What happened: The D.C. Council maintained funding for the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the nation’s first publicly funded program intended to raise the pay of child care workers in the district and provide them with free or low-cost health insurance.

The back story: In the face of a $700 million budget shortfall, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting the $87 million program to replenish the city’s diminished reserve fund. The final budget passed by the council in June keeps the $70 million of the funding in place. The budget was unanimously approved by the 13-member council on June 12.

What’s next: Several proposed rule changes are also expected to pass that could save money for the fund, including capping participants at 4,100 and limiting the program to workers with a child development credential or higher, said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC, which operates two centers in the city. Advocates are pushing to keep the salary increases and health benefits for child care workers in place, but expect to learn more about how the cuts will impact the program by September 3, when a task force is set to present its recommendations.

“We know some things are going to be cut, we just don’t know exactly what. We’re trying to keep it as whole as possible,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit organization that supported the fund.

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

The post Washington lawmakers keep local fund that boosts child care teacher pay appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.

Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.

“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”

Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.

The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.

But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.

The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.

Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.

“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.

If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.

That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by  the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”

The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.

Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.

Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.

“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”

The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.

The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.

“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.

Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.

The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent.  Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.

And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.

Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.

Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.

Related: States stuck trying to fix early ed pay as feds drop the ball

Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.

“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.

“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”

Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.

Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.

Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.

As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.

“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.

The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.

“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”

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

The post D.C. experimented with giving child care workers big raises. The project may not last 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.

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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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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.

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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

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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.

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BOCA RATON, Fla. – It doesn’t take much searching to spot the fallout from the newest Florida law seeking to erase DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, from public campuses.

Several weeks ago, for example, staff offices at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy in Boca Raton were vacant, with name plates blank and abandoned desks, plus LGBTQ+ flags, posters and pamphlets left behind.

Elsewhere on the palm-tree-framed campus, a sign for the “Women and Gender Equity Resource Center” remained, but a laminated paper on the door offered a new identity, “Women’s Resource and Community Connection Division of Student Affairs.”

In Florida, which, along with Texas, has the most extreme anti-DEI laws in the country, virtually all DEI staff have been fired or reassigned and offices shuttered — but that’s not the only story. There is also mounting resistance to the laws.

Students have devised workarounds, like camouflaging FAU’s annual homecoming drag show as “Owl Manor,” nodding to the school mascot. Mary Rasura, a senior, launched an LGBTQ+ newspaper, “Out FAU,” saying, “It just seemed like a no-brainer. You know, we are still a community. Like, we’re still here.”

And while some wary faculty members have recast their lectures, others have boldly not done so. Prof. Robert Cassanello at the University of Central Florida in Orlando — one of the nation’s largest campuses with 70,000 students — warned in red ink on the syllabus for his graduate seminar on the Civil Rights Movement (as for all courses he teaches) that he “will expose you to content that does not comply with and will violate” anti-DEI laws.

Cassanello feels compelled to object. “My area of research is Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. Being told not to discuss institutional, structural racism, “that’s like, what would be the point of me teaching? You know, I might as well just go home.”

Related: Student Voice: Bill targeting DEI offices in public universities has a chilling impact on students

The anti-DEI pressure in higher education has caught on — the Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI tracker identifies 85 anti-DEI bills introduced in 28 states since last year, with 13 becoming law — but it is hardly something that colleges and universities came to on their own. Rather, it is a campaign led by the conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo and other far-right influencers seeking to make “DEI” as scary and repulsive a term as “CRT” (Critical Race Theory). Rufo has said as much.

And while Rufo frames DEI as an affront to colorblind meritocracy, Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University who studies politics and policy in higher education, argues that there is nothing ideological in how DEI offices operate.

“The DEI movement as it manifests in colleges and universities is not radical,” he said. “It’s very bureaucratic and institutional.”

Cantwell said DEI shows up in tasks such as student advising or ensuring that databases accommodate gender identities and meet federal regulations — efforts that have arisen over the past decade as a direct response to campuses growing more diverse, racially and in other ways. DEI also covers veterans, first-generation students, international students, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and people of different faiths. The aim has been to institute policies and practices that allow all students to feel accepted.

But now anti-DEI laws are reaching beyond attacking such functions and seeking to control what may be taught in college courses.

“We are fighting over whether or not political parties that are in control of state government, in control of Congress, can control higher education,” Cantwell said. This is not about regulating funding or financial aid, but “what people learn” and “how colleges and universities can serve their students and staff.”

That was apparent in January when the Board of Governors for Florida’s state university system, in approving regulations for the new anti-DEI law, also removed sociology from the list of courses that meet general education requirements. (On the social platform X, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz berated sociology as “woke ideology.”)

For Prof. Michael Armato, the sociology undergraduate director at UCF, the elimination of general education credit for his discipline was upsetting enough; introductory sociology enrolls 700 to 800 students per semester. But more disturbing, he said, “was the absolute silence on behalf of our administrators” who failed to defend the field or challenge state “meddling” in campus curriculum.

“What’s next?” he said, noting that fields like literature, anthropology and psychology also grapple with issues of race, gender and sexuality. “There is this sort of fear hovering over us,” said Armato, raising concerns “for what we can teach, for what we can advise students about.” As a result, his department now allows faculty who are assigned to teach potentially hot subjects like race and ethnicity to bow out. “It is their neck on the line,” he said.

Yet he is not backing down himself. He is preparing to teach a graduate course that includes Critical Race Theory.* “I refuse to kowtow to attempts to have me not teach what is the accepted and documented evidence within my field,” he said. Last semester, he taught a course, “Beyond the Binary.” Still, Armato wonders, “Is this going to blow up on me?”

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

Certainly, it’s easy to spot worry on campuses. At UCF, the student government counts on staff members to run an annual diversity training. The staffer responsible for it said he was unsure if it could happen — “we are waiting on guidance” — then ignored all follow-up emails. Across the state, more than a dozen campus leaders, including administrators, faculty representatives, staffers and student leaders who were contacted, declined to be interviewed about DEI or even to answer questions via email. Some apologized, as one did after initially agreeing to an interview, that “this is a very sensitive subject for state employees.” Some spoke only on background.

In teaching, Cassanello has a latitude that others don’t, because he has tenure. “If I were a lecturer, and I see what’s going on in Tallahassee,” he said, “I would say, ‘Maybe I don’t teach that concept.’”

Marissa Bellenger, one of Cassanello’s graduate students, was warned by a visiting professor teaching a lecture course on American history for which she is a teaching assistant. “He said, ‘You know, be careful of students asking you questions to get a rise out of you, to get you to say something that will get you in trouble,’” she said when we met outdoors in a shaded spot on campus. “I mean, if he’s worried about you, that says a lot.”

Bellenger, from Tampa, is studying for her Ph.D. at UCF, and has weighed leaving the state but would want to “come back and teach here. But then, it’s like, what is there to teach? You know, I’m going to be censoring myself.”

Such calculations are shaping Grace Castelin’s plans. Castelin, a senior and the president of the UCF chapter of the NAACP, sees professors avoiding certain discussions; they offer comments like, “Oh guys, you know, so the law, I can’t really say too much on this,” she said, or, as another did, add a disclaimer about “not trying to impose any beliefs on you guys.”

“It’s frustrating. It’s like we’re not getting the full course content,” Castelin said. She plans to go out of state to attend graduate school in public policy. “I applied to seven schools. None of them are in Florida,” she said. “If I stay here, I’m not going to learn the content that I need to know without it being censored.”

It is this kind of worry that spurred Michael H. Gavin, the president of Delta College in Michigan, a two-year institution, to start Education for All a year ago. The group gathers some 175 higher education leaders, many of them community college presidents, to monitor attacks on DEI and coordinate support through an online discussion list and regular meetings.

Gavin, who wrote a book on white nationalism and politics in higher education, said it is critical for leaders in states not facing anti-DEI laws to speak up for those who cannot. “Let’s not get tricked into this notion that we have to somehow be quiet about things that are right in our domain,” like restricting curriculum topics and banning books, he said.

He added that anti-DEI attacks are particularly damaging to students in community colleges, many of whom are from marginalized groups, “because the rhetoric is about their very identity.”

Related: One school district’s ‘playbook’ for undoing far-right education policies

Conservative activists cast the anti-DEI movement as a sober pursuit, but opponents say it appears bent on chasing certain people from view or halting efforts to acknowledge and serve them. This, despite the fact that high-quality research shows the value of “belonging” to student success.

But even as home pages for DEI offices are redirected or show error messages, services may still exist. For example, the University of North Florida in Jacksonville dissolved DEI-related offices, but OneJax, which had run UNF’s Interfaith Center for 11 years, became an independent nonprofit. Elizabeth Andersen, the executive director, said the group hired the same leader who is “continuing to serve youth in an interfaith capacity on campus.”

Severing campus ties left them without office space or supports, like HR and IT, however. “It’s been a difficult nine months,” she said.

Andersen finds the anti-DEI landscape absurd. “The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion have been co-opted to be bad words is bizarre to me,” she said.

A sense of outrage fuels Carlos Guillermo Smith, a policy adviser for Equality Florida and a former state representative now running for the state senate. Smith, a UCF graduate, helped lead a large protest on campus last spring. Smith is campaigning to support abortion rights, affordable housing and college affordability — and to hold DeSantis’s administration “accountable.”

Despite the clampdown in Florida, Smith said he sees no choice but to speak up and push back. “Resistance, public pressure and litigation are the only paths” to counter “the far-right’s extreme agenda of censorship and control,” he said.” I am committed to that fight for as long as it takes.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the course that Prof. Michael Armato is teaching this fall.

This story about the anti-DEI movement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post  Amid clampdown on DEI, some on campuses push back appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BALTIMORE – Jazz Lewis wound up at the University of Maryland not by luck or privilege but by the strings of a guitar.

Now a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, Lewis said he paid for his college degree with a mix of scholarships and money paid from stints with his church band. As one of the first men in his family to attend college, he said higher education was by no means a given; he earned it.

That’s why, Lewis said, he co-sponsored legislation designed to eliminate the use of legacy preferences at Maryland universities.

“I’m a Terp; I would love for my son to go there,” he said of the main campus at College Park. “But I just think, as a matter of public policy, state money shouldn’t be helping fulfill these types of preferences.”

The bill passed just before the end of the legislative session, was signed by Gov. Wes Moore in late April and will become law on July 1.

The idea for the legislation came last summer, after the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions. Lewis, like many others across the country, wondered why colleges could still consider whether an applicant was the child of alumni or donors, but not the child’s race. While some have lauded his bill, others say it’s not enough unless it comes with other efforts to foster diversity on campus.

Lewis, a 35-year-old Democrat serving his second term in the state legislature, sees it as an easy win for Maryland, one of the most racially diverse states in the country, where the most selective college, Johns Hopkins University, and the state’s flagship, the University of Maryland, already do not consider legacy status in admissions.

Maryland becomes the third state to eliminate the practice, as the question of fairness in admissions undergoes increased scrutiny across the country. Colorado was the first state to ban legacy preference in 2021, and earlier this spring, Virginia became the second.

Legislators in California, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Connecticut are considering similar proposals. On the federal level, Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia (a Democrat) and Todd Young of Indiana (a Republican) have introduced a bill that would prevent colleges from being accredited if they considered legacy or donor connections in admissions.

Julie J. Park, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies equity in college admissions, said that giving preference to applicants who have ties to alumni or donors unfairly benefits students who likely already have advantages over their peers.

“They’re obviously not first-generation college students, they’re not suffering due to lack of opportunity,” Park said, and those with fewer advantages “are usually the students we want to help.”

Even though elite colleges have slowly diversified over the past several decades, Park said, the people who benefit from legacy preferences are still disproportionately white and affluent.

Across the country, racial disparities in access to college are pervasive. Far more white Americans than Black Americans hold college degrees, and the gap is growing. And many taxpayer-funded flagship universities, including in Maryland, have been failing to enroll Black and Latino students in the same proportions as Black and Latino graduates from their state’s high schools.

The Supreme Court’s majority determined that attempts to diversify college campuses with affirmative action policies violated the Constitution’s equal protections clause designed to prevent race-based discrimination. But the court’s dissenting justices argued that ignoring race would hurt, rather than help, students from historically disadvantaged groups and reverse progress on promoting more inclusive campuses.

