say to her or what answers to give. I felt the support of [her] teachers, but also the rejection of other teachers - indifference and discrimination. But I feel that your care as teachers - as angels - who surround my daughter can outweigh the indifference and discrimination from others."

In every way we can think of, we need to be those activist angels.

Part of our response needs to be curricular. Whether it is Hmong, Somali, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chilean, Guatemalan, Congolese, Honduran, Iraqi, or Mexican immigrants, our students need to appreciate the deep complicity of the United States in disrupting the societies that have forced so many people to flee their homelands. In an excellent In These Times article, " Don't Punish the Dreamers - Punish the Corporations Driving Forced Migration," David Bacon offers an indictment of the economic policies that have carpet-bombed the Mexican countryside.

Bacon writes: "It's impossible to understand the outrageous injustice of deporting the Dreamers without acknowledging the reasons why they live in the United States to begin with."

According to World Bank figures, in just a few years, from 1992-94 - immediately preceding the 1994 implementation of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement - to 1996-98, extreme rural poverty in Mexico rose from 35 percent to 55 percent. By 2010, 53 million Mexicans lived in poverty. NAFTA required the Mexican government to abandon price supports for Mexican farmers at the very moment Mexico was being flooded with cheap corn, subsidized through the U.S. farm bill. Between 1992 and 2008, U.S. corn exports to Mexico increased more than fivefold. In the sick, contradictory logic of "free trade," in NAFTA's first decade, the price Mexican farmers received for corn fell by 66 percent, as the price of corn tortillas jumped 279 percent.

In some commentary about the "innocence" of the DACA Dreamers - who, it is said, arrived in the United States through no "fault" of their own - lies an implied indictment of Dreamers' parents. But as Bacon summarizes, Mexican "parents aren't criminals any more than their children are. They chose survival over hunger, and sought to keep their families together and give them a future." A similar defense can be made for parents in other lands where the United States overthrew elected governments, propped up dictators, bombed, and destroyed people's livelihoods with cheap produce.

This critical context is not just for adults. Through role plays, simulations, first-person readings, poetry, short stories, imaginative writing, and more, we need to find ways to share it with our students. [See the Rethinking Schools book, The Line Between Us: Teaching the Border and Mexican Immigration, and articles like "Who's Stealing Our Jobs - NAFTA and Xenophobia."] Part of expressing solidarity with immigrant students and communities means helping young people recognize the conditions that led immigrants to migrate in the first place.

Creating curriculum that addresses these vital issues needn't occur in isolation. In Portland, Oregon, teachers have been meeting to develop and try out curriculum through the auspices of the Portland Association of Teachers (NEA) and the Oregon Writing Project. A role play is easier to write when its outlines are discussed as a group, and its writing is distributed through a number of individual teachers. And results can be shared through the network of teaching social justice conferences that have sprouted throughout the country, among other venues.

Racist and repressive immigration policies have had deep roots and bipartisan backing in the United States for decades, including during the Obama administrations. But Trump's campaign of hate, hysteria, and militarized enforcement have made his anti-immigrant policies a centerpiece of his administration's efforts to consolidate a reactionary takeover of U.S. political and social institutions. They need to be resisted as fiercely as we resist his efforts to expand mass incarceration, defend police violence, and make war on the poor.

As Jose Antonio Vargas reminds us, teachers "are the ones who see up close the injustice of life as an undocumented immigrant in this country." In our unions, in our communities, in our school districts, in our schools, and in our classrooms, we have opportunities to act on our insights and our commitments. There is no time to waste.

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From Rethinking Schools: Editorial: Defending Immigrant Students - in the Streets and in Our Classrooms

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In a recent New York Times opinion piece, "'Dreamers' Put Their Trust in DACA.What Now?" journalist Jose Antonio Vargas recounts the story of the first adult he ever told that he was in the United States without papers - Mrs.

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

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

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Learning for Justice | Education Resources

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

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We are all all alike on the inside!

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It will be easy to start with this really great egg activity. A great visual demonstration is always tops in our book here at Kids Activities Blog.

1 white egg

1 brown egg

plate

MORE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY ACTIVITIES

Discuss differences when you are out and about. When you see someone in a wheelchair, using sign, dressed in their cultural attire, blind....

Eat at a restaurant from a different culture of your own.

Attend cultural events.

Read books that discuss different cultures, languages, colors...

