SD Notebook is back in 2024 with a new post by Margaret Thornton about her great new book on an overlooked aspect of contemporary school segregation: classroom ability tracking. We know that segregation has increased rather dramatically since the late ‘80’s. Of the schools that maintain some level of diversity/integration, however, we can’t fully know…
I wrote this last year when the teachers’ union in my home district went on strike for (and won!) a better contract for the educators and students in our diverse and quirky little community. And, I’m reposting here in honor of the strikerversary earlier this week. Enjoy! It’s Monday October 17, 2022 and, as Malden…
As part of a collaboration between SD Notebook and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), this post is reproduced from the most recent issue of PRRAC’s “Poverty & Race” journal, which focuses on the relationship between school finance and segregation. And, it’s great. I highly recommend reading the articles themselves and/or tuning into…
This guest post is written by Bonnie Siegler and Greer Mellon. Bonnie Siegler is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia University. Her research examines mechanisms that produce inequality and equality in education. Her current work focuses on how equity and diversity discourses relate to efforts for promoting racial equity and diversity in educational organizations.…
SD Notebook is back from a mid-summer break with a guest post that extends a recent series on the relationship between parental decision-making and school segregation. Guest authored by Allison Roda and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, this post summarizes their new study on how White parents navigate New York City’s complex school choice ecosystem. It includes stunning…
This guest post is written by Bryan Mann, a faculty member in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department at the University of Kansas. Bryan uses geographic methods and spatial theories to understand educational policies and their effects. You can view his research team’s website at https://geographyedu.org/. The summary below offers a contrast to a…
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the case that essentially approved school funding inequity, has been called one of the “most important SCOTUS decisions you’ve never heard of.” I was thinking about why/how it got this reputation during the #RodriguezAt50 Twitter chat marking its 50th anniversary, hosted by the National Coalition on School Diversity…
Courtney Everts Mykytyn, my friend and late founder of Integrated Schools, always talked about the power of “playground” conversations in shaping the school choice decisions that parents make for their children. As a white person in our deeply segregated society, I’ve mostly had these kinds of conversations with other white parents. As you’d imagine, test…
This guest post is written by Alexandra Cooperstock, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersection of neighborhoods, schools, and policy for shaping inequality and educational opportunity. Originally published in the Social Forces journal, this post is a summary of research about school district secession in…
Originally published in the Poverty & Race journal, this post is a summary of a new research brief that I co-wrote with my friend James Noonan. James worked for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA), one of the promising alternatives to test-based school quality measurement that we highlight below. When James started in the faculty…
This post is written by Sarah Asson, Annie Maselli, and Ruth Krebs Buck, graduate students at Penn State University and research assistants on the Longitudinal School Attendance Boundary Survey (LSABS). LSABS is led by Dr. Erica Frankenberg, Penn State Professor of Education and Demography at Penn State, and Dr. Christopher Fowler, Associate Professor of Geography…
This guest post is written by Alexandra Freidus, an educational ethnographer, writer, and professor of educational leadership at the University of Connecticut. Alex uses sociocultural and critical race theory to explore how educators, policymakers, families, and young people sustain and interrupt racialized inequality in public schools. Alex’s writing and teaching are deeply informed by more…
This post was originally published in Poverty & Race a journal from the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. In addition to the article posted below, the most recent edition includes articles about expanding access to affordable housing and an excerpt from this new book on school segregation in NYC. All are highly recommended. The…
It’s bad out there right now. Even if you’ve been following the anti-”CRT” backlash closely, the sheer volume of activity might still be surprising. As reported recently in Ed Week, PEN America did a national scan of the 2022 legislative session so far, looking for bills that restrict K-12 classroom conversations or staff training about…
This post is written by Andrene J. Castro & Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, each professors in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. Along with Kimberly Bridges, Shenita E. Williams, and Mitchell Perry, they’ve been engaged in a larger project researching school rezoning across Virginia between 2019 and 2021. The summary below offers key findings from…
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