The School Diversity Notebook is excited to offer a guest post from Dr. Liz Nigro (she/her)! Liz is a former public elementary school teacher, who worked for four years as a general and special educator in Washington, DC. Her experience teaching in two segregated school contexts, with vastly different educational opportunities, shaped her decision to…
I grew up in a town with a liberal reputation and an overwhelmingly white k-12 school district, where racism was an animating feature of everything from zoning laws to playground “jokes.” There are obviously many places like this, and, as you know, these places typically aren’t considered to be “segregated schools” in need of political…
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…
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 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…
In part 1 of this post, I looked at SchoolSparrow.com, an equity-oriented school ratings site that is positioned as an alternative to GreatSchools.org. In the lead up to its national launch, I had an email conversation with the founder, Tom Brown, where I outlined some mixed feelings about the site. As I say in part…
This guest post is written by Katie Dulaney, a former middle school teacher in North Carolina. Katie is currently an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State University, where she studies how school districts instill and nurture commitments to equity. This post is part two in a three-part…
Glenn Youngkin was in the news a lot last week. It wasn’t great. And, while this post won’t attempt a summary of what he knew and didn’t know, said and didn’t say about the prayerful salute to a Jan 6 flag at one of his rallies, it did feel like a good reason to revisit…
I’m happy to be back with the first SD Notebook post in a while. As you know, there’s been a lot going on in this world. And, while the Critical Race Theory bans have rightly gotten a lot of attention, not everything has been so maddening. Though smaller in number, there are also state level…
Though it might go unnoticed in the hailstorm of coronavirus, election, etc news, the pandemic has caused cities to reconsider a bastion of racial segregation: gated entry for so-called “elite” public K-12 schools. Boston, for example, has three “exam” (or, I prefer, “restrictive enrollment”) schools, which determine entry based on student GPA and scores on…
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