When ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, advocates and watchdogs warned about the potential for racial bias. The new large language model was created by harvesting 300 billion words from books, articles and online writing, which include racist falsehoods and reflect writers’ implicit biases. Biased training data is likely to generate biased advice, answers and essays. Garbage in, garbage out. 

Researchers are starting to document how AI bias manifests in unexpected ways. Inside the research and development arm of the giant testing organization ETS, which administers the SAT, a pair of investigators pitted man against machine in evaluating more than 13,000 essays written by students in grades 8 to 12. They discovered that the AI model that powers ChatGPT penalized Asian American students more than other races and ethnicities in grading the essays. This was purely a research exercise and these essays and machine scores weren’t used in any of ETS’s assessments. But the organization shared its analysis with me to warn schools and teachers about the potential for racial bias when using ChatGPT or other AI apps in the classroom.

AI and humans scored essays differently by race and ethnicity

“Take a little bit of caution and do some evaluation of the scores before presenting them to students,” said Mo Zhang, one of the ETS researchers who conducted the analysis. “There are methods for doing this and you don’t want to take people who specialize in educational measurement out of the equation.”

That might sound self-serving for an employee of a company that specializes in educational measurement. But Zhang’s advice is worth heeding in the excitement to try new AI technology. There are potential dangers as teachers save time by offloading grading work to a robot.

In ETS’s analysis, Zhang and her colleague Matt Johnson fed 13,121 essays into one of the latest versions of the AI model that powers ChatGPT, called GPT 4 Omni or simply GPT-4o. (This version was added to ChatGPT in May 2024, but when the researchers conducted this experiment they used the latest AI model through a different portal.)  

A little background about this large bundle of essays: students across the nation had originally written these essays between 2015 and 2019 as part of state standardized exams or classroom assessments. Their assignment had been to write an argumentative essay, such as “Should students be allowed to use cell phones in school?” The essays were collected to help scientists develop and test automated writing evaluation.

Each of the essays had been graded by expert raters of writing on a 1-to-6 point scale with 6 being the highest score. ETS asked GPT-4o to score them on the same six-point scale using the same scoring guide that the humans used. Neither man nor machine was told the race or ethnicity of the student, but researchers could see students’ demographic information in the datasets that accompany these essays.

GPT-4o marked the essays almost a point lower than the humans did. The average score across the 13,121 essays was 2.8 for GPT-4o and 3.7 for the humans. But Asian Americans were docked by an additional quarter point. Human evaluators gave Asian Americans a 4.3, on average, while GPT-4o gave them only a 3.2 – roughly a 1.1 point deduction. By contrast, the score difference between humans and GPT-4o was only about 0.9 points for white, Black and Hispanic students. Imagine an ice cream truck that kept shaving off an extra quarter scoop only from the cones of Asian American kids. 

“Clearly, this doesn’t seem fair,” wrote Johnson and Zhang in an unpublished report they shared with me. Though the extra penalty for Asian Americans wasn’t terribly large, they said, it’s substantial enough that it shouldn’t be ignored. 

The researchers don’t know why GPT-4o issued lower grades than humans, and why it gave an extra penalty to Asian Americans. Zhang and Johnson described the AI system as a “huge black box” of algorithms that operate in ways “not fully understood by their own developers.” That inability to explain a student’s grade on a writing assignment makes the systems especially frustrating to use in schools.

This one study isn’t proof that AI is consistently underrating essays or biased against Asian Americans. Other versions of AI sometimes produce different results. A separate analysis of essay scoring by researchers from University of California, Irvine and Arizona State University found that AI essay grades were just as frequently too high as they were too low. That study, which used the 3.5 version of ChatGPT, did not scrutinize results by race and ethnicity.

I wondered if AI bias against Asian Americans was somehow connected to high achievement. Just as Asian Americans tend to score high on math and reading tests, Asian Americans, on average, were the strongest writers in this bundle of 13,000 essays. Even with the penalty, Asian Americans still had the highest essay scores, well above those of white, Black, Hispanic, Native American or multi-racial students. 

In both the ETS and UC-ASU essay studies, AI awarded far fewer perfect scores than humans did. For example, in this ETS study, humans awarded 732 perfect 6s, while GPT-4o gave out a grand total of only three. GPT’s stinginess with perfect scores might have affected a lot of Asian Americans who had received 6s from human raters.

ETS’s researchers had asked GPT-4o to score the essays cold, without showing the chatbot any graded examples to calibrate its scores. It’s possible that a few sample essays or small tweaks to the grading instructions, or prompts, given to ChatGPT could reduce or eliminate the bias against Asian Americans. Perhaps the robot would be fairer to Asian Americans if it were explicitly prompted to “give out more perfect 6s.” 

