PASADENA, Calif. — After starting elementary school in the late 1960s, Naomi Hirahara and three other girls formed a clique called the C.L.A.N., an acronym that represented each of the girl’s first initials. Hirahara said she and her friends didn’t consider the racial implications of their group’s name until one of their fathers objected: “The Klan is very bad!”

The group consisted of Hirahara, who is Japanese-American, two Black girls and a White Jewish girl. They attended Loma Alta Elementary, a racially diverse school in Altadena, Calif., that stood out from many others in the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), especially its high schools, which were more racially homogenous.

“I really treasured the fact that we could form these interracial and intercultural relationships,” Hirahara said of her school, where, she recalled, students acknowledged racial differences, but weren’t fixated on them.

By 1970, the racial makeup of PUSD schools would command the attention of the entire country. A U.S. district court judge determined the school system had “knowingly assigned” students to schools by race and ordered it to desegregate based on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional. To racially integrate, PUSD launched what CBS News and The New York Times described then as the most substantial busing program outside the South.

Seventy years after the Brown decision on May 17, 1954, PUSD is still rebounding from the white flight that followed its desegregation order. More than 27,700 school-age youth live in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, the communities served by the district, but only about half of them attend public school.

With 133,560 residents, Pasadena has one of the densest concentrations of private schools in the country, according to school officials. But the moms in the community who support public schools have organized to create a more equitable and diverse educational landscape.

They have teamed up with local educational organizations to advocate for the school district, and by extension, for racially and economically diverse schools. They have reached out to families with preschoolers, joined public school tours and gone door-to-door to reframe the narrative around PUSD. District officials, for their part, have expanded magnet and dual language immersion offerings, among other competitive programs, at schools to attract families from a wide range of backgrounds.

Families and officials have also worked together to educate realtors. It turns out that some of them dissuaded homeowners from enrolling children in PUSD, contributing to the exodus to private schools and, more recently, charter schools.

Changing negative perceptions that date back to school desegregation during the 1970s hasn’t been easy, they said. Back then, the backlash to the busing program occurred almost as soon as it started, with a recall campaign against school board members and a near 12-percentage-point drop in white student enrollment. Ronald Reagan, who was California’s governor at the time, stoked the fire when he signed legislation that prohibited busing without parental consent.

Today, advocating for Pasadena’s public schools is all the more challenging when considering that more than 40 private schools have been established in PUSD’s boundaries; the district has 23 public schools. In interviews, community members told The 19th that the proliferation of private schools has enabled white, middle- and upper-class families to evade public schools in the five decades since court-ordered desegregation.

“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,” said Brian McDonald, who served as PUSD’s superintendent for nine years before stepping down in 2023.

California is not usually a place associated with segregation, though segregation has historically been a problem in the state. A 1973 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that school segregation there and elsewhere in the West is frequently “as severe as in the South.” A report released last month by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA — “The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America – from Brown to Now” —  ranked California as the top state in the country where Black and Latino students attend schools with the lowest percentages of white students.

“California has gone through a major racial transition,” said Gary Orfield, one of the authors of the report and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “It was an overwhelmingly White state in terms of school enrollment at the time of the Brown decision, but it’s now, of course, a state that is overwhelmingly non-White in terms of student enrollment. That’s basically caused by tanking birth rates and immigration.”

Fueling segregation, Orfield said, is the fact that California has largely lacked state policies designed to racially balance schools since the 1960s and 1970s, when court orders brought about change.

In Pasadena, some residents say that the school district’s reputation is improving and more people want to invest and enroll their children in public schools. Although white and Asian-American students remain underrepresented in PUSD, the White student population has slightly increased over the past 20 years despite the drop in the city’s White population during that period.

After failed attempts, Pasadena voters have approved ballot measures to increase funding for local schools in recent years, enabling the district to make millions of dollars in upgrades. The district has also received national recognition for its academic programs, school tours are packed and young parents now tend to view diversity as an asset, its supporters say.

“Most school districts across the country have given up on integration. It’s not on the radar screen,” said Richard Kahlenberg, who has authored studies on PUSD and is director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “Pasadena, along with a number of other forward-looking communities, is trying to do something about that. They haven’t reached all their goals, but I’m inspired that there is a critical mass of parents who recognize the benefits of diversity for all students.”

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During a recent information session for prospective public school parents, Nancy Dufford, executive director of the Pasadena Education Network (PEN), which works to get families involved in district schools, told the audience: “Probably, a lot of you were told when you moved here that you couldn’t send your kids to public school.”

She was stunned to find out that none of the families had actually heard such comments. It was the first time she had spoken to a group of parents who hadn’t been warned away. In Pasadena, Dufford said, it has been tradition for established families not to send their children to public schools. “So many people live here for long periods of time,” she said. “So you have generations of families here who have that message.”

The message ends up making its way to newer Pasadenans. Dufford said she heard it herself after becoming a mother in the 1990s, shortly after relocating to the city. In fact, PEN, the group she runs today, was started in 2006 by a group of preschool parents who had heard the same thing yet refused to listen.

They were among the parents who asked questions like, “Why do people say the schools aren’t good?”

Kimberly Kenne, president of the PUSD Board of Education and one of the founding members of PEN, said that she also wondered about this “pervasive narrative” when she moved to town in the early 1990s. She wasn’t aware of the bias against public schools in Pasadena, though her husband, who was raised in the city, attended private school when the desegregation order came down.

After their first child was born in 1997, Kenne considered enrolling him in the neighborhood public school — only to be admonished by fellow parents. “Are you sure you’re going to share the values of the other parents at public school?” she recalled them asking.

She enrolled her son in a private school, but changed her mind. One reason is that the school wasn’t equipped to meet his needs as a neurodivergent child. Another is that the private school lacked racial diversity in the student body, something that mattered to her.

Jennifer Hall Lee, vice president of PUSD’s Board of Education, also enrolled her daughter, who is now 20, in private school — regretting the decision when she realized her daughter didn’t seem comfortable interacting with people from a wide range of backgrounds.

Lee herself had gone to a public high school in Atlanta in the 1970s that had equal percentages of Black and White students. After switching her daughter to public school, Lee noticed that the child’s worldview changed.

“She would talk to me about the kids in the schools, from first-generation immigrant kids to foster youth,” Lee said. “She began to really understand the differences in socioeconomic status and understand that people lived in apartments and not everybody owned a home. She started understanding the full breadth of her community.”

In a city where the median home sale price is $1.1 million and the median household income is almost six figures, it’s confusing for newcomers to understand why the school system has a poor reputation since affluence in a community typically translates into quality in its public schools.

Pasadena, however, has become known as “a tale of two cities,” a place where the gap between the rich and the poor has only widened and the two groups don’t mingle socially or academically. At $97,818, the median household income is just above the state’s and $23,000 above the nation’s. At the same time, the city’s poverty rate of 13.4 percent is slightly higher than the state and national rate.

When the school district’s critics mention that its test scores are lower than those in surrounding school systems, supporters respond that the city has a wealth gap that’s largely absent from the more homogeneous neighboring suburbs. Many of the detractors, Dufford said, are also unaware that PUSD’s “bad” reputation coincided with the 1970 desegregation order that accelerated the departure of white, middle- and upper-income families from the district.

White flight out of Pasadena has been traced back as far as the 1940s. The reasons include lower birth rates among white families, an economic downturn in the aerospace industry that limited employment opportunities and the restructuring of neighborhoods to make way for freeways. By 1960, the racial demographics of the city were also changing, with communities of color expanding rapidly. The next year, PUSD lost about 400 students when the mostly white community of La Cañada broke away from the district to form its own separate school system, which to this day is ranked as one of the state’s best. In 1976, La Cañada Flintridge became its own city.

“The fact that people are willing to create whole new municipalities, so they don’t have to integrate — that should really wow people,” said Shannon Malone, PUSD’s senior director of principals, who added that her views were not the school district’s but her own. “You would rather create a whole new city than to let your child sit next to a person of color. I don’t think people have a full understanding of that at all.”

Having lived through the desegregation order, Hirahara, who is now an award-winning mystery writer, wishes more people knew about the history of the city’s schools. In 2016, she received a grant from the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division to present “Loma Alta: Tales of Desegregation,” a talk at a public library that featured her and two other district alumni sharing their experiences.

“So many people don’t even know that it was the first West Coast school district to get the order to desegregate, so it’s a very unique and telling experience of why we’re still dealing with issues of race today,” Hirahara said.

When Hirahara was enrolled in Loma Alta, about half of its students were Black. It was one of Pasadena’s top-performing elementary schools, which the 1973 report from the Civil Rights commission attributed to the fact that many of the students came from middle-class households. Other high-achieving schools in the district with large Black populations included Audubon Primary School and John Muir High School. Six students at John Muir were accepted into the elite California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1972, a rare feat that prompted Caltech’s then-president to write about the accomplishment in the local newspapers.

The Brown v. Board decision had the unintended consequence of costing tens of thousands of Black educators their jobs as many white schools did not want to employ these teachers and principals after integration. The consequences have endured for decades. In 2021, about 15 percent of public school students nationwide were Black, but only 6 percent of public school teachers nationwide were, according to a forthcoming report by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit that works to advance equitable education policies.

