The report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.��

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as .��

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a to take advantage of — a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered “hazardous” or “undesirable” typically housing people of color, was more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including , still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.

While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, “carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.”

“Public schools must be ‘,’ and … if you look at the system we have across the country, you can see that we are falling so far short of that — and the primary reason for that is that we assign kids to schools based on their address,” DeRoche said. 

The report used Public School 19 and Public School 16 as examples. Both schools are in the north Bronx’s school District 11 and are located about a mile from one another — a 20-minute walk — but serve contrasting populations.

The Bronx

Attendance zone boundaries for P.S. 19 “mirror, almost perfectly, the area deemed to be ‘desirable’ by the racist redlining map drawn by federal government bureaucrats in 1938,” the report said. Whereas P.S. 16’s boundaries fell directly in a declining area, according to the 1938 map.

The remnants of redlining are echoed in both schools’ data — where P.S. 19 educates a population that is 43% Black and Latino and two-thirds low income, with 62% reading proficiency. That compares to P.S 16’s 88% Black and Latino student body, 95% of whom are low income with grade level reading just over 30%.

Schools like P.S. 19 “become almost quasi-private schools,” DeRoche said.

There were many examples across the New York City Public Schools system, as well as several upstate school districts.

Manhattan

Queens

“It’s really hard to find a place [in New York] that’s not segregated or a school district that’s not experiencing either racial segregation or some sense of class segregation,” said Kris DeFilippis, a former assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, who is now a clinical professor at New York University. “Not much has changed. … Wherever those lines were drawn [in the 1930s], it has largely stayed the same, unless there’s been a movement toward gentrification.”

In Albany, New York’s capital, New Scotland Elementary School was zoned over neighborhoods identified as desirable in 1938. The school serves a student population that is less than half Black or brown (41%) and low-income (47%) with reading scores near 60%.��

Just about two miles away at Giffen Memorial Elementary School, more than three-quarters of students are Black and Hispanic (84%) and qualify for free and reduced priced lunch (84%). Less than a quarter of students at Giffen Memorial read on grade level (21%).

Much of Giffen Memorial’s attendance zone lines up with 1938 redlining declining areas.

Albany

“You wouldn’t see these massive gaps [in demographics and student achievement] between two schools two miles away … if those two schools were truly open to kids,” DeRoche said. “The government has to be enforcing that in some way. How are they enforcing it? Well, they’re enforcing it with these maps. The kids on the wrong side of the line aren’t eligible to go to the public school that’s a mile [or two] from their home.”

In upstate New York, while there’s access to charter and magnet schools, school choice within a district is limited among traditional public schools. Students are generally required to go to the school in their attendance zone, “unless there are exceeding circumstances,” DeFilippis said, “but that is rare, it just doesn’t happen.”

In New York City, “it’s a bit different,” DeFilippis continued. Students typically attend a local elementary school before choice options open up in middle and high school grades across the metropolitan area  – creating its own challenges and limitations when it comes to admission to later grades.

“There’s almost like a false narrative that in New York City students can go where they want,” DeFilippis said, “but it’s not entirely accurate.”

For a student, traveling across the city to attend a school that works best for them can be difficult and it may also be challenging to get into competitive schools because they “haven’t had the same experiences at the lower grades that their peers have had,” DeFillipis said. So, ultimately, the current setup, “does not lead to equitable outcomes for Black and brown students, or low-income students, at all.”

The report recommended possible solutions for lawmakers to consider, such as decriminalizing address sharing, requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students who live outside the zone and allowing students to enroll in any public school within a three-mile radius of the child’s home.

The underlying principle, DeRoche said, is to “just decrease the link between where you live and which schools you’re allowed to attend.”

“These policies have been bad, not just for educational opportunity, but I think they’ve affected urban development and I think they’ve affected how our cities work and don’t work,” DeRoche said.

Reflecting on this incongruity, we’ve come to the conclusion that to be a Black teacher in America today is to — as James Baldwin put it — “be in a rage almost all the time,” while simultaneously operating in a constant state of hope. And, though no community of any kind is or should be considered a monolith, we wanted to dedicate some time to exploring why that is through our own experiences and the experiences of Black teachers around us.

Hope

, compared to 78% of white teachers. While we can’t speak for every Black teacher, we know that for us, part of the pull to stay is the sense of activism imbued in our daily work. We know a Black educator’s presence — in the classroom, but also in the building — instills a sense of hope in our students who look like us and even those we don’t teach. Their hope gives us hope.

, compared to just 13% of white teachers. In Black traditions, we train our replacements. We know that the work we are doing is so connected to children and grandchildren who will look like our own children and grandchildren, that determining who will lead the next generation of classrooms is work that must be attended to. 

, compared to just 25% of white teachers. We believe part of the explanation behind this is our deep belief in the abilities of our students. We know that two teachers can look at the same student so differently, and that our belief in them is critical to their success. We also know that when the pandemic paused formal schooling, teachers of color had the antennae to pick up on the signals of learning happening outside of it. 

We recognized the leadership roles kids were playing: managing budgets, taking care of siblings and getting them fed. And we know how to tap into that resilience and independence to catch students up on the schooling they missed, because the alternative — to give up, to lose hope — is unacceptable.

Rage

The optimism expressed in these survey results must be tempered by recognizing it is not fueled solely by hope. It is also fueled by rage.

We know that if we leave the classroom, there may be no one left — not one Black teacher — to represent the culture and community when we’re gone. We don’t just ask. “Who’s going to teach my kids if I leave?” but also, “Who is going to support them in the racial and cultural context(s) in which they’re being educated? Who is going to challenge the misrepresentations in their curriculum? Who is going to make these spaces less anti-racist, less anti-immigrant, less anti-Black?”

And, while survey results show that Black teachers and teachers of color are seemingly more optimistic than white teachers, they still �������’t optimistic: . It’s an unthinkable but relatable paradox, especially as Black male educators, to want more people who look like us to join us in a difficult and lonely profession. K-12 education more often than not is a hostile space for Black people, and changing it from the inside out is exhausting. 

This difficult, lonely profession sometimes looks like coming to school the day and listening to complaints about the broken copy machine. It sometimes looks like facing “professionalized racism:” experiencing a racist incident that brings you back to an experience you had as a student, and grappling simultaneously with the trauma of that memory and its repetition in the moment. 

It sometimes looks like school districts claiming they want more Black teachers,but refusing to take meaningful steps to stabilize, secure and support these educators, such as through the . No one has Black teachers in their backpacks, but there are steps and models for school and district leadership teams can and must take to address both ends of the pipeline: recognition, recruitment and retention.

Organizations like the Center for Black Educator Development are certainly a source for Black teachers by providing a model and a lens for how to invite youth into the profession and how to treat them — providing safe and sustainable cultures that ignite and encourage them to show their brilliance — in order to retain them.

To be a Black teacher in the United States is to live in a state of activism and analysis fueled by both hope and rage, because the alternative is to live in a state of utter despair. It has to get better. We must lift our students as we climb ourselves, even if we are also balancing on a precipice.  We work tirelessly alongside teachers of color, who believe that it will get better, who channel their hope and their rage into fighting for every one of our students. 

Teachers who express optimism do so not because they are happy now, but because they believe deeply in what they are working toward.

“Congratulations! You have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation. Bring all your stuff, and be there on time.”

Similar text messages were also received by Black children and students across the country. For me – an education analyst and school leader – and for my son – a freshman at a historically Black university – the jarring incident not only infuriated us. It also prompted important questions about how best we should respond in this fraught time in our history.

Hudson’s natural reaction was to reach out to his family. Here’s how he recalls the episode:

On Nov. 6, I was sitting at my desk doing work, when I saw a text come in from one of my group chats. There are about 12 of us on that chat—all of us friends, most of us are in college, some of us go to the same school. In the text, one friend asked the group, “Have you all seen the plantation text?” At the time, most of us hadn’t yet gotten the text on our own phones (that would happen over the next few days), so she shared a screen grab.

None of us knew how to respond. The language was obviously racist, but it was phrased in such a friendly manner that it was more confusing than inflammatory. It was only after I read it a few more times that the words sunk in. I was shocked.

At the time we didn’t know how many people had received the text, or if it had been sent to people in other areas. But all of us began to grow very upset. And angry. Racism in any form upsets me. That’s why I decided to tell my family in our group chat. I was raised to believe that when bad things happen, you need to check in immediately with people you trust, and family is the first place you go for that trust. 

—

When Hudson’s missive reached our family chat, I was among the first to read it. Our family chat is typically a boisterous free-for-all, filled with comments about upcoming plans, family jokes and dog photos. But now we all fell silent. One by one, my parents, my uncle and our cousins began to weigh in about the mysterious nature of Hudson’s text. Who sent it? How did they get the students’ phone numbers? And most important, what can we do to support my son, a freshman, who had just left the nest?

My chest constricted, and a familiar, unpleasant feeling began to set in. I felt the same sense of disorientation two years earlier when someone called my daughter the n-word at school. I wrote about it in 2022, : “I’ve worked in schools in New York City for more than 10 years and received my doctorate in educational leadership, yet I felt ill-equipped at first to handle this situation because this was my daughter.”

This time it was my son.

Somehow this felt even more invasive. Only a few months ago, I was basking in the joy of my son attending an HBCU, building his independence, beginning adulthood. Yet now, racist hatred had reached Hudson in a way that was faceless and intangible. How do I tell him that this is the world we live in? And how can I, a researcher who studies hope, provide some glimmer of optimism at such a dark moment?

Given my background in education, I knew that, legally, there were resources and systems my child could turn to for help and assistance. But more immediately, I needed to know how to provide comfort to him when he is many states away at a college.

How we respond to our children at this moment in our history — particularly as they navigate a national mental health crisis — is crucial. And so my advice to parents is to channel the fierce anger into something positive and constructive.

Here’s what we did:

Report it.

We began making calls. According to Jessica Rosenworcel, chair of the , law enforcement bureaus are investigating the texts, which were apparently sent to Black people across the country, targeting various HBCU students. This first step of reporting an incident to the authorities is essential, so that they can properly document the scale of the problem.

Hold space for your child and validate their feelings.

When my son first shared the text to our family chat, I called him privately and offered to drive to his school and pick him up. The mother bear in me kicked in: I wanted to bring him home and protect him, and I was determined not to let him get hurt again. I know from my studies, as well as my own personal experience, that the unknown is scary; and that having an anonymous threat targeted at you makes that dreadful feeling overwhelming. But, no surprise, I couldn’t tear Hudson away from the friends, community and independence that he’d rightfully earned at his school and was obviously enjoying.

So instead, I validated his feelings over the phone, confirming to him that it is painful to read a text like that, and that it was okay to feel the anger he was feeling. But I also encouraged him to understand that this was the precise mission of the racist actors who’d sent the text: to disrupt and disorient him. What he did with those feelings, I told him, was up to him.

Monitor your child’s mental health.

It is no secret that, since the pandemic, mental health challenges with teenagers and college students have soared to an all-time high. Indeed, in 2023, the National Educational Association that most college students today meet the criteria for having at least one mental health issue.

Today, we, as parents, are on the front lines of this problem, and we are being called on every day to bear witness to the vulnerability of our children’s mental health and well-being. So what do we need to do? 

Speak to professionals about what resources are available for situations like this; reach out to other parents to share ideas about supporting our children.

Additionally, have a conversation with yourself about your expectations. In our household, for example, we want our children to do well, but they are not required to have perfect grades or attendance. Mental health always takes priority, so if that means taking a day off from school, so be it. 

We will all face many challenges as we continue to navigate this divided world, but care, empathy and support are paramount for our children. I had to put aside my own fierce anger and make room for my son to share what was going on inside him. It is our duty as parents to navigate these challenges with micro-doses of hope and solidarity.

Soon after she had gone to jail for trying to get her children a better education, Kelley Williams-Bolar’s teenage daughter Jada confronted her mother with an accusation that will stick with her forever. 

