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Aspire's Equity Focus at a Glance

Rooted in Mission: Committed to high-quality education in historically underserved communities, especially for Latinx and Black students.

Championing Black Excellence: Celebrates and honors Black culture across schools.

Equity in Action: Identifies and addresses systemic issues impacting students, staff, and schools.

Inclusive Learning Environments: Supports student growth, college readiness, and belonging.

Family as Partners: Prioritizes meaningful engagement and communication with families.

Investing in Educators: Builds an internal pipeline to recruit and retain diverse teachers.

Innovative Support for Students with Disabilities: Uses a co-teaching model to ensure access to grade-level learning and close achievement gaps.

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Melissa Medina, Aspire Vanguard College Preparatory Academy English teacher and 2021 Don Shalvey Award Recipient

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Our Collective Movement - 2021-2022 Gratitude Report - Aspire Public Schools

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Aspire Public Schools is a K-12 school system focused on improving public education by preparing underserved students for college, training highly effective teachers and sharing innovative best practices.

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Aspire Public Schools highlights its commitment to equity, acknowledging that society provides varying opportunities based on factors beyond individual control.

Aspire's "Our Collective Movement" report emphasizes their anti-racist core values and dedication to addressing opportunity gaps for Black and Latinx students, exacerbated by learning loss and trauma during the pandemic.

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After a year of remote and hybrid learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, school systems are designing plans for reopening. https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-continues-aggressive-plan-safely-reopen-schools

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The video of the police shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago was released days after the killing of Duarte Wright in Brooklyn Center, MN and the pepper spraying of Lt. Caron Nazario in Windsor, VA all happening during the trial of Derek Chauvin. Ma'Kiah Bryant is shot within hours of Chauvin's conviction reading.

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Derek Chauvin is convicted on three accounts of murdering George Floyd.

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A mob of pro-Trump extremists stormed the Capitol, where Congress had convened to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The insurrectionists clashed with police, scaled walls, broke windows, and carried Confederate and Trump flags throughout the Capitol’s halls. Members of Congress and their staffers sheltered in place before being evacuated from the building.

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The White House’s Office of Management and Budget notifies agency heads Sept. 4 that federal workplaces will no longer be allowed to conduct “divisive, anti-American propaganda” training that focuses on race theory and white privilege. The Office of Personnel Management must review and approve training materials going forward.

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Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) and Asian Pacific Policy & Plannig Council (A3PCON) launch “Stop AAPI Hate”website to track incidents of COVID-19 discrimination.

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Millions have mobilized in support of Black Lives Matter in protests that still continue to today. Data suggest that over 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations, making it the largest movement in the country’s history, the New York Times reports.

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George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and more murdered by police.

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The World Health Organization declares COVID-19 a pandemic and President Donald Trump declares it a national emergency. As countries around the world order businesses to shut down and people to stay at home, schools plunge into remote learning. The pandemic itself--and the shift to remote learning--shine a light on the educational inequities that affect black and brown children.

A report published by the Society for Research on Child Development states: "Black Americans are contracting and dying from COVID-19 at rates that far exceed other racial and ethnic groups. Through inequitable policies and practices, Black Americans are forced into conditions that elevate their risk for COVID-19, and consequently, place Black children at the epicenter of loss in multiple domains of life."

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December 2018, California's updated School Dashboard identified 374 school districts and county offices of education (out of approximately 1,000) as needing additional assistance through the state's System of Support. The higher number in 2018 was largely attributed to the inclusion of new indicators on the Dashboard, specifically chronic absenteeism and college/career readiness. Support was differentiated in the Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP).

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Violence erupted in the college town of Charlottesville on Aug. 12 after hundreds of white nationalists and their supporters who gathered for a "Unite the Right" rally over plans to remove a Confederate statue were met by counter-protesters, leading Virginia’s governor to declare a state of emergency. James Fields Jr., ultimately pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes and was sentenced to life in prison for ramming his car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 other people.

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State Board of Education adopts the California English Learner Roadmap

Voters approve Proposition 58, repealing bilingual education restrictions enacted by Proposition 227 in 1998. This change allowed school districts more flexibility in designing English language programs, including the option to offer dual-language programs for both English learners and native English speakers.

