Education Secretary Linda McMahon withdrew the department’s appeal in a federal lawsuit that challenged warning schools against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” 

In April, she asked states to agreeing to the administration’s view of non-discrimination laws or risk losing federal funds. In , Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, a district judge for the District of Maryland, called both the letter and the certification requirement “substantively improper.” 

“The administration is entitled to express its viewpoints and to promulgate policies aligned with those viewpoints,” she wrote. “But it must do so within the procedural bounds Congress has outlined. And it may not do so at the expense of constitutional rights.”

Other litigation over the letter and the certification is ongoing.

The department’s tough anti-DEI stance drew a broad mix of reactions. Some Republican state education chiefs welcomed the letter, with Ryan Walters, former Oklahoma superintendent, posting a video of himself signing the form. Blue states refused to sign, while at the district level,  the actions largely sparked confusion over whether they could still hold events related to Black History Month or teach about racism. One Georgia school board and then reinstated it when the court blocked the letter.

The lawsuit, led by American Federation of Teachers, is one of four related to the letter or the threat to withhold funds. The National Education Association, 19 Democratic-led states and the NAACP also challenged the department’s actions. But the department didn’t initially fare well in court. On the same day in late April, Gallagher suspended the letter while two other federal judges blocked enforcement of the certification form.

“With the stroke of a pen, the administration tried to take a hatchet to 60 years of civil rights laws that were meant to create educational opportunity for all kids,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It took a union to stand in the stead of kids and educators who feared retribution from the government.”

The department did not respond to a request for comment, but its decision in the AFT case doesn’t put the issue to rest.

In the NEA case, the judge has not issued a final ruling, but an remains in place.  The department filed a motion to dismiss the NAACP case last summer, but the court has not yet ruled. The , meanwhile, is set for trial in June. 

While the department was unable to pressure schools through a “dear colleague” letter, it has continued to launch civil rights investigations into districts with diversity and equity initiatives, like Black Student Success Plan. 

Even some conservatives criticized the agency’s use of non-binding guidance to implement policy.

“There are good reasons to be concerned about the capricious use of dear colleague letters. Many of us have been warning about the problems for 15 years now, dating back to Obama’s first term,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Seeing the administration instead rely on the machinery of the Office for Civil Rights is probably a good thing, as that should ensure that this is less about federal diktats than about investigations into specific complaints.”

The department said it will reinstate roughly 25 employees Sept. 8, nearly three months after a federal judge told the department to start the process, and will return another 60 every two weeks until early November. 

The plan comes after the Massachusetts district court judge to throw out a June 18 order requiring the department to put the employees back to work. Department officials are now appealing that ruling.

Sean Ouellette, who represents the families and advocates who sued over the firings at OCR, said he was pleased to see “a commitment” from the department.

“I hope they restore staff on the schedule they laid out, or hopefully faster. We’re not really sure it should take that long,” said Ouellette, a senior attorney with Public Justice. “We’re a little skeptical because this only comes after the court called them out on the delay.”

In another personnel development, the department will begin reinstating employees in late January because their positions were linked, sometimes tenuously, to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs. Many of those targeted were told by their supervisors during the first Trump administration to attend a DEI training. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents the department staff, filed for arbitration — a dispute resolution process — rather than bringing a lawsuit.

“Because our local refused to stand down, we have learned that a number of our members placed on DEI leave are being returned to duty,” Sheria Smith, president of Local 252, wrote to employees Tuesday. 

But Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, disputed that arbitration played a role in the decision.

“The agency determined they are an asset to the workforce,” she said.

The action could slow down progress toward President Donald Trump’s pledge to dismantle the Education Department and eliminate any DEI-related activity — central pieces of his agenda that the public doesn’t necessarily support, according to recent PDK Poll results.Ìę

McMahon fired roughly half its OCR staff members March 11 along with over 1,000 other employees. The Victims Rights Law Center, which represents victims of sexual assault, argued that their dismissal in combination with the closure of seven out of 12 regional offices, left the office unable to perform duties mandated by law. 

The department tried to link the OCR firings to a in which the Supreme Court allowed McMahon to let staff go from other divisions within the agency. In both cases, the courts have yet to issue a final decision on whether the firings were legal. Judge agreed with Public Justice, saying that the OCR case presented “distinct factual circumstances,” and “cannot be lumped in with” the other lawsuit. 

The department disagrees. “At bottom, plaintiffs’ lawsuit is an improper programmatic attack on how the department runs OCR,” wrote Michael Bruns, an attorney with the Justice Department.ÌęIn the appeal to the U.S. Appeals Court for the First Circuit, he called the lawsuit “crafty pleading.”

For now, however, Joun’s opinion leaves the department with no further options but to bring back the staff. 

OCR, not surprisingly, hasn’t been able to move through cases as quickly as it did prior to the layoffs. Since March 11, the office has resolved 413 complaints, compared to about 200 per month previously, Steven Schaefer, deputy assistant secretary for policy at OCR, wrote in a filing to the court.  

Ouellette, the Public Justice attorney, said having more attorneys and investigators back to work should help OCR make progress on the backlog.

“At least that will get things back to the way they were, which was already strained,” he said.

‘Called back’

Union officials haven’t received any communication from the department specifying which employees are returning or when they will start work, said spokesman Andrew Feldman. But the department did tell some to report to the cafeteria on Monday for a “brief orientation,” according to a notice to employees shared with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

“We have members who have self-reported to us they have been called back,” Feldman said.

One of those is Kissy Chapman-Thaw, an education program specialist and former teacher. She learned secondhand that she would be among those returning Sept. 8, which she said the department’s IT help desk confirmed Wednesday. 

She oversaw budgeting and higher education grants, including COVID relief funds, but she attended the three-day DEI training in 2019, which she thinks likely contributed to her dismissal.   

“For me, as an African American woman, I felt not just educated, but I understood how to be more sensitive to other people in general,” she said. She refused to quit while her job was in limbo. “After a month, I was like, I’m not going anywhere. They’ve got to fire me. I’m just not going to walk away that easily.”

In a 6-3 ruling, the conservative justices said the Montgomery County Public Schools must reinstate its opt-out policy. The opinion puts districts nationwide on notice that parents should have a greater say over whether their children are exposed to views that conflict with what they learn at home. 

“We conclude that the parents are likely to succeed in their challenge to the board’s policies,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”

The case, , now returns to a lower court, which will consider whether the district violated the parents’ First Amendment rights. Eric Baxter, an attorney with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the parents, said he expects the district to settle.

“The court’s ruling clearly will extend through the end of this case,” he said. “I don’t think there are any facts the school board can produce that will change the court’s mind.” 

In , the district said it “will determine next steps and navigate this moment with integrity and purpose.”

‘The assault on books’

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed sympathy for district officials’ decision to stop allowing families to opt out. 

“The result will be chaos for this nation’s public schools” and “impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” she said in the minority opinion, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan. What would happen, she asked, if a school had to alert parents any time a lesson or story might contradict what parents believe. “Next to go could be teaching on evolution, the work of female scientist Marie Curie, or the history of vaccines.”

PEN America, a free speech organization that advocates against restrictions on books, criticized the ruling, saying that it lays the “foundation for a new frontier in the assault on books of all kinds in schools.” 

The case reflects an ongoing clash between efforts to represent LGBTQ families in the curriculum and the rights of religious parents. The families who sued — Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox Christian — argued that simply having the books in the classroom offended their beliefs. But rather than demanding the district remove them outright, they asked that their children be allowed to leave class when teachers read the books. The Trump administration, 26 GOP-led states and 66 members of Congress sided with the parents.

“This ruling is more than just a legal win. It is a moral and spiritual triumph that acknowledges the sacred responsibility entrusted to parents,” said Billy Moges, a Christian mother of three and board member for Kids First, an advocacy group that formed to oppose the district’s move.

In a call with reporters Friday, Baxter called the ruling “a win-win” because it shows parents with religious disagreements “don’t get to veto everyone else’s practices.”

In 2022, the 160,000-student Montgomery district added LGBTQ inclusive books like “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a girl’s uncle who marries another man, and “Born Ready,” about a transgender boy, to its elementary curriculum. In March 2023, officials announced they would end their policy of allowing parents to opt their children out of listening to the stories and any classroom discussions about the books. They argued that the policy applied to all parents, not just those wanting opt outs for religious reasons. 

The books were not intended to influence students’ beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity, officials argued, but to reflect the diversity of the community. That didn’t satisfy the parents who sued, some of whom left the district over the issue.

“I would have loved to keep my children in public school, 
 but I just didn’t have that choice,” Moges told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ before the oral arguments in April. 

‘Need not wait for the damage’

The conservatives rejected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s opinion that there was insufficient evidence of how teachers were actually using the books in the classroom to determine whether students were coerced into adopting the views they represented. 

“When a deprivation of First Amendment rights is at stake, a plaintiff need not wait for the damage to occur before filing suit,” Alito wrote. The books, he said, “are designed to present the opposite viewpoint to young, impressionable children, 
present same-sex weddings as occasions for great celebration and suggest that the only rubric for determining whether a marriage is acceptable is whether the individuals concerned ‘love each other.’ ” 

The ruling came a day after the of the court’s landmark ruling in that made gay marriage legal nationwide. Alito, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from the majority in that case. 

In the Mahmoud ruling, the court also shot down the suggestion — one that Jackson elaborated on during oral arguments — that parents who don’t like what public schools teach can put their children in private school or homeschool them.

“Public education is a public benefit, and the government cannot ‘condition’ its ‘availability’ on parents’ willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise,” Alito wrote.

The ruling means that schools will have to give parents, especially those with young children, more advance notice when lessons are planned that touch on religious beliefs.

“The court drew a clear line: simple exposure to ideas is allowed, but instruction that pushes a particular moral viewpoint — especially without room for dissent — can cross into a constitutional burden,” said Asma Uddin, a Georgetown University law professor who focuses on religious liberty.  

Some faith leaders argue the books never should have been viewed through a religious lens and that the court’s decision will further marginalize LGBTQ students and families at a time when the Trump administration is seeking to remove their legal protections.  

The ruling “is just the latest example of religion being used as a tool of discrimination and misappropriated to harm our neighbors,” Rev. Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America, a Christian social-justice organization, said in a statement. “The truth is that there is no scripture or religious doctrine that denies the existence of LGBTQ people.”

But the result was something else.

Parents bombarded the dedicated email address with off-topic rants on issues from kids using outdated textbooks to districts that failed to pay for special education evaluations. In the end, the process likely attracted more critics than supporters to the governor’s cause.  urged Black parents to “flood” the governor with complaints about “history being silenced.” The state shut the tip line down offering scant evidence of indoctrination.

A New Hampshire project met . State officials disabled it last year after a ruled that the state’s 2021 “banned concepts” laws that restricted lessons on LGBTQ issues and racial history were too vague. 

But in Oklahoma, a school safety alert system that Superintendent Ryan Walters uses to expose and punish what he calls the Five complaints pointed to books that Walters deemed “pornographic” in a district north of Oklahoma City. His accusation sparked a legal battle over whether the state chief could control the contents of school libraries. 

Richard Cobb, superintendent of the Mid-Del Schools, outside Oklahoma City, called the online system “a huge overreach.” 

“It’s frustrating because anyone can report anything,” he said. “Then the burden is on us to prove our innocence.”

And for many educators, there’s the rub — especially now that the Trump administration has made combating diversity, equity and inclusion an urgent national priority.

On Feb. 27, the U.S. Department of Education launched the . Its name leaves no doubt about its purpose — to uncover and eradicate examples of diversity, equity and inclusion in more than 100,000 schools across the nation. In a statement, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice urged parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.”

Trump made the issue a hallmark of his campaign, calling such policies “absolute nonsense” and “illegal.” 

On the department’s portal, a simple online form invites parents to report “illegal discriminatory practices“ that the department will use to launch investigations. 

But the department didn’t say what made DEI illegal, and the concept has proved notoriously difficult to define. Schools have implemented race-focused activities like in elementary school, drawing backlash from parents who say the lessons make their children feel ashamed. But others have blocked lessons of clear historical significance, such as about Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend a school in New Orleans. 

Even in its attempt to eliminate DEI, the department has found the concept to be something of a moving target.

The launch of the portal followed a stern from the Office for Civil Rights that districts could face investigation if they treat “students differently on the basis of race.” In response, some teachers from lessons on Black history. A day after unveiling the portal, however, officials followed up with a more , explaining that cultural observances like Black History Month and International Holocaust Remembrance Day would be acceptable as long as all students, regardless of race, are welcome to participate. 

But the department recently resumed the offensive. Last week, it told states and districts to sign a document certifying that they have eliminated DEI practices or risk losing millions of dollars in federal funding. The department has since extended the deadline until April 24, said Madi Biedermann, a department spokeswoman.

New York is among of states that has . Washington state Superintendent Chris Reykdal called the department’s ultimatum “an assault on the autonomy of states” and said it would be “irresponsible” to sign the certification. California also seems to be . In an emailed statement, the state education agency called the demand “another attempt to impose a national ideology on local schools by threatening to withhold vital resources for students.”

Adding to the outsize stakes is the way the Trump administration has weaponized the issue, canceling grants and connected with even tangential connections to DEI work. In some cases, it has used DEI as an excuse to challenge legitimate history and bolster thinly veiled discrimination. Using artificial intelligence to comb through over 1,000 web pages, the Pentagon to notable achievements among minority members of the military. It later restored some of them. And in January, Trump for a fatal mid-air collision between a helicopter and a plane over the Potomac River.

Those who have worked in states that have implemented tip lines expect End DEI to meet with a similar flurry of confusion, tangents, spam, personal grievances — and a chill on important classroom discussions.

“I can see the parallel” with Oklahoma, Cobb said. “We’ve seen the Trump administration bully powerful law firms and Ivy League schools into submission. I imagine they would have zero qualms about applying similar pressure to individuals or school districts.”

‘Snitch line mentality’

The department’s move comes amid deep national divisions about DEI. A January by The Economist and YouGov found a roughly even split, with 45% in favor of ending such programs in government and schools, and 40% opposed.

As Trump took office on Jan. 20, another survey attempted to gauge the effects of critical race theory on classroom instruction. The results were similarly mixed. Fifty-eight percent  of high school students reported that their  teachers frequently make comments like, “We must be actively anti-racist,” while 42% responded that teachers support the Black Lives Matter movement. At the same time, 77% said their teachers either never or rarely made them feel uncomfortable about disagreeing with their point of view. 

Brian Kisida, a government and public affairs professor at the University of Missouri and a lead author of the study, said the department’s portal could give parents a vehicle for reporting actual discrimination against their children. But he expressed concern that the likely result would be to magnify the polarization it is designed to eradicate, saying “this snitch line mentality can do more harm than good.”

“I expect many of these disputes could be solved if parents and educators just had good-faith conversations with each other, and both sides would likely learn something in the process,” he said.

Some wonder how the department can thoughtfully navigate the issues, given the dramatic cuts to the program that normally would have been responsible for investigating discrimination complaints: the department’s civil rights office.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon eliminated half of the OCR staff along with seven regional offices that handle investigations. With its remaining employees, the department redirected civil rights enforcement toward administration priorities like ending antisemitic protests on college campuses and keeping transgender students out of girls’ sports. 

“If you’re dismantling the Department of Education and moving everything somewhere else, who are these people that are going to do the investigation?” asked LaToya Baldwin Clark, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles who . “Who are these people that actually do any type of enforcement?”

Biedermann, the department spokeswoman, would not say who is reviewing the submissions or whether officials have followed up on any tips. But unlike the Department of Defense, she said staff members at the department — not AI — will review submissions to identify potential areas for investigation. Biederman offered no information on how many reports the system has received, but Marleigh Schaefer, a spokeswoman for Moms for Liberty, said “thousands of parents have submitted to the portal.” 

One of them is Lauren McDonough, part of a Texas conservative group called Families Engaged.

In her complaint to the department, she described her failed attempts to get the Richardson Independent School District to pass a policy requiring students to use bathrooms that match their sex assigned at birth. She became concerned after learning that a trans girl in first grade attends her daughters’ school. In an email, a district official told her that schools consider transgender students’ requests on a case-by-case basis.

“I was like ‘What the heck, it takes five minutes,’ ” McDonough said of the form. “If something comes of it, great, but my hopes are very low. I feel like I have to exhaust my resources as a parent.”

Biedermann said people who make submissions shouldn’t necessarily expect a response and described the portal as a “tool to identify where and if there are pockets or patterns of 
 violations.”

Not surprisingly, the site, created by staff from billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, fell prey to pranks. “Y’all know what to do 
Copy the Bee Movie script,” one critic — a reference to an about sending the entire script from the 2014 movie to crash a site. Three former staffers at the department said in the rush to get the portal up, the site went down within 12 hours.

“We were laughing about it,” said a former employee who asked to remain anonymous to protect colleagues still at the department. 

Biedermann acknowledged that the portal was initially overwhelmed, but said it resumed operations in about an hour and is now working smoothly.

‘Name names’ 

In Virginia, Youngkin set up his special email address to make good on a promise to listen to parents’ concerns. His successful run for governor in 2021 tapped into deep anger over remote learning and fears that critical race theory was infiltrating classrooms. An academic principle usually reserved for graduate schools, CRT argues that racism is built into the fabric of American institutions.

As governor, Youngkin’s first banned classroom lessons based on CRT. On a , he promoted the tip line as a way to track down “inherently divisive teaching practices.” 

He called out the Fairfax County district for a high school English assignment, titled Privilege Bingo, that was intended to teach students about diverse perspectives. The squares on the bingo card listed features such as being white, Christian, male and able-bodied. , an Army veteran complained that the lesson listed being part of a military family as an example of privilege. The district apologized and revised the activity, but said it remained committed to teaching students how to understand multiple viewpoints. Youngkin pledged to wipe out similar lessons from Virginia classrooms. 

“We’re going to make sure that we catalog it all,” he said.

But the effort didn’t go as planned. Teachers in the Prince William County district, next to Fairfax, thought it was a joke. They even ordered custom T-shirts that read “Hi tip line? I’d like to report Virginia teachers for being incredible at what they do. Thanks Bye.” 

“We just couldn’t believe that they were going to spend tax dollars to run this tip line, but not fully fund our schools to decrease class sizes,” said Angie Trerotola, a high school social studies teacher in Prince William.  

Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update got into the act. Co-anchor Colin Jost quipped, “You know you’re racist when you call the cops about a Black character in a book.”

In response to public records requests, the governor’s staff initially submissions to the tip line. But when several news outlets sued, the governor turned over 350 emails as part of a settlement, few of which pointed to lessons Youngkin was trying to eliminate. A spokesman referred ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ to a statement it released in the fall of 2022 explaining that it the tip line because it was “receiving little to no volume.”

A similar tip line in Rhode Island also failed to gain traction. The Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a nonprofit, at the height of outrage and confusion over how schools were teaching racial issues. It called on parents to “‘name names’ of those indoctrinating our kids.” 

The free market think tank and the conservative Civics Alliance collaborated on that said state social studies standards are “animated by a radical identity-politics ideology” and show “hostility toward America.” The standards expect students to study Latino history, workers’ rights and feminism, they wrote, but distort “history where white men played the leading roles.”

More recently, Mike Stenhouse, the center’s CEO, that a policy that recognizes transgender students and protects their decision to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity puts them at risk of a civil rights investigation by the Trump administration.

But after four years, the group’s tip line had nothing to show for it, Stenhouse said in an email. The line “has not yielded any notable results” or received many “credible responses,” he said. Stenhouse blamed the lack of participation on the center’s failure to adequately promote the site.

‘Soup du jour’

In Oklahoma, Superintendent Walters has had more success getting the public’s help. His predecessor, Joy Hofmeister, launched a website called Awareity to report school security risks. Walters turned to it to and districts violating a state law banning divisive concepts and his own mandates.

last year focused on two books in the Edmond School District’s high school libraries. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, is an award-winning bestseller about an Afghan boy’s relationship with his father set against the backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war, and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family. Both books include descriptions of sexual assault.

Walters threatened to downgrade the district’s accreditation if they didn’t remove them. When the district sued over his rule, it had chosen to “peddle porn and is leading the charge to undermine parents in Oklahoma.”

Cobb, the Mid-Del superintendent, didn’t pull the books, but others preemptively removed the titles and similar ones Walters labeled “filth.”

“I guess we all have to make our own decisions,” Cobb said. “But I’d rather stand up and fight than comply in advance with something that is wrong.”

Walters lost the case Edmond brought against him last year. The Oklahoma Supreme Court accused the superintendent of acting with “unauthorized quasi-judicial authority” and said decisions over library materials are up to local districts. 

The option to report “pornographic materials or sexualized content” no longer appears in Awareity’s dropdown menu. The public also can no longer use it to report that a teacher is violating the state’s divisive concepts law. Last June, a federal judge parts of the legislation, finding some of the language confusing for teachers to follow. 

But Walters has a new use for Awareity. The public can report a “violation of religious liberty and patriotism rights.” Those categories complement his controversial mandate for teachers to in the classroom and that students should be allowed to fly and display the American flag at school “without infringement.” 

“It’s like the soup du jour — whatever issues seem to be playing well at the current time,” said Brendon Hoover, coordinator at the Kirkpatrick Policy Group, which advocates for schools having full-time librarians.

He worked with Oklahoma Appleseed for Law and Justice, a nonprofit law firm, to file an open records request for Awareity files. Complaints included objections to schools offering Stamped, by anti-racist author Ibram Kendi, and a middle school book fair featuring selections from the LGBTQ-themed Heartstopper series of graphic novels.

The Oklahoma Department of Education did not respond to questions about Awareity.

Hoover blames the current atmosphere surrounding classroom instruction for contributing to an exodus of teachers from the profession and the state. Last year, Oklahoma approved nearly for teachers to fill vacancies, breaking a previous record, the Oklahoma Voice reported.

“Oklahoma has a huge teacher shortage,” Hoover said, “and it’s because teachers are under attack by their own state Superintendent.”

One former Oklahoma health teacher got tired of being a target. Describing herself as a “blue drop in a red sea,” she said the threat of being reported for discussing racial issues was one reason she left the classroom in 2022. She stopped teaching a lesson about how the slave trade likely contributed to Black Americans’ to certain diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure. After parents complained, an administrator encouraged her to drop the material from her curriculum.

“What the parents heard was, ‘White folks did this to Black folks,’ ” said the teacher, who asked to remain anonymous to protect future job prospects.

UCLA’s Clark said she expects the new End DEI portal to create a similar chill. 

“These mechanisms to surveil and to monitor teachers and principals are ripe for reports that are not serious or not given in good faith,” she said. Ultimately, she said, “the purpose is to get people to self-censor.”

As a result, corporations and institutions are rescinding their DEI commitments, and negative consequences are emerging. For instance, enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at selective colleges after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action.

Beyond the courts, the White House has launched its own anti-DEI initiatives, such as the executive order on January 21 — which arrived just as the nation was honoring Martin Luther King Jr. The order asserts that DEI policies “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

As someone who has studied moral philosophy and psychology and worked on DEI initiatives throughout my career in education, I find these assumptions disturbing. Meritocracy is an ideal worth striving for, but the playing field is not level in many settings, particularly in education.

Education is rife with systemic inequities that disproportionately and predictably disadvantage students based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, and language. These barriers hinder fair access to resources and opportunities. For example, schools in economically disadvantaged communities, especially those serving students of color, often struggle to attract and retain experienced, highly qualified educators.

When I worked at a charter school in Indianapolis serving multilingual students and students of color, the average teacher tenure was just three years, meaning most were novices. In contrast, when I was an administrator in a highly affluent Chicago suburb, the teaching staff was a mix of experienced and new educators, most with advanced degrees and credentials. 

The disparities were staggering. consistently shows that teacher quality strongly influences student achievement. With high teacher turnover, it is nearly impossible to make strong gains, because the faculty and staff are unable to build the critical level of expertise needed for achieving excellence. Without DEI initiatives, how are schools supposed to address these persistent inequities?

People define DEI in various ways. In my work, DEI initiatives focus on analyzing, studying, and addressing inequities; promoting and valuing diversity; and creating environments that foster inclusion and belonging. For example, my team and I applied DEI frameworks to explore ways to increase the success of historically marginalized groups in STEM courses and career pathways. h showed that one barrier for many students was a lack of connections to STEM professionals. 

A school questionnaire revealed that most of our students did not personally know a scientist or understand what an engineer does. In response, we developed a STEM strategic plan that intentionally incorporated mentoring opportunities with scientists and engineers who identified as female or as people of color. In addition, we expanded access to assistive technologies for students who might otherwise struggle to fully engage with STEM content. Tools such as language translators, closed captioning, and text readers improved accessibility for multilingual learners and students receiving special education services. 

At its core, DEI is about fostering a fair and just society. Eliminating DEI programs allows deeply flawed systems to persist. In education, women and people of color remain underrepresented in leadership roles. The School Superintendents Association’s 2020 found that the typical superintendent is male and white. At the time of the study, only 27% of superintendents were women. 

A from the University of Texas at Austin confirmed similar numbers in Texas, despite women comprising 76% of the teaching workforce. This suggests that the path to leadership is not equally accessible to women, even as they are held to the same credentialing and training requirements as men. DEI initiatives help identify and address these disparities.

The same study found racial disparities in leadership, as well. While Hispanic students made up 53% of Texas’s student population, 79% of school superintendents were white. Research has shown that students of color benefit from educators who share their identities, suggesting that increasing Hispanic representation in educational leadership could better serve Texas youth. Yet, Trump’s recent executive order prohibits considering race in hiring decisions.

Opponents have irresponsibly weaponized the term “DEI hire” to argue that marginalized individuals who attain leadership positions are unqualified, reinforcing harmful stereotypes and deepening inequities. This perspective assumes that white superintendents dominate leadership positions solely due to merit, an argument that dangerously echoes long-debunked racial hierarchies of intelligence.

True DEI is not about being anti-white or indoctrinating students with a liberal ideology. It is about ensuring that all individuals, especially the historically marginalized, have equitable access to success. The current backlash against DEI risks cementing barriers that have persisted for generations, leaving educators with fewer tools to address disparities.

At its core, education is meant to be a great equalizer. But without intentional efforts to level the playing field, it often reinforces existing inequalities. DEI is not a threat to meritocracy – it is an essential mechanism for achieving it. As educators, we have a moral obligation to uphold these principles, ensuring that fairness and justice remain foundational in our schools and society.

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.”

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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. 

“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.”

We met an inspired 15-year-old STEM activist, Kavya Venkatesan, from Old Bridge, New Jersey who believes innovation and STEM can solve social issues affecting everything from bias in healthcare to sustainability. Kavya is also dedicated to building the nation’s female STEM workforce pipeline

She has developed strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on her home state by creating an app, NJ X Connect, that connects individuals in low-income, coastal communities with flood relief organizations and resources in the event of an emergency. “Because right now, our strategy in those communities should be helping them be more resilient,” she said.

Kavya’s second app, Helios, a heat advisory system, aims to educate users about their risk of being hospitalized from heat strokes.

Her passion for STEM as a means of social change led her to the national organization Society of Women Engineers, where she brings industry professionals and students together to develop solutions for social change.

“I realized diversity, equity and inclusion — it has to be something that we need to focus more on in the STEM field,” Kavya said.

See our full interview — and celebrate our full 2022 class! 

After five years of leading , where I work with school systems across the nation to help them create a reality where critical thinking is no longer a luxury good, I was extremely reluctant to step into the world of “equity training” when the demand exploded after the summer of 2020.

For one, I took great pride in my obsessive focus on practical, but powerful tools educators could use to seamlessly integrate critical thinking into their existing content. As a Black man leading this work, it meant something to be known as a curriculum and instruction expert, a resource for enhancing access and outcomes in gifted and talented programs, and a trusted guide for helping parents and families . I refused to be pigeonholed as the “DEI guy.” 

But this was not just about image, it was about impact. Although I’ve attended many powerful workshops dealing with issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, it always felt like something was missing. As many of our school system partners across 40 states engaged in this work, a strange pattern emerged. So many school leaders and educators left these workshops pumped up, especially when you looked past the naysayers and focused on those who were fully bought-in to the big ideas around systemic racism, implicit bias and opportunity gaps. 

This pattern raised a challenging question that confounded school system cabinets across the nation: Why do so many educators who are deeply committed to ending educational inequity still struggle with persistent inequities in their classrooms? Inequitable academic outcomes, inequitable disciplinary consequences, and in some cases, inequitable everything?

All of these educators understood why achieving educational equity was an urgent priority. They all saw enough of that equality vs. equity graphic with the little boys standing on crates to see the baseball game from outside of the fence to know, conceptually, what equity was. But the “how” remained elusive, and sometimes, flat-out wrong.

Part of why I wrote was to offer a clear definition of what educational equity actually means to me. I define educational equity as the work we do to eliminate the predictive power that demographics have on outcomes. This would destroy the norm of demographics determining destiny. The outcome of anything we call equity work must accomplish this goal. If the policy change, program, or service does not disrupt the predictive power of demographics, it isn’t equity.Ìę

This transformational vision of educational equity is multi-layered. On one level, Tangible Equity requires a laser-focus on traditional academic outcomes. This approach is indifferent to the common practice of rejecting the deficit phrasing of “the achievement gap” calling it “the opportunity gap,” instead. This distinction means nothing to minoritized students grappling with intergenerational poverty, students who will struggle to have any opportunities without successful academic outcomes. In other words, the outcome is the opportunity. How could we reduce the predictive power of demographics on outcomes without focusing on outcomes?

But the second level of the Tangible Equity approach requires a bolder vision. As an achievement-over-everything educator, I preached the same sermon to my students that my immigrant grandmother and mother preached to me. The same sermon so many in marginalized groups heard when they grew up and still preach to their children: “You can’t just be good. You have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” 

It is easy to be outraged about crystal clear racial injustice, police killings of unarmed Black folks and racist shooting sprees. But after decades of hearing and preaching the work-twice-as-hard-to-get-half-as-far gospel,. I suddenly asked myself, “isn’t this unacceptable, too?” This gospel is and always has been extremely unjust, but it is so deeply entrenched into our reality that most marginalized and minoritized folks accept it and keep pushing it. But I couldn’t do that anymore. I drew a line in the sand. I refuse to teach this lesson to my children.

Maybe I could lead an equity workshop if the outcome was a practical instructional framework and set of tools that prepared students to not just play the game, but to slay the game. I want to use my life as an example of the problem here. My education was successful on the first level of Tangible Equity, because I am blessed to have a demographics-defying story. I grew up on free and reduced lunch in Brooklyn, New York as a child of immigrants in a single-parent home with a father incarcerated for selling drugs. And I “made it” by getting into NYC’s gifted and talented program, attending one of NYC’s top specialized high schools, graduating with my computer science degree from Syracuse University, teaching, graduating top of my law school class, getting the big law firm job, founding this organization thinkLaw that is working with schools all over the country, and selling over 20,000 copies of my first book, .

But so much of me “making it” was about me learning all the things and doing all the things necessary to successfully navigate an unjust system. I get that this is the way it is. But this is not the way it ought to be. If all we focused on was playing the game, we have to ask, “at what cost?” Scholar-activist and education leader Charles Cole III’s addresses this in his book, , where he coins the jaw-dropping term “The Black Achievement Trauma Tax.” I “made it,” but I also paid this tax. I started going bald in my early twenties, I struggle with prostate and high blood pressure issues, deal with deep levels of imposter syndrome and irrational fears that my success can instantly be snatched away, and grapple with strained family and personal relationships. 

Academic success matters. So does building instructional models that give students frequent opportunities to go beyond analyzing the world as it is and push them to question what the world ought to be. It would inflict massive harm on students if we did not give the tools needed to successfully navigate our systems. But if we do not also give them the tools to question and dismantle the unjust elements of these systems, the work is not enough. 

This is why I wrote . I wanted to help educators, school and system leaders see why it was so important to shift from a conversation to something more concrete. Tangible Equity obsesses with the “how” by providing several systemic approaches all stakeholders in our school systems can use to eliminate inequities by prioritizing issues within their individual scope of power and authority. 

This book also lays out the five philosophical shifts necessary for school systems to adopt a Tangible Equity culture, such as moving the conversation from closing achievement gaps to shattering achievement ceilings. And lastly, but most importantly, Tangible Equity provides practical, easy-to-implement frameworks teachers can seamlessly integrate into their existing curriculum to deepen learning relationships, accelerate learning outcomes and hold up a mirror to our students so they can see their own power.

It is my hope that this book helps educators, school and system leaders overcome the “one more thing” syndrome that often plagues new initiatives, including equity efforts. Because you should not have an equity plan, anyhow. Equity needs to be the lens used to plan for everything. Please let the Tangible Equity approach guide the vision of your equity lens and translate your plans into reality. A reality where students will successfully play the game and have all the tools necessary to slay the game.

In the introduction, I defined equity as reducing the predictive power of demographics and zip codes to determine the success of young people inside and outside of the classroom to zero. This utopian idea sounds too pie-in-the-sky for a book called Tangible Equity. But there is a reason I set forward such an extreme, unreachable goal for equity: the process matters more than the outcome.

The Tangible Equity process is part of my personal journey. My story, as a Black child receiving free and reduced lunch from a family of immigrants with an incarcerated father, is one of bucking the highly predictive power of demographics on student success. On demographics alone, I am the type of student our educational system typically does not serve that well. Making matters more complicated, I was not just a bad first grader — I was gifted at being bad. I went above and beyond in my mischief. Looking back at my behavior as an adult, I realize that the greatest crimes I committed were not quite the acts of terror they were painted as at the time.

Apparently, I talked. A lot. To everyone. At any time. It did not matter how many days in a row I would lose recess as a punishment, I was going to talk! It is worth noting that taking recess away from a high-energy child is probably going to punish that teacher post-lunch much more than it punishes the child. I was shocked to learn as an adult that at some point, my mother told my third-grade teacher she was no longer allowed to call her to complain about my unappreciated gift of gab. She couldn’t figure out how to stop me from talking either! So deal with it! With the hundreds of keynotes, YouTube videos, podcasts, and panels I speak on each year, maybe talking in class was not really willfully defiant after all.

I was also a repeat offender of the serious felony of excessive question-asking. Because how dare I ask “why” and protest that “it makes no sense” to write the word “paint” ten times when I already knew how to spell it before class even started? My most terrible act? Fighting my teacher. Not fist-fighting or physically attacking my teacher. I’m from a Caribbean family and I learned in pre-school that my family’s old-school method of parenting and my highly-sensitive rear end were not compatible, so I was not going to go there. By fighting, I mean having the audacity to question the way a teacher was doing something, or even worse, suggesting that she ought to do that thing my way instead.

As “bad” as these so-called behavior challenges were, they all stemmed from the same root: a lack of being challenged. As you read that last sentence, can you think of a child who shares my story? Behavior challenges arising due to a lack of academic challenges? I want you to personalize this as much as possible because a major event happened in my academic career that can certainly happen for the child you are thinking of right now. That major event was my accidental identification into the New York City Department of Education’s gifted and talented program. This was the most transformational experience in my educational career. But you know what the biggest transformation was? The fact that I did not change.

I was still the same Colin. But I was no longer “bad,” I was gifted. Talking was far less offensive in a class where student-centered work, student-centered inquiry, and basically student-centered everything was simply the way it was. We were the classroom that frequently got that knock from the law-and-order teacher next door about needing to tone it down because her students were almost always at Level 0 (complete silence) while learning. And for some reason, these students then and students I see in classrooms across the country today are often asked to be at Level 0 for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with learning. But that is an issue I will get to later in the book. Another transformation? Asking questions was no longer disrespectful. Asking questions was now required for what it meant to be inquisitive and curious. When Mr Eisenberg wanted me to do the required math fair project on fractions with some annoying, unoriginal recipe assignment about multiplying fractional quantities to feed the school what I was certain would be subpar cupcakes, I refused! I told him it was boring, dumb, and I did not want to do it. This would have been a no-recess-for-life moment in another classroom. But for Mr Eisenberg, he was as cool as the other side of the pillow:

            Him: “Do you have a better idea?”

        Me: “Of course I do! I play piano and I want to do a project called Fractional Music where we look at all the ways fractions show up in music with quarter notes, half notes, triplets, dotted quarter notes, etc.”

        Him: “Class, Colin had a different idea for the math project. Colin, explain what you were saying.”

         Me: “I am brilliant. Just do what I say because I am brilliant.” (paraphrased)

        Class (in unison): “Colin is brilliant! Let’s just do what he says because he is brilliant.” 

                                                                                   (100% accurate, word for word)

What could have been a moment of willful defiance in any other classroom became a moment where my advocacy and leadership was encouraged and celebrated. This memory helps me see that I omitted a huge piece of the puzzle in my zealous advocacy for a critical thinking revolution in education. There is a massive prerequisite for critical thinking to flourish in today’s education system that is almost entirely an adult issue: ensuring children have the safety to be brilliant. In many of our hyper-compliant, rules-over-everything classroom environments, I question whether these spaces are psychologically safe for students to wonder, ask, speak up, collaborate, offer alternatives, think creatively and do all the things we associate with 21st century readiness.

Culturally, my Caribbean upbringing, like the upbringing of many immigrant households and other super-strict families, was one where “because I said so” was a good-enough justification for parents to do just about anything. But when we think about the safety to be brilliant, do we ever ask ourselves why parent phrases like “don’t get smart with me” exist? It is hard for me to think that the grave consequences Black folks could face historically for “getting smart” with the wrong white person does not play a role in this type of rhetoric. I have undocumented family members. So, I am also very familiar with the guidance, said or unsaid, that children of undocumented parents receive about not shining their lights too brightly in school to avoid raising unnecessary attention.

Tangible Equity recognizes that we cannot rest on proclamations and resolutions about how much we care about and value student diversity. It makes no sense to have this beautifully diverse set of students and ask them to spend most of their time conforming to what we deem “normal.” There is no value to our students’ diversity if we do not find ways to allow them to be themselves as a regularly-scheduled aspect of their learning process.

This resonates with me because I have experienced the downside to what happens when we do not create the psychological and actual safety students need to exercise their brilliance. I lived the student experience of never having a learning space speak to the magic of my identity, and I know that I am not alone. My elementary school, self-contained gifted class bussed in some of the most brilliant children from South Brooklyn. But as amazing and transformational as this experience was, I spent years scratching my head about why three of these students did not graduate from high school. Not graduate school, not college, but high school. Mind you, my classmates and I all started high school at least one or two grade levels ahead because of high school credits we earned in middle school. Still, three did not graduate, and I was so close to being the fourth one with the 80 absences I had in ninth grade.

Why does this happen? Why do we have so many children who are rock stars in their earlier grades, but go through this process where the longer they are in school, the less they are into school? I have more questions than answers, and there are plenty of amazing scholars who research this question in more detail. I just know that the painful sight of leaving genius on the table was unbearable for me.

This sight stuck with me when I became a teacher. I was the outcomes-over-everything educator to the extreme. I was not pro-high stakes standardized exams. But I was, and still am, pro-reality. Leveraging Tangible Equity’s power must involve interrupting intergenerational poverty. As an educator, therefore, I had to ask myself a simple yes or no question: is education an important part of disrupting intergenerational poverty? Yes or No? Mind you, I’m not asking whether education is the be-all, end-all. But I doubt any reader of this book would doubt whether education was at least an important part of what it takes to interrupt intergenerational poverty.

If we believe this, we must also be able to look into our classrooms and see our students as future doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and even future teachers. This means they have to pass tests. A common objection usually occurs around this time where someone chimes in saying “college isn’t for everyone.” When we say this, we miss the reality that the power of a thoughtfully financed college degree is undeniably transformational, particularly for women and people of color. Given the vast improvements in earnings with a four-year college degree vs anything less than this, it literally still pays to go to college. But in recognition of the growing opportunities for well-paid, high advancement potential fields that do not require a four-year college degree, we should be clear that tests are still necessary. Plumbers still have to pass tests. So do police officers. We cannot talk about Tangible Equity without talking about the outcomes needed to fulfill the promise of Tangible Equity.

Equity of outcomes sounds utopian. I am often asked, “don’t you mean to say equity of opportunity?” The answer is no. I mean to talk about the equity of outcomes. Recall that I am defining equity as reducing the predictive power of demographics on outcomes. This means that changed outcomes are the only way to show that the predictive power of demographics has been reduced. Fortunately, the equity of outcomes is tied to equity in opportunity in significant ways. I would not have received a transformational educational experience had I not been accidentally identified as gifted and bussed to a gifted and talented program outside of my neighborhood. For brilliant students with no such program within bussing distance and without transformational learning options in their neighborhood schools, they do not have this opportunity. But even if they did, opportunity itself would not be enough.

Let’s use basketball as an example. Pedro Noguera often uses an example of the National Basketball Association that I want to borrow to explain why opportunity is not enough. In 2020, although Black people represented 13.4% of the population, Black players in the NBA represent 75% of all NBA players. This statistic is often used by doubters, who say “See! Racism and poverty are just excuses. Black athletes’ dominance and prominence in basketball proves that if they cared about school as much as they cared about shooting hoops, these inequities would not exist.” But Noguera offers brilliant insights to counter this flawed reasoning that uses basketball to teach us what an equity of outcomes could look like in education.

In basketball, the rules are standardized and common to all players. The rim is always ten feet off the ground. Basketballs must be inflated between 7.5 and 8.5 pounds. The free throw line has to be set 15 feet away from the face of the backboard. The point system is standardized and common to all players. A basket in the hoop counts for two points during play. Free throws count as one point. Anyone gets three points for shooting the ball from 23’9” away from the middle of the basket. These rules are the same no matter what state you live in, what basketball court you are playing in, how much money your parents earn, the zip code you live in, your race, your ethnicity, your native language, or your parents’ educational level. Basketball, therefore, is a level playing field. The rules of playing the game and the rules for winning the game are always the same. I can therefore conclude that athletically gifted basketball players who do not get injured and put forth the time, effort, and hard work to reach greatness have as much of a shot at NBA success as anyone else with similar situated gifted, healthy, athletes who exert the same time, effort, and hard work.

We are nowhere close to this in education. The only universal standard in the United States’ education system is that nothing is universally standard. Outcomes must be tied to opportunity because equitable opportunity is not enough for a brilliant child who is the fourth generation of her family to grow up in an economically disadvantaged trailer park community. She can have a 4.0 grade point average and even be the valedictorian of her class. And even with this impeccable resume, she could still not be accepted to highly selective universities. As outrageous as this might sound, it is even possible that she could graduate at the top of her high school class and not meet the course requirements to enroll in her state’s flagship public university. This is not to say merit does not matter, because it does. But merit, alone, is not enough.

When we consider the extraordinary educational effort required to transcend intergenerational poverty, the time, effort, and hard work are not measured by any sort of standardized or common set of rules. Do you remember the wild Varsity Blues scandal that revealed the lengths wealthy families went through to buy their children access to universities through bogus sports accolades, extra-curricular activities, and faked test scores?7 This illegal scandal pales in comparison with the very legal system that gives the super-privileged access to (and the ability to afford) prestigious unpaid internships, and the pay-to-play social capital system from prestigious pre-kindergarten programs to Ivy League feeder high schools. These are not the same rules. This is not even the same game.

This reality is not news to those growing up in the struggle. Part of why I push so hard for equitable outcomes goes beyond knowing our students need to pass tests to be future doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and even future teachers. Because this is so much more complicated than simply passing tests. As an immigrant, my mother was raised under the mantra that she had to work twice as hard to get half as far. She raised me to understand that as a Black boy growing up in Brooklyn, I was also required to work twice as hard to get half as far. As a father to two young children, I feel completely ashamed that at some point, I need to explain the same thing to my children. I am truly ashamed of myself.

I have dedicated so much of my life to ensuring that stories like mine are no longer the exception to the rule. Yet, I have spent so much of my energy challenging myself to successfully navigate this unfair system instead of challenging the unfair system itself. The rules for playing the game and winning the game are not standardized and common. The rules are highly dependent on what state you live in, what kind of school you go to, how much money your parents earn, the zip code you live in, your race, your ethnicity, your native language, or your parents’ educational level.

In education, we are still very far from being able to conclude that academically gifted students growing up in the struggle who put forth the time, effort, and hard work to reach greatness have as much of a shot at successful educational options as anyone else with similar gifts who exert the same time, effort, and hard work. Yet, I have spent so much of my energy helping children master all the tricks and shenanigans of playing an unfair game. What would happen if instead, I focused more on what it would take for them to master the skills needed to slay the game altogether.

Tangible Equity is not an either/or challenge? Academic success must be present for Tangible Equity to exist. But as long as a child’s race, income, and zip code translates to requiring extraordinary levels of academic success to reach ordinary outcomes, academic success is not enough. We need academic success and educational justice. Educational justice would mean getting our system to be similar to the standardized and common rules of basketball. The math teacher in me recognized the need for a formula to describe what I am trying to say here in a way that breaks it down more clearly in Figure 1.1.

Think about how often we celebrate stories of children who grow up in the struggle, overcome all sorts of unfair obstacles, and “make it.” The Tangible Equity Equation helps us rethink what it means to truly “make it.”

I recall my experience as a Computer Science major selected for the amazing INROADS program. This non-profit organization’s vision of diversifying Corporate America is 50 years strong, and I was proud to go to New York City and meet lots of other Black and Brown college students aspiring for internships that would put us on the path for lucrative, successful careers in Fortune 500 companies. I remember attending a workshop on how to dress appropriately.

All of us college students had our most professional clothing on, but I only heard what they told us young men because young women received a different workshop. I learned that facial hair was a no-go. I learned that bright-colored shirts underneath my suit were loud and improper. I learned that cornrows were unprofessional. Wearing my hair in twists or locks? Completely unacceptable. I learned how to sit. I learned how to look someone in the eyes and give a firm handshake. How to speak, sit, question, and answer professionally. I could only imagine the kind of lessons the young women learned about how not to dress and how not to style their hair. By the end of the day, I learned the hidden curriculum of how to succeed in Corporate America.

The most important lesson of this hidden curriculum was that important pieces of me needed to stay hidden. The two Black men presenting this workshop were passionate, funny, cool, and caring. They wanted nothing more than to open doors for us, doors that would not be opened if we could not master all the necessary ways-of-being that make these lucrative careers accessible to Black and Brown college students. We had to be “professional.” As uneasy as I felt about this, I carried this same mindset into my classroom. I spoke frequently to my students about code-switching so they understood that when they were in “professional” settings they needed to act differently. Speak “properly.” Act “appropriately.” Because again, if we want to realize the potentially transformational impact of education for students most impacted by the ills of racial discrimination and poverty, access to successful career paths matters.

Something always bothered me about my INROADS experience. If diversity is such an asset to Corporate America, why would they require folks from diverse backgrounds to conform in such an extreme fashion? How could they realize the benefits of my diverse perspective and unique understandings if I am asked to hide so much of myself to even gain access to the entry level? It is even more bothersome when I realize that I attended this INROADS workshop in the year 2000. In the 20-year period after that workshop, Fortune 500 companies have had only 16 Black CEOs, 36 Latinx CEOs, ten East Asian CEOs, and 22 South Asian CEOs. With only 72 white women holding at the helm during this same time period, leading in Corporate America is still clearly a white man’s game.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong about teaching our young people the hidden curriculum to successfully navigate an unjust system. But at what point do we teach them how to use their access to the system to question it, reimagine it, and dismantle it altogether? From an educational perspective, it is hard to think about classrooms that equip young people with the tools to lead, innovate, and break what needs to be broken when students still get in trouble for asking too many questions. I cannot envision a dismantling of unjust systems when it is still far too common for classroom teachers to punish student leadership and advocacy as “willful defiance.”

I understand and value my mother’s journey and why working twice as hard to get half as far mattered so much to her life that she had to pass that lesson onto me. I understand and value the journey of the gracious Black men who took a Saturday break from their challenging positions in Corporate America to school us to the tricks we needed to master to access these lucrative career fields. But the work of reducing the impact of demographics on the predictability of outcomes requires that we put equal effort into helping young people know what it takes to play the game as we do equipping them with the transformational tools needed to slay these unjust games altogether.

Updated April 7

Attending a mostly white boarding school in Connecticut allowed Dena Simmons to escape the danger of her poor, Black and Latino neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. But it also separated her from her culture and made her feel like she didn’t belong. “There is emotional damage done when young people can’t be themselves,” she said six years ago during a that has received almost 1.4 million views.

That’s why Simmons, who became assistant director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in 2018, worked to make the center’s popular K-12 program on understanding feelings more meaningful for marginalized students. She pushed to include figures such as former President Barack Obama and girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai in lessons and challenged teachers with bold statements about schools being systems of white supremacy.

Her drive for cultural relevance, however, repeatedly clashed with the views of her supervisor, Marc Brackett, the center’s prominent director and best-selling author of .

“The political examples automatically alienate people (Black or white) and we can’t judge people for being Democrats or Republicans,” Brackett wrote Simmons in one of several emails and documents shared with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

His insistence on staying on the political sidelines ran afoul of Simmons and others at the Yale center who viewed his stance as tone deafness toward issues of historical injustice. Their lessons — for example, using a book about a transgender boy to teach about feeling understood — might get the curriculum “banned” in some parts of the country, Brackett said in one email. The conflict has put the center in the middle of a controversy that has rippled from the university to the larger world of what has come to be known as social-emotional learning.

Simmons, 37, resigned from her position in January, seven months after she was targeted by anonymous racial slurs during an to memorialize the death of George Floyd. She left, she told the university at the time, due to a “hostile work environment” at the center, where she was subjected to “unconsented hair touching” and once received a reprimand from a supervisor for calling out social-emotional learning practices she viewed as harmful to students of color.

In interviews, four other former staffers supported her account, describing what they saw as an unwelcome atmosphere at the center toward issues of diversity and inclusion.

“There was no emotional intelligence afforded me,” Simmons told the 74. “I hope to push the field and institutions to do better — to put their actions where they say their values are.”

In a lengthy statement on her resignation sent to roughly 2,500 schools and organizations it works with around the world, center leaders said they were “deeply disheartened by our colleagues’ hurtful experiences at Yale.”

“We want to stress that we do not tolerate discrimination or bias in any form,” they wrote. “We care deeply about our team’s well-being and safety, and we continuously strive to create a workplace that fosters a sense of belonging where all people feel valued and connected.”

Despite strides toward “creating and sustaining an antiracist workplace,” the statement acknowledged “there is much more work to do.” Contacted by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Brackett said he is taking “a pause on interviews” and sent a link to his center’s on diversity, equity and inclusion — developed after the online incident.

The episode at one of the nation’s most elite universities offers a window into how social-emotional learning programs — and schools more generally — are grappling with issues of historical discrimination as well as a growing backlash from those who say such efforts are politicizing the curriculum.

“As goes the consciousness of the country, so goes education,” said Robert Jagers, vice president of research at the (CASEL), a hub for research and policy expertise in the field. “There is a measure of urgency that was not present two years ago.”

Mood Meters and Meta-Moments

In many ways, the Yale schism reflects the enormous growth social-emotional learning has experienced since the term’s first invocation at a . Today, the concept is ubiquitous. It is not unusual for large school districts to have whole departments devoted to helping students form positive relationships, manage difficult emotions and make sound decisions. It’s also big business, drawing $21 billion to $47 billion annually on programs and teacher training, according to a .

While some criticize the field for “” definitions and unclear targets, a formidable body of research now says social-emotional learning can improve and lead to .

After completing post-doctoral work in psychology with Peter Salovey, now Yale’s president, Brackett became one of the field’s early pioneers. Like Simmons, he came to the study of human emotion from painful personal experience. In an last year with BrenĂ© Brown, author of and , he described being sexually abused as a child and turning to his uncle, a teacher, for help.

“When I disclosed what was happening, he was the only adult who was there for me,” Brackett said. “He just listened. He didn’t say, ‘Toughen up!’ like my father did, and he didn’t have a breakdown like my mom did. And God bless my parents, they did everything they could, but they just had no resilience, they had no strategies to deal with their feelings.”

His center’s signature program is RULER — an acronym for “recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating” emotions. The “Meta-Moment,” one of its stock tools, prompts students to imagine their “best self” when responding to tense situations. Lessons on “feeling words” ask students to study how a book character or a well-known person might have felt in a particular situation.

“Marc’s vital voice regarding the connection between emotions, cognition and learning has resonated in the field,” said Chi Kim, CEO of Pure Edge, a nonprofit that provides health and fitness programs for schools and funds research in social-emotional learning.

The Yale center, which sits in the medical school, draws in millions of dollars in grants, including at least $5 million in from the U.S. Department of Education since 2012. It has even earned the endorsement of current Secretary Miguel Cardona. As state chief in Connecticut, he hired Brackett’s center to give all educators in the state access to a 10-hour , funded in part with $500,000 from Dalio Education, a state foundation. CASEL cites RULER as an example of a program based on research, and Brackett sits on its board.

He has also brought to the field pop-culture cachet. He teamed up with Lady Gaga in 2015 for on how teens feel about school and frequently on TV talk shows. Even parents who don’t know RULER or recognize Brackett’s name are familiar with the “Mood Meter,” which teaches children to associate feelings with colors. The resulting boards of multi-hued Post-it Notes produced by parents and teachers have become mainstays on .

A former middle school math and English teacher in the Bronx, Simmons joined the center in 2014. She believed in its mission and called the opportunity “a dream come true.” Her doctoral studies had focused on how middle school teachers can address bullying. Now, she wanted to help schools become more compassionate places for marginalized students.

But as the program grew, so did Simmons’s view that the center’s leaders saw equity as an “add-on.” She became convinced that common practices in social-emotional learning, such as taking deep breaths in times of stress, wouldn’t serve students of color well.

“Try telling a child in poverty to breathe through racism,” she said in an interview. “That is insulting.”

She recruited others with classroom experience to the center and blended Learning for Justice’s — like showing “empathy when people are excluded or mistreated” — into RULER materials.

Susan Rivers, who co-founded the center with Brackett in 2013, recalled that Simmons “emerged as an education leader, despite not having the support, encouragement or collaboration to do anti-racist, inclusive work while at Yale.”

“She asks really tough and essential questions about equity in education, and she has the courage and conviction to do and lead the work,” said Rivers, who left the center in 2016 and now runs iThrive Games, a foundation that supports game-based learning for teens.

That quality often put Simmons at odds with the center’s leadership. In commentaries such as 2019’s “Why We Can’t Afford Whitewashed Social-Emotional Learning,” she argued that sidestepping the “larger sociopolitical context” in which students live keeps them from developing skills to confront hate and injustice. Ignoring that background, she said, could turn their teachings into “.” That statement, she said, earned her a warning from Linda Mayes, director of the Yale Child Study Center that oversees the emotional intelligence program, to be more careful with her words.

Mayes declined to comment on the incident.

‘Dead presidents’

In charge of teacher training and curriculum, Simmons directed her energy toward integrating that real-world context into RULER’s “feeling words” — the vocabulary students develop to describe their emotions and match them with the red, blue, green and yellow quadrants on the Mood Meter.

For “hopeful” — in the yellow, energetic and highly pleasant range — Simmons thought Obama, author of 2006’s , would be a natural fit. But at a lunch meeting with two other center leaders, Brackett blanched at the idea, she recalled.

“He said … that if we focus on presidents, we should only focus on dead presidents,” she said. “He must not have realized that all of the dead presidents were white men.” The two others she said were present — Scott Levy, the center’s executive director, and Nicole Elbertson, the director of content and communications — did not respond to requests for comment. Levy announced his resignation from the center March 10. Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for the Yale School of Medicine, said he is “pursuing another opportunity” but will remain on the center’s board.

The center’s leaders ultimately acquiesced on using those examples, but drew the line on others. For a lesson on “despair,” Karina Medved-Wu, who worked on RULER’s lessons for afterschool programs, dipped into current events and wrote a vignette about an undocumented parent stuck in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.

The example was replaced with the story of a runaway cat.

Medved-Wu noted the irony of a workplace devoted to emotional intelligence where many workers felt uncomfortable sharing their emotions.

“If Black employees, non-Black employees of color, employees who have self-identified as LGBTQ+and employees with disabilities do not feel safe, valued or heard in-house,” she asked, “then what biases and messaging are being sent locally and globally?”

She also proposed a fifth-grade lesson about , the book about a transgender child that sparked pushback from Brackett. “We can’t be in a position that our curriculum is banned,” he wrote in an email to Simmons and other staff members. “We have to be neutral.” To respond to his concerns, Medved-Wu included an alternative assignment: in which a father took a forgiving approach to confronting a boy who had bullied his son.

In October 2019, she said she spoke to Darin Latimore, the medical school’s deputy dean for diversity and inclusion, who indicated he had launched an investigation into the working environment at the center; at the time of their talk, he told her he had spoken to 15 people, she recalled. Latimore did not respond to requests for comment.

Peart, the Yale spokeswoman, declined to discuss the results of his “climate assessment,” but said without elaboration that “action is in process to address the themes gleaned during the review.” The center’s goal is for RULER to be “non-partisan,” she said, adding that it regularly seeks feedback on content to make it more inclusive. A school that wanted to use The Other Boy, she said “would be met with our full support.”

To the bewilderment of some staffers, Brackett appeared to have no resistance to such themes in his personal life. Brackett, who is gay, supports finding ways for young people “” to feel accepted, and he recently completed with his cinematographer husband on a camp for youth devoted to “exploring gender diversity.”

But inside the center, staff members say they heard a different message. “I recall him frequently emphasizing 
 that the appeal of our work had to be for everyone,” said Sarah Kadden, a former program manager for early childhood.

Simmons and Medved-Wu suspect Brackett’s motivation for keeping the lessons free of controversy was financial. A six-week training institute for three district staff members costs $6,000.

“If RULER were to be banned, it would impact the bottom line,” Simmons said.

The issue most important to Simmons — equity — was where she felt the least support. She had been pushing for years to brand the term into the center’s mission statement. In 2019, Brackett proposed in an email that she “create the vision … for how we infuse equity/culturally responsive practices, etc. into our training and curriculum.” By that point, Simmons said, the center was sending mixed messages, pushing inclusion while resisting her attempts to broaden the curriculum. In one email, she told Brackett that she did not want to become “a prop” for the center’s work on diversity.

“We were discouraged from raising equity issues, such as the school-to-prison pipeline, racist discipline practices [and] the cultural mismatch often found between students and teachers,” said Kadden, now a social worker in Connecticut’s New London Public Schools.

Then came the Zoom bomb.

On May 25, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody sparked an outcry in cities and campuses across the country. In early June, thousands of Black Lives Matter flooded the streets of New Haven, where Yale is located, presenting a list of demands, including the removal of resource officers from local schools. Weeks later, during an online event devoted to racial healing held by Yale’s Child Study Center, Simmons was reading a poem when several anonymous gate-crashers interrupted her with racial slurs, both verbally and in the chat field. Simmons logged off of the event, which was not password protected, but returned at the urging of colleagues. The harassment resumed.

In its statement, the Yale emotional intelligence center decried the “horrific, racist Zoom bombing” and said it had taken steps to curb its online “vulnerabilities.” Leaders have offered workshops on cultural sensitivity, hired a chief diversity officer and scrutinized RULER to “ensure it is equitable and inclusive,” the statement said. But Simmons, who took a seven-month medical leave, said the experience followed a pattern of incidents in which she felt dehumanized, such as colleagues touching her hair and calling it exotic. She left the university Jan. 19, the day she was supposed to return.

For those who view Simmons as a leader, not only in social-emotional learning but in the broader anti-racist movement, her departure raises troubling questions.

“Dena’s star was certainly on the rise 
 because she brought a perspective in content that was transformational,” said Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t know how you lose somebody like that.”

Some districts that use RULER and sent teachers to learn from Simmons have taken note of her departure. An official in the Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma said any further expansion of RULER in the district is “on pause [until we] see the response from the university.” And the executive director of the Tauck Family Foundation in Wilton, Connecticut, which funds RULER in Bridgeport early-childhood programs, said she wants to see what “progress has been made in addressing the issues raised” by Simmons’s resignation before continuing its support.

Many schools are playing catch-up in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, which sparked a reckoning on issues of race in education, from hiring practices to teaching history. “I think that Marc and Yale feel constrained about what they can do and they can’t do,” said David Osher, vice president and fellow at the non-partisan American Institutes for Research. “Probably many organizations prior to this past summer were 
 more timid about taking on issues that involved being explicitly anti-racist.”

Osher’s work on school safety and student engagement includes social-emotional learning. He’s collaborated on grants with the Yale center and credits Brackett’s work with helping him understand the importance of training adults before children. But he noted that curriculum developers must create programs that “play in both blue and red states.” Of the Yale center, he added, nothing about Simmons’s departure “would make me stop working with them.”

The push for educators to address structural racism has prompted its own outcry, turning critical race theory and new histories such as The New York Times’ “1619 Project” into fodder for the nation’s ongoing culture wars. At , for example, a former staff member has attracted a passionate YouTube following for criticizing the school’s insistence that employees undergo anti-bias training that centers on white privilege. Several academics recently formed the to combat what they see as an overly cynical emphasis on race, gender and sexual orientation, rather than “.”

“There is no such thing as a values-neutral [social-emotional learning] program,” said Ian Rowe, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a member of the foundation’s board. “But integrating reductionist ideas that carry oppressor [and] oppressed identities based on race will only perpetuate false, corrosive notions of superiority and inferiority.”

‘Sins of our history’

With Yale behind her, Simmons is free to approach social-emotional learning her way.

She has launched — a curriculum with equity at the center — and next year, St. Martin’s Press will publish her book, . “I needed my voice to ring louder than other people’s doubts, slights and limitations,” she wrote recently. “I left so that I could save myself, so that I could dream. And I left so that I could invest my time into changing the very system that failed me and is failing so many others.”

Dena Simmons is finishing her book, White Rules for Black People. (Nuria Rius for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ)

But her message still rattles. When she spoke in February to teachers in a predominantly white, affluent Chicago suburb, a writer for a right-wing website called out some of Simmons’s more provocative statements, such as saying the nation’s education system is “based on a foundation of whiteness.” Simmons later that coverage of the event sparked threats and hate mail.

Dan Iverson, president of the Naperville Union Education Association, said he heard complaints from a few participants, though he and most teachers present saw the speech in a more positive light.

“It’s not a sin to be white,” told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “We’ve always had a hard time in this country with the idea that the sins of our history are still relevant. It’s inherently very difficult to exist in a place where you can be OK with who you are as a white guy, but to understand you are better off.”

Flare-ups like the one in Naperville do not surprise Kamilah Drummond-Forrester. For years, she has asked teachers to examine their attitudes and biases toward students as part of the training for Open Circle, a social-emotional learning program based at Wellesley College, an elite liberal arts school in Massachusetts. The program is used in about 300 schools across the country.

In workshops, teachers sometimes drop comments, such as, “Those students don’t care about school,” or “Their parents aren’t interested,” said Drummond-Forrester, the program’s former director. Teachers call out what they view as “coded language” toward Black and Hispanic students, only to anger colleagues who think they’re being branded as racists.

But like Simmons, Drummond-Foster views such encounters as necessary. “You can’t talk about teaching skills around social awareness devoid of the systems that these kids are navigating,” she said.

That’s not the only thing they have in common. Just 10 days after Simmons’s resignation, Drummond-Forrester left her position as head of the Wellesley program.

In a statement, the college’s Centers for Women, which includes Open Circle, called Drummond-Forrester “a thought leader” for her work exploring social-emotional learning “through an equity lens,” and said staff would continue to work with her on other . Echoing Simmons’s concerns, Drummond-Forrester said the responsibility for equity work fell on her shoulders because she is Black.

“I was burned out,” she said.

Disclosures: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Lead Image: Dena Simmons spent seven years striving to make the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s popular RULER program more culturally responsive. Now she’s leading her own efforts to incorporate equity into social-emotional learning. (Nuria Rius for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ)