Accountability Systems & the Persistence of School Segregation

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…

New Research: When White parents believe in diversity and deficit

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…

New Research: School Rezoning Processes & Outcomes

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…

As new federal funds for school integration efforts become a possibility, we should explore how current integration policies address race and choice in their design

This post is written by Madeline Good, a former teacher and current doctoral student studying educational policy at the University of Missouri. Her primary research focuses on how policies interact with the sociological, political, and technological contexts of education, especially regarding issues of equity and teacher expertise. A new era of school integration efforts may…

With the potential for new federal funding for ECE, we need to critically analyze how current funding policies have built on decades of discrimination

This post is written by Karen Babbs Hollett, a former teacher, instructional leader, and director at a state department of education. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Penn State University where she studies racial equity in early care and education (ECE) policy. The pandemic has made clear how reliant our nation is on early…

Hate incidents in “good” schools

Things aren’t looking good in Massachusetts’ suburban schools these days. Last month, the Boston Globe released a series of articles on a culture of racism and homophobia on the Danvers High School hockey team. On “hard R Fridays,” students on the all-white team shouted the n-word in team huddles. When one player refused, others welted…

New Research: Literacy outcomes in segregated schools

I’m excited to feature new guest authors on the blog, with a new study that supports a fundamental pillar of school integration advocacy: segregated schools are bad for student learning. Specifically, the authors re-analyzed all studies, from the last 25 years, that compare English language arts/reading outcomes with school composition (race and SES). They went…

New Research: School resegregation in Boston

A new report puts concrete (and indeed shocking) numbers on something we know anecdotally: White families with kids leave the city (in this case, Boston) when their kids get to be school-aged. Released last month, Kids Today from Boston Indicators looks at how these (and other) troubling trends have contributed to increased segregation in Boston’s…

Preschool Segregation, part 2: “Segregation at an Early Age” 2019 update

I’m thrilled to announce the release of “Segregation at an Early Age – the 2019 Update,” co-written with Erica Frankenberg and published by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights. In part 1 of this post, I summarized three very recent studies of preschool segregation, part of a flurry of activity on this topic.…