After long decades of silence or backsliding, state legislatures are newly beginning to think about policy solutions to contemporary school segregation. A bill in North Carolina, for example, would require public reporting on levels of segregation at each school, and my home state of Massachusetts is considering a bill that would establish a grant program…
When I started this series, it was before police shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, before they tossed water to a white supremacist who had just murdered two protesters. That was only one week ago, but it already feels like forever-ago or, more accurately, feels like a version of this has been happening…
In part 1, posted last week, Matt Kautz looked at the origins of school policing in Boston: as students peacefully protested conditions in the city’s segregated schools, their dissent was criminalized. That post details efforts by the Boston School Committee, led by Louise Day Hicks, to frame student protest as dangerous, leading to police presence…
In the discussion about policing following George Floyd’s murder, we’ve learned (or been reminded) that contemporary policing has its roots in the slave patrols of the early 1800’s. It turns out there’s a sort of analogy with schools: instead of maintaining safety, school policing likewise began as an effort to criminalize people of color who…
In Boston, school policing understandably gets a lot of attention- students, for example, have been deported for fabricated offenses and the district’s proposed new policy doesn’t appear to protect students from ICE. Though it gets less attention, things are also bad in Springfield, where the struggling district pays over $1 million for armed school resource…
I’ve been aching to write something about the virus, quarantine and racial justice in education. It’s been tough, though. It’s tough to find a unique way into an issue that has clearly important, yet well-covered headlines- stories about things like racial disparities in access to online learning or about how school closures have raised even…
Shortly after starting my job at the Center for Education and Civil Rights, I learned about a unique art exhibit that was set to be installed at Penn State as part of a national tour. The exhibit is called “Still Separate – Still Unequal,” co-curated with Larry Ossei-Mensah, and it is the second part of…
May 17th will mark 65 years since the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. It’s a key moment in the year for the school integration movement, a time to reflect (often on the pace of resegregation or the unfulfilled promises of Brown) and a time that many groups use for conversation…
In the contemporary movement for school integration, there’s an important core principle: that integration is so much more than desegregation. While battles about race and student enrollment are still extremely critical, the impact of school integration would not nearly be the same if it was limited just to the demographic composition of districts/schools. Many, many…
As mentioned in yesterday’s post, it’s been a while since I’ve done a news roundup; so, there was a lot to talk about. To keep things manageable, I broke it up into three posts – the first looked at coverage of school segregation in Charlottesville and San Antonio (specifically analyze how media talks about or…
School Diversity Notebook 