Social Justice (7/25)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

TWB

Teaching While Black has been problematic for decades.

If we roll the clock back to the Brown vs. Board of Education, we discover a response that some folks have just forgotten all about.

In the spring of 1953, with the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, Wendell Godwin, superintendent of schools in Topeka, sent letters to black elementary school teachers. Painfully polite, the letters couldn't mask the message: If segregation dies, you will lose your jobs.

The Non-White Teacher Problem

New research from Jason A. Grissom and Christopher Redding looked for new information to explain the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted programs. It's complicated problem, but the researchers came up with one answer-- white teachers are far less likely than teachers of color to identify students of color as gifted. (Consider this the second cousin of the finding that police view young Black men as older and less innocent than whites).

Testing Minorities: Hard Lessons for Public Ed Supporters

Public ed supporters have at times wrestled with the support for testing in the social justice community. There are some hard lessons to be learned.

The Social Justice Argument

No part of the ed refom agenda better demonstrates the trick of coupling a real problem with a fake solution.