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.”

According to a survey of more than 3,000 teachers conducted by AdoptAClassroom.org, a nonprofit crowdfunding platform, teachers received a median classroom school supply budget of $200 last school year – an amount that 93% of the respondents said was not enough to cover their in-class needs.

Many teachers choose to subsidize the remainder of the costs, but it comes at a steep price. Out-of-pocket spending among teachers has increased by 44% since 2015, the survey found, with teachers reporting that they spent an average of $860 of their own money on supplies and other expenses during the 2022-2023 school year.

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“Teachers spend their classroom supply budget fast,” Melissa Hruza, Vice President, Marketing & Development at AdoptAClassroom.org, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “Even though they are willing to provide basic items like food and supplies for their students, their ability to pay for it is decreasing.”

One big reason: teacher pay has failed to keep up with the sky high rate of inflation in recent years. Adjusted for inflation, teachers are making $3,644 less than they did a decade ago, according to the National Education Association.

Communities and parents appear to be recognizing the challenges teachers face. AdoptAClassroom.org said its site has received more donations to teachers for the 2024-2025 back-to-school season than last year.

“Comparing July and August 2024 to the same period in 2023, the number of contributions to educators on AdoptAClassroom.org is currently up 13% from 2023 to 2024 so far this year,” Hruza said. “There’s also been a 9% increase in the number of both new fundraisers and total number of teachers with active campaigns.”

GoFundMe has seen a similar bump. So far this year, more than $12 million has been raised for K-12 education on the crowdfunding platform. In 2023, total funds raised for educators reached over $24 million — a 7% increase from the previous year.

“[P]eople don’t always see the hidden costs that end up on teachers’ hands, like providing additional resources for students who can’t afford small items like pencils,” Shawn An, a first-year earth and environmental science teacher at Julius L. Chambers High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

To ensure he and his students were fully prepared for this school year, An launched a GoFundMe campaign called A Classroom for Future Scientists, with a goal to raise $1,000. He ended up receiving $1,045 in donations.

“What this funding created is the opportunity for me to bring the basic necessities into the classroom I need to succeed, like organizers and writing utensils to grade with,” An said. “It’s helped me create a space where I can be efficient and to find resources for students to engage in the work we’re asking them to do.”

Lightening the load

To help teachers afford the supplies they need, GoFundMe launched its own fundraising initiative called the Education Opportunity Fund. Since the fund’s launch in 2020, GoFundMe has raised more than $240,000 and has distributed more than 550 grants to teachers in order to help them afford classroom supplies and other educational resources, Leigh Lehman, GoFundMe director of communications, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

“The grants were an additional step to offer help to educators and lighten their load a bit, and there are still grants available for teachers who are in need,” Lehman said.

Grants of can be put toward common classroom items like school supplies, books and class decorations. Funds can also be used for other educational resources or items like field trips, playground equipment, updated technology and extracurricular activities.

Similar to GoFundMe’s grant initiative, AdoptAClassroom.org provides funding through their Spotlight Fund Grants program. This program targets classroom initiatives that address things like social-emotional wellness, Indigenous language, arts, STEM education and racial equity. Eligible teachers can apply for grants of $750 or more on AdoptAClassroom.org.

“People all around the country want to find ways to help more teachers,” GoFundMe’s Lehman said. “They understand there is a gap in funding and that teachers are incredibly stressed.”

Keeping kids engaged

Hana Syed Khan, a fourth grade teacher in New Jersey’s South River Public Schools district, started her own GoFundMe campaign, A Classroom Built on Kindness, in August to support her efforts to make her classroom “as useful, accessible and hands-on as possible.”

Entering her fifth year of teaching at a new school in a new district, Syed Khan knew she had to be more creative with the amount of classroom space she has, materials needed and the resources available.

Her campaign raised $1,920 in funds, which she used to purchase a spin-the-wheel device, a carpet for reading time, books for the classroom library and the classroom staple Better Than Paper.

“The [kids] want to touch everything, and they should be able to. It’s their room,” Syed Khan told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Through sharing via family group chats, her husband’s LinkedIn account, word-of-mouth and other social media platforms, like and , Syed Khan said she “feels fortunate to have set up the fundraiser and leverage community support for her classroom.”

She plans to keep her fundraiser open to donations so she can continue to afford classroom activities and incentives with hopes to keep students engaged through the year.