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WHAT IS DIVERSITY? {EGG ACTIVITY FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY} - Kids Activities

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It will be easy to start with this really great egg activity . A great visual demonstration is always tops in our book here at Kids Activities Blog. 1 white egg 1 brown egg plate MORE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY ACTIVITIES Discuss differences when you are out and about.

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I thought this was very interesting. Stereotypes about the way we speak. Let me ax you what do you think?

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I thought this was very interesting. Stereotypes about the way we speak. Let me ax you what do you think?

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http://www.mtv.com/episodes/h4h6di/decoded-why-do-people-say-ax-instead-of-ask-ep-601

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How to think about discipline disparities

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How to think about discipline disparities

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Something to think about....

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On average, due to a host of factors beyond their own control, including poverty, fatherlessness, and trauma, poor children of color are more likely to misbehave at school than are their peers. Saying so doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you a realist. https://t.co/8Q2gPFCfrK

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On average, due to a host of factors beyond their own control, including poverty, fatherlessness, and trauma, poor children of color are more likely to misbehave at school than are their peers. Saying so doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you a realist. https://t.co/8Q2gPFCfrK https://t.co/v3GEvB1r6u

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On average, due to a host of factors beyond their own control, including poverty, fatherlessness, and trauma, poor children of color are more likely to misbehave at school than are their peers. Saying so doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you a realist. https://t.co/8Q2gPFCfrK pic.twitter.com/v3GEvB1r6u
— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) December 8, 2017

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On average, due to a host of factors beyond their own control, including poverty, fatherlessness, and trauma, poor children of color are more likely to misbehave at school than are their peers. Saying so doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you a realist. https://t.co/8Q2gPFCfrK https://t.co/v3GEvB1r6u

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
On average, due to a host of factors beyond their own control, including poverty, fatherlessness, and trauma, poor children of color are more likely to misbehave at school than are their peers. Saying so doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you a realist. https://t.co/8Q2gPFCfrK https://t.co/v3GEvB1r6u

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
On average, due to a host of factors beyond their own control, including poverty, fatherlessness, and trauma, poor children of color are more likely to misbehave at school than are their peers. Saying so doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you a realist. https://t.co/8Q2gPFCfrK

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IISC has long believed that this image, illustrating the difference between equality and equity, is worth a thousand words. As a gift to the world of equity practitioners, IISC engaged artist Angus Maguire to draw a new version of an old favorite (since we could only find pixelated versions of the original). Please feel free to download the high-resolution image and use in your presentations.

Would you like to use this image somewhere?

This image is free to use with attribution: "Interaction Institute for Social Change | Artist: Angus Maguire." For online use please provide links: interactioninstitute.org and madewithangus.com.

We love hearing stories about how the image is being used so please get in touch with us and let us know how you used it. We especially enjoy hearing about how this image helps to start conversations about equity and equality. We're on social media and email (comms@interactioninstitute.org and angus@madewithangus.com).
Updates since this article was first published:
20 May 2016: We were notified via Twitter that the original creator of the original graphic wrote a piece cataloging the evolution of the meme. Here's the piece. It even encompasses our version and a few riffs on it, including our followup collaboration with the Center for Story-Based Strategy & Angus, #the4thbox.

In the News

Cynthia Silva Parker was quoted by Sustainable Cities Network in an article: Infusing Equity into the Urban Planning Process.
What is equity? In the simplest terms, it means fairness, which is not necessarily the same thing as equality. It's not about everybody getting the same thing," Parker said. "It's about everybody getting what they need in order to improve the quality of their situation." One difficulty in including equity goals in planning is that the people who need them most can be hard to involve. Traditionally, planners involve stakeholders by inviting them to public meetings and asking them to read and comment on plans. This can be a time-consuming process, and people who work multiple jobs and lack transportation and child-care options are unlikely to show up at the library for a three-hour meeting. And even if they're able to offer their time, they may not be willing.
"Trust is the No. 1 thing, 'Why are you asking, and will it make a difference,' " Parker said. "When we got started, there was a bit of interesting community jargon: 'Planning Fatigue.' People were tired of being asked to come to meetings, asked to share their vision, asked to draw another picture of a beautiful community, and then nothing is going to happen, or it's going to take 15 years and they're going to say, 'We don't even remember that we were part of that.'"

We hope you will consider enrolling in one of our public trainings this year.

Over the past 25 years, we have developed a lens through which we facilitate social change and we bring it to every engagement. IISC invites groups and leaders to shift power dynamics, focus on building networks, and magnify love as a force for social change. Using this collaborative change lens, we see leaders overcome challenges and have astounding impact.

