Education
Pity the White Folks
Tourists in the Capitol! This was Georgia Representative Andrew Clydes’s characterization of the fine folks who visited Washington D.C. on January 6th. It might have been a tad more understandable if Clyde were a Florida Congressman. I did see some slight resemblance between the merry marauders in the Capitol and some scenes from spring break…
Read MoreLet’s Dump The ABC’s — And D’s and F’s, Too
The votes are in. Experience, common sense and neuroscientists agree: People don’t learn when they are scared. Well, they learn, but they don’t learn math or history or whatever lessons schools are actually trying to teach. Kids learn to hate school or to fear Mr. Smith or even to hate themselves, and the cause is…
Read MoreLet’s not conflate white supremacy with white people
I never thought I’d hear a U.S. president explicitly call out white supremacy in an inauguration address. For President Joe Biden to follow it up a week later with a slate of executive orders aimed at pursuing a racial equity agenda offers an encouraging start to the much more difficult project of healing the divisions…
Read MoreREAD, DAMN IT!
Education blogger Jan Resseger published a particularly fine piece on April 26, reporting the alarming backward trend toward the “Read by third grade or else!” policies of the recent past. As she convincingly argues, such an approach is particularly harmful as we emerge from the pandemic. What kids need most is social and emotional reconnection,…
Read MoreCreating Environments Where Black Students Can Thrive
As white adoptive parents raising a biracial son, my husband and I set out to equip him and ourselves with the tools to navigate an experience far more complex than our own. Long before he was born, we tried to prepare, educating ourselves by devouring research and resources about race and racism and talking to…
Read MoreRelying on Your Own Mind
A recent issue of Time magazine launched the new “Kid of the Year” recognition. Along with this year’s selection of Gitanjali Rao, the magazine profiled four other young people whose accomplishments, imagination, and engagement in life are impressive. As I read about them, I couldn’t help imagining them among the thousands of other students I…
Read MoreCall Me Pathologically “Woke”
In a recent New York Times column, conservative pundit Bret Stephens argued strenuously that divisiveness was ruining our great nation. He was specifically irritated by a proposed ethnic studies curriculum in California’s public schools. He hauled out all the culture war piñatas and beat them relentlessly. “Critical race theory” was most prominent among the targets. His conservative columns routinely…
Read MoreNeutral Doesn’t Work When Talking About Race
When people take a “neutral position” on race, it doesn’t work. This describes the main finding of a study I explored in my doctoral dissertation at University of California, Los Angeles. The study, conducted in 2020 and guided by Pedro Noguera, consisted of in-depth interviews with 30 recent alumni of color, representing Black, Latinx, and…
Read MoreThe Problem with Inclusion: Time to Shift to Belonging
“Hummus…what’s that?” I remember asking my 9th grade white peers as we sat around the lunch table for the first time, aware of their looks and smirks because I did not know what it was. In my Afro-Caribbean immigrant household, hummus was not on the menu. This was one of the first othering experiences I…
Read MoreZoom is the Devil’s Work
Resist Remote Learning! “It’s like deja vu all over again.” – Yogi Berra I have no idea what the 20th century sage was referring to, but the quote is apt when considering the locomotive bearing down on education as the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel grows brighter. Early in the 20th century…
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