In the wake of the decision, the Departments of Education and Justice jointly released a list of recommendations for colleges to use to advance opportunities for applicants from historically underrepresented groups. The list included eliminating legacy considerations from admissions, but some institutions have hesitated to adopt this recommendation.

James Murphy, the director of postsecondary policy at the advocacy group Education Reform, said he expects legacy admission preferences to disappear through a combination of legislation, like Maryland’s bill, and institutions voluntarily dropping the practice.

“Legislation has become necessary,” he added, “because colleges have not chosen to do the right thing themselves.”

At least 593 colleges across the United States reported that they considered legacy status in admissions during the 2022-2023 academic year, according to the most recently available data from the National Center for Education Statistics. That number has since shrunk due to the statewide ban on legacy preferences in Virginia, and other individual institutions dropping the practice. In Maryland, schools that do consider legacy status include Bowie State University, Capitol Technology University, Goucher College, Hood College, Loyola University of Maryland, Mount St. Mary’s University, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Salisbury University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the United States Naval Academy, Washington College and Women’s Institute of Torah Seminary and College.

Murphy said that passing this kind of legislation matters because “it sends a clear signal that Maryland is a state that doesn’t believe it’s fair to give students an advantage that is passed along family bloodlines.”

Also, he said, just because some college leaders drop the practice doesn’t mean their successors will follow the same course. Creating laws that prohibit the consideration of legacy status in admissions will ensure that these practices become a relic of the past.

And Park, the University of Maryland professor, said that states banning the practice can contribute to the momentum of the movement across the country.

“We can say, ‘Hey, this is something that if institutions are not brave enough on their own to step away from it, then, you know, states will act,’” she said.

Research shows that elite colleges benefit from accepting legacy students. These students often matriculate at higher rates than their peers, boosting completion rates and other success metrics, and their alumni family members are more likely to donate.

Johns Hopkins University ended legacy-conscious admissions in 2013, a move that university president Ronald J. Daniels said helped boost its proportion of low-income and first-generation students. The number of Pell grant recipients increased by about 10 percentage points from 2013 to 2022, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Admissions Office. Meanwhile, the number of legacy students dropped from more than 8 percent in 2013 to fewer than 2 percent over that same period, while the percentage of first-generation college students grew from about 8 percent to 21 percent.

In an interview, Daniels said that creating more parity during the admissions process has enriched the social fabric of the campus during a period he described as “highly polarized” across the country.

“There’s a richness of debate you’re able to have on a set of contemporary political and social issues that is possible with more diverse students,” Daniels said.

The institution did weigh the effect the move would have on alumni support, but Daniels said alumni giving has not significantly declined.

The university’s effort to broaden access also benefited, he said, from a $1.8 billion donation from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2018 that allowed Hopkins to provide more need-based financial assistance to students. And it has changed its recruiting and outreach procedures to identify more students who might not have considered Hopkins as an option.

“We have worked very deliberately to change the applicant pool,” Daniels said. “The truth is, it’s multi-factorial … but I don’t think we would’ve been entirely as successful at changing the percentage of students from Pell-eligible populations had it not been for the coupling of the legacy admissions [ban] and the change in strategy.”

If Hopkins can end legacy-conscious admissions, Lewis said, other Maryland institutions should have no problem following suit.

“If it’s good for the most selective private institution in the state, then all the other private institutions in the state, I think, can come aboard,” Lewis said.

In written testimony about the bill, Matt Power, president of the Maryland Independent College and University Association, wrote that some private institutions in the state do consider “alumni relationships” as part of a comprehensive application process, but that students who do not meet admission standards are never accepted due to legacy or alumni relationships alone. He also wrote that alumni relationships can be powerful tools to recruit and attract prospective students. (The group did not take a position on the legislation.)

During committee hearings, Lewis and the bill’s co-sponsor, state Sen. Benjamin Brooks, a Baltimore County Democrat, also faced questions about the legislation having “unintended consequences” of harming admissions chances for students of color and low-income students at selective institutions that had accepted their parents or relatives.

Brooks, an Army veteran who attended college with help from the G.I. Bill, said that the legislation might have flaws, but with the Supreme Court having “taken the stance they did,” this bill “is one way of bringing some equity back into the process.”

Supporters of fair admissions acknowledge that ending legacy-conscious admissions alone won’t diversify college campuses.

“These legacy admission bans often are simply a way to create the illusion of change, and excusing institutions that end the practice from taking more substantive steps,” a former U.S. Education Secretary, John B. King, said in a keynote address earlier this year. “The reality is, this is performative wokeness when transformative action is what is desperately needed.”

King, now the chancellor of the State University of New York, said that the legacy preference bans must come with other efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity among the student body.

He said colleges should strive to double the number of Pell-eligible students and try harder to recruit students from rural communities. He urged colleges to value student extracurricular activities such as part-time jobs or caring for family members as much as “equestrian trophies or glam charity outings in the more vacation-friendly developing nations.”

Lewis, the state delegate, said he can’t remember meeting with University of Maryland recruiters when he looked into applying to colleges. He now has two degrees from College Park, which he attributes to hard work — but he hopes his bill can make it easier for the next generation of Black and low-income scholars to get their feet in the door.

“I don’t see this bill as a silver bullet,” Lewis said. “I see it as one piece of our broader collection of bills that me and other colleagues are bringing to make sure that we don’t move backwards in Maryland. And hopefully, we can be a leader in the country.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct an error in federal data. McDaniel College does not consider legacy status in admissions.

This story about banning legacy admissions was produced by The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit local news site, and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Maryland becomes the third state to completely ban legacy preference in admissions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Cuando Angel Amankwaah viajó desde Denver a la Universidad Central de Carolina del Norte este verano para recibir orientación para nuevos estudiantes, supo que había tomado la decisión correcta.

Se divirtió aprendiendo los cantos que corean los aficionados en los partidos de fútbol. Pero también vio que “hay estudiantes que se parecen a mí y profesores que se parecen a mí” en la universidad históricamente negra, dijo Amankwaah, de 18 años, quien es negra. “Sabía que estaba en un espacio seguro”.

De repente, esto se ha convertido en una consideración importante para los estudiantes de todos los orígenes y creencias que van a la universidad.

Durante mucho tiempo, los estudiantes han elegido universidades en función de su reputación académica y vida social. Pero con los campus en la mira de las guerras culturales, ahora muchos estudiantes también están haciendo un balance de los ataques a la diversidad, el contenido de los cursos y los discursos, así como de los oradores en ambos extremos del espectro político. Están monitoreando los crímenes de odio, la legislación anti-LGBTQ, las leyes estatales de aborto y si estudiantes como ellos (negros, de zonas rurales, veteranos militares, LGBTQ o de otros orígenes) están representados y apoyados en el campus.

“No hay duda de que lo que está sucediendo a nivel estatal está afectando directamente a estos estudiantes”, dijo Alyse Levine, fundadora y directora ejecutiva de Premium Prep, una firma consultora de admisiones a universidades privadas en Chapel Hill, Carolina del Norte. Cuando ven las universidades de algunos estados ahora, dice, “hay estudiantes que se preguntan: ‘¿Realmente me quieren ahí?’”.

Para algunos estudiantes en ambos lados de la división política, la respuesta es no. En el caótico nuevo mundo de las universidades e institutos universitarios estadounidenses, muchos dicen que no se sienten bienvenidos en ciertas escuelas, mientras que otros están dispuestos a cancelar oradores y denunciar a profesores con cuyas opiniones no están de acuerdo.

Es demasiado pronto para saber en qué medida esta tendencia afectará dónde y si los futuros estudiantes terminarán yendo a la universidad, ya que los datos de inscripción disponibles públicamente se retrasan en tiempo real. Pero hay indicios de que está teniendo un impacto significativo.

Uno de cada cuatro futuros estudiantes ya ha descartado considerar una facultad o universidad debido al clima político en su estado, según una encuesta realizada por la consultora de educación superior Art & Science Group.

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Entre los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como liberales, la razón más común para descartar institutos universitarios y universidades, según esa encuesta, es porque es en un estado en particular “demasiado republicano” o tiene lo que consideran regulaciones laxas sobre armas, legislación anti-LGBTQ, leyes restrictivas sobre el aborto y falta de preocupación por el racismo. Los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como conservadores rechazan estados que creen que son “demasiado demócratas” y que tienen leyes liberales sobre el aborto y los derechos homosexuales.

Con tanta atención centrada en estos temas, The Hechinger Report ha creado una Campus Welcome Guide (Guía de Bienvenida al Campus)—la primera herramienta de su tipo— que muestra las leyes estatales y las políticas institucionales que afectan a los estudiantes universitarios. Desde prohibiciones de iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y “teoría crítica de la raza”, hasta si se aceptan los carnets de estudiantes como prueba de residencia a efectos de votación.

También enumera —para cada institución de cuatro años en el país— aspectos como la diversidad racial y de género entre estudiantes y profesores, el número de estudiantes veteranos matriculados, la incidencia de crímenes de odio motivados por la raza en el campus, clasificaciones de la libertad de expresión y si la universidad o instituto universitario atiende a muchos estudiantes de zonas rurales.

El sesenta por ciento de los futuros estudiantes de todos los orígenes afrima que las nuevas restricciones estatales al aborto es relevante en al menos en cierta medida en el lugar donde eligen ir a la universidad, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por Gallup y Lumina Foundation. De ellos, ocho de cada 10 dicen que preferirían ir a un estado con mayor acceso a servicios de salud reproductiva. (Lumina se encuentra entre quienes financian a The Hechinger Report, que produjo esta historia).

“Tenemos muchas mujeres jóvenes que no consideran ciertos estados”, dijo Levine. Una de sus propias clientas desistió de ir a una universidad en St. Louis después de que Missouri prohibiera casi todos los abortos tras la decisión Dobbs de la Corte Suprema, dijo.

Las instituciones de Alabama, Florida, Luisiana y Texas son las que tienen más probabilidades de ser eliminadas de las listas de estudiantes liberales, según la encuesta de Art & Science Group. En general, es más probable que se mantengan alejados del sur y el medio oeste, mientras que los estudiantes conservadores eviten California y Nueva York.

Uno de cada ocho estudiantes de secundaria en Florida dice que no iría a una universidad pública en su propio estado debido a sus políticas educativas, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por el sitio web de información y clasificación de universidades www.Intelligent.com.

Con 494 leyes anti-LGBTQ propuestas o adoptadas este año —según American Civil Liberties Union— los futuros estudiantes que son LGBTQ+ y que han experimentado un acoso significativo a causa de ello tienen casi el doble de probabilidades de decir que no planean ir a la universidad en absoluto que los estudiantes que experimentaron niveles más bajos de acoso, según una encuesta realizada por GLSEN, anteriormente Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

“Estás atacando a niños que ya son vulnerables”, dijo Javier Gómez, un estudiante LGBTQ en su primer año en Miami Dade College. “Y no se trata sólo de estudiantes queer. Muchos jóvenes están hartos”.

Aún no es evidente si las nuevas leyes están afectando el lugar donde los jóvenes LGBTQ eligen ir a la universidad, dijo Casey Pick, director de leyes y políticas de The Trevor Project, que apoya a los jóvenes LGBTQ en crisis. Existe evidencia que los adultos LGBTQ si se están alejando de los estados que aprueban leyes anti-LGBTQ, dijo Pick. Y “si los empleados adultos toman esto en cuenta cuando deciden dónde quieren vivir, puedes apostar que los estudiantes universitarios están tomando las mismas decisiones”.

Mientras tanto, en una era de rechazo a las políticas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión en muchos estados —y contra la acción afirmativa en todo el país— Amankwaah es una de un número creciente de estudiantes negros que eligen lo que consideran la seguridad relativa de una HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). La inscripción en las HBCU aumentó alrededor del 3 por ciento en 2021, el último año del que se dispone de cifras, mientras que el número de estudiantes en otras universidades y facultades disminuyó.

“El verdadero ataque aquí es el sentimiento de pertenencia”, dijo Jerry Young, quien dirige el programa Freedom to Learn en PEN America, que hace seguimiento a las leyes que restringen los esfuerzos de diversidad y la enseñanza sobre la raza en colegios y universidades. “Lo que realmente hace es izar una bandera para decirle a los estudiantes más marginados: ‘No los queremos aquí'”.

Más del 40 por ciento de los administradores de universidades y facultades dicen que el fallo de la Corte Suprema que restringe el uso de la acción afirmativa en las admisiones afectará la diversidad en sus campus, según una encuesta de Princeton Review cuando comenzaba el año escolar.

Los estudiantes universitarios de todas las razas y tendencias políticas informan que se sienten incómodos en los campus que se han convertido en campos de batalla de temas culturales y políticos. Los de izquierda están furiosos por las nuevas leyes que bloquean programas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y la enseñanza de ciertas perspectivas sobre la raza. Mientras los de derecha lamentan que los oradores conservadores son abucheados o cancelados, los comentarios impopulares criticados en clase y lo que ven como una adopción de valores diferentes a los que aprendieron en casa.

Un padre de Michigan dijo que apoyaba la decisión de su hijo de saltarse la universidad. Según él, otros padres también están disuadiendo a sus hijos de ir a la universidad, citando “el consumo excesivo de alcohol, la cultura de las relaciones, las enseñanzas seculares, profesores de izquierdista radicales que mezclan antiamericanismo, anticapitalismo, anti libertad de expresión y un énfasis en la diversidad, equidad e inclusión” que, según él, es contrario a un enfoque en el mérito. El padre pidió que no se usara su nombre para que sus comentarios no afectaran a su hija, quien asiste a una universidad pública.

Más de uno de cada 10 estudiantes en universidades de cuatro años ahora dicen que sienten que no pertenecen a su campus, y otros dos de cada 10 no están ni de acuerdo ni muy de acuerdo con que pertenecen, según encontró otra encuesta de Lumina y Gallup. También descubrió que quienes responden de esta manera tienen más probabilidades de experimentar estrés con frecuencia y de abandonar los estudios. Uno de cada cuatro estudiantes hispanos informa que frecuente u ocasionalmente se siente inseguro o sufre falta de respeto, discriminación o acoso.

Los veteranos militares que utilizan los beneficios de la ley G.I. para retomar los estudios dicen que una de sus barreras más importantes es la sensación de que no serán bienvenidos, según una encuesta realizada por el Instituto D’Aniello para Veteranos y Familias Militares de la Universidad de Syracuse. Casi dos tercios dice que los profesores y administradores no entienden los desafíos que enfrentan, y el 70 por ciento dice lo mismo sobre sus compañeros de clase no veteranos.

Las universidades deben ser “espacios seguros y de afirmación”, dijo Pick, del Proyecto Trevor, no lugares de aislamiento y alienación.

Sin embargo, un número significativo de estudiantes dice que no se siente cómodo compartiendo sus puntos de vista en clase, según otra encuesta realizada por College Pulse para el Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, de tendencia conservadora, en la Universidad Estatal de Dakota del Norte. De ellos, el 72 por ciento dice que teme que sus opiniones sean consideradas inaceptables por sus compañeros de clase y el 45 por ciento por sus profesores. Los estudiantes conservadores tienen menos probabilidades que sus compañeros liberales, de creer que todos los puntos de vista son bienvenidos y están menos dispuestos a compartir los suyos.

“¿Es realmente un entorno intelectualmente diverso?” se pregunta Sean Stevens, director de encuestas y análisis de la Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), que ha lanzado una clasificación de la libertad de expresión en los campus basada en las percepciones de los estudiantes sobre la comodidad al expresar ideas, la tolerancia hacia los oradores y otras medidas.

“Anecdóticamente y por experiencia personal, ciertamente hay un grupo de estudiantes

que están considerando estos factores en términos de dónde ir a la universidad”, dijo Stevens.

El 81 por ciento de los estudiantes liberales y el 53 por ciento de los conservadores dicen que apoyan las denuncias a profesores que hacen comentarios que consideran ofensivos, según la misma encuesta. Esta utilizó comentarios en su muestra como: “No hay evidencia de prejuicios contra los negros en los tiroteos policiales”, “Exigir la vacunación contra el COVID es un asalto a la libertad individual” y “El sexo biológico es un hecho científico”.

Una profesora de la Universidad Texas A&M fue investigada cuando un estudiante la acusó de criticar al vicegobernador del estado durante una conferencia, aunque finalmente fue exonerada. Una profesora de antropología de la Universidad de Chicago que impartió un curso universitario llamado “El problema de la blancura” dijo que se vio inundada de mensajes de odio cuando un estudiante conservador publicó su foto y su dirección de correo electrónico en las redes sociales.

Más de la mitad de los estudiantes de primer año dicen que las universidades tienen derecho a prohibir a oradores radicales, según una encuesta anual realizada por un instituto de la UCLA. La encuesta de College Pulse dice que el sentimiento lo comparte el doble de proporción de estudiantes liberales que de conservadores.

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La aparición de un jurista conservador —quien habló en el Washington College de Maryland el mes pasado— fue interrumpida por estudiantes debido a sus posiciones sobre cuestiones LGBTQ y el aborto. El tema: la libertad de expresión en el campus.

En marzo, un grupo de estudiantes en el campus de Stanford interrumpió un discurso de un juez federal cuyo historial judicial, según dijeron, era anti-LGBTQ. Cuando pidió la intervención de un administrador, un decano asociado de diversidad, equidad e inclusión lo confrontó y le preguntó: “¿Vale la pena el dolor que esto causa y la división que esto causa?”. El decano asociado fue suspendido y luego renunció.

“Hoy es un hecho triste que la mayor amenaza a la libertad de expresión proviene del interior de la academia”, afirmó el American Council of Trustees and Alumni, de tendencia derechista, que está presionando a las universidades para que firmen su Iniciativa de Libertad Universitaria que alienta a enseñar a los estudiantes sobre libertad de expresión durante la orientación para estudiantes de primer año y disciplinar a las personas que interrumpan a los oradores o eventos, entre otras medidas.

“Tengo que imaginar que en las universidades que tienen un mal historial en materia de libertad de expresión o libertad académica, esto afectará su reputación”, dijo Steven Maguire, becario de libertad en el campus de la organización. “Escucho a personas decir cosas como: ‘Me preocupa a qué tipo de instituto universitario o universidad puedo enviar a mis hijos y si serán libres de ser ellos mismos y de expresarse'”.

Algunas universidades ahora están reclutando activamente estudiantes basándose en este tipo de inquietudes. Colorado College creó en septiembre un programa para facilitar el proceso a los estudiantes que desean transferirse de instituciones en estados que han prohibido las iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión. Hampshire College en Massachusetts ha ofrecido admisión a cualquier estudiante de New College en Florida, sujeto a lo que los críticos han descrito como una toma de posesión conservadora. Hasta ahora, treinta y cinco han aceptado la invitación.

Aunque muchos críticos conservadores de los institutos universitarios y universidades dicen que los profesores están adoctrinando a los estudiantes con opiniones liberales, los estudiantes entrantes de primer año tienden a tener opiniones de izquierda antes de poner un pie en el aula, según esa encuesta de UCLA.

Menos de uno de cada cinco se considera conservador. Tres cuartas partes dicen que el aborto debería ser legal y favorecer leyes de control de armas más estrictas, el 68 por ciento dice que las personas ricas deberían pagar más impuestos de los que pagan ahora y el 86 por ciento que el cambio climático debería ser una prioridad federal y que debería haber un camino claro hacia la ciudadanía para todos los inmigrantes indocumentados.

Los futuros estudiantes dicen que están observando cómo se aprueban nuevas leyes, surgen controversias en los campus y analizan activamente no sólo la calidad de la comida y las especialidades disponibles en las universidades a las que podrían asistir, sino también la política estatal.

“Una vez que decidí que iba a Carolina del Norte Central, busqué si Carolina del Norte era un estado rojo o un estado azul”, dijo Amankwaah. (Carolina del Norte tiene un demócrata como gobernador, pero los republicanos controlan ambas cámaras de la legislatura y tienen una supermayoría a prueba de veto en el Senado estatal).

Las leyes anti-LGBTQ de Florida llevaron a Javier Gómez a dejar su estado natal y mudarse a Nueva York para ir a la escuela de moda. Pero luego regresó y se transfirió a Miami Dade.

“La gente me pregunta: ‘¿Por qué diablos estás de vuelta en Florida?’”, dijo Gómez. “La razón por la que regresé fue porque tenía esa vocación innata de que tenías que quedarte y luchar por los niños queer y trans de aquí. A veces es abrumador. Puede ser muy agotador mentalmente. Pero quería quedarme y continuar la lucha y construir una comunidad contra el odio”.

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