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A Washington Post analysis has found that black Americans are disproportionately affected by police violence. The data focuses specifically on police shootings and it mainly relies on police reports, news accounts and social media postings. Since the start of 2015, 4,728 people across the country have died in police shootings and approximately half - 2,385 - were white. Out of the remainder, 1,252 were black, 877 were Hispanic and 214 were from other racial groups. The data looks different as a share of the population, however. Black Americans account for less than 13 percent of the population but they are shot and killed by the police at a rate that's over twice as high as for white Americans.

In July 2014, a cellphone video captured some of Eric Garner's final words as New York City police officers sat on his head and pinned him to the ground on a sidewalk: "I can't breathe." On May 25 of 2020, the same words were spoken by George Floyd, who pleaded for release as an officer knelt on his neck and pinned him to the ground on a Minneapolis street for 8 min and 46 seconds. This event continues to lead to calls for actions across the country and the world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

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Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica's Miseducation website is an interactive database that examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation/

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The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed by President Barack Obama on December 10, 2015. This bipartisan measure reauthorizes the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the nation’s national education law and longstanding commitment to equal opportunity for all students. The new law builds on key areas of progress in recent years, made possible by the efforts of educators, communities, parents, and students across the country.
STATE LEADERS HAVE TO FOLLOW CERTAIN REQUIREMENTS:
- Report results for more student subgroups
- Continue to have 95 percent state test participation
- Identify the lowest-performing schools, approve locally developed improvement plans, and monitor the schools’ progress
- Report data on the distribution of effective teachers
- Consult a prescribed list of stakeholders when developing the state’s plans.
- Makes funds more flexible (e.g., Title II and Title IV transferable)

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In 2014, the California State Board of Education suspended the API and began work on a new accountability system that includes measurements of academic achievement, school climate, parent involvement, implementation of academic standards and other indicators of school conditions and student performance. In March 2017, state education officials released the California School Dashboard

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The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, 18 U.S.C. § 249 was signed into law by President Barack Obama. Conceived as a response to the murders of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., both in 1998, the measure expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. Shepard was a gay student who was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming;  Byrd was an African American man who was tied to a truck by two white supremacists, dragged behind it, and decapitated in Jasper, Texas.

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the California State Board of Education adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for mathematics and English language arts. This adoption marked a significant change in educational standards, aiming to prepare students for college and careers in the 21st century and to address longstanding achievement gaps.

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Implementing the Common Core State Standards in California - Public Policy Institute of California

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The Common Core State Standards (CCSS)—adopted in 2010—are similar to California’s current K–12 standards, but their emphasis on conceptual understanding and problem solving will require changes in classroom instruction. California’s transition to the CCSS has gotten off to a slow start. Survey data suggest that many teachers will deliver the new standards for the first time in 2014–15—the first year of CCSS-based testing. Like other states, California will probably see a drop in test scores under the new standards. But as the transition continues beyond 2014–15, the hope is that the new standards and tests will create incentives that lead to higher student achievement.

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The state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards was launched in 2009 by state leaders, including governors and state commissioners of education from 48 states

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President Bush signs the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, requiring states to track progress of subgroups, including minorities and special education students.

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This five-year research study (1996-2001) focused on English language learners (ELLs/LEPs) long-term academic achievement in Grades K-12. This study includes qualitative and quantitative research findings from five urban and rural research sites in the northeast, northwest, south-central, and southeast U.S. It was designed to answer urgent policy questions of interest to the federal and state governments of the United States, since this demographic group is projected to be 40 percent of the school-age population by the 2030s and most U.S. schools are currently under-educating this student group. Overall, this research provides whole school district views of policy decision-making that is data-driven regarding designing, implementing, evaluating, and reforming the education of Language Minority students.

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Since 2000, 71 predominately white communities have attempted to secede from their school districts. Of these, 47 communities have been successful at splitting from their districts.

States such as Alabama make it easy for a town to create its own district.