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IISC has long believed that this image, illustrating the difference between equality and equity, is worth a thousand words. As a gift to the world of equity practitioners, IISC engaged artist Angus Maguire to draw a new version of an old favorite (since we could only find pixelated versions of the original).

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My life is full of sweet blessings from God - both big and small. I'm a wife, mother, step-mother, daughter, sister, friend, former teacher or gifted and talented and an Instructional Technology Coordinator. I'm a technology nerd, a fast talker, and an insomniac. I'm a southern girl who loves to cook for my friends and family. I'm addicted to Sonic Diet Coke and proud of it. I'm a bit OCD and baking is my therapy. No matter how crazy life gets, blessings always abound in my life! I am blessed indeeed!

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Fair isn't... Free Printable Classroom Poster - Teach Junkie

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As a teacher and a mother I'm sure I've heard the worlds "No FAIR!" at least 3,492 {or more} times! Those words are such a common refrain that I think kids truly don't understand the meaning of FAIR. This free printable classroom poster says, "Fair isn't everybody getting the same thing.....

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This Teacher Taught His Class A Powerful Lesson About Privilege

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37,317 points * 890 comments - This Teacher Taught His Class A Powerful Lesson About Privilege - 9GAG has the best funny pics, gifs, videos, gaming, anime, manga, movie, tv, cosplay, sport, food, memes, cute, fail, wtf photos on the internet!

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Post by JungleVT.

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How Do You Visualize a World You Haven't Seen Yet?

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How Do You Visualize a World You Haven't Seen Yet?

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Inequity in Education

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A shift is taking place to include more exposure to diverse authors and book characters.

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For 20 years, Read Across America has been synonymous with youngsters wearing red and white striped hats sitting down for story time on March 2, Dr. Seuss's birthday. But this fall, the biggest national literacy awareness program, sponsored by the National Education Association (NEA), will be shifting its focus toward a year-round promotion of diverse children's books. It's a change resulting from both a heightened awareness of representation in kid lit, as well as growing scrutiny of racial imagery in the work of the beloved children's book author.

Katie Ishizuka has been analyzing Seuss' body of work for the past year. Ishizuka [a cousin of Kathy Ishizuka, SLJ's executive editor] and her husband, Ramon Stephens, founded the Conscious Kid Social Justice Library, a subscription service which sends its subscribers monthly shipments of titles featuring multicultural characters. Stephens is a Ph.D. student in education at the University of California at San Diego, home to the Theodor Seuss Geisel Library, where he first came across a collection of the cartoonist's early work-World War II political cartoons, featuring slurs and racist drawings of Japanese Americans, portraying them as a danger to nation.

Ishizuka, whose grandparents and other relatives were sent by the U.S. government to internment camps during World War II, was very upset. "My grandmother was fired from her job at Seattle schools [and] then incarcerated," she says. "This had real impact on my personal family. Thinking about how widely beloved and celebrated Seuss is as an author was another blow."

In March 2016, Ishizuka wrote a piece on the website Blavity about Seuss' anti-Japanese cartoons, along with work that used the N-word and depicted blacks at a slave auction or rendered to resemble monkeys. She also pointed out images portraying Middle Eastern men as camel-riding sultans and women as hyper-sexualized harem dwellers. But what Ishizuka found even more troubling were racist images hidden in plain sight in Seuss's popular picture books. Ishizuka, who holds a Master's degree in social work, conducted a critical race analysis of 50 children's books by Seuss and found that 98 percent of the human characters were white, and only two percent were people of color.

The Cat in the Hat and blackface minstrelsy

"In addition to how people of color are portrayed in his children's books through Orientalist and anti-Black stereotypes and caricatures, they are almost always presented as subservient, and peripheral to, the white characters," concludes Ishizuka in her study. She points out that the Cat in the Hat, perhaps Seuss' most famous character, is based on minstrel stereotypes. "The Cat's physical appearance, including the Cat's oversized top hat, floppy bow tie, white gloves, and frequently open mouth, mirrors actual blackface performers; as does the role he plays as 'entertainer' to the white family-in whose house he doesn't belong," says Ishizuka. She isn't the first scholar to point out racial stereotypes in Dr. Seuss' picture books. Kansas State University English professor Phillip Nel recently published a book Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism in Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, which examines The Cat in the Hat 's roots in blackface minstrelsy.

However the cat, along with his striped headwear, is also associated with Read Across America, just as Clifford the Big Red Dog is synonymous with the literacy organization Reading is Fundamental.

