Family and Community Engagement

"...Strong communication between school staff and families is important in any school and has special relevance for schools committed to anti-bias education.

Communication built on misinformation, assumptions or stereotypes can create distance between schools, families and students. If handled with respect and cultural sensitivity, however, school-family communication provides an opportunity to live out the values of inclusiveness and equity, which are at the heart of anti-bias education. The following guidelines can help schools avoid communication pitfalls and support teacher-family relationships built on respect..."

Read and Explore here:

Family and Community Engagement

Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education

This critical practices guide offers practical strategies for creating a space where academic and social-emotional goals are accomplished side by side. It also provides valuable advice for implementing culturally responsive pedagogy and describes how teachers can bring anti-bias values to life by

• building and drawing on intergroup awareness, understanding and skills;
• creating classroom environments that reflect diversity, equity and justice;
• engaging families and communities in ways that are meaningful and culturally competent;
• encouraging students to speak out against bias and injustice;
• including anti-bias curricula as part of larger individual, school and community action;
• supporting students’ identities and making it safe for them to fully be themselves; and
• using instructional strategies that support diverse learning styles and allow for deep exploration of anti-bias themes.

Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education is organized into four sections: Instruction, Classroom Culture, Family and Community Engagement, and Teacher Leadership. In each section, you can explore recommended practices, find helpful explanations and learn how each practice connects to anti-bias education. 

Don't Say Nothing

As educators we (sometimes unknowingly) step into roles of advocate, caretaker, guide, and even mother or father to students. Students pay attention to everything we say and do. They particularly pay attention to our silence. 

We may be uncomfortable talking about race, but we can no longer afford to be silent. We have chosen a profession, which—like parenting—requires that our comforts come second to those of children.

Read the article here:

