Equity In Schools Quotes

Equity, after all, does not mean simply equal funding. Equal funding for unequal needs is not equality.

Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school—and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.

Did you ever think our misfortune is directly related to your good fortune? Maybe the house your parents bought was on the market because the sellers didn't want my mama in the neighborhood. Maybe the good grades that eventually led you to law school were possible because your mama didn't have to work eighteen hours a day, and was there to read to you at night, or make sure you did your homework. How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can't? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one's thinking you're speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard is it for you to find the greeting card for your baby's birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you? Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.

where all the differences in schooling and money and skin colour evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.

This, then, is the dread that seems to lie beneath the fear of equalizing. Equity is seen as dispossession. Local autonomy is seen as liberty--even if the poverty of those in nearby cities robs them of all meaningful autonomy by narrowing their choices to the meanest and the shabbiest of options. In this way, defendants in these cases seem to polarize two of the principles that lie close to the origins of this republic. Liberty and equity are seen as antibodies to each other.

Municipal bonds finance local government projects, such as schools, roads, and utilities. So there’s a public good aspect to investing in municipalities that isn’t antithetical to equity investing but it’s different.

The only statistic I care about is return on equity. After many sessions with some of our business school graduates (yes, we do have some), I think they have helped me understand the secret to improving our R.O.E. It seems that if we increase revenues and cut expenses, return on equity goes up and that is what makes me happy. Please make me happy! I can be very unpleasant when I’m not.

research has found that once we put a score or a grade on an assignment, the student is less likely to review comments or learn from that grade (Butler & Nisan, 1986).

The last question "What do humanizing practices look like in and outside of the classroom?" is also essential, because it speaks to those "social justice" educators who leave the school and don't live in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other anti-oppressive ways in their daily lives. This is why we must not just be non-racist or non-oppressive but also work with passion and diligence to actively disrupt oppression in and outside of the classroom. Simple good intentions aren't enough. The intentions must be deliberately connected to actions.

When you send a girl to school, the good deed never dies. It goes on for generations advancing every public good, from health to economic gain to gender equity and national prosperity

Genuine education equity will be achieved only when schools serving low-income children mirror in number, variety, and access the options that affluent parents have come to expect for their children.

Rather than say, “In the real world you only get one chance,” perhaps our most truthful and most helpful message should be “In the real world, retakes are often available; you just might have to ask for them and put in some additional work.

There’s a blessed equity in the English social system,’ said Grimes, ‘that ensures the public school man against starvation. One goes through four or five years of perfect hell at an age when life is bound to be hell anyway, and after that the social system never lets one down.

There’s only one way America’s neighborhoods will begin to integrate: people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need to market. It’s the only real solution to segregated schools, for one.

The creative writing teacher was horrified at the thought that she was teaching a pack of insipient arsonists—or Lord of the Flies sociopaths. In fact, they were just boys. But, increasingly, in our schools and in our homes, everyday boyishness is seen as aberrational, toxic—a pathology in need of a cure. Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.

Equity is about the “tomorrows” for our students and children. Equity provides an educational experience wherein all students can succeed because they are individually accepted, understood, and supported by the educators within the school. With equity, every student owns his or her future. With equity, excellence is found.

What exactly do people who aren’t white men have that could be more inclusive of white men? We do not have control of our local governments, our national governments, our school boards, our universities, our police forces, our militaries, our workplaces. All we have is our struggle. And yet we are told that our struggle for inclusion and equity—and our celebration of even symbolic steps toward them—is divisive and threatening to those who have far greater access to everything else than we can dream of. If white men are finding that the overwhelmingly white-male-controlled system isn’t meeting their needs, how did we end up being the problem?

Conversations about grading weren’t like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the “real world” and beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.

There’s no research that finds that failing grades motivate students, and plenty of research that has found the opposite—that a student who receives 0s and Fs becomes less motivated, not more motivated. Guskey (2009) found that “no studies support the use of low grades as punishment. Instead of prompting greater effort, low grades more often cause students to withdraw from learning.

The lift that comes from sending girls like Sona to school is stunning—for the girls, their families, and their communities. When you send a girl to school, the good deed never dies. It goes on for generations advancing every public good, from health to economic gain to gender equity and national prosperity. Here are just a few of the things we know from the research. Sending girls to school leads to greater literacy, higher wages, faster income growth, and more productive farming. It reduces premarital sex, lowers the chance of early marriage, delays first births, and helps mothers plan how many children to have and when. Mothers who have had an education do a better job learning about nutrition, vaccination, and other behaviors necessary for raising healthy children.

Many people, even those who view themselves as liberals on other issues, tend to grow indignant, even rather agitated, if invited to look closely at these inequalities. “Life isn’t fair,” one parent in Winnetka answered flatly when I pressed the matter. “Wealthy children also go to summer camp. All summer. Poor kids maybe not at all. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, for two weeks. Wealthy children have the chance to go to Europe and they have the access to good libraries, encyclopedias, computers, better doctors, nicer homes. Some of my neighbors send their kids to schools like Exeter and Groton. Is government supposed to equalize these things as well?” But government, of course, does not assign us to our homes, our summer camps, our doctors—or to Exeter. It does assign us to our public schools. Indeed, it forces us to go to them. Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school—and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.

In this wealthy, technologically advanced, highly educated nation, more and more of our darkest children are dying on the streets--literally. Still, this uncontested reality polarizes adults along racial lines, not as we attempt to discover meaningful solutions to these brutal slaughters but in our racially balkanized expression of beliefs and determinations regarding the cause of these senseless deaths.

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental…. The freedom to learn … has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be. —W.E.B. DuBois

I Dream I am from a clash of Color, From an idea of love, modeled for others’ perception. I see me as I am, but am hidden from others’ views. I am who I am, but a living contradiction to my peers. I see life as a blessing, a gift granted to me. Why should my tint describe me? Why should my culture degrade me? Why should the ignorance of another conjure my presence? Too many times I’ve been disappointed by the looks, By the sneers and misconceptions of the people who don’t get me, Who don’t understand why it hurts. I dream of a place of glory and freedom, Of losing the weight of oppression on my back. I dream of the enlightenment of people, Of the opening of their eyes. I dream for acceptance, And for the blessing of feeling special just once. One moment of glory . . . for the true virtue in my life. For the glimmer of freedom, and a rise in real pride.

The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free – were given schools and the right to vote – what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.

And, if we teachers are honest with ourselves, it may be easier to assign a zero when a student misses an assignment than to pressure and support the student to complete it. It can be time-consuming and exhausting for the teacher to call parents and caregivers or require students to stay after school until assignments are completed. Yet if we’re committed to making our grades accurate, we can’t give a grade until we have sufficient evidence of a student’s actual level of achievement.

the nature of work will continue to change ever more rapidly. During much of the 20th century, most workers held two or three jobs during their lifetimes. However, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that many of today’s workers will hold more than 10 jobs before they reach the age of 40.2 The top 10 in-demand jobs projected for 2010 did not exist in 2004.3 Thus, the new mission of schools is to prepare students to work at jobs that do not yet exist, creating ideas and solutions for products and problems that have not yet been identified, using technologies that have not yet been invented.

What may be learned from the rebuttals made by the defendants in New Jersey and from the protests that were sparked by the decision of the court? Much of the resistance, it appears, derives from a conservative anxiety that equity equates to "leveling." The fear that comes across in many of the letters and the editorials in the New Jersey press is that democratizing opportunity will undermine diversity and even elegance in our society and that the best schools will be dragged down to a sullen norm, a mediocre middle ground of uniformity. References to Eastern European socialism keep appearing in these letters.

Defining freedom cannot amount to simply substituting it with inclusion. Countering the criminalization of Black girls requires fundamentally altering the relationship between Black girls and the institutions of power that have worked to reinforce their subjugation. History has taught us that civil rights are but one component of a larger movement for this type of social transformation. Civil rights may be at the core of equal justice movements, and they may elevate an equity agenda that protects our children from racial and gender discrimination, but they do not have the capacity to fully redistribute power and eradicate racial inequity. There is only one practice that can do that. Love.

In one study, a trio of professors from Harvard Business School tracked more than one thousand acclaimed equity analysts over a decade and monitored how their performance changed as they switched firms. Their dour conclusion, “When a company hires a star, the star’s performance plunges, there is a sharp decline in the functioning of the group or team the person works with, and the company’s market value falls.”20 The hiring organization is let down because it failed to consider systems-based advantages that the prior employer supplied, including firm reputation and resources. Employers also underestimate the relationships that supported previous success, the quality of the other employees, and a familiarity with past processes.

The principal reason that districts within states often differ markedly in per-pupil expenditures is that school funding is almost always tied to property taxes, which are in turn a direct function of local wealth. Having school funding depend on local wealth creates a situation in which poor districts must tax themselves far more heavily than wealthy ones, yet still may not be able to generate adequate income. For example, Baltimore City is one of the poorest jurisdictions in Maryland, and the Baltimore City Public Schools have the lowest per-pupil instructional expenses of any of Maryland's 24 districts. Yet Baltimore's property tax rate is twice that of the next highest jurisdiction.(FN2) Before the funding equity decision in New Jersey, the impoverished East Orange district had one of the highest tax rates in the state, but spent only $3,000 per pupil, one of the lowest per-pupil expenditures in the state.(FN3) A similar story could be told in almost any state in the U.S.(FN4) Funding formulas work systematically against children who happen to be located in high-poverty districts, but also reflect idiosyncratic local circumstances. For example, a factory closing can bankrupt a small school district. What sense does it make for children's education to suffer based on local accidents of geography or economics? To my knowledge, the U.S. is the only nation to fund elementary and secondary education based on local wealth. Other developed countries either equalize funding or provide extra funding for individuals or groups felt to need it. In the Netherlands, for example, national funding is provided to all schools based on the number of pupils enrolled, but for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child, exactly the opposite of the situation in the U.S. where lower-class and minority children typically receive less than middle-class white children.(FN5) Regional differences in per-pupil costs may exist in other countries, but the situation in which underfunded urban or rural districts exist in close proximity to wealthy suburban districts is probably uniquely American. Of course, even equality in per-pupil costs in no way ensures equality in educational services. Not only do poor districts typically have fewer funds, they also have greater needs.

Unfortunately, in most classrooms teachers penalize students for mistakes they make during the learning process, for assignments that prepare them for the test. Students lose points for errors (and for answers they don’t complete) on homework, classwork, and on any task that the teacher designs to help students learn content. Those scores are entered into the gradebook and included in the overall calculation of a student’s grade. With this grading approach, student mistakes are penalized during the very stage of learning when students should be making mistakes. If mistakes on any work—homework assignments, tests, quizzes, in-class worksheets, discussions—are always penalized with a score that is incorporated into a grade no matter whether those mistakes occur at the beginning, middle, or end of learning, then the message is that mistakes aren’t ever acceptable, much less desired, and they certainly aren’t ever valuable. Students will be discouraged, not encouraged, to take risks and be vulnerable.

Literacy was to be developed in a socially constructed environment so that new ideas and information learned from texts could be shared and spread among one another and those in the community. Members of all ages and experiences with reading would assemble to teach one another. Although individual literacy was valued, these societies were highly collaborative and prompted social responsibility to share knowledge gained from acts of literacy rather than keep education to one’s self. This collaboration for literacy learning built the foundation of the “chain letter of instruction” model, which embodied a shared accountability for knowledge (Fisher, 2004). If one person, for example, acquired knowledge, it was then his or her responsibility to pass it on to others to create a flame-like effect. To keep knowledge to one’s self was seen as a selfish act, and each person therefore was responsible to elevate others through education in the immediate and larger community. This ideal of collectivism is in direct conflict with schools today, as schools are largely grounded in competition and individualism. This is perhaps one major reason why students of color often do not reach their full potential in schools—because schools are in disharmony with their histories and identities.