"One of the reasons we partnered with Seuss 20 years ago in 1997 was to kick-start this program," says Steven Grant, a NEA spokesperson, who has also managed the Read Across America program since 2005. "That was the strategy up front, so kids would see Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat and spark some attention." The program has successfully reached children nationwide; Grant estimates that 45 million students and teachers take part in Read Across America events each year.

But not all families think the author should be celebrated. In March, two Japanese-American children in South Pasadena, CA, saw their school's Dr. Seuss Week in conjunction with Read Across America as a chance to educate their classmates about the cartoonist's role in fanning fears that led to the internment of Japanese Americans. "Their teachers and administrators shut them down, wouldn't allow them to hand out the flyers, and told them school was not the appropriate place for that," says Ishizuka. "To me, this was alarming and represented a serious racial justice issue." Ishizuka also points out that black children may feel uncomfortable going to school on Read Across America Day. "It's very dehumanizing for black children to be expected to wear one of those hats."

In April, Ishizuka sent a copy of her 43-page analysis, along with a compendium of diverse books resources, to the NEA, which organizes Read Across America. "Last year was the first year in my 14 years [with NEA] that I had seen so much bubble up as far as concerned interests," says Grant, who praises Ishizuka's recommendations for suggested authors and partner organizations to bring wider representation to the event.

Even before Ishizuka sent the material, NEA's Read Across America advisory committee (comprised of teachers, education support professionals, librarians, and others) had already been discussing issues surrounding Seuss' early work, based on Richard H. Minear's 2001 book Dr. Seuss Goes to War, which critiques the cartoonist's early political drawings, including the anti-Japanese works.

Grant adds that that for the past two years, the NEA board has already shifting Read Across America's mission towards promoting diverse literature and reaching a broader range of readers.

Ishizuka and Stephens emphasize that they're not trying to ban Dr. Seuss. "It's not about reading or not reading certain books, it's about raising awareness around the social and systemic bias that such books promote," says Stephens. "Dr. Seuss and whiteness is a reflection of the overwhelming silence in literacy regarding matters of race, especially with both young people and white people."

This fall, for the 20th anniversary of the program, Read Across America will place greater emphasis on year-round literacy with its annual calendar. In its 10th year in print, the calendar features monthly book recommendations along with online resources. The 2017-18 calendar features the theme of "Building a Nation of Diverse Readers" and gives monthly suggested titles for elementary, middle school, and high school students. For example, September's choices include All the Way to Havana by Margarita Engle, The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet by Carmen Agra Deedy, and The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande. Read Across America will also be highlighting literacy events, such as El día de los niños/El día de los libros. NEA will distribute 80,000 calendars.

NEA to offer $60K in grants for diverse books

Grant says raising exposure for diverse books is one thing, but putting them in the hands of educators is another. "In a lot of cases, the teacher has to buy the books with her or her own money," he explains. During the 2017-18 school year, NEA will award $60,000 in grants for diverse books. Over the past two years, the organization gave a total of $250,000 in funds for diverse books, thanks to a contribution from Walden Media and the Weinstein Company. Reading is Fundamental will also offer digital resources to accompany the calendar, and First Book and the publisher Lee & Low Books will provide diverse titles at a discount for Title I schools.

Like the story of the black-and-white cartoon cat, the NEA is finding that something that started off as whimsical fun might be challenging to put back into a box. Grant says Read Across America has never required participants to use Seuss material, but "after 20 years, it's easy for some folks to just pull Seuss stuff off the bookshelves from last year." The annual Read Across America Day event may be hard to untangle from its mascot, particularly since the annual event takes place on Dr. Seuss' birthday. The Read Across America logo -along with all the event merchandise sold on the website-features the black-and-white feline sitting on top of a silhouette of the United States.

Since 1997, the NEA has contracted with Seuss Enterprises for the rights to use the images without royalty fees. The current agreement runs through August 2018. "This is really going to be a transitional year for us," explains Grant. "We're going to be trying different things and moving in some different directions to see if that works." That could include collaborations with other authors or illustrators to re-brand Read Across America Day to appeal to a more diverse student body. "The goal is to encourage the educator, because we can't force him or her to do anything."

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Is the Cat in the Hat Racist? Read Across America Shifts Away From Dr. Seuss and Toward Diverse Books

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For 20 years, Read Across America has been synonymous with youngsters wearing red and white striped hats sitting down for story time on March 2, Dr. Seuss's birthday. But this fall, the biggest national literacy awareness program, sponsored by the National Education Association (NEA), will be shifting its focus toward a year-round promotion of diverse children's books.

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