Suggested Reading

This Is the Summer of Race and Equity in Education

by Anna Baldwin, Education Post.

This 2014 Montana State Teacher of the Year writes about her experience as a white high school teacher and The Summer of Equity. In her article she urges her colleagues to speak up about issues of equity even if they feel they don’t have the credibility as a non-minority teacher. “I do not pretend to understand what it means to be Black, but I do understand what it means to be white in a racist society,” she writes. While attending a conference and questioning whether she should speak up, a woman of color she encountered at a conference tol her “but you have to speak up. It’s really lonely doing this ourselves.”

Oregon’s ‘Equity Lens’ Frames Schools’ Take on Bias

With children of color making up a growing share of Oregon students, state education officials five years ago took another hard, long look at how those students were doing. What they saw was sobering but not surprising: Despite attempts to close achievement gaps between students of color, immigrant students, and low-income students and their more affluent white peers, wide disparities persisted in student performance on state tests, graduation rates, school attendance, and college-going rates. So Oregon tried a different approach. In 2011, education agencies adopted an “equity lens,” a public policy statement explicitly acknowledging the salience of race and ethnicity in contributing to disparate student outcomes and committing to narrow achievement and opportunity gaps from cradle to career through a focus on race and ethnicity. Read the Story.

Educational Equity Toolkit

Parents and local leaders must be at the forefront of advocating for equity and holding school systems accountable to ensuring every child graduates college- and career-ready.This toolkit was created to educate, equip, encourage and empower you to advocate for greater education equity in your local community. It is designed to be used in conjunction with The Leadership Conference Education Fund’s Grassroots Campaigns & Advocacy Toolkit.

Virtual Classrooms Can Be as Unequal as Real Ones

Online courses are praised for their potential to make education accessible to everyone—but they’re leaving students behind.

by Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic.

In the 2010s when online courses exploded in popularity, educators were particularly excited about the potential online learning had to give disadvantaged students access to a quality education. However, new research has shown that the same factors that challenge low-income and minority students in traditional classrooms also plague virtual ones. Read the Story.