“As of spring 2023, 3 percent of teachers said that limitations on race- or gender-related topics positively impact student learning. Teachers were about ten times more likely to say that such limitations negatively impact student learning. Teachers who opposed limitations voiced concerns that these limitations constrain students’ learning opportunities, diminish students’ sense of belonging and […]
“Ginsburg said that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit, reports that more professors on the left and right have been “fired in the last few years than in the entire McCarthy period,” often in response to student demands: “This professor took this position, we can’t have this person here.” The complaints typically […]
“Amid national debates about what schools are teaching, we asked public K-12 teachers, teens and the American public how they see topics related to race, sexual orientation and gender identity playing out in the classroom.”
“For more than two decades, I’ve taught versions of this fiction-writing exercise. I’ve used it in universities, middle schools and private workshops, with 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But in recent years openness to this exercise and to the imaginative leap it’s designed to teach has shrunk to a pinprick. As our country’s public conversation has gotten […]
“But the complaint also pinpoints what Pennridge schools teach — and what they prevent students from learning — as a violation of civil rights. The curriculum changes, removal of DEI resources, and other steps to restrict student education on discrimination and its history “created an environment where race- and sex-based harassment can flourish,” the filing […]
“The responses varied notably by race and ethnicity. Among Black adults, 52 percent said the legal victory for Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was “mostly a good thing,” while 48 percent found it mostly bad. In comparison, 72 percent of white respondents, 68 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent […]
“Together and separately, we’ve taught tens of thousands of individuals from all walks of life to have more meaningful and effective conversations across their differences. We focus our efforts on coaching people in positions of power because they have the greatest opportunity to transform the dynamics of these interactions — to foster empathy instead of […]
“The course will launch for credit next fall, and is currently being taught as a pilot program in 700 schools across 40 states… African American studies is an interdisciplinary field, melding history with the study of contemporary politics, culture and law.”
“The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that ended race-conscious admissions is widely expected to lead to a dramatic drop in the number of Black and Hispanic students at selective colleges. But the court’s decision could have other, surprising consequences, as colleges try to follow the law but also admit a diverse class of students.”
“Poskett argues that this story is an empirical failure: it misses how science is actually done, and it does a disservice to practicing scientists. Above all, it misses where science is done. Against the standard narrative of a European scientific revolution, Poskett implores us to see science as a global enterprise, the result of the intermingling of […]
“Courses that are meant to distinguish between serious and unserious students, it has become clear, often do a better job distinguishing between students who have ample resources and those who don’t… Instead, universities should focus on the broader goal of teaching for equity and with empathy, which means ensuring that students get the support they need to learn and succeed, […]
“Gallup defines equity as fair treatment, access and advancement for each person in an organization. This definition considers the historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences so that policies, procedures and systems can help meet people’s unique needs without one person or group having an unfair advantage over another.”
“Creating more connections across class lines – either through greater economic integration of our institutions and neighborhoods or more opportunities for cross-class social engagement – looks to be the most promising route to improving rates of upward economic mobility.”
“Also called “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day,” or “Emancipation Day” (among other names), Juneteenth is the annual commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. On June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with General Orders, No. 3, declaring: “… in accordance with a proclamation from […]
“After collecting the data from 253 accounts, we focused our analysis on data by location. Our initial analysis focuses on New York City, home to the Klingenstein Center and to a robust and diverse micro-ecosystem of independent schools. This analysis examines more than 900 posts involving 11 New York City-area independent schools. Using the text […]
“The difficulty in understanding equity and social justice in education and in developing effective policies comes from conceptual confusion. A large range of concepts populate this space of research and policy, often with conflicting meanings and consequences. An attempt is made to distinguish and define the most common conceptualizations of equity:”
““The Kalven Report” remains one of the most important statements describing the purpose and mission of universities, and by implication, all institutions committed to learning… It advances an argument for what the drafting committee called “neutrality” in political and social action. In order to protect mission—the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” —educational institutions, the […]
“The findings are striking for such a simple intervention. How simple? The writing exercises were given just three times in each school year. Pencils, paper, and one hour of time spread out over seven or eight months—even doable virtually. It’s hard to get much simpler than that. Why wouldn’t schools want to jump on this even while the mechanisms […]
“Cultivating a genius isn’t just about introducing someone to a set of facts or skills and believing in them. Muhammad distilled what matters into the five tenets of the Historically Responsive Literacy framework: identity, skills, intellectualism, criticality and joy.”
