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12 Ways To Understand Equity In Education
Center for Curriculum Redesign
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4/1/22
“The difficulty in understanding equity and social justice in education and in developing effective policies comes from conceptual confusion. A large range of concepts populate this space of research and policy, often with conflicting meanings and consequences. An attempt is made to distinguish and define the most common conceptualizations of equity:”
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Head Of School Reflects On Maintaining Neutrality In High Conflict Times
Deerfield
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10/22/21
““The Kelvin Report” remains one of the most important statements describing the purpose and mission of universities, and by implication, all institutions committed to learning… It advances an argument for what the drafting committee called “neutrality” in political and social action. In order to protect mission—the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” —educational institutions, the committee concluded, “must maintain independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” Schools and universities are not, in other words, political organizations or political actors; they are places of learning, inquiry, and question-asking. In this way the university stands apart from the world, even as it remains, in its commitment to inquiry, in vital relationship to it. On the one hand, the institution, as a corporate entity, seeks to remain neutral, recusing itself from political engagement. On the other hand, it imagines itself as a space of open and robust civic inquiry, especially for students. It claims for itself the widest possible scope for discussion and debate.”
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Head Of School Reflects On Maintaining Neutrality In High Conflict Times
Deerfield
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10/22/21
““The Kelvin Report” remains one of the most important statements describing the purpose and mission of universities, and by implication, all institutions committed to learning… It advances an argument for what the drafting committee called “neutrality” in political and social action. In order to protect mission—the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” —educational institutions, the committee concluded, “must maintain independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” Schools and universities are not, in other words, political organizations or political actors; they are places of learning, inquiry, and question-asking. In this way the university stands apart from the world, even as it remains, in its commitment to inquiry, in vital relationship to it. On the one hand, the institution, as a corporate entity, seeks to remain neutral, recusing itself from political engagement. On the other hand, it imagines itself as a space of open and robust civic inquiry, especially for students. It claims for itself the widest possible scope for discussion and debate.”
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Simple Values-Based Intervention That Reduces Learning Gaps And Discipline
Fordham Institute
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10/4/21
“The findings are striking for such a simple intervention. How simple? The writing exercises were given just three times in each school year. Pencils, paper, and one hour of time spread out over seven or eight months—even doable virtually. It’s hard to get much simpler than that. Why wouldn’t schools want to jump on this even while the mechanisms at work here are being evaluated?”
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“How Do You Cultivate Genius In All Students?”
KQED
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9/14/21
“Cultivating a genius isn’t just about introducing someone to a set of facts or skills and believing in them. Muhammad distilled what matters into the five tenets of the Historically Responsive Literacy framework: identity, skills, intellectualism, criticality and joy.”
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Bridging Difference Is An Act of Feeling, Not Thought
Aeon
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8/9/21
“It’s time to give up the idea that ‘truth’ is the almighty stop-gap for justification and the hope that reasons will win out if we just find the right ones. Politically transformative work should aim to cause feelings and experiences in one’s adversaries that invite further investigation and reflection. Science, the environment, racial justice – all of these things matter because we care about them. As Nietzsche once mused, the head is merely the intestine of the heart.”
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“Don’t Mistake Training for Education”
Inside Higher Ed
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4/29/21
“Training has its uses. It can even save lives. (See CPR above.) But training is woefully inadequate when it comes to confronting social problems such as poverty, discrimination and racism. These are long-standing, knotty and complex issues that defy ready-made solutions. Any serious effort to address them must start with education, a process for which there are no shortcuts.”
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“A Racial Slur, A Viral Video, And A Reckoning”
New York Times
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12/26/20
“In one sense, the public shaming… underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.” But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties.”
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“Racism In America” A Free Collection Of Essays By Harvard University Press
Harvard
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8/4/20
“Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black racism through the eyes of our most incisive commentators. Readers will find such classic selections as Toni Morrison’s description of the Africanist presence in the White American literary imagination, Walter Johnson’s depiction of the nation’s largest slave market, and Stuart Hall’s theorization of the relationship between race and nationhood. More recent voices include Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the pernicious myth of Black criminality, Elizabeth Hinton on the link between mass incarceration and 1960s social welfare programs, Anthony Abraham Jack on how elite institutions continue to fail first-generation college students, Mehrsa Baradaran on the racial wealth gap, Nicole Fleetwood on carceral art, and Joshua Bennett on the anti-Black bias implicit in how we talk about animals and the environment.”
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Chris Emdin: “Reality Pedagogy” Is Meeting Kids Where They Are
Atlantic
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7/24/20
“Reality pedagogy involves connecting academic content to events happening in the world that affect students. The curriculum can weave in specific references to the neighborhoods where young people are from, inequities that they and their families are hurt by, and protests in the community. But that doesn’t mean these lessons are always serious. Students can compete to show their knowledge through art, games, and music.”
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“Reflections From A Token Black Friend”
Medium
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6/4/20
“If there is one thing every token black friend knows, it is that we are not to provoke serious discussions of racial issues among our white crowd. We should only offer an opinion on such matters when invited to do so by our white peers. Further, we should ensure that the opinion is in line enough with the shared opinion of our white friends, as to not make it too awkward or ostracizing. It doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be this way. Many of us are eager to share our stories, and we have been waiting for the invitation to do so.”
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“Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters”
McKinsey
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5/19/20
“Our latest report shows not only that the business case remains robust but also that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time. These findings emerge from our largest data set so far, encompassing 15 countries and more than 1,000 large companies. By incorporating a “social listening” analysis of employee sentiment in online reviews, the report also provides new insights into how inclusion matters. It shows that companies should pay much greater attention to inclusion, even when they are relatively diverse.”
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“How To Respond To Microaggressions”
New York Times
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3/3/20
“Should you let that comment slide, or address it head on? Is it more harm than it’s worth? We can help.”
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What Is The Effect Of Bringing Low Income Kids Of Color To Selective Private Schools?
New Yorker
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3/2/20
“We are all embedded within systems, but each life—each child—is an unrepeatable anecdote. According to the adults I knew when I was a kid, the worst thing in the world was to be a “statistic,” subsumed into a mass of low expectations and bad outcomes determined by color and class and sustained by a bureaucracy that was, at best, inept and, at worst, intractably racist. Education, then, was triage; escape was a higher-order concern than reform. Parents murmured about how So-and-So had got her daughter into Such-and-Such school, and had spirited the kid away from a school system whose failures symbolized—and, in many ways, flowed out of—a larger set of brutal social facts.”
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“7 Ways Of Looking At Diversity”
Inside Higher Ed
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11/21/19
“There are all kinds of ways that people talk about identity and diversity these days. I’ve been trying to organize them into approaches. Here’s my first crack. My goal here is to be descriptive, not judgmental. I don’t think these approaches are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people within each of these approaches are fiercely committed to their own paradigms in a way that dismisses others.”
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5 Ways To Be An Anti-Racist Educator
ASCD
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10/1/19
“The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist… Teaching for an antiracist future starts with us, the educators. An antiracist educator actively works to dismantle the structures, policies, institutions, and systems that create barriers and perpetuate race-based inequities for people of color.”
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An "Adversity Score”? The SAT Seeks To Recognize Student Challenges
New York Times
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5/17/19
“The decision to give students who take the SAT test a numerical rating that reflects the challenges they have overcome in life is the most telling sign yet that universities across the country are searching for ways to diversify their classes without considering race or ethnicity… In the initial data the College Board has collected on some schools that have tried out the new tool, it found that disadvantaged students who did not attend high schools known to be regular feeders to college were more likely to be admitted.”
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How To Manage The Dr. Seuss Controversy Without Giving Up Dr. Seuss
Teaching Tolerance
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3/4/19
“In light of a new study revealing stereotyped characters across Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, published just before Read Across America Day, how can educators engage students in a critical discussion of this canonical author?”
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A Striking Short Film About How Inclusion Works
Respectability
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12/6/18
“All kids want to play. Kids with disabilities are no different. “Ian” is a short, animated film inspired by the real-life Ian, a boy with a disability determined to get to the playground despite his playmates bullying him. This film sets out to show that children with disabilities can and should be included... “Ian” premiered at Cannes in May 2018.”