“You’re not there for me,” said Jada, now 26. Like the rest of her family, Jada still struggles with her mother’s 2011 felony conviction for sending Jada and her sister Kayla to a suburban school outside Akron, Ohio, using their grandfather’s address.

By the time Jada stood firmly in front of her, Williams-Bolger had spent nine days in jail, overwhelmed by how a felony could upend their lives, jeopardizing future housing and employment opportunities. She started to defend herself, then went silent. She knew Jada was right.

“But you know, it was my mind that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there for years,” conceded Williams-Bolar, a longtime educator and child care provider. “…Honestly, it destroyed me. It was a lot to deal with. I wasn’t the same mom for my daughters.”

Years after their prosecutions and forced removal from districts, families across the country like Williams-Bolar’s are still paying the price, economically and emotionally, after being prosecuted for acting in the best interest of their children. 

In Pennsylvania, one family ultimately owed over $10,000 for tuition and amassed legal fees into the six figures for keeping their child enrolled in a suburban school after moving out of the district three months before the end of the school year. In Connecticut, Tanya McDowell, whose family was experiencing homelessness, used her babysitter’s address to enroll her five year old in a Norwalk school. She was convicted on larceny and unrelated drug charges, serving . 

Outside of the legal ramifications, many families still struggle with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, their family relationships and work suffering as a result. Their children have felt at times like they had lost their parents and interest in school. 

Now seven decades after the Supreme Court outlawed sorting children by race and promised quality education for all in the landmark Brown v. Board decision, experts are beating the drum that continuing to exclude children from quality schools based on their home addresses perpetuates segregation. Advocates have also called for an end to the practice of prosecuting parents who, knowingly or unknowingly, disregard zone lines when enrolling their children.

Williams-Bolar’s daughters were zoned for Akron Public Schools, 15 minutes but seemingly a world apart from Copley-Fairlawn, the predominantly white suburban district where her father lived and often cared for her daughters. Visiting Copley’s schools, she saw acres of land, science fairs, a sprawling greenhouse, and a full computer room. Akron’s schools at the time had rapidly decaying infrastructure. Styrofoam cups filled with dirt were the plants in her daughters’ science classes. 

Night and day, she said. She just couldn’t have anticipated what the cost of enrolling her kids in Copley would be. 

Months later, her trial began. Intense scrutiny on the case made their family recipients of unwanted, international attention. A school district contractor showed up to their front door, looking inside their refrigerator, closets, bathrooms, counting each toothbrush. Teachers and students at her daughters’ school made snide remarks about their mother’s jail time. They’d catch neighbors’ side eyed, judgemental gazes. 

White men started driving slowly by their home at any time of day, never speaking, only staring. This would happen about a dozen separate times. 

Williams-Bolar sometimes stayed in her room crying for days, not knowing how much time was passing. Her depression lingered well after . 

Three years on probation also meant the family couldn’t travel to see relatives in the south. She was also barred from visiting her father in prison for months. Though his involvement with her school enrollment case was dropped, soon after the state convicted him on fraud charges related to government benefits. Williams-Bolar maintains the case against her father would not have been pursued without the unprecedented spotlight on her family. 

“Once you get in the lion’s den, they’re not just gonna let you go,” she said. 

He served 11 months in prison, and died in its hospital one month before release. 

“He loved going out barbecuing in the front yard. He loved all his grand babies coming over, always listening to music,” said Kayla, now 30. “I mean, the greatest grandpa a girl could ever ask for. Damn near like a father to me, and I’d do anything to have him back. But here we are.”

Investigations in and recently confirmed districts still regularly confront families suspected of living outside of their boundaries. Today, their methods are usually less public, with districts hiring private investigators or threatening prosecution to get families to disenroll their children. The thousands known to be kicked out of their schools for address sharing are disproportionately Black and brown. 

In at least 24 states, parents can face criminal prosecution, fines and jail sentences for address sharing. Only one, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice. 

To reduce the scale of the issue and promote integration, districts could adopt county boundaries, encompassing more diversity and better reflecting work-life patterns, rather than neighborhood lines that mirror racist housing segregation. But they often “lack the political will,” to do so; quality schools remain scarce by design, said civil rights lawyer Erika Wilson. 

And though Williams-Bolar knows a friend was similarly confronted by the district who believed her family lived outside the boundary, they never prosecuted her or asked her to remove her two children. The friend was related to a prominent leader in the NAACP. Williams-Bolar later met a former Copley student who alleged he lived in Akron, too, and that the school knew at the time, but let him stay because he was an athlete. 

“I think it’s common at these, these selective schools. The problem is it’s very, very selectively enforced,” said Tim DeRoche, author, researcher and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization. 

‘I remember my wife losing her hair’

Around the same time Williams-Bolar was navigating her trial, just one state over, six year old Fiorella Garcia pleaded with the governor of Pennsylvania to drop charges against her parents. Crying, she said she didn’t want to go into foster care. 

In 2012, her parents Hamlet and Olesia Garcia faced up to seven years in prison, felony convictions, and losing custody of their daughter. The suburban Lower Moreland Township School District alleged Fiorella lived outside of its zone, in Philadelphia. Fiorella and Olesia lived temporarily with her grandparents in Lower Moreland, but failed to notify the district that they had moved out. 

In records reviewed by ����Ӱ��, the Garcias repeatedly offered to pay the district the cost for Fiorella to finish the school year in Lower Moreland so as to not interrupt her schooling. Their requests were denied. 

Their mug shots headlined local news the night they were arrested, alongside headlines that alluded to tax fraud. Olesia, who owned a private insurance company, risked losing her license and business. Their address made its way into coverage, and soon after, their car was vandalized.  

“This has never got off my head … I remember my wife losing her hair,” Hamlet Garcia said, trying to hold back tears. Losing so much sleep, he tried medication and experienced chest pains, which he attributes to the stress. 

Their tide only changed after leaving their public defender, who wanted them to settle for a guilty plea. The Garcias incurred close to $100,000 in debt to instead hire a high profile law team from Florida, money they say would have gone toward their daughters’ college education or family vacations. 

Ultimately, all . The family paid $10,752 “tuition” to the district and a $100 fine. 

In the decade that has followed, Garcia has devoted most of his time to learning education law, organizing for school choice and Republican political campaigns, feeling betrayed by the Democrats he felt were responsible. Fiorella, now 17, is about to graduate from high school. 

Telling her story and becoming a parent advocate has been Williams-Bolar’s “medicine.” She feels she’s a part of changing education policy to expand access to quality schools and “leave a legacy for my dad because he didn’t deserve none of that. He didn’t deserve to die in jail.” 

Today she works at one of Akron Public Schools’ high schools as a paraprofessional: the superintendent refused to fire her after the ordeal.

“Honestly,” said Kayla, who’s also considering going back to school to be an educator, “I’m still trying to heal.” 

Family members and NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke of the violent threats endured for years following the decision, which outlawed separating children into schools by their race. 

President Joe Biden met with the delegation of two original plaintiffs, about 20 descendants and NAACP leadership “critical in fighting for these and other hard-won freedoms for Black Americans,” according to a White House official. 

Several family members reiterated the struggle to make good on �����Ƿɲ�’s promise of quality education for all is far from over. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Cheryl Brown Henderson, youngest daughter of namesake plaintiff Oliver Brown, just after leaving the Oval Office. “… We’re still fighting the battle over whose children we invest in.”

In the private meeting, family members said they urged the President to continue that fight and support HBCUs. President Biden thanked them for taking on the risks required to push back on Jim Crow and segregation, including risking “your life, your livelihood, your home,” said Brown Henderson.

At least one litigating family’s home was burned to the ground in South Carolina. Many others lost jobs, compounding the challenges Black families faced in trying to build economic wealth less than a century after the fall of slavery. 

One descendant urged the President to consider a national holiday commemorating the landmark court decision so that its significance and history would not be lost.

“We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that teaching “adequate” history is being threatened in multiple states. Last month, the organization for its “anti-indoctrination” law and alleged discrimination against Advanced Placement African American Studies courses.

“So the fight continues,” Johnson said. “It is a political fight. It is a legal fight. It is a moral fight, to ensure that we have a future that’s reflective of the demographics of this country today and not the demographics of 1950.” 

Earlier this week, scholars at Stanford University and University of Southern California unveiled troubling research that school segregation steadily increased in the last three decades. Experts say there’s an urgent need to reform how students are sorted into schools – four states require, and nearly all allow, districts to enforce attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing or sundown town boundaries from nearly a century ago. 

Family members called out the press’s failure to accurately document challenges to �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation and racial educational inequities being played out in schools today. They also voiced criticism for the administration’s military and war spending in comparison to education priorities. This week and late last month signed a for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and other countries. 

“The truth about education in America? Are the kids from the Indian reservations … in West Virginia, or my mother’s hometown in South Carolina [getting quality education]? I say no. Tell me I’m wrong,” said Nathaniel Briggs, son of the namesake plaintiff in . “We’ll spend millions of dollars to buy an airplane and a bomb, but not on education.” 

Thursday’s event was the first of several NAACP and White House engagements commemorating the anniversary. Tomorrow, seven decades to the day since the court issued the Brown decision, the President will share remarks at the African American Smithsonian. 

The trend is unsurprising to lawyers and researchers familiar with the challenges of �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation, who’ve sounded the alarm that the widespread practice of tying school assignment to childrens’ home addresses has  perpetuated segregation.

But one civil rights and education law expert maintains a sense of optimism, offering new ideas for how courts and state legislatures can take on integration efforts.

“There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to,” said University of North Carolina law professor Erika Wilson, “but often states lack the political will.” 

For years, Wilson, who teaches on and explores the intersections of race in education, has tracked how segregation has persisted. Across the country, modern school district boundaries mirror the boundaries of , where violence and threat of bodily harm against Black families maintained all-white areas. Modern day school district lines today are legally allowed to mirror the historically racist boundaries. 

Among other recommendations, she argues courts can and should take districts’ historical context into consideration when determining whether lines are discriminatory and infringing on student rights. States could also shift who is responsible for drawing lines, or use regional or county lines for districts, which would encompass more racially and economically diverse areas. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Wilson explores some ways segregation has taken on new forms, what states could take up today, and why abandoning integration to “just fix schools” for everyone won’t work in a vacuum. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: What do you think is missing in the current conversation around desegregating schools? Especially as many districts around the country are about to consider closures or consolidations and might be looking at attendance zone lines? 

It’s a tough question, but I’ve thought about this. One thing I wish that people would consider about not just school desegregation issues, but education in general, is the importance of public education to a healthy and thriving democracy, especially a multiracial democracy.

We really didn’t have a robust system of public schools nationwide until after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and that is in large part because the formerly enslaved and emancipated Africans made education a cornerstone of their efforts to become full citizens …. They understood, and I wish we understood as well, how important that is to cultivating citizenship on equal terms and allowing us all to live together harmoniously. 

It’s kind of a pie in the sky answer – but I do think it’s an important one. We’re seeing the rollbacks on public education, the push towards forms of privatization, at the same time as we’re seeing a complete erosion of democratic norms and commitment to democracy – I don’t think those are a coincidence.

Part of your work is explaining how violence maintained all-white areas and how district maps are now maintaining that exclusion. Can you talk about the ways that you’ve seen that violence shift over time to maintain these areas? Are there more quiet ways that you’ve seen play out?

One of the things I talk about is the way that violence becomes ensconced within geography. And how, at least with respect to schools, we think of geography as race-neutral, unattached from that history of violence against Black bodies in particular.

When you think about modern ways that this manifests itself, the rigid maintenance of school district boundary lines around areas that we know are formerly whites-only sundown towns are an example. 

A less obvious example might be the way that we see zoning laws in these areas… they’re not going to build the kind of multifamily housing or high higher density housing that would attract people who are not predominantly white and/or affluent.

Those are certainly examples of the ways the violence that was used to create these all-white areas continues unabated, in a way that’s completely lawful, and in a way that people are hesitant to associate with forms of violence. Because it would implicate themselves in terms of their desire to move to the whitest areas with the best school districts.

