The scale of the disparity has fueled intense debate. Some policymakers argue the gap is primarily the result of systemic racism or unequal school resources. But does the data back up this notion?  Recently, I to try and determine what factors are truly driving this gap in the Badger State. 

This new analysis of Wisconsin’s statewide Forward Exam indicates that a significant share of the gap is driven not by racism, but by factors strongly correlated with race: especially poverty, disability status and family stability. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but in reality it is key for figuring out how best to address the problem.  

Common policy solutions often focus on skin color as the driver of disparities. For instance, when he was state superintendent, now Gov. Tony Evers that one cause of the racial achievement gap is that too many people who work in schools “look like me.” Current Superintendent Jill Underly that “culturally responsive teaching” and diversification of the education workforce are among the keys to addressing the achievement gap.  

But it’s not clear those steps are the right approach. Using data from the 2022-23 edition of the state’s Forward Exam, I conducted what is known as a mediation analysis. Mediation analysis attempts to figure out how or why something causes an effect by identifying the middle step —the “go-between” factor — that explains the relationship. The results of one such mediation analysis with poverty as the go-between is shown below. 

The direct pathway shows that as the percentage of African American students in a school goes from 0 to 100 percent, the proficiency rate on the Forward Exam would be expected to decline by about 39%. However, there is the “behind the scenes” path to consider as well. A school with 100% African American students would be expected to have poverty rates 69% higher than a school with no African American students, and high poverty is in turn correlated with about a 41% reduction in proficiency rates. The analysis shows schools with higher percentages of African American students also tend to have far higher poverty rates, which then play a major role in academic outcomes.

Decades of research show that economic disadvantage strongly affects academic performance. Students growing up in poverty often face barriers that can hinder learning, from unstable housing and food insecurity to limited access to books, educational materials and early learning opportunities. In Wisconsin, poverty rates among African American families are particularly high. More than in the state live below the poverty line, placing Wisconsin among the highest in the nation on that measure.

Another factor influencing achievement gaps is disability identification. African American students are identified for special education services at higher rates than their white peers in both as a whole, particularly in categories that rely heavily on subjective judgment, such as emotional disturbance or intellectual disability. Students receiving special education services on average score lower on standardized tests and have lower graduation rates than students without disabilities.

 The Forward Exam analysis found that disability status explains a smaller but still measurable portion of the achievement gap. About 3.6% of the relationship between race and proficiency was mediated by differences in disability rates.

Some influences on student outcomes cannot be directly measured in the school-level data that we have access to. One of the most significant is family structure. Research that children raised in two-parent households tend to experience stronger academic outcomes and fewer behavioral challenges. Two parents simply have more time and resources to devote to a child’s development, from supervising homework to reading together at home.

In Wisconsin, however, the rate of married African American adults is the lowest in the country—, well below the national average of 31% for African Americans nationwide. Although the precise impact cannot be quantified in school testing data, decades of social science research suggest family stability plays a meaningful role in shaping educational outcomes.

Survey data from the in 2020 — the most recent year for which there was a large enough sample size for each group in Wisconsin — shows that African American families in Wisconsin are less likely to read regularly to young children than white or Hispanic families. About 55% of Black families report reading to young children fewer than four days per week, compared with 33% of white families. It is important to note that this factor is likely also correlated with poverty, but teasing out any independent effect between the two is not possible with existing data. 

Those early literacy experiences matter. Foundational reading skills built before kindergarten strongly influence later academic success across subjects.

Wisconsin’s disparities are real and deeply concerning. But the research indicates that race itself is not the primary driver of the state’s academic divide. Poverty, disability status, and family stability  together explain a large share of the gap.

Strategies focused narrowly on racial identity — such as diversity training or race-based programs — may miss the deeper issues shaping student outcomes. Other approaches, such as  focusing aggressively on early literacy, have shown progress in other states. Mississippi, as has been well-documented in The74, dramatically improved reading outcomes through policies aligned with the “science of reading,” which emphasize systematic instruction in phonics, vocabulary and comprehension.  A significant achievement gap still exists in Mississippi, but at 25 points it is significantly smaller than Wisconsin’s, even as proficiency levels rise in the state across the board. 

Closing the gap will likely require policies that address the broader social and economic realities affecting students’ lives: reducing poverty, strengthening families, improving early literacy and targeting support to disadvantaged students regardless of race. Reduction will also require a focus on what can work in large urban districts like Milwaukee, where about 44% of the state’s African American students attend school. This district has been plagued by decades of and across the racial spectrum.

If Wisconsin hopes to move up from the bottom of the nation’s achievement-gap rankings, solutions will need to look beyond race, and stop accepting the soft bigotry of low expectations. 

When Cara Romero’s daughter was 11, she became interested in dolls. Romero, who is an enrolled member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe in Southern California, began to think about doll culture more deeply and what it can convey to the next generation. 

Romero’s husband grew up collecting G.I. Joes, and her mother-in-law had her own Victorian-style porcelain doll collection. For Romero, though, her daughter’s doll phase reminded her of the Native American dolls she grew up seeing at truck stops along I-40.

The dolls were often dressed in plastic pony beads and fake buckskin that parroted the Native American Halloween costumes she knew all too well as dehumanizing stereotypes. So Romero, who is a photographer and artist, set out to create a series of photos that broke down these tropes.

Each photograph in the “First American Doll” series features a life-sized doll box that she designed and crafted, where she poses the women with objects that represent their families, traditions and unique stories. 

She wanted her daughter to be proud of her heritage. “I come from a community where women are allowed to have a voice, allowed to be really strong,” she said. “So [I was] wanting to pass down good self esteem and a strong sense of self and identity,” she said. “That’s what we aim to do as moms.”

She started the series with artist and powwow dancer Wakeah Jhane, who is of Kiowa, Comanche and Blackfeet descent. While the Plains Tribes that she is from are the models for stereotypical dolls and costumes, Romero’s photograph captures her intricate buckskin regalia, which was made by her family. Also on display are her moccasins and a fan.

“You can see the stark contrast between what she’s wearing and the Halloween costumes that people portray Plains people as,” she said. “I really wanted to kind of own it and be like, “You guys even have this wrong.’” 

She has since published nine photographs for the series, the most recent featuring Fawn Douglas, an artist, activist and enrolled member of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, who is posed with handcrafted baskets and a gourd rattle made by her family. The box is bordered by a Las Vegas playing card motif. 

The current day symbolism and high fashion lighting communicates that these women are also contemporary, Romero said. “When artwork, and specifically photography, is devoid of modern context, it does something psychologically, it perpetuates [this idea] that we’re gone and only living in history.”  

Naming each of the pieces after the models was also meant to humanize Indigenous women in a way that they weren’t in historical photos. “A lot of times in the ethnographic photographs, they didn’t even say their name,” she said. “We don’t know who they were.”

Some of the photographs from the series are currently traveling the country as part of Romero’s first solo museum exhibition, titled: “Panûpünüwügai (Living Light).” They will be on display next at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona starting in February.

was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of ..

A senior Texas A&M University System official testing a new artificial intelligence tool this fall asked it to find how many courses discuss feminism at one of its regional universities. Each time she asked in a slightly different way, she got a different number.

“Either the tool is learning from my previous queries,” Texas A&M system’s chief strategy officer Korry Castillo told colleagues in an email, “or we need to fine tune our requests to get the best results.”

It was Sept. 25, and Castillo was trying to deliver on a Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents had already made: to audit courses across all of the system’s 12 universities after conservative outrage over a gender-identity lesson at the flagship campus intensified earlier that month, leading to and . 

Texas A&M officials said the controversy stemmed from the course’s content not aligning with its description in the university’s course catalog and framed the audit as a way to ensure students knew what they were signing up for. As other public universities came under similar scrutiny and began preparing to comply with that gives governor-appointed regents more authority over curricula, they, too, announced audits.

Records obtained by The Texas Tribune offer a first look at how Texas universities are experimenting with AI to conduct those reviews. 

At Texas A&M, internal emails show staff are using AI software to search syllabi and course descriptions for words that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender. 

At Texas State, memos show administrators are suggesting faculty use an AI writing assistant to revise course descriptions. They urged professors to drop words such as “challenging,” “dismantling” and “decolonizing” and to rename courses with titles like “Combating Racism in Healthcare” to something university officials consider more neutral like “Race and Public Health in America.”

While school officials describe the efforts as an innovative approach that fosters transparency and accountability, AI experts say these systems do not actually analyze or understand course content, instead generating answers that sound right based on patterns in their training data.

That means small changes in how a question is phrased can lead to different results, they said, making the systems unreliable for deciding whether a class matches its official description. They warned that using AI this way could lead to courses being flagged over isolated words and further shift control of teaching away from faculty and toward administrators.

“I’m not convinced this is about serving students or cleaning up syllabi,” said Chris Gilliard, co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute. “This looks like a project to control education and remove it from professors and put it into the hands of administrators and legislatures.”

Setting up the tool

During a board of regents meeting last month, Texas A&M System leaders described the new processes they were developing to audit courses as a repeatable enforcement mechanism. 

Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs James Hallmark said the system would use “AI-assisted tools” to examine course data under “consistent, evidence-based criteria,” which would guide future board action on courses. Regent Sam Torn praised it as “real governance,” saying Texas A&M was “stepping up first, setting the model that others will follow.” 

That same day, requiring presidents to sign off on any course that could be seen as advocating for “race and gender ideology” and prohibiting professors from teaching material not on the approved syllabus for a course.

In a statement to the Tribune, Chris Bryan, the system’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, said Texas A&M is using OpenAI services through an existing subscription to aid the system’s course audit and that the tool is still being tested as universities finish sharing their course data. He said “any decisions about appropriateness, alignment with degree programs, or student outcomes will be made by people, not software.”

In records obtained by the Tribune, Castillo, the system’s chief strategy officer, told colleagues to prepare for about 20 system employees to use the tool to make hundreds of queries each semester. 

The records also show some of the concerns that arose from early tests of the tool.  

When Castillo told colleagues about the varying results she obtained when searching for classes that discuss feminism, deputy chief information officer Mark Schultz cautioned that the tool came with “an inherent risk of inaccuracy.”

“Some of that can be mitigated with training,” he said, “but it probably can’t be fully eliminated.”

Schultz did not specify what kinds of inaccuracies he meant. When asked if the potential inaccuracies had been resolved, Bryan said, “We are testing baseline conversations with the AI tool to validate the accuracy, relevance and repeatability of the prompts.” He said this includes seeing how the tool responds to invalid or misleading prompts and having humans review the results.

Experts said the different answers Castillo received when she rephrased her question reflect how these systems operate. They explained that these kinds of AI tools generate their responses by predicting patterns and generating strings of text.

“These systems are fundamentally systems for repeatedly answering the question ‘what is the likely next word’ and that’s it,” said Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. “The sequence of words that comes out looks like the kind of thing you would expect in that context, but it is not based on reason or understanding or looking at information.”

Because of that, small changes to how a question is phrased can produce different results. Experts also said users can nudge the model toward the answer they want. Gilliard said that is because these systems are also prone to what developers call “sycophancy,” meaning they try to agree with or please the user. 

“Very often, a thing that happens when people use this technology is if you chide or correct the machine, it will say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ or like ‘you’re right,’ so you can often goad these systems into getting the answer you desire,” he said.

T. Philip Nichols, a Baylor University professor who studies how technology influences teaching and learning in schools, said keyword searches also provide little insight into how a topic is actually taught. He called the tool “a blunt instrument” that isn’t capable of understanding how certain discussions that the software might flag as unrelated to the course tie into broader class themes. 

“Those pedagogical choices of an instructor might not be present in a syllabus, so to just feed that into a chatbot and say, ‘Is this topic mentioned?’ tells you nothing about how it’s talked about or in what way,” Nichols said. 

Castillo’s description of her experience testing the AI tool was the only time in the records reviewed by the Tribune when Texas A&M administrators discussed specific search terms being used to inspect course content. In another email, Castillo said she would share search terms with staff in person or by phone rather than email. 

System officials did not provide the list of search terms the system plans to use in the audit.

Martin Peterson, a Texas A&M philosophy professor who studies the ethics of technology, said faculty have not been asked to weigh in on the tool, including members of the university’s AI council. He noted that the council’s ethics and governance committee is charged with helping set standards for responsible AI use.

While Peterson generally opposes the push to audit the university system’s courses, he said he is “a little more open to the idea that some such tool could perhaps be used.”

“It is just that we have to do our homework before we start using the tool,” Peterson said.

AI-assisted revisions

At Texas State University, officials ordered faculty to rewrite their syllabi and suggested they use AI to do it.

In October, administrators flagged 280 courses for review and told faculty to revise titles, descriptions and learning outcomes to remove wording the university said was not neutral. Records indicate that dozens of courses set to be offered by the College of Liberal Arts in the Spring 2026 semester were singled out for neutrality concerns. They included courses such as Intro to Diversity, Social Inequality, Freedom in America, Southwest in Film and Chinese-English Translation.

Faculty were given until Dec. 10 to complete the rewrites, with a second-level review scheduled in January and the entire catalog to be evaluated by June. 

Administrators shared with faculty a guide outlining wording they said signaled advocacy. It discouraged learning outcomes that describe students “measure or require belief, attitude or activism (e.g., value diversity, embrace activism, commit to change).”

Administrators also provided a prompt for faculty to paste into an AI writing assistant alongside their materials. The prompt instructs the chatbot to “identify any language that signals advocacy, prescriptive conclusions, affective outcomes or ideological commitments” and generate three alternative versions that remove those elements. 

Jayme Blaschke, assistant director of media relations at Texas State, described the internal review as “thorough” and “deliberative,” but would not say whether any classes have already been revised or removed, only that “measures are in place to guide students through any adjustments and keep their academic progress on track.” He also declined to explain how courses were initially flagged and who wrote the neutrality expectations.

Faculty say the changes have reshaped how curriculum decisions are made on campus.

Aimee Villarreal, an assistant professor of anthropology and president of Texas State’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said the process is usually faculty-driven and unfolds over a longer period of time. She believes the structure of this audit allows administrators to more closely monitor how faculty describe their disciplines and steer how that material must be presented.

She said the requirement to revise courses quickly or risk having them removed from the spring schedule has created pressure to comply, which may have pushed some faculty toward using the AI writing assistant.

Villarreal said the process reflects a lack of trust in faculty and their field expertise when deciding what to teach.

“I love what I do,” Villarreal said, “and it’s very sad to see the core of what I do being undermined in this way.”

Nichols warned the trend of using AI in this way represents a larger threat. 

“This is a kind of de-professionalizing of what we do in classrooms, where we’re narrowing the horizon of what’s possible,” he said. “And I think once we give that up, that’s like giving up the whole game. That’s the whole purpose of why universities exist.”

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: Baylor University, Texas A&M University and Texas A&M University System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This first appeared on .

This statement is not about racial preference, or any so-called “woke” priorities. It’s about improving learning outcomes for all children. And right now, with public schools divided among  even more than they have been since the Civil Rights era, those who claim to care about Black children’s success in school should care whether those students see themselves reflected in those teaching them. 

the power of Black teachers and culturally responsive learning environments. They contribute to higher achievement, increased critical thinking skills, and better preparation for a global workforce. By contrast, eliminating these efforts ensures that future generations, especially Black and Latino students, face even greater barriers to success.

Ronald Reagan understood this. Reagan, the GOP’s lionized conservative icon, encouraged our country to put more Black teachers in our classrooms. 

In 1987, Reagan issued  recognizing the significant contributions of Black teachers within American society. It urged citizens to honor Black educators and acknowledge the historical challenges they’d surmounted. 

The proclamation states: “So that America continues to remain a land of opportunity for all people… we should encourage a wide representation of African Americans as teachers and continued concern for African American students.” 

Reagan, the classic “America First” president, cared enough about our country’s future to emphasize the need for Black educators. But in today’s GOP, which has embraced racial polarization and denies the need for any race-based initiatives, Reagan would be derided and booted out.  

Today, Ronald Reagan would be labeled “woke” (although others had more  for him) by the Trump administration and his followers.��

The divergence between these two Republican presidents highlights how far half of the body politic has moved in just under four decades. We are moving socially and politically backwards at a time when our country is becoming increasingly more . 

The recent executive orders, veiled as an attempt to reduce government spending, and applied on Trump’s first day in office before any real due diligence on expenditures could be accounted for, set sights on . 