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The lawsuit Williams v. California, filed in 2000 by the ACLU and other civil rights organizations, argued that thousands of California public school students, particularly those in low-income communities and communities of color, were being denied equal educational opportunity. The case was settled in 2004, resulting in a landmark agreement and new legislation aimed at addressing the issues raised in the lawsuit.

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Williams v. California: Lessons From Nine Years of Implementation | ACLU of Northern CA

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Students in all of California’s public schools deserve at least these basic necessities for educational opportunity. The plaintiffs in the historic Williams v. California lawsuit fought for this principle, and on September 29, 2004, when legislation implementing the settlement agreement was signed into law, they helped to usher in a new era for public education in California.

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Aspire Public Schools was founded to open and operate small, high-quality, tuition-free charter schools in low-income neighborhoods

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Gloria Ladson Billings introduces the theory of "culturally relevant pedagogy". It rests on 3 criteria or propositions: a) students must experience academic success; b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order.

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During this decade many districts won release from court ordered desegregation plans.

A report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project said that while schools in the South still have more integration of African-Americans and whites than before the desegregation movement, they lost ground in the 1990s.

The report also highlights that segregation of Latinos from non-Hispanic whites in schools is even greater than it is for African-Americans.

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A Nation at Risk is published. President Ronald Reagan developed an education reform program because of the report targeting schools that were deemed failing. The term "at-risk" was then expanded to refer to "failing" students themselves.

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In June 1982, the Supreme Court issued Plyler v. Doe, a landmark decision holding that states cannot constitutionally deny students a free public education on account of their immigration status. By a 5-4 vote, the Court found that any resources which might be saved from excluding undocumented children from public schools were far outweighed by the harms imposed on society at large from denying them an education.

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Proposition 13 passes, leading to disinvestment in public education that moves California from #1 in per pupil spending to #47 in 2018.

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The Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted in 1978 because of the disproportionately high rate of forced removal of Native American children from their traditional homes and essentially from Native American cultures as a whole.

It also gave Native American parents the legal right to deny their children’s placement in off-reservation schools and boarding schools.

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In response to civil rights legislation, the federal Office of Management and Budget issues Directive 15, creating standard government race and ethnic categories for the first time. The categories are meant to aid agencies, but they are arbitrary, inconsistent, and based on varying assumptions. For example, "Black" is defined as a "racial group" but "white" is not. "Hispanic" reflects Spanish colonization and excludes non-Spanish parts of Central and South America; while "American Indian or Alaskan Native" requires "cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition" - a condition of no other category. The categories are amended in 1996, and "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander" is added.

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The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a law that makes available a free appropriate public education to eligible children with disabilities throughout the nation and ensures special education and related services to those children.The IDEA governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education, and related services to more than 6.5 million eligible infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities.Infants and toddlers, birth through age 2, with disabilities and their families receive early intervention services under IDEA Part C. Children and youth ages 3 through 21 receive special education and related services under IDEA Part B.

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Lau v. Nichols was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court unanimously decided that the lack of supplemental language instruction in public school for students with limited English proficiency violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court held that since non-English speakers were denied a meaningful education, the disparate impact caused by the school policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the school district was demanded to provide students with "appropriate relief".

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In 1974, Milliken v. Bradley clarified the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, confirming that segregation was allowed if it was not considered an explicit policy of each school district. The Court held that the school systems were not responsible for desegregation across district lines unless it could be shown that they had each deliberately engaged in a policy of segregation.

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The Equal Educational Opportunities Act is passed. The act guaranteed education free of bias and discrimination, or unequal treatment, for all people. The EEOA is one of a set of federal laws that works to prohibit discrimination in schools. Specifically, EEOA bans discrimination based on race, nationality, color, or sex against faculty, staff, and students. It requires schools to take action to overcome barriers which prevent equal protection. The legislation has been particularly important in protecting the rights of students with limited English proficiency.

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The Oakland Community School was opened in 1973 and operated by the Black Panther Party in Oakland. The alternative school grew out of No. 5 in the Black Panther

Party’s Ten Point Program, which called for educating black and poor people about

their true history in the United

States.

