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…

Even in a School With an ‘A’ Rating, Students of Color Are Being Failed

Around the country, schools that initially impress observers with high overall test scores often lose their luster upon closer examination, when inequities in achievement by…

Black Families Haven’t Been Hoodwinked, We Come From a Legacy of School Choice

The Democratic party once embraced charter schools as a tool for equity and opportunity. Now, as Andre Perry points out in his recent op-ed, “Support…

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.…

Stop Arguing About ‘Equity’ and Focus on Student Outcomes

WHAT WE GOT WRONG: There’s a major force in the education world that has attempted to claim ownership over the term “equity.”…

The Equity Backlash Is Real. Resist It.

WHAT WE GOT WRONG: For all its problems, No Child Left Behind illustrated a whole lot of problems that we still haven’t fixed. The hard data that came back showed some of the failures in education that bell hooks and Paulo Freire had been talking about forever. In large part, we have those numbers to thank for the increased focus and funding that led to the rise of the modern educational equity movement.…

My Black Students Have Learned to Be Wary of People Who Look Like Me, And That’s Not Racist

Recently in class, my students and I were listening to Lil Nas X sing “Old Town Road,” for what felt like the 100th time. Unintentionally…

We Can’t Just Teach About Heroes and Holidays and Call It Culturally Responsive

In a recent training on culturally responsive teaching, I was introduced to a theory called the “Stages of Multicultural Transformation.” It goes something like this.…

Want to Build a Wise, Engaged Citizenry? Read Banned Books in Schools, Especially by Authors of Color

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s words would have made her a literary giant no matter what, but her position as one of our country’s ‘most-banned’ authors…

Reading the Right Books, Not Just the White Books, Will Help Black Students Succeed

Dear Black Students:  I want to tell you something controversial, something different from the messages most people will give you. I want you to know…