The major news story this week was a Kentucky bill (HB151), passed by the state House of Representatives, that has been described as the “death of integration.” The language of the bill is simple: it would “permit a student to enroll in the school nearest to their home,” with a few minor exceptions (see great…
In what has become an early theme of the DeVos’ DOE and its supporters, last week our new Secretary of Education made a comment that was as shockingly racist as it was mind boggling. It’s been covered extensively and dissected thoughtfully, so I did not want to rehash that here. But, what I did want…
Close readers of the blog will note that I typically post news summaries on the Sunday following that week’s news; however, I’ve decided to switch that up a bit. I noticed I had mainly been using the roundups to post short summaries of recently published research – I wanted to get this stuff “out there,”…
It’s a short roundup this week. There was some speculation about who might picked to lead the Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Education. (Gail Heroit, a law professor at the University of San Diego and an apparent opponent of considering race in college admissions.) And, a look inside recruitment strategies at…
The third in a series of posts about “All Deliberate Speed,” by Charles Ogletree. See the first post here about the Brown decision and the second post about the Boston busing riots. Part memoir and part historical survey, “All Deliberate Speed” weaves between Ogletree’s personal experience as, in his language, a “Brown baby” (born near…
This week, there was a great story about housing segregation and another new report on the connection between charters and school segregation. The key argument of “Segregation had to be invented,” is exactly that. The article traces the history of segregation in Charlotte, NC, though its historical background is relevant for much of the South.…
Just over a week ago, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education and Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. For advocates of school desegregation, it’s hard to imagine a worse scenario. In light of all this, I wanted to revisit the GAO report on school segregation mentioned in my first post. As noted there, the…
This week’s news roundup features an opinion piece from the New York Times and a new report from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (IMO) at the University of Minnesota. IMO was founded by Myron Orfield, an influential social demographic researcher and brother of Gary Orfield, himself an influential school desegregation researcher who leads the Civil…
Second installment in a series of posts about “All Deliberate Speed” by Charles Ogletree. Click here for the first post. When I was reading chapter 4 of “All Deliberate Speed” – about the 1974-75 Boston busing riots – it reminded me of the account in “All Souls” of the anger/racism that gripped the city that…
It was a mixed bag of articles this week, though one theme remains common: that popular policies have largely been ineffective in improving student learning and, meanwhile, have exacerbated (or ignored) school segregation. This Atlantic article looks at a recent report that went overlooked among everything else that’s happened so far this year. Released just…
School Diversity Notebook 