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By Adam Sanchez, Jesse Hagopian

Illustrator: Bettmann | Getty Images

On Monday April 1, 1967, "George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, California . . . heard 10 gunshots. Sometime after 5:00 a.m., George came upon his older brother Denzil Dowell lying in the street, shot in the back and head. Police from the county sheriff's department were there, but no ambulance had been called. . . . [The] sheriff's office reported that deputy sheriffs Mel Brunkhorst and Kenneth Gibson had arrived at the scene at 4:50 a.m. on a tip from an unidentified caller about a burglary in progress. They claimed that when they arrived, Denzil Dowell and another man ran from the back of a liquor store and refused to stop when ordered to halt. Brunkhorst fired one blast from a shotgun, striking Dowell and killing him. . . . For the Dowells, the official explanation did not add up, and community members helped the family investigate. . . . There was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise, at Bill's Liquors, the store that Dowell had allegedly been robbing. Further, the police had reported that Dowell had not only run but also jumped two fences to get away before being shot down. But Dowell had a bad hip, a limp, and the family claimed that he could not run, let alone jump fences. . . . A doctor who worked on the case told the family that judging from the way the bullets had entered Dowell's body, Dowell had been shot with his hands raised. . . . Mrs. Dowell publicly announced, 'I believe the police murdered my son.' . . . A white jury took little time deciding that the killing of unarmed Dowell was 'justifiable homicide' because the police officers on the scene had suspected that he was in the act of committing a felony. Outraged, the Black community demanded justice."
-Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
Helping North Richmond's Black community demand justice for the killing of Denzil Dowell was one of the first major organizing campaigns of the Black Panther Party, and the first issue of The Black Panther newspaper, which at its height around 1970 had a circulation of 140,000 copies per week, asked, "WHY WAS DENZIL DOWELL KILLED?" Anyone reading the story of Dowell today can't help but draw parallels to the unarmed Black men and women regularly murdered by police. The disparity between the police's story and the victim's family's, the police harassment Dowell endured before his murder, the jury letting Dowell's killer off without punishment, even the reports that Dowell had his hands raised while he was gunned down, eerily echo the police killings today that have led to the explosion of the movement for Black lives.

Yet when we learn about the early years of the Panthers, the organizing they did in Richmond - conducting their own investigation into Dowell's death, confronting police who harassed Dowell's family, helping mothers in the community organize against abuse at the local school, organizing armed street rallies in which hundreds filled out applications to join the Party - is almost always absent. Born just over 50 years ago, the history of the Black Panther Party holds vital lessons for today's movement to confront racism and police violence - yet textbooks either misrepresent or minimize the significance of the Panthers. Armed with a revolutionary socialist ideology, they fought in Black communities across the nation for giving the poor access to decent housing, health care, education, and much more. And as the Panthers grew, so did the issues they organized around.

This local organizing that the Panthers engaged in has been largely erased, yet it is precisely what won them such widespread support. By 1970, a Market Dynamics/ABC poll found that Black people judged the Panthers to be the organization "most likely" to increase the effectiveness of the Black liberation struggle, and two-thirds showed admiration for the party. Coming in the midst of an all-out assault on the Panthers from the white press and law enforcement - including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's claim that the Panthers were "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" - this support was remarkable.

The Textbook Version of the BPP

A few of the major textbooks don't even mention the Black Panthers, while most spend only a sentence or two on the organization. Even the small number that do devote a few paragraphs to the Party give little context for their actions and greatly distort their ideology.

Textbooks often associate the Panthers with violence and racial separatism. For example, according to Teachers' Curriculum Institute's History Alive! The United States Through Modern Times, "Black Power groups formed that embraced militant strategies and the use of violence. Organizations such as the Black Panthers rejected all things white and talked of building a separate black nation." While ignoring that the Panthers believed in using violence only in self-defense, this passage also attempts to divide the Panthers from "nonviolent" civil rights groups. The Panthers didn't develop out of thin air but evolved from their relationships with other civil rights organizations, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The name and symbol of the Panthers were adopted from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), an independent political organization SNCC helped organize in Alabama, which was also called the "Black Panther Party." Furthermore, SNCC allied with the Panthers in 1968 and although the alliance lasted only five months, it was a crucial time for the growth of the Panthers.