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How (And How Not) To Discuss Sensitive Topics In Class
Medium
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8/5/18
“So often… class discussions become a reflection of existing power relations in society, rather than a tool for dismantling and reorganizing them.”
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"Why Diversity Wins” - A Succinct And Compelling Explanation [Video]
Everything is s Remix
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7/23/18
“This kind of diversity, diversity of thought, is the hidden advantage of diversity, because it better enables us to solve complex problems.”
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"Here's What’s Going On With Affirmative Action And School Admissions”
NPR
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7/7/18
“An announcement from Jeff Sessions, a Harvard lawsuit, changes in the Supreme Court and proposals for selective high schools in New York City. Here's a rundown of the facts in place, and the latest developments.”
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“3 Keys To Effective Diversity And Inclusion Training”
Gallup
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5/31/18
“A meta-analysis of more than 40 studies on diversity and inclusion training found that training is effective when it meets these three conditions: 1. the training is complemented by other diversity initiatives. 2. the training targets both awareness and skills development. 3. the training is conducted over a significant period of time.”
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Abby Wambach’s Barnard Commencement Address: “Demand The Ball”
Ladders
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5/21/18
"Our landscape is overrun with archaic ways of thinking about women, about people of color, about the “other,” about the rich and the poor, about the powerful and the powerless. And these ways of thinking are destroying us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We will not Little Red Riding hood our way through life. We will unite our pack, storm the valley together and change the whole bloody system.”
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First Translation Of The Odyssey Into English By A Woman
New York Times
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11/2/17
"I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker.”
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A Modern History Of The “Diversity” Movement In Schools
New Yorker
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10/9/17
"The modern history of diversity began on June 28, 1978. That was the day the Supreme Court decided a case brought by Allan Bakke, a white military veteran who had applied to medical school at the University of California, Davis… The Court’s decision was not particularly decisive—there were six separate opinions.”
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The Business Case For Inclusive Decision Making
Forbes
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9/21/17
"Teams that follow an inclusive process make decisions 2X faster with 1/2 the meetings. Decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results.”
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Red State, Blue State: A School Pen Pal Exchange
San Francisco Friends School
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9/6/17
"Today, we write back. We thank them for looking at our projects and ask for more details about what they mean when they say “safety net.” We try to answer their questions about our thoughts on the “Muslim ban.””
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Teenagers Respond: What Defines American Values? [Video]
New York Times
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8/23/17
“"What are your values as a person? What are American values? Do you think the country is living up to those values today? Why or why not?”… I wrote to dozens of teenagers — young people I’d met at protests, young Republicans I’d talked to around Election Day, teenagers who were already vlogging about their high school experiences on YouTube. I also reached out to Christian youth groups, home-schooling associations, L.G.B.T. rights organizations, groups representing Native American youth and many other organizations, asking them to recommend young people who might want to participate.
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Hashtag Emerges For Resources To Teach About Charlottesville
Twitter
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8/13/17
"Educators: Be thinking now about how to engage students in critical discussions about white supremacy. Check out #CharlottesvilleCurriculum”
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9 General Tips For Talking With Kids About Racial Violence
LA Times
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8/12/17
"Mental health experts and parents discussed their experiences Saturday, and shared advice for talking to children about the violence in Charlottesville. Here are their tips:”
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The Google Memo: Echoes Of Campus “Free Speech” Issues
Gizmodo
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8/5/17
"Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.”
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Colleges Hold Separate Commencement for Black, 1st Gen Students
New York Times
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6/2/17
"Participants say the ceremonies are a way of celebrating their shared experience as a group, and not a rejection of official college graduations, which they also attend. Depending on one’s point of view, the ceremonies may also be reinforcing an image of the 21st-century campus as an incubator for identity politics.”
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A Deep Reflection On Inclusion, When It’s Real, And When It’s Not
Medium
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4/25/17
"By celebrating the inclusion of insiders — people of different genders and races who have been pre-assimilated into Silicon Valley via Harvard or Georgetown or Stanford — the industry misdirects attention from the inclusion of actual outsiders. We don’t change much by publicizing that we have hired people that we would have hired anyway… You’re a woman who went to Harvard, we have a job for you! You are an African American engineer from MIT, we have 6 competing offers! That’s not to say that these candidates aren’t fantastic, they are. It’s saying that we’re not looking past race and gender to other forms of socioeconomic mobility.”
