Past, Present, and Future: Making and Unmaking the School-Prison Nexus

As part of a collaboration between SD Notebook and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), this post is reproduced from the most recent issue of PRRAC’s “Poverty & Race” journal, which focuses on the relationship between school finance and segregation. And, it’s great. I highly recommend reading the articles themselves and/or tuning into…

Betrayal of Brown: A recap of NCSD’s #RodriguezAt50 Twitter chat

San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the case that essentially approved school funding inequity, has been called one of the “most important SCOTUS decisions you’ve never heard of.” I was thinking about why/how it got this reputation during the #RodriguezAt50 Twitter chat marking its 50th anniversary, hosted by the National Coalition on School Diversity…

#PoliceFreeSchools in Springfield, MA

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…

SD Research Roundup: Secession, voluntary integration and school spending, part 2

Recent research has examined contemporary school segregation in a variety of forms, including segregation of students in early childhood education, the relationship between school segregation and residential segregation, and segregation that clusters low-income students in under-resourced schools. In part 1 of this post, I linked to a few of these studies before focusing in more…

School integration 65 years after Brown

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…

SD News Roundup: The Different Faces of Segregation

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…

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…