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Why Schools Fail To Teach Slavery's 'Hard History'

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Why Schools Fail To Teach Slavery's 'Hard History'

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"In the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery," write the authors of a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), "the nation needs an intervention."

This new report, titled Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, is meant to be that intervention: a resource for teachers who are eager to help their students better understand slavery - not as some "peculiar institution" but as the blood-soaked bedrock on which the United States was built.

The report, which is the work of the SPLC's Teaching Tolerance project, is also an appeal to states, school district leaders and textbook-makers to stop avoiding slavery's hard truths and lasting impact.

The Teaching Tolerance project began in 1991, according to its website, "to reduce prejudice, improve intergroup relations and support equitable school experiences for our nation's children."

The report includes the "dismal" results of a new, multiple-choice survey of 1,000 high school seniors - results that suggest many young people know little about slavery's origins and the government's role in perpetuating it. Just a third of students correctly identified the law that officially ended slavery, the 13th Amendment, and fewer than half knew of the Middle Passage. Most alarming, though, were the results to this question:

Which was the reason the South seceded from the Union? a. To preserve states' rights b. To preserve slavery c. To protest taxes on imported goods d. To avoid rapid industrialization e. Not sure

Nearly half blamed taxes on imported goods. Perhaps, the report's authors guessed, students were confusing the Civil War with the Revolutionary War.

How many students chose slavery as the reason the South seceded?

Eight percent.

"Slavery is hard history," writes Hasan Kwame Jeffries in the report's preface. He is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and chair of the Teaching Hard History Advisory Board. "It is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it."

The problem, according to the report, is not that slavery is ignored in the classroom or that teachers, like their students, don't understand its importance. Many clearly do. The problem is deeper than that.

The Teaching Tolerance project surveyed nearly 1,800 K-12 social studies teachers. While nearly 90 percent agreed that "teaching and learning about slavery is essential to understanding American history," many reported feeling uncomfortable teaching slavery and said they get very little help from their textbooks or state standards. The report includes several powerful quotes from teachers explaining their discomfort, including this from a teacher in California:

"Although I teach it through the lens of injustice, just the fact that it was a widely accepted practice in our nation seems to give the concept of inferiority more weight in some students' eyes, like if it happened, then it must be true. Sometimes it gives students the idea to call black students slaves or tell them to go work in the field because of the lack of representation in textbooks. So when students see themselves or their black classmates only represented as slaves in textbooks, that affects their sense of self and how other students view them."

And this from a teacher in Maine:

"I find it painful, and embarrassing (as a white male) to teach about the history of exploitation, abuse, discrimination and outrageous crimes committed against African Americans and other minorities, over many centuries-especially at the hands of white males. I also find it very difficult to convey the concept of white privilege to my white students. While some are able to begin to understand this important concept, many struggle with or actively resist it."

Jackie Katz, a history teacher at Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Mass., says student discomfort is a big challenge when talking honestly about slavery.

"When you bring up racism, kids start getting really defensive, thinking that they're to blame," says Katz. "To feel comfortable, you need to have a really good classroom climate, where students feel that they're not being blamed for what happened in the American past, where they don't feel shame about it. It is 100 percent not their fault that there is racism in this country. It will be their fault if they don't do anything about it in the next 20 years."

This defensiveness from students does not surprise Ibram X. Kendi, a professor of history at American University and author of the National Book Award-winning Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas In America.

"Saying that the deadliest conflict in American history was fought over an effort to keep people enslaved conflicts with students' sense of the grandness of America, the grandness of American history and, therefore, the grandness of themselves as Americans," says Kendi.

Beyond this discomfort, the report lays out several key "problems" with the way slavery is often presented to students. Among them:

Textbooks and teachers tend to accentuate the positive, focusing on heroes like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass without also giving students the full, painful context of slavery.

Slavery is often described as a Southern problem. It was much, much more. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, it was a problem across the colonies. Even in the run-up to the Civil War, the North profited mightily from slave labor.