“It’s time to give up the idea that ‘truth’ is the almighty stop-gap for justification and the hope that reasons will win out if we just find the right ones. Politically transformative work should aim to cause feelings and experiences in one’s adversaries that invite further investigation and reflection. Science, the environment, racial justice – […]
“Training has its uses. It can even save lives. (See CPR above.) But training is woefully inadequate when it comes to confronting social problems such as poverty, discrimination and racism. These are long-standing, knotty and complex issues that defy ready-made solutions. Any serious effort to address them must start with education, a process for which […]
“In one sense, the public shaming… underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.” But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one […]
“Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black […]
“Reality pedagogy involves connecting academic content to events happening in the world that affect students. The curriculum can weave in specific references to the neighborhoods where young people are from, inequities that they and their families are hurt by, and protests in the community. But that doesn’t mean these lessons are always serious. Students can […]
“If there is one thing every token black friend knows, it is that we are not to provoke serious discussions of racial issues among our white crowd. We should only offer an opinion on such matters when invited to do so by our white peers. Further, we should ensure that the opinion is in line […]
“Our latest report shows not only that the business case remains robust but also that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time. These findings emerge from our largest data set so far, encompassing 15 countries and more than 1,000 large companies. By incorporating a “social […]
“Should you let that comment slide, or address it head on? Is it more harm than it’s worth? We can help.”
“We are all embedded within systems, but each life—each child—is an unrepeatable anecdote. According to the adults I knew when I was a kid, the worst thing in the world was to be a “statistic,” subsumed into a mass of low expectations and bad outcomes determined by color and class and sustained by a bureaucracy […]
“There are all kinds of ways that people talk about identity and diversity these days. I’ve been trying to organize them into approaches. Here’s my first crack. My goal here is to be descriptive, not judgmental. I don’t think these approaches are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people within each of these […]
“The opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘anti-racist.’ … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist… Teaching for an antiracist future starts with us, the educators. An antiracist educator actively works to dismantle the […]
“The decision to give students who take the SAT test a numerical rating that reflects the challenges they have overcome in life is the most telling sign yet that universities across the country are searching for ways to diversify their classes without considering race or ethnicity… In the initial data the College Board has collected on some […]
“In light of a new study revealing stereotyped characters across Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, published just before Read Across America Day, how can educators engage students in a critical discussion of this canonical author?”
“All kids want to play. Kids with disabilities are no different. “Ian” is a short, animated film inspired by the real-life Ian, a boy with a disability determined to get to the playground despite his playmates bullying him. This film sets out to show that children with disabilities can and should be included… “Ian” premiered […]
“So often… class discussions become a reflection of existing power relations in society, rather than a tool for dismantling and reorganizing them.”
“This kind of diversity, diversity of thought, is the hidden advantage of diversity, because it better enables us to solve complex problems.”
“An announcement from Jeff Sessions, a Harvard lawsuit, changes in the Supreme Court and proposals for selective high schools in New York City. Here’s a rundown of the facts in place, and the latest developments.”
“A meta-analysis of more than 40 studies on diversity and inclusion training found that training is effective when it meets these three conditions: 1. the training is complemented by other diversity initiatives. 2. the training targets both awareness and skills development. 3. the training is conducted over a significant period of time.”
Our landscape is overrun with archaic ways of thinking about women, about people of color, about the “other,” about the rich and the poor, about the powerful and the powerless. And these ways of thinking are destroying us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We will not Little Red Riding hood our way […]
I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker.”