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Dr. Chris Emdin Electrifies SXSWedu: Kids, Trauma, & Learning
EdSurge
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3/6/17
“When a student is brilliant on the street corner but falling asleep in class, something is wrong with the schooling system.”
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The Trump Effect, 2,500 Acts Of Hate In Schools, And How To Combat It
Teaching Tolerance
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11/29/16
"The results of a survey taken by more than 10,000 educators following Donald Trump’s election and a divisive campaign that targeted racial, ethnic and religious minorities… described an increase in the use of slurs and derogatory language, along with disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags. The report also cited more than 2,500 specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric, including assaults on both students and teachers and acts of vandalism depicting hate symbols and speech… The report also offers a set of recommendations to help school leaders manage student anxiety and combat hate speech and acts of bias.”
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The Long, Slow Process Of Turning Hate To Love
Washington Post
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10/15/16
"He tried to convince [his father] for a few hours at the restaurant. He told him about white privilege and repeated the scientific studies about institutionalized racism. He mentioned the great Islamic societies that had developed algebra and predicted a lunar eclipse. He said that now, as he recognized strains of white nationalism spreading into mainstream politics, he felt accountable. “It’s not just that I was wrong. It’s that it caused real damage,” he remembered saying.”
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How Promoting Nonconformity Strengthens Your Organization
Harvard Business Review
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10/1/16
"Of course, not all conformity is bad. But to be successful and evolve, organizations need to strike a balance between adherence to the formal and informal rules that provide necessary structure and the freedom that helps employees do their best work… Let’s look at the three main, and interrelated, reasons why we so often conform at work… Six strategies can help leaders encourage constructive nonconformity in their organizations and themselves.”
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Howard Stevenson on How to Talk with Kids after Racial Incidents
University of Pennsylvania
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7/13/16
"Talking about race in America can be scary. People don’t want to be seen as a racist or someone trying to start a conflict. But the less prepared we are to think about race and talk about race, the scarier those conversations are when they occur. And children need tools for how to feel and speak about these issues.”
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How (Unpaid) Summer Internships Deepen Inequality
New York Times
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7/5/16
"As the summer internship season gets into full swing, consider, for instance, how a plum internship may alter a young person’s career trajectory. While some students take a summer job in food service to pay the bills, others can afford to accept unpaid jobs at high-profile organizations, setting them on a more lucrative path… The broader implication is privilege multiplied by privilege, a compounding effect prejudiced against students who come from working-class or lower-income circumstances. By shutting out these students from entry-level experiences in certain fields, entire sectors engineer long-term deficits of much-needed talent and perspective. In other words, we’re all paying the price for unpaid internships.”
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Close Achievement Gaps With Simple Interventions For New Students
Stanford
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5/31/16
"The results add to the evidence that well designed psychological interventions could help close persistent achievement gaps occurring in higher education institutions nationwide. Students who are from lower income backgrounds, under-represented minority groups or families with no previous college graduates typically do worse than other students at the same schools… The findings from the study… showed that the interventions narrowed the difference not only in academic achievement in college but also in terms of students’ involvement in campus life and building relationships with classmates, faculty and administrators.”
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Identity Politics In Today’s Age Of Student Activism
New Yorker
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5/30/16
"“This is the generation of kids that grew up being told that the nation was basically over race,” Renee Romano, a professor of history at Oberlin, says. When they were eleven or twelve, Barack Obama was elected President, and people hailed this as a national-historic moment that changed everything. “That’s the bill of goods they’ve been sold,” Romano explains. “And, as they get older, they go, ‘This is crap! It’s not true!’ ” They saw the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. And, at schools like Oberlin, they noticed that the warm abstractions of liberalism weren’t connecting with the way things operated on the ground.”