Even worse, traditional grading that penalizes students for mistakes often isn’t just limited to a student’s academic work. Teachers often assign grades based on mistakes in students’ behaviors as well: downgrading a score if an assignment is late, subtracting points from a daily participation grade if a student is tardy to class, or lowering a group’s grade if the group becomes too noisy while they work. In this environment, every mistake is penalized and incorporated into the final grade. Even if just a few points are docked for forgetting to bring a notebook to class or losing a few points for not heading a paper correctly, the message is clear: All mistakes result in penalties. While some might argue that this is simply accountability—“I asked the students to do something, so it has to count”—it’s missing the forest for the trees. The more assignments and behaviors a teacher grades, the less willing a student will be to reveal her weaknesses and vulnerability. With no zones of learning that are “grade free,” it becomes nearly impossible to build an effective teacher–student relationship and positive learning environment in which students try new things, venture into unfamiliar learning territory, or feel comfortable making errors, and grow. When everything a student does is graded, and every mistake counts against her grade, that student can perceive that to receive a good grade she has to be perfect all of the time. Students don’t feel trust in their teachers, only the pressure to conceal weaknesses and avoid errors.

The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. What will it profit him to be able to send his children to an integrated school if the family income is insufficient to buy them school clothes? What will he gain by being permitted to move to an integrated neighborhood if he cannot afford to do so because he is unemployed or has a low-paying job with no future? During the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, a nightclub comic observed that, had the demonstrators been served, some of them could not have paid for the meal. Of what advantage is it to the Negro to establish that he can be served in integrated restaurants, or accommodated in integrated hotels, if he is bound to the kind of financial servitude which will not allow him to take a vacation or even to take his wife out to dine? Negroes must not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public, but they must also be absorbed into our economic system in such a manner that they can afford to exercise that right. The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities. In asking for something special, the Negro is not seeking charity. He does not want to languish on welfare rolls any more than the next man. He does not want to be given a job he cannot handle. Neither, however, does he want to be told that there is no place where he can be trained to handle it. So with equal opportunity must come the practical, realistic aid which will equip him to seize it. Giving a pair of shoes to a man who has not learned to walk is a cruel jest.

Stock market or equity market is a network of buyers and sellers of stocks or shares and is considered as one of the greatest tools for building wealth. It is one of the most used ways for companies to raise money when they need an additional financial capital for expansion. They

Ultimately, the CCO is accountable for increasing the profitability of the firm’s customers, as measured by metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer equity as well as by intermediate indicators, such as word of mouth (or mouse). Customer

Twenty-first-century schooling challenges teachers to balance competing goals for education: equity and excellence, standards and customization, efficiency and relationships.

By the time I bought Pronto Markets, it might have taken only a slightly bigger trailer, mostly to accommodate the cribs for the two kids we now had. We did find the money, somehow. Rexall was willing to take back paper. (Dart was in a hurry to wind up his retailing affairs. This was a big advantage for me, because if I walked away, he’d be left with a crumb of a bastard business.) We had $4,000 from Alice’s savings from her teaching school before she had the kids (we lived on my $325) and we sold our little house in which we had an equity of $7,000. I borrowed $2,000 from my grandmother and $5,000 from my father. (Pop, an engineer, spent most of his career being alternately employed and dis-employed by General Dynamics depending on the vagaries of the aerospace business; in between he owned a series of small businesses. I think he even had a Mac Tool route in 1962.)

How can students achieve if they don’t feel that they belong in our schools? More importantly, in what ways do we actively prevent students from belonging simply through our use of language?

Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, Repairing Our Divided Nation: How to Fix America's Broken Government, Racial Inequity, and Troubled Schools is impressively informative, thoughtful and thought -provoking -- making it a timely and unreservedly recommended addition to community, college, and library Contemporary Social Issues collections and Political Science supplemental curriculum studies lists...for students, academic, governmental policy makers, political activists, social reformers, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.

