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White Coaches Pick the Wrong Side When They Talk Down to Their Black Athletes
Editorâs Note: This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechingerâs newsletter. Now that the NCAA basketball tournament is over and passions about everyoneâs favorite team are not running as high, we need to have a conversation about coachesâ abusive…
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Night School Makes the Grade in Depicting Adults With Learning Disabilities
Anyone with an adult child with special needs knows how hard they can fall after they leave high school and no longer have that safety net. In school, academic and other cognitive tests are used to bring tutors, therapists and other academic supports to students who need them. After high school, all they get are…
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Educators Shouldn't Be Afraid to Teach the History of the N-Word
Omarosa Manigault Newman, the senior White House staffer turned author, said recently during her book tour that she had heard a tape of President Donald Trump using the n-word during his time on the reality show The Apprentice. Trump denied the existence of any such tape, tweeting, âI donât have that word in my vocabulary…
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LeBron's I Promise School Offers a Few Important Lessons in Education Reform
Last week, President Trump scoffedâalbeit passive aggressivelyâat basketball icon LeBron Jamesâ intelligence in a tweet, stating, âLebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon,â Mr. Trump wrote, âHe made Lebron look smart, which isnât easy to do. I like Mike!â But it looks like LeBron is the one taking Trump…
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A Case for Educational Reparations for Formerly Incarcerated People
We donât like to think of social justice as a zero-sum game. But there are costs associated with bringing equity and fairness to victims of discrimination, especially for those incarcerated throughout this nation. Those restitutions wonât come out of thin air. Stanford University research shows that the black incarceration rate nationwide is five times the…
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Dear, Teacher: How Does It Feel to Be an Oppressor?
The New York Daily News reported Feb. 1âthe start of Black History Monthâthat a teacher in a majority-minority school in the Bronx, N.Y., instructed three black children in her seventh-grade class to lie on the floor during a lesson on slavery. Then she stepped on the studentsâ backs, allegedly to show them âhow it feels…
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Black History Canât and Shouldnât Be Relegated to a Single Month
Last year, Vice President Mike Pence commemorated the start of Black History Month by acknowledging Abraham Lincoln, a white man, for submitting the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. Penceâs snubbing of black people happened on the same day President Donald Trump talked as if Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, writer and civil rights leader, were still alive…
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The Charter School Movement Is Complicit With Segregation
Charter schools didnât create segregation, but the charter school movement isnât helping to end it, either. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, âWe must never adjust ourselves to racial segregation,â he wasnât suggesting that black kids need white kids and white teachers in the classroom with them to learn. King was acutely aware that segregation…
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HBCUs Can Revive US Cities
Looking to move to a new city to live or to set up a business? Consider a town where thereâs an HBCU. âI didnât realize that it wasnât normal for your barber to live next to your professor until I left Grambling [in Louisiana],â said Grambling State University President Richard Gallot Jr. If thereâs anyone…
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Replacing Confederate Fables With Black-Girl Magic: UVA Honors Vivian Pinn
Editorâs note: Once a month, the National Interest column will tackle broader questions about what the country should do to increase educational opportunities for black youths. âI still remember my first trip to UVA, to the hospital, was in the â50s,â the renowned physician Vivian Pinn recounted to board directors of the National Medical Association…