The passage from History Alive! also incorrectly paints the Panthers as anti-white, erasing their important work building multiracial coalitions. Most famously, Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton organized the Rainbow Coalition that included the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Young Patriots - a group of poor, Southern, white migrants. The Black Panthers helped the Patriots set up their own community service programs. In California, the Panthers made an important alliance with the mostly white Peace and Freedom Party, which in 1968 ran Eldridge Cleaver for President in an attempt to provide an antiwar, anti-racist alternative to the Democratic Party. An editorial in The Black Panther explained: "The increasing isolation of the black radical movement from the white radical movement was a dangerous thing, playing into the power structure's game of divide and conquer."

Other textbooks also erase the socialist character of the Black Panther Party. Holt McDougal's The Americans reads, "Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded a political party known as the Black Panthers to fight police brutality in the ghetto." While the textbook later acknowledges other things the Panthers advocated, by reducing the reason for their founding to fighting police brutality, The Americans profoundly diminishes the important ideological basis of the party. More clearly than any other national civil rights organization, the Panthers linked the fight against racism with the fight against capitalism. As Panther Huey Newton explained, "We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme. We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both." The Panthers understood that Black people could not achieve socialism on their own and their work building multiracial anti-capitalist coalitions flowed from that analysis. In fact, the Panthers developed an education requirement for joining the party that consisted of reading 10 books relating to Black liberation and socialism.

Several textbooks also blame the Panthers for the end of the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously ignoring or downplaying the role the FBI played in destroying the party. In a later section in The Americans, the authors write, "Public support for the Civil Rights Movement declined because some whites were frightened by the urban riots and the Black Panthers." What textbooks like this fail to mention is the decline in public support was a result of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of the FBI. According to scholar Ward Churchill:

The Black Panther Party was savaged by a campaign of political repression, which in terms of its sheer viciousness has few parallels in American history. Coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . and enlisting dozens of local police departments around the country, the assault left at least 30 Panthers dead, scores of others imprisoned after dubious convictions, and hundreds more suffering permanent physical or psychological damage. Simultaneously, the party was infiltrated at every level by agents provocateurs, all of them harnessed to the task of disrupting its internal functioning. Completing the package was a torrent of "disinformation" planted in the media to discredit the Panthers before the public, both personally and organizationally, thus isolating them from potential support.

With minimal and problematic coverage in the history textbooks, there is little curriculum for teachers hoping to provide students with the crucial history of the Black Panther Party. This is why we were excited last year to hear that PBS began distributing Stanley Nelson's new documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. The documentary is an essential tool for the classroom and gives high school teachers an incomparable visual companion to teaching the Panthers. Like any documentary, the film has some oversights that teachers should be aware of. Although it discusses the Panthers' 10-Point Platform, it doesn't do a great job of explaining the Panthers' Marxist ideology. It also doesn't provide enough historical context for the Panthers' activities, making it difficult for students to fully understand both the rise and fall of the Party. And in its attempt to tell the national story of the Panthers, it sometimes skips over important local organizing efforts. But chunked into sections and coupled with readings that help flesh out the documentary's omissions, it is a crucial addition to any social justice teacher's tool chest.

Teaching the Panthers Through Role Play

To introduce the film and to try to give students a fuller picture of the party's history, we developed a mixer activity in which each student takes on a role of someone who was in, or connected to, the Black Panthers. Students are given a role with a thumbnail sketch of that person's biography along with details that help illuminate aspects of the party. In all of the roles, we tried to emphasize why people joined the Black Panther Party. For example, the role of Kathleen Cleaver begins:

As a young Black woman growing up in Alabama in the 1950s, you wanted to challenge injustice. You were inspired by powerful women leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). . . . These women were creating a social revolution in the Deep South and all worked with SNCC. . . . In 1966, you went to organize in SNCC's New York office and then to Atlanta, Georgia. You had joined SNCC at the time it took up the slogan "Black Power," and you saw the Black Panther Party as taking the positions SNCC was headed toward. . . . You decided to move to San Francisco and join the Panthers.