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Why One Star Student Chose To Ditch College And Go Off The Grid
New York Post
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5/29/16
"Two weeks earlier, I was almost finished with my sophomore year at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science when I decided to start my new life. I skipped my final exams, changed bank accounts, got a second phone number and deleted my Facebook page. I needed to break from my old life of high pressure and unreasonable expectations.”
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Sports And The Classroom: A Plea To Coaches To Bridge The Gap
Chronicle of Higher Education
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4/1/16
"How ironic it was then to discover that at one of the greatest institutions of learning in the world, coaches built a tacit but impenetrable wall between athletics and the life of the mind… coaches made no attempt to get to know me as a person beyond basketball, except when I decided to leave the team. There were no conversations regarding my academic life, no conversations about my personal background and no discussions about the cultural and social responsibilities that come with being a student-athlete.”
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Students Recommend 25 NYT Articles For Women’s History Month
New York Times
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3/3/16
"In honor of Women’s History Month, we asked our spring Student Council — 25 teenagers from all over the United States, as well as from China, South Korea, England and Canada — to search the Times and find the most interesting pieces they could on the broad topic of gender… They unearthed everything from a 1911 report on the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and a 1972 Times review of “Free to Be … You and Me” to current articles, videos and essays on Hillary Clinton, campus rape debates, gender pronouns, abortion, Title IX, parenting, and the struggles of the transgender community.”
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James Baldwin’s Talk To Teachers In 1963 Is Remarkably Relevant
Zinn Education Project
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3/1/16
"Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within.”
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Don't Talk About Privilege: Get To Know Different People
Atlantic
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2/27/16
"These kids almost certainly don't need to spend any more time talking to classmates about what sets them apart from the world around them. They need to have as many experiences as possible outside the privileged halls of their schools… They need to discover not just what makes them different, but what they share in common, and what they can learn from individuals who've taken different paths through life.”
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Protecting Some Students From Stereotype Threat Benefits All
Stanford
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1/25/16
"The findings showed that the classrooms with higher concentrations of African American students protected from stereotype threat by the intervention triggered higher academic performances among all classmates – regardless of race or participation in the intervention."
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Bruni: Diversifying School Campuses Must Be Only The First Step
New York Times
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12/12/15
"A given [school] may be a heterogeneous archipelago. But most of its students spend the bulk of their time on one of many homogeneous islands. That’s consistent with the splintered state of America today, but it’s a betrayal of education’s mission to challenge ingrained assumptions, disrupt entrenched thinking, broaden the frame of reference.”
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Diversity Leads To Better Decision Making In Groups
New York Times
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12/9/15
"When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.”
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How Can Technology Solutions Help Those Who Need Them Most?
EdTechResearcher
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12/4/15
"In most of the research on this topic, affluent students use technology for more creative purposes with more adult supervision, while less affluent students use technology for repetitive drill and practice without the same level of guidance… It doesn’t have to be this way.”
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“1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault On Campus”
New York Times
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9/21/15
"27.2 percent of female college seniors reported that, since entering college, they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact — anything from touching to rape — carried out by incapacitation, usually due to alcohol or drugs, or by force.”
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A Sociological Deep Dive Into Microaggressions and Victimhood
Atlantic
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9/11/15
"The sociologists offer structural explanations for why college students are addressing conflicts within the framework of “microaggressions.” Victimhood culture “arose because of the rise of social conditions conducive to it,” they argue, “and if it prevails it will be because those conditions have prevailed.” Those social conditions include the following…”
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MLK: 6 Pillars Of Nonviolent Resistance, And The Greek Sense Of “Agape”
Brain Pickings
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7/1/15
"Nonviolence … does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation.”
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Does Privilege Influence Post-College Well-Being?
Gallup
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7/1/15
"What we do know is that regardless of minority status, socioeconomic class and first-generation college student status, how you take advantage of college is more important than where you go. For example, graduates who had mentoring relationships, internships and jobs where they applied their learning, as well as long-term projects lasting more than a semester, doubled their odds of being engaged in work and thriving in their well-being later in life. It may be the case that those who value college most take more advantage of the opportunity.”
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Should Wealthy Schools Educate the Least Wealthy Students?