“Students in this district suffer from chronic absenteeism, which may stem from lack of transportation, parents’ schedule or a lack of motivation for themselves,” Syed Khan said. “Classroom incentives, like parties at the end of the month, are a really big part of what I want to use the funds for next.”

Drawing from his own school experience, An said he understands that many of his students face challenges outside of the classroom. Bringing smaller tools and supplies like writing utensils and paper to class is not the first thing on their mind.

“That can be a real barrier for students to access what teachers are asking them to do,” An said. “Using the donations to directly address those barriers helps students stay engaged to do their best in the classroom.”

He used a portion of the donations he has raised to purchase a rolling cart that allows for easy access to classroom supplies.

An and Syed Khan hope their efforts inspire other teachers to overcome the fear of asking for help. For Syed Khan, it was difficult to find the right words for the campaign and the video she included to go along with it. She wanted to ensure her classroom needs were as clear as possible to potential donors.

“Trying to figure out what to say to grab people’s attention was the most challenging part,” Syed Khan said.

“It definitely wasn’t easy,” she said. “But when people see someone speaking and explaining what the funds will be used for, it can attract many people because they see a real human.”

An experienced similar doubts about asking for help. He credits his family for providing feedback on his campaign narrative and helping him to frame his message.

“My family and I went through a co-writing process to get the point across that this was me, just as a person, asking a personal favor of people who were available,” An said.

GoFundMe currently hosts webinars for educators and education-related organizations to help them learn how to effectively fundraise. They’ve also updated their with tips for teachers to share their campaign and keep communities engaged.

“Seeing more teachers turn to external sources of funding to help support their students’ needs is definitely eye-opening,” An said. “It highlights the fact that not as much care is funneled into education as I think it should be.”

Flush with federal dollars, new and robust offerings have been open to a wide swath of students starting in the summer of 2021 and will continue in many districts this year. But the trend could stop as that pandemic relief money runs out.

Some districts, including , have summer programs, inviting only those students identified as struggling, while others can’t even reach all the children on that list — at least not during the summer. 

Baltimore City Public Schools saw some of the most staggering losses in mathematics at the fourth-grade level — on the 2022 NAEP exams compared to those in 2019 — tying it with Cleveland for worst-in-the-nation.

Baltimore’s and Cleveland’s decline in fourth-grade math scores was nearly double the average eight-point drop among the 26 big city districts that took the tests and dwarfed the average five-point drop of fourth graders nationally. 

Eighth graders in both cities also saw their math test scores plummet: They dropped nine points in Baltimore and eight points in Cleveland. These losses are on par with the rest of the nation: The major cities’ average and the national average for eighth grade math both declined by eight points. 

The 76,000-student Baltimore district has been working for years to remediate those who have fallen behind. It offers extensive summer programming for children at every grade level — more than 22,000 seats from pre-K through 12th grade for summer 2023 programming, up by 2,000 from the year before, district administrators said. But only 15,000 children participated last year, meaning thousands of seats were left open. 

And even with the additional slots, the number might not match the need as it relates to this subject: Just on recent state exams. At 23 Baltimore schools, not a single student tested proficient in math.

Administrators said their district’s summer program was developed, in part, in response to recent NAEP scores. But they know some children who might have benefited from the program will be left out because of budgetary restrictions. 

“Of course, we would love to be able to offer every student an opportunity to engage in learning during the summer,” said Laurie-Lynn Sutton-Platt, director of summer and extended learning.

The upcoming program can’t be a catch-all, but it can help, district administrators said. 

“It’s a start,” said Kerry Steinbrenner, Baltimore’s director of mathematics. “Summer is an ideal opportunity for students to continue to develop their math skills and we don’t want to miss that … We want to try to impact as many kids as we can during that time.” 

Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which serves , is also working to undo damage done by the pandemic. Some 4,200 students are enrolled in its five-week summer learning program with more added to the list every day. The district hopes the figure will reach the height it did last year at 6,500. 

But it can’t guarantee participation. 

“We are working to reach all of the students we can during the summer, but it is dependent upon students and families electing to enroll,” said chief communications officer Roseann Canfora. “We cannot require them to do so.”

Although driven by poor reading, not math scores, some third graders in Tennessee are summer programming this year if they performed poorly on that portion of the state exam and are at risk of being held back.

In the long term, average for fourth and eighth graders on the NAEP between the early 1970s and 2012. Between 2012 and 2020, just before the pandemic struck, they largely flattened while achievement gaps between high and low scorers — a persistent equity issue with NAEP — widened. And then the unprecedented drop in the 2022 scores brought COVID’s impact into full relief. 

How long it will take children to recover from that — or what it will take for more students to reach grade-level proficiency in math — are big questions, but recent research has shown the sharp decline in math proficiency could have lifelong negative consequences. 

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, executive director and founder of Beyond100K, a national network focused on preparing and retaining 150,000 excellent STEM teachers in 10 years, believes wealthier children have long made up what was lost. 

But others will never reach that goal, she said. 

“What’s different isn’t the kids: It’s their experience during the pandemic and the support they’ve received since,” she said. “We could have corralled all our resources to accelerate the mental, emotional and academic recovery of all kids — and if we would have, we’d likely have created the next great generation — but we haven’t. At least not yet.”

The federal government gave schools $190 billion in COVID aid with $3 billion available for summer learning. Experts say the type and quality of the summer programming counts, while some researchers assert that even that unprecedented overall sum is not enough to reverse the level of learning loss. 

Melodie Baker, national policy director at , an organization that promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success, said students need engaging and meaningful content that helps them make sense of the material and retain what they’ve learned. This is true whether it’s delivered during the school year or the summer, she said. 

“It’s also important to recognize the role of teacher diversity as a long-term strategy for improving student engagement and learning outcomes,” Baker said. “A diverse teaching staff can provide students with a range of perspectives and experiences that can enhance their understanding of the material and make it more relevant to their lives.”

Some 110,000 of New York City’s roughly 1 million students will participate in summer learning this year, a spokeswoman told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. NYC students slid nine points on the fourth-grade NAEP mathematics tests and four points on the eighth-grade exams. 

One program, , will focus on grade-level instructional priorities for grades K-8, helping students build math foundations, fluency and conceptual understanding to support learning recovery, acceleration and enrichment, she said. It includes assessments meant to identify weaknesses and help teachers narrow learning gaps ahead of the upcoming school year. Other programs include project-based learning and financial literacy.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where fourth graders saw their math scores drop 13 points and eighth graders 11 on the 2022 NAEP exams, plans to grow its summertime math offerings for middle schoolers heading into ninth grade.

Mark Bosco, the district’s senior administrator for expanded learning and partnerships, said the four week-long program is expected to swell from 400 to 1,000 participants this summer. 

“This is designed for students who find math abstract,” Bosco said. 

Pre- and post-assessments reveal improvement: Children who stayed for the 16-day duration who could not answer a single pre-algebra question correctly at the start of the program could successfully answer five or six questions out of 20 at the end, Bosco said. 

He described the summer program as hands-on and project-based. In one instance, he said, reflecting on last year’s program, students were made to go through the steps of finding and financing a car, learning about credit applications, compounding interest and loans. 

“It really got them thinking about how math can be so important in everyday life,” he said. “The kids are applying concepts in pretty advanced ways.”

Chicago Public Schools is encouraging schools to implement math camps this summer for rising third and fourth graders in addition to programs for students in middle and high school, a spokesman said. Fourth graders in the district saw a 10-point decrease on math NAEP scores. The loss was worse for eighth graders, who suffered a 12-point decline. 

More than 73,000 of Chicago Public Schools’ engaged in at least one summer program last year. Math enrichment at the district includes the Summer of Algebra and Math Camp programs. A group of elementary schools also will host a Computer Science/Engineering Camp for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. 

Despite the success of some programs, funding remains a concern: Canfora, of the Cleveland schools, said federal COVID relief funds likely will not be available for summer 2024. Her district is building next summer into this fiscal year’s general fund budget, which will be submitted to the school board this month. 

Aaron Philip Dworkin, chief executive officer of the , said districts should always work to establish and strengthen relationships with outside partners to build better programs and to secure funding so they are not as reliant on federal dollars. 

“What do you do when the money runs out?” he asked. “We will figure it out. Everyone will contribute what they can and we will make it work.” 

In , scholar Leslie T. Fenwick, tapping seldom-seen transcripts from a series of 1971 U.S. Senate hearings on the topic, writes that the loss of Black educators post-Brown was “the most significant brain drain from the U.S. public education system that the nation has ever seen. It was so pervasive and destabilizing that, even more than half-century later, the nation’s public schools still have not recovered.”

While Black students now represent about 15 percent of K-12 enrollment, just 7 percent of teachers and 11 percent of principals are Black. Research shows that this dearth of Black educators has consequences: One 2018 study, for instance, found that Black students who had by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college. Those who had two were 32 percent more likely.

What’s more, Fenwick says, current threats over issues such as Critical Race Theory are cut from the same cloth as the threats that Black educators faced post-Brown.

74 contributor Greg Toppo spoke with Fenwick, an education policy professor and dean emerita of the School of Education at Howard University, about the Senate hearings, the backlash to Brown and ways to bring Black teachers back into the classroom.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: Can you take us back to the moment when you first learned about this history?

Leslie T. Fenwick: I learned this history on my own as part of my disgust with a Politics of Education class that I was taking as a doctoral student. The professor decided that the class on the politics of education would not discuss Brown! Instead, we were going to start at a different point, the [the 1971 decision that upheld busing to achieve integrated schools]. And I remember being outraged by that. If there’s any place where we should be unpacking Brown, it should be in that class. Additionally, the faculty member opened the class with this roster of statistics reflecting disparities in education between Blacks and whites, but I was concerned that there was no framing for these statistics, and that without the framing, there was kind of a tacit reinforcement of some racist assumptions about Blacks and intellectual and academic underachievement. So after class I marched to the library, almost in protest, saying to myself that I was going to bring back some statistics and facts to inform this faculty member about education disparities and also to make the case for why we should be discussing Brown. And as I’m looking for resources in the library — I’m literally in the stacks because this is before the Internet — I come across these on the displacement of Black principals. And I start reading them. And that’s where I learned about this history. I carried those transcripts around for quite some time, looking for someone to write the book that I ended up writing.

Those 1971 Senate hearings feel like a hidden history. Why are they not more widely known?

These [Senate hearing] transcripts have been cited at least 100 times in work by scholars and journalists, but no one has written in depth about the most prominent focus of the transcripts, which was Black educators’ superior academic credentials and professional experiences, and how they were replaced by lesser-qualified whites. I wasn’t expecting to find that. … This is the thrust of the hearings. And yet in all the work that cites the hearings, there’s not a focus on these Black educators’ exceptional academic credentials.

You paraphrase testimony from the hearings, writing that as school desegregation slowly played out post-Brown, “White principals and teachers became its direct beneficiaries, while Black educators were its primary prey.” Reading that, I wondered, “Who were the hunters?”

We’re talking about life in the 17 dual-system states, although outside of those states, there are jurisdictions that also have . And we see, even in the North, this is happening too. But en masse, it’s happening in the 17 racially segregated states, from Delaware down to Florida, over to Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, etc. And the hunters become governors, mayors, state legislatures — not individual legislators, but legislatures — and also locally elected officials: mayors, but also school superintendents and school boards. Remember, this is a time still after Brown of a lot of racial constriction. The customs of racism and Jim Crow are alive and well, which means that Blacks experience difficulty and barriers to voting. So that means local officials, school board members, superintendents in the states and jurisdictions where they are elected — and certainly state legislatures and governors [are involved]. And so without full voting rights extended to Blacks, those controlling the state and local levers of power and policy are almost all white and mainly committed to maintaining the segregationist hold on schools. And these are the individuals and entities that facilitate, through the use of state budgets and the use of state codes and statutes, the firing, dismissal and demotion of Black principals and teachers.

You write that Thurgood Marshall in 1955 noted that Black educators’ jobs needed to be protected. Did he and the legal team go into Brown with this possibility on their minds?

There was a that led up to Brown that were about disparities in paying Black and white teachers. Again, Black teachers with more credentials would make less money in the 17 dual-system states than white teachers with certificates. Thurgood Marshall and many of his team litigated those cases … Marshall and his team knew Black educator displacement was likely to happen. Remember, prior to Brown they’re going to Southern and border states, and they’re litigating all the cases around pay inequalities and voter registration. They knew the parameters of Jim Crow very well. In fact, early on, Marshall establishes the of the NAACP to provide funding for legal support to the Black principals and teachers whom he thought would be illegally targeted and lose their jobs as a result of white backlash to Brown.

Do you give Marshall’s legal team any culpability for being naive in their strategy?

I don’t hold the Brown decision, nor the men who were the geniuses behind that decision, culpable. But what I do hold culpable is white resistance and the ability of local and state leaders to, in a swoop, use state statutes and budgets to support their segregationist agenda in the face of Brown, which would become the law of the land. Brown was right: There is no place in an American democracy for segregation. There is no reason Black citizens should not be able to access tax-supported institutions. There is no reason we should have, in this great country, racially segregated customs and laws. Brown was a great and brilliant decision. But there was powerful backlash to the decision that continued for at least 25 years. Sadly, I think it’s still continuing. In fact, the current death threats against superintendents who have initiated race equity initiatives, the physical intimidation of school board members, the threats against teachers and to burn books — when I was writing Jim Crow’s Pink Slip and then looking at the current news, it’s the same script, and that really shocks me.

You’ve anticipated my next question: Reading your book, I felt like the conversations we’re seeing now about CRT and pushing students away from subjects that make them uncomfortable are a direct result of this history. Can you reflect on that?

I wrote the book to push against this myth that there are not enough Black teachers, because after Brown, Blacks fled the profession to pursue fields and careers that were previously unavailable. Well, the history doesn’t say that, nor do U.S. Labor Department statistics show that. And we’re still living with this history: Of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, about 7 percent are Black. About 11 percent of the nation’s 93,000 principals are Black. And less than 3 percent of the nation’s almost 14,000 superintendents are Black. And so I ask myself, and I ask the reader: Where would we be if these generations of Black educators, who were more credentialed than their white peers who replaced them, who had a personal commitment to end anti-Black racism, who had put their lives on the line to lead voter-rights campaigns in their communities, who were committed to a representative democracy — what if they hadn’t been fired? What if they had been in place during a critical time in our nation’s history and were part of building integrated schools? Where might we be as a nation now?

As you write, they weren’t just teaching, they were also politically active.

Many of these principals and teachers were establishing voting-rights campaigns in their locales. They were establishing NAACP chapters. This was their activism. And in other literature, they’re called community activists and community leaders. But more specifically, their community activism was devoted to helping Blacks get registered to vote and working with the NAACP on lots of equality issues. And so they were threats. These Black educators were cornerstones of political activism even in the face of threats to their own lives.

So in 2022, if the dearth of Black teachers isn’t a recruitment issue, what’s the solution?

When the Nixon administration was pressured about this as a result of the Senate hearings in the ‘70s, the response of the administration was not pro-integration. They designated $3.2 million to the retraining of Black educators for integrated schools. Well, Black educators didn’t need retraining. On a near one-to-one basis, they were more credentialed than the white educators who replaced them. So, the Nixon administration’s retraining investment is literally used to usher Black principals and teachers out of the profession. I go into great, great detail and cite the federal documents that show how they were ushered out of the field. So we need a counter-investment, and particularly in institutions that produce large percentages or numbers of Black and other educators of color. I always say that even in 2022, HBCUs, which are 3 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, are producing 50 percent of the nation’s Black teachers — and two HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions), one in Texas and one in Florida, produce 90 percent of the nation’s Latinx teachers. So we do need some financial investment in the institutions that are producing teachers of color. And we need to examine, I think, any other structural barriers preventing Black and other teachers of color from entering the profession, either as teacher education students or novice teachers.

It strikes me that it’s such a vicious cycle: If you’re a Black student and don’t see Black teachers, your incentive to do this work, to see yourself in this job, just gets reduced. And that feeds into an ongoing cycle.

We know that academic and social benefits accrue to African-American, Hispanic/Latinx students when they’re in highly diverse-staffed schools. They’re less likely to be expelled, less likely to be misplaced in special education, more likely to graduate high school, more likely to apply for college, have reading and math achievement that’s excellent in certain grades. And so we are losing out on some academic achievement, not just for Black and brown students, but possibly for all students. I say in the book, over and over again, that all children benefit from having diverse models of intellectual authority.

See previous 74 Interviews: professor Daryl Scott on teaching the history of race in America; author Amanda Ripley on losing trust in schools; professor Seth Gershenson on the importance of teacher diversity; author Paul Tough on higher education myths; and the full archive of 74 interviews.