The downward trend for women in the postwar years also appears for PHD and law degrees, with a greater proportion of women earning degrees in the 1930s than in the 1950s (see Figure 2.3). The percentage of medical degrees granted to women was about the same in the 1930s and the 1950s, possibly because medical schools limited entering classes to 5% women no matter how many qualified women applied, in an informal but systematic program of discrimination. (The Women’s Equity Action League eventually sued U.S. medical schools for sex discrimination in the 1970s.) Law was even more limited: A scant 3% of graduating lawyers were women in the 1950s and early 1960s, and many had trouble finding jobs. Despite graduating at the top of their law school classes, future Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor (b. 1930) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933) both struggled to land jobs when they graduated in the 1950s.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Obama’s teacher at Harvard Law School and friend since then, has sought to hide his association with Obama. “I am a leftist,” he later told an Obama biographer, “and by conviction as well as temperament, a revolutionary. Any association of mine with Barack Obama . . . could only do harm.” Unger advocates what he terms “world revolution,” a basic takeover of financial institutions and their reshaping to serve global economic equity. For instance, Unger calls for “the dismembership of the traditional property right” in favor of what he calls “social endowments.” Most remarkably, Unger calls for a global coalition of countries—supported by American progressives—to reduce the influence of the United States. He calls this a “ganging up of lesser powers against the United States.” He specifically calls for China, India, Russia, and Brazil to lead this anti-American coalition. Unger says that global justice is impossible when a single superpower dominates. He wants a “containment of American hegemony” and its replacement by a plurality of centers of power.

Our culture of achievement has grown to emphasize visions of success that are, for the most part, fairly predictable. Cole skipped a couple of steps. The basic plan is to go to Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or the like, then maybe to a top-ranked business school, then back to banking, consulting, private equity, hedge funds, or a name-brand tech company. Or maybe go from law school to top firm to partner or in house at an investment firm, and live in New York, San Francisco, Boston, or Washington, DC.* Again, these institutions and roles are necessary, and they’re natural developments in our economy. We need them. But we need people doing other things too. We need people willing to take risks and, yes, to occasionally fail. Like real-world consequences fail. We need people committed over extended periods of time to creating value, no matter how hard that is. We need people who care deeply about the work they’re doing. Imagine someone who you think could stand to take on some risk—someone well educated who would always have something to fall back on, whose family might have some resources so he would be unlikely to starve. And this person would probably be young and free of major life obligations. Someone sort of like . . .  Cole. What’s interesting is that many of the people I meet who are young, highly educated, and from good families are among the most risk-averse. They feel like they need to be making progress along a ladder with each passing month or year. Their parents have often set high expectations for them. They measure themselves each period against their peers, who are generally following various well-defined paths.

In 2009, Zeke and I decided to entertain suitors, in large part because Zeke’s charter school, the Equity Project, was in full swing.* It wasn’t an easy decision, but we felt that having a well-resourced parent would ensure that the company would thrive in the long term. After a competitive bidding process, we agreed to be acquired by Kaplan and the Washington Post Company in December of that year. I remember the day vividly. After all the documents were signed, I sat there and waited for the transfer to clear. I was sitting at my web browser, hitting refresh over and over again until it cleared in the late afternoon. And there it was. I let out a “Yeah!” and emerged from my office. I walked around dispensing checks to employees, as we had set aside a bonus pool for both staff and instructors. It’s a lot of fun giving away money. I was Asian Santa Claus for a day. I went home for the holidays the following week. At this point my parents were quite pleased with me; my assuming the mortgage on their apartment likely had something to do with that. I zeroed out my student loans that week too. I’d gone from scrapping and scrimping for almost a decade to being a thirty-four-year-old millionaire.

The over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing in state and federal accountability systems is undermining educational quality and equity in U.S. public schools by hampering educators’ efforts to focus on the broad range of learning experiences that promote the innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and deep subject-matter knowledge that will allow students to thrive in a democracy and an increasingly global society and economy,” the organization states.5

When the norms associated with race take on a static and determining quality, they can be very difficult to undermine. Students who receive a lot of support and encouragement at home may be more likely to cross over and work against these separations. But as my wife and I found for a time with Joaquin, middle-class African American parents who try to encourage their kids to excel in school often find this can’t be done because the peer pressures against crossing these boundaries are too great.

The racial separation we see in schools might also be seen as an element of the “hidden curriculum,” an unspoken set of rules that “teaches” certain students what they can and cannot do because of who they are. There are aspects of this hidden curriculum that are not being taught by the adults. It may well be that students are the ones teaching it to each other. No adult goes onto the playground and says, “I don’t want the boys and girls to play together.” The girls and boys do that themselves, and it’s a rare child who crosses over. Why? Because

While he was in school, we needed to pay our bills. I had to get a job. I'd majored in music (piano). I had no business credentials, connections, or confidence, so I started as a secretary to a retail sales broker at Smith Barney in midtown Manhattan. It was the era of Liar's Poker, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Working Girl. Working on Wall Street was exciting. I started taking business courses at night and I had a boss who believed in me, which allowed me to bridge from secretary to investment banker. This rarely happens. Later I became an equity research analyst and subsequently cofounded the investment firm Rose Park Advisors with Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. When I walked onto Wall Street through the secretarial side door, and then walked off Wall Street to become an entrepreneur, I was a disruptor. "Disruptive innovation" is a term coined by Christensen to describe an innovation at the low end of the market that eventually upends an industry. In my case, I had started at the bottom and climbed to the top—now I wanted to upend my own career. No wonder my friend thought I'd lost my sanity. According to Christensen's theory, disruptors secure their initial foothold at the low end of the market, offering inferior, low-margin products. At first, the disrupter's position is weak. For example, when Toyota entered the U.S. market in the 1950s, it introduced the Corona, a small, cheap, no-frills car that appealed to first-time car buyers on a tight budget.

By [college], many skills, attitudes, and habits have already been formed. We can have a much bigger impact on people at younger ages. Efforts to achieve true equity should focus instead on high-quality kindergarten and pre-K, high-quality weekend learning programs, high-quality charter schools, and high-quality after-school tutoring.

This ideal of collectivism is in direct conflict with schools today, as schools are largely grounded in competition and individualism. This is perhaps one major reason why students of color often do not reach their full potential in schools—because schools are in disharmony with their histories and identities.

Universal healthcare ensures that all individuals have access to necessary medical services regardless of their ability to pay. This policy addresses the gaps and inequities in the current healthcare system, where millions of Americans remain uninsured or underinsured. Countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom provide successful examples of universal healthcare systems that deliver better health outcomes at lower costs compared to the U.S. system. Education policy is another area where progressive alternatives can counteract Project 2025’s agenda. Investing in public education, increasing funding for schools in underserved communities, and promoting inclusive curricula that reflect the diversity of American society are essential steps toward achieving educational equity. Progressive education policies prioritize the needs of students and educators over privatization efforts and standardized testing, ensuring that all children have access to a high-quality education.

A humbling but reluctantly honest reason many of us continue to use the zero on a 100-point scale may be because the zero satisfies a psychological need. While Reeves sardonically recognizes teachers’ need to “punish the little miscreants who fail to complete our assignments” (2004), this need among us to feel satisfaction, to “hold students accountable” for not following our directions, is real and powerful. Guskey (2004) suggests that teachers, particularly at the secondary grades, assign a zero because they recognize that their power over students is relatively limited, and want students to really “feel” the consequences for not performing.

I am honored to receive this review from the highly regarded Midwest Book Review: “Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, Repairing Our Divided Nation: How to Fix America's Broken Government, Racial Inequity, and Troubled Schools is impressively informative, thoughtful and thought -provoking -- making it a timely and unreservedly recommended addition to community, college, and library Contemporary Social Issues collections and Political Science supplemental curriculum studies lists...for students, academic, governmental policy makers, political activists, social reformers, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.” ...more Midwest Book Review

Anyone looking for a good overview of the nation’s political history and a well-thought-out proposal for problem-solving within the government, society, and the educational system will find it here. ….. As Ellison declares, 'Now is the time to repair our divided nation.' He has given readers both the reason for such a divide and the way forward to bringing the nation together.” — US Review of Books

If we aim to get it right with all youth, a productive starting point is to design teaching and learning to the group (s) of students who have been marginalized the most in society and within schools. Thus, we need frameworks that have been written by people of color and designed for children of color.

Based on this "pool of available data," you make decisions about which data you think matter; these are the data you select to pay attention to. Still, as you begin to review the data, some will seem more credible or important than others, leading you to assign meaning and draw conclusions. From that step, you take action, generating more data.