Slavery depended on the ideology of white supremacy, and teachers shouldn't try to tackle the former without discussing the latter.

Too often, the report says, "the varied, lived experience of enslaved people is neglected." Instead, lessons focus on politics and economics, which means focusing on the actions and experiences of white people.

States and textbook-makers deserve considerable blame for these problems, according to the report. The project reviewed history standards in 15 states and found them generally "timid," often looking for slavery's silver lining; hence a common preference for coverage of the abolitionist movement over talk of white supremacy or the everyday experiences of enslaved people.

"State standards we looked at are simply confused," says Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance. "We celebrate the heroes who escaped slavery long before we explain to children what slavery was."

Reviewers also studied a dozen popular history textbooks, using a 30-point rubric to measure their engagement with slavery's key concepts. No book scored above 70 percent; five scored below 25 percent, including state-level texts from Texas and Alabama that earned just 6 points out of a possible 87.

Teaching Hard History comes out of earlier work the Teaching Tolerance project had done, unpacking how schools teach the U.S. civil rights movement.

"One of the reasons that schools don't teach the civil rights movement particularly effectively," says Costello, "is because we don't do a very good job of teaching the history that made it necessary, which is our long history of slavery."

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Why Schools Fail To Teach Slavery's 'Hard History'

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"In the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery," write the authors of a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), "the nation needs an intervention."

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The Long-Term Effects of Social-Justice Education on Black Students

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The Long-Term Effects of Social-Justice Education on Black Students

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Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title- The Savage City, a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s. The 24-year teaching veteran said he chose the book to give his students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, a chance to read "an honest depiction of the Black Panther Party and the corruption that existed in the NYPD during the '60s." In a school where black students are half of the student body-and a photo of two white peers in blackface caused an uproar in May-Whitaker's classroom is a space for students to examine issues such as oppression, classism, and abuse of power. And it's yielding results.

When the South Orange-Maplewood School District recently considered restoring school resource officers, law-enforcement officials assigned to school campuses, the move was met with sizeable opposition from juniors and seniors in Whitaker's class. They organized fellow students to attend the public forums and testify on their experiences with local police-both in school and the community. And notably, they relied on Whitaker's class discussions to bolster their arguments.

Transformative social-justice education is often viewed as a path to more equitable classrooms and cross-racial understanding, at a time when public-school classrooms are increasingly segregated. Most frequently associated with the Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire, it is an approach growing in popularity and interest nationally. But for students from marginalized and disenfranchised groups-those most in need of upending the status quo-what is the payoff? And how can teachers steeped in this method affect their learning?

A new study from Pennsylvania State University seeks to answer these lingering questions. Marinda K. Harrell-Levy, an assistant professor of human development and family studies at Penn State Brandywine, set out to explore the long-term impact of a transformative social-justice course on black adolescents. The class, a junior-year requirement, intended to motivate students to become social agents in their schools and communities, and included a service learning component. In 2010, as part of a larger research project, Harrell-Levy followed up with 13 black students who graduated from an urban parochial high school in 1995 to 2009, and, though the sample size was small, she found that the benefits of their mandatory social-justice class extended well into adulthood.

"We know that if you teach ... anything related to civic development, it's very likely that within the next week or two after taking the course, students are going to have a positive feeling about their experiences," she said. "[But] how do they feel ... years later? Is it still resonating?" Harrell-Levy's goal was to discover how the social-justice class helped a socioeconomically diverse group of black teenagers see themselves in society. What the study revealed was a deep-rooted link between the course, career choices, and the former students' civic and social-justice values.
"[These] thought-provoking conversations made them consider, or reconsider, their own perspective on what it meant to be black."
Black alumni of the class, many years after graduating, uniformly credited the social-justice course for provoking a process of self-exploration that altered their sense of justice and influenced their self-identity. Eleven of the 13 reported identifying or revising career interests while taking the course, prioritizing professions to improve their community. Helping convicted felons return to the workforce, pursuing a degree in social work, and working in the education field all flowed from their enrollment in the social-justice class.