The modern history of diversity began on June 28, 1978. That was the day the Supreme Court decided a case brought by Allan Bakke, a white military veteran who had applied to medical school at the University of California, Davis… The Court’s decision was not particularly decisive—there were six separate opinions.”
Teams that follow an inclusive process make decisions 2X faster with 1/2 the meetings. Decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results.”
Today, we write back. We thank them for looking at our projects and ask for more details about what they mean when they say “safety net.” We try to answer their questions about our thoughts on the “Muslim ban.””
“What are your values as a person? What are American values? Do you think the country is living up to those values today? Why or why not?”… I wrote to dozens of teenagers — young people I’d met at protests, young Republicans I’d talked to around Election Day, teenagers who were already vlogging about their […]
Educators: Be thinking now about how to engage students in critical discussions about white supremacy. Check out #CharlottesvilleCurriculum”
Mental health experts and parents discussed their experiences Saturday, and shared advice for talking to children about the violence in Charlottesville. Here are their tips:”
Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which […]
Participants say the ceremonies are a way of celebrating their shared experience as a group, and not a rejection of official college graduations, which they also attend. Depending on one’s point of view, the ceremonies may also be reinforcing an image of the 21st-century campus as an incubator for identity politics.”
By celebrating the inclusion of insiders — people of different genders and races who have been pre-assimilated into Silicon Valley via Harvard or Georgetown or Stanford — the industry misdirects attention from the inclusion of actual outsiders. We don’t change much by publicizing that we have hired people that we would have hired anyway… You’re a woman who went […]
“When a student is brilliant on the street corner but falling asleep in class, something is wrong with the schooling system.”
The results of a survey taken by more than 10,000 educators following Donald Trump’s election and a divisive campaign that targeted racial, ethnic and religious minorities… described an increase in the use of slurs and derogatory language, along with disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags. The report also cited more than 2,500 […]
He tried to convince [his father] for a few hours at the restaurant. He told him about white privilege and repeated the scientific studies about institutionalized racism. He mentioned the great Islamic societies that had developed algebra and predicted a lunar eclipse. He said that now, as he recognized strains of white nationalism spreading into […]
Of course, not all conformity is bad. But to be successful and evolve, organizations need to strike a balance between adherence to the formal and informal rules that provide necessary structure and the freedom that helps employees do their best work… Let’s look at the three main, and interrelated, reasons why we so often conform […]
Talking about race in America can be scary. People don’t want to be seen as a racist or someone trying to start a conflict. But the less prepared we are to think about race and talk about race, the scarier those conversations are when they occur. And children need tools for how to feel and […]
As the summer internship season gets into full swing, consider, for instance, how a plum internship may alter a young person’s career trajectory. While some students take a summer job in food service to pay the bills, others can afford to accept unpaid jobs at high-profile organizations, setting them on a more lucrative path… The […]
The results add to the evidence that well designed psychological interventions could help close persistent achievement gaps occurring in higher education institutions nationwide. Students who are from lower income backgrounds, under-represented minority groups or families with no previous college graduates typically do worse than other students at the same schools… The findings from the study… […]
“This is the generation of kids that grew up being told that the nation was basically over race,” Renee Romano, a professor of history at Oberlin, says. When they were eleven or twelve, Barack Obama was elected President, and people hailed this as a national-historic moment that changed everything. “That’s the bill of goods they’ve […]
Two weeks earlier, I was almost finished with my sophomore year at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science when I decided to start my new life. I skipped my final exams, changed bank accounts, got a second phone number and deleted my Facebook page. I needed to break from my old life […]
How ironic it was then to discover that at one of the greatest institutions of learning in the world, coaches built a tacit but impenetrable wall between athletics and the life of the mind… coaches made no attempt to get to know me as a person beyond basketball, except when I decided to leave the […]
In honor of Women’s History Month, we asked our spring Student Council — 25 teenagers from all over the United States, as well as from China, South Korea, England and Canada — to search the Times and find the most interesting pieces they could on the broad topic of gender… They unearthed everything from a […]
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, […]
These kids almost certainly don’t need to spend any more time talking to classmates about what sets them apart from the world around them. They need to have as many experiences as possible outside the privileged halls of their schools… They need to discover not just what makes them different, but what they share in […]
The findings showed that the classrooms with higher concentrations of African American students protected from stereotype threat by the intervention triggered higher academic performances among all classmates – regardless of race or participation in the intervention.
A given [school] may be a heterogeneous archipelago. But most of its students spend the bulk of their time on one of many homogeneous islands. That’s consistent with the splintered state of America today, but it’s a betrayal of education’s mission to challenge ingrained assumptions, disrupt entrenched thinking, broaden the frame of reference.”
When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity […]
In most of the research on this topic, affluent students use technology for more creative purposes with more adult supervision, while less affluent students use technology for repetitive drill and practice without the same level of guidance… It doesn’t have to be this way.”
27.2 percent of female college seniors reported that, since entering college, they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact — anything from touching to rape — carried out by incapacitation, usually due to alcohol or drugs, or by force.”
The sociologists offer structural explanations for why college students are addressing conflicts within the framework of “microaggressions.” Victimhood culture “arose because of the rise of social conditions conducive to it,” they argue, “and if it prevails it will be because those conditions have prevailed.” Those social conditions include the following…”
Nonviolence … does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end […]
What we do know is that regardless of minority status, socioeconomic class and first-generation college student status, how you take advantage of college is more important than where you go. For example, graduates who had mentoring relationships, internships and jobs where they applied their learning, as well as long-term projects lasting more than a semester, […]
Selective institutions should do more to enroll low-income students, and that it would be fair for the government to expect institutions that receive a large amount of federal aid to also enroll higher numbers of low-income students.”
Freshmen were assigned to attend one of two hourlong orientation sessions. In one, panelists gave advice about the transition to college and challenges like choosing classes. In the other, the same panelists wove their backgrounds into advice… Typically, first-generation freshman G.P.A.s lag behind their peers’ by 0.3 points. The gap was eliminated for students in […]
I feel like here I’m moving up the socioeconomic ladder. But when I graduate, will I slip back down?”
The worlds of Richmond High School and Marin Academy are only one bridge away from each other, but they rarely collide. That was until a theater project asked students from both schools to interview each other, and perform each other’s lives on stage… You have to learn to move the way that person moves, and […]
For the first time, students of color make up the majority of the class at 51.4 percent. Of these students, 13.8 percent are Asian, 11.6 percent Black/African American, 18.3 percent Hispanic, 7.4 percent multiracial and less than 1 percent Native American.”
There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide.”
“Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their […]
It seems obvious that a group of people with diverse individual expertise would be better than a homogeneous group at solving complex, nonroutine problems. It is less obvious that social diversity should work in the same way—yet the science shows that it does. This is not only because people with different backgrounds bring new information. […]
“Preliminary results suggest that female students learn better when they are surrounded by female classmates—even virtual ones—and the more women in the room, the better. Perone’s and Friend’s findings suggest that the reason behind the success of the Online School for Girls may not be its stated emphasis on teaching girls differently, but simply the […]
At the very least, schools that believe in equity and justice and want their students to be future leaders need to help students — especially white students — understand the history of race and racism and how both play out in contemporary society. This racial content knowledge constitutes a basic social literacy that all students […]
“Racism is a prejudice… coupled with discriminatory action. It’s a very simple definition, it took me a long time to arrive at it, but it is composed of these two parts. You need to have prejudices concerning a certain group of human beings — to whom you attribute mental and physical features reproduced from generation […]
According to the study, people who feel pressured into changing prejudiced views will actually become more prejudiced. On the other hand, methods that persuade people that giving up prejudice is good for its own sake are more effective… Autonomy-primed students read statements like, “I enjoy relating to people of different groups,” and “It’s fun to […]
“Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” socialpsychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ […]