This guest post is written by Karen Babbs Hollett, a former teacher, instructional leader, and director at a state department of education. Karen is currently an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State University, where she studies issues of racial equity in early care and education (ECE) policy. Following…
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…
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…
I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about Serial’s Nice White Parents podcast. And, understandably so- it’s a remarkably engaging story about something felt by most people (everyone?) but rarely discussed in such a public kind of way. It’s made my day job a little easier- instead of going through some convoluted explanation about contemporary…
Today, teachers in the Little Rock School District (LRSD) are engaged in a one-day strike to protest a multi-year State effort to limit democratic engagement in Little Rock schools and divide the district. Tim Jackson wrote an update for Diane Ravitch’s blog after a crucial State board of education meeting in early October. I’m thrilled…
This is the first part of a two-part series on the Brown@65 conference, hosted by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights & Africana Research Center. Part two covers the conference keynote from Nikole Hannah-Jones, and it is available here. Today – 65 years after the Brown decision – the school integration movement is…
Last week, I posted a news roundup from the last month or so that focused on major stories about K-12 and higher ed admissions. As I mentioned there, these big stories likely overshadowed another trend I saw in the news during this time- compelling op-eds from white parents about the value of school integration and…
For the research roundups, I’ve wanted to focus on particular topics so that I can look at similarities/differences across different articles. (See recent posts on charter schools and school discipline.) Along those lines, this post focuses on a major (the major?) topic in contemporary education policy – school choice. Specifically: Can school choice be used…
The SD Notebook is easing back into the new year with a very quick post that highlights a variety of good and important studies from the end of 2018. I mainly just didn’t want these pieces to get lost amidst all the activity of the holidays, end of semester etc. As always, I hope you…
It’s been a little while since I wrote my last news roundup – I took some time off for summer, got a new job, etc, and, during that time, I was collecting stories about school diversity. There were a lot. I wrote about two big stories recently, comparing approaches to talking about race and school…
School Diversity Notebook 