While federal dollars account for about  to public schools, public schools are an easy political target. Weaponizing racial equity initiatives that support students — such as actively recruiting more Black teachers — helps score cheap political points. The effect on students is of no concern to those now in control.

Historically, Republican leaders, even if reluctantly, recognized that investing in education and ensuring access for all Americans, including Black students, was crucial for national prosperity. 

The Republican party of Reagan’s era somewhat embraced the contributions of Black educators and the essential importance of education for Black Americans to succeed. Today it has been declared that to “Make America Great Again,” we must erase all mention of race from public discourse in the name of parity while  to remove inconvenient and painful realities. 

Reagan’s public acknowledgment of the need for Black educators and inclusive learning environments reflects at least a basic understanding that when diverse talent flourishes, so does the nation and its economy. This appears to elude current Republican leadership.

We have to ask: What does the Republican party lose by having a diversified workforce? An increased number of Black teachers? More educated Black students? What could be gained if we did have all three?

As their anti-woke fever dreams come to life, they are destroying the very tools that could make America stronger, more competitive, more prosperous – and actually great.

The Republican party of Reagan’s era paid lip service to the idea that Black achievement was part of America’s success. The Republican party of Trump, however, seems determined to move the country closer to a dangerous precipice by erasing that idea altogether.

Roughly a mile away, the demographics at Billingsville, another K-5, sat in stark contrast. Located in the Grier Heights neighborhood — an old farming community founded by a former slave — Billingsville was a high-poverty school serving an all-Black student population.

“We operated in silos that I never understood as a principal,” Hash said.

Portable classrooms on Cotswold’s overcrowded campus were evidence of the school’s popularity, while Billingsville occupied a brand new building with room to spare.

In 2018, the two schools became part of a unique experiment that was unlike any student assignment plan families had ever been part of. The schools would merge, but instead of moving into one building, the early grades would occupy Billingsville, and Cotswold would serve grades 3 through 5. 

Almost immediately, under the new arrangement, Billingsville went from having one white student to being 40% white, Hash said. Both schools now offer the rigorous IB program and have a more racially and socioeconomically balanced population. Across both schools, less than half of the students live in poverty, 41% students are Black, about 17% are Hispanic and 34% are white. 

“Our school looks like the world. Our school looks like Charlotte,” Hash said. 

The student assignment method, called a pairing, is not new. In fact, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district employed the same design in the 1970s following a that required the district to desegregate. But the model has been underutilized as an integration strategy, experts say. 

Now, shows that such mergers could reduce racial and ethnic isolation by as much as 60% in 200 large school districts nationwide. At the same time, the method would increase parents’ commute to school by only a few minutes — not a small matter for families managing busy drop-off and pick-up schedules.

“What we’re trying to do … is highlight how student assignment policy changes might help produce environments that can reduce the concentration of different forms of disadvantage,” said Nabeel Gillani, an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and the lead researcher on the project. “Disadvantage can prevent young people and their families from reaching their potential.”

Under a , schools are no longer permitted to consider race when pursuing integration goals. But blending schools with different socioeconomic profiles can still result in more racially diverse schools. In a moment when leaders of the ruling party in Washington want to “” and argue that “,” Gillani urges districts not to back off efforts to create more integrated schools. He said he hopes that the Trump administration’s warnings against any emphasis on racial diversity “will light a stronger fire under more districts” to consider pairing, “instead of scaring them away.”

Along with the research paper, released Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ Nexus journal, Gillani and doctoral student Madison Landry created an that shows how pairing, and sometimes tripling, would change school demographics in communities across the country. 

For example, in Plano, Texas, 26% of the students at Shepard Elementary are non-white, according to 2022 data, while 83% of students at Sigler, about six minutes away, are non-white. 

Pairing the two schools would more than double the percentage of students of color at Shepard and decrease the percentage at Sigler to 52.9%, bringing both closer to the districtwide figure of 65%.

‘A desired racial balance’

Across the country, data shows that schools have grown increasingly divided by race, ethnicity and family income. A from the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed that more than a third of students attended schools in 2020-21 where 75% or more students were of a single race or ethnicity. , however, shows that students who attend integrated schools have higher test scores and lower dropout rates. 

In 2017, Billingsville earned a D rating from the state. Now the combined Billingsville-Cotswold earns a C, but also met its academic growth target, a measure that captures progress from year to year. 

Such results are one reason why the Biden administration in 2023 took steps to encourage districts to implement strategies like pairing. The U.S. Department of Education awarded $14 million to states, districts and charter networks working to create more integrated schools. 

Gillani has advised one of the recipients, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, as it develops a redistricting plan. While the plans don’t involve pairing, leaders are still redrawing boundaries with an eye toward reducing socioeconomic isolation across the district. 

Other recipients included a Rhode Island charter network, the Oakland Unified School District in California and the Maryland Department of Education.

A department spokeswoman said she had no information about whether the program would continue, but one advocate for school integration doubts it, considering the administration’s opposition to diversity efforts. 

“I think it’s unlikely that they would run another competition for that grant under this administration,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. 

In fact, the department’s Feb. 14 “” letter warned districts against taking steps to “achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.” 

But “socioeconomic diversity has its own independent value,” said Richard Kahlenberg, director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “There is a wealth of research to suggest that students benefit from attending a mixed-income school … even if there is zero impact on racial diversity.”

The Supreme Court has also upheld race-neutral policies. Within the past year, the court has declined to hear two cases, one from Boston and one from Fairfax County, Virginia, that challenged efforts to create more diversity in highly selective schools.

“The judiciary will almost surely uphold socioeconomic integration plans at the end of the day,” Kahlenberg said. 

Even though the federal grant program was small, Potter said she hopes the efforts would offer “some important proof points” for how to encourage integration at a time when many districts are considering mergers because of declining enrollment. 

“There really is a chance to have a win-win situation when it’s structured right,” she said, “and when there’s community engagement to work through these hard conversations.”

‘Why are they changing everything?’

One benefit of pairing — over a typical redistricting plan that reassigns students to new schools — is that it doesn’t split up peers from the same grade level. They might relocate to a different building, but they stay with their friends.

That doesn’t make it easy, however. Families often have multiple children in the same elementary school and arrange afterschool programs and child care around that location. 

“Our first reaction was ‘Oh gosh, why are they changing everything?’ ” said Brantley Alvey, whose oldest daughter, now in seventh grade, went through the merger.  Her youngest is in fifth grade at the school. “When we bought our house, we said ‘We love that our kids are going to walk to elementary school for six years.’ ”

Parents also had questions over how the makeup of their children’s classrooms would change after the merger.

“Would they be the only child of color or would they be the only child that wasn’t of color?” Hash recalled. “Those were real conversations that we had to tackle.”

To help parents manage morning and afternoon routines, the schools have staggered bell schedules. The district also spent the entire 2017-18 school year preparing families for the change. Hash organized campus beautification days and concerts to help families from the two schools get to know each other. She said she had to view the merger of communities not just from an instructional and management perspective, but with a “micro-political lens.”

“You have to lean in with how we’re alike versus how we’re different,” she said. “This is a model that can be replicated across the United States, not just in Charlotte.”

Hash is the principal for both campuses, dividing her time between the two. Because of the pairing, Alvey said, the school has benefited from more resources — like two full-time art teachers, and more playground equipment and library books. For parent leaders, however, organizing carnivals and other family events has often been “labor intensive,” she said. “We’re constantly feeling like we have to duplicate our efforts on two different campuses.” 

While the positives, she said, have outweighed the negatives, the one-school, two-campus model won’t be in place much longer. will eventually bring all K-5 students together in a newly built Cotswold, while the Billingsville site becomes a district Montessori school. Grier Heights families will be able to choose which school they want their children to attend.

Still, Alvey said the pairing has benefited her children and helped to break down barriers between the two neighborhoods — especially since both schools feed into the same middle and high school.

“It’s not just low-income kids that benefit from diversity; it’s the higher income kids as well,” she said. “We want our kids to be comfortable with people from different backgrounds and different cultures. That’s only going to better prepare them to be good citizens of the world.”

Experts consider a released by the department late Friday to be more in line with how the courts have traditionally viewed illegal discrimination.

“This is such a far cry from what they put out two weeks ago,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It’s downright reasonable.”

Part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion, the called diversity a “nebulous” goal and warned that districts could be subject to investigations for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” It prompted opposition from , and education . And it left some educators wondering topics like Black History Month.

The Q&A, however, asserts that officials would not automatically consider anything labelled DEI to be illegal and would examine as part of its investigations whether a policy actually resulted in discrimination against students. Cultural and historical observances are fine, the document says, as long as all students are welcome to participate, regardless of race.

“They were trying to see how far they could go, and then they got the pushback,” Wernz said, noting the timing of the department’s guidance. “I love that they say you can celebrate Black history at the end of the month.”

In a on the changes, Wernz noted that the department clarified that it would need evidence that a particular racial group was harmed before it decided to launch an investigation. But she still warned districts to avoid lessons that separate students by race or assignments that ask them to identify their race. 

Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said there was no need to walk back any instructions to districts.

“I don’t think the earlier letter needed to be softened,” she said. “But, of course, school districts were going to have questions and this seemed to answer them.”

‘Vagueness, Confusion and Chaos’

The department is still likely to get wide-ranging reports of what members of the public consider “divisive ideologies and indoctrination.” The portal it unveiled last week doesn’t define what the department considers to be illegal discrimination. 

The additional guidance hasn’t prompted the American Federation of Teachers to drop its federal lawsuit over the original letter. In a statement, AFT President Randi Weingarten said that the Q&A “just made things murkier.”

Last week, the union, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, sued, appeared to ban the teaching of “systemic and structural racism” in American history. The lawsuit says the teachers would be afraid to discuss Jim Crow laws, the internment of Japanese Americans and other examples of historical discrimination.

The Q&A doesn’t discuss how teachers should approach lessons on history and only says, “OCR’s assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”

“If you are a classroom teacher, you still have no idea what you can or can’t teach when it comes to the history of the United States and the world,” Weingarten  said. “It seems like vagueness, confusion and chaos is the point.”

California’s K-12 schools are getting some clarity on how to handle the Trump administration’s sweeping orders to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The answer is: Do nothing. Not yet, anyway.

“Time to take a breath. Just because Trump ordered it, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen,” Noelle Ellerson Ng, a legislative advocate for the ,  last week. “Executive orders on their own can’t really accomplish much … There’s a distinct difference between activity and productivity.”

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education  for any school that has programs focused on race. That could include clubs, activities, prizes, graduation ceremonies “and all other aspects of student, academic and campus life,” .

“With this guidance, the Trump Administration is directing schools to end the use of racial preferences and race stereotypes in their programs and activities — a victory for justice, civil rights laws, and the Constitution,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights for the education department, said in a .   

Schools have until Feb. 28 to end the programs.

On Friday, a judge  some of Trump’s orders related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The ruling prevents the federal government from cutting funding, but it doesn’t stop it from investigating schools’ race-related programs – at least for now.

Nearly every high school in California has at least some programs focused on students’ race. Black, Latino and Asian student clubs are common, as are celebrations like Chinese New Year or Cinco de Mayo. In recent years, more students — particularly Native American students — have worn ethnic regalia to graduation ceremonies, or even held separate ceremonies.

About 8% of California’s K-12 funding comes from the federal government, mostly as payments for special education and Title I grants for schools where at least 40% of the student population is low-income. If the federal money disappears, those schools and students will be most affected.

Attorney General Rob Bonta said he was reviewing the Department of Education’s directive, but in general, he said that DEI programs are legal and schools have a right to promote them.

In a  in January with 12 other state attorneys general, Bonta called Trump’s anti-DEI efforts “unnecessary and disingenuous.”

“The administration is targeting lawful policies and programs that are beneficial to all Americans,” they wrote. “These policies and programs are not only consistent with state and federal anti-discrimination laws, they foster environments where everyone has an opportunity to succeed.” 

Attorney General weighs in

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, but earlier in February he urged schools to “stay focused” and not get distracted by Trump’s orders.

“Now is not the time to be distracted by external efforts to demean and divide,” Thurmond wrote to school authorities. “Please continue to stay the course with local programs that are producing results. Now is the time when our students need consistency, support, and community more than ever.” 

Some parents were dismayed at the directive, saying it would limit their children’s exposure to other cultures. Katie Walton, a mother of three Native American children, said she worried how it would impact Native American programs and curriculum, particularly a  requiring schools to teach about the genocide of Native Californians during the Spanish and Gold Rush eras.

“Me and my husband will teach our kids what they need to know, but I’m worried about all the other kids who might not get this information,” said Walton, who lives in Madera County and whose children are part of the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians. “It makes me sad.” 

Angie Barfield, executive director of , said she’s received calls from school administrators throughout the state who are unsure whether to disband their campus Black student clubs.

She tells them to “stand firm.”

“This is not the time to run,” Barield said. “The governor is going to fight, the attorney general is going to fight, and we’re going to fight, too.”

Black student clubs began decades ago

At least 3,000 high school students in California belong to Black student clubs, although the number is probably much higher, Barfield said. The groups date from the late 1960s, when students at San Francisco State started the first Black student union, and have spread to high schools and colleges nationwide.

Traditionally open to everyone, the clubs give students a chance to socialize, discuss issues and advocate for the needs of Black students. The students in Barfield’s organization also go on college tours, run a youth senate and advocate for student health.

“These clubs have a long track record of supporting not just Black students, but all students,” Barfield said. “This order is taking us backwards.” 

Ng and her colleagues are advising school administrators to consult with school boards, lawyers and community members to see what their options are, and how to respond. But, she said, it’s important to stay calm until there’s more specific information from Washington, D.C., such as a Congressional order.

“Regardless of what the Trump administration does, public school doors are still open and kids still show up,” Ng said. “So quitting is not an option, and we have to figure out how to respond.”

Since taking office in January, Trump has made a  to reshape public schools, some of which are already moving forward. He vowed to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, legalize vouchers for parents to use public money to send their children to private school, and overhaul Title IX, which bans discrimination based on gender.

Earlier this month, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency , which paid for reviews of teaching strategies, literacy programs and special education support, among other services. 

Trump also eliminated a law enforcement provision that protected schools, hospitals and other “sensitive locations” from immigration enforcement. That move has thrown immigrant communities into panic, with parents in some areas .

This story was originally published on CalMatters.

Leaders say they have no plans to hit pause on the project despite a from the U.S. Department of Education that warns against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” The strongly worded message from Craig Trainor, the top civil rights official at the department, said schools could be investigated for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” 

The Long Beach community asked for “a space that lifts the experience of Black youth,” said Deputy Superintendent Tiffany Brown, adding that the district has a “commitment to listen to those voices.”

Long Beach is not alone. While many school leaders at the letter’s tone, several left-leaning states and districts have since countered Trainor’s threats with tough statements of their own. 

“We’re going to be as inclusive as we’ve always been,” said Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of the Beaverton School District in Oregon. He called the department’s letter “an attempt to bully” districts. “Let’s not be hyper-reactive to things that come out right now.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey in a statement that DEI efforts make the state stronger. California state Superintendent assured districts that memos can’t override existing law or “impose new terms on existing agreements.” And Illinois state chief Tony Sanders reminded educators that state law on the history of different racial groups and LGBTQ issues. 

The letter is part of the Trump administration’s larger DEI offensive, which has included and the cancellation of millions of dollars in contracts related to equity goals.

On Thursday, the department unveiled , a website where the public can report schools they think are illegally discriminating against students.

Many districts and advocacy organizations like , the School Superintendents Association, have homed in on a footnote in Trainor’s letter stating that it “does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards.” 

“It is just a letter. It’s not rules or regs. It’s not changing law,” said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Association, a network with member schools nationwide. “We have diverse in our name. It’s not something we’re going to fade away from.” 

The letter referenced , a 2023 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions. But some experts say the letter is inconsistent with the court’s opinion. 

“The letter goes far beyond what the Supreme Court said in SFFA, and, indeed, even contradicts it,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute. Trainor, for example, said that when making admission decisions, colleges can’t factor essays in which students write about the role of race in their lives. 

But that’s the opposite of what the court ruled, McCluskey said. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing in the ruling “should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” 

According to Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, officials plan to issue additional guidance. Andrew Manna, an Indianapolis-area education lawyer, said it might also take an actual complaint against a district or an OCR investigation to get clarity on what officials consider to be illegal discrimination. 

But some welcome the department’s more muscular approach. 