Among the other roles is Ruby Dowell, Denzil Dowell's sister who joined the party after the organizing the Panthers did in Richmond.

We also tried to highlight the repression the Panthers faced along with some of the lesser known but important stories of Panther community organizing. The role for Lumumba Shakur, founder of the New York Black Panther Party chapter, explains how the entire New York Panther leadership was arrested on flimsy evidence. Part of the role's description:

You spent two years in prison while the trial proceeded. You organized prisoners to fight for better living conditions and at one point took control of the jail from the prison guards. You demanded and received bail hearings for every prisoner. Hundreds of prisoners were released as a result of the new hearings.

Students also encounter Panther allies like William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the Young Patriots, Madonna Thunder Hawk of the American Indian Movement, Gloria Arellanes of the Brown Berets, and Jose "Cha-Cha" Jimenez of the Young Lords. They also meet Panther "enemies" like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Los Angeles Police Officer Pat McKinley.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the Panthers we tried to highlight was their role in the struggle for anti-racist education. Historian Donna Murch details how the Panthers had their origins in "agitation for Black Studies courses and debates about the 'relevance' of education," and describes the membership of Panthers as "composed largely of Southern migrants under 25, including many students recruited from local high schools and community colleges..." The Panthers were originally formed out of a study group at Oakland's Merritt community college. The Panthers' belief in the need for an education beyond what was being taught in the school system led them to develop a network of liberation schools for youth.

In the mixer, the role of Ericka Huggins highlights the Panthers' flagship liberation school in Oakland. Other roles highlight the Panthers' fight for ethnic studies and their free breakfast program that fed hundreds of hungry children before school and was eventually adopted by the U.S. education system - one of the party's most meaningful and lasting reforms.

Lastly, we tried to include criticisms of the Panthers in the roles - not just from the police and conservative politicians, but from Black Panthers themselves. Often students can glorify the Black Panther Party, especially students of color who are regularly harassed by police and are justifiably impressed with the Panthers' bold defiance against what they called "the pig power structure." But the Black Panther Party existed as a national organization for only a short period, and while a large responsibility for their destruction should be put on the FBI and police efforts to destroy the party, it's also important for students to ask whether the Panthers could have done anything differently. Whether it is the sexism some female Panthers experienced, or the ideological debate that caused an eventual split in the party, we wanted to provide students with tools to critically assess this complex history.

To start the activity, we distribute roles to students and ask them to read them several times, underline important information, and list out three or four crucial facts on the back of the role. Students are often blown away by the stories presented. "My character's a badass!" one student exclaimed after reading about Bobby Seale's acts of defiance in the courtroom when he was put on trial after participating in the 1968 antiwar demonstration at the Democratic National Convention.

When students finish reading, we give out eight questions that guide them as they circulate around the room, meeting others and finding a different person to answer each of the questions. For example, "Find someone who has an opinion on the role of women in the Black Panther Party. Who is this person and what is their opinion?" We encourage students to take their time - the point of the mixer is not to race through and get all the answers to the questions, but to learn from the various stories in the room to get a fuller picture of the Black Panther Party. As teachers, we participate in the mixer as well. It's helpful to take a role with a more complex critique that might be hard for students to explain, like Stokely Carmichael or Luke Tripp of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. Students are often eager to learn the stories in the room and a buzz fills the air as they grab one another and share their roles.

At the end of class - with at least 20 minutes left, we ask students to head back to their seats and silently write on four questions:

1. What were some of the things you learned about the Black Panthers that you didn't know before the mixer?

2. Whose story did you find most interesting or surprising?

3. What did you think of the critiques of the Black Panthers you encountered?

4. What would you like to know more about?

We've always been impressed by the rich discussion these four questions produce. Students are often surprised to learn the story of Richard Aoki. "I thought they'd only allow Black people into their group, but Aoki was Japanese American," Maya wrote. For many students this is the first time they learn about Latinx or Asian American radicals. Aliyah exclaimed, "It was cool to learn about Gloria [Arellanes] and Cha-Cha Jimenez. I didn't know that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were fighting in the same ways as the Panthers." "Yeah, my mom told me about the Brown Berets," Ayanna stated, "but I didn't know that they were connected to the Panthers."

