We Need To Know if the Biden Administration Is Really With and For Us

Before taking a much needed vacation at the end of last year, I wrote a piece talking about how education for Black kids cannot look…

A Student Who Is Ineffectively Taught by an Anti-Racist Teacher Is Not Receiving Justice

Last Sunday educators, students, and families marched in Philadelphia demanding a long overdue anti-racist action in the city’s schools, insisting that anti-racism “be the overarching…

We Don’t Recognize America’s Independence Day Over Here in Wakanda

“Independence Day” is upon us. But Black fam’, before we get geeked to partake in such traditions as backyard barbecues and celebratory fireworks commemorating a…

How ‘Social Distancing’ Is Changing the Way We View Schools

Paradoxically enough, as Washington, D.C., has slid from mass school closures into social distancing and working from home toward increasingly likely shelter-in-place, my neighborhood is…

Children With Disabilities Have Civil Rights, Too

When we think of legally segregated and unequal schools, we usually think of the Jim Crow system of “Black and White” schools. Most of us…

Black and Latino Students Are Locked Out of Advanced Classes While White Students Reap the Benefits

In schools across America, Black and Latino students are being pushed into less advanced courses, while their White peers reap the benefits of taking advanced…

Here’s What It Really Means to Move to a ‘Good School’ in a ‘Good Neighborhood’

Many White folks, especially Northern White liberals who voted for Obama, would argue they are not racist, even while they actively cause harm to Black…

27 Mistakes White Teachers of Black Students Make and How to Fix Them

A few years back, I was in my room meeting parents during an open house, just days before the school year started. A woman walked…

70 Years of Promises in Education. What Will It Take for Us to Keep Them?

The promise of public education is that it prepares young people for life—and the commitments we have made to meet this aspiration have dramatically increased…

Black Kids Don’t Need to Sit Next to White Kids to Learn

WHAT WE GOT WRONG: Over the last decade, and indeed for longer than that, those fighting for justice, many of them White, have largely looked to integration as the panacea for educational inequity.…