“I think, and hope, the department will be at least as strict as the Obama administration was,” said Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. She’s referring to a 2014 alerting districts that they risked civil rights investigations if they disproportionately disciplined Black and Hispanic students. A few months later, OCR launched an investigation into the , later finding over 100 instances where Black students were disciplined more harshly than their white peers for similar infractions.

“This is a fundamental question of fairness, as was SFFA,” Deshpande said. “OCR should absolutely go after schools that undermine fairness via unfair DEI preferences.”

Groups or classes or extra academic support aimed at specific are among the practices that Parents Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group, argues are illegal.

The American Federation of Teachers, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, is challenging the letter. They in federal court Tuesday, saying the “vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself.”

‘Target-rich environment’

Leaders in more right-leaning parts of the country said they’re also not worried about Trainor’s letter, largely because lawmakers in their states have already banned DEI.

Last year, Utah, for example, passed that labels diversity, equity and inclusion “prohibited discriminatory practices.” When Utah’s education department gave the legislature a compliance update, there were no violations to report, state Superintendent Sydnee Dickson told The 74. 

“We didn’t need to make dramatic changes in our K-12 system,” she said. 

Trainor’s letter followed an from the president that called on the education department to devise a plan for stripping districts of their federal funds if they advance “discriminatory equity ideology.” Officials have until the end of April to devise such policies. 

But the OCR letter accelerates the process, warning districts to “cease all efforts” to accomplish what it calls “nebulous” diversity goals and that it will begin taking “appropriate measures to assess compliance” March 1. The department has yet to specify what those measures might be.

Parents Defending Education has already done a lot of the work for the new administration. The organization keeps a of districts nationwide that have equity-related policies and initiatives. Last year, it forced the Los Angeles district to revise its Black Student Achievement Plan, which provided additional counseling and academic support in schools predominantly serving Black students. All students, not just those who are Black, are now eligible for the extra help. 

 The group’s list has more districts from California than from any other state. 

“California is a target-rich environment for the administration’s causes,” said Laura Preston, director of government affairs for F3Law, which handles education cases throughout the state. 

She suggested that the state might not want to risk the loss of federal education funds at a time when state resources are needed to rebuild parts of Los Angeles ravaged by fire. But she also questioned OCR’s ability to conduct thorough investigations when the department is . The letter, she said, sets up a potential clash between states and the federal government. prohibits the government from mandating or controlling instruction or withholding funds from districts if they don’t comply. 

“Trump keeps saying he wants states’ rights [and] then tries to be the federal school board,” she said. “It doesn’t work in the long haul.”

‘Committed to full compliance’

To show that some education leaders welcome Trainor’s message, the department last week highlighted statements from several state chiefs who agree with the letter. 

“I applaud this directive from the U.S. Department of Education and Florida stands ready to assist other states to end racial preferences in education,” said Manny Diaz, Florida education commissioner. And Ellen Weaver, state superintendent in South Carolina, said her department is “committed to full compliance with the U.S. Department of Education’s directive.”

But Diaz, Weaver and Dickson from Utah were also among the 12 state education leaders who last month told Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary nominee, that they wanted the department to stop issuing “dear colleague” letters intended to push states to “take actions aligned to the current administration’s priorities and opinions.”

McCluskey at Cato said the letter is still consistent with their request, which was to clearly state that dear colleague letters are not legally binding. But he still finds such missives problematic.

“For all intents and purposes they impose new law, while those who issue them simultaneously claim they legally change nothing,” he said. “Of course, they shouldn’t change anything. Changing law is a legislative responsibility.”

Aaron Spence, superintendent of the Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia — which has long been targeted on Parents Defending Education’s — said he’s tried to reassure the community that his district isn’t doing anything illegal, like using racial quotas or hiring staff based on race instead of qualifications.

In January 2022, just after his election, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an demanding that schools avoid “inherently divisive concepts.” But Spence doesn’t view his district’s to be controversial and said under , districts are required to report student progress for different subgroups. 

“People get this pie mentality, which is ‘Oh gosh, if they do more for this group of students, they’re doing less for this group of students,’ ” he said. “The goal for everybody is 100% success. We’re working to ensure all of them get over the bar of achievement that we’ve set for them.”

For example, teachers in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are almost three times more likely to be early in their career, with less than three years of experience. And students in these districts are 16 times more likely to learn from a teacher with temporary or emergency credentials than their peers in Michigan’s wealthiest school districts.

“The teacher shortage crisis that we hear a lot about here in Michigan is far worse for our students with the greatest needs,” said Jen DeNeal, director of policy and research at EdTrust-Midwest and lead author of the report. 

DeNeal noted that research shows that novice, not fully credentialed teachers are generally less effective in the classroom.

While the national teacher shortage in certain subjects has been as an intractable issue that’s worsened since the pandemic, the EdTrust study released last month uniquely zooms in on district-level data and demonstrates the scope of the problem.

“Having gaps is, of course, not a surprise,” said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Having gaps of this magnitude is pretty stark.”

DeNeal and her team at EdTrust, which advocates for educational equity with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved, spent two years analyzing educator workforce data from public and non-public sources, conducting focus groups and reviewing previous research.

They used Michigan’s a state funding formula passed in 2023 that includes an index for concentrations of poverty, to divide school districts into six bands. Band one includes districts with fewer than 20% of students living in concentrated poverty while band six includes districts where 85% to 100% of students live in these conditions. 

Researchers then looked at how highly qualified teachers — defined as those who were fully certified with more than three years of experience teaching in their certification or more refined speciality areas — were distributed across these districts.

They found that in the 2022-23 school year, more than 16% of teachers in high-poverty districts were teaching a subject or grade not listed on their license — that’s twice the state average. These districts accounted for more than a third of all out-of-field educators in the state, despite only employing 13.5% of Michigan teachers. 

While out-of-field teachers are typically a stop-gap resource preferable to a revolving door of substitutes, they may lack the content knowledge and skills needed to effectively teach, and students who learn from them tend to have in that subject. Those with emergency credentials are also able to fill teacher vacancies when more qualified ones aren’t available, though they’re more likely to be rated as when compared to other new teachers.

Hansen noted that being trained and fully licensed makes a teacher more likely to provide quality instruction in the classroom, but “it’s no guarantee.” And while these findings do likely point to a “more effective teacher workforce in these more affluent settings, and … a less effective workforce in the high-needs settings, it’s probably not the case that it’s going to be 16 times more effective.”

Yet, “of all these different factors and characteristics that they’re highlighting in this report, experience is the number one that’s documented to show an impact across multiple studies and multiple grades,” he added.

Persistent vacancies may be particularly hard to fill in Michigan, where teacher attrition is slightly worse than the national average, and teacher turnover is far higher for students living in poverty. For example Black students, who account for only 18% of the statewide student enrollment, make up 45% of where teachers were most likely to leave.

In districts where a majority of children are Black, students were nearly four times more likely to learn from an out-of-field teacher, four times more likely to learn from a teacher with emergency credentials and nearly twice as likely to learn from a beginning teacher than in districts serving primarily white students.

In focus groups, teachers pointed to a number of factors contributing to the shortage, including the pandemic, discipline challenges and chronic absenteeism. They also reported that their classrooms are overfilled, they have less one-on-one time with students and less planning time because they’re being called on to substitute teach. One issue, though, came up again and again: pay.

“We’re not competitive regionally and we’re not terribly competitive nationally,” DeNeal said.

Between Michigan’s inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell more than 20%, representing the second-largest teacher salary decline in the country. First-year teachers in Michigan earned, on average, about $39,000 a year, rendering it 39th nationally and last among Great Lake states. And researchers found that teachers in the wealthiest district are paid, on average, about $4,000 more annually than those in the poorest districts.

This is exactly the opposite of what the pay structure should look like, according to Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institute of Research and the University of Washington. He argued that teachers in more challenging environments should be paid more than their peers to compensate for the additional hurdles.

“I don’t think this is an issue where we need a lot of research to know that this problem exists and to know at least what some of the potential solutions are,” he said. “This is an issue where the politics I think make it challenging to implement at least some of the solutions.”

DeNeal said that although these challenges are “troubling and extremely persistent, they are not insurmountable.”

The report put forward five recommendations, based on teacher focus groups and previous research: prioritize fair and equitable funding; improve state education data systems to increase transparency; provide greater support for school administrators; focus on making teaching an attractive and competitive career and increase access to high-quality professional development for teachers.

Thomas Morgan, spokesperson for the Michigan Education Association, emphasized the importance of incorporating teacher voice in the solutions.

“When you want to know what to do to fix our schools,” he said, “the first people you should talk to are people working on the front lines: those teachers working in our schools. They see things, they live it, they breathe it and they should be consulted.”

While the policy has since been replaced, a group of white and Asian parents sued the district, claiming that although it appeared to be race neutral, in practice it disproportionately harmed them and violated their rights under the Equal Protection Clause. The families were seeking damages, as well as spots at the schools for five students who argued they would have been accepted under the pre-COVID policy. 

The decision, handed down earlier this month, lets stand a lower court’s ruling that the policy did not violate the rights of white and Asian students. It was closely watched for signs of how eager the high court might be to apply to K-12 admissions elements of its landmark 2023 decision overturning affirmative action in higher education.

In a five-page dissent, justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said that in declining to hear the case, the court “refused to correct a glaring constitutional error that threatens to perpetuate race-based affirmative action in defiance of” that earlier case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina.

Writing in favor of the decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the fact that the policy is no longer in place at least partially convinced him it was unnecessary to hear the case. That being said, he cautioned against reading into his reasoning an approval of the lower court’s decision and encouraged future judges to consider the concerns raised in his fellow justices’ dissent. 

Advocacy organizations in favor of race-conscious policies considered the court’s decision a victory.

“Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard affirmative action case, right-wing groups have unsuccessfully tried to extend its reach to challenge diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of said in a statement. “But today’s action by the Supreme Court sends a clear signal: there’s no appetite for extending the affirmative action decision beyond its narrow scope in college admissions.”

Bethany Li, executive director of The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, was part of a multi-racial coalition of community organizations and families that joined Boston Public Schools in defending the policy. She felt it was particularly important for her organization to get involved to signal that the Asian community is not a monolith and that many support affirmative action.

“Asian Americans wanted to very visibly show that we were standing in solidarity with the Black and Latino community on this issue,” she said in an interview with The 74. “I think there’s always this story that’s told that Asian Americans, for example, aren’t as supportive of affirmative action, or aren’t supportive of policies that increase diversity — and that’s actually not the case.”

Li also argued that the challenge should have been dismissed long ago, since the policy is no longer in place. Under the new policy, students receive an admissions score — their GPA accounts for 70% and a standardized test for the remaining 30%. Students may be eligible to receive additional points if they meet specific criteria, like living in public housing or attending a school with an enrollment of 40% or more economically disadvantaged students.

Boston Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.

Christopher Kieser, a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the plaintiffs, pushed back on the defunct-policy argument. 

“It was unfortunate to see that that was cited as a reason not to take the case,” he said, adding that “actually this is a really good vehicle to address this question, because it’s a really concrete thing. There’s no future moving parts that are going to be coming up. We already know what happened, and all we’re asking for is to send it back and for the district court to be able to give a remedy to these five kids.”

Historically, the three schools — Boston Latin Academy, the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, and Boston Latin School — solely considered a student’s grades and a single standardized test score to determine admissions. Critics had long argued this criteria meant few Black and Latino students were selected for the coveted positions, and the Boston School Committee — the governing body for Boston Public Schools — began considering amendments to the policy in 2019.

These changes came to fruition in the 2021-22 school year, when Boston Public Schools temporarily suspended the entrance exam, and instead prioritized grades and geography. Under the new, two-part policy, one-fifth of seats were given to the top academic students across the city. For the remaining 80% of the entering class, geography was included in admissions criteria: each of the city’s zip codes had the opportunity to send their students with the highest GPAs, a move meant to diversify the schools. 

Advocates say the policy was a success: between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years, Black students increased from 14% to 23% of total enrollment and Latino students grew from 21% to 23%, while white students decreased from 40% to 31% and Asian students shrank from 21% to 18%. A lower court ruled that this did not disproportionately harm Asian and white students, since they were still overrepresented in the sought-after schools compared to their numbers in Boston Public Schools’ overall enrollment. In his dissent, Alito wrote, “This reasoning is indefensible.”

This type of case is not unique: earlier this year the firm representing the Asian and white families in Boston asked the high court to hear a similar one surrounding an admissions policy at a prestigious magnet school in The court ultimately denied that request as well, but the Pacific Legal Foundation is currently litigating other cases against admissions policies in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools and in New York City. 

New York City’s eight specialized high schools — including Stuyvesant High School and The Bronx High School of Science — are of particular prominence. They almost exclusively only look at a student’s score on a single standardized test to determine admissions, which critics say drives lopsided demographics. Last spring, just 4.5% of offers went to Black students and 7.6% went to Hispanic students. In 2024, only 10 Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant’s first-year class of 744 in Lower Manhattan, according to reporting by  

In attempting to bring this latest batch of cases to the Supreme Court, plaintiffs were hoping to establish a similar precedent in K-12 schools as was laid out in Students for Fair Admissions.

“Overall the precedent we want to set is that you can’t make race-based decisions in K-12 admissions … whether you do it through a proxy or you do it explicitly, it’s the same,” said Kieser.

“We’re going to keep going as much as we can,” he added. “Like I said, we’ve had issues where it’s taken us 10, 12 times to ask the court to hear a case before they’ve done it. So it’s not over.”

The nonprofit released its analysis alongside a . Previously, they’ve tracked the racial makeup of teachers as compared to their students; this year, for the first time, they’ve added a new metric: the diversity of the college-educated workforce nationally.

“Comparing teacher diversity to student diversity is meaningful, and it is important for students to see themselves reflected in their teachers,” said Heather Peske, president of the organization known as . “But we also have to make sure that as we’re setting goals for diversifying the workforce, [that] we set goals based on who we can … attract into the teacher workforce right now.” 

Historically, teachers have been slightly more diverse than the population of college-educated working adults, a trend which shifted around 2020. As of the most recently available data, teachers from historically disadvantaged groups make up 22.6% of working-age adults with degrees but 21.1% of the state teacher workforce. 

While the 1.5-point gap may seem small, Peske told The 74 that it’s significant and points to what she called a “troubling trend:” increasingly people of color are either choosing other professions or are leaving the classroom. 

“We’re really using [the] dashboard both as a rearview mirror … but also as a way to forecast the possibilities of where we’re going. We worry that the gap could grow larger, and so that’s why we think it’s really important to pay attention to it now,” she said.  

The authors of the NCTQ report hypothesize this points to long-standing issues in the teaching profession, including low pay and status, inequitable hiring and the uncompensated and added responsibilities teachers of color often face — like mentoring or interpreting for families— known as the “invisible tax.”

These numbers also shed light on where in the pipeline the disparity originates, according to Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the , who also contributed to the report.

“I think sometimes if we’re only looking at the student and teacher parity … there’s a tendency to just be hypnotized by the problem,” he said, “where this analysis that NCTQ was doing through this dashboard actually gives us even more concrete steps to take to inform our planning.”

El-Mekki said it’s not only important to incentivize people of color to become teachers but also to focus on their retention once they enter the classroom — teacher turnover is higher for teachers of color (22%) than white teachers . Black teachers have some of the highest levels of student loan debt, he added, so offering scholarships or debt relief can make a huge difference. 

“We didn’t want our pursuit to rebuild a Black teacher pipeline to be disconnected from the social and economic realities that Black youth may face,” he said, so his organization designed a Black Teacher Pipeline Fellowship, which provides support to educators socially, professionally and financially. They also emphasize the importance of early exposure, offering career and technical education courses to high schoolers who may be interested in becoming teachers later on. 

NCTQ’s new dashboard continues to show a persistent gap in diversity when comparing the teacher workforce to student populations.  The report cites 48.8% of students nationally who come from historically disadvantaged groups vs. 21.1% of teachers who do. That number was actually two percentage points closer in 2014, with 18.3% of teachers and 44.2% of students.

The organization defines historically disadvantaged groups as including all teachers of color except those who identify as Asian. “While Asian people have certainly experienced discrimination in U.S. history, we haven’t seen the effects of discrimination show up in terms of their educational experiences or earnings outcomes. Asian students often outperform white students, and, as a demographic group, are least likely to suffer from a poor education,” an NCTQ spokesperson told The 74.

