On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?

Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students progress from elementary school to middle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latino counterparts. Most research to date has focused on the role of poverty, family stability, and other external influences in explaining poor performance at school, especially in urban contexts. Diamond and Lewis instead situate their research in a suburban school, and look at what factors within the school itself could be causing the disparity. Most crucially, they challenge many common explanations of the 'racial achievement gap, ' exploring what race actually means in this situation, and why it matters.

An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.

University of. Wisconsin-Madison Book Review | Book Preview

In Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework—one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names, Historically Responsive Literacy, was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices. The equity framework will help educators teach and lead toward the following learning goals or pursuits:

• Identity Development—Helping youth to make sense of themselves and others

• Skill Development— Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplines

• Intellectual Development—Gaining knowledge and becoming smarter

• Criticality—Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression

When these four learning pursuits are taught together—through the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Muhammad provides probing, self-reflective questions for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators as well as sample culturally and historically responsive sample plans and text sets across grades and content areas. In this book, Muhammad presents practical approaches to cultivate the genius in students and within teachers.

Author Interview on EdWeek.org | Goodreads Reviews | Sample Chapter

As middle and high school teachers, we know that students begin to develop racial identities and ideologies as early as preschool. By the time they reach us, there is much socializing and learning that needs to be undone. Textured Teaching is a way to seamlessly embed the social justice work that is needed to undo; to begin to make things right.

With Culturally Sustaining Practice as its foundation, Textured Teaching helps secondary teachers in any school setting stop wondering and guessing how to implement teaching and learning that leads to social justice. Lorena shares her framework for creating a classroom environment that is highly rigorous and engaging, and that reflects the core traits of Textured Teaching: student-driven, community centered, interdisciplinary, experiential, and flexible. Throughout the book, Lorena shares lesson design strategies that build traditional literacy skills while supporting students in developing their social justice skills at the same time. The actionable strategies Lorena uses to bring Textured Teaching values to life illuminate what is possible when we welcome all types of texts, all types of voices, and all forms of expression into the classroom.

Goodreads Reviews | Sample Chapter

Most educators want to cultivate an antibias and antiracist classroom and school community, but they often struggle with where and how to get started. Liz helps us set ourselves up for success and prepare for the mistakes we'll make along the way.

Each chapter in Start Here, Start Now addresses many of the questions and challenges educators have about getting started, using a framework for tackling perceived barriers from a proactive stance. Liz answers the questions with personal stories, sample lessons, anchor charts, resources, conversation starters, extensive teacher and activist accounts, and more. We can break the habits that are holding us back from this work and be empowered to take the first step towards re-imagining the possibilities of how antibias antiracist work can transform schools and the world at large.

We must remind ourselves that what is right is often not what is easy, and we must continue to dream. Amidst the chaos, our path ahead is clear. This is our chance to dream big and build something better.

Free Chapter Preview

Radically reimagine our ways of being, learning, and doing.

Education can be transformed if we eradicate our fixation on big data like standardized test scores as the supreme measure of equity and learning. Instead of the focus being on “fixing” and “filling” academic gaps, we must envision and rebuild the system from the student up—with classrooms, schools and systems built around students’ brilliance, cultural wealth, and intellectual potential. Street data reminds us that what is measurable is not the same as what is valuable and that data can be humanizing, liberatory and healing.

By breaking down street data fundamentals: what it is, how to gather it, and how it can complement other forms of data to guide a school or district’s equity journey, Safir and Dugan offer an actionable framework for school transformation. Written for educators and policymakers, this book

• Offers fresh ideas and innovative tools to apply immediately

• Provides an asset-based model to help educators look for what’s right in our students and communities instead of seeking what’s wrong

• Explores a different application of data, from its capacity to help us diagnose root causes of inequity, to its potential to transform learning, and its power to reshape adult culture

Now is the time to take an antiracist stance, interrogate our assumptions about knowledge, measurement, and what really matters when it comes to educating young people.

GoodReads Reviews | Free Resources | Book Talk on YouTube

Looking to tackle climate change and climate science in your classroom? This timely and insightful book supports and enables secondary science teachers to develop effective curricula ready to meet the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by grounding their instruction on the climate crisis.

Nearly one-third of the secondary science standards relate to climate science, but teachers need design and implementation support to create empowering learning experiences centered around the climate crisis. Experienced science educator, instructional coach, and educational leader Dr. Kelley T. Le offers this support, providing an overview of the teaching shifts needed for NGSS and to support climate literacy for students via urgent topics in climate science and environmental justice – from the COVID-19 pandemic to global warming, rising sea temperatures, deforestation, and mass extinction. You’ll also learn how to engage the complexity of climate change by exploring social, racial, and environmental injustices stemming from the climate crisis that directly impact students.

By anchoring instruction around the climate crisis, Dr. Le offers guidance on how to empower students to be the agents of change needed in their own communities. A range of additional teacher resources are also available at www.empoweredscienceteachers.com.

Go to www.empoweredscienceteachers.com to learn more.

Most of the top jobs for the future require students to have a strong foundational understanding of mathematics. Our failure to mathematically educate most students in general, and students of color in particular, is bad not only for these students individually but also for our society. In Choosing to See, Pamela Seda and Kyndall Brown offer a substantive, rigorous, and necessary set of interventions to move mathematics education toward greater equity, particularly in serving the needs of Black and Brown students, who are underrepresented and underserved as math scholars. The authors’ thoughtful ICUCARE equity framework serves as a lens to help teachers see where they are achieving this alignment and where they are not. Through this lens, choosing to see means caring enough about what you see to act. It means accepting that every one of your students can be an expert given the opportunity. It means recognizing negative stereotypes about marginalized students and understanding their effects. It means knowing that your students have rich lives outside the classroom that can inform what you do inside the classroom. And it means recognizing and celebrating their human dimensions, so that all students’ strengths, capabilities, and talents can grow.

NEW RELEASE! | Choosing to See Book Talk

American democracy is at risk. Fueled by partisan news and emotion-stoking social media, Americans are becoming less and less able to think rationally about the challenges facing the country. For self-governance to succeed, citizens must analyze issues objectively, engage with one another respectfully, and ground their disagreements in reason and facts. At this precarious moment in our history, we need a renaissance in critical thinking.

It can start in the math classroom.

Composed as a letter to fellow educators, Dear Citizen Math offers an inspiring new vision for math class: as a forum for discussing the most important and interesting issues in society, from healthcare reform to global pandemics, fake discounts to the acceleration of technology. For generations students have viewed mathematics as a set of random skills to memorize and concepts with a little connection to reality. In fact, math is a powerful prism for exploring and making sense of the world, and math teachers can be the most influential people in American democracy. They have the potential to kindle a newfound commitment to reason and cultivate a more thoughtful citizenry.

Free Resources | Goodreads Reviews | Sample Chapter | Podcast Interview

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

GoodReads Reviews | Grading Blog by Author | Podcast Episode

Reform assessment, reduce stress, and strengthen learning

Great things happen when students are able to focus on their learning instead of their scores. However, assessment reform, including standards-based grading, remains a hotly debated issue in education. Going Gradeless shows that it is possible to teach and assess without the stress of traditional grading practices.

Sharing their successful shifts to alternate assessment and their perspectives as experienced classroom teachers, the authors show you how to remove the negative impacts of grades while still maintaining a high level of accountability. Readers will find concrete examples of how these approaches can be developed and applied, plus:

• Sample assessments and rubrics

• Student work samples from all grade levels

• An accountability checklist

• A review of collected data

It is possible to go gradeless! Focusing less on letter grades allows students to interact with the content more deeply, develop better relationships with their teachers and peers, and gain confidence in the classroom, school, and beyond.

Related Edutopia Article | PodCast on Earning to Learning