Students are often shocked at the level of violence the Panthers faced at the hands of the FBI. "It was sad to hear the story of Lil' Bobby Hutton," Brandon wrote. "He was trying to help his people and was shot more than 12 times with his hands up. He was only 16!" David added, "I found it interesting the way the FBI set up the BPP. It's clear the government did not want them to succeed." More specifically, James noticed, "The FBI sent fake letters to the Oakland and New York Panthers to create tensions between them. I didn't realize the FBI was so involved in breaking them up."

We've found that students can often be impressively articulate when evaluating the critiques they come in contact with during the mixer. Keisha wrote, "I thought Luke Tripp's ideas made sense when thinking about how to fight capitalism. He founded the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in Detroit and was focused on helping working-class Blacks. He thought the confrontations with police would just get Panthers thrown in jail and that they should focus on organizing strikes." Melanie disagreed, "I actually think the confrontations with police were important because it showed people the Panthers weren't scared." Madison grappled with the differing views of sexism in the party that she encountered: "It was interesting that Roberta Alexander called out sexism in the BPP and thought they didn't give women equal rights. Other Panther women I met disagreed. People still have sexist attitudes toward women and women don't have equal rights so that was interesting to think about." Other students defended the Panthers against critiques from the right and left. "[California State Assemblyman] Donald Mulford said that he wanted to protect society from Black people with guns. But I feel like society needs to be protected from white people with guns," declared JT. "I really like Stokely Carmichael," Gregory began, "but I disagree with his critique of the Panthers for making alliances with white people. I get where he's coming from, but you can't fight racism with racism." Without realizing it, Gregory's words echoed Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton's.

We hope the mixer we wrote, Stanley Nelson's new documentary, Wayne Au's lesson on the Panthers' 10-Point Program, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca's lesson on COINTELPRO, can be starting points for educators who hope to arm a new generation with the story of the Panthers. As the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party passes by, these lessons should be just a few of many to come that help teachers and students explore this rich - and too often ignored Ñ history.

Resources: Click here for the Black Panther Party mixer.

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What We Don't Learn About the Black Panther Party - but Should

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By Adam Sanchez, Jesse Hagopian Illustrator: Bettmann | Getty Images On Monday April 1, 1967, "George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, California . . . heard 10 gunshots. Sometime after 5:00 a.m., George came upon his older brother Denzil Dowell lying in the street, shot in the back and head.

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Congress adopted the Indian Education Act of 1972. The Act is based on the following premises:
1) American Indians have unique academic needs, especially with respect to language preservation; 2) a continuum of services, pre-school through post-secondary education, is imperative; 3) the trust relationship between the federal
government and Indian people must be reinforced across governmental agencies; and 4) every Indian student, regardless of federal recognition status, deserves equal access to federal funding aimed at educational improvement.

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Supreme Court rules unanimously that busing of students may be ordered to achieve racial desegregation.

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Fair Housing Act, also called Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, U.S. federal legislation that protects individuals and families from discrimination in the sale, rental, financing, or advertising of housing. The Fair Housing Act, as amended in 1988, prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, disability, family status, and national origin.

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In 1968 Congress passes the Bilingual Education Act, providing the first funding to encourage schools to incorporate native-language education into their curriculum.

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President Lyndon Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) into law. It establishes high standards and accountability, provides fair and equal opportunities to receive an education, and provides funds for professional development, instructional materials, and the promotion of parental involvement. The sections of the act include:

Title I – Financial Assistance To Local Educational Agencies For The Education Of Children Of Low-Income Families

Title II – School Library Resources, Textbooks, and other Instructional Materials

Title III – Supplementary Educational Centers and Services

Title IV – Educational Research And Training

Title V – Grants To Strengthen State Departments Of Education

Title VI – General Provisions

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The Elementary and Secondary Education Act: 40 Years Later

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the federal government’s first general foray into public K–12 education. Since then, the government’s involvement in education policy has come to seem a given, part of a recognizable landscape marked by famili…

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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the act five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the act secured the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South.