That being said, Asian students are less likely than many of their peers of color to see themselves represented in their teachers’ racial identities. Almost 11% of working-age adults with degrees and 5.4% of students are Asian, yet only 2.2% of the state teacher workforce is.

While the percentage of Black educators largely mirrors the population of working-age Black adults with degrees (both at roughly 9%), the percentage of Black students at 15% is six points greater. 

To El-Mekki that demonstrates that there is an untapped Black teacher potential in the number of Black students who could — and do — choose teaching as a career if and when they get the opportunity to go to college. This allows advocates to then probe a little bit deeper, and focus on how to get more Black youth to and through college, so a larger pool is eligible to join the teacher workforce down the line.

An even starker trend exists for Hispanic teachers: Just over 10% of both working-age adults with degrees and the teacher workforce identify as Latino, while 28% of students do. 

The dashboard also includes more granular analysis at the state level, where researchers explored the racial makeup of teacher preparation programs in order to better understand their contribution to diversity between 2019 and 2021. This serves as a roadmap, Peske said, demonstrating which teacher preparation programs are “leading the way towards a more diverse teacher workforce, and which teacher prep programs may be adding roadblocks to diversity by actually making the workforce more white.” 

Extensive research has pointed to the benefits of a diverse teacher workforce, both for students of color and for white students, according to Constance Lindsay, a and assistant education professor at the University of North Carolina.

“For particular populations, it’s very important to have access to a teacher of color or teachers demographically similar to them.” she said, “I would say, particularly for Black boys, definitely on both the quantitative and qualitative side, it’s been demonstrated many times [that] it’s super important for them.”

Some other research highlights:

• Teachers of color produce additional positive academic, social-emotional and behavioral outcomes for all students, On average, students of all races (in upper-elementary grades) show stronger gains in reading and math when they have a teacher of color. 
  
• Black students in Tennessee randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in kindergarten through third grade are 13% more likely to and 19% more likely to enroll in college compared to their Black schoolmates who were not. Additional data from North Carolina revealed similar findings. For the most disadvantaged Black males, conservative estimates suggest that exposure to a Black teacher in primary school cuts high school dropout rates by almost 40%.
  
• Black students in North Carolina matched to a Black teacher tend to have and are less likely to experience , such as expulsion and suspension.
  
• Black students matched to Black teachers are less likely to be identified for .
  
• Student–teacher race and ethnicity matches were associated with for Latino students in a California high school district.

“We have this rapidly diversifying public school student population that is tomorrow’s workers, citizens, etc,” Lindsay added. “We know that of all of the different things that we’ve tried to do to get rid of achievement gaps, having diverse teachers is … a very efficient and effective intervention.”

Disclosure: Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, The Joyce Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide funding to the National Council on Teacher Quality and The 74.

These tensions escalated last year when a teacher disagreed with the superintendent’s decision to follow the advice of the school district’s lawyer and honor a transgender student’s request not to share their transition with their parents. The teacher went public and the results were swift and intense.

Hundreds of people descended on the next school board meeting. A local talk radio host said the superintendent wanted to “indoctrinate their children and … make them become gay and transgender.” Community members verbally accosted the schools chief in public saying, “You’re gonna go to hell. You never read the Bible.” 

The fiscal consequences were also considerable, forcing the district to divert funds from planned professional development. Ultimately, five educators left their jobs in response to the spreading unrest.

This small community’s turmoil is one of many accounts included in a new , which tries for the first time to put a dollar amount on the costs of the culture war conflicts that have consumed school districts over the past several years. The researchers estimate that the nation’s public schools spent approximately $3.2 billion in 2023-24 dealing with divisive public debates over race, gender and sexual orientation, forcing them to spend money on legal fees, security, public relations and employee hours responding to misinformation, disinformation and public records requests. 

And although the researchers said their figures don’t account for the emotional and social toll on educators and students, their numbers do include a significant and related expense: staff turnover.  

“There are many different costs that are really consequential and are undermining the ability of educators to support student learning and well-being,” said John Rogers, a professor at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and the report’s lead author.

Data from the report comes from a national survey of 467 superintendents across 46 states conducted during summer 2024, followed by interviews with 42 superintendents across 12 states. Of those interviewed, 12 had taken the survey and reported moderate or high levels of conflict; the remaining 30 hadn’t taken the survey and were identified through professional leadership networks.

School districts were categorized as having either high, moderate, or low levels of conflict based on a series of questions about the nature of conflict related to culturally divisive issues, the frequency of and topics associated with personal or professional threats to superintendents and district staff and the financial and human resource costs.

Moms for Liberty, a high-profile parental rights group, was named specifically in the report in relation to board members they supported and other far-right groups accusing a western school district of indoctrinating students around sexual health issues. That superintendent cited having to spend roughly $100,000 to hire “armed plainclothes off-duty officers” and more than $500,000 in legal fees. Superintendents and school board members being attacked as pedophiles, groomers or sexual predators was a common refrain in the report.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. Closely aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the group’s influence over school board elections is seen as waning even if battles over curriculum content and library books are still being waged.

Of the districts surveyed, roughly one-third experienced low levels of conflict, just over one-third experienced moderate levels and just under one-third experienced high levels. About 2.5% of superintendents reported no conflict. Overall, Rogers said those surveyed “look a lot like superintendents from the entirety of the (national) pool” in terms of their race, gender and whether they lead urban, rural or suburban districts.

Half of the schools chiefs reported that they experienced at least one instance of harassment in the 2023-24 school year. One in 10 said violent threats were directed toward them and 11% experienced property vandalism.

In order to calculate the overall fiscal costs, researchers asked superintendents about direct expenditures during the 2023-24 school year that were above and beyond what they previously would have spent for resources such as legal services or security; indirect costs, such as redeployed staff time; and employee turnover costs. 

To determine the cost of redeployed staff time, researchers took the number of hours that superintendents reported across these different activities and assigned them a dollar figure based on average district administrator wages from the . For each staff member that left the district, researchers assigned a dollar figure related to recruitment and new staff training based on research out of the .

Rogers noted that “there’s a certain imprecision” when it comes to calculating the cost of staff turnover because “you’re asking superintendents to draw upon the knowledge that they have to make this determination” of why educators and administrators left their positions. Follow-up interviews, he added, helped to bolster the reliability of these figures.

The researchers, who also include Rachel White of the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Shand of American University and Joseph Kahne of the University of California, Riverside, estimated that in their entirety, the conflict-related costs were more than enough to expand the national school breakfast program by 40% or hire “an additional counselor or psychologist for every public high school in the United States.”

Beyond the dollar figures, when speaking with superintendents, Rogers said he was particularly struck by the ways in which violent threats were playing out and how frequently it appeared there was a “concerted effort to disrupt, to foment conflict for the sake of fomenting conflict.”

For example, he heard from a number of superintendents whose districts spent an immense amount of time fulfilling public records requests they felt had been filed in bad faith. Once the materials were compiled, they often went unused, Rogers said.

The lasting implications of these in-district battles — beyond the fiscal costs — still remain unknown and appear to be shifting with the changing landscape. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the History of Education at The University of Pennsylvania, recently on his previous work around the culture wars’ impact on history teachers, writing, “It seems like I might have exaggerated them.” 

But, he noted in an interview with The 74 this week, the effects on other educators and administrators are ongoing. Within the culture wars, he’s noticed less of a focus on race and critical race theory and more on gender and sexuality, hypothesizing that this may mean history teachers feel a lesser impact than English teachers, who might be more likely to teach directly about gender.

His sees the report as a reflection of the country’s “brittle and abusive” political culture. 

“This is the school politics chapter of a much broader story about the way that politics is conducted in America,” he said.

It appears that even as some of these more divisive players move on or are voted out, their political agendas may persist. That’s been the case in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, one of the most closely watched regions for these debates. 

According to recent New York Times , despite Democrats sweeping the last school board election, not all contested books have been returned to school library shelves nor have teachers been allowed to display identity markers, like rainbow flags. Nearly a year after the Moms for Liberty-backed candidates were ousted, their presence is still felt. 

A new report from the  released this week studied the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) on disparities in reading, mathematics, and science achievement among racial and ethnic groups of elementary students in the United States.

Among other things, the study looked at which SES factors best explain existing achievement gaps, along with disparities among high-achieving students. The authors analyzed two sets of data from the federal Early Child Longitudinal Study, from 1998-99 and 2010-11.

The study’s resulting analysis “a broad set of family SES factors explains a substantial portion of racial achievement gaps: between 34 and 64 percent of the Black-white gap and between 51 and 77 percent of the Hispanic-white gap, depending on the subject and grade level.”

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“Racial achievement gaps in schools are well documented and remain a significant cause of concern in education. Troubling too is that the role of socioeconomic disparities in mediating these gaps remains unresolved,” the “While SES accounts for much of the racial achievement disparities, closing these gaps requires a comprehensive approach, including improving school quality and supporting family stability.”

The institute’s study used a broad set of measures of family background, including parents’ education, family finances, household structure, and “household opportunity factors.” The latter measure refers to academic, enrichment, and familial activities.

The authors of the study, University of Albany’s Eric Hengyu Hu and Paul L. Morgan, identified the following key findings from their analysis:

• Racial achievement gaps decrease significantly when controlling for the SES factors (though SES explains more of the Hispanic-white gap than the Black-white gap).
• Of all the SES factors analyzed, household income best explains the Black-white gap in academic achievement and mother’s education best explains the Hispanic-white gap.
• SES indicators, and the extent to which they explain racial/ethnic achievement gaps, are stable over time (1998-99 and 2010-11).
• SES also helps explain racial and ethnic excellence gaps (differences in the proportions of student groups within the highest achievement levels). The SES factors explain a larger share of Hispanic-white excellence gaps than Black-white excellence gaps across the board.
• The Black-white achievement gap grows as students age through elementary school, while the Hispanic-white gap shrinks.

Key findings from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s study.

To close such gaps, the authors recommend investments in early childhood education and income supplements, such as expanding child tax credits.

“Because achievement gaps are already evident by elementary school, including as early as kindergarten, investing in high-quality early childhood education programs, especially in underprivileged communities, may be beneficial in mitigating the effects of socioeconomic disparities,” the report says.

In addition to early childhood investments, the authors also propose the following solutions:

• Support programs to help parents earn their high school diplomas or higher education credentials.
• Economic support and financial aid for low-income families.
• Addressing racial and ethnic disparities, including the adoption of “curricula that reflect diverse cultures and programs that specifically support underrepresented students,” and student-teacher racial and ethnic matching.

“Whatever the approach, there is no denying the urgency of making the U.S. educational system more equitable,” the report says. “…The time to act is now. By enacting comprehensive and inclusive policies, we can narrow achievement gaps and create a more just educational landscape for the next generation.”

You can download and read the full study .

A look a gaps in North Carolina

Achievement gaps — also known as opportunity or equity gaps — follow national trends in North Carolina.

, following the start of the pandemic, only 51% of students tested as grade-level proficient. Proficiency was even lower among historically disadvantaged students, at 33% for Black students, 40% for Hispanic students, and 35% for economically disadvantaged students.

While those rates slightly increased during , gaps and low proficiency rates persist.

More highlights from the report

Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Michael J. Petrilli wrote in the report’s foreword that “the vast racial disparities in socioeconomic conditions and prenatal and early-life health experiences explain the achievement gaps we see between racial and ethnic groups, at least at school entry.”

Citing by economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt, “Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School,” Petrilli writes that this suggests that “universal, race-neutral interventions designed to improve the academic, social, economic, and health conditions of the poor would lift all boats and would also narrow racial gaps.”

Using data from the federal Early Child Longitudinal Study — data cited by Fryer and Levitt, along with more recent data — Petrilli said the report aimed to answer a few questions:

• Had the relationship between socioeconomic achievement gaps and racial/ethnic achievement gaps shifted?
• Was the Black-white gap still growing during elementary school?
• And how did all of this look for the white-Hispanic gap and for subjects beyond just reading and math?

Here is a look at the measures explored in the institute’s paper.

The institute’s study found that family socioeconomic factors explain more “of the Black-white achievement gap in first grade reading than in other subjects and grade levels.” The report proposes this may be the case because parents play a larger role in teaching language skills to young children than they do for math and science.

“The advantages of high SES—and disadvantages of low SES—thus show up more for students’ initial reading skills than for their math and science ones,” the report says. “As students get older and benefit from classroom instruction, their relative advantages and disadvantages start to matter less.”

However, while the gap narrows with age, there is still a gap. According to the report, this likely means “we still haven’t closed the ‘school quality gap’ between Black students and their white peers.”

As mentioned above, the report also found that family socioeconomic factors “explain more of the Hispanic-white achievement gap than the Black-white achievement gap.”

According to the report, this could be because Hispanic children in Spanish-speaking families “have latent potential that is obscured by their lack of English skills.”

The report also suggests that non-socioeconomic factors, racism, and bias affect Black children at higher rates than their Hispanic peers.

“For lower-income Black children, who are more likely to experience deep, persistent poverty than other groups, the combination of ‘adverse childhood experiences’ might exacerbate inequalities,” the report says. “And for middle class Black children, bias, stereotype threat, and related factors might be especially at play. This might also be why the Black-white achievement gap grows over the course of elementary school, while the Hispanic-white gap shrinks.”

Petrilli concludes: “When it comes to the interplay between race, poverty, and schooling, the honest read is that it’s complicated. What’s undeniable, though, is that much hard work remains, especially when it comes to providing effective schools to marginalized students, especially those who are Black. Let’s keep at it.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A Philadelphia group wants schools to focus more on being places of joy as a way to overhaul the culture in district schools, and it’s relying on parents and community voices for help.

Lift Every Voice, the organization behind this year’s Joy Campaign, is backing the creation of a to bolster access to recess, the arts, counselors, and the district’s program to bolster student mental health known as the Support Team for Educational Partnership. The blueprint would also create a Chief of Joy position in the district; in June, the City Council a resolution in Philly schools. The group says this approach to budgeting and community input is crucial for reducing things like disparities in student discipline.

The district has its own federally funded restorative justice program that focuses on student empowerment and engagement. But Lift Every Voice wants its work to be broader by auditing whether collective punishments like enforced quiet times and limited recess in schools contribute to inequities and an anti-Black environment. Parent surveys conducted by Lift Every Voice from earlier this year show that student mental health and school climate and environments are still major concerns that the district must address, the group says.

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Ultimately, it

“The school system is a closed system that doesn’t want to be told what to do and we’re starting to force them to come to grips with our voice that’s not going away,” said Wes Lathrop, Lift Every Voice’s organizing director.

Councilmember Kendra Brooks, who co-sponsored the June resolution, sees the campaign as a way to help schools embrace cultural differences, and as a way to to reduce disparities and biases, including those held by adults.

“We have to find a way to embrace the model and make it part of the normal cultural norms,” Brooks said. “A project we’re taking on has to be embedded. The only way we do that is consistency and sustainability, and oftentimes we haven’t seen that.”

Lathrop sees community involvement in restorative justice as a two-way street, pointing to the importance for all citizens of having students who are well-prepared for the job market and post-graduation life: “Parents can be a real guiding powerful force to really shape the future of the district.”

Susan McLeod, a Philadelphia public schools parent, got involved with Lift Every Voice because of issues her child was facing. She feels crucial decisions are made in the district without any parent involvement, such as announcements of district school closures more than 10 years ago that took her completely off guard. The group has helped her feel empowered on her own and her child’s behalf.

“It’s important for us to lay this foundation for our kids to have a better learning experience as young as elementary school,” McLeod said.

Racial disparities in student discipline represent one particular concern. The district has adopted practices rooted in restorative justice, an approach to discipline that emphasizes conflict mediation between students and other forms of resolving conflicts as alternatives to student suspensions and expulsions.

Overall suspensions have declined in Philadelphia public schools recently: The percentage of students with at least one suspension in a school year has dropped from about 11.5% in 2013 to about 5.7% in 2023. But over that same period, Black and Hispanic students were suspended at higher rates relative to their total enrollment than white students, according to data from the .

The district’s Relationships First initiative started in 2019 and expanded in 2023 to include more schools. It’s focused on developing students as leaders in restorative justice efforts and trains teachers to guide students in that work.

“Folks have the opportunity to engage in restorative conversations … and to be able to provide alternatives to suspension across the entire district,” said Luis Rosario, assistant director of school climate and culture for the district. “I do think it’s a testament to the leadership of our school district to move in that direction.”

These efforts dovetail with another led by Healing Futures. Healing Futures is operated by the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project that receives case referrals from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office in place of a legal charge. In programs that last a minimum of eight weeks with mentor participation, students attend weekly discussions about their values and community and how to take accountability for the harm created by the student’s actions.

“We want to make sure that as many different perspectives of a situation can come into the room and offer their insight and support collectively,” said Hanae Mason, who is shadowing Healing Futures as part of her work as a to improve systems serving youth.

Building students’ agency and perspective can take different forms and lead to various outcomes.

Mary Libby, former principal at what’s now the Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy, worked to introduce restorative justice practices and noticed students taking on more responsibility after formal restorative sessions. Students led the push when in honor of singer and local civil rights activist Marian Anderson, Libby said.

“In order for us to collectively move forward in a restorative and inclusive way, we need to trust and let the kids lead that process,” Libby said.

Malachi Grogan, an incoming seventh grader at Anderson who helped lead efforts to change the school’s name, is proud of the trust he has created with his peers where he can now lead restorative or cooling conversations.

“If we talk about it then we can get to know how people are feeling,” Grogan said. “And if we don’t know how people are feeling, how are we supposed to help them?”

Correction, Aug. 8, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that Healing Futures is not led by the district attorney’s office, but is part of the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project. It receives case referrals from the district attorney’s office but is not part of city government.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

In Natasha Sonia Alford’s newly released memoir, American Negra, she describes an early childhood memory of being the new kid at school: “What are you?” another student asked. “I’m Puerto Rican and Black,” she responded, noting these were “the only words I had at the time to explain my identity in terms that made sense.” 

“Language mattered,” she writes, “and yet at this age no one had prepared us to explain who we were accurately.” Her memoir does just that: it is an exploration of her intersecting identities and an explanation of their impact on her experiences as a student, teacher, hedge fund management associate and journalist.

Alford’s story begins with her childhood in Syracuse, New York, where she excelled academically and was ultimately selected as one of three college-bound students to be profiled by the local newspaper during her junior year. After receiving acceptance letters from a number of selective schools, including Howard University, Alford enrolled at Harvard. 

Despite her successes and on-paper credentials, as she calls them, Alford struggled at first to find her passion and her place as the pressures of perfectionism wore on her. 

While American Negra is a study of Alford’s personal identities, it is also an analysis of American society more broadly, with a particular focus on our education system. She writes about the mantra she was taught that for kids of color in the U.S., education is the path out of marginalization. She encourages readers, though, to expand their understanding of this idea: too often, she argues, students are told that in order to be successful in school they must erase parts of themselves and conform. 

“I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book,” Alford told The 74. “The point is that that pressure to be ‘twice as good,’ if you bring up a child in that culture and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough.” 

Years after graduating from Harvard, the 37-year-old, former Teach for America alum said she finally felt ready to take a risk and pursue a career in media. Alford, who got her master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and who freelanced for The 74 early in her career, now serves as the vice president of digital content and an anchor at TheGrio, where she leads a national team reporting on critical issues facing Black communities. She is also a CNN political analyst and the recipient of numerous awards including “Emerging Journalist of the Year” in 2018 by the National Association of Black Journalists. 

American Negra, published by HarperCollins on Feb. 27, was named a “Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Book of 2024” by and the audio version list for Black and African-American books. The 74’s Amanda Geduld chatted with Alford about her book, education policy and solutions journalism. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: I want to start with a little bit of context. Can you explain to our readers how you selected the title for your book, American Negra?

“American Negra” is a phrase that describes what it’s like to live at the intersection of two worlds. I wanted to paint a portrait of an American experience that we don’t see often portrayed in the mainstream: being an African American and being a Latina — Puerto Rican specifically. The term “negra” just means a Black woman. If it’s “negro” it means a Black man. When you are in Latino cultures, it is not uncommon for somebody to refer to you as a “negra.” It is often a term of endearment, but it can also be used as an insult. But the point is, ultimately, that they are centering your race and your identity.

What makes it so interesting is that often in Latino cultures, we hear about color blindness and we hear about racial democracy. There’s an assumption that because many Latinos are people of color, there’s not really an issue with race — that race is something that is sort of a U.S. obsession. And so there’s a bit of a contradiction in that obviously: a culture that doesn’t really see itself focused on race to identify people by their race. I wanted to highlight that experience, while also making it clear that my experience was one that is based in America. I’m an upstate girl — grew up in Syracuse, New York — and so my experience of being Black and Latina is very much influenced by the United States and all of our recent politics and all of our histories.

And then finally, I think it’s also a declaration. It’s an embracing of the term because for some people to be called “negra,” or to be identified that way, is a bit of an insult. They don’t want to be called Black. But for me, I’m really centering my Black identity to say that no matter where I go, I’m a Black woman. It shapes my experience. I’m proud of it. 

So much of your book comes back to the themes of education and opportunity. What inspired you to tell the story in this way — with such a heavy focus on the education system — and can you talk about the ways in which your Black and Puerto Rican identities shaped this journey?

That is exactly why there’s an apple on the front cover of the book. That was very much intentional, because this is an education story as much as it is a story about identity. The reason why is because for so many communities of color — communities that are marginalized in the United States — education is our path out of that marginalization. At least that’s the message that we are told from the time that we are children. And that was the message that my parents imparted to me: that I came from two peoples who had been discriminated against in this country at various points in time throughout history, but education was something that no one could take from me.

What you see in this book is the pursuit of education, but also the pursuit of authentic self. I think too often when we talk about education and young people, it’s framed through this lens of conformity: you go to school, you have to assume a different identity, you have to speak a certain way, there are certain careers that are so-called successful. At each step of the way, young people are shedding parts of themselves or feel that they’re forced to. In the end, they may not recognize themselves. They may have succeeded on paper, but they’ve lost themselves in the process. 

I wanted to disrupt the education narrative that ends with someone getting into the Ivy League or getting into college and that being the end. And say no, actually, that’s when things just get started. The success is not just getting into this institution or conforming to this institution, but it is what you do with [it]. That’s the power of education … 

In terms of your own path to becoming an educator, your senior year at Harvard, when you were initially debating your career in education, you write in your book about this fear that people might say, “You went to Harvard to become a teacher? Shouldn’t you be doing better than that?” I’m wondering where you think this devaluation of educators comes from and what we can do to combat it.

There’s this really … about how high achievers learn to not become teachers. It explains essentially that we have created a culture in which young people pick up messages about what careers are valued and which ones are not. In terms of where this comes from, I can only assume that there’s a gendered dynamic to this. 

There is an element of sexism that has made its way into education and the fact that the majority of teachers are women, and women are not always paid what they deserve — we are often behind in terms of our male counterparts and many more are behind when you look at the different segments of women by race. So we are a society that gives teachers lip service, but doesn’t actually back it up with a financial investment in teachers and education more broadly. 

I actually don’t blame young people for seeing that. I don’t think that young people should have to be martyrs, frankly, especially young people who may be coming from working-class families themselves — may be coming out of broken educational systems. To go back and teach I don’t think they should have to struggle. From my short time in the education policy space and just in education, my takeaway was that we have a pipeline problem in terms of recruiting generally, but that in order to change education, you’re going to have to pay the talent — you’re going to have to pay them, you’re going to have to nurture them, and that it shouldn’t be an industry that you’re going into to make a sacrifice … This is something where we’re going to make the investment and see the results or not make the investment and the overall system will continue to struggle …

How can we get teachers to persist in the classroom when they’re up against challenges like the ones that you write about, like chronic absenteeism or eighth graders reading at a first-grade reading level? 

… I think what maybe would’ve kept me in the classroom was just having realistic expectations about what I could do in two years. Sometimes when teachers come in, they’re idealistic and they’re not necessarily ready for how long these problems have been brewing. If a student has not been supported academically from kindergarten, and you get them in fifth grade, there has to be some level-setting about what you can do. 

And so one critique I have of the short-term teaching programs is just with the optimism and the accountability and the expectation of making change. Sometimes there’s also unrealistic pressure put on a new teacher about what they can accomplish in one or two years, and that can be really deflating. If that teacher comes in hoping for the best, working really hard, going above and beyond, and they don’t see the “results” that are so valued by the people who are counting the numbers and counting the test scores, that makes them feel like a failure. When in fact, it takes much longer to build — whether it’s building school culture, establishing yourself within the school community, or just becoming the teacher that you truly can be … 

You recently tweeted about Nikki Haley’s “revisionist history” and the general idea within the Republican Party of color blindness. You were on CNN talking about why those narratives are so harmful, and I’m wondering if you can comment a little bit more on that in terms of how this plays out in the educational landscape.

She’s used the talking point many times: that if we tell children America was once a racist country, that somehow they will feel disempowered, and that they will feel like victims, and that they will have no incentive to try. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We have examples every day of people who were fully aware of America’s racist history, and who are strong in spite of that, who invested in this country in spite of that, who served this country in the military and in schools and universities, in spite of what they faced … 

We have to contend with this history because it’s ours. We have to own it. And that’s how we become a better county with each passing year, with each passing decade. But to ignore it is to handicap our children. It can leave them without context or understanding of what they’re looking at. What it does, then, [is lead to them] blaming themselves, believing that they’re inferior, thinking that something is wrong with them, and not necessarily wrong with the systems that produce many of the inequalities that we see today. 

So I completely differ from Nikki Haley in terms of my approach to history, and also just my general acceptance of America’s past. But I think it’s instructive and yet another reason why teachers are on the front lines of these culture wars around what is true and what is not. I give my deepest respect to all the history teachers and all the social studies teachers, because they’re doing some serious work right now that is important for raising a conscious generation who will go forth empowered to make change for the better.

You also recently wrote about race in higher education specifically around the former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, stepping down. And this line really stuck out to me from your :  “With a new generation of Black students and young people looking to us adults for lessons from this moment, perhaps they are better served to know the truth: that even being ‘twice as good’ won’t always protect you from people who need your failure to justify their blind rage.” I’m wondering if you can expand a little bit more on how you experienced Gay’s stepping down and the vitriol that she received, especially as an alum of Harvard.

It became apparent right away that the attacks on Dr. Claudine Gay were about more than her testimony on the Hill. We’ve essentially forgotten about the third president who testified. It just went to show that this was always about more than the initial conversation of anti-semitism. What was really disheartening was that she became a punching bag for all of these critics’ anger and rage and a sense of frustration with what they feel is a loss. What they feel is that Black people’s advancement is somehow their loss, even though we’re all in this together. We’re all living and creating community and shaping this society together. Somehow they see it as a zero sum game … 

I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book. The point is that that pressure to be “twice as good,” if you bring up a child in that culture, and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough. 

I read an article, I think it’s called “Contingencies of Self-Worth,” and the biggest lesson of that piece is that our own self worth can’t be contingent upon grades or upon getting into a certain school. We have to shift the way that we’re teaching young people about their value. And so “twice as good” is a survival strategy, but it’s not necessarily a strategy to thrive. I hope that my story — by being honest about many of the struggles that I’ve had despite having acquired certain credentials on paper — [encourages] others to talk about some of their struggles as well, and that we can cultivate a new generation that will be kinder to themselves and also accepting of the fullness of their humanity.

As a high schooler, you were followed by the local newspaper for all of your accomplishments. What kind of impact did that have to be so perceived at all times? It was because you were a role model and accomplishing so much, but I wonder what kind of narrative that instills in a young person about what they need to do to be successful.

Right. It was certainly a privilege, and I am grateful for the coverage that the local paper gave and appreciate that they wanted to show a young person of color from the city doing positive things. However, that also created a sense that failure was not an option. Making mistakes was not OK. And it inhibited me in ways. There were certain things that I wanted to try or do that I was afraid to do because I couldn’t guarantee my success. And that is not a way to go through life. You have to make mistakes, you have to experiment. You have to fully spread your wings in order to discover yourself and so really, I don’t spread my wings fully until I’m long gone from college. 

Five years after that I truly am honest with myself about what I’ve always wanted to do, and that was journalism and media. And I’ve made peace with, “OK, this might not work out, but I have to give it a try. I have to know if this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” It took much longer because of that perfectionist mindset that wouldn’t give me the freedom to try right out of school. 

My story is my story. I’m happy still. I think my life still worked out. I ended up where I wanted to be. I still feel blessed. But maybe someone else will be able to get to their destination a little bit sooner if they’re able to let go of some of that perfectionist weight that can keep you down.

As a former educator and now a journalist, what are education journalists getting right and wrong today? And how can we strengthen our coverage and make sure that we’re combating some of these problematic narratives that have become so ingrained over the years?

I know that journalists are working hard, and it’s not always easy. We have deadlines and fewer and fewer resources. I know many of us are doing the best that we can. But I would encourage us to move towards solutions journalism. We are dealing with a public that is weary. They’ve been hearing about problems nonstop. And it’s our job to also provide examples of what is working. Who’s getting it right. And not in a superficial way of “this overachiever managed to do X, Y and Z.” But what risks were taken? What experimentation is happening that’s really inspiring? 

I think it’s our job to highlight those things and also highlight diverse examples of this. Be open to information. Be open to inspiration coming from unexpected places and give people a reason to hope. That is our job as much as it is to point out what is not working. Because I think people who are living it know that a lot of this is not working. So I think that we can do that work to point them towards potential solutions and then hopefully people are inspired to go out and enact it at a grander scale.

Almost half of 13- to 17-year-olds surveyed last fall say they would prefer to learn that the legacy of slavery is still felt today, while 40% say they’d prefer to be taught that slavery no longer affects Black Americans. Nearly identical shares of parents surveyed by Pew in 2022 expressed the same preferences. 

Eleven percent of teens say topics involving race should not be taught at all, while 8% say racism has not come up in class. Twice as many Black teens as whites and Latinos believe they should learn that slavery’s impact is still being felt.

Almost two-thirds of teachers say students should learn about slavery’s legacy, according to the report. A majority (58%) believe their state officials have too much influence over what is taught, while 71% feel teachers don’t have enough say.

As many parents (31%) would prefer their children learn that gender can be different from sex at birth as want students taught that gender is determined by sex at birth; 37% are opposed to any discussion of gender identity in school. Half of teens say the topic should not be taught, and the remainder are divided on whether students should learn that sex is determined at birth. Fourteen percent say LGBTQ topics have not been mentioned in their classes. 

A majority of Republican teens (56%) don’t think they should learn about gender identity in school. Among Democratic teens, 42% would prefer to learn that a person’s gender can differ from their sex assigned at birth, versus 8% of Republicans.

The Pew report is the latest opinion survey to find stronger public support for teaching about race than about LGBTQ people and history. Like the new research, polls conducted by the , Educators for Excellence, and others have found similar sharp partisan divides and wide demographic gaps among adults.

The report provides new context about how people who favor instruction on race and gender identity want the topics framed, as well as about students’ comfort levels in classrooms where the discussions take place. Nearly 1,500 teens who are not homeschooled were surveyed.

Teens’ responses about what they believe should be taught and whether they’re uncomfortable when race and LGBTQ topics are raised in class do not indicate what their personal views are, notes Juliana Horowitz, Pew associate director of research. The survey did not probe teens’ school environments or ask about their sexual orientation or gender expression. 

Among teens who say the issues have arisen, 38% are comfortable when race comes up in class, versus 21% who are not. Regarding LGBTQ topics, 29% are comfortable while 33% are not. In both categories, the rest of those surveyed reported feeling neutral.

The survey also found racial, ethnic and political divides. One-third of Black teens feel uncomfortable when racism or inequality is raised in class, compared with 19% of white students and 17% of Latinos. Youth who say they lean toward the Democratic Party are more at ease than their Republican peers, with 43% and 33% saying they are somewhat or very comfortable. Almost one fourth of Republican-identified teens express discomfort, versus 18% of Democrats.

The data doesn’t reveal why students are uncomfortable, says Horowitz: “We don’t have information about the school environment that they’re in. For example, we don’t know if this is more the case among Black teens who are in class with mostly teens who are white or who are not Black, or if this is across the board.”

suggests people are most comfortable talking about race with those who share their background, she adds.

While 79% of Black teens would prefer to learn that the legacy of slavery is still felt, as would 68% of Democratic youth, just 41% of white teens and 45% of Latinos do. A majority (60%) of Republican teens would prefer to learn that slavery no longer has an impact on Black people.