The ETS researchers told me this wasn’t the first time that they’ve noticed Asian students treated differently by a robo-grader. Older automated essay graders, which used different algorithms, have sometimes done the opposite, giving Asians higher marks than human raters did. For example, an ETS automated scoring system developed more than a decade ago, called e-rater, tended to inflate scores for students from Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong on their essays for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), according to a study published in 2012. That may have been because some Asian students had memorized well-structured paragraphs, while humans easily noticed that the essays were off-topic. (The ETS website says it only relies on the e-rater score alone for practice tests, and uses it in conjunction with human scores for actual exams.) 

Asian Americans also garnered higher marks from an automated scoring system created during a coding competition in 2021 and powered by BERT, which had been the most advanced algorithm before the current generation of large language models, such as GPT. Computer scientists put their experimental robo-grader through a series of tests and discovered that it gave higher scores than humans did to Asian Americans’ open-response answers on a reading comprehension test. 

It was also unclear why BERT sometimes treated Asian Americans differently. But it illustrates how important it is to test these systems before we unleash them in schools. Based on educator enthusiasm, however, I fear this train has already left the station. In recent webinars, I’ve seen many teachers post in the chat window that they’re already using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI-powered apps to grade writing. That might be a time saver for teachers, but it could also be harming students. 

This story about AI bias was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: Asian American students lose more points in an AI essay grading study — but researchers don’t know why appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Growing up in an immigrant family, I was painfully aware of the sacrifices my parents made for me to be educated in the United States. Their love and support were boundless, embodied by their long hours of work and their emphasis on education from an early age.

One day, I remember taking it upon myself to try to give them the best of everything by chasing after the golden ticket to success: getting into an elite college. It had been emphasized to me that those schools had the best resources, and if I wanted to become a successful scientist, this was seemingly the only way.

The benefits of an Ivy-plus education were drilled into my head from early childhood. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actress Natalie Portman went to Harvard. Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) went to MIT.

And the colleges referenced in popular media and literature are always the hardest to get into: In the popular television show The Summer I Turned Pretty, Conrad, one of the main love interests and heartthrobs, transfers from Brown to Stanford. Many of Ali Hazelwood’s bestseller books are centered around premier institutions like Stanford and MIT. And I haven’t even begun to mention the arbitrary U.S. News Rankings.

In addition, teen social media feeds are filled with reels like “Do these five things if you want to get into Harvard” and “You’ll never believe where this INSANE applicant got accepted to college!”

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However, elite colleges aren’t a guaranteed means to success, and the immeasurable value we are placing on them sends harmful and dangerous messages to today’s youth.

From eighth grade on, I participated in activities that I loved and, of course, made me stand out. I even wound up on the news. College admission was always on my mind. I put everything I had into getting into one of the most prestigious colleges in the U.S.

This year, my senior year in high school, changed things. The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down affirmative action and changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process induced an atmosphere of confusion and tension. Still, I applied to schools like Columbia and the California Institute of Technology.

My classmates and I vehemently expressed our frustrations with the FAFSA delays; some had to postpone making college commitments (early action) until they were sure that going to their school of choice wouldn’t place them under financial stress. Though we were encouraged to seek out help in school, we only had one counselor dedicated to helping a class of almost 800 seniors with their FAFSA and college application concerns.

For a family with no experience with American college admissions, the best free advice I could find was on platforms like Reddit, College Confidential and Instagram. When news hit that FAFSA had a calculation error, our physics group chat went wild.

The FAFSA errors and delays had the power to impact where we would spend ournext four years. And, from youth, we were taught that these four years had the sole power to determine the rest of our lives. I was lucky to have supportive friends and family and the luxury of a computer and internet at home. But without thousands to spend on expert advice and services, many of my classmates and I were often left in the dark.

Some of my friends expressed having no clue how to fill out the FAFSA with its tricky wording. My dad and I watched a step-by-step YouTube video and an Instagram reel I saved, “What NOT to do on the FAFSA,” to help us figure out how to fill it out.

As the months passed, rejections and waitlists hit me hard. I learned that college admission is not a meritocracy. On a popular Reddit community, I found posts of people lamenting their broken futures now that their Ivy dreams had been crushed.

I heard the stories of kids who stopped talking with friends and family and whose perceptions of themselves changed after getting rejection letters from elite schools. I felt the same. After six rejections, I wondered if I was good enough to pursue astrophysics, the subject I want to study in college.

My ambitious dreams felt foolish. After years of effort, I was planning to stay in my home state of Texas to attend UT Austin.

Just like that, some people changed their attitude toward me even though, in reality, I was the same girl. I had just been overwhelmed by an increasingly stressful and competitive process.

A person who goes to a state school is no less capable of success than a person who goes to Harvard. I’m tired of the college tutors, essay-writing companies and social media creators who are making some teenagers think otherwise.

Related: OPINION: Post-affirmative action, let’s look past our obsession with the Ivy Leagues and other elite schools

I got a call from one of my dream schools, the University of Chicago. I had been accepted off the waitlist, but it seemed likely that I wouldn’t be able to attend because of the cost.

Ultimately, with the help of financial aid, I’ll head there this fall.

We are forced to believe that only the very top colleges matter. When high schoolers are immersed in that mindset, it’s no wonder some feel like their world is ending if they can’t get in.

There is so much that goes into the college admissions process that we can’t control, but we can change the narrative of the culture surrounding it. We can start by providing free support to families who need it.

Siddhi Raut is graduating from Ronald Reagan High School in San Antonio, Texas, and she will be a freshman at the University of Chicago this fall.

This story about elite college applications 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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Teacher layoffs are likely this fall as $190 billion in federal pandemic aid expires. By one estimate, schools spent a fifth of their temporary funds on hiring new people, most of them teachers. Those jobs may soon be cut with many less experienced teachers losing their jobs first. The education world describes this policy with a business acronym used in inventory accounting: LIFO or “Last In, First Out.” 

Intuitively, LIFO seems smart. It not only rewards teachers for their years of service, but there’s also good evidence that teachers improve with experience. Not every seasoned teacher is great, but on average, veterans are better than rookies. Keeping them in classrooms is generally best for students.

The problem is that senior teachers aren’t evenly distributed across schools. Wealthier and whiter schools tend to have more experienced teachers. By contrast, high-poverty schools, often populated by Black and Hispanic students, are staffed by more junior teachers. That’s because stressful working conditions at low-income schools prompt many teachers to leave after a short stint. Each year, they’re replaced with a fresh crop of young teachers and the turnover repeats. 

When school districts lay teachers off by seniority, high-poverty schools end up bearing the brunt of the job cuts. The policy exacerbates the teacher churn at these schools. And that churn alone harms student achievement, especially when a large share of teachers are going through the rocky period of adjusting to a new workplace. 

“LIFO is not very good for kids,” said Dan Goldhaber, a labor economist at the American Institutes for Research, speaking to journalists about expected teacher layoffs at the 2024 annual meeting of the Education Writers Association in Las Vegas.

The last time there were mass teacher layoffs was after the 2008 recession. Economists estimate that 120,000 elementary, middle and high school teachers lost their jobs between 2008 and 2012. The vast majority of school districts used seniority as the sole criteria for determining which teachers were laid off, according to a 2022 policy brief published in the journal Education Finance and Policy. In some cases, state law mandated that teacher layoffs had to be done by seniority. LIFO rules were also written into teachers union contracts. In other cases, school leaders simply decided to carry out layoffs this way. 

Economists haven’t been able to conclusively prove that student achievement suffered more under LIFO layoffs than other ways of reducing the teacher workforce. But the evidence points in that direction for children in poverty and for Black and Hispanic students, according to two research briefs by separate groups of scholars that reviewed dozens of studies. For example, in the first two years after the 2008 recession, Black and Hispanic elementary students in Los Angeles Unified School District had 72 percent and 25 percent greater odds, respectively, of having their teacher laid off compared to their white peers, according to one study. 

Districts with higher rates of poverty and larger shares of Black and Hispanic students were more likely to have seniority-based layoff policies, according to another study. “LIFO layoff policies end up removing less experienced teachers, sometimes in mass, from a small handful of schools,” wrote Matthew Kraft and Joshua Bleiberg in their 2022 policy brief for the journal, Education Finance and Policy.

Budget cuts can create some messy situations. Terry Grier, a retired superintendent, who ran the San Diego school district following the 2008 recession, remembers that his district cut costs by eliminating jobs in the central office and reassigning these bureaucrats, many of whom had teacher certifications, to fill classroom vacancies. To avoid additional layoffs, his school board forced him to transfer teachers in overstaffed schools to fill classroom vacancies elsewhere, Grier said. The union contract specified that forced transfers had to begin with teachers who had the least seniority. That exacerbated teacher turnover at his poorest schools, and the loss of some very good teachers, he said. 

“Despite being relatively new to the profession, many of these teachers were highly skilled,” said Grier. 

Losing promising new talent is painful. Raúl Gastón, the principal of a predominantly Hispanic and low-income middle school in Villa Park, Ill., still regrets not having the discretion to lay off a teacher whose poor performance was under review, and being forced instead to let go of an “excellent” rookie teacher in 2015.

“It was a gut punch,” Gastón said. “She had just received a great rating on her evaluation. I was looking forward to what she could do to bring up our scores and help our students.”

The loss of excellent early career teachers was made stark in Minnesota, where Qorsho Hassan lost her job in the spring of 2020 because of her district’s adherence to LIFO rules. After her layoff, Hassan was named the state’s Teacher of the Year. 

Hassan was also a Black teacher, which highlights another unintended consequence of layoff policies that protect veteran teachers: they disproportionately eliminate Black and Hispanic faculty. That undermines efforts to diversify the teacher workforce, which is 80 percent white, while the U.S. public school student population is less than half white. In recent years, districts have had some success in recruiting more Black and Hispanic teachers, but many of them are still early in their careers. 

The unfairness of LIFO layoffs became evident after the 2008 recession. Since then, 20 states have enacted laws to restrict the use of seniority as the main criteria for who gets laid off. But many states still permit it, including Texas. State laws in California and New York still require that layoffs be carried out by seniority, according to TNTP, a nonprofit focused on improving K-12 education, and Educators for Excellence. 

While there is a consensus among researchers that LIFO layoffs have unintended consequences that harm both students and teachers, there’s debate about what should replace this policy. One approach would be to lay off less effective teachers, regardless of seniority. But teacher effectiveness ratings, based on student test scores, are controversial and unpopular with teachers. Observational ratings can be subjective and, in practice, these evaluations tend to rate most teachers highly, making it hard to use them to distinguish teacher quality.

Others have suggested keeping a seniority system in place but adding additional protections for certain kinds of teachers, such as those who teach in hard-to-staff, high-poverty schools. Oregon keeps LIFO in place, but in 2021 carved out an exception for teachers with “cultural and linguistic expertise.” In 2022, Minneapolis schools decided that “underrepresented” teachers would be skipped during seniority-based layoffs. Still another idea is to make layoffs proportional to school size so that poor schools don’t suffer more than others.

This story about teacher layoffs was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: As teacher layoffs loom, research evidence mounts that seniority protections hurt kids in poverty appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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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Linda Brown was a third grader in Topeka, Kansas, when her father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white public school four blocks from her home. Otherwise, she would have had to walk across railroad tracks to take a bus to attend the nearest all-Black one.

When she was denied admission, Oliver Brown sued.

The case, and four others from Delaware, the District of Columbia, South Carolina and Virginia were combined and made their way to the Supreme Court. All of them involved school children required to attend all-Black schools that were of lower quality than schools for white children.

While the Supreme Court found in 1954 in Oliver Brown’s favor, years would pass before desegregation  of American schools began in earnest. And for many Black students now, 70 years since the nation’s highest court held unanimously that separate is inherently unequal, educational resources and access remain woefully uneven.

Here are some of the racial realities of American public education today:

25: That’s the percentage increase in Black-white school segregation between 1991 and 2019, according to an analysis of 533 districts by sociologists Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California. While school segregation fell dramatically beginning in 1968 with a series of court orders, it began to tick up in the early 1990s because of the expiration of court orders mandating integration, school choice policies, and other factors. Still, schools remain significantly less segregated than they did before and immediately after the Brown decision.

10: That’s the proportion of Black students learning in a school where more than 90 percent of their classmates were also Black, according to 2022 Department of Education data. That figure is down from 23 percent in 2000. Even as Black-white school segregation has increased slightly since the early 1990s, the number of extremely segregated schools has shrunk, in part because of an increase in the Hispanic student population. Meanwhile, from 2000 to 2022, the percentage of white students attending a school that is 90 percent or more white fell from 44 percent to 14 percent.

6: This is the percentage of teachers in American public schools who are Black. By comparison, Black students make up about 15 percent of public school enrollment. One legacy of Brown v. Boardis the dearth of  Black teachers: More than 38,000 Black educators lost their jobs after the decision came down, as white administrators of integrating schools refused to hire Black professionals for teaching roles or pushed them out. Yet research suggests that more Black teachers in the classroom can help boost Black student outcomes such as college enrollment.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

2014: That’s the year that Wilcox County High School, in rural Georgia, held its first school-sponsored, racially integrated prom. After desegregation, parents in the community, like many across the South, began organizing private, off-site proms to keep the events exclusively white. That practice persisted in Wilcox County until 2013, when high schoolers organized a prom for both white and Black students. The next year, the school made it official, finally holding an integrated event.

$14,385: This is the average amount spent per Black pupil in public school, compared with $14,263 per white student, according to a 2022 analysis of 2017-18 data by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The researchers found that while school district spending was very similar for Black and white students, the sources of funding differed somewhat, with Black students receiving more federal funding and white students receiving more local funding. The amount of money spent on instruction per pupil, meanwhile, was slightly lower for Black students – $7,169 – than for white students ($7,329). The researchers attributed that to a number of small, predominantly white districts that spent far above average on their students.

7: That’s the share of incoming students at the University of Mississippi who were Black in 2022 — even though nearly half the state’s public high school graduates, 48 percent, were Black that year. That gap between Black students graduating from high school in Mississippi and those enrolling at the state flagship university has grown over the past decade, according to a Hechinger analysis. Similar trends are playing out elsewhere in the country: In 2022, 16 state flagship universities had a gap of 10 percentage points or more between Black high school graduates and incoming freshmen. And at two dozen flagships, the gap for Black students stayed the same or grew between 2019 and 2022. Yet public flagships were created to educate the residents of their states, and most make that explicit.

700: That’s roughly how many high schools are offering the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American Studies course this school year, more than 10 times as many that offered it a year earlier, when it debuted. The course was created in part in response to longstanding concerns that African American history has been downplayed or left out of K-12 curriculum. But the A.P. course, an elective, became ensnared in politics. The content has evolved after criticism that it introduced students to “divisive concepts,” among other reasons; it has been banned or restricted in some states. Nevertheless, about 13,000 students are enrolled in this second year of the pilot course, which took more than 10 years to develop. Forty-five percent of students taking the class had never previously taken another AP course, which can earn them college credit.

This story about Brown v. Board of Education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Last week, I wrote about trends in school segregation in the 70 years since the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. That data showed considerable progress in integrating schools but also some steps backward, especially since the 1990s in the nation’s biggest cities.

We should care about this troubling shift because many researchers say that children learn best in integrated classrooms. That’s why I also wanted to trace the data on academic achievement over the same time period. Unfortunately, we don’t have consistent test scores dating back to 1954, but we do have reading scores since 1971, when school segregation plummeted, and math scores starting in 1978.

The four charts below show that achievement follows a bumpy path. Black students tended to make remarkable gains in the 1970s and 1980s, narrowing the achievement gaps between white and Black students. Then, Black achievement continued to climb even as the gap between the races widened. That’s because achievement gains for white students often grew faster than for Black students. (The long-term assessment format changed in 2004, which is why you’ll notice some spikes or kinks for that year in the graphs below.) Since the pandemic, achievement for both white and Black students has deteriorated, but the deterioration has been sharper for Black students.

Students are expected to have learned to read by age 9, which corresponds to third or fourth grade in elementary school. This chart shows that young Black students progressed in reading for four decades, from 1971 to 2012, when the scores of Black children peaked. The gap between white and Black students hasn't improved much since 2008.

As students moved from elementary to middle school, the improvement in reading for Black students was dramatic in the 1970s and 1980s. The gap between white and Black students was at its most narrow in 1988, but the scores of Black 13-year-olds continued to rise until 2008. In a speech delivered at the 2024 annual meeting of the American Educational Research association, Linda Darling-Hammond, president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute and a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, projected these scores onto a screen and credited President Johnson’s War on Poverty and new investments in education for halving the achievement gap in the 1960s and 1970s. “Elimination of these policies reopened the achievement gap, which is now 30 percent larger than it was 35 years ago,” Darling-Hammond calculated.

Math scores for 9-year-olds show a more consistent march upwards, with both Black and white students improving at similar rates through the 1980s and 1990s. Achievement gaps were at their most narrow in 2004, but Black 9-year-olds continued to make progress in math through 2012.

The pattern for 13-year-olds in math mimics the pattern for 9-year-olds through 2012, but there’s an alarming slide for Black students after that. Between 2012 and 2023, 40 years of progress in math vanished. This is a critical time as students transition to algebra and advanced high school math classes. Mastery of more complex math becomes important for college applications and the option to major in a STEM field.

Test scores aren’t the only important measure of achievement. Rucker Johnson, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, documents that significant gains in graduation rates and adult earnings are missed when there’s too much focus on short-term test score gains.

Another large study published in 2022 found that educational gains for Black students were the largest in the South after desegregation, while Black students in the north did not show similar improvement.

More detailed analysis of Black achievement explains how intertwined it is with poverty. So many Black students are concentrated in high-poverty schools, where teacher turnover is high and students are less likely to be taught by excellent, veteran teachers. Meanwhile administrators are struggling with non-academic challenges, such as high rates of homelessness, foster care, violence and absenteeism that interfere with learning. None of these are problems that schools alone can fix.

This story about Black-white achievement gaps was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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Before she got to the math in her lesson on linear equations last fall, Sydney Kealanahele asked her class of eighth graders on Oahu why kalo, or taro root, is so important in Hawaii.* What do you know about kalo, she asked them. Have you ever picked it?

A boy who had never spoken in class, and never seemed even slightly interested in math, raised his hand.

“He said, ‘I pick kalo with my grandma. She has a farm,’” Kealanahele recalled. “He was excited to tell us about that.”

Class discussion got animated. Everybody knew about poi, the creamy staple Hawaiian food made from mashed taro. Others had even noticed that there were fewer taro farms on Oahu.

That’s when Kealanahele guided the conversation to the whiteboard, plotting data on pounds of taro produced over time on a graph, which created a perfect descending line. The class talked about why there is less taro production, which led to a discussion about the shortage of farm labor.

Kealanahele had taught eighth-grade math for six years at a campus of the Kamehameha Schools, but this was the first time she had started a lesson with a conversation about farming. The idea came from professional development she’d just completed, in ethnomathematics, an approach that connects math to culture by embedding math in a story about something relevant to students’ lives.

Ethnomathematics isn’t new, but until recently it was limited to a niche area of educational and anthropological research on how different cultures use math. Over the past couple of decades, it has evolved into one of several efforts to create more engaging and inclusive math classrooms, particularly for Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students, who tend to score lower on federal tests than their Asian and white peers. Ethnomathematics advocates say that persistent achievement gaps are in part a result of overly abstract math instruction that’s disconnected from student experience, and that there’s an urgent need for new approaches that recognize mathematical knowledge as it’s practiced outside of textbooks.

Many Black and Brown students don’t feel comfortable in math classes, said Shelly Jones, professor of math education at Central Connecticut State University. She said those classes tend to be “competitive” and that teachers “hone in on what Black and Brown students don’t know as opposed to honoring what they do know.” She added:  “We are trying to pull in students who have not traditionally felt they belonged in math spaces.”

That said, research on the impact of ethnomathematics is limited, and its practice is largely confined to individual classrooms — like Kealanehele’s — where the teacher has sought out the approach. And teachers who incorporate ethnomathematics without the right support and instructional tools risk stumbling into a cultural minefield, experts say. Most teachers in U.S. classrooms are white. If one of those white teachers decides their Hispanic students should learn base-20 Mayan numbers, and their students ask why, the teacher will have to come up with an answer, said Ron Eglash, a professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Information.

“Telling kids, ‘Because it’s your heritage,’ sounds really awkward from a white teacher,” Eglash said.

But experts say that high-quality ethnomathematics lessons boost student confidence and engagement when used by teachers (of any race) who have been trained and who allow students the time to explore the material on their own and through discussion.

Ethnomathematics falls under the same umbrella as culturally responsive math instruction. Experts say that teaching math this way requires teachers to get to know their students and create a learning environment where students can connect to math concepts. It involves developing lessons that reveal the math in everyday activities, like skateboarding, braiding and weaving. It can also include exploring the math involved in cultural practices, like beading.

“A lot of this work is about removing barriers or perceptions from a marginalized population that math is something the Greeks created and is imposed on me,” said Mark Ellis, a professor of education at California State University, Fullerton. He said that culturally responsive instruction takes other measures into account, besides academic outcomes, when determining impact. These include students’ attitude about math, sense of belonging in math classes and engagement in math discourses.

Related: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. Some districts buck the trend

Traditional math instruction, Ellis said, is treated as if math were acultural, even though, as we know it in the U.S., math descended from the computational traditions of many places, including Mesopotamia (360-degree circles), ancient Greece (geometry and trigonometry), India (decimal notation, the concept of zero) and China (negative numbers). If these mathematical traditions are taught, Ellis and others ask, then why not Hawaiian calculations for slope, sub-Saharan fractal geometry and Mayan counting systems?

Eglash argues that ethnomathematics lessons aren’t just for students from the culture that the lessons draw from. It’s important that students explore math concepts from all cultures, including their own, he said.

Ethnomathematics, a term coined in the 1970s by Brazilian mathematician Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, first appeared in the U.S. about 25 years ago. That’s when Eglash and his wife, University of Michigan design professor Audrey Bennett, developed a suite of teaching modules by which students learn the history or context of a practice — braiding hair into cornrows, for example — and then use algebra, geometry and trigonometry to create their own cornrow designs with software.

Eglash and Bennett designed the teaching tools with the idea that students can use a module to create their work, which can mean mixing cultures. A Puerto Rican student used Eglash’s module about Native American beading to create a Puerto Rican flag simulation.

In 2009, Richmond City Public Schools asked Eglash and Bennett to teach a module called Cornrow Curves to a class of Black 10th graders. Eglash asked the class where cornrows came from. Their answer: “Brooklyn!” That led to discussion about the African origins of cornrows — where they indicated marriage status, religious affiliation and other social markers — and on through cornrows’ history during the Middle Passage, Civil Rights, hip-hop and Afrofuturism.

Only then did the students begin doing math, designing their own cornrows, noticing how the plaits get closer together or further apart depending on the values students enter in a simulation. One student created a design for straight-line cornrows by visually estimating how far to space them apart. In her presentation to class, Eglash recalled, she said that “there are 12 spaces between the braids on one side, which covers 90 degrees, so the braids are positioned every 7.5 degrees because 90/12 = 7.5.”

The Cornrow Curves module and other lessons like it have now been adopted by districts in 25 states. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, began offering a culturally responsive computer science curriculum in 2008 that incorporates ethnomathematics lessons that Eglash and Bennett developed. Some evidence indicates that this course helped boost student participation in computer science: An external evaluation found that enrollment in the classes rose by nearly 800 percent from 2009 to 2014.

In 2012, Chicago Public Schools adopted the same curriculum for an introduction to computer science course and invested in significant professional development for teachers. In 2016, the course became a graduation requirement for all Chicago high school students, and 250 teachers are trained each year on the curriculum.

An outside analysis of the Chicago program showed that students who took the course before taking AP computer science were 3.5 times more likely to pass the AP computer science exam than those who only took the AP course. A separate study in Chicago and Wisconsin showed that where the course was offered racial and gender achievement divides disappeared and that students were more likely to take another computer science class.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

Keily Hernandez, 15, a first-year student at Chicago’s George Westinghouse College Prep High School, was happy to see the computer science course on her schedule this year, because she plans to major in computer science in college. At first, she found the cornrows module challenging — getting the designs to look the way she wanted them to look was difficult — but it was also fun, she said.

The class is collaborative, she said, and students often turn to each other or to the internet for ideas and help. Hernandez said that taking the class has relieved her doubts that she can be a computer scientist.

“The class made me reassured,” she said. “Math isn’t something that you just know, the same way that computer science isn’t something that you just know. You get better at it the more you do it.”

It’s students like Hernandez that Linda Furuto wanted to attract when she took the job as head of the math and science subdivision at the University of Hawaii West Oahu in 2007. At the time, student enrollment was so low that the school offered just two math courses. Furuto, who had grown up on Oahu and received her Ph.D. in math education from the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled thinking, “This isn’t working. We need to implement ethnomathematics here.”

Over the next six years, she began to integrate ethnomathematics into coursework, and student interest grew. By 2013, the university offered more than 20 math classes.

“Students would say things like, ‘I hated math. I felt no connection to it. But now I see that math is my culture and because of that I want to be a secondary math teacher,’” Furuto said. “Just knowing that the life of a student has in some way, shape or form been transformed speaks volumes.”

In 2018,  by then a professor of mathematics education at the University of Hawaii Manoa, Furuto established the world’s first ethnomathematics graduate certificate and master’s degree program.* So far, about 300 teachers have participated in the online program; about half are from Hawaii.

While teachers in Chicago get ongoing professional development in cohorts both before and while they teach the district’s ethnomathematics-based computer science course, educators who complete the University of Hawaii program are highly likely to be the only teacher at their school with this niche training.

Sydney Kealanahele, the teacher on Oahu, said that as inspired as she was by the ethnomathematics program, she doesn’t have time to teach using the method more than twice every three months.

“To create a really good lesson that feels authentic to me, and not just thrown together,” she said, “it takes time to do the research.”

For a teacher who doesn’t have colleagues in their school using the same approach, it can be hard to fit in something new like ethnomathematics, said Janel Marr, a math resource teacher in Oahu’s Windward School District. Marr was one of the first teachers to participate in the ethnomathematics graduate program, as an eighth-grade math teacher. Today she teaches in the graduate program.

“When you go back to the classroom, there are so many other things from all sides, from administration and curriculum to state tests,” she said. “It starts to get overwhelming. It’s not being implemented as much as we in the program would want it to be.”

Related: How one district diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

Ideally, said Eglash, ethnomathematics content should be related to real-world situations, even if that involves exploring painful periods of history. Where possible, content should connect with art, history, sports and math to provide multiple ways for students to interact. This is critical, he said, to address power dynamics and “identity barriers” in the classroom, like the race of the teacher. When teachers let students explore content individually and through group discussion, students gain control over their own learning.

“The teacher finds a way to use the tool that is authentic — which is something the kids pick up on and respect, even for white folks,” he said. “It’s when you are trying to be something you are not that teaching becomes awkward.”

Doing ethnomathematics right can also engage teachers, Marr said. She had been teaching eighth-grade math at Kailua Intermediate School for 13 years when she hit a wall. Her students would ask why they had to learn math, she said, and she didn’t have an answer. She was looking for inspiration when she heard about the University of Hawaii ethnomathematics program.

“My students would learn to work with the numbers and everything, but it wasn’t like they were making a connection of why there is slope,” Marr said.

After earning her master’s, Marr had the idea to approach linear equations in a new way. She showed her students a photo of a mountain with a long, bare line down its lush, forested side and asked if anyone knew what they were looking at. Most students didn’t.

She wrote a word on the whiteboard: holua. The path, students learned from research they did in class, was made of gravel pounded into lava rocks, and it ran down the side of the Hualālai Volcano on the east side of Hawaii. Elite members of ancient Hawaiian communities sledded down mountainside paths like this one as part of the extreme sport known as holua.

“We talked about those pictures and talked about, well what would the slope be? How fast might they be going? Because slope is really related to the rate of speed,” she said. “Math isn’t just theoretical. It’s having an experience of being part of the place.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Sydney Kealanahele’s name, and to clarify Linda Furuto’s role when she started the ethnomathematics program.

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

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Seventy years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, rejecting legal racial segregation of public schools. The decision appeared to pave the way for equal educational opportunities for every child and integrated classrooms where students from all backgrounds could prepare to thrive in their communities, careers and lives.

Yet our progress toward integration stalled and is now backsliding, even as our communities and workforce grow evermore diverse. And we’ve failed to achieve equity on just about every metric of access to educational opportunity.

In the 1954 decision, the justices declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” They also called education “the most important function of state and local governments,” the “very foundation of good citizenship” and “a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values [and] in preparing him for later professional training.”

Seven decades later, those words ring truer than ever. The link between education and economic opportunity has only increased. And our democracy is desperately in need of shared knowledge and understanding across cultural, racial, economic and geographic lines.

But the tragic reality is that our schools are still segregated, and separate is still unequal. Educational resources remain correlated to the whiteness of a school or district’s student body. I spent nearly two decades of my career working to change that equation: to shift funding and other crucial resources toward schools that disproportionately serve Black and Latino students, students from lower-income communities and other groups of students who have historically been denied equal opportunity.

Now I’ve come to believe that in a country shaped by centuries of systemic racism and structural inequality, we will never find the political will to achieve true funding equity at scale so long as schools remain highly segregated.

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It’s a hard truth that, in America, green still follows white. So, until our children all sit together, the odds are long that we’ll fairly fund allour schools.

One thing we have seen work at scale? Integration. In the wake of Brown, court-ordered desegregation increased high school graduation rates for Black students by 30 percent and decreased poverty rates by 22 percent. Integration works for Latino students too. Due to desegregation after Mendez v. Westminster, a different lawsuit in California, Mexican American students’ graduation rates rose by over 19 percent.

These were big, life-changing results with intergenerational effects for families.

None of this is to say that the early attempts at integration were perfect; far from it. Too often, the brunt of those efforts was borne by Black communities in the form of long commutes, isolation, discrimination, educator job losses and outright racist intimidation.

The political backlash against desegregation left a lasting impression on a generation of leaders and advocates; that backlash at least partially explains why so many in the education field have turned their backs on integration as an equity strategy.

But while we must not repeat the mistakes of past desegregation efforts, we cannot afford to turn our backs on integration.

Our understanding of what makes for successful and inclusive integration has evolved tremendously since the early days of desegregation. We know now, to take just one example, that a truly integrated school must include both diverse students and diverse educators.

The political landscape is shifting. In a recent nationwide poll, our nonprofit, Brown’s Promise, found that 71 percent of American adults — including strong majorities across racial groups — favor “re-organizing school districts to have more racially and economically diverse student bodies and providing more resources to the school districts that serve students who need the most help.”

Just 12 percent oppose.

The overwhelming and, for some, surprising support reflects a growing realization that diverse classrooms benefit all children by preparing them for the real world and the workplaces they will face as adults.

And it reflects what we are hearing at Brown’s Promise when we revisit this 70-year-old conversation with community-based partners in states across the country: curiosity about the way invisible district lines segregate children and lead to unfair school funding practices and interest in what we can do differently.

As we approach this milestone anniversary, I am feeling inspired by these conversations with families and community leaders.

Our task now is to harness that support and recommit to real action toward realizing Brown’s promise by rethinking school and district lines that have separated children from each other for far too long.

The specifics of that action will vary from community to community based on local context, but some examples include: creating interdistrict transfer programs; investing in magnet schools to attract students of all racial, ethnic, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds; fostering school pairings, in which two highly segregated neighborhood elementary schools unite to create a single, integrated school; and consolidating small, gerrymandered school districts into larger, more diverse, countywide districts.

Related: PROOF POINTS: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision

Any of these actions must be paired with additional measures to fully and fairly fund public schools and to ensure positive student experiences for all students — especially for students of color in primarily white environments.

None of this will be easy; it never has been. But there are clear paths forward that we can forge together. And if we don’t try, we’ll still be sitting here in another 70 years reflecting on the lack of progress since Brown.

Ary Amerikaner is co-founder and executive director of Brown’s Promise, an organization housed at the Southern Education Foundation and dedicated to achieving educational equity. She served as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education from 2015 to 2017

This story about Brown v. Board of Education and school segregation 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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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.

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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.

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