“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,”

Brian McDonald, the Pasadena Unified School District, former superintendent

Malone, who is Black and was bused to schools in Los Angeles, underscored the results of studies that show that students of color excel when they have Black teachers, demonstrating better academic and behavioral outcomes. But when Black children attend integrated schools, their support systems don’t usually accompany them, she said.

The achievements of students at racially diverse schools in the district didn’t stop the parents bent on leaving PUSD from doing so, administrators complained to federal officials in 1973. The biggest obstacle preventing the district from truly becoming integrated, the administrators said, was “white flight.” The Civil Rights commission’s report quoted one administrator making a remark that could have come from a PUSD supporter today: “White parents don’t take time to see whether the system is bad or not. They simply listen to people who criticize the district without foundation.”

What’s different is that now the district has an army of moms actively challenging these attitudes. Victoria Knapp is one of them, but it took time and trust in herself before she became a public school crusader.

Related: Revisiting Brown, 70 years later.

When Knapp entered grade school in Pasadena in the 1970s, she heard that children her age were being bused from one neighborhood to another, but she didn’t understand why it was being done or what it was like. Knapp did not attend the city’s public schools.

“My schools were predominantly white, predominantly Catholic and predominantly middle class or above,” she said.

She had some familiarity with public schools because her mother taught for the Los Angeles Unified School District, but she didn’t know that a contentious debate about integrating them had unfolded in her own community. Years later, after the birth of her older son, she felt pressure from fellow moms to send her children to private school. The aversion to public school in her moms’ group made her reflect on her city’s past. She thought to herself: “You mean to tell me that whatever was going on here 40 years ago is still going on?”

Still, her Catholic school upbringing and the nudging from the private school enthusiasts led Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council’s executive committee, to rule out PUSD. First, she and her husband enrolled their eldest son in a parochial school. Then they tried a nonsectarian private school. The couple felt that both schools exposed their children to experiences and behaviors they did not appreciate, like the sense of entitlement expressed by some of their classmates. Knapp, for the first time, began to consider an alternative.

“It did seem counterintuitive to me that I was going to have this relatively homogenous group of moms dictate what we were going to decide for our own kid,” she said.

After touring PUSD schools, Knapp questioned the idea that they were inferior to the city’s private schools. She wondered, “What’s not good? Is it that our public schools are predominantly Black and Brown children?”

When some parents raised safety concerns, she responded that elementary schools aren’t typically dangerous and that fights, gun violence and truancy occur at private and public schools alike. “They could never really articulate what safety meant,” Knapp said. “What safety meant was they didn’t want their child in an integrated, diverse school. They just didn’t. And that’s exactly where I wanted my privileged white sons to be.”

Both of her sons, a sixth grader and an 11th grader, have now attended public school for years. Her younger son attended Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson’s alma mater, Cleveland Elementary School.

Knapp became an active PUSD parent, serving as a PTA president at Altadena Arts Magnet, the school her younger son attended next, and an ambassador for the Pasadena Education Network, a role that has her regularly participate in school tours. Going on tours allows her to field questions from prospective parents. What the families see often surprises them, Knapp said.

“They think they’re going to see chaos and mayhem, then they come in,” she said. “Altadena Arts is an inclusion school, so kids of all neurodiversities are included in the same classroom. It’s socioeconomically diverse, it’s racially diverse, it’s gender diverse, it’s very integrated. You walk up there and it’s like, ‘This is what a school should look like.’”

Karina Montilla Edmonds, who moved to Pasadena in 1992 to attend Caltech, never doubted the city’s public school district. When her now 22-year-old daughter was entering kindergarten, Edmonds and her former husband turned down the chance to send her to the neighboring San Marino Unified School District (SMUSD), which ranks as one of the state’s top 10 school systems. Her then-husband taught for SMUSD, qualifying their eldest daughter for an interdistrict transfer to the suburb where the median household income is $174,253 and more than 85 percent of students are proficient in reading and math.

Edmonds wasn’t interested. “At the time, I was like, ‘That’s not my school. That’s not my community. I have a school two blocks away. Why wouldn’t I go there?’”

The decision appalled many of her fellow parents. “People thought I was nuts,” she said. “Luckily, I have a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech, so they knew I wasn’t stupid, but they definitely thought I was crazy.”

The mom of three from Rhode Island didn’t fear that her children wouldn’t get a good education in Pasadena’s public schools because she excelled in the public education system in her state while growing up in a household of few resources, raised by parents with limited formal education. “I thought I was rich because everybody around me was on public aid,” she said. When she attended a competitive public high school, she learned just how economically disadvantaged her family was. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I’m poor.’”

She now serves on the board of the Pasadena Educational Foundation, a nonprofit focused on developing community partnerships to help the city’s public schools excel. The organization also works with the Pasadena-Foothills Association of Realtors to educate real estate agents about the public schools since some realtors had a history of discouraging homebuyers from enrolling their children in PUSD. McDonald, the former superintendent, said that it happened to him when he was buying a home several years ago.

“She advised me to put my kids in every other school and district except for PUSD,” he said. “But I’m happy to say that through the efforts of the district and the Pasadena Educational Foundation, primarily utilizing the realtor initiative, we were able to change a few minds.”

Edmonds agrees that educating realtors is an important step. Her perspective on public schools and the surrounding communities, she added, also comes from the fact that her ex-husband taught in Pasadena before San Marino. Was he suddenly a better teacher because he moved from a less affluent school district to a more affluent one? She didn’t think so. She also didn’t compare the two district’s test scores because their populations are different. Pasadena Unified has significantly more low-income students, foster youth, English language learners and Black and Brown students than San Marino Unified, which is predominantly White and Asian American.

“To me, that’s part of the enrichment of getting to be with and learn from a broader part of our community,” she said, adding that children don’t suffer because they attend school in diverse environments.

The idea of seeking out or avoiding schools based on demographics concerns her.

“I feel like our democracy depends on an educated population,” she said. “I think every child should have access to excellent education and have an opportunity for success because I know the opportunities that I had given to me through the public school system.”

Related: Proof Points: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision.

The year after McDonald became the PUSD superintendent in 2014, he wrote a column in the local paper describing the difficulties the district was experiencing because of the high percentage of parents sending their children to private school. He estimated that the district was losing out on about $14 million because of declining enrollment, money that could help PUSD prevent school closures, teacher layoffs and cuts to student services.

But he also touted the district’s variety of programs for students such as dual language immersion schools and International Baccalaureate, as well as the piloting of a dual enrollment program with the local community college. Since then, the district has expanded its initiatives and created new ones. In addition to Spanish and Mandarin, the district’s dual language immersion tracks now include French and Armenian. From 2013 to 2022, PUSD also received three federal magnet assistance program grants that allow it to bring more academic rigor to its schools.

“We lose enrollment because people have a negative perception of our schools, so I think the idea of a magnet theme, whether it’s arts or early college, or a dual-language program, can really get people excited about something that their students are really interested in or maybe a value that their family has, let’s say, around the arts,” said Shannon Mumolo, PUSD’s director of

magnet schools, enrollment, and community engagement. Schools with themed magnet programs, she added, can sway families who weren’t interested in PUSD to consider at least going on a school tour.

Enrollment at PUSD’s John Muir High School has increased since it became an Early College Magnet in 2019, Mumolo said. Across the board, enrollment of students from underrepresented groups — white and Asian American — have gone up since the school district expanded its academic programs over the past decade.

“But I also want to make sure to emphasize that the schools have maintained their enrollment of their Black and Latino students,” Mumolo said. “We want to make sure that we’re keeping our neighborhood students and maintaining enrollment for those groups.”

The former superintendent also touts PUSD’s Math Academy, which The Washington Post in 2021 lauded as “the nation’s most accelerated math program.” The course allows gifted middle school students to take classes, such as Advanced Placement Calculus BC, that are so rigorous that only a small percentage of high school seniors take them.

Kenne, the school board president, said that her children, now both in their 20s, were gifted math students. The Math Academy was not available when they were in grade school. She and her husband switched them out of PUSD in high school, in part, because at the time they had more opportunities to excel in math in private school, she said, acknowledging that it was a controversial choice for a parent who advocates for public education. 

“People do have reasons,” Kenne said of some parents who choose private school. But she also said that private school overall wasn’t especially rigorous for her children. “My son calculated that he didn’t need to do homework for some classes to get a decent grade,” she said.

By introducing a wide variety of academic programs, including in math, PUSD has challenged the gap between what outsiders perceive it to be and what the district actually is, according to McDonald. “I think if we had not implemented those programs, the declining enrollment would have been much more acute,” he said.

Kahlenberg, the researcher, agrees. He said data suggests that when middle-class families get the right incentives to go to a public school, even one that’s outside their neighborhood, they do.

Since the busing integration program did not succeed in the district, Kahlenberg, in his studies of the school district, recommended that PUSD take creative approaches to lure in middle-income families. That includes introducing unique academic programs as well as developing or deepening partnerships with institutions in or around Pasadena — Caltech, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pasadena Playhouse, Art College Center of Design, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library.   

But the focus on winning parents back has led to some tension, Kenne said.

“Sometimes a message that we’ve heard in the last 10, 20 years is, do we care more about marketing to the people who don’t come to our district, or working hard for the people who are already here?” Kenne said. “Because sometimes the public-facing message seems to be all about getting kids back, and it makes the people in the system go, ‘Am I not important to you? I’m already here.’”