After the initial, unavoidably chaotic lockdown period in the spring of 2020, we should have paid more attention to the toll of online learning: the terrible equity impacts on lower-income families who didn’t have the tech; the way it left out many students with developmental disabilities who needed in-person supports; the way it made it impossible for single parents to work outside the home and often inside it, with devastating effects for mothers in particular; the mental health impacts that social isolation was having on countless young people. The solution was not to fling open school doors where the virus was still surging and before vaccines had been rolled out. But where were the more spacious discussions about how to reimagine public schools so that they could be safer despite the virus—with smaller classrooms, more teachers and teacher’s aides, better ventilation, and more outdoor learning? We knew early on that teens and young adults were facing a mental health crisis amid the lockdowns—so why didn’t we invest in outdoor conservation and recreation programs that could have pried them away from their screens, put them in communities of other young people, generated meaningful work for our ailing planet, and lifted their spirits all at the same time?

Until recently, San Francisco’s acclaimed Lowell High School admitted a majority of its students based on middle school GPA and a standardized admissions test. Lowell’s student body was 82 percent non-white,8 but because blacks were underrepresented compared to their share of San Francisco’s population, the school board in 2021 accused Lowell of “perpetuat[ing] segregation and exclusion.”9 Henceforth, Lowell would use a lottery for admissions. (The receipt of Ds and Fs shot up 300 percent in the first lottery-enrolled class.)10

Under these conditions, the promise of equity is ultimately hollow because White people can use the language of justice while remaining deeply committed and invested in Whiteness—thereby devaluing the work of DEI as a “symbolic commitment.

The report went on to recommend the bureaucracy inflation that is every school’s default response to racial protest: in this case, a new associate dean for equity and diversity, a permanent committee on equity and diversity, diversity training for the faculty, and a beefed-up grievance process for lodging complaints of racial discrimination, among other measures lifted directly from the protesters’ petition.

With the markets and Goldman’s earnings recovering, Goldman went public on May 3, 1999, pricing the stock at $53 per share, implying an equity market valuation of over $30 billion. In the end, Goldman decided to offer only a small portion of the company to the public, with some 48 percent still held by the partnership pool, 22 percent of the company held by nonpartner employees, and 18 percent held by retired Goldman partners and Sumitomo Bank and the investing arm of Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii. This left approximately 12 percent of the company held by the public.

I work at a school that serves families privileged by race, class, and education. The children at my school have more opportunities than many other people in the world, and it is a cornerstone value for me to help them to develop and foster dispositions for equity, to practice perspective-taking, and to become comfortable with what's unfamiliar.

The usual reduction in class size,” says the Journal—from 30 to 24, for instance—“isn’t enough to make a difference.” If this were really true, and if the Journal wanted to help the poorest children of Chicago, the logical solution would appear to be to cut their class size even more—perhaps to 17, as in Winnetka. This is a change that even the Journal’s editors concede to be worthwhile. But this is a degree of equity the Journal does not entertain. It contemplates a minor change and then concludes that it would make only a minor difference. In actual fact, as every teacher of small children knows, the difference even from 30 kids to 24 would be a blessing in most cases, if some other needed changes came at the same time. But the Journal does not speak of several changes. The search is for the one change that will cost the least and bring the best return. “Changing parent values” is the ideal answer to this search because, if it were possible, it would cost nothing and, since it isn’t really possible, it doesn’t even need to be attempted. Isolating one thing and then telling us that this alone won’t do much good and, for this reason, ought not to be tried, is a way of saying that the children of the poor will have to choose one out of seven things rich children take for granted—and then, as a kind of final curse upon their dreams, that any one of those seven things will not make a difference. Why not offer them all seven things?

Liberty, school conservatives have argued, is diminished when the local powers of school districts have been sacrificed to centralized control. The opposition to desegregation in the South, for instance, was portrayed as local (states’) rights as a sacred principle infringed upon by federal court decisions. The opposition to the drive for equal funding in a given state is now portrayed as local (district) rights in opposition to the powers of the state. While local control may be defended and supported on a number of important grounds, it is unmistakable that it has been historically advanced to counter equity demands; this is no less the case today.

