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…

Nice white parents in Nashville

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…

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…

SD News Roundup: Focus on Pittsburgh

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…

SD News Roundup: Three major stories

There’s been a few major stories related to school diversity recently, and this post is a quick (and small) collection of some of the best coverage/resources I’ve come across. Since readers are likely quite familiar with each of these, I’m keeping my summaries extremely short. I mainly just want to put these out there, in…

SD Resources Roundup: Equity Maps, Toolkits, Events & More

I normally include resources and events/opportunities as part of the news roundup posts, but I’ve come across so much great stuff lately that I thought it makes sense to highlight these in a standalone post. As always, I hope you find something useful. And, feel free to use comments to let me know if I…

SD Research Review: Secession in Memphis-Shelby County & the meaning of “local control”

This post is about a great piece of recent research on school resegregation. I want to talk about the content of the article itself as well as the value, more generally, of research that relies on interviews and media analysis to understand the current moment that we’re experiencing with race and schooling. I think this…

SD News Roundup: #HB514 and Re-Segregation in North Carolina

Last week, I wrote about a promising school integration lawsuit in New Jersey. This week, the news is not as good: On Wednesday, North Carolina passed a law – #HB514 – that will allow 4 majority white suburbs of Charlotte to secede from the countywide Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. Although secession efforts have been common across…

SD News Roundup: Spotlight on New Jersey

There was major news out of New Jersey last week: Civil Rights groups filed a lawsuit against the state for laws that codify school segregation. This post is a very quick summary for those who are unfamiliar and then my attempt to put the lawsuit in the larger context of the struggle for racial justice…