Nationwide, Black students who attended school in the late 1960s were more likely to be in integrated classrooms than Black youth today. Supreme Court decisions, such as 1991’sBoard of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowelland 2007’s Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, have contributed to the resegregation of the nation’s schools by phasing out court-ordered busing and making it harder to racially balance schools, according to experts.

Kahlenberg said schools nonetheless have a duty to continue trying to integrate — if not by race, then by class.

“The children of engineers and doctors bring resources to a school, but so do the children of recent immigrants or children whose parents have struggled,” Kahlenberg said. “The more affluent kids benefit as well from an integrated environment. When people have different life experiences they can bring to the discussion novel ideas and new ways of thinking, and that nicely integrated environment is possible in a place like Pasadena.”

Hirahara, for one, still cherishes her childhood in the school district, back when she befriended the girls in the C.L.A.N. As schools across the nation have largely re-segregated, she fears that too few young people get to experience what she did.

“I’m so glad that I had that kind of upbringing,” she said, “and I think it prepared me better for life.”

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Even as we approach the 70th anniversary of Brown vs. Board this May, key parts of its history remain buried. Reporting has begun to engage with some of the lost, and often complex, aspects of Brown’s legacy, such as the mass firing of Black educators following the Brown decision.

At least one critical piece, however, still remains largely unknown: NAACP lawyers submitted a letter with evidence about segregation’s impact on white students as well as Black students.

In the letter, signed by more than 30 social scientists, Thurgood Marshall and his team at the NAACP warned that, in addition to its more well-known harms to Black educational opportunity, segregation also has detrimental effects on white children.

If school integration is going to reach its full potential — for schools and for democracy in general — we should take a close look at this neglected letter and its chilling resonances with contemporary society. The letter notes that “segregation imposes upon individuals a distorted sense of social reality” that can take shape in different ways for white students.

As we approach a milestone for Brown, let’s seize this opportunity to recommit to one of its primary goals: integrated public schools as “the very foundation of good citizenship.”

This requires thinking about Brown more expansively than we have in the past. Thinking of school integration not as an individual benefit for one group of students but as an essential component of a healthy multicultural democracy.

Related: Any educational reform that ignores segregation is doomed to failure

Indeed, research clearly illustrates that white students in diverse schools gain social awareness and intercultural understanding among other benefits. In a recent study, my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts and I compared white students in segregated white schools with those in racially diverse schools. We found that the latter reported higher levels of civic engagement and a sense of belonging.

This is just one example in a long history of social science research that connects racial contact to enhanced participation in a diverse democracy — including increased sociocultural empathy and reduced belief in stereotypes.

The NAACP letter warns that those on the top of a social hierarchy can experience “confusion, conflict [and] moral cynicism” when trying to reconcile a contradiction between the stated “importance of justice and fair play by the same persons and institutions who, in their support of racial segregation and related practices, seem to be acting in a prejudiced and discriminatory manner.”

It notes that those majority members, in their effort to make sense of this apparent paradox, may “develop patterns of guilt feelings” or embrace “rigid stereotypes.”

Others may “attempt to resolve this conflict by intensifying their hostility toward the minority group,” the letter notes.

And in perhaps its most prophetic line, the letter warns that racial hostility is often accompanied by an “uncritical idealization of all authority figures” and “the development of a social climate within which violent outbreaks of racial tensions are likely to occur.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. And it’s deeply troubling. Consider the recent steady rise of hate incidents that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the “Trump effect.”

The former president’s current campaign is even more explicit in its embrace of racial stereotypes and dictatorial rule.

Surely, part of Trump’s support is connected to those “feelings of hostility” the letter described.

We see this today in efforts to ban curriculum on the history of school desegregation or even to outlaw any analysis of racism that inspires feelings of “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”  

Our current political climate might look different if the court had emphasized the benefits for all students in its final Brown ruling; of course, it did not.

Related: OPINION: Why segregation and racial gaps in education persist 70 years after the end of legal segregation

Segregation’s impact on white students is noticeably absent from one of the decision’s most iconic lines: “Segregation of white and colored children in the public schools hasa detrimental effect upon the colored children.”

Taking its cues from the court ruling, our country pursued Brown’s mandate narrowly, as an often one-way form of desegregation. Families of color bore a disproportionate burden — long bus rides, the white mobs — because it was presumed that desegregation was for their benefit only.

Thankfully, there are vibrant existing venues for a more expansive conception of school integration, much of which is organized by the National Coalition on School Diversity.

In some cities, youth organizers are carrying forward the similarly forgotten legacy of student protest for school integration. The student organizing operates according to a reimagined notion of Brown’s mandate, described as the 5 Rs of real integration: race and enrollment, resources, relationships, restorative justice and representation.

There are also efforts underway across the country to organize white and/or affluent parents — of course, the chief opponents of desegregation — to choose racially diverse schools for their children.

Research gives us reason to feel hopeful that these kinds of efforts can usher in a new era of school integration. Recent polling illustrates that white parents opposed to school integration are likely to change their opinions after learning more about the impact of segregation on white children: the exact results the NAACP letter warned us about 70 years ago.

We need to address segregation as a collective challenge and create a new approach that breaks from the one-sidedness of the past. Even as Brown turns 70, it’s not too late.

The seeds were planted long ago, and our current moment gives us plenty of motivation to help them grow.

Peter Piazza is a research assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate director of the university’s Beyond Test Scores Project.

This story about Brown vs. Board of Education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: 70 years after Brown vs. Board decision, key takeaways remain buried appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Although state and local leaders are building comprehensive plans to increase the number of Black teachers, few plans include the recruitment of more Black principals, who play a critical role in Black teachers’ development.

Only 10 percent of public school principals nationwide are Black, which helps explain why hiring and retaining Black teachers has been so problematic.

The roots of this issue go back to the historic 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which declared that laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white students were unconstitutional. While the Brown decision required faculty, administration and student bodies to be integrated, that’s not what happened; as student bodies integrated, Black teachers and principals were dismissed.

This year marks the decision’s 70th anniversary, yet the promise of Brown has not been fulfilled, nor has integration led to taking more seriously the role of Black educators in the lives of Black children.

Before 1954, Black principals played a unique and transformational role in ensuring Black students had Black teachers. Horace Tate, for example, featured in Vanessa Siddle Walker’s book, “The Lost Education of Horace Tate,” was a hero who, beginning in the 1940s, aggressively recruited undergraduate students from historically Black colleges and universities to teach in rural Georgia. He saw Black teacher recruitment and retention as critical to uplifting the Black community. Tate and the Georgia Teachers and Education Association also fought against unfair credentialing practices that strained the Black teacher pipeline.

Related: How to hire more black principals

In the wake of Brown, Leslie T. Fenwick tells in her groundbreaking book “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip,” Black principals lost their jobs in such devastating numbers that a Senate committee hearing was called to investigate the problem in 1971. Lack of support from the Nixon administration meant that those principals had no redress; however, testimony from the riveting hearing preserved the historical record.

Fenwick notes that policy efforts today must acknowledge and deal with the relics of that “systematic dismissal of Black educators from public schools.” Her book calls for a deeper understanding of what has been, should be and can be.

If states are committed to fulfilling the promise of Brown, they must not only rebuild the Black teacher pipeline but also come to grips with the critical role Black principals have played and can play in developing Black teachers. Horace Tate is no relic of history; Black principals are still fighting that fight today. I did.

During my first year as principal of a Mississippi middle school, I fought to recruit Black teachers and retain the ones I already had on my campus. I spent countless hours calling teachers who once taught at the school and trying to convince Black graduates of HBCUs to give our kids a chance to be taught by someone who looked like them and shared their values.

Later, while working at the Mississippi Department of Education, I led state-level efforts to address the state’s critical teacher shortage and increase the share of Black, Latino and indigenous teachers. We built a comprehensive plan that focused on such policy changes.

We worked with the legislature to amend the law to include more entry points into teacher education programs by adding a provision that takes into account prospective teachers’ GPAs, instead of relying solely on ACT and Praxis scores.

We provided statewide access to training and tutoring for assessments in partnership with our teacher advocacy organizations and focused on building community among Black educators. And we launched the nation’s first state-run teacher residency program for teachers: Our first class of residents, as I recall, was over 70 percent Black.

Related: OPINION: A Black principal’s case against educator neutrality

Many educators, including me, see this work as following in the legacy of Black principals like Tate, and as embodying what activist Mary Church Terrell refers to as “lifting as we climb.”

These stories underline a growing need for state education agency leaders to truly engage with Black principals, understand the need for more of them and recognize how they have effectively done the work of increasing the share of Black teachers.

Any strategy that does not engage Black principals is short-sighted. Professor Jarvis Givens, in his book “Fugitive Pedagogy,” describes “defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence,” as a marker of Black educational leaders who saw their subversive acts as paramount to improving Black education.

Today’s efforts should no longer be fugitive. In fact, educational leaders should consider these efforts necessary. To start, leaders might support the work of Black school leaders to recruit high-caliber, diverse teachers by scaling grow-your-own and teacher residency programs like we did in Mississippi.

State policymakers must also invest in HBCUs and other institutions (such as Hispanic-serving institutions and institutions serving Native Americans) serving populations underrepresented in teaching and reform existing loan forgiveness programs to make them better recruiting tools for teachers.