Inside Higher Ed
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5/21/15
"Selective institutions should do more to enroll low-income students, and that it would be fair for the government to expect institutions that receive a large amount of federal aid to also enroll higher numbers of low-income students.”
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A Deep Dive Into The First-Generation College Experience
New York Times
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4/12/15
"Freshmen were assigned to attend one of two hourlong orientation sessions. In one, panelists gave advice about the transition to college and challenges like choosing classes. In the other, the same panelists wove their backgrounds into advice… Typically, first-generation freshman G.P.A.s lag behind their peers’ by 0.3 points. The gap was eliminated for students in the session where panelists shared their backgrounds; they also reported being happier, less stressed out and more willing to seek help than the control group.”
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The Perils and Promise of 1st Generation College Kids (at Ivies)
Boston Globe
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4/9/15
"I feel like here I’m moving up the socioeconomic ladder. But when I graduate, will I slip back down?”
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Documentary Theater: Bridging The Public-Private Divide
KQED
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4/3/15
"The worlds of Richmond High School and Marin Academy are only one bridge away from each other, but they rarely collide. That was until a theater project asked students from both schools to interview each other, and perform each other’s lives on stage… You have to learn to move the way that person moves, and follow the exact words that person said — even the ums, the ahs, the likes. So each student met with a student from the other school, and they basically ripped their hearts out, knowing full well that these interviews would end up on stage for everyone to see, performed by the student that interviewed them.”
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Students of Color Are A Majority In Pomona College’s Admitted Class
Pomona
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3/20/15
"For the first time, students of color make up the majority of the class at 51.4 percent. Of these students, 13.8 percent are Asian, 11.6 percent Black/African American, 18.3 percent Hispanic, 7.4 percent multiracial and less than 1 percent Native American.”
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Public v. Private School: the Opportunity Gap [podcast]
This American Life
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3/13/15
"There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide.”
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On Girls’ Growing Dominance In School And University
Economist
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3/7/15
“Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.”
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"How Diversity Makes Us Smarter”
Scientific American
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10/1/14
"It seems obvious that a group of people with diverse individual expertise would be better than a homogeneous group at solving complex, nonroutine problems. It is less obvious that social diversity should work in the same way—yet the science shows that it does. This is not only because people with different backgrounds bring new information. Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort.”
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For More Girls in STEM: Change the Feel of STEM Classrooms
Brilliant Blog
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9/10/14
“Preliminary results suggest that female students learn better when they are surrounded by female classmates—even virtual ones—and the more women in the room, the better. Perone’s and Friend’s findings suggest that the reason behind the success of the Online School for Girls may not be its stated emphasis on teaching girls differently, but simply the fact that its students know that their classmates are girls like them.”
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Why Talking About Race Can Be Awkward. How To Fix It.
NAIS
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6/1/14
"At the very least, schools that believe in equity and justice and want their students to be future leaders need to help students — especially white students — understand the history of race and racism and how both play out in contemporary society. This racial content knowledge constitutes a basic social literacy that all students should have.”
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A History of Race, A Definition of Racism, And How to Write History
Five Books
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5/20/14
“Racism is a prejudice... coupled with discriminatory action. It’s a very simple definition, it took me a long time to arrive at it, but it is composed of these two parts. You need to have prejudices concerning a certain group of human beings — to whom you attribute mental and physical features reproduced from generation to generation — coupled with discriminatory action. If you have only prejudices, you don’t have racism.”
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How To Address Bigotry Without Alienating The Listener
University of Toronto
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12/20/11
"According to the study, people who feel pressured into changing prejudiced views will actually become more prejudiced. On the other hand, methods that persuade people that giving up prejudice is good for its own sake are more effective… Autonomy-primed students read statements like, “I enjoy relating to people of different groups,” and “It’s fun to meet people from other cultures.” The controlling primed subjects read things like “It is socially unacceptable to discriminate based on cultural background,” and “Prejudiced people are not well liked.””
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Social-Psychological Interventions In Education: They’re Not Magic
CSUN
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1/6/11
“Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” socialpsychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ psychology, such as their beliefs that they have the potential to improve their intelligence or that they belong and are valued in school. “