I don’t know that you would use this exact term, but you’ve also written about new forms of segregation, like  school districts in the south seceding from more integrated districts, which used county lines, under the guise of local control. Can you talk about the scale of these kinds of efforts and what sort of protections would have to exist to curb them?

It’s hard to quantify from what I’ve seen, particularly with the secessions. Around 2000 to 2014, there was a ramp up in efforts and then a scaling back as it got a little bit more attention. 

I do think that the scale is larger or at least increasing in the South as these particular school systems are released from desegregation orders. Even if they’re still under existing desegregation orders, the people charged with enforcing them aren’t paying attention. Suggested changes may go uncontested.

One of the things I wrote about was what was happening in Baton Rouge and St. George – just the other day St. George found a workaround. .

The next step will undoubtedly be to try and create their own school district.

So this is the other danger, and part of the reason why it’s difficult to quantify scale. Even when there are protections put in place to stop things like secessions, there’s immediately an attempted workaround. Whether it’s what they did in St. George or attempted to do in North Carolina, where they tried to create these charter school enclaves that were essentially charter districts that would have the same effect as a public school district secession.

What I’ve tried to do is identify where it is happening, because usually what you see is copycat attempts. I wouldn’t be surprised if what St. George did ultimately gets replicated in other places. Honestly, creating their own city is even worse than creating their own school district – that has even broader implications.

For tax revenues, policing, everything. The St. George example also gets at an idea you explore in your work, that high quality schools are scarce partially by design. In this current context, how do you see state legislatures taking desegregation up?

I like to remind people that states have plenary authority over public education. There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to, but often states lack the political will. We worry about campaigns, reelections, perceptions, all of those things. But in a perfect world where we could muster the political will, then there are a number of things that state legislatures could do.

The first I would suggest is rethinking the amount of authority given to school districts, particularly drawing school district boundary lines around municipal boundary lines. We take for granted that’s the way it has to be, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

Many of us don’t live our lives confined to one municipality, particularly when you’re in a metropolitan area with many neighboring municipalities. For example, I live in Durham but I work in Chapel Hill, I often drive [outside] for my son’s sports. We don’t live just confined to Durham, but the way that schools tend to work is that we confine [entry] based on these arbitrary boundary lines that don’t make sense, to reinforce segregation and inequality.

States could decide, for example, that their primary way of distributing public education would be around regional boundary lines. They might take a group of municipalities and lump them together for the purposes of creating a school district unit. Those municipalities might share local revenues, they might assign children across municipal boundary lines, that sort of thing.

They could also read the right to education clauses in state constitutions differently to require more robust forms of funding, to suggest that any kind of secession, for example, would violate that right to education clause.

I’ve also heard this critique that it’s difficult to challenge these systems that are dependent on geography because of the limitations of the equal protection clause and the , which states the neighborhood is the appropriate basis for determining school assignment. Could you walk through the new legal framework you put forth in your work, and what might be required to get there?

The framework I set forth is to really challenge this connection between racialized geography and school assignment.

When you look at a seminal case like Milliken v. Bradley, where the Supreme Court said that you could not bring in the suburban school districts to help desegregate the Detroit public schools because those suburban school districts didn’t do anything wrong. 

Well, that’s just not true. As I note in the article, something like two thirds of the suburbs surrounding the Detroit public schools were sundown towns. They were quite complicit then in the segregated patterns that ended up happening with Detroit public schools.

The problem I’m suggesting is that from an equal protection perspective, there’s no doctrinal mechanism to unearth that kind of connection between race and geography that would create a racially segregated pattern.

I suggest borrowing from the Voting Rights Act, which has this sensitive test of factors that it uses to suss out whether or not boundary lines should exist or persist. And I suggest that we borrow some of that framework to look and see when we should abrogate boundary lines for purposes of an equal protection challenge.

Similarly, I suggest that that framework could also be useful to legislators in deciding whether or not they want to maintain certain boundary lines if they want to, as I alluded to earlier, use their plenary power to rethink and redraw district boundary lines in ways that would be more racially and economically inclusive.

I wonder if we could spend just a moment with charter schools because they do have some parts of their enrollment policies that people have pointed to as promising, like, as you know, requiring a lottery once they’re full or perhaps requiring some geographic quotas. Do you see charters more often being used as the example you shared before, to create exclusionary districts of their own?

It really depends. 

We have a large contingent of parents of color who are flocking to charter schools. It says something about what the feeling is around some of the deficiencies of public schools. That being said charters were never meant to supplant a system of public education. Where we go wrong, I think, is having charters be the primary [school option] rather than supplementing public schools.

Their original intention was to be places of innovation where you could have some relaxed regulations and you would reach a smaller cohort of students. Well, that’s being turned on its head so that charters … seek to be a primary vehicle of educating children.Some of the benefits of relaxed regulations, innovation, all of those things become detrimental when charter schools are the main thing in town, because charters can be places of exclusion. 

For example, a charter school can basically lawfully exclude poor children, children with disabilities, children of color by using race neutral mechanisms to do so. Some charter schools may say we’re not gonna offer free and reduced lunch. Well, that’s going to cut out a swath of children who would depend on free and reduced lunch. Other charters might say we’re not gonna offer transportation. Well, that’s gonna cut out a large swath of children who need transportation. 

A more sneaky way of doing it is that we have the specialized charter schools, let’s say, a Latin charter school, a Montessori, an Afrocentric charter school, some of the theme charter schools are going to attract a certain cohort of students.

And if you have a combination of a special charter school like that and they don’t offer free and reduced lunch and they don’t offer transportation, then what you’re going to get is a very specific kind of student who attends.

From that perspective, they can be exclusionary. 

If we think about public education as a gateway to cultivating citizens for democracy, the exclusionary aspects of charter schools are very bad, in ways that are even more dangerous than private schools because people tend to believe that because charters are quasi public that they’re doing the right thing. It’s just not always true. Some of these charter schools operate as exclusionary as private schools depending on some of the rules that are put in place. 

It’s great that charter schools do things like a lottery to ensure equity in terms of enrollment. Even those processes can be skewed in terms of information and symmetry to even sign up to be a part of the lottery. Some schools have requirements that you have to, for example, stand in line to put your kid’s name on the list. Parents have camped out in order to do that, and what kind of parents can do that?

The saddest part to me is that we are resulting to a lottery to distribute forms of public education. The kind of education you get shouldn’t be subject to the whims of a lottery.

Are there any efforts that you’ve seen successfully disrupt the significance of geography in school opportunity?

A while back in Nebraska, they made attempts at a regional school district. There was a voluntary component to it though, that didn’t make it ideal. I sadly can’t point to any area and say this is a model of how it should be done.

The one area I would say used to be a model is actually in Wake County, North Carolina. They have county based boundary lines, which means that all municipalities within the county are part of the school district. They used to have this really great socio-economic diversity school assignment plan that ultimately got shot down, because parents were upset and didn’t like it.

Would you say that’s usually where the efforts end? With failure of political will or the parent outrage, white parent outrage particularly?

Yeah, I think the parents are a huge driver of what ultimately ends up happening … there’s this idea that their child is being denied something … It’s a mix of parents and special interests that pump up certain kinds of parents and use them to advance ideas that are meant to decimate public education. I’ve seen those explode in recent years.

Anything on your mind that I haven’t asked you explicitly, or any areas you feel the media has ignored or misconstrued?

The question I get often is, given the reluctance of parents, particularly white parents, and the lack of political will, aren’t we better off just trying to abandon notions of integrating schools and just fixing schools so that they are great schools for all children? Even if they end up being racially and economically segregated schools?

I think that’s a fair question. But my response is that it’s important that we not abandon the project of trying to get racially and economically integrated schools.

Throughout our very brief history in the United States, we have not seen a successful model of racially and economically segregated schools that really advances everyone because of the way that race operates in America. Segregation by design is going to end up connoting forms of inferiority. It’s going to preclude necessary intergroup contact that we need to buttress a really flailing democracy.

The one time period in America where we can say that we actually try to have racially integrated schools, it worked. If you look at about 1968 to 1984, where we actually took seriously the legal mandate to integrate schools, what we saw happening is better cross-racial relationships. Reduction of the achievement gap score between Black and white. These are things that I think we lose sight of.

It might seem like there’s some pathway to just fix schools even if they end up being predominantly white or predominantly Black or Latino or nonwhite schools. It doesn’t work. A lot of focus goes on how it doesn’t work for students of color, but it really doesn’t work for white students either.

In the seminal Brown v. Board of Education, everyone’s heard of the doll test that the court relied on to suggest that segregated schools make black students feel inferior. What people don’t know is that the court was also presented with social science evidence regarding the harms of segregation for white students.

One of [the harms] that’s important at this moment is that white segregation creates feelings of superiority, but moral conflict as well. 

Having a group of inferior people – they struggle to reconcile that in ways that makes them more susceptible to authoritarianism and less likely to embrace democratic norms and ideals, which have the potential to disrupt their so-called superiority.

Almost everything that was in that social science research brief about the harms of white segregation is arguably coming to fruition today in terms of the way that democracy is unraveling.

Staring down the nearly 80-year history of modern suburbia, Herold finds that the effort produced mostly “disposable communities” across the country. While they served their first few sets of residents — his family included — they have failed to deliver the promise of the American Dream to the families of color who followed. Case in point: He notes that in the north of Dallas, where his reporting takes him, Black mortgage loan applications are now denied at a rate 23 percentage points higher than those of white applicants with similar incomes.

And while many families sought suburban homes in large part for their superior schools, even that isn’t a given anymore, he finds — especially if you’re not white or born in the U.S.A. Instead of an educational upgrade, he reports, many families now find troubled, underfunded schools, intractable bureaucracies, teachers’ union contracts that make “any wholesale changes difficult” and, perhaps worst of all, maddening discrimination in the very place where they’d sought refuge.

A longtime Education Week staffer who now teaches journalism at Temple University, Herold spent four years examining the historical record and found a pattern: As suburbs age, municipal revenues often fall, even as the costs of maintaining infrastructure rise. An “entrenched culture of political backscratching and can-kicking” exacerbates these problems.

In one suburban district in Evanston, Ill., outside of Chicago, crusading superintendent Paul Goren tells Herold, “I landed in a district that had a foundation of quicksand. It was wobbly on the instructional side, with lots of people doing their own thing because that was what they had done for years. We were [also] facing some level of financial doom.”  

Eventually, Herold writes, what befell so many suburbs was what he calls a “relentless cycle of racialized development and decline that took root after World War II, then sucked huge swaths of the country into a pattern of slash-and-burn development that functioned like a Ponzi scheme.”

His book, out Tuesday, follows five diverse families in suburban Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. He actually grew up in the Penn Hills neighborhood east of Pittsburgh, and finds one of his subjects just three doors down from his childhood home.

Herold spent years getting to know these families, offering a deeply reported and closely observed account of five families’ struggles to capture what his family so easily enjoyed. 

����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo caught up with Herold earlier this month.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: You note at the outset that you’re a suburban kid, raised in Penn Hills. Things for you went as they were supposed to. Yet you report that your dad ended up selling your childhood home in 2014 for one-fourth of what it was worth, to a guy he met on Craigslist. Is this the inevitable fate of inner-ring suburbs like yours? What’s at play here? Why don’t suburbs work anymore, and how do public schools play a part in this failure?

Benjamin Herold: Suburbia worked great for my middle-class white family and millions of others like us who received guaranteed mortgage loans, massive tax breaks and sparkling new infrastructure, including public schools we got decades to mold in our own image. But all that was made possible by trading short-term wealth for massive debts and liabilities that we pushed off on to future generations. Eventually, the bills come due. That’s what we’re seeing now.

You write that America’s suburbs since World War II have resembled a kind of Ponzi scheme that has stuck later investors with the bill. So we’re in the “after” part of the cycle, right?

All too often, it’s newer suburban families of color who get stuck paying for all the opportunity that whiter and wealthier families like mine already extracted. Because this cycle plays out over large geographies and multiple generations, it can be difficult to recognize when we take snapshots of a single suburban community at a single point in time. That’s why I followed five families living in five suburban communities that are each at a different stage of this process.