If educational leaders fully grasp the profound impact Black principals have on the Black teacher pipeline, they’ll push to increase the share of Black principals — who, for decades, have called for greater attention to Black teacher recruitment and retention.

Phelton Moss is the acting director of American University’s Education Policy and Leadership Program. He is a professor of Education Policy at American University and a fellow in the center for Education Innovation at the NAACP.

This story about Black principals was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Black principals play a key role in transforming education. We need more of them appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Entrando a un centro comunitario repleto de estudiantes de último año de secundaria, Atnre Alleyne tiene algunos consejos para la audiencia, miembros de la primera clase de solicitantes universitarios que serán influenciados por el fallo de la Corte Suprema del pasado junio que derribo las admisiones con conciencia racial.

“Hay que obtener buenas calificaciones, hay que encontrar una manera de hacer lo académico, pero también convertirse en líderes”, dijo Alleyne, el enérgico cofundador y director ejecutivo de TeenSHARP, una organización sin fines de lucro que prepara a estudiantes de entornos subrepresentados para la educación superior. “¡En sus escuelas, hagan algo! Luchen por la justicia social”.

A varios de los participantes de TeenSHARP reunidos ahí, que son predominantemente negros o hispanos, les preocupa que sus posibilidades de ingresar a escuelas de primer nivel hayan disminuido con la decisión del tribunal. Se preguntan qué decir en sus ensayos de admisión y qué tan cómodos se sentirán en campus que podrían volverse cada vez menos diversos.

En esta noche de otoño, Alleyne y su equipo responden preguntas de las docenas de estudiantes a quienes asesoran, sobre todo, desde plazos de aplicación temprana hasta qué escuelas tienen más probabilidades de otorgar becas y ayuda generosa financiera. El cambio en el panorama de admisiones solo ha aumentado la determinación del equipo de desarrollar una nueva generación de líderes, estudiantes que lucharán por que sus voces estén representadas en los campus y más adelante en el lugar de trabajo.

“Quiero que abran las puertas de estos lugares de una patada, para que regresen y abran más puertas”, dijo Alleyne.

Este objetivo lo comparten los ex alumnos del programa que Alleyne y su esposa, Tatiana Poladko, iniciaron en el sótano de una iglesia hace 14 años. Varios están presentes esta noche contando sus propias travesías educativas, que culminaron con becas completas para escuelas como la Universidad de Chicago y la Universidad Wesleyan, donde los costos anuales estimados se acercan a los $90,000.

Antes de la decisión de la Corte Suprema en el caso Students for Fair Admissions contrz Harvard, las universidades altamente selectivas servían como un faro de esperanza y movilidad económica para estudiantes como los que aconseja TeenSHARP. Muchos son los primeros en sus familias en asistir a la universidad y carecen de conexiones heredadas o de acceso a consejeros privados que durante mucho tiempo han dado un impulso a los estudiantes más ricos.

But even before the high court ruling, Black and Latino students were poorly represented at these institutions, while the college degree gap between Black and white Americans was getting worse. For some students, the court decision sends a message that they do not belong, and if they get in, they worry they’ll stand out even more.

Incluso antes del fallo del tribunal superior, los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos estaban escasamente representados en estas instituciones, mientas que la brecha de títulos universitarios entre estadounidenses negros y blancos sigue empeoriando. Para algunos estudiantes, la decisión judicial envía el mensaje de que no pertenecen, y que, si ingresan, les preocupa resaltar aún más.

“Me sentí realmente molesto por eso”, dijo Jamel Powell, un estudiante de secundaria de Belle Mead, Nueva Jersey, que participa en TeenSHARP, sobre el fallo de acción afirmativa. “Este sistema ha ayudado a muchas minorías subrepresentadas a ingresar a estas escuelas de la Ivy League y sobresalir”.

Si bien el impacto total de la decisión sobre la demografía de los estudiantes no es claro, los representantes de 33 universidades escribieron en un informe amicus presentado en el caso que la proporción de estudiantes afroamericanos en sus campus caería de aproximadamente 7.1 por ciento a 2.1 por ciento, si se prohíben acciones afirmativas.

La incertidumbre sobre lo que significa la decisión está pasando factura a los estudiantes y consejeros escolares a nivel nacional, dijo Mandy Savitz-Romer, profesora titular de la Graduate School of Education de Harvard. Mientras las universidades analizan cómo pueden cumplir sus compromisos con la diversidad y al mismo tiempo cumplir con la ley, los estudiantes se preguntan si mencionar su raza en los ensayos de aplicación los ayudará o los perjudicará.

En la decisión mayoritaria, el presidente del Tribunal Supremo, John Roberts, escribió que la raza sólo podía invocarse dentro del contexto de la historia de vida del solicitante, haciendo de los ensayos la única oportunidad para que los estudiantes discutieran su raza y origen étnico. Pero desde entonces, Edward Blum, el activista conservador que ayudó a llevar el caso ante el tribunal, ha amenazado con más demandas, prometiendo cuestionar cualquier tema de ensayo que no sea “más que un subterfugio clandestino para divulgar la raza de un estudiante”.

El Departamento de Educación ha publicado directrices que dicen que, si bien las escuelas no pueden poner el dedo en la escala de los estudiantes en función de su raza, “siguen siendo libres” de considerar las características vinculadas a las experiencias de vida de los estudiantes individuales, incluida la raza. La National Association of College Admission Counseling emitió una guía similar, mientras que la Common App introdujo nuevos temas de ensayo que incluyen uno sobre la “identidad” y los “antecedentes” de los estudiantes.

Debido a la incertidumbre, los consejeros escolares necesitan capacitación específica en la elaboración de ensayos y en cómo hablar o no sobre la raza, dijo Savitz-Romer durante un webinar en Harvard, el mes pasado, sobre admisiones universitarias después de la acción afirmativa. “Necesitamos consejeros y maestros para que los estudiantes comprendan que la universidad todavía es para ellos”, dijo.

Es una tarea difícil: en promedio, los consejeros de las escuelas públicas atienden a más de 400 estudiantes cada uno, lo que ofrece poco tiempo para asesoramiento personalizado.

Esa realidad es la razón por la que grupos de asesoramiento sin fines de lucro como TeenSHARP trabajan junto a los estudiantes, guiándolos a través de un sistema de admisión cada vez más confuso. El equipo de tres asesores de TeenSHARP trabaja intensamente con aproximadamente 140 estudiantes a la vez, incluidos 50 estudiantes de último año que a menudo se postulan hasta a 20 universidades para maximizar sus posibilidades.

Esa es una fracción de los que necesitan ayuda, otra razón por la que los líderes del grupo dependen de su red de más de 500 “Sharpies”, como se conoce a los alumnos.

Emily Rodríguez, estudiante de último año de TeenSHARP que asiste a la Escuela de Ciencias Conrad en Wilmington, decidió abordar la raza de frente en sus ensayos universitarios: escribió sobre su determinación de no “hacer el papel de la pobre y sumisa mexicana”.

Hamza Parker, estudiante de último año de la escuela secundaria Smyrna de Delaware, quien se mudó a Estados Unidos desde Arabia Saudita cuando cursaba sexto grado, dijo que al principio estaba en contra de escribir sobre su identidad. “Siento que te pone en una posición en la que tienes que tener una historia triste para tu ensayo en lugar de hablar de algo bueno que sucedió en tu vida”, les dijo a Alleyne y Poladko durante una sesión de asesoramiento por Zoom.

Pero en la sesión, Alleyne y Poladko la alentaron a inspirarse en su propia historia, una de la que conocen algo gracias a su trabajo con su hermana mayor, Hasana, ahora estudiante de tercer año en Pomona College. La familia tuvo una mudanza difícil desde Arabia Saudita a la ciudad de Nueva York y más tarde a Delaware, donde Hamza se unió a la Black Student Coalition de Delaware.

Hamza decidió revisar su ensayo centrado en la lingüística para describir cómo experimentó el racismo y luego abrazó su herencia musulmana.

“Soy mi yo social normal y mi fe y vestimenta musulmana son ampliamente conocidas y respetadas en mi escuela”, escribió. “Incluso mi escuela tiene ahora un espacio dedicado a la oración durante el Ramadán”.

Alleyne y Poladko normalmente trabajan con estudiantes que están comenzando su primer año de escuela secundaria, por lo que la pareja puede guiar todo el proceso de solicitud de ingreso a la universidad, como lo hacen algunos costosos asesores privados. Los servicios de TeenSHARP son gratuitos y como organización sin fines de lucro, depende del apoyo de una variedad de donantes.

Ni Poladko ni Alleyne asistieron a escuelas de élite. Se conocieron como estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Rutgers y se comprometieron a iniciar TeenSHARP después de ayudar a la sobrina de Alleyne, estudiante de una gran escuela secundaria pública de la ciudad de Nueva York, a postularse para universidades.

Asombrados por lo complicadas e inaccesibles que podían ser las admisiones universitarias, los dos decidieron convertirlo en el trabajo de su vida, redactando subvenciones y obteniendo donaciones de bancos y fundaciones locales para poder atender a más estudiantes.

Su trabajo ahora es en gran medida remoto: durante la pandemia, la pareja se mudó de Wilmington a la Ucrania natal de Poladko para estar más cerca de su familia, lo que los llevó a una dramática fuga a Polonia con sus tres hijos pequeños cuando estalló la guerra. Poladko se está tomando un año sabático en TeenSHARP este año, aunque todavía ayuda a algunos estudiantes a través de Zoom. Alleyne vuela de Varsovia a Wilmington para reunirse con los estudiantes en persona, a menudo en el centro comunitario del lugar que alguna vez albergó sus oficinas.

También dependen de las relaciones que han construido a lo largo de los años con presidentes de universidades y funcionarios de admisiones en escuelas como Boston College, Pomona College y Wesleyan, Carleton y Macalester Colleges en Minnesota y muchas otras universidades las cuales han dado la bienvenida a los solicitantes de TeenSHARP.

“Necesitamos más ‘Sharpies’ en nuestro campus”, dijo Suzanne Rivera, presidenta de Macalester College, en Minnesota, y miembro del consejo asesor de TeenSHARP. “Sus preguntas son siempre muy inteligentes y reveladoras”.

Los Sharpies también tienden a convertirse en líderes del campus, en parte porque TeenSHARP requiere que sus estudiantes desarrollen habilidades de liderazgo. Eso es algo que William García, quien se graduó de la Universidad de Chicago la primavera pasada, les dijo a los estudiantes de último año en Wilmington.

Al principio, se sintió aislado en Chicago, reticente a hablar de sus experiencias como hispano. “Yo estaba en tu lugar hace cinco años”, dijo García. Más tarde se dio cuenta de que su experiencia podía ser una ventaja y la aprovechó para convertir un ingrediente de uno de los licores más populares de México en una iniciativa comercial para su propia empresa de bebidas de agave.

“Abraza tu historia; cuenta tu historia”, dijo García. “Contaba mi historia y la gente se interesaba mucho y empezaba a ayudarme”.

Alphina Kamara, graduada de Wesleyan University en 2022, instó a los estudiantes de último año a apuntar alto y mirar más allá de las escuelas estatales y los colegios comunitarios locales que tienen tasas de graduación más bajas y menos recursos, lugares donde podría haber terminado si no fueran para TeenSHARP.

“Nunca hubiera sabido que existían escuelas como Wesleyan y que yo, como mujer negra de primera generación, tenía un lugar en ellas”, dijo Kamara, hija de padres inmigrantes de Sierra Leona.

Aun así, siempre habrá algunos estudiantes de TeenSHARP que no van a querer estar en campus con un historial terrible en materia de diversidad, incluso antes de la decisión del tribunal.

Tariah Hyland, quien en la escuela secundaria cofundó la Black Student Coalition de Delaware, sabía que se sentiría más cómoda en uno de los más de 100 colegios y universidades históricamente negros (o HBCU, por sus siglas en inglés) del país. Le dijo a la audiencia de Delaware que está prosperando en su tercer año en la Universidad Howard, donde estudia ciencias políticas.

Powell, estudiante de tercer año de Nueva Jersey, está mirando tanto a Howard como al Morehouse College de Atlanta y dijo que probablemente sólo postulará a las HBCU.

“Cuando estaba en la escuela pública, era el único niño negro en mis clases”, dijo Powell, que ahora asiste a Acelus Academy, una escuela en línea. “Siempre fui una minoría, por lo que, al ir a una HBCU, probablemente vería más personas que se parecen a mí”.

Esto no sorprende a Chelsea Holley, directora de admisiones del Spelman College en Atlanta, quien dijo que espera “más interés por parte de los estudiantes negros y minoritarios, ahora que la Corte Suprema ha tomado lo que creo que es una decisión política regresiva”.

HBCU como Spelman, entre cuyos graduados se encuentran la fundadora del Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, y la autora Alice Walker, ya están viendo más solicitudes y se están volviendo aún más competitivas.

“Si los estudiantes afroamericanos de último año de secundaria ya no se sienten bienvenidos en campus predominantemente blancos, es menos probable que presenten su solicitud e incluso menos probable que se inscriban, aun cuando se les ofrece la admisión”, dijo Holley y agregó que los estudiantes pueden estar preocupados por más ataques a la diversidad y la inclusión en los campus universitarios y creen que se sentirán más cómodos en una HBCU.

Aun así, no todos predicen que el fallo judicial precipitará una caída permanente de estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos en universidades selectivas predominantemente blancas. Richard Kahlenberg, autor y académico de la Universidad de Georgetown, predice que la caída será temporal y que la prohibición de la acción afirmativa eventualmente conducirá a un panorama más justo para los estudiantes de bajos ingresos de todas las razas.

Kahlenberg, quien sirvió como testigo experto para Students for Fair Admissions, dijo que quiere ver el fin de las preferencias heredadas, así como del reclutamiento atlético, para que las universidades puedan dar “un impulso significativo” a los “estudiantes desfavorecidos de todas las razas”, agregando que es posible “obtener diversidad racial sin preferencias raciales”. Los desafíos a las admisiones heredadas están aumentando: el Departamento de Educación ha abierto una investigación sobre el uso de esta práctica por parte de Harvard y un reciente proyecto de ley bipartidista exige que las universidades pongan fin a esta práctica.

A medida que se acerca la mitad de diciembre, Alleyne y Poladko esperan ansiosamente ver cómo le irá al puñado de estudiantes de TeenSHARP que solicitaron una decisión anticipada.

“Los funcionarios de admisiones nos aseguran que su compromiso con la diversidad no ha cambiado”, dijo Poladko. “Pero tendremos que ver. Hemos explicado a las familias y a los estudiantes que este año es un año de aprendizaje”.

Hasta entonces, tanto Poladko como Alleyne seguirán presionando a los estudiantes para que ayuden a quienes vengan después de ellos.

“Nuestro objetivo es descubrir el juego de las admisiones y darles una ventaja a nuestros estudiantes”, dijo Alleyne. “Y nuestro trabajo es enseñarles cómo jugar”.

Esta historia sobre TeenSHARP es la primera en una serie de artículos producidos por by The Hechinger Report conjunto con Soledad O’Brien Productions, sobre el impacto de la decisión de la Corte Suprema que prohíbe la acción afirmativa.

The post Asesores universitarios prometen “abrir la puerta” a estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos a pesar del fallo de acción afirmativa appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

I have taught at Columbia University for the better part of 25 years. Last Wednesday, I held office hours, as I do every week. I met with students and we talked about their classes, their essays on Shakespeare and Milton, their progress toward their respective degrees, and their feelings about graduation.

We also spoke about their reactions to Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s recent Congressional testimony and her decision to authorize New York City police to break up the “Gaza Solidary Encampment” on campus, along with their views on the protests.

In each conversation, I was impressed with their thoughtfulness, intelligence and compassion – and with their skills as evaluators of others’ use of language. They are English majors, so they should have good close reading skills. But they took the time to evaluate the statements of others, in context, from multiple perspectives.

In some ways, Columbia students are getting two world-class educations right now: one in their classes, and another on a campus that has become a center of cultural and political forces we will spend years parsing.

Related: How to combat anti-semitism without compromising academic freedom

Everything changed on campus after our president authorized police to sweep the encampment, resulting in dozens of students being arrested. It was done without appropriate consultation with faculty and the university senate. There was no “clear and present danger,” as the administration claimed.

Columbia faculty are, for the most part, longform thinkers, researchers, experimenters and writers, considerers of evidence and engagers in dialogue, experimentation and peer review. We are not good at sound bites – or at least I am not. I am not interested in social media as a platform for speech or dialogue. But I am passionately interested in the university as a place for teaching, research and debate.

The president’s action not only degraded the mission of a great university as such a place, but it subjected our students and every single member of this community to an unnecessary escalation of turmoil both inside and outside our gates.

Many students were outraged. Many faculty were outraged. And the full media circus, along with dozens of extremists of all kinds, arrived at our gates. 

Much of our time now – the time of biologists and language teachers, of immunologists and anthropologists, teachers of literature and computer science and art – is going into handling the fallout from this grossly mismanaged crisis. It is not a good use of our time.

In some ways, Columbia is still working as it should. Students are protesting a brutal war, including in tents on a lawn, they are going to classes and to the library, writing essays, putting on the Varsity Show, and reporting, at a very high level, on the events unfolding for campus publications WKCR, BWOG and The Columbia Spectator.

Students are learning, very imperfectly, about the history of the Middle East, the history of protests on Columbia’s campus and elsewhere, and about the rights of protestors and the rights of other students.

They are also learning, again imperfectly, about the differences between their perceptions of what is happening on campus and the perceptions of others on that same campus at the same time, and about the difference between suspending a student for hate speech or harassment, and suspending them for participating in a protest.

They are learning about the power and opportunism of some members of the U.S. Congress, and about the consequences of bad decisions on the part of their university’s administration.

Our students also belatedly learned that administrators might learn from their mistakes after Columbia’s president, provost and trustee chairs took a step back Friday night, writing in a letter to the entire Columbia community that calling the police back to clear the encampment a second time “would be counterproductive, further inflaming what is happening on campus, and drawing thousands to our doorstep who would threaten our community.”

On Monday, they discovered that talks with administrators and student organizers have failed to reach an agreement.

The pressures working against nuanced dialogue across vast differences and experiences are enormous. Yet, we must restart those conversations. There are established places on campus for that work to take place: in classrooms, in representative student governing bodies, in representative faculty governing bodies, in conversations among students, faculty and administration, and in the university senate – the shared governing structure for the university.

More than 550 people came to the last open senate meeting on Friday. After much debate, the majority of senators voted on a resolution demanding that Columbia address reports of administrative actions jeopardizing academic freedom and breaching privacy and due process of students and faculty, along with violating shared governance principles. 

They proposed establishing a senate task force to present findings and recommendations for further senate action. The senate is contentious and baggy, but it, along with Columbia’s rules of conduct, were put in place 50 years ago to ensure that major university decisions be made representatively rather than by fiat.

They worked for 50 years. It’s time to bring them back.

Julie Crawford is the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Columbia University’s Teachers College.

This opinion piece about campus protests was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: I teach Renaissance literature at Columbia, but this week’s lessons are about political protests and administrative decisions  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

At a national park in Virginia on Monday, President Joe Biden announced that people can start applying to the American Climate Corps, a program that is expected to connect workers with more than 20,000 green jobs. 

“You’ll get paid to fight climate change, learning how to install those solar panels, fight wildfires, rebuild wetlands, weatherize homes, and so much more that’s going to protect the environment and build a clean energy economy,” Biden said at the Earth Day event. 

The American Climate Corps (ACC) is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to employ men in environmental projects on the country’s public lands — projects like trail building, planting trees and soil erosion control. Nearly 3 million people were put to work in an effort to address both Depression-era unemployment and to shore up national infrastructure.

But it wasn’t very diverse. Although Black and Native American men were allowed to enroll, the work was segregated. And women could not apply. For a brief time, a sister program created by Eleanor Roosevelt — mockingly called the “She-She-She camps” by its detractors — trained 8,500 women in skills like typing and filing.  

The Biden administration is adamant that this iteration of the program will attract a more diverse conservation and climate workforce, promising that the program will “look like America” and expand pathways into the workforce for people from marginalized backgrounds.

On Monday, Biden announced the launch of a long-awaited job board where applicants can look for opportunities. Some positions were created through the American Climate Corps partner agencies like the Forest Service, which announced the Forest Corps — 80 jobs in reforestation and wildfire mitigation — or the USDA’s Working Lands Climate Corps, with 100 positions. At the same time, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy announced a new project that will place corps members in priority energy communities — places that have historically been the site of coal mining and power plants — for work in community-led projects like environmental remediation. All of these positions have a term limit, although they vary; some listed on the website are seven-months for example, others are over a year long. 

Other jobs listed on the site are compiled from existing conservation corps programs; either state-run programs like the California Conservation Corps or those run by nonprofits like Conservation Legacy. These provide opportunities for young people in local communities to do everything from prescribed burning on public lands to solar panel installations on schools. 

So far, there are 273 listings on the website, ranging from working on trail crews to invasive plant management to wildland firefighting positions. There is also an “ag literacy” position to teach kids about where their food comes from, and a posting for a climate impact coordinator who will help a Minnesota nonprofit develop climate resilience projects. That’s a far cry from the administration’s goal of 20,000 jobs.

But supporters of the program say opportunities to expand ACC are endless — from home weatherization positions to planting tree canopies in urban areas. The question is whether these mostly taxpayer-funded jobs will attract and retain a diverse workforce and benefits women and LGBTQ+ workers, as well as people of color. 

“We know that it is going to take everybody to solve the climate process and we need to field the whole team. That’s exactly the way we’ve thought about building this program,” said Maggie Thomas, special assistant for climate to Biden.

Because the program is working with The Corps Network, a national association of about 140 conservation groups, there is already some data on how modern-day organizations operate, said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of the network. “They collectively engage almost 25,000 young people a year and are very diverse — young people from urban areas to rural areas. There is a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and education level.”

According to the organization’s data from 2023, the most recent year available, 44 percent of their members were women and 3 percent were gender non-conforming or gender expansive.

Fifty-nine percent identified as White, while 14 percent were Black, 23 percent were Latino, 4 percent were American Indian, 3 percent were Asian and 2 percent were Pacific Islander. 

Sprenkel sees those numbers as progress. “What has evolved out of the original CCC has naturally become much more diverse in terms of member opportunities. And so building on that for the ACC, I think it will naturally happen,” said Sprenkel. 

In addition, any of the jobs created through federal agencies in collaboration with the ACC must adhere to the administration’s Justice 40 initiative, which means 40 percent of the benefits must go to marginalized communities, in this case either through job creation, or through the projects being funded through monies like the Inflation Reduction Act. 

One aspect of parity will be how well these jobs pay. Many of the positions listed on the ACC site are funded through AmeriCorps, which pays modest living stipends that have been criticized as “poverty wages.” AmeriCorps “was designed for middle class White people who could get support from their parents to have this opportunity,” Sprenkel said. But the Biden administration wants to ensure that all young people can serve, she continued, not just those who can afford to take lower-paying positions.

Sprenkel said the administration is aiming for positions to pay a living wage — with some wiggle room that allows for lower wages as long as housing and other benefits are provided. “[They’ve] said we would like for programs to strive to pay their members $15 an hour, but if that is the result of a package where you’re providing housing and transportation, that’s OK.”

One way the administration has aimed to increase pay transparency is to list an hourly wage equivalent for the jobs posted on the ACC website, said Thomas. This number could factor in stipends for transportation, living expenses and educational awards. Many jobs currently listed go above the $15 minimum — though some require more than entry-level experience. 

There are also efforts in the works to increase the low stipends of current AmeriCorps members. “The president has called on Congress to raise the minimum living allowance for all of our crew members to at least $15 an hour as a starting point,” said Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, senior advisor for AmeriCorps. In the interim, she said, many corps positions have been able to offer packages equivalent to $15 an hour through public and private partnerships with states and outside organizations.

Madeleine Sirois, a research analyst with the left-leaning think tank Urban Institute, has been researching workforce development pathways in the clean energy transition. She said offering paid opportunities to enter a new career is a good starting point. “So many people want to upskill, they want to get new credentials, and maybe change career paths. But then they can’t leave their current job that maybe only pays 10 bucks an hour,” she said. 

But other benefits are important, too, if the program is going to be equitable in its rollout, said Sirois. “It’s been mentioned on the portal that there are health care, child care, transportation and housing available, but it does say only some opportunities will offer that,” she said. “So it leaves me with the question of: Who has access to that and who doesn’t?” 

Among the initial 273 listings posted on the ACC site, The 19th found only four that listed child care as a benefit, though Shaheen-McConnell said that eventually more of the positions will offer it. 

Sirois said another important aspect of the ACC will be whether it will lead to actual jobs in clean energy and climate work after corps service ends. She was heartened by Monday’s announcement that the ACC had partnered with the North America’s Building Trades Alliance TradeFutures program, which will provide every ACC member access to a free pre-apprenticeship trades readiness program. Trades jobs make up the foundation of the clean energy transition, but have historically gone to men. Just 4 percent of women are trades workers in the United States. 

“These are all really important, especially for getting women and people of color into these jobs, and apprenticeships that will lead into quality careers that are unionized in many cases. So I think that’s fantastic,” said Sirois. However, while the administration has also touted that ACC positions will offer workforce certifications and skill-based training, Sirois said those are only offered for some corps members. Getting clarity on how many of these jobs will lead to improved employment opportunities will be key. 

It’s going to take time to see how the program plays out, she said, and learn if it will be successful in placing women and people of color in trades jobs, despite historic discrimination.

“When we talk about moving people into jobs, it’s making sure we’re very specific about what kinds of jobs in terms of the quality,” she said. “It’s about opportunities for advancement, having meaningful work, a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, and feeling that you have a voice on the job.” Sirois hopes the administration will collect data on corps members that tracks completion rates and job placements after service, and that the data can be disaggregated by gender and race.

Thomas said American Climate Corps jobs should be considered the earliest stage of the workforce development pipeline — leading to better paying jobs down the line. “This is an opportunity for young people to take action right now in communities across the country, on climate projects that we know have a tangible impact today.”

This story was originally published by The 19^th and reprinted with permission.

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Students gather once a month at my high school for what we call “equity lunch chats” with teachers and administrators. The students ask about many topics, including tardy policies, access to athletics and clubs, and even treatment by deans and security. Their questions give the adults like me in the room a glimpse into their world. But no matter how the conversation starts, the students — nearly half of whom are Black, Asian, Hispanic or multiracial — often come back to complaints about the lack of diversity in our school’s textbooks and educational materials.

They want to see themselves and their cultures reflected in the books we read, and they don’t want token representation. They want more diverse classroom experiences.

“I appreciate that my teachers try to offer different narratives,” a student said at one of our sessions discussing teaching materials featuring history and stories from all continents, “but they always seem to be about hardship or having to overcome an obstacle. We are never just the average main character.” Another student pointed out that he already knows about the “famous people of color, but never hears about the everyday lives of them.”

As a Colorado secondary school history teacher and former English teacher, I believe, and research shows, that student achievement improves when learners are personally engaged. Higher engagement correlates with higher productivity, work quality and satisfaction — and even improved attendance rates.

Students tell us this every day in ways big and small. I see them clamor for Zheng He, Simon Bolivar, Cesar Chavez, Mary Wollstonecraft and Haile Selassie when they choose research topics. In her research paper this year, a student named Briana who picked Cesar Chavez wrote that she had never been given so many choices before, and that “the choices have never included topics that make me feel like I am learning about my own heritage at the same time. I am so proud to be Hispanic and loved researching a personal hero of mine.”

I also see my students’ hands go up when we study world religions, and they can share a story from home. They nod along as we cover topics that connect to stories their grandparents shared with them, like tales of migration and cultural celebrations.

Related: Teaching social studies in a polarized world

It’s time we listened to our students and strengthened our curriculums to teach a balanced history that honors all cultures and narratives. Here are a few ways we can do this:

Improve instructional materials. Our long-standing curricula highlight a Eurocentric global history and white-centric American history, with only small cameos by the people who were enslaved, harmed and marginalized. Gathering a team of students and educators to advise on an inclusive curriculum would give students a voice in the process and create a starting place for teachers like me as we build our own classroom lesson plans.

Provide all students opportunities to advocate for inclusive sources. When students have voice and choice in their learning, they are more inclined to participate and succeed. Teachers can learn from those choices and adapt long-term lesson-planning to respond to the various needs and interests of all their students. High schools can build student-led spaces like those in our equity lunch chats, where students suggest texts and topics, and history classes like mine can support the mission of making our curriculum more inclusive.

Provide educators with the time and training to be culturally responsive teachers. As schools across the country welcome more diverse student populations (including 2,800 migrant children newly enrolled in Denver schools in January), the need for teachers to be culturally responsive is ever more pressing. States should offer teachers stipends and extra time to diversify their historical knowledge and then build lessons and materials to reflect it. Districts should also consider bringing in students and experts in equity studies as sounding boards and editors for these new curriculums.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: There’s something missing from my Advanced Placement classes, and that needs to change

In the meantime, I look forward to our lunch chats and to learning from our students about how we can listen better and make real gains toward their goal of a more equitable education. We must continue to be advocates for an inclusive learning experience that allows for honesty, connection and relevance for all our learners.

Emily Muellenberg is a social studies teacher at Grandview High School in Aurora, Colorado. She is a 2023-24 Teach Plus Colorado Policy Fellow.

This story about creating more diverse classroom experiences was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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TOLEDO, Ohio – The sound of his teacher smacking his desk jolted Marquan into consciousness, and his head jerked up. “Wake up,” his teacher said.

Marquan hadn’t slept much the night before, and the words came out before he was fully coherent. “Watch out before you make me mad,” he said. 

His teacher turned and asked if that was a threat. The 16-year-old said no, he was just startled, but it was too late – he was sent out of the classroom and given a two-day suspension. 

What the teacher heard as a threat was, for Marquan, an instinctive reaction, and he had failed to code-switch in that groggy moment.

“I wasn’t threatening him; it was just loud and all of a sudden,” said Marquan, now 17 and a sophomore at Jesup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “That was the most unfair thing.” 

In Ohio, Black students like Marquan are suspended for incidents like this far more frequently than their white peers. In the past six years, Ohio has issued close to 885,000  suspensions and expulsions for comments and misbehaviors tagged as disobedience or disruption. Nearly half of those dismissals have been for Black students, even though they make up only 17 percent of the public school population. Black students in Ohio are, on average, kicked out of classes for these offenses at four and half times the rate of white students.

A Hechinger Report analysis across 20 states found that these types of categories are cited as justification in nearly a third of all suspension and expulsion records. In many states, including Indiana, Maryland and Rhode Island, Black students are suspended more often for these kinds of incidents, which can include dress code violations, talking back to teachers and being too noisy in class.

States use different terms to describe the offenses – disrespect, insubordination, defiance – depending on their discipline code. But what they all have in common is the subjective nature of an educator’s decision; experts say that’s what leads to racial disparities. What seems disrespectful and threatening in one classroom can be entirely acceptable in another, depending on who’s listening and who’s speaking. That’s when racial and cultural differences between educators and students can come into play. Bias also plays a role.

“Disobedience is identified, by and large, by lived experiences,” said Jennifer Myree, who was a principal and assistant principal in Cincinnati for seven years and now works for the Ohio Department of Education. “If you have a child who comes from a home where they’re allowed to speak out about injustices, for example, saying ‘That’s not fair,’ and the classroom teacher, or the administrators, don’t believe that the child should speak out on things, they can consider that disobedience.”

Researchers say that racial disparities inside schools tend to reflect what’s happening in society as a whole and that income level does not explain the discrepancies.

“Teachers are no more biased than other people, but also no less biased,” said Russell Skiba, a professor in the school psychology program at Indiana University and director of its Equity Project. “Race is the much more important predictor of whether a kid gets suspended rather than poverty.”

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

A spokesperson from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Lacey Snoke, didn’t respond directly to questions about the state’s racial disparities. Snoke, the chief communications officer, said the department “supports schools and districts as they address non-academic barriers to learning.” The Indiana Department of Education said that school discipline policies were set at the local level. Rhode Island said that it helps school districts in setting discipline policies that “are conducive to a safe and nurturing environment that promotes academic success.” Maryland’s state education agency said only that it makes annual data available for school districts to analyze.

Snoke also noted that the state requires schools to use a student support system known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS. “When implementing PBIS with fidelity, schools and districts see a reduction in out-of-school suspension and exclusionary discipline,” she said.

Like many of America’s school districts, Toledo’s public schools have struggled with keeping discipline racially equitable for years. In 2020, following a federal civil rights investigation, the district agreed to a settlement with the federal Department of Justice “to address and prevent discriminatory discipline of students based on race or disability.” Last spring, the government extended its monitoring for an additional year after finding that the district was not in full compliance with the settlement terms. 

Part of the problem in Toledo, the fifth-largest school district in Ohio with more than 21,000 students, is that teachers and administrators haven’t figured out what’s at the root of the disparity, according to a federal monitoring report sent to the district last May and obtained by The Hechinger Report as part of its investigation into the widespread use of suspension for things like defiance and disruption around the country.

“Speculative answers about the reasons for why disciplinary referrals would be greater for Black students when compared to white students ranged from blaming the students’ underperformance in math and English language arts to blaming ‘parents who don’t take pride’ or are otherwise uninvolved in their children’s lives,” according to the report. “Educators at one school opined that they are not using strategies that engage kids of color; those at another school said they needed to develop activities for students to feel more of a sense of belonging.”        

Last year, there were more than 12,000 suspensions in Toledo public schools for defiance or disruption and more than 7,700 were given to Black students, up from 7,000 the year before. Black students received 65 percent of defiance and disruption suspensions last year, even though they make up about 46 percent of the student population in Toledo.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first    

The reason for the high numbers is multi-faceted, and the solutions need to be as well, said Amerah Archer, acting executive director for the Department of Equity Diversity and Inclusion in the Toledo Public Schools.

“We understand there’s sometimes a cultural mismatch between teachers and students and their backgrounds,” Archer said. “So we offer culturally responsive training, to help our teachers understand how to build relationships and students across cultures.”

The district has also brought in outside mental health providers and — in all 57 of its schools — it has set up social-emotional wellness teams to examine discipline data and look for trends, including racial disparities within schools and classrooms. Educators receive training on how to respond to students who have endured trauma and may be acting out as a result, with responses that can lead to alternatives to suspensions.

Sheena Barnes, president of the school board until January this year, points to a culture that views some children as more dangerous than others. She’s also concerned about educators who have trouble appropriately interpreting a child’s behavior.

Barnes, who is Black, got a call last year to come to her child’s school immediately. Her son, who is on the autism spectrum and was in third grade at the time, had been trying to mix paints to make a specific color. The teacher accidentally took one of the colors away, frustrating the boy, who threw his paintbrush and splattered some paint. After Barnes arrived and helped de-escalate the situation, she said the teacher asked her if they could talk. 

“’He just scares me,” she said the teacher confessed to her. 

“So I asked her, ‘What did he do? Did he bite you, kick you, did he throw something at you, cuss at you? I’m going through all the list of things that could make you scared of a 9-year old, my baby.’ And she says, ‘It’s the way he looks at me.’

“And I just crumble,” Barnes recalled. “If you’re scared of him in third grade, what the hell are you gonna do to him in ninth grade?”

Moments like these – when adults see children as threatening – can influence decisions made in a heated classroom situation. The Department of Justice report on Toledo schools last spring concluded that “subjective infractions that are prone to bias, such as ‘Disruptive Behavior’ and ‘Failure to Follow Directions’” play a role in racial discrepancies when it comes to discipline.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Toledo school officials noted that the report said that the district had “made significant progress” in some areas and that the Covid-19 pandemic had “hampered and delayed the District’s ability to execute certain provisions in a timely manner.”

Barnes, who remains on the school board, said she welcomed the continued monitoring by the government, because, she said, “we still have work to do.”

“There’s not a bad child – there’s a child reacting to a bad situation,” she said, sitting in a cafe in downtown Toledo, and noting the many serious issues faced by young people, such as gun violence and food insecurity.

“Maybe I can’t read. So, I’m gonna disrupt the class, because I don’t want to get embarrassed,” said Barnes. “Or if you ask me where my homework is, I’m gonna make some silly jokes and get kicked out, because I don’t want people to know that I didn’t have a home to sleep in last night, or I couldn’t do my homework, because we didn’t have power.”

Sometimes disruptive behavior starts with a small incident – like a student calling out in class. If a teacher has trouble redirecting the child, it can escalate, and the classroom can become chaotic. Teachers sometimes conclude that removing the child who is being loud is in the best interest of the whole class.

Experience and training can provide teachers with tools to address student conduct without suspensions.

One study in California published last year found that it was often the least-experienced teachers who relied on removing disruptive students from the classroom, and that even three years of teaching experience led to a substantial drop in the number of students referred for discipline.

The same study found that, among teachers who removed students from class and sent them to the principal’s office for disciplinary action, the top 5 percent did this so often that they accounted for most of the racial gaps in these referrals – effectively doubling those gaps.

Those gaps are largely driven by incidents that require a more subjective call, such as for “defiance,” rather than more objective categories like drug use or skipping class, according to Jing Liu, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland and one of the study’s authors. 

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

Other researchers argue that stressful environments can bolster racial inequities.

“When people are stressed out, when they are under pressure, when they don’t have the time to think through a response, they are more likely to rely on racial biases,” said Juan Del Toro, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who has studied the impact of discipline policies on Black students. 

Del Toro argues that more support for teachers could bring down the number of suspensions for low-level offenses, which in turn could help more students perform well academically. His research showed that when students committed minor misbehavior infractions, those who were suspended experienced significant negative academic consequences, compared with students who were just written up for the same kind of offense. 

In Toledo, Jamarion, a 10th grader at E. L. Bowsher High School, was serving an in-school suspension last December for getting in an argument with another student when he was assigned an additional three days for talking in the suspension room.

“We were just talking about the way we were feeling, bored and all that. You’re just sitting there all day staring at the wall or doing your homework,” said Jamarion, who is 15. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “You should at least get a warning or something.”

“It’s not fair,” he said. “I was mad, upset.” And he said he was concerned about missing more math classes and falling behind.

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions     

Educators and administrators emphasize that simply banning suspensions for low-level offenses would not change school culture or help educators find alternatives. “It could fix the data,” said Myree, the former Cincinnati principal, “but it might not fix what’s going on in the building.”

Some districts in Ohio, such as Cleveland Municipal, reduced the number of disobedience suspensions of Black children over the past year, but the number in Ohio overall climbed to more than 78,400 in 2022-23, up 16 percent from the previous year.

Izetta Thomas spent 18 years as an educator in Columbus public schools in Ohio and is now the education justice organizer for the Columbus Education Association, the union that represents Columbus educators. 

She believes individual teachers have a responsibility for their actions, but that teacher-prep programs and the school system itself could do more to curb the overuse of suspensions. 

“It’s hard for educators because a lot of us might feel like this [discipline decisions] is not what I signed up to do, this is not what I learned in my college classroom,” said Thomas. “But why isn’t it a part of teacher training in colleges? Why isn’t understanding of our own biases and lenses and those that are different from ours, why aren’t we taught early on what that is?”

“Everybody needs Band-Aids, she added, “but Band-Aids only last so long.”

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

This story about racial disparities in school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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The Oct. 7 terrorist attack and subsequent Israel-Hamas war transformed American college campuses into a different type of battleground. Extreme anti-Israel protests have been accompanied by a surge in antisemitic incidents. School administrators are walking a tightrope, trying to balance students’ freedom of expression with campus safety. The correct path forward is clear: College and university presidents should follow the law and enforce the rules equally for everyone.

A cornerstone of this approach is a moral and legal imperative to define and denounce antisemitism. Doing so is not a political statement. Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, colleges and universities are legally bound to protect their students from discrimination based on, among other things, religion or national origin. Failure to identify and properly address antisemitism is often a result of ambiguous or nonexistent definitions of the term.

Adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s standard, as the U.S. Department of Education has done, would provide colleges and universities with a globally recognized framework and align with schools’ obligations under the Civil Rights Act. The alliance’s working definition is as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” The alliance also includes practical examples of antisemitic content and commentary, along with resources for scholars and education professionals. Integrating this important tool does not require a formal announcement or change in official policy. Administrators can simply instruct deans and other campus officials to use the alliance’s definition when evaluating bias incidents on campus.

This is a necessary step, but it is not enough. The University of Pennsylvania adopted the alliance’s standard as part of an “antisemitism action plan,” but it was too little too late. President Elizabeth Magill’s lackluster response to a surge in antisemitism on campus led to a donor revolt, an embarrassing congressional hearing and eventually her resignation. A proactive approach to the issue with meaningful action to protect Jewish students would have almost certainly saved Magill’s job.

To avoid her fate, college and university presidents must consistently and relentlessly apply policies across the board. The basic legal and moral expectation on any college campus is that no students will be targeted due to their race, religion, ethnicity or national origin. Jewish and Israeli students do not seek special treatment. Selective enforcement, as we saw when MIT president Sally Kornbluth reversed suspensions for foreign students who had violated campus rules citing “visa issues,” undermines the integrity of institutional rules and sets a dangerous precedent. Having different sets of standards for student conduct is counterproductive and dangerous.

Related: Students have reacted strongly to university presidents’ Congressional testimony about antisemitism

While many institutions have struggled mightily in this climate, others have avoided scrutiny. High-profile leadership failures, such as the case of Harvard president Claudine Gay, make the front page. Those who successfully navigate these troubled waters do not generate headlines. Syracuse University is a great example of a school getting it right. A viral video captured Syracuse staff calmly and deliberately instructing students to remove signage calling for an “intifada.” The university interpreted the signage as calling for the genocide of Jews and therefore determined that this form of protest was a violation of the student code of conduct.

Colleges and universities often serve as melting pots for students representing a wide variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. It is the job of administrators to channel this dynamic into academic discovery and learning while keeping students safe from discrimination and harassment. Schools do not need to choose sides in geopolitical conflicts or decide between protecting one group of students or another. They must simply uphold and safeguard the rights of everyone. Institutionalizing the alliance’s definition of antisemitism will further protect Jewish and Zionist students now and in the future. Administrators must lead the way and take this practical action now.

Avi D. Gordon is executive director of Alums for Campus Fairness, which is sponsoring an advocacy campaign at several universities across the country, including Cornell and Northwestern, encouraging them to define and denounce antisemitism.

This op-ed about campus antisemitism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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If you worry about your own screen time, just think about the young people in your life.

The amount of time they spend consuming media and scrolling through content might alarm you. Teens are glued to screens for more than eight hours a day, reports show. So much screen time could pose risks for adolescents — including exposure to toxic misinformation.

With millions of Americans voting in federal, state and local elections this year, misinformation poses grave challenges to our democratic processes.

Standards-based news organizations carefully fact-check information with an eye toward fairness and a dedication to accuracy. Yet much of what populates our social media feeds is user-generated, unvetted and of varying reliability.

Too often, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the onslaught of information we face. Many students — our next generation of voters — have no idea how to tell the difference between what’s meant to inform them and what’s meant to entertain them, sell them something or even mislead them. Luckily, a growing number of states are tackling this problem by helping students become more media literate. More states must follow.

Related: One state is poised to teach media literacy starting in kindergarten

In 2023 alone, New Jersey and California passed laws requiring that students be taught media literacy skills. Those states join others, including Delaware, Illinois and Texas, that led the way for mandating such requirements.

Media literacy teaches students how to access and evaluate all types of communication. News literacy falls under the umbrella of media literacy, and is focused on helping students understand the importance of a free press in a democracy and on developing the ability to determine the credibility of news.

News literacy teaches students how to think, not what to think. It develops a healthy skepticism — not cynicism — about the news.

Students who learn news literacy skills, for example, are more likely to notice when a social media post does not present credible evidence, assessments show. Studies have shown that “prebunking” — preemptively teaching people the common tactics used to spread false and misleading information — can effectively teach people to resist it. At a time of historically low levels of trust in news organizations, news and media literacy builds appreciation of and demand for quality journalism, a cornerstone of our democracy, and prepares students to be informed participants in our civic life.

States have taken different approaches to helping students find credible information: In Illinois, students must receive at least one unit of news literacy instruction before graduation. New Jersey has gone even further, requiring students in every grade to learn “information literacy,” an umbrella term that includes the ability to navigate all forms of information.

Related: The in-school push to fight misinformation from the outside world

Legislation to require media literacy instruction is a powerful part of the solution to misinformation, but it won’t solve the problem alone. Doing so will also require help from social media and technology companies, media organizations, civic organizations and the philanthropic community.

We need to do away with the myth of the “digital native.” Just because young people have grown up with technology does not mean that they instinctively know how to navigate the challenges of our information landscape. A recent report showed that teens receive more than 200 alerts on their phones a day. It’s important that we teach young people how to recognize the different types and quality of information they’re bombarded with, or we will leave them vulnerable to information that is unreliable or even intentionally misleading.

Most Americans are concerned about misinformation. As we head into an election cycle with AI technologies becoming more widely available and social media companies scaling back moderation efforts, it’s more important than ever to make sure everyone knows where to turn for accurate information about where, how and when to vote. This is especially true for our students who are just becoming old enough to cast their ballots for the first time.

By ensuring that more people are news literate, we can build a stronger, more inclusive democracy.

In 2024, let’s expand this work in schools and at home.

Ebonee Otoo is senior vice president of educator engagement at the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that teaches people how to identify credible sources of news and information.

This story about teaching media literacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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