I am irritated by the fact that so many concerned policymakers who oppose choice because of its potential impact on equity are already exercising choice for their own children. They are generally among the millions of well-intentioned citizens who have chosen private schools, gotten their children into selective or specialized public schools, moved to more affluent communities where the schools are better, or taken whatever measures were needed to see that their children qualified for classes for the gifted. Despite their recognition that such choices are likely to have negative consequences, they cannot resist. Writ larger, however, such individual acts have already fatally damaged most of our neighborhood schools and made change of the sort advocated by policymakers in place of choice nearly impossible.

[T]he education system in America is designed to keep wealth and resources for the privileged and to keep the poor and the crushed folks at the bottom, with rare exceptions usually amplified and promoted for PR purposes. If education’s primary purpose is to save people through knowledge and social mobility, then the millions of Americans, including many Black people, who don’t have access to good education as do the rich and privileged children getting prepped up early on for ivy league schools, is a clear indication that the American education is a huge failure.

The first was the foundation of accounting: Assets=Liabilities + Equity. The second mantra was: Accounting=Economic truth + Measurement error + Bias.

I’ve copied homework because I left my book in my locker and I didn’t have time to get it before I went home and my class was literally the next period. I had a bad grade—it was a wavering A where it was literally just 90-point something. When you’re that close to getting a B you don’t want to do anything wrong. If we didn’t have the homework, [the teacher] would just give us a zero.” (Annika, middle school student)

It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens. We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system of common-school training in the South, that the national government must soon step in and aid popular education in some way. To-day it has been only by the most strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South that the Negro’s share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and that movement not only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

Rising levels of abuse, addiction, and drug-related violence should have been a sign that something was wrong with America. It should have led the nation to focus on the myriad ways in which 350 years of white supremacy had produced persistent Black suffering and disadvantage. It should have caused politicians to interrogate the cumulative impact of convict leasing, lynching, redlining, school segregation, and drinking water poisoned with lead. Instead of asking, "What kind of people are they that would use and sell drugs?" the nation should have been asking a question that, to this day, demands an answer: "What kind of people are we that build prisons while closing treatment centers?

We can’t complain that students are point-grubbers when we give them extra points to grub.

Race to the Top was only marginally different from No Child Left Behind. In fact, it was worse, because it gave full-throated Democratic endorsement to the long-standing Republican agenda of testing, accountability, and choice. Race to the Top abandoned equity as the driving principle of federal aid. From the initiation of federal aid to local school districts in 1965, Democratic administrations had insisted on formula grants, which distributed federal money to schools and districts based on the proportion of students who were poor, not on a competition among states.

When students are taught, their minds expand and open. When students are indoctrinated, their minds narrow and close. Friedersdorf quotes a parent of a child in the program—a parent who was generally supportive of the school’s “BLM week”: They present every issue with such moral certainty—like there is no other viewpoint. And we’re definitely seeing this in my daughter. She can make the case for defunding the police, but when I tried to explain to her why someone might have a Blue Lives Matter sign, why some families support the police, she wasn’t open to considering that view. She had a blinding certainty that troubled me. She thinks that even raising the question is racist. If she even hears a squeak of criticism of BLM, or of an idea that’s presented as supporting equity, she’s quick to call out racism.109 The problem in all these cases is not the inclusion of SJF ideas in a student’s education—it’s the teaching of those ideas as if they’re Bible verses in a religious school, not to be challenged or questioned.

Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) and AP classes composed solely of White and Asian students Special education classrooms where Black students are overrepresented School orchestras with no Black, Brown, or Indigenous students Suspension and expulsion data showing that a disproportionate number of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students are suspended or expelled Remedial classrooms with high proportions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students Honors classes with low proportions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students

Resources are limited in many schools--however, if we prioritize dismantling systemic oppression, if we prioritize the needs of our most marginalized students, we can find the time, support, money, and resources that we need.

Equity and inclusion are central to addressing academic underachievement, as systemic factors like racism, bias, and inequality contribute significantly to students' academic struggles.

I suggest you write I love you in your daily diary when we hang up so that you can refer to it should you ever develop that need to read those words again.

James Ed went to his office and sat down at his small, metal desk. He smiled as he considered Penny Jones’ plan to shame him out of her life. Would he let her do that? He shook his head as he thought, No way in hell!