"Jenna" (pseudonyms were used in the study to protect the identity of the student participants) pointed to the course as giving her "a different moral standpoint and a different conception of justice." Her knowledge of civic issues like capital punishment increased, she said, inspiring her to enroll in law school "to contribute to a socially just world." Likewise, conversations with participants like "Patricia" showed how the social-justice class ignited "the power of her own agency"-a sentiment widely shared, in which students saw themselves as capable of changing conditions in their own lives as well as larger institutional injustices.

The former students were very forthcoming, said Harrell-Levy, sharing all types of experiences they were going through, from "My father was in jail" and "My mother was addicted to drugs" to "I was in a foster home during half of my time at the school"-underscoring how their teachers incorporated those experiences into the learning process. "They felt that they were relevant. That their experiences were relevant. There was this nexus of culture and pedagogy that was happening with the students and with the teachers that made the learning process that much more meaningful for everybody," said the study's lead author.

Additionally, the research showed that the race of the teachers was not an impediment to the course's mission-a crucial takeaway given that just over 8 out of 10 public schoolteachers are white. "They didn't ignore the fact they are white," said Harrell-Levy, stressing that "colorblind ideology" was rejected. Instead, recognizing that her students looked at her as "this privileged white lady who had the luxury of illuminating about issues [of diversity]," the teacher brought the students' reluctance into the classroom discussion as a learning point.

An unexpected outcome for the researchers was how the course allowed students to unravel issues of advantage among black students based on class-an aspect that seldom surfaces in social-justice discourse. The predominately black Catholic school included a mix of students attending through school vouchers, athletic scholarships, academic scholarships and other financial means. According to Harrell-Levy, the combination offered a unique opportunity for the teachers to challenge intra-racial stereotypes. Participants who described themselves as "privileged" or "sheltered" revealed that their opinions of the "black poor"-and more generally, those living in poverty-were effectively confronted through the social-justice curriculum.
"We've got to give them the tools...to process in ways that are healthy and will actually build our democracy."
"All of these ... thought-provoking conversations made them consider, or reconsider, their own perspective on what it meant to be black. Their own perspective on what it meant to be poor and black. Their own perspective on what it meant to be [economically advantaged] and black. That was a type of conversation that teachers willingly let [happen]."

Leigh Patel, an associate education professor at Boston College and a sociologist of education, characterized the study as a nuanced take on race and class, and a departure from the study of blackness and black youth as a monolithic topic. She cautioned, however, that understanding the full scope of transformative social-justice education should extend beyond the individual to the collective impact.

"Are we transforming individuals' [career] pathways [or] are we transforming a collective population's realities of wellness and suffering?" asked Patel, noting that the drawback to focusing primarily on "individualistic, live-your-best-life" measures is that inequities are never experienced exclusively by individuals. By contrast, Patel cited United We Dream, the Dream Defenders, and We Charge Genocide as "explicit projects of social transformation" that are "fundamentally collective."

Where Patel and Harrell-Levy found firm agreement was on the critical need to rethink teacher training and professional development to incorporate transformational social-justice teaching. "What's required here is a certain vulnerability that you don't really expect [and] teachers don't generally want," said the Penn State researcher. "The teachers in the study, on a regular basis, had to expose themselves in order to connect with the students. At the very least, teachers need to understand the impact that they're having on students' identity. Whether it's intentional or unintentional, it's happening."

In the wake of recent fatal police shootings of black men, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and heightened interest in how black youth are processing these events, Harrell-Levy said the time is now to revisit the role of teachers and schools. "There's a lot of emotion surging through a lot of [youth] right now, who don't have any experience on what to do with it, and how to deal with it," she said. "There's a mental toll to ... literally seeing life leave bodies on YouTube, again and again. We've got to give them the tools...to process in ways that are healthy and will actually build our democracy."