Pew also asked adults whether they believe parents should be able to opt their children out of learning about race and LGBTQ issues. More than 80% of white Democrats say parents should not be allowed to remove children from lessons involving race, compared with 65% and 61% of Black and Latino parents. White Democrats also oppose allowing parents to opt out of instruction on LGBTQ topics in larger numbers than other groups, with 60% saying no, versus 42% of Latinos and 34% Blacks. Four in five Republicans say instruction involving LGBTQ people should be optional.

In 2020, the Fairfax district in northern Virginia changed its admissions criteria to better reflect the racial makeup of students in the county. Last May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit .

The Supreme Court offered no explanation for its refusal to hear the case. But from Justice Samuel Alito, backed by Justice Clarence Thomas, called the lower court’s ruling in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, “a virus that may spread if not promptly eliminated.” 

“What the Fourth Circuit majority held, in essence, is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional so long as it is not too severe,” Alito wrote. “This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction.”

The Supreme Court’s earlier ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina over affirmative action-based admissions left some districts in limbo over whether K-12 integration efforts based on family income, rather than race, could pass legal muster. Echoing arguments similar to those that Students for Fair Admissions made against affirmative action in higher education, the Fairfax parents said admissions changes at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology make it more difficult for Asian-American students to be accepted. 

Before Fairfax changed its admissions rules, about three-fourths of the school’s students were Asian Americans. District leaders eliminated a rigorous test for applicants and a $100 fee. And they reserved seats at the school for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Coalition for TJ said the new rules were racially biased because the proportion of Asian American students accepted dropped to 54%.

“The Supreme Court missed an important opportunity to end race-based discrimination in K-12 admissions,” Joshua Thompson, a senior attorney with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, said in a statement Tuesday. The firm represents the Fairfax parents who sued. “Schools should evaluate students as individuals, not as groups based on racial identity.” 

But some integration experts say the court’s decision not to hear the case confirms that using socioeconomic status in admissions is constitutional. Richard Kahlenberg, a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, called the court’s denial “a victory for poor and working class students of all races.” On behalf of the plaintiffs in the cases against Harvard and UNC, he testified in favor of socioeconomic integration, but said Tuesday that both that earlier opinion and the court’s denial of the TJ case fit with an ongoing public consensus in “support of racial diversity, but in opposition to using racial preferences to get there.”

“The decision of seven justices not to hear the case makes good sense because for three decades, even the most conservative justices have been urging educational institutions to use precisely the kind of race-neutral strategies that Thomas Jefferson High School employed,” he said. 

Supporters of the admissions changes note the current , 3.9, is higher than it was under the previous policy.

“We have long believed that the new admissions process is both constitutional and in the best interest of all of our students,” Karl Frisch, chair of the district’s board, said in a statement. “It guarantees that all qualified students from all neighborhoods in Fairfax County have a fair shot at attending this exceptional high school.”

The ‘best public schools’

The Supreme Court’s denial of the TJ appeal is the second blow in three months to Pacific Legal’s efforts to curb what it sees as discrimination against white and Asian American students in K-12. In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled against the firm’s clients in a similar case over selective schools in .��

Following the opinion’s release, Erin Wilcox, another Pacific Legal attorney, said it was disappointing that just six months after the court’s affirmative action ruling, “the First Circuit held … that it’s perfectly legal for Boston to use racial proxies to determine who is admitted to some of its best public schools.”

Pacific Legal plans to go back to the High Court in the next few weeks to ask the justices to examine many of the same issues it objected to in the TJ case. 

But Stefan Lallinger, executive director at Next100, a progressive think tank affiliated with The Century Foundation, called the First Circuit’s decision “a shot in the arm to districts that understand the value of diversity,” but were left “confused or worse, afraid, to take bold and affirmative steps” after the Supreme Court’s opinion on Harvard and UNC.

The Boston Public Schools made changes similar to those in Fairfax. The district replaced a merit-based admissions policy for its exclusive “exam” schools with one that drew students with high GPAs from all ZIP codes. (The system was later changed to reflect — small geographic areas within a county.) 

The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp., a nonprofit, sued last year over the policy change, which has led to more Black and Hispanic students attending the schools.

Pacific Legal is also representing plaintiffs suing over criteria for entrance to highly competitive schools in , and . And in January, the firm filed on behalf of a group of New York parents over a statewide that prepares students to study STEM fields in college. The plaintiffs argue that the criteria favors Black, Hispanic, Alaskan Native and American Indian students regardless of their family’s income.

In Philadelphia, the American First Legal Foundation, another conservative law firm, after the district dropped merit-based application requirements, such as recommendation letters, attendance and test scores, for competitive schools. District leaders moved to in which students from certain ZIP codes receive preference. The system targets neighborhoods with the lowest representation of students who previously accepted offers to attend those schools.��

The case is currently pending in federal district court.

That means twice as many teachers as are legally barred from discussing what critics call “divisive concepts” have chosen to curtail their own classroom speech.

The finding marked the first time that researchers have quantified what the report describes as a “spillover effect” that causes educators to censor themselves even in communities that have typically supported such discussions, says Ashley Woo, one of the authors. 

A key reason why educators engage in self-censorship, RAND found, is a concern that their instruction — legal or not — could trigger a parental backlash.

“Oftentimes, it’s a really mobilized, very vocal minority of parents in a community,” says Woo. “Not only can parents come up to you and have a verbal altercation, but there’s also this idea that they can threaten your reputation through social media, or that they might be able to go to your leaders and threaten your job. … Even the specter of that can create a lot of anxiety for teachers.”

More than a third of America’s 3 million teachers reside in one of the 18 states that adopted laws restricting educator speech regarding race, gender and LGBTQ people between April 2021 and January 2023. But because some are subject to local policies or edicts prohibiting instruction about certain topics, half teach under some type of restriction. 

Teachers in states that don’t have the laws are just as likely as those that do to say that they are subject to school- or district-level restrictions, the survey found. Some have stopped discussing controversial topics not covered by statutes or policies, such as abortion rights or climate change. Unsure what exactly has been outlawed, others report deciding not to discuss historical figures of color or civil rights. 

Fifty-five percent of teachers who aren’t governed by any state or local limits on speech decided to change their instruction anyhow. Educators who don’t face formal speech constraints but live in conservative communities were more likely to choose not to address social and political topics. About 40% of educators in politically liberal places where no restriction exists reported curtailing their instruction.

“Those are the kinds of communities where probably parents actually want and support those kinds of conversations in the classroom,” says Woo. “These are not voters who voted for the leaders who are putting these kinds of policies in place. These are not communities that want these restrictions in place.”

The survey’s findings jibe with recent research from the free speech organization PEN America estimating that laws the organization deems “educational gag orders” affect 1.3 million K-12 teachers and millions of students. The “spillover effect,” RAND notes, means the number impacted is actually much higher. 

The data is drawn from RAND’s 2023 State of the American Teacher Survey, administered to a nationally representative sample of 1,439 K-12 teachers in January and February 2023. Communities’ political leanings were gauged by voting patterns in the counties where respondents live. 

Regardless of why individual teachers choose to alter their curriculum or other features of their instruction, top factors cited include fear of angering parents, a lack of guidance or perceived support from school administrators and concerns they might lose their jobs or licenses. Some of those surveyed mentioned hearing that educators elsewhere had been disciplined for engaging in controversial discussions. 

Local guidance to teachers sometimes comes in the form of a policy, but often it’s an admonition from a principal: “More implicit than maybe like a formal policy, but it’s still a message that teachers are receiving from their local leaders,” says Woo. “Teachers may take that and be, like, ‘Okay, well, I guess I shouldn’t be talking about that, then.’ ” 

Across the board, 49% named concern that higher-ups would not support them if parents complained as one of their top three reasons for deciding to self-censor. Some teachers said school or district leaders had told them to avoid certain topics because of community pressure, while others said they had received little or no guidance. 

Proponents of restrictive laws say parents need more control over what their children are exposed to in school and that discussion of “divisive concepts” pressures students to adhere to an ideology and tramples free-speech rights of those who disagree. Polling has consistently for limiting instruction about race but disagreement about whether and at what age students should learn about LGBTQ history. 

In many communities in states where there is little political support for curtailing instruction, protesters have brought school board meetings to a halt and threatened to root out educators and curricula aimed at “indoctrination.” Record numbers of board members and other district leaders have quit as a result of harassment.

PEN estimates 1.3 million K-12 teachers and 100,000 public college and university professors are now affected, as are millions of students. 

The analysis traces how proponents of what PEN calls educational gag orders have adjusted their tactics over the last three years. The authors say this reveals both rising public opposition to the laws and efforts by the restrictions’ right-wing backers to steer around political flashpoints. As a result, they say, they expect more — and more draconian — bills in 2024.

“What we have seen this year is that the people who are advocating for these laws are not going to stop because the poll numbers are bad, they’re not going to stop because some parts of the laws have been struck down by the courts, they’re going to continue,” says Jeremy Young, program director of PEN’s Freedom to Learn initiative. “They’re going to continue to evolve these laws in more and more insidious ways.” 

“This is an ongoing crisis,” he adds. “And it will continue until these laws are defeated in the courts or at the ballot box or in the legislature consistently.”

Backers of the measures argue that parents of K-12 students need more control over what their children are exposed to in school and that colleges should not foster discussion of “divisive concepts.” Teaching about race, history, gender and sexual minorities and other topics, they say, pressures students to adhere to an ideology and tramples the free speech rights of those who disagree.

“If we do not act now, I fear we will continue down the path of servitude to a woke agenda from which there may be no return,” Republican state Sen. Jerry Cirino of a 2023 Ohio bill, still under consideration, that would ban speech on a number of topics. “This bill isn’t even law yet, but it’s already served as an agent of change.”

How much of the broader public agrees and is comfortable imposing restrictions on educators varies greatly depending on the topics at issue, the age of the students in question and how the measures are framed, PEN’s analysis found.

The report traces the genesis of the movement to curtail instruction to former President Donald Trump’s September 2020 denunciation of “toxic propaganda,” including classroom materials based on “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times’s and journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s history of race in America. Three months later, the first state bill to curtail what teachers could say about race was introduced in Mississippi.

The vast majority of the speech-restricting measures introduced in 2021 and 2022 focused on stopping instruction involving race and history and “divisive concepts” in K-12 schools and colleges — often targeting both in the same piece of legislation. By contrast, in 2023, no bills simultaneously focused on the K-12 and university levels.

Thirty-nine of this year’s measures were aimed solely at shutting down discussion of LGBTQ people and topics in elementary and high schools. Most are modeled after the Florida law that critics refer to as the “Don’t Say Gay” act. The laws have been cited by people demanding book bans and in the elimination of anti-bullying efforts. 

More bills are expected in 2024, and PEN believes some will go much further. This year, for the first time, some of the proposed measures took aim at individuals’ speech, the report notes, with to prohibit students from disclosing their LGBTQ identity and that would mete out “disciplinary sanctions” or faculty who violate the “intellectual diversity rights” of others by discussing topics such as “allyship, diversity, social justice, sustainability, systemic racism, gender identity, equity or inclusion.”

“So a dean who sends out an email cheering for the new sustainable roof on the environmental sciences building [would be] violating the law because he’s expressing an institutional position on sustainability,” says Young. 

There are practical reasons why the legislation proposed in 2023 and predicted for next year — which in many cases use identical language, suggesting increased coordination across states

— will be harder to fight than the laws previously enacted, he says. Courts are likely to uphold college faculty free speech rights, but so far advocacy groups trying to overturn bans on LGBTQ topics have had a hard time meeting the legal threshold for proving plaintiffs have been harmed.

PEN’s researchers suggest public opinion may be one reason why backers of the bills have changed tactics and appear poised to do so again next year. Polls consistently show that Americans support teaching older students about race and oppose banning books about the topic. A by the American Public Media Research Lab and Pennsylvania State University found just 13 % of respondents believe state lawmakers should have a “great deal of influence” over classroom discussions of race or slavery. 

Some of the same surveys, however, have found much lower support for exposing K-12 students to LGBTQ topics, a much higher partisan divide and disagreement over at what age, if any, such discussions are appropriate. A University of Southern California poll last year found that 80% of Democrats say high schoolers should learn about gay rights, sexual orientation, gender identity and trans rights, while fewer than 40% of Republicans agree. Only about 30% of Americans believe such instruction is appropriate for elementary pupils. 

One of the researchers behind the USC survey, Morgan Polikoff, agrees that public opinion probably played a role in the change of tactics among proponents of limiting educator speech. “I would be surprised if that were not true,” he says. “The pivot is very apparent if you are paying attention.”

Republicans, he adds, are starting to make inroads with Black and Latino voters and as a result may be reluctant to continue to describe race as a divisive concept. 

Polikff also agrees with PEN’s assertion that the bills’ authors changed the way they targeted because public opinion data showed that attempts to curtail what professors may say — a centerpiece of many 2021 and 2022 bills — are wildly unpopular. 

Recent bills propose dismantling faculty unions, senates and other internal groups that protect academic freedom — systems most people have never heard of. For example, a Florida law passed this year weakens faculty hiring and tenure rights and, by decreeing that course content “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics,” for some classes and majors to be taught, critics say.

“This new breed of legislation is designed to kick the legs out from underneath university governance and autonomy,” the PEN report explains, “so that the next time the state moves to censor faculty, no one is in position to push back.”

The proposal never received serious consideration from Congressional Republicans. But the Department of Education didn’t give up and won approval from to apply a far more modest amount of existing funds toward helping districts stem increasing racial isolation in the nation’s schools.

“It has been a priority for our administration since day one to really build on our country’s greatest strength, which is our diversity,” said Roberto Rodriguez, the department’s assistant secretary for the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. 

in California, the , Tennessee district, which includes Chattanooga, and a are among the recipients. They plan to use the funds on family engagement, college and career programs and improving student performance in high-poverty neighborhoods. The will work with five districts to increase diversity in pre-K, expand dual language programs and push more minority students to apply for selective schools and programs. 

The grants, totaling $14 million, follow a from the department that connected widening achievement gaps to the end of major desegregation efforts in the 1980s and ‘90s. Nearly one-third of all students now attend schools where the vast majority of their peers are minorities. The Fostering Diverse Schools program also comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious college admissions, which Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said calls for a“courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice.” The court is now considering whether to take up an appeal over a competitive high school admissions policy in Virginia. 

At the state level, meanwhile, conservative lawmakers have restricted how educators can discuss or address — all of which makes integration efforts “tricky politically,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a Georgetown University researcher and senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

“These grants will help showcase models for school leaders across the country who might be nervous about tackling segregation and are looking for concrete ways integration can be accomplished,” he said. 

With House Republicans wanting to and the fiscal year 2024 budget over issues like aid to Israel and Ukraine, it’s unclear if the department will be able to award more grants next year. But Rodriguez said officials see the need for “a stronger investment from the federal level to encourage and partner with districts that are doing more to intentionally enhance diversity and in their schools.” 

‘Thinking across sectors’

During the Obama years, former Education Secretary John King launched a similar initiative, called . The department allocated $12 million for the program and 26 districts applied. But former President Donald Trump eliminated it once he took office. 

Reviving the effort by using funds dedicated for student support and enrichment will allow the department to “get this off the ground,” said Halley Potter of The Century Foundation, a left-leaning that is part of the , a network of almost 60 organizations. The Foundation, she said, worked with “champions on The Hill” to tap funds for providing students a “well-rounded education.”

Three districts — , , and — received the largest awards to implement programs intended to attract a broader cross section of families to public schools. 

The department awarded the New York City schools two separate grants totaling over $3 million to further integration efforts, even as the district continues to face opposition over efforts to diversify elite schools and programs. 

Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the district to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students from low-income schools considered for admission to the district’s specialized high schools. But Asian American groups sued, saying the change is discriminatory. 

, pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, shows how controversial such changes can be. The city’s efforts to increase diversity in and middle school have also received pushback. 

The district aims to create more racially and socioeconomically balanced schools in other ways. In District 3, on the West Side of Manhattan, schools will focus on “culturally affirming” learning, according to a of the application. The goal in Brooklyn’s District 13 will be to attract more minority families to the city’s middle schools — including those who attend charters, which can minimally contribute to segregation.

“If your goal is to have integration in your schools, you really need to be thinking across sectors,” Potter said.

The other 10 grants are smaller and will support planning efforts, giving districts a chance to “piggyback” integration efforts onto other priorities, such as school construction and renovation projects, she said.