It’s also why public schools are such a valuable lens — we can only really see the bigger picture when we pay close attention to the anger, frustration and disillusionment that so many suburban parents feel when they’ve done everything right, yet still have to deal with their children being called racial slurs, subjected to unfair discipline and denied access to opportunities like gifted programs.

Just three doors down from your old house in Penn Hills, you knock on a door and find one of your five subjects: Bethany Smith, a Black woman who bought the place with her mother. That Bethany’s experience is so different from your family’s seems to reveal what you’re getting at in the book. Tell us about her. [Note: Herold uses pseudonyms for all of his subjects with the exception of Smith, who writes the book’s epilogue.]

Bethany’s family and mine wanted the same things: a quiet street, good public schools, homes that steadily increase in value, systems and services that just work. The difference is that my white family got most of those things without paying full price, while Bethany’s family had to pay extra to receive declining services, a school district that was raising taxes and slashing services and a stagnant housing market. 

Your subjects — almost all of whom are people of color — seem in many ways left to their own devices when it comes to pursuing these dreams in mostly crumbling, formerly white suburbs. What should communities be doing differently to help these families?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s why: In suburban Atlanta, I followed a middle-class Black family named the Robinsons. Both parents have advanced degrees, good jobs, rich social networks, and a strong spiritual foundation. Both also unabashedly love learning. Nika, the mom, was pursuing her PhD in public health, and Anthony, the dad, was a network engineer and former middle school teacher who stayed up late each night re-teaching geometry concepts to his teen son. Both parents were extremely active in their children’s schools, volunteering in the library, going to every parent-teacher meeting and maintaining running email correspondence with their kids’ teachers. And both Nika and Anthony are extremely kind and funny to boot. So for me, the question becomes: How on earth does a well-regarded system like the Gwinnett County Public Schools not only fail to connect with a family like the Robinsons, but actively alienate them, by gradually whittling away their oldest son’s spirit, joy, and sense of self, despite the abundant resources, assets and gifts the Robinsons bring with them?

So how can we understand the Robinsons’ experience through your lens of suburban decline instead of incompetence at the school level?

By 2019, Gwinnett County was nearly two-thirds Black, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial. But in many ways, the Gwinnett County Public Schools operated as if it were still the early 1990s, when the population it served was still 90 percent white. During the period I write about, this was evident in big racial disparities in school discipline and access to gifted programs; Black and brown children now made up about two-thirds of all the district’s students, but barely one-third of the kids the district identified as gifted and talented.

Above all, though, this dynamic was evident in the district’s leadership. Prior to 2018, Gwinnett had somehow never elected a person of color to its five-member school board, which was largely controlled by three older white women, one of whom had held her seat for 47 years, and all of whom were vocal in their beliefs that changing the way things had always been in order to reflect the priorities and values of a changing population was tantamount to diluting the quality of the education the district offered. There was plenty of incompetence, but it occurred within the larger context of a $2.3 billion organization with policies, practices, and personnel that too often showed flagrant disregard for the majority of families it served. 

Eventually, things start to fall apart for nearly all of your subjects, it seems. Even the Beckers, a conservative and affluent white family, ultimately give up on the public schools in their exclusive Dallas exurb after a single year. They end up in a private Christian academy in a Plano strip mall. That makes me wonder: Is at least some of the “unraveling” you’re describing just the messiness of life, parent restlessness writ large?

I approached writing Disillusioned from two angles. I wanted to illuminate a big economic, social, and political pattern that we all now live within because America is such a suburban nation. I also wanted to explore the choices everyday families make and the lives we build as we try to figure out our relationship to that pattern. So I don’t think the Beckers’ relentless search for better schools is separate or distinct from the cycle of suburban churn they’re trying to navigate. As with the rest of us, these larger forces help determine the available options, and the choices we make in turn help shape those larger forces. 

You note throughout the book that Black and brown students have always had a fraught relationship with their suburban schools: “For so long,” you write, “so much of suburbia had been organized around trying first to keep those kids out, then treating them as a problem to be managed.” Yet in Compton, Calif., which is now almost entirely Black and brown, you find a measure of promise. Can you say more?

Jefferson Elementary in Compton is housed in a ramshackle facility consisting of several rundown bungalow buildings with narrow slits for windows that are almost reminiscent of a prison. But what I saw inside Jefferson and Compton Unified was a multiracial collection of adults — including a Black superintendent and school board chair, a Filipino principal, and a Latino fourth-grade teacher whose classroom I followed — who were unflagging in their belief that Compton’s children were bursting with talent and deserved all the opportunities and supports the system could muster. 

One of my favorite little examples of this was a narrative essay the fourth-graders were asked to write. The kids had to describe what a typical day would look like if they worked at . A boy named Jacob, whose family I was following, wrote this incredible piece about designing new droids and prototyping new light sabers and having water-cooler conversations with George Lucas. Between assignments like that, after-school robotics clubs, the chance to create a class newspaper, engineering lessons through [a well-regarded STEM-focused curriculum], and a class-wide mock trial, the kids were flooded with opportunities to imagine themselves shaping America’s future. And Superintendent Darin Brawley was extremely intentional about this, at a very big-picture level — he recognized that his retirement and his own family’s progress would depend on how well he prepared the students in Compton Unified, and so he took that responsibility not just seriously, but personally.

Your idea to pay Bethany Smith, the Penn Hills mom, to write the book’s epilogue strikes me as a bold choice. She’s quite blunt, for the record, writing that white people “are always fucking some shit up, then expecting everybody else to go fix it.” Why, among all of your subjects, does she deserve the last word? After the century-long narrative you’ve woven, is this the message you want readers to take away?

I love Bethany’s epilogue. I think it’s just tremendous. I’m so grateful she agreed to write it, and I’m even more grateful she was willing to get really, really honest, even when doing so was painful for her and unflattering for me. 

A central question drove me to give four years of my life to this project. I wanted to know how the opportunities my white family enjoyed in Penn Hills a generation ago are connected to the declining fortunes of the families who live in Penn Hills now. And I think Bethany’s epilogue really helped capture and communicate the answer. But it took me a long-time to actually be able to really hear what she was saying, in part because I had to shed a lot of my own illusions.

The breakthrough came when I finally realized I had to engage these questions emotionally, not just intellectually. And that meant putting under a microscope my own experience as a white person who grew up in suburbia, reaped its benefits and left behind a mess so I could go build a comfortable life somewhere else. Doing that made the book much richer, and that was a direct result of the challenge Bethany issued to me. So I’m extremely thankful to her, and to all the families and educators featured in this book who helped create a space that allowed all of us to give as much of our hearts as we felt comfortable sharing. 

Disclosure: Benjamin Herold received support from at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Greg Toppo is a Spencer Fellowship board member.

A teacher has filed a lawsuit accusing the Ottumwa school district of encouraging students’ racist behavior by failing to impose sufficient discipline for such conduct.

Robert Bender is suing the Ottumwa Community School District in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, and is seeking unspecified damages related to alleged harassment, discrimination, retaliation and violations of the federal Civil Rights Act. Also named as defendants are Jerry Miller, a school principal, and Dana Warnecke, an assistant school principal.

Bender, who is Black, began working for the district in July 2021 as a behavior instructor teacher and the high school’s junior varsity boys’ basketball coach. Since then, he has also held the position of junior high school girls’ track coach and he currently works for the district as a high school special education teacher.

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In his lawsuit, Bender alleges that from the time he first began working for the district in 2021, he has been the target of racially motivated abuse and harassment by students. In early September 2021, he alleges, a student referred to him using the n-word. While several of co-workers witnessed the incident, they did not challenge the student’s behavior, the lawsuit alleges.

According to the lawsuit, two more incidents of a similar nature occurred in the weeks that followed, and after the matter was reported to Miller and Warnecke, the student who was involved was suspended for either a half day or a full day.

Over the next three months, the lawsuit claims, Bender was routinely referred to by the same racial epithet uttered by different students in front of other district employees, administrators and students.

During that time, Bender also received sticky notes with racist messages written on them, according to the lawsuit. Bender reported the conduct to Miller and Warnecke. The matter was referred to the district’s executive director of human resources, who assured Bender such behavior would not be tolerated, according to the lawsuit.

“Unfortunately, the lack of discipline emboldened the students, and they continued to refer to Mr. Bender as a “n—–” in front of staff and administration,” the lawsuit alleges. “One student in particular has repeatedly used the racist term in reference to Mr. Bender. The student was eventually sent to ‘timeout’ for his use of the term, but Mr. Bender was the adult in charge of supervising the student. Throughout the duration of the timeout, the student continued to use the term directed toward Mr. Bender.”

In March 2022, Miller allegedly reassigned Bender from a “behavioral teacher” to an “inclusion teacher” for the 2022-23 school year. The reassignment was reportedly because Bender had allowed a student to walk out of his class – a common occurrence in the district, the lawsuit claims.

That same month, a student at a bus stop allegedly directed the n-word at Bender in front of staff and parents and, a few weeks later, used the word again in front of Miller. The student was not removed from class and, to Bender’s knowledge, was not disciplined, the lawsuit states.

At around the same time, other students were being suspended for three days – one for slamming a door in the face of an assistant principal and one for calling a teacher “fat man.” According to the lawsuit, Miller later told Bender that while he took no offense to the n-word, he understood why Bender would.

The lawsuit alleges the defendants enabled students to harass and humiliate Bender through the students’ “severe and pervasive” daily use of racial slurs and racially charged language.

The district has yet to file a response to the lawsuit. The Iowa Capital Dispatch was unable to reach the district’s communications specialist for comment on the lawsuit.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

How did NBCDI arrive at its Eight Future Outcomes?

NBCDI’s Eight Future Outcomes are the result of years of reviewing academic research, engaging in national and statewide advocacy, and listening to the needs of our National Village Network. We learned from the lived experiences of parents of young Black children who are actively working to secure a better future for their families.

Our Eight Future Outcomes reflect the well-being, culture and perspective of Black children, including the positive attributes they bring to the classroom, how they see themselves and, more broadly, engage in a global society. These outcomes motivate the work of NBCDI and will be an important guidepost to create a world that experiences the strengths Black children have to offer. Our current stubborn racist systems and constructs must be dismantled.

How will you measure progress toward these goals?

We will provide resources and tools to our members and partners, host events and advocacy opportunities to ignite movements, and mobilize around creating an equitable and just future for Black children and families. Ultimately, we want to build a network of millions of NBCDI members that are thought partners, organizers and informed advocates that mobilize around our Eight Future Outcomes and our mission to improve and enhance the lives of Black children and families through education and advocacy.

That’s how we plan to measure progress: if people are noticing our work, sharing our resources and social media posts, mentioning us in thought leadership pieces, referencing our op-eds and publications and joining our efforts. We want to see changes in Black children’s actual experiences in childhood, which the data and indicators will show are evidenced with significant improvement across our eight outcomes; that is the benchmark of progress for us.

What changes has NBCDI undergone in the wake of the pandemic?

Black and brown people experienced higher fallout from the pandemic from increased rates of infection, lack of access to quality childcare and unsafe working conditions. Many of us still showed up to our professions, day-in and day-out, but without the sick time and other adequate support to make it through the pandemic and adjust afterward. Now Black and brown people are disproportionately impacted by inflation, the inability to return to the same level of employment, rent, and interest rate hikes and lack of quality child care. The pandemic amplified our work and purpose.

What about George Floyd’s murder?

George Floyd’s murder was agonizing, inhumane and dastardly, but unfortunately not rare. The murders of Black children, men and women because of systemic racism plague our nation. NBCDI as an organization was born out of the Civil Rights era, and it is unfathomable that we need to intensify our efforts to advocate for racial justice half a century later. We have made significant strides toward equality and are experiencing some setbacks, but more partners and allies are involved, which has helped tremendously to maintain momentum.

Most of my staff are parents, and we are all children and siblings, so these tragedies hit close to home for us personally and professionally. While we acknowledge the mental toll, and I encourage my staff to prioritize self-care and take time to process, we are more motivated than discouraged about our ability to effect change. We feel a sense of urgency like never before, which may be the most significant change.

What is NBCDI’s National Village Network? How do the sites in the network communicate and collaborate?

Our National Village Network is the heart of NBCDI. In more than 24 communities across the nation, these volunteer-driven villages partner with children, families and community-based organizations to implement culturally relevant and evidence-based programs promoting literacy, health and wellness and parent engagement, while advocating for better, stronger and more effective policies for Black children ages birth to eight at the local, state and federal level. The network celebrates the strengths and talents of Black children by fostering a sense of community and belonging, where Black children feel supported and valued.

Our job at the national level is to ensure the Network has the channels and resources they need to communicate and collaborate. That’s why we convene our Village Network regularly, providing time and space to share experiences, brainstorm ideas and troubleshoot challenges.

What are the plans for National Black Child Development Week (NBCDW)?

NBCDW is a time to raise community awareness about important issues impacting Black children and families. During NBCDW 2023, the National Village Network will host a series of events to celebrate the pillars of the Black community by honoring leaders who champion NBCDI’s Eight Future Outcomes.

How about the conference in October?

For the past 52 years, the NBCDI National Conference has convened families, educators, advocates, policymakers, and more to fellowship, brainstorm, advocate, educate, and fight for equity, equality and justice for our children and families. This year’s conference is in Charlotte, North Carolina, October 13-15, 2023.

Our conferences provide rich opportunities for everyone to engage, recharge and rally around policies and educational advancements for our earliest learners. This year’s theme is Unleash the Promise and Genius of Black Children and Families. Our main sessions will highlight women and men in the early childhood education space who are moving the needle on our Eight Future Outcomes. We want folks to work alongside us as we convene around these goals and learn from one another as advocates for Black children and families.

What do you wish more people understood about Black children?

Oftentimes, across public discourse in literature, film and media, Black children are painted in an adversarial light. The stories that are told about Black children are stories of struggle, trials and tribulations. Our nation needs to understand the inherent brilliance, unfettered joy and everlasting prosperity that Black children possess. Our new vision for NBCDI will focus less on deficits and more on our commitment to highlighting the assets Black children bring to our communities.

What are the most promising opportunities for this approach?

Black children are an important part of our nation’s future. Along with Hispanic children, they will make up the majority of our nation’s future workforce and bring their unique talents, knowledge and expertise to our ever-changing economy. As such, it is our job to advocate for the rights of Black children now, so they can live prosperous lives in the future.

Despite the challenges of systemic racism that plague our country, Black children continue to prove their ability to lead happy lives — achieving everyday milestones and making important contributions to American society. In many ways, their success can be attributed to the unwavering support of their families and communities who provide them with the necessary love and guidance to navigate a world that often marginalizes them and threatens their very existence.

What are some stories from your own childhood that inform your work today?

I spent time with my dad’s family in Bowling Green, Kentucky. every summer until I was 12 years old. The time spent with my Aunt Ersa was pivotal in creating the person and professional I am today. Aunt Ersa was a third grade teacher and helped me define what it truly means to be an educator. She was confident, knowledgeable, serious and well-dressed! She would never say, “I’m just a teacher.” For her, being a teacher should be the most highly regarded profession, comparable to a lawyer, doctor or politician. With this insight I also became an educator, teaching kindergarten, first and third grade during the earlier part of my career. I left the teaching profession with a deep understanding and admiration for teachers and students. I’m imprinted by my classroom experiences.

So, in every role I’ve held since, I’ve considered that point-of-view and made it my mission to consider the impact my work will have on educators and children. At NBCDI, one of our outcomes is that every Black child has access to schools that affirm and expand them. This is how we define a high-quality education. We want all children to have educational experiences that affirm them. One that says, “Who you are is wonderful and amazing. You should be proud.”

How can readers participate?

By . Additionally, or nearby, then get involved and participate in NBCDW events. Lastly, follow us on and !

Better yet, his students were discussing “,” a 1909 E.M. Forster story in which future humans live in isolation, even from family members, forever in fear of toxic air and human contact. The characters see each other only through screens.

Forster’s story frames the narrative of , the debut graphic memoir by Bessie, along with the artist Peter Glanting, which offers a surreal, often grim take on the pandemic and its effects on both Bessie and his students. The book also bemoans the “diaspora” that the pandemic brought forth, concluding that while it didn’t create “inequality, standardization and corporatization” in public education, it made them more “painfully visible” than ever.

So far the book is garnering lavish praise: Publishers Weekly gave it a , calling it “poignant” and one of the chapters. It also named it one of graphic novels and adult comics. 

Bessie entered the Spring 2020 semester in the middle of a personal crisis, returning to campus as he recovered from chemotherapy after surgery to remove a brain tumor. He had long enjoyed the infectious energy and “electrical current” that flows through a good classroom, invoking educator ’ observation that students are “the power in the room.”

So he naturally mourned the loss of face-to-face instruction and dreaded the flattening that took place on Zoom. Once distinctive, quirky individuals, his students quickly became “identical in size, dimension, proportion, equal tiles in a perfect grid.” They often showed up with cameras and microphones turned off, “black boxes on mute.”

That sudden absence gave Bessie the opportunity to step back and see the transformation taking place not just in his classroom but in his life, as he continued cancer treatments. He began to see himself as an experimental subject whose day job was guiding his own students through another kind of experiment, as his college broadened its pre-pandemic reliance on technologies like Zoom, Canvas and Google. While these tools tethered the community together during the crisis, he writes, they also came with their own strict demands: access to a computer, stable wifi and a quiet study space, all parameters “set by the software requirements,” not educators. These demands soon overwhelmed many students, some of whom never returned. 

In an interview, the longtime English instructor said giving in to these demands could threaten community colleges’ open access mission, squeezing out the neediest students — the very students they’re designed to uplift. In a way, he said, the book is an exploration of this question: “To what degree are we ceding public control of the Commons to corporations?”

The narrative in Going Remote, Bessie said, “was immediately a comic. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to express this story in a graphic form.” As soon as the pandemic began, he found himself “writing and drawing to myself about this, because I said, ‘There is going to be something new after this.’ … I had this feeling like, ‘This is going to be a major shift.’” 

He’d always been drawn to comics, largely for their ability to translate abstract, complex concepts into visual form — early on, Glanting, the artist, illustrates Bessie’s lingering brain cancer as a pint-sized, white-eyed blob, leaning against a stack of books on a shelf in Bessie’s office. 

Bessie also drew inspiration from the graphic adaptation of University of Illinois scholar William Ayers’ memoir.

Like Ayers, Bessie writes from a distinctly leftist perspective, making the case that community colleges from the beginning were both profoundly democratic and “steeped with the virus of classist and racist contempt” for their students, part stepping stool and part gate-keeper.

Community colleges play a big role in Bessie’s own family history: His father, a penniless Korean War veteran who suffered a “profound hearing loss,” enrolled in a California community college and found educators who believed in his potential, despite his disability. He eventually found his way to the University of Southern California, training to become a physical therapist and going on to a successful career.

“When I come into the classroom, I still have that feeling: Each one of these students is somebody that could have been my own father, is somebody that society didn’t think would be educated,” he said.

Yet he also warns that there’s a dark side to community colleges’ legacy. Founded more than a century ago, the system began with an intentional design, he said, that, just as often as it uplifted marginalized students like Bessie’s father, excluded others from the mainstream of elite higher education. 

So in the winter of 2020, when his students — starting with his “most marginalized” and ending with his best, most outgoing students — began disappearing altogether from Zoom, Bessie was, in a way, not surprised. Whether beset by technical problems, work and family obligations, or something else altogether, he concluded that they were really the victims of a kind of longstanding neglect that systematically deprives them of opportunities.

Even now, three years after the first lockdowns, with students slowly returning to campus (Bessie never reveals the name of his Bay Area institution, Diablo Valley College), he said he and his colleagues must take on more responsibilities, becoming “frontline emotional workers” to students in crisis: Since late 2020, he has served on his campus CARE (Campus Assessment, Response, and Evaluation) team, which works with students experiencing homelessness, mental health issues, family crises, and even spousal abuse. Since the pandemic, he said, CARE reports “have gone through the roof.”

He sees this as a key function of institutions like Diablo Valley.

“When I’m looking at the future of community college, to me, I want us to put as much energy in these systems of care as we do in these systems of technology. … All of us were trained in how to use online technology. But none of us were trained in what to do when a student says, ‘I attempted suicide.’”

Now back in the classroom roughly half-time — Bessie is teaching two fully in-person classes and two hybrid classes — he feels “more optimistic than I did in finishing the book.” Classes, he said, have “amazing energy,” with engaging conversations about readings that resemble those he and his students enjoyed pre-pandemic.

And he’s doing his best to remain open-minded about technology. The series of remote semesters, he said, actually forced him to consider not just how students can shine in an online classroom, but also the limitations of face-to-face teaching. When he’s teaching online, for instance, students who didn’t hear something the first time — he’s a very fast talker, he’ll admit — can go back and rewatch the lesson.

Excerpt from Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey, published by Seven Stories Press

But he still has concerns. Enrollment, for one thing, has dropped “precipitously” since the pandemic, forcing the college to reduce offerings. Ironically, even though Zoom proved to be difficult for many students, a fair share are now clamoring for remote, fully asynchronous classes. He worries that, given the hybrid schedule, many new students will never get “that campus experience … of being pulled into community.” Between lower enrollment and online coursework, he estimated, the college seems about one-fourth as populated as in 2019. 

In the end, though, it’s “more vibrant than when I finished the book,” he said. A few days ago, for the first time in months, he smelled the aroma of someone vaping tobacco outside his office building. And then he heard someone else playing music a bit too loud. “And I was just like, ‘Yes, we’re back!’”

As critics pounce, advocates for greater pre-K investments grumble, “Look, the study showed that pre-K was solidly effective at preparing kids for kindergarten. Why are we measuring its value in terms of metrics that come way later? By that logic, we shouldn’t just end pre-K investments … we should also cancel 2nd grade (and maybe the rest of early elementary school).”

To be sure, there’s a showing that early education programs are effective. They’re among we can make! But that doesn’t stop us replaying the aforementioned pattern. 

It’s a weird tendency in education debates: we blame good, tested, and effective ideas for not solving the full extent of U.S. inequities. Even the best ideas — the ones that help students succeed, the ones that close divisions in schools and society — rarely get credit for their efficacy. So pre-K debates have less to do with whether pre-K works at preparing kids for kindergarten, and more with whether it “works” on some other array of distant metrics.��

Folks in education do this all the time. Take charter schools, for example. Over the past several decades, a bevy of studies have shown that when charters are opened and overseen by rigorous authorizers, they can significantly improve academic achievement, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. In the 2010s, researchers at Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released showing that well-regulated charters tend to be for raising the test scores of English learners, students from low-income families, and African-American students. of charter schools’ academic performance found similarly encouraging results across the country. 

But as a policy idea, charter schools are besieged with criticism for “failing” to fully in all places and at all times. It’s not that there’s no room for criticism of charter schools; indeed, studies have shown that with tend to generally be than comparable public schools. It’s just that, too often, even are regularly blamed for not yet having defeated the full breadth of systemic and economic inequality in American life. 

Why is this? The blame cuts in two directions, but both have to do with how we define effectiveness of particular programs. First: advocates for certain education reforms often set up their ideas for failure. Pre-K advocates spent many years promising that universal pre-K could close achievement gaps before they begin to widen, obviate the need for controversial K-12 reforms by raising academic achievement, increase participants’ future incomes and lower their chances of incarceration as adults, and . Against that backdrop, is it any wonder that pre-K programs that simply prepare kids to succeed in kindergarten feel like flops? 

This kind of overpromising can be useful for drawing attention to a policy idea, but advocates ought to recognize that inflated rhetoric comes with the cost of raising expectations well beyond what they can likely deliver. (Note: there is that pre-K programs with modest short-term academic impacts may still improve participants’ long-term life outcomes.)

Second: policy critiques are almost always driven more by prior political preferences than the facts on the ground. Sure, when new ideas arrive in public education, critics justifiably warn against “experimenting on schools and kids.” But as the evidentiary base gets better for a particular idea over time, critics shift to less honest work—muddying the measurement waters. If pre-K seems to be really effective at improving children’s school readiness and long-term outcomes, critics who loathe public investment in education and pine for traditional one-income households with stay-at-home mothers caring for kids … find it easy to redefine successful pre-K as something else (e.g. ). 

If, with sufficient public oversight, charter schools produce strong academic outcomes for historically marginalized children, critics who worry that charter schools divert resources and attention from traditional school districts … find it easy to frame those successes out of the picture by measuring charters against other benchmarks (even those that also also elude traditional public schools). For instance, it’s frustrating to see refusing to enroll hard-to-serve students who might be at risk of failing to graduate on time, ).

To be sure, the design, implementation, and defense of new education policies are always going to be plagued by politics. That’s a basic element of living in a democracy. But we really need to stop blaming good-faith efforts to improve schools for failing to solve American racism, economic inequality, etc. 

Instead, we ought to think of education reforms as . Nearly every study shows that developmentally appropriate, well-funded pre-K is good for kids—but . Indeed, a system of high-quality pre-K that feeds into an equitably funded system of effective K-12 schools…is also likely to fall short. (Add in , and a , though, and we might really be getting somewhere.) 

But that’s no excuse for doing nothing. The roots of racist inequities against communities of color are centuries deep and systemically wide; undoing them requires sustained reforms at all levels.

It found that 49 percent of 1,200 respondents from around the country said schools have a responsibility to ensure students learn about the ongoing effects of slavery and racism in America while 41 percent believe schools should teach students about the nation’s history of slavery and racism — but not about race relations today. 

A full 10 percent said schools do not have a responsibility to teach anything about slavery or racism in the U.S., according to the sixth annual conducted by The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. 

​​The results were further broken down by other demographic factors: 79 percent of Black respondents and 77 percent of Democrats and Independents who lean Democratic believe students should, in fact, learn about the ongoing impacts of both slavery and racism. 

The teaching of both topics has been under intense fire with recently moving to prohibit or attempting to dramatically curtail discussion of race and race-related topics in the classroom, often targeting a concept called which explains how American racism has impacted a wide range of systems and institutions. 

Conservatives across the country have renewed their push for removing some texts — including the the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel — that explain racial and ethnic discrimination. 

“The public is a little more divided than we thought,” said Craig Helmstetter, managing partner at American Public Media Research Lab, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based group that conducts independent, nonpartisan research and reporting. APM Research Lab reported the poll results and analysis.

The poll, released today, was conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 7, 2021. The data was collected online by and has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. 

In addition to questions on race, it also addresses the degree to which people believe parents should influence their child’s education — another current flashpoint — and the teaching of evolution and sex education.

“There are an awful lot of people who think parents ought to have a substantial amount of influence even though they have no statutory or legal role in setting curriculum,” said Eric Plutzer, a political science professor at Penn State and the McCourtney Institutes’s director of polling. “That was especially pronounced among Republicans and social conservatives.”

Another group, he said, believes these decisions should be left up to people with expertise, including teachers, because of their subject matter knowledge and classroom experience, and state agencies, which have long crafted curriculum standards.

“That view was expressed by Democrats and social liberals,” Plutzer said.

The biggest gap between those who thought parents should have the most sway and those who thought teachers should be more influential was on the question of COVID safety, with 46 percent saying parents should have a great deal of influence in that area and 28 percent saying educators should.

The poll considered respondents’ gender, age, race, income and political party, among other factors. It also accounted for religion, including affiliation and frequency of worship attendance.

While 90 percent of respondents said schools should teach scientific evolution, half think it should be combined with the teaching of biblical perspectives about creation. A full 10 percent said schools should teach only biblical perspectives.

More than a quarter of those surveyed said they were born again or Evangelical Christians, and their distinctiveness from those of other faiths shows up in several ways:

Just 12 percent believed schools should teach evolution only as compared to 58 percent of other respondents. A full 66 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic held the position as compared to 25 percent of those who were Republican or Republican-leaning.

Helmstetter said policymakers should not discount the role of religion in America.

“Although there is a long, steady decline in the number of people attending church on a regular basis, it is still an important and significant part of people’s lives,” he said. “We should acknowledge and pay attention to it. There are some pretty big divisions across all of these questions, specifically as it relates to people being identified as born again Christians.”

And while 75 percent of respondents believe sexual education for teens should include the dangers of sexually transmitted infections as well as contraception, a majority said they believe parents of school children should have “a great deal of influence” on how sex education is taught. That number includes 72 percent of Republicans, among them Independents who lean Republican, 66 percent of born again Christians and 63 percent of those age 65 or older.

Nearly half of born again Christians think sex education for teens should stop at teaching about STIs and abstinence: 37 percent of Republicans, including independents who lean Republican, held this same view.

Just 22 percent of respondents said local school boards and state departments of education should have significant influence over the teaching of sexual education, an opinion slightly more common among Black Americans and Democrats as compared to other groups.

The survey included a number of open-ended questions that allow respondents to explain their views in their own words: A 63-year-old white woman from Georgia, who does not identify as a born again Christian or Evangelical, said school boards and educators should have a great deal of influence on the teaching of sex education.

“Local teachers have a rapport with students and can build a trust with them,” said the woman, who identified herself as Republican.

Plutzer, considering the division on so many issues, said schools looking to make big decisions without including parents might be considered out of touch.

“There is already eroding respect for expert judgement in many parts of our society including education,” he said, adding a failure to include parents would only make adopting best practices more difficult. “It doesn’t mean the recommendations of those experts is wrong, but it means that if they are resisted, even a good recommendation is not going to be implemented well.” 

Conducted by , “Our Power, Our Legacy,” , was commissioned by to identify what priorities Black women identify as critical for future economic success after the .

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“I want to turn and ask Black mothers, what do they need, and how can we better engage them more authentically in co-architecting solutions?” said Gabrielle Wyatt, who founded the Highland Project in 2020. About 89 percent of Black mothers surveyed say reaching educational goals is a key measure of success; while 85 percent say improving K-12 education is the top priority.

The report’s sample is geographically representative, with 27 percent of respondents having children under 18; 32 percent holding a higher education degree; and 38 percent married or partnered.

The findings will inform programming for The Highland Project’s and advocacy plans for their local partners, including the education-focused in Indianapolis. Wyatt, Newark Schools’ former chief of strategy, created the nonprofit Highland Project as a coalition of Black women leaders aimed at closing the racial wealth gap via systems-level change.

Wyatt told ����Ӱ�� that The Highland Project’s mission was born out of a belief that wealth provides opportunity — to things like home ownership and rainy day funds — yet economic solutions alone cannot solve the racial wealth gap.

“I think about — our lives and our bodies to be protected and need to be thriving. We need access to incredible health care,” said Wyatt. “We need access to great and nutritious foods. We need access to a community policing model… We also need access to great and incredible schools. When we say wealth, we need to be thinking about pulling multiple policy levers in order to get there.”

Here are three of the survey’s key findings and their implications for education policy:

1. Black women worry about children’s education more than anything else

Fifty-nine percent of Black women say the issue most frequently on their mind — more concerning than retirement savings, healthcare costs, and losing their job — is whether their child or the children around them are “getting a good enough education.”

Quality education for the younger generation was the most frequently cited worry among .

The ability to afford higher education is a top concern for 47 percent, as well. College access and affordability is of greater concern for single Black women across age groups — 55 percent fear that they won’t be able to afford higher education for themselves or a family member.

. One year after graduating from 4-year institutions, Black women owe an average of $8,000 more than their white peers, likely due to compounding factors: generational wealth and a family’s ability to contribute to college costs, access to employment and wage gaps.

“What we have seen and what we have heard, as a culture, is that college is supposed to be the thing that closes the wealth gap for us, with our white peers, and what we’re seeing now is the opposite happening,” Wyatt said. “We’re in an urgent state of affairs in terms of addressing the student debt crisis, and continuing to kick the can on this, via the extension of loan payment relief, isn’t going to get us there.”

The report recommends eliminating student debt, calling it a “crippling barrier to wealth building.”

2. Lack of educational opportunities is a top barrier to economic success for Black women

About 21 percent of Black women cite lack of educational opportunities as a key hurdle to economic success, and more than a quarter of Black women with college degrees believe so. Racial discrimination and lack of job opportunities were the other most frequently chosen hurdles.

The barriers align with the reports’ central finding of what priorities Black women want leaders to focus on: voting rights, racial discrimination, and access to quality education.

Wyatt told ����Ӱ�� that the lack of diversity in educational leadership may be part of why Black women �������’t accessing more educational opportunities. Nationally, of the public school population are Black students yet are Black teachers and about three percent of superintendents are Black women.

To promote academic and social opportunities, education advocates and suggest strengthening the teacher and leadership pipeline to better represent students.

“The federal dollars that are at play right now offer huge opportunities for districts to help improve teacher diversity in particular, from recruiting and hiring, to setting up mentorship programs to encourage students of color to become teachers,” Wyatt said.

3. Black women say the ability to pursue educational goals is a key measure of overall success

An overwhelming majority of Black women define success in ways that affect their quality of life beyond financial means. Eighty-five percent say that pursuing educational goals is one key way they look at success.

Educational opportunity and attainment is more important to Black womens’ perceived success than a high-paying job (82 percent), owning a home or raising kids (81 percent).

For Wyatt, these findings are another indicator that leaders must look to education policy to ameliorate racial inequities, particularly as more data is released from pandemic-era learning.

“We know that and we know that students are learning at different rates,” said Wyatt, “and for me that means that we differentiated solutions that are rooted deeply in community voice, deeply in evidence and deeply with equity and justice as our Northstar.”

Other notable findings

• 83 percent say college needs to be made more affordable
• 88 percent say they will likely vote during midterm elections
• 78 percent say quality day care needs to be made more affordable

The call to action was answered and countless charter founders sprung into action to create innovative models, with authorizing and applications following suit.

With thirty years under our belt, we have seen tremendous progress in charter network growth, the creation and refining of accountability measures; and increased funding and philanthropic support for this work. Trial and error. Research and development. Growth, expansion and replication. Still many lessons to be learned.

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Over this time people of color have also been in, around and leading in this work: Educators like Harriett Ball, a Black educator whose teaching practices inspired the KIPP program or Lagra Newma, who founded a single site school rooted in her track record of leadership, classroom experience, and personal mission and vision. Tim King curated a culture of academic excellence and a Black male-centered system in Chicago to address an unmet need.

As the country continues to grapple with systemic racism, video evidence and data collection now validate the violence and traumas many people of color process and face daily, making these transgressions more difficult to ignore.

America sits at an inflection point: We continue to uncover where, when and how racial biases show up in all of our systems. Now we are facing another reckoning with the ongoing effort to minimize teaching and imparting fact-based history. So, while it had been easy to turn a blind eye to inequities, we are forced to face the fact that no system is immune: policing, lending, healthcare. Even . How do we reconcile this?

Just as educators and social entrepreneurs sought to address the barriers to high-quality education for marginalized students and families through the creation of charter schools thirty years ago, we must now re-evaluate and continue to evolve and eliminate the barriers in the charter sector. The charter sector has approached its “Second Great Awakening.”

Cue an analogy that my high school religion teachers may or may not appreciate. The “gospel” of charters has reached countless families and caregivers seeking alternatives to meet their children’s academic and social needs. Leaders, educators, funders, and supporters have been brought into the work, but to further expand the reach of this effort, we must recalibrate to see true change in outcomes for the sector and education overall. How? The support for leaders of color must evolve beyond pathways to the leadership of existing organizations to include a “grow your own” or a for us by us movement.

During the 2020 racial reckoning, a number of schools that serve Black and brown students were called to the carpet for harmful practices, forcing many who had turned a blind eye to become aware of the problematic and racially steeped biases in this sector. Many now rush to write Black Lives Matter statements, rush to address race, equity, diversity and inclusion efforts by hiring or training, and acknowledge transgressions of bad actors and problematic school culture and norms. Leaders of color watch this outpouring of focus and funding and collectively shake their heads.

For years, while Black, Brown, and indigenous leaders designed, founded and ran schools focused on serving the communities they intrinsically understood. Their white counterparts were offered more opportunities to expand despite their failings to reflect and connect with communities. New Profit’s report, , highlights the access to capital and multi-year funding challenge faced by leaders of color.

Over time, racial biases have deepened, creating barriers to application review and approval for school founding teams led by people of color. The system that precipitated the need for charter schools created a space that perpetuated inequities. of inequitable practices exist not only for students and charter school leaders of color but prospective school founders. Essentially, authorizing bodies have become comfortable approving schools that fit a mold, spurring the replication of models that veer further from the innovation and supports that meet the needs of students and communities.

The was born out of the disproportionate charter revocations and closure of charter schools led by Black and brown leaders. The organization’s co-founders — Trish Dziko and Kim Smith — recognized a dearth of financial support, resources, and access to critical networks puts far too many schools steeped in culturally relevant practices at risk of poor standing in the eyes of authorizing bodies at best or non-renewal, revocation and closure. The worst-case scenario impacts not only students, families, and communities, but the sector. Removing bad actors affirms a commitment to accountability, but allowing schools to flounder when resources and supports exist is self-sabotage.

In the last year and a half, we’ve seen a groundswell in supporting people of color. Many of the recent announcements of new leadership in the education sector of outstanding leaders of color. This is one way to address and acknowledge the importance of diversity. But we must do more. We must focus on the next iteration of this work and the generation poised to lead. Let’s collectively encourage our colleagues, policy makers, funders, and philanthropic partners to support leaders of color from inception to sustainability.

Support single site charter leaders of color with funding, leadership development, and other resources to create conditions for growth and success. NCC created a community for school leaders operating in silos to share best practices and unpack challenges while centering the lived experiences of leaders, their staff, and their students.

Our inaugural engaged leaders based in Washington, DC as a collective to:​ 1) create an authentic and close-knit community​, 2) identify a shared problem of practice​, and 3) design a shared solution to expand an aspect of their school​s. We will continue to deepen this work and expand the supports offered, as this is a necessary function of sustaining high-quality schools. Additional concerted advocacy that speaks to the challenges single-site charters face is also necessary to improve conditions.

Spur pipelines for new schools and founders of color committed to designing community schools. Earlier this year NACSA kicked off its campaign outlining a set of to create the best education systems for our students by putting community needs at the center of its work. Communities and families come with ideas and passion to do what works for children — they often lack the investments to see those ideas come to life. NACSA recognizes “as charter schooling and authorizing center on the aspirations and needs of communities, a range of new and different outcomes could emerge – all leading to excellent educational opportunities for students.” NCC is committed to exploring and solidifying partnerships that create pipelines and opportunities for aspiring leaders of color to meet the needs NACSA has identified. However, the sector has several layers of interrogation to meet this challenge.

The sustainability of the charter sector depends on the collective approach to this work and who is at the table for the next thirty years. Are we willing to expand school models and deepen support and engagement of community focused schools? Are we willing to awaken to what’s possible for children, families and communities may sit outside of the norms we’ve established?Will we support the next generation of Harriet’s, Lagra’s, and Tim’s to have even greater impact in the next chapter of our work?

As we collectively consider these questions, the National Charter Collaborative is committed to strengthening leaders of color in this work, creating pathways for new leaders, and we look forward to doing this work with our larger community.

Naomi Shelton is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Charter Collaborative

Gov. into law a bill last week that restricts how current events and America’s history of racism can be taught in Texas schools. It’s been commonly referred to as the “critical race theory” bill, though the term “critical race theory” never appears in it.

But in signing the bill, Abbott said “more must be done” to “abolish critical race theory in Texas,” and that he would ask the Legislature to address the issue during a special session this summer.

Meanwhile, the debate has across the nation. Last year, conservative activist Christopher Rufo the term “critical race theory” publicly to denounce anti-racist education efforts. Since then, conservative lawmakers, commentators and parents have raised alarm that critical race theory is being used to teach children that they are racist, and that the U.S. is a racist country with irredeemable roots. U.S. Sen. and others have for centering the nation’s story on racial conflict. In addition, conservative commentator Gerard Baker has that critical race theory bans critical thought in favor of what resembles religious instruction.

Those who study the discipline say that the attacks have nothing to do with critical race theory, but instead are targeting any teachings that challenge and complicate dominant narratives about the country’s history and identity.

They say that critical race theory itself actually shifts emphasis away from accusing individuals — in history or in the classroom — of being racist, which tends to dominate liberal discussions of racism. Instead, it offers tools for shifting public policy to create equity and freedom for all.

So what is critical race theory, and why is it relevant to Texans? And why is there an effort against it in Texas — and around the nation?

What is critical race theory?

Critical race theory is a discipline, analytical tool and approach that in the 1970s and ‘80s. Scholars took up the ways racial inequity persisted even after “a whole set of landmark civil rights laws and anti-discrimination laws passed” during the civil right movement, Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, said.

“These scholars and writers are asking, ‘why is it that racial inequality endures and persists, even decades after these laws have passed?’” HoSang said. “Why is racism still enduring? And how do we contribute to abolishing it?”

HoSang described critical race theory not as “content,” or a “set of beliefs,” but rather an approach that “encourage[s] us to move past the superficial explanations that are given about equality and suffering, and to ask for new kinds of explanations.”

In the introduction of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, a seminal collection of the foundational essays of the movement edited by principal founders and scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Neil Gotanda, the editors write that critical race theory is about transforming social structures to create freedom for all, and it’s grounded in an “ethical commitment to human liberation.”

Key concepts

Racial formation: One key concept in critical race theory is racial formation. Developed by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, the theory rejects the idea that race — Black, white, Asian — is a fixed category that has always meant the same thing. Instead, it traces the way that race has been defined, understood and constructed in different ways throughout history. Omi and Winant race as an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.”

For example, they write that in the U.S., the racial category of “Black” was created as slavery was established and evolved. Africans whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba or Fulani in Africa were grouped into the category “Black” as they were enslaved in America. Part of the meaning of being “Black” in America was being less than human and therefore enslavable. James Baldwin wrote in that Europeans who moved to America became “white” through a process of “denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.”

Omi and Winant describe racial formation as the “process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” — a process that has continued throughout history.

Monica Martinez, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in Latinx history, described how racial formation has played out in Texas in the racialization of Mexicans and the history of anti-Mexican violence.

“Before this region became Texas, there were debates about the character of Mexicans as a group of people,” she said. Figures like Stephen F. Austin and John Calhoun cast them as “treacherous people, thieves and murderers.”

From 1910 to 1920, she explained, hundreds of ethnic Mexicans at the hands of police and the Texas Rangers. Many of them were American citizens, and they included labor organizers and journalists who were writing about race and injustice. This amounted to an effort to “remove Mexicans from having economic or political or cultural influence,” she said.

“Oppression was enacted through violence, and it was sanctioned by governors, Texas legislators and local courts,” she said.

Oppression was furthered by “Juan Crow” segregation laws that racially segregated communities, Mexican American children to poorly developed schools and intimidated Mexicans from voting. This system of laws and policies had lasting effects on Mexican Americans and how they’re conceived of today.

Rhetoric has played a role in racial formation as well, continually loading the term “Mexican” with racial meaning.

“100 years ago, people talked about Mexicans as bandits, as thieves, and as a threat,” she said. “Today, they talk about them as potential cartel members and gang members.”

This language to racial profiling and violence today. “In communities in south Texas, anybody who looks ‘Mexican,’ or looks like an ‘immigrant,’ can be targeted—not just with policing, but also by [general] hostility,” she said.

Racism is structural: The mainstream understanding is that racism is an individual prejudice and choice. The default is to be free of bias and racism, so racism is an exception from the norm. It can be addressed by individual measures, such as humiliating and punishing the person who messes up, and enforcing moral codes on an individual level.

On the other hand, critical race theory says that racism is inherent in our institutions and structures of governance. It’s ordinary, and it’s baked into all our consciousnesses in complex ways through our education, government, the media, and our participation in systems. Racism must be addressed not just by punishing individuals, but by shifting structures and policies.

HoSang, the Yale professor, explained that critical race theory isn’t focused on “the stock characters of a racist,” such as Bull Connor, who directed police to use fire hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. HoSang said that a focus on denouncing individuals is “not a good use of our energy.” Instead, he said, the question is, “Even in places where civil rights and anti-discrimination laws passed, why do these forms of inequality persist?”

“So [critical race theory] actually says, no, we shouldn’t be preoccupied with trying to discern ‘who is the racist here,’ because that moves the attention away from the structures,” he said.

One example of this is in housing segregation — how “many, many complex layers” of “policies around zoning, lending and redlining, around private realtors and developers” have reproduced unequal access to housing, which in turn furthers gaps in generational wealth and stability, HoSang said.

In his for the Austin American-Statesman, Dan Zehr traces how this process has played out in Austin, which has one of the of income segregation in the nation. In 1928, city plans created a “negro district” east of Interstate 35 and denied public services and utilities to Black people outside of it, pushing Black residents to the eastern part of the city. When the government began offering loans to promote homeownership and help citizens rebuild wealth as part of the New Deal after the Great Depression, neighborhoods for people of color were excluded through a practice called “redlining.” Austin’s “negro district” was the largest redlined zone in the city, Zehr writes.

“As most Americans gained equity in new homes or upgraded the value of their existing houses, the black population saw a racial wedge driven deeper between Anglo affluence and African-American poverty,” he explains.

All these processes are systemic. “You can’t explain [this] through any one person’s biases and prejudices.” HoSang said.

Is critical race theory being taught in K-12 classrooms?

Experts and teachers put it plainly.

“Nobody in K-12 is teaching critical race theory,” Andrew Robinson, an 8th grade U.S. history teacher at Uplift Luna Preparatory in Dallas, said. “If I tried to walk in and teach critical race theory, my kids would just have a blank stare on their face.”

“Critical race theory is not being taught in schools,” Martinez said.

Keffrelyn Brown, a professor of cultural studies in education at UT-Austin and a teacher-educator, agreed.

“A vast majority of teachers in K-12 schools don’t know critical race theory,” she said. “They are not coming into the classroom and saying, ‘I’m going to teach critical race theory.’”

HoSang pointed out that to begin with, critical race theory is not “a body of content that can be taught.”

Given that, Abbott’s to “abolish critical race theory in Texas” make no sense, those who study it said.

“I don’t think you can ‘abolish’ a theory,” Brown said.

How does Texas’ new law and surrounding debate discuss critical race theory?

While it has gained the ire of national Republicans on Fox News and elsewhere for months, critical race theory was thrust in the political spotlight in Texas this spring because of the progress of HB 3979. Lawmakers that it combats the theory.

The wording of the bill is vague — for example, it bans discussion of current events unless a teacher “strive[s] to explore those topics from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective,” and teachers can’t teach that “with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”

In an early statement supporting the legislation, Lt. Gov. said that critical race theory is a “woke philosoph[y]” that “maintain[s] that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex or that any individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive.”

The phrase “critical race theory” does not appear in the bill once, however.

Brown described the way the term “critical race theory” has been mobilized as a label that has nothing to do with critical race theory itself.

“It has become the catch-all phrase for any kind of perspective, or any kind of framework, or any kind of knowledge that shows the roots of racism and how deeply they are embedded in our society,” she said.

Experts pointed out several key mischaracterizations of critical race theory.

Political discourse has claimed that critical race theory unfairly assigns guilt and blame to individuals based on their race. In one section that lists concepts teachers can’t teach, the bill prohibits teaching that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”

“[Critical race theory] has nothing to do with sentiment, guilt or shame,” HoSang said. “In fact, one of its premises is that those are not actually helpful places to examine. It’s taking us out of racism as a psychological and emotional question, and is focusing much more on the structures, the policies that people create that govern our lives.”

Martinez said the worry comes out of “false claims that when you teach histories of slavery, or race, or racism, that you make some white students feel guilty or shame for being white.”

To focus on directly instilling racial guilt would be taking a liberal, individualistic approach that critical race theory actually critiques.

The bill also prohibits teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

If anything, Martinez said, the current, longstanding way of teaching Texas history already teaches that one race is superior. “Look at how it teaches the history of the Texas revolution — that people like Stephen F. Austin are racially superior to the treacherous Mexican, like Santa Anna,” she said. “Texas history has been taught in a way that celebrates people who were fighting for the institution of slavery, that were espousing publicly that Mexicans were an inferior race.”

HoSang agreed. “There’s so much of the dominant curriculum that does just what the bills claim they’re objecting to, in terms of constructing a moral ideology,” he said. “One could argue the current curriculum promotes intolerance and animosity against Indigenous people, and that it does the same for immigrants.”

Future impact

Brown, the UT-Austin cultural studies professor, described the new Texas law as an effort to “try to stop the momentum over the last year and a half of families and communities saying we need to know more about racism.”

“We need to understand [our history of racism] so that we actually can get to a place where we are operating with justice, with equity, with fairness,” she said.

Instead, she said, the bill may “create enough confusion and possible concern that teachers or districts would just simply not talk about issues of race, or racism, for fear that it’s going to create some conflict.”

Abbott’s press office did not comment on what he additionally wants the legislature to do about “critical race theory” during this summer’s special session. But many teachers about the “chilling effect” that the new law will already have on their attempts to teach history well — which includes nurturing students’ critical thinking skills by bringing in multiple perspectives on historical events, and showing how the past has impacted present day issues.

“What they’re trying to say with this is that the actions of the past aren’t affecting the present,” said Robinson, the 8th grade history teacher in Dallas. “They want us to act like slavery and Jim Crow have no bearing on the issues in our society right now. And if that’s the case, then they should cancel my class.”

Isabella Zou is a reporting fellow , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Gov. has signed the controversial bill that prescribes how Texas teachers can talk about current events and America’s history of racism in the classroom, to Texas Legislature Online. His signature makes Texas one of a handful of states across the country that have passed such legislation, which aims to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” in K-12 public school classrooms.

Critical race theory is an academic term that studies how race and racism have impacted social and local structures in the United States. Over the past year, GOP leaders have decried its teaching in public schools, pointing to limited examples in various school districts across the state. In 2020, former President Donald Trump from training that discusses “critical race theory” or “white privilege,” calling it propaganda.

Several versions of the bill passed back and forth between the two chambers as Texas Democrats raised concerns the bill would have a chilling effect on classroom conversations. An amended version sent back to the House had appeared dead at one point after state Rep. , D-Round Rock, tanked it on a procedural violation. after senators reverted back to an earlier approved version of the bill and sent it to the governor’s office. for the legislation since the start of the legislative session.

This law, which goes into effect Sept. 1, includes a list of founding documents that Texas students must be taught. It also includes a list of additional historical documents written by people of color and women that House Democrats had added. It also mandates that students be taught “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”

Still, which states that teachers cannot be compelled to discuss current events and if they do, they must “give deference to both sides.” Opponents say it limits honest conversations about race and racism in American society and will force teachers to equivocate on controversial or sensitive topics that will result in less educated students.

It also prohibits students from getting credit or extra credit for participating in civic activities that include political activism or lobbying elected officials on a particular issue.

The version signed by the governor also bans the teaching of The New York Times’ , a reporting endeavor that examines U.S. history from the date when enslaved people first arrived on American soil, marking that as the country’s foundational date.

Supporters of , which mirrors legislation making its way through state legislatures across the country, argue they are trying to combat personal biases bleeding into public education, pointing to a few individual instances in school districts across the state where parents have raised concerns.

Throughout legislative debates over the bill, they expressed concerns that teachers are unfairly blaming white people for historical wrongs and distorting the founding fathers’ accomplishments. In recent years, there have been calls for more transparency about historical figures’ racist beliefs or connections to slavery.

But education advocacy groups said the law is ultimately politically motivated.

“The specific references by Republicans to banning Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project make it clear that they want this to be a wedge issue for state and local political races,” said the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers in a statement in late May. “The bill is part of a national movement by conservatives trying to sow a narrative of students being indoctrinated by teachers. Our members rightfully have expressed outrage against this insult of their professionalism to provide balanced conversations with students on controversial issues.”

Governors in Idaho and Tennessee have signed similar bills into law with more than a dozen other states considering legislation.

Kate McGee is a higher education reporter at The Texas Tribune, the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Disclosure: New York Times has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

Here are our top 5 takeaways.

1. Racism is a systemic issue. There are many interconnected systems affecting children’s daily lives and well-being. As with other systems in America, “The early childhood sector reflects many of the longstanding inequities that stem from the historical injustice of slavery, Jim Crow, as well as current policies and practices,” Escayg explained.

While changes have been made, these issues persist on individual and macro levels. This history is evident when valuing the profession, as well as when distinguishing between who is leading and who is in the service roles.

2. Legacy and leadership matter. “A lot of Black women, both enslaved and during Reconstruction, etc., were required to take care of other people’s children,” Futrell said, “And that notion, that history is still there to some extent.”

Today, the groups, institutions and organizations leading in the early childhood care and education arena are still very much white, “If we are not changing some of those levers, then we will continue to be racist in our underpinnings even if we do well for young children,” Iruka explained.

3. Care and education access must be equitable and high quality. Seminal studies show that high-quality care helps in terms of school entry, life and health outcomes. “We see lower rates of criminal offenses, higher rates of employment and stability and actual physical health outcomes in terms of diabetes and cardiovascular,” Iruka explained.

Not every family relies on these forms of child care, but there is a shortage for those that do. “We have a shortage in terms of spaces but also in terms of the workforce around prenatal and birth to age 5.” This deficit again disproportionately impacts children and families of color, including the providers themselves.

4. More representation in research is needed. “Because of stereotypes, the rich cultural perspectives and experiences of Black women are ignored, dismissed and silenced, and this is apparent in how we define quality in early childhood education,” Escayg said, adding, “Research funding and assessment continue to implement practices that deny the saliency of marginalized voices while recentering the social capital, power and privilege of the dominant group.”

Researchers define what matters, from whose perspective and create the measurement tools. Research must include more Black voices and researchers should apply a very critical, race-theory lens in their work.

5. Alignment and action are required. Before we begin work to change the system, we have to take stock in ourselves to ensure that “each of us is on a journey towards making sure that we aware of the biases that we hold and understand that we are gatekeepers to many things,” Iruka said.

She urged everyone to acknowledge the interconnectedness of this landscape and the need for wider anti-racist alignment. “We have to work hard with health systems, K-12 systems, community systems, even family support systems, to make deep and lasting change,” she said.

Racism is not something that only impacts Black or brown children; it impacts all of us. “This is about getting the best outcomes for our children,” McConnell explained. “They’re going to go beyond our homes and programs, and we want to make sure we have them well equipped.”

They are, however, little sponges, rapidly soaking up the attitudes and emotional responses they encounter. By the time they are toddling and talking, they have begun to form opinions and responses of their own — again, before they even have words to articulate their thoughts. By the time they are 2, they have begun to internalize racial bias.

“Racial attitudes are formed not only by what children hear, but by actions and reactions of those around them,” Dougé says. “You may never say to your child, ‘I think such-and-such about race,’ but your child will absorb what you think and feel.”

As health services director of Maryland’s Howard County Health Department, Dougé coauthored a policy statement for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) journal Pediatrics on the . Although progress has been made in the U.S. toward racial equality and equity, she writes, racism’s ongoing negative impact on the health and well-being of the nation’s children is clear. Failure to address racism will continue to undermine health equity for all of our children and families. The good news, she says, is that this moment represents an unprecedented opportunity to shape the future in powerful ways, for our children and for ourselves.

Just as we vaccinate our children early in their lives against polio and other devastating diseases, so we can inoculate our children against racial bias and provide them with lifelong tools to effectively address the biases they encounter. In the process, we can enrich our own lives.

As with all cultural change, the starting place is with ourselves, Dougé says. Confronting our biases and fears, examining our attitudes and consciously creating a wide, culturally diverse social network can provide the first steps toward profound social change. Make some new friends and take your babies with you. Your interest, kindness and compassion will model how you want your children to respond to people’s differences without your ever saying a word.

According to two , there’s even more to it than that. According to professor Kang Lee, these studies show that babies begin to show racial preferences by the time they 6 to 9 months old in favor or members of their own race and against those of other races. The cause, he says, appears to be a lack of exposure to other races. Prior studies from other labs indicate that more than 90% of infants only interact with people of their own race, which provides little to no experience with other-race individuals. Early exposure may help hard-wire awareness of “otherness” in positive ways.

When it’s time to talk about race, Dougé wants you to know it’s OK. It isn’t racist to address the issue or answer and anticipate questions your child may have — particularly in this time when every media source is insistently broadcasting stories of race. When your child notices differences, there’s no need to self-consciously shush them: consider it a teaching moment, and one in which similarities as well as differences can be underscored. If you don’t talk to them about race, they could begin to fill in the blanks with the biases of the world outside your home.

“It’s important that you have these conversations in ways that are developmentally appropriate,” she says. “When you teach your kids the importance of washing hands to prevent the spread of disease, you don’t go into the whole epidemiologic, scientific background. It’s the same way with race. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that people have different hair colors, eye colors and skin colors, and doing that when children are very young.”

“There’s no shame to noticing. You don’t want to shame anyone — we just want to start from very young being conscious of how we create the narrative about how people are and how they can be.”

One tip Dougé and Dr. Ashaunta Anderson, who cowrote “” as an AAP resource for parents, offer is when your preschooler notices and points out differences in the people around you in the grocery store or park, hold your arm against theirs to show the differences in skin tone even within your own family. Comparing and commenting about how our wonderful differences are will go much farther than trying to distract or shush a child who has noticed that people don’t all look the same. Or, if they say something biased, ask how they know that and gently correct the mistaken belief.

For most of our children, day care and school are the two places second to family where racial attitudes are learned. Though the coronavirus pandemic has limited many children’s exposure to other children, we won’t all be staying at home forever and Brugé says it’s extremely important for parents and caregivers to be conscious, aware and involved when it comes to what’s happening in their school and group situations.

According to a , racial profiling of our children begins almost as soon as children enter preschool. Black children represent 18% of preschool enrollment but 48% of children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. We are talking about 4-year-olds.

“There’s a role for parents to play in terms of making sure that the environment is supportive of all kids and reaching out to teachers, the board of education, whomever they need to get involved,” she says. “Beginning from an early age, parents can educate their children to speak up about things they see that are unfair or wrong. Depending on the age of the child, a parent might need to step in and say, ‘What you said there is probably not the nicest thing to say,’ when they observe stereotyping or bias. Again, this models effective behavior even starting at a very young age.

“There are always opportunities to teach our children to not just stand by but to actually help to make a difference when they can. If they’re too young or uncomfortable to intervene themselves, we can teach them to tell their teacher or another adult.”

Dougé says she is encouraged by the massive energy and awareness behind the Black Lives Matter protests that continue to take place throughout the country and particularly the participation of people who previously might not have thought that racism directly affected them.

“This is really an ‘all-and-everyone’ situation now,” she says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, the Black people have it,’ because that’s not how change happens. Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Yes, we have the historical figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the other Black people in that movement. But if you look at the March on Washington, many of the individuals were not Black. They were white Americans. There’s been a long history of white Americans taking up the cause of justice. And when we’re talking about women’s rights and suffrage, men also took part in that cause.”

“To move this country forward, it isn’t just the marginalized people who make that change. It’s all of us working together and coming in to help,” she says. “I know confronting all of this is uncomfortable, but it’s time to have these conversations and do this work.”

Starting with our babies and our own circle of connections.

RESOURCES

• Online module: (Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences)
• : The American Academy of Pediatrics Parenting Website
• “,” by Peggy McIntosh (Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August, 1989).��
• (TEDEd)
• (NPR)