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What Are the Effects of Teaching Black Students About Social Justice?

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Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title- The Savage City, a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s.

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14 Disturbing Stats About Racial Inequality in American Public Schools

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14 Disturbing Stats About Racial Inequality in American Public Schools

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Comprehensive data released Friday by the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights offers a striking glance at the extent of racial inequality plaguing the nation's education system.

Analysts found that black, Latino and Native American students have less access to advanced math and science courses and are more likely to be taught by first-year instructors than white students. Black and Native American students are also suspended and expelled at disproportionate rates.

For the first time in history, the Education Department also examined school discipline at the pre-K level, finding that black students as young as four years old are already facing unequal treatment from school administrators.

The Education Department released four papers with the data, analyzing inequality in school discipline, early learning, college readiness and teacher equity (pdfs). Here's a breakdown of some of the key findings, taken straight from those papers. During the 2011-12 school year:

1. Black students accounted for 18 percent of the country's pre-K enrollment, but made up 48 percent of preschoolers with multiple out-of-school suspensions.

2. Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students.

3. American Indian and Native-Alaskan students represented less than 1 percent of students, but 3 percent of expulsions.

4. Black girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys.

5. American Indian and Native-Alaskan girls were suspended at higher rates than white boys or girls.

6. Nearly one in four boys of color, excepting Latino and Asian American students, with disabilities received an out-of-school suspension.

7. One in five girls of color with disabilities received an out-of-school suspension.

8. A quarter of the schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students did not offer Algebra II.

9. A third of these schools did not offer chemistry.

10. Less than half of American Indian and Native-Alaskan high school students had access to the full range of math and science courses, which consists of Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, calculus, biology, chemistry and physics.

11. Black and Latino students accounted for 40 percent of enrollment at schools with gifted programs, but only represented 26 percent of students in such programs.

12. Black, Latino and Native American students attended schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers (3 to 4 percent) than white students (1 percent).

13. Black students were more than three times as likely to attend schools where fewer than 60 percent of teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements.

14. Latino students were twice as likely to attend such schools.

The Department of Education's civil rights survey examined all 97,000 public schools in the US, representing 49 million students. Explore the datasets, organized by school, state and district, here.

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14 Disturbing Stats About Racial Inequality in American Public Schools

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Comprehensive data released Friday by the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights offers a striking glance at the extent of racial inequality plaguing the nation's education system. Analysts found that black, Latino and Native American students have less access to advanced math and science courses and are more likely to be taught by first-year instructors than white students.

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Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking About Race In The Classroom

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Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking About Race In The Classroom

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Open up the newspaper or turn on the news these days, and you'll find plenty of talk about race and racism. But it's a different story in many classrooms.

Some teachers don't consider race germane to their math or English syllabus. Others strive for colorblindness in the classroom, wanting to believe we live in a post-racial society. Unfortunately, says H. Richard Milner, we don't.

Milner directs the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh. He spends much of his time researching effective teaching methods and leading professional development for teachers, schools and districts, helping to implement teaching strategies that deal with race.

He's motivated by research that shows that people who feel good about their own race do better academically.

"I'm someone's father. I'm someone's husband. I'm someone's friend. I'm someone's son," says Milner, "but I'm also a black man. And my being black shapes my experiences, and so if you are not attuned to the part of my being that is race, then it's very difficult for you to understand and respond to my humanity."

Milner's new book, Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms, serves as a tool for educators who want to better understand what talking about race can sound like - with evidence-based approaches and practical classroom tips.
How did your work in classrooms drive you to write this book?
I often found that teachers would shy away from and were very uncomfortable talking about race.