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina will use the $445,000 it received to take a fresh look at its school assignment plan, which hasn’t changed in 30 years. The district is among the top 10 most in the state, with predominantly white schools concentrated in the western part of the county, schools with a higher enrollment of Hispanic students in the southern region and those in the urban core with a majority-Black student population. 

The district will use the funds to hire mapping experts and gather input from families and district employees on school attendance boundaries, with the goal of reaching at least 5,000 students, parents and educators over the next nine months. As a bonus, leaders hope that redrawing attendance boundaries will reduce commute times for students. 

“These zones have not been adjusted to reflect population shifts since the 90s,” said Effie McMillian, the district’s chief equity officer. It’s important, she added, to give “students an opportunity to interact with people that they may not always interact with within their local community of where they live.”

 She’s a product of that community’s public schools, which host one of the country’s longest-running, and evolving, school integration experiments. We sat down to discuss her new book, which came out Aug. 22 to and as well as the past, present, and future of racial equity in the Cleveland suburb. 

“You have to do a lot of different things and you have to keep at it,” Meckler told me. “That’s why I came away from writing Dream Town with optimism. This is a community that is still trying and still looking at all sorts of different things — a community that hasn’t given up — whereas in a lot of America, people don’t even care or don’t even try.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Let’s start with some context: what makes Shaker Heights unique? What’s its history? 

Well, I think of Shaker Heights as a story in three acts. The first act is its founding at the turn of the 20th century as an elite refuge for wealthy Clevelanders escaping the city at a time when the number of black residents in the city was rising with the Great Migration. Shaker was developed as a sort of “best of the best” community, with very high standards for architecture and for the people who they let in. And that’s how it was for a few decades. 

Then we move into what I think of as the second act. Of course, Black families could not get in for a long time, but in the mid-1950s, a few Black families did manage to get into Shaker’s Ludlow neighborhood, and once a few got in, more got in, and soon that neighborhood was rapidly moving towards resegregation.

But something different happened in Shaker, something that really sets it apart from most of the country, which is that the white people living there and the Black people living there decided to get together and fight against all the pressures that were leading towards segregation and white flight. With the and fear mongering that was being driven by the real estate and banking industries, they chose something different.��

So they got together and formed a community association. It started out with just getting to know each other, but then it moved into actual real estate, showing houses to white families and even offering second mortgages again to white families. They viewed it as a way to counter the forces that were pressing down against them. 

This spread to other Shaker Heights neighborhoods, and eventually to the city itself, which chose to be a place that was embracing diversity and promoting integration. So Shaker developed a national reputation as an integration leader—first in housing and then in schools. In 1970, a very forward-looking superintendent led the district to a voluntary school busing plan to desegregate the elementary schools. This, of course, was at a time when lots of communities across the country were to do the same. Shaker was embracing it, white families voluntarily sending their kids into the predominantly Black school, and vice versa. 

The third act comes in more recent years: a struggle over what racial equity means, over whether the schools are delivering it.

Shaker Heights is your hometown, you’re a product of its school district. But what brought you to this particular project for this particular moment? Why Shaker Heights? Why now? 

I first started thinking about reporting on my hometown back in 2013, when I was coming off of the White House beat and onto a beat covering demographics. I heard about a new Shaker superintendent who was taking on the achievement gap and taking on the question of racial equity. I was interested and intrigued. 

It took a while, but it . Usually, when I’m done with a big story, I sort of take a deep breath and move on to the next one. This time it felt like I had just scratched the surface.

There had never been a book about Shaker Heights. There had been a lot of media coverage, a lot of academic work, but never a book for the general public and I felt like I was really in a great position to tell this story. And then the pandemic hit, and I thought, “Well, if not now — when I have some time — then when?” So I started working on it in earnest.

The book is a story about, as you put it, “the promise and problems of Shaker Heights,” about its efforts to advance racial equity in the past and present. In recent years, various tracking systems — honors and AP classes and so forth — threatened the district’s equity efforts. How?

For a long time, Shaker Heights had this glow, like it felt really good about itself. “Hey, we’re doing this. We’ve got this. Maybe you guys out there have trouble with race, but we’re enlightened, and we are a model.” 

But in more recent years, there was growing discomfort with the academic achievement gap and the racially disproportionate placement of students by academic levels. The top levels — the Advanced Placement (AP) classes, the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, the honors classes — were all disproportionately white, and the regular and remedial classes were disproportionately Black. When you walked into Shaker Heights High School you’d look at the hallways, and it would be incredibly diverse. And then you’d walk into a particular classroom, and you’d say, “Is this an all-white school or is this an all-Black school?” depending on which level it was on.

There were a variety of things tried over the years to try to address this, none of them successful. When arrived a few years ago, he started combining some of the honors classes with what were called “core” classes, regular-level classes. So there’d be kids in honors and kids in core learning together in the same classrooms, with maybe different assignments or workloads. 

Then, in the , the superintendent made a huge change — to dismantle the tracking system. In one fell swoop, he moved all children into the honors level, basically starting in fifth grade all the way through ninth grade. Essentially everything up until you got to AP and IB classes. 

How did the community react? I mean, that’s the central theme of the book, right, Shaker Heights wrestling with its sense of itself, with its priorities and what those actually require it to do. 

There was a lot of confusion, because a lot of other pandemic stressors were in the air and this change was not well explained. Some people didn’t know about it at all. Other people thought that they were getting rid of AP classes. Both sides of that were wrong. 

Some people were thrilled. A lot of very equity-minded people, Black and white in the community, were very pleased. They thought, “It’s about time. We’re finally taking this on.” Others, who felt like these classes weren’t truly being taught at the honors level because they had such a wide range of academic ability in the class, were very unsettled. 

At the same time, the district was reducing homework and was giving people more time to do work, just sort of lightening the load. That happened in other communities also during the pandemic. But here, it happened at the same time as the detracking. So some people felt like the standards were dropping. Shaker, in addition to having a national reputation for integration also had a national reputation for excellence. 

So there were parents and students who felt like, “Are we no longer valuing, you know, real academic achievement? Are the very top kids gonna be lost in this?” 

Finally, this was sort of sprung on teachers at the last minute. They did not have any training before it happened. It was particularly hard for math teachers. Think about it: all eighth graders were put into Algebra I, which is typically a ninth-grade class. On the honors track it’s an eighth-grade class. But there were eighth graders in there who had never had pre-algebra, and maybe they didn’t do all that well in whichever seventh-grade math class they took. Now, all of a sudden, they’re not doing seventh- or eighth-grade math. They’re taking ninth-grade math.

Teachers told me that the training they got was mostly about the moral urgency of the matter, not the nuts and bolts of implementation. 

This is exactly what I was thinking as I was reading. I’m a former teacher and I feel like differentiation gets treated like a magic wand. It pops up when folks have theoretical priorities that run into practical headaches. Somebody says, “OK, well, what are you gonna do about the fact that a bunch of these kids haven’t had pre-algebra?” And then people go, “We’ll differentiate!” as though that’s just an easy, obvious answer. But differentiation is wildly difficult to do, even if it’s easy to say! How is Shaker Heights wrestling with the possibilities and limits of differentiation?

I did observe some classrooms where I saw teachers trying, and I saw some good things happening. 

The thinking is that you know, if everybody’s talking about the same thing, they can all be in the class together learning together, even if they show that learning in different ways. For example, they can all read the same novel—maybe some kids are writing long papers in response and other kids are doing a graphic panel. Someone else is maybe doing a podcast. 

I saw an eighth-grade math class working on probability. There were two girls working together, one Black and one white, and the Black girl was lost. I mean she was really lost. I could see she didn’t really understand it. The white girl definitely had it mastered, but she was very patiently explaining it to the Black girl. It was helping both of them, because the girl who was struggling was getting this one-on-one help, and she seemed to be getting it. And the girl who already understood, told me later that explaining it to somebody else solidified it in her own mind. We’ve all had that experience. 

At one point in the book, Shaker Heights High School principal Eric Juli asks: what if high schools focused on teaching kids to live and work together as opposed to looking up the Battle of Gettysburg? We don’t need you to memorize that, really. But we do need you to be able to live with one another and work together.

We often talk about school integration as this strategy in and of itself — integrating schools means changing the demographics of a school and its classrooms. That’s the work. Shift the demographics and you’ve done the reform. We don’t always talk about the necessary, discomforting system changes that come next. 

Juli’s view is that there are all sorts of ways to learn. And he’s very interested in project-based learning. His view is that let’s aim for a class that’s fun and cool, where you build and set off rockets, instead of just aiming for AP Physics. 

When I asked him, “Is there any value to, you know, reading a novel and being able to write a paper where you explore the characters and themes and show that you’ve understood it?” 

And he said, “Yes, but not every semester for all four years.”

Racial equity work isn’t just about in-class differentiation. It’s about shifting things like dress codes, disciplinary systems, the PTO, and such to help all kids and families feel like they belong, right?

Absolutely. That might even be the most important thing. What does it mean to feel like you belong? Why does that matter? You think, “Oh, you don’t go to a PTO meeting, someone else will plan the carnival. You don’t need to go.” 

But it does matter, because that’s the place where informal information is exchanged. That’s where people find out about the cool new classes or the teachers you really do or don’t want. That’s the information that affects kids’ lives. 

If you don’t feel comfortable walking into the school, are you gonna show up at the parent-teacher conferences? It’s easy not to. Maybe it’s hard because you’ve been working all day, you’re exhausted, your kids haven’t had dinner, and you don’t have any energy left. Maybe you also think, by the way, I don’t really like it there. Maybe that’s because you didn’t do well in school, maybe school doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy to you.

But if you have a sense of belonging and you’re part of this community, then yeah, you’re gonna go to Back to School Night. You’re going to the parent-teacher conferences. You’re going to the PTO meeting. 

Obviously, it also matters for students. Do you see yourself in the curriculum? Are your strengths and accomplishments reflected in the school’s trophy cases? How do you experience the school’s discipline system? If the Black kids are always, just always getting in trouble, you know, how are you feeling about this? Is school your place, or are you feeling like this is a place I have to go and just make it through the day? 

One day, Eric Juli was talking to a science teacher who’d asked a kid in his class to remove his durag, a tight skull cap that some Black boys and men wear, and the mother complained. The teacher says to Juli, “It’s against our dress code. You’re not allowed to wear any sort of hood.”

And Juli said, “Yeah, technically, this is against the dress code, but we’re not enforcing it.” He even said, there are skinny white girls walking around here half naked, and no one’s stopping them. We can’t be seen as just selectively enforcing it for this one kid. We don’t have bandwidth as a staff to start enforcing it evenly, so we’re gonna let this go. The teacher goes, “You know what? I hear you and I understand.” 

It’s one small thing, but I think it was reflective of something larger. Because how do you feel like you belong in this school when you don’t get to wear the thing you want to wear when it really isn’t bothering anybody.

Exactly. School integration isn’t an alternative to structural education reforms. It’s not like we get to choose between integrating schools and changing the internal systems and dynamics of how schools operate. We have to do both — a serious push towards racial equity that begins with student demographics and race at the center ends up requiring all kinds of uncomfortable things from adults, right?

It’s definitely both, and there’s no magic bullet. There’s no five-point plan for fixing your schools. It’s not that simple. You have to do a lot of different things and you have to keep at it. That’s why I came away from writing Dream Town with optimism. This is a community that is still trying and still looking at all sorts of different things — a community that hasn’t given up — whereas in a lot of America, people don’t even care or don’t even try. 

So no simple plug-and-play plan for the world beyond Shaker, fair enough. But is there a message for the rest of the country? For other schools? 

Different places have different demographics. Different places have different challenges. Different places have different potential for integration. Different places have different levels of achievement gaps. Everybody’s got their own, their own puzzle to solve. But I think if they look at the different kinds of strategies that Shaker has tried, communities can pull out different things and give people in their communities things to think about. 

So much of the conversation about education today is rooted in culture wars. Should you even be talking about racial equity? Is that critical race theory? Is that offensive? Is that racist in and of itself? Some people feel that way— so this may not be for them. But there’s also another part of the country that is interested in a different conversation, in exploring these issues and looking under that hood. 

I wouldn’t say that they’ve cracked the code, but I would say that they’re still at the decoder.

As an assistant district attorney in 2013, Willis turned heads in one of her first big cases: She helped convene a grand jury that indicted decorated Superintendent Beverly Hall and nearly three dozen other educators for cheating on state standardized tests. In the end, Willis brought a dozen cases to trial, with a jury convicting 11.

This week, Willis invoked the same statute — Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act — to indict Trump and 18 others in an alleged plot to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. 

In doing so, she offered a reminder of her role in a divisive chapter in the city’s recent history. While the former president that Willis is, among other things, “a rabid partisan,” the cheating prosecutions left fissures in her own community, where many say she stood up for children but others accuse her of turning her back on Black educators. 

‘Cooking the books’

Hall, the Atlanta superintendent, arrived in the district in 1999, eventually leading what she would call a data-driven turnaround. She told observers that under her tenure, Atlanta schools were “debunking the American algorithm that socio-economics predicts academic success,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .

By 2009, her efforts had earned her one of education’s top honors: . But the same year, the Journal-Constitution the first of several stories analyzing Atlanta’s results on the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. The analysis found that scores had risen at rates that were statistically “all but impossible.” It also found that district officials disregarded internal irregularities and retaliated against whistleblowers. 

Critics would soon compare Hall to “a Mafia boss who demanded fealty from subordinates while perpetrating a massive, self-serving fraud,” the city newspaper reported at the time. Willis pursued Hall using the same tools many prosecutors employ against Mafia bosses and drug kingpins. In bringing charges under the state’s RICO Act, Willis alleged that Hall and her colleagues used the “legitimate enterprise” of the school system to carry out an illegitimate act: cheating.

Lonnie King, a former head of the local NAACP, the newspaper that when he looked at the data, “I thought Beverly Hall was cooking the books” as early as 2006.

The newspaper’s coverage led Gov. Sonny Perdue to appoint a team of special investigators, who conducted 2,100 interviews and reviewed 800,000 documents. By 2011, they uncovered cheating in 44 of the 56 schools they examined, concluding that 178 educators participated. Investigators eventually found widespread tampering with test papers and concluded that Hall stood at the center of “a culture of corruption.”

Special investigator Michael Bowers, a former state attorney general, in 2013 that interrogating teachers in the scheme had left him in tears.

“The thing I remember most was talking to some of the teachers who had been mistreated, mostly single moms,” he said. “And it’s heartbreaking. They told of how they had been forced to cheat.” One told him, “I had no choice.”

‘On the backs of babies’

Hall retired in 2011, but on March 29, 2013, a Fulton County grand jury indicted her and more than 30 others in what Willis called a conspiracy comprising administrators, principals, teachers and even a school secretary.

Similar to this week’s indictments, the Atlanta defendants faced charges of racketeering, conspiracy and making false statements. Hall also faced theft charges because her rising salary was tied to test scores — in 2009, the year she was named Superintendent of the Year, she got , prosecutors noted.

If convicted, Hall could have served as many as 45 years in prison, but she soon fell ill and the judge in the case indefinitely postponed her trial. At an April 2014 hearing, Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador, rose in the courtroom and asked the judge to be “merciful” and drop the case against her.

“Let God judge her,” he said.

Hall died of breast cancer in 2015, at age 68.

Public opinion on the case was sharply divided, with many Black commentators accusing Willis of overreach. But eventually, 34 of Hall’s subordinates faced criminal charges.

Brittney Cooper, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, : “Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here.”

Cooper noted that former Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is Korean-American, had also been for creating a “culture of fear about test scores.” An by USA Today revealed findings similar to Atlanta’s, but an inspector general report found of widespread cheating and Rhee never faced prosecution.

While most of the Atlanta educators eventually pleaded guilty to avoid jail time, 12 went to trial in 2014. As with the Trump case, this one was complex: Jury selection took more than , and jurors sat through complex statistical analyses of answer-sheet erasure patterns, among other matters. At a few points in the trial, a dozen or more lawyers offered different versions of events.

In an early case that went to trial in 2013, Willis said supervisor Tamara Cotman worked to protect educators’ jobs by advising principals under investigation not to cooperate with state investigators — a charge Cotman denied — and by vowing to return high test scores at any cost.

“She did it on the backs of babies,” Willis during closing arguments. The jury acquitted Cotman, who was later convicted of other charges in the larger case.

In court, Willis told the jury of “cheating parties” at which educators got together to erase children’s incorrect answers on test sheets and pencil in correct ones. At a few of the parties, she said, educators “ate fish and grits — I can’t make this up.” 

The jury convicted 11 of the 12 of racketeering and other charges.

The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, at the time senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church — he now serves as a U.S. Senator — The New York Times, “There’s no question that this has not been our finest hour. It’s a dark chapter, but it’s just that. It’s a chapter.”

In 2015, commentators Van Jones and Mark Holden that the educators convicted in the case were “the latest victims of overcriminalization,” facing serious jail time because of Willis’s “unprecedented use” of RICO. Three were sentenced to seven years in prison, they noted, while others received one- or two-year sentences if they didn’t accept plea deals. 

“These punishments do not fit the crimes,” they wrote. 

Since then, several of the defendants have loudly proclaimed their innocence, even as they’ve served prison time or pursued appeals to avoid it. A handful of those cases remain outstanding. In several instances, they and their defenders say they’ve spent their life savings pursuing appeals.

In 2019, Shani Robinson, one of those found guilty, about the ordeal. In an interview, , “the thought of being blamed for something that I did not do is horrifying. … I felt like if I was on the right side of justice, that one day I would be vindicated. That was the moment that I decided that I would never take a plea deal.”

But many parents saw it differently.

Shawnna Hayes-Jocelyn had three of her four children in classes at schools affected by the cheating. She said Willis rightly brought RICO charges. 

“You’d better believe she did the right thing, because that was the worst Black-on-Black crime example that could have ever happened around education,” she told The 74. “Because what they did to those children is that they didn’t give those children options and opportunities.”

Hayes-Jocelyn said her mind was made up once she read the state report that alleged widespread cheating among educators. 

“When I read that report and saw what was happening in that school system, yeah, people said, ‘Oh, this is RICO. We think about RICO as organized crime.’ I said, ‘This was organized crime.’” 

Those familiar with Willis’s work say she’s tenacious. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs, one of the defense attorneys in the cheating trial, told The Guardian this week that Trump is “going to be very surprised when he’s sitting across from her for months on trial. He’ll find out how great of a lawyer she really is.”

Asked in 2021 if she had regrets about pursuing the school cheating cases, Willis was blunt, the Times that by going after teachers, principals and administrators, she was “defending poor Black children.” Public education, she said, offers these children their only chance to get ahead. “So if what I am being criticized for is doing something to protect people that did not have a voice for themselves, I sit in that criticism, and y’all can put it in my obituary.”

“What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the in the case against Harvard University.

Several conservatives are glomming on to that quote as a warning to school districts that rely on admission criteria they claim is race-neutral even as they pursue a goal of increasing the number of Black and Hispanic students they accept.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” said Erin Wilcox, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation. The right-leaning nonprofit law firm represents families in four East Coast districts suing over policies that determine who gets into competitive schools.

This summer, the firm will ask the Supreme Court to hear against the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia over changes to the admissions policy at the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

“Treating students based on their experiences as individuals, not on the basis of race, is what we’ve been fighting for,” Wilcox said. 

Pacific Legal, part of the conservative , is making the same argument on behalf of plaintiffs in Montgomery County, Maryland, New York City and Boston. In revising their selection processes to pursue greater equity, the complaints say district leaders openly expressed a desire to limit the numbers of white and Asian-American students attending those schools.

Advocates for racially balanced schools, however, call the firm’s argument far-fetched and maintain there’s still legal backing for policies that take socioeconomic status into account when admitting students. K-12 leaders, they argue, those efforts out of concern for what the courts may do.

“Rather than try to guess how this [ruling] affects them, I think schools and districts should continue to promote diverse, equitable learning environments for students because research tells us that’s what’s best for kids,” said Stefan Lallinger, executive director at Next100, a progressive think tank affiliated with The Century Foundation. 

Racial segregation is “pernicious,” he said, and with the end of affirmative action in college admissions, K-12 schools to address educational inequities. 

“For hundreds of years in some cases, selective institutions have discriminated against people of color,” he said. “If the Pacific Legal Foundation’s argument is that there are no legal remedies available … we’re really in trouble.”

‘Proxy discrimination’

Amid the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, in which districts nationally tried to expand educational opportunities for minority students, Fairfax leaders eliminated a rigorous test for applicants and a $100 fee. They reserved seats at the school, known as TJ, for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. 

“We firmly believe this admission plan is fair and gives qualified applicants at every middle school a fair chance of a seat at T.J.,” John Foster, an attorney for the Fairfax County Public Schools, said in May when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled against Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case. 

But that’s no consolation for families who thought their children had a good shot of being admitted to TJ under the old system. Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a member of the coalition, said her oldest son, who is half Asian, did well in accelerated math classes and took three semesters of engineering. 

“He should have been a competitive candidate,” she said.

But after making the waitlist, his application for this fall was rejected. Lundquist-Arora has two younger sons — one of which is taking honors algebra in seventh grade — but she’s concerned they could also be shut out of what is considered high school.

Although Asian-Americans still make up the majority of students at the school, their enrollment numbers dropped from 73% to 54% in the year after the metrics changed — evidence, Wilcox argued, that the new policy is biased.

The complaint offers text messages from Fairfax County school board members alluding to their policy’s “anti asian [sic] feel” to show that race-neutral admissions can be “proxy discrimination.”

Similar disparaging remarks from board members about white students are part of the complaint in the , currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp., a nonprofit, sued last year when the district replaced an admissions policy for its prestigious “exam” schools based solely on merit with one that drew students with high GPAs from all ZIP codes. (The system is now based on , small geographic areas within a county.)

In a text exchange cited in court documents, former board member Lorna Rivera wrote, “I hate W[est] R[oxbury],” referring to a predominantly white neighborhood. Alexandra Oliver-Davila, another former member, responded: “Sick of westie whites.” resigned after being caught on Zoom mocking ethnic-sounding names. 

But advocates who support the new policy say the comments reflect years of frustration with the district prioritizing the exam schools and offering fewer resources to schools serving Black and Hispanic students.

Ruby Reyes, director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance, said affluent white and Asian parents might think their children have lost the chance to get into those elite schools because of the policy change.

“It isn’t a loss,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing. The admission policy has had a great impact in terms of diversity.”

In addition to attending the schools, the rates of students with disabilities and English learners receiving invitations to attend has also increased as a result of the new policy.

Families at one of the schools, however, oppose to move O’Bryant School of Math and Science — the most racially diverse of the three exam schools — from its current Roxbury location, a historically Black neighborhood, to West Roxbury, which is predominantly white. 

The new location would provide the school with much-needed space, but with fewer public transportation options in West Roxbury, the change could affect which students choose to attend, Reyes said.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, leaders amended the admissions process for four sought-after magnet middle schools. Under a new provision, the selection process favors high-achieving students who don’t attend school with a lot of other gifted peers.

As a result, high-performing Asian-American students, who tend to be concentrated in a small group of elementary schools, are less likely to be admitted while more Black and Hispanic students who attend schools spread across the district get in, said.

Finally, Pacific Legal represents who say the district has limited their children’s opportunities to attend any of nine top-ranked high schools, such as Stuyvesant High, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School. Students are admitted based on entrance exam scores, but in 2020, former Mayor Bill de Blasio increased the number of students considered for admission from low-income schools that predominantly serve Black and Hispanic students. 

The plaintiffs appealed a lower court ruling in favor of the city to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, where it awaits a decision. 

‘Mere reflections upon race’

Joshua Dunn, executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, is among those who think that if district leaders aimed to reduce the number of white and Asian-American students admitted, their race-neutral policy under this Supreme Court.

The ruling in favor of Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group that sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, “reinforces that racial balance can’t be the goal and the [Fairfax] board made it clear that’s what it was after,” Dunn said. “Bottom line, I don’t see how the appellate decision survives in light of the court’s ruling and the factual record.”

But others agree with the 4th Circuit, which said that texts or other statements expressing a desire to increase diversity aren’t enough to “inflict adverse effects” on a particular racial group. David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law — which represented UNC before the court — called Pacific Legal’s argument an “extreme colorblind interpretation.”

“Nowhere in the Harvard/UNC opinion does the court suggest that mere reflections upon race are unlawful,” he said. 

Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert on integration, added that districts are on firm legal ground if their admission policies promote the selection of promising students who have shown determination despite poverty or other obstacles.

He points to from Justice Clarence Thomas defending such programs. Thomas reiterated that position in his concurring in the Harvard/UNC ruling.

“Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments,” he wrote. “What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them.”

Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness on race-neutral policies for Students for Fair Admissions, suggests the court might take the TJ case to further clarify what schools can still do to increase diversity. But he added, “The high court does not have an appetite for going further and eliminating preferences based on socioeconomic status or geography.”

One likely effect is obvious. “There is going to be some closing of doors,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “It’s going to be a landscape in which it’s harder to secure access in most competitive schools.” 

But further down the line, a ruling against schools that factor race in admissions could affect a host of other academic mainstays, from scholarships to the centrality of tests like the SAT and ACT.

The ruling might not end diversity efforts outright. Granting preferential admission to low-income students, children of single parents or those from communities where students often don’t go to college could achieve similar results, experts say, without courting legal trouble. 

“ don’t want race used in admissions, but Americans do want selective institutions to be racially diverse,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and an expert on integration. He thinks the court’s decision could reflect that paradox. “They don’t want to be seen as simply dismissive of the aspiration of racial diversity.”

The court is expected to issue decisions in two lawsuits — brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — later this month. The plaintiff in both cases argues that the weight universities place on race in admissions violates anti-discrimination laws and puts Asian American students at a disadvantage. 

‘Next generation’

While the cases don’t deal directly with K-12 schools, the high court’s decision could elevate the importance of a recent lower court ruling rejecting a legal challenge to diversity efforts at an elite Virginia high school. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., removed a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats at the school for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case, called the revised admissions criteria discriminatory against Asian American students. 

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that view. “The policy challenged here is not just race-neutral: It is race blind,” Fourth Circuit of Appeals Judge Toby Heytens wrote in the

The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said board members’ desire to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students at the school motivated the new policy. They plan to ask the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit. 

Kahlenberg, who testified on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions about race-neutral alternatives, called the TJ case a “next generation issue.”

If the Supreme Court rules that universities can no longer ask applicants to identify their race, they might see the Fairfax case as a chance to “spell out in further detail the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable,” he said. “I think the answer will be that the TJ program is perfectly fine.” 

‘Formative experiences’

The college admissions industry, meanwhile, has been preparing for the end of affirmative action for months. Beginning in August, for example, colleges can hide a student’s race if it’s included in the , a uniform application for undergraduate admissions accepted at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide.  

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Counselors earlier this year to review all of their policies and practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to examine any area, such as mission statements and recruitment efforts, where race is a factor — “no matter how minor” — to determine if changes are needed.

Organizations that focus on high school graduation and college enrollment say they plan to continue to identify students who would be the first in their families to attend college, regardless of race. 

“In some ways for us, it will be business as usual — to serve underserved students. That’s been really the heart of our work long before this became a hot-button issue,” said Pam Johnson Davis, director of fellow support for OneGoal, a nonprofit that works in eight states to increase graduation and college enrollment rates. Eighty-six percent of the students served by the organization are Black or Hispanic. She supports 400 “fellows” in the Chicago area who are already in college or another postsecondary program.

If students are barred from bringing up their race even in their admissions essays — a hypothetical scenario that came up during Supreme Court — teachers at OneGoal schools would still encourage students to write about barriers they overcame to pursue education, Davis said.

Facing discrimination, raising younger siblings, translating for parents who don’t speak English — “these are really formative experiences in students’ lives,” she said. “Their stories will be shaped by their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Stephen Barker, a spokesman for the organization, added that opportunities for Black and Hispanic high school students to earn college credit could become more important for colleges and universities if the court strikes down affirmative action in admissions. 

“Institutions need to double down on those partnerships [with districts] if they want to keep that diversity going in a race-neutral way,” he said.

But he said it’s hard to predict what importance universities might place on other aspects of a student’s application, including GPAs, honors classes, and SAT and Advanced Placement exam scores if race no longer factors into the equation.

The potential end of affirmative action in admissions a growing movement away from requiring the SAT or ACT for admission, with some researchers and advocates for educational equity arguing the tests are biased against Black and Hispanic students and . According to FairTest, an advocacy group, are now test-optional or don’t even accept the exams.

But others say that criticism of the tests is misguided and that they still serve as a good predictor of how well students will perform in college. Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, said are “deeply vetted” to remove content that might disadvantage minority students. GPAs, he added, are less controversial, but large remain.

He doesn’t think the test-optional trend is only about removing barriers for Black and Hispanic applicants. Admissions officers may have other motivations, he said.

“Either [universities]think that the exams aren’t so important or … they, for financial reasons, desire an excuse for admitting more affluent students with less academic preparation,” he said.

With or without admissions exams, the end of race-conscious admissions would put more pressure on K-12 counselors serving Black and Hispanic students, Kahlenberg said.

“For years, the [private] prep school kids have had the upper hand. There are fewer students per counselor and they can put time into writing impressive letters [of recommendation],” he said. “Here’s an opportunity for public school counselors to paint a picture of students who have done remarkably well despite the barriers.”

What these pieces have in common is that they’re meant to guide conversations after a tragedy. But there is also a lot caregivers and educators can do to reduce the need for these conversations by making incidents of police brutality rare rather than routine. While helping children process their emotions and make developmentally appropriate sense of what happens in the immediate aftermath is important work, truly disrupting the soul-numbing routine of racialized violence means bringing the struggle home — in three ways. 

First, engage children’s racial learning early — the earlier, the better

Many adults, especially white caregivers to white children, believe that youngsters are racial innocents — naïve about race, fragile with respect to its hard realities and unable to grasp its complexities. The average adult that a first conversation about race should occur about the time a child turns 5. Why talk about race with kids who are otherwise cheerfully unaware of or indifferent to it? Why stress them out if they won’t understand it anyway? 

The truth is that infants, toddlers and preschoolers learn about race whether or not the adults around them believe it and participate intentionally in that learning. Developmental studies show that , children begin to adopt many of the same implicit racial attitudes held by adults. Few recognize themselves in the actions of the officers who murdered Nichols. But it’s in the unremarkable routines of homes, schools and communities that the ugliness expressed in racialized violence can take root in the culture. The question isn’t whether children are learning about race at an early age. It’s the degree to which they take their cues from caring, informed adults who talk about race honestly while knowing that showing is at least as important as telling.

Second, make the challenge personal

Whether as parents, grandparents, teachers, counselors, coaches, pediatricians or in another caregiving role, most adults play a meaningful role in the life of at least one child. As such, the challenge is not only to provide children with information that will shape their attitudes, values and beliefs about race, but also to guide them in processing information from other sources: family and friends, peers, books and movies, teachers, neighborhoods and communities. The racial messages children and all of us receive are constant, usually implicit rather than explicit and often confusing and contradictory.

What does it mean to do the work of socializing children conscientiously in this context?

For starters, it means adults must try to be brave learners by taking an active approach to their own learning and modeling that approach with the children in their lives. Whatever their racial identities, adults have to explore their own experiences and honestly examine their own beliefs and behaviors around race. You don’t have to be an expert to talk with children about race and related topics. They don’t need grownups to have all the answers; they need grownups to ask them questions and listen to their answers, to be willing to say “I don’t know” and try to educate themselves when they have more to learn. It is also important to be steadfast in this work by making clear to children that their curiosity and observations about race are always welcome. Inevitably, adults will make mistakes; do not allow those mistakes to be paralyzing. The point is to learn more and do better.

Third, look for the helpers

No one has to do this work alone. In areas from parenting and preK-12 education to children’s media and the health professions, are creating great tools and resources to help caregivers working to raise children who are thoughtful, informed and brave about race. Our own organization, , is one of many doing this work, offering everything from on talking to your children about racial injustice to of parents who are trying to have these conversations with their own kids.��

Ultimately, the work of ending police brutality against Black people and people of color, and more broadly creating a society marked by authentic multiracial belonging, begins in our homes, schools, and communities with our children’s hearts and minds. President Barack Obama once observed that “every generation has the opportunity to remake the world.” What skills, knowledge and convictions about race will the current generation of children bring to their world-remaking work tomorrow? As parents and guardians, aunties, uncles and grandparents, educators, social workers and community members, we all have vital parts to play in shaping the answer to that question.