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In 1963, a lawsuit, Crawford v. Board of Ed. of Los Angeles[18] was filed to end segregation in the district. The California Supreme Court required the district to come up with a plan in 1977. The board returned to court with what the court of appeal years later would describe as "one of if not the most drastic plan of mandatory student reassignment in the nation."[18] A desegregation busing plan was developed to be implemented in the 1978 school year. Two lawsuits to stop the enforced busing plan, both titled Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Bd. of Ed., were filed by the group Bustop Inc. and were petitioned to the United States Supreme Court.[19][20] The petitions to stop the busing plan were subsequently denied by Justice Rehnquist and Justice Powell. California Constitutional Proposition 1, which mandated that busing follow the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution passed in 1979 with 70% of the vote. The Crawford v. Board of Ed. of Los Angeles lawsuit was heard in the Supreme Court in 1982.[21] The Supreme Court upheld the decision that Proposition 1 was constitutional.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed public, intentional discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin in government agencies and facilities, public accommodations, education, and employment; established a federal enforcement structure and empowered victims of discrimination to sue and the government to withhold federal funds from violators.

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The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled at the formerly all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to safely help the students enter the building, when the Arkansas governor blocked their entry.

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal", and therefore violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".

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The 1946 ruling of Melendez v. Westminster gives Mexican students in California equal rights to education.

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This 1942 sign details the places where people of Japanese descent were allowed to live.

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During the 1940s, Orange County, CA schools used this chart to enroll students.

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The federal government’s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) commissioned surveys of American cities that assessed mortgage risk for lenders. The surveys included “residential security” and “racial concentration” maps of all surveyed cities. Risk was tied to the presence of minorities, which made it harder to get a loan in a majority Hispanic or black area.

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The Binet-Simon test (originally developed to identify children who were behind in academic performance so they could receive remedial education) is renamed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test. Part of the change is the invention of the Intelligence Quotient, designed as a way to sort people by intellect level.

Intelligence testing became a tool used by the eugenics movement. Race and ethnicity were often used to classify students who scored poorly on the tests.

By 1932, a survey of 150 school districts revealed that 75% of larger U.S. cities were using intelligence testing to place students in different academic tracks.

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Frederick Hoffman's book, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, is published. A key measure for him was the differential rates of tuberculosis between whites and blacks. And what he found was that African Americans had very, very high rates of tuberculosis. He also found high rates of syphilis and venereal diseases. But for him, though, tuberculosis was key because he felt that this was the signal index of whether or not African Americans would be able to survive outside of slavery.

He would say, "Well, given these high rates of tuberculosis and other kinds of infectious diseases, we expect the Negro and the Native American to become extinct. They just simply will not be able to survive the rigors of civilization because in part, their bodies are not fit for those environments. Their intellects aren't fit to compete with us. They are not capable of engaging with us in the rough and tumble world of the marketplace. And therefore, they will simply die off."

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Most southern states have laws forbidding the teaching of enslaved people to read. Even so, about 5% of enslaved African Americans became literate at great personal risk.

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First public high school in the U.S., Boston English, opens for white students.

*MA passes the first state law making all grades of public school open to all white pupils free of charge in 1827.

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In August 1619, a ship arrived in Point Comfort, Virginia, carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans, the first on record to be brought to the English colony of Virginia. They were among the 12.5 million Africans forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade through the Middle Passage.

The school curriculum linked to the New York Times' 1619 Project— an initiative that aims to reframe U.S. history by putting the legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at its center— is the target of lawmakers, who seek to ban the materials in states.

Lawmakers Push to Ban '1619 Project' From Schools https://www.edweek.org › teaching-learning › 2021/02

Chalkbeat reports efforts in 17 states to expand education on racism and bias, while in 36 states there are efforts to restrict that kind of education. https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-legislation-teaching-racism