I believe most educators in general have great intentions, but I do believe they are grossly underprepared for the types of complexity they face every day in school. So, until we get race right, until we get class right, until we get the intersection of race and class correct, we're going to reap the consequences of it. So we can continue walking around like race and racism and issues of discrimination are not pervasive, but the students are the ones who are grossly underserved. As adults, even if it might make us uncomfortable, we've got to engage in these uncomfortable conversations. Even if we disagree.
So where does a teacher's work start and where does it end?
One of the reasons this work is so complex is because the outside school experiences of students are quite often inconsistent with what the expectations are inside school. It's the schools' responsibility to take on the onus of understanding language patterns, of understanding what the students experience outside of school.

For instance, if students read particular kinds of books outside of school, if they engage in social media outside of school, then teachers must figure out how to utilize that as an anchor for what happens inside of school.

Instructionally, it's the teacher's responsibility to really research and develop learner lenses to understand what's happening with the student outside of school, so that she or he can be responsive to that reality.

Teachers want lessons that make connections, that make it real for students.
So how can teachers incorporate those outside realities into curriculum? You mention a case study in the book that involves a robbery that happened right around the corner from a middle school. When you talked to teachers at that school, what did you recommend?
I was doing a professional development session with the teachers, and I just posed a question. I said, "I'm wondering why you guys didn't mention the robbery in the classroom," and the educators in the room just got offended.

There was a guy who sat in the back and said, "I teach math and science, what does a robbery have to do with my teaching math and science?"

So I gave some examples: You could talk about the relationship between well-lit communities and those that aren't. You could count the number of streetlights in a particular vicinity. You could pull up Google Maps and have the students guesstimate the amount of time it would take the police to drive from the police precinct to the robbery scene at different rates of speed. You could have the students look at the relationship between gun shop access and crime.

There are all these mathematical ways of engaging the incident and being responsive to the things that the students are concerned about. But it takes the teachers' willingness to delve into, to be creative, and to be consistent with and align with the things that they're supposed to be teaching. I would never tell a teacher to teach anything that they are not supposed to teach. Teachers can make lessons relevant and accessible to students and still align with and be consistent with the Common Core standards and so forth.
In the book you give examples from your classroom visits - but you don't always offer solutions or answers. Why? Is that intentional?
So this work is contextual. With the cases, I really want teachers to read them to reflect about their own practices, to problematize them, to call me out and say "I disagree with this."

Just because it's complex and we don't know for sure what's going on doesn't mean we shouldn't be interrogating and trying to figure it out. And that's where I think we really fall short.

We see that particular groups of students, like black and brown male students, are constantly being suspended and expelled from school, and we've got to stop it. We've got to recognize what's going on, and we've got to address it. So with each case, it invites readers to strategize about what they would do in a particular situation.
In the book, you talk about community assets - how negative circumstances can be viewed in positive ways. How does this apply to teachers?
It's the lenses by which we look at situations. On an individual level the fact that a student is able to work six or seven hours every night at McDonald's or Hardee's or wherever it happens to be for several nights a week demonstrates an asset. Rather than saying, "Poor thing, she's barely getting by in my class." That's looking at it from a deficit.

An assets perspective: "Carla demonstrates the capacity to balance her schoolwork and her part-time job. I should talk with her about how I can assist her ..."

Even when talking about neighborhood conditions, a student has made it through a situation where they walk through gang violence. The asset is: That student has been able to navigate and negotiate a challenging set of circumstances.
Do you get any pushback? What do you say to teachers or principals who say, "This is too much" or "This is not my job"?
I do get pushback. Some districts I go in, and the principal will say, "Well, we don't really have a race issue."

I always say that it's important for teachers and people to relax their egos and to realize that it is not only about them. This work is about how we better, more effectively meet the needs of every child, of every student. When I get teachers to a place where they are deliberate about and intentional about reflecting on why they're doing what they're doing in the classroom, people tend to come around, at least in terms of thinking about the possibilities.

I also stress that parents care about their children. They may not know necessarily how to support them educationally, but I have very rarely if ever met a parent who doesn't care about his or her child. All communities care about their children. I think that's important to show teachers.

We are in trouble. This is urgent work. Teachers can wait on parents to change. They can wait on policymakers to come up with something extraordinary. Or they can be proactive and say, "You know what, I am complicit in ensuring the underachievement of some of our students."
What should readers take away from this book?
We've really got to disrupt and confront the attempts to not address issues of race, racism and other forms of discrimination on a micro level as well as a macro level. We can't have conversations about poverty if we're not having serious conversations about race.

The other one is that we can talk about reform, we can talk about shifts to classroom level, but we also need to make sure we're deliberate about making serious shifts on a district level as well. Because there are outstanding individual teachers who go into the classroom, close their doors and great things happen. It really is about how we make changes for black and brown children on a broader level.

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Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking About Race In The Classroom

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Open up the newspaper or turn on the news these days, and you'll find plenty of talk about race and racism. But it's a different story in many classrooms. Some teachers don't consider race germane to their math or English syllabus. Others strive for colorblindness in the classroom, wanting to believe we live in a post-racial society.

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TEACHER VOICE: It’s time to shatter the silence about race

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TEACHER VOICE: It’s time to shatter the silence about race

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I am one of few African-American educators in a predominantly white school district.

After I reported witnessing dozens of white students in a group using the N-word on school property, an administrator said to me, "I'm sure that was awful for you. Why don't you speak with the students and tell them how that made you feel?" I was stunned.

Essentially, I was told that this incident was offensive only to me and that it was my responsibility alone to confront their behavior. The onus to address racism rests upon the shoulders of all educators in my district, not simply the African-American teacher.

I rejected his offer and instead co-founded the Race Matters Committee (RMC) - named after Cornel West's Race Matters, which passionately and urgently addresses racial tensions - in our district.

In the United States, I envision RMC to be a place where committed educators, from all grade levels and content areas, meet to focus specifically on issues related to race and racism.

Educators will join the RMC to have courageous conversations, to seek out and provide quality professional development for ourselves and our colleagues, to develop anti-racist and anti-bias curricula and, most importantly, to implement racial justice work in our classrooms of mostly white students.
Related: How teachers should talk to students about Trump's racism
Recent events have resulted in an awakening for many educators that they simply must do more to combat racism - and it is critical that this work happens in predominantly white spaces. If we continue to normalize discussions of racism and bias, and lean into, rather than away from, our discomfort, the silence will eventually become uncomfortable. Practices that dismantle institutional racism will become the rule rather than the exception.

The onus to address racism rests upon the shoulders of all educators in my district, not simply the African-American teacher.

From the spate of mosque fires to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, 2017 was marked by a string of violent events across the United States that put a spotlight on issues of race and racism.

Whether or not they're invited, these issues enter our schools and our classrooms -and teachers have a responsibility to address them.

Although some educators are eager to facilitate these critical conversations, many others are skeptical, resistant or indifferent. Particularly in predominantly white K-12 schools, teachers often take a colorblind approach when teaching historical and current events, silencing conversations about race and racism. However, a racial justice approach in schools and curricula can educate students in profound ways that help them grow as informed, active participants in a democratic society.

Research shows that by preschool age, children recognize and understand that whiteness is more valued in U.S. society. Therefore, to deconstruct and disrupt powerful and harmful narratives about race, it is essential that schools cultivate anti-racism curricula and prioritize anti-bias education from the beginning. This may be challenging, especially in predominantly white schools.
Related: History of civil rights movement gets short shrift in Mississippi classrooms
A major roadblock to racial justice work in schools is discomfort. In a 2017 survey conducted by the Education Week Research Center, 22 percent of educators said they find it "somewhat" or "very" difficult to discuss issues of race and ethnicity in the classroom. Moreover, about 82 percent of elementary and secondary teachers in the United States are white. These data suggest that in many classrooms around the country, conversations about race simply aren't happening. When discomfort begets silence, students don't acquire the tools necessary to develop racial literacy skills.

Many white educators believe that racial justice work isn't important for white children. They view discussions about race as polarizing and potentially harmful to children who may experience feelings of shame or guilt. This mindset becomes a rationale for shielding students from these challenging conversations.

Finally, most schools do not provide the anti-racist and anti-bias professional development that educators need to break through the boundaries of racial justice work. Teachers need sufficient training in this specific area of education to feel confident and prepared when delivering these lessons.
A version of this article originally appeared in the January/February 2018 issue of Sonja Cherry-Paul, a teacher for 20 years, is an author and a consultant. She is currently working on her doctorate in curriculum and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Literacy Today, the member magazine of the International Literacy Association. It is reprinted here with permission.
Educators looking to disrupt silences in their own schools can start with these five steps:

1. Build a safe space: Work with other concerned educators to create a judgment-free zone where you can learn together, give voice to the challenges of racial justice work, and discuss ways to overcome those challenges.

2. Establish a unified vision: Craft a mission statement that highlights your committee's purpose. Describe who you are and what you hope to achieve.

3. Create an action plan: This working document increases efficiency and accountability among changemakers. Goals become concrete when documented and revisited often.

4. Identify goals: Identify short- and long-term goals to address the specific needs of your school district. Possible focus areas include professional development, curriculum, school structures and hiring practices.

5. Partner with parents: The staying power of any new initiative in a school district relies on the support of parents and the community. If administrators know that parents care about race-related issues, it behooves them to prioritize and support your efforts.

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TEACHER VOICE: It's time to shatter the silence about race - The Hechinger Report

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I am one of few African-American educators in a predominantly white school district. After I reported witnessing dozens of white students in a group using the N-word on school property, an administrator said to me, "I'm sure that was awful for you. Why don't you speak with the students and tell them how that made ...

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A Yale study charts the impact of racism in preschools

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A Yale study charts the impact of racism in preschools

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Preschool should be a world of naps, first friendships, and macaroni crafts. Yet, even at this early age, preschool children are subject to racial bias from their teachers.

A Yale University Child Study Center has found evidence of implicit bias among preschool teachers, which helps explain why young black students are expelled or suspended from school far more often than white students. The study also showed that black teachers recommended longer suspensions regardless of the child's race or gender.

In the research, 132 teachers were asked to watch video clips of preschool children and to note instances of challenging behavior. The videos were filmed using actors and didn't include any signs of trouble. Eye tracking software showed that the teachers spent more time looking at black children than white children. In particular, they spent considerably more time watching black boys.

The study suggests that preschool teachers expect trouble from certain students based on their race and gender, and need training to rectify these assumptions, the study author and Yale child psychology professor Walter Gilliam told the Washington Post.

"Implicit biases do not begin with black men and police. They begin with black preschoolers and their teachers, if not earlier," he said. "Implicit bias is like the wind: You can't see it, but you can sure see its effects."

The study also found that white and black teachers evaluated a child's behavior differently depending on their race. When asked to read about an instance of misbehavior from a child with a stereotypically black name (such as DeShawn and Latoya), white teachers were less likely to say that the child's misbehavior had been severe. The authors believe this is because white teachers hold black preschoolers to a lower standard; they expect misbehavior from black children and so acting out "may not seem very severe at all for a black child," they write.

Meanwhile, when teachers were given background information about difficulties in the misbehaving child's home, they were found to be more empathetic only if they were the same race as the child.

It's unlikely that preschool teachers are intentionally prejudiced against certain students. With black preschoolers 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than white children, it seems implicit bias is shaping teachers' attitudes towards young children.

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A Yale study charts the impact of racism in preschools

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Preschool should be a world of naps, first friendships, and macaroni crafts. Yet, even at this early age, preschool children are subject to racial bias from their teachers. A Yale University Child Study Center has found evidence of implicit bias among preschool teachers, which helps explain why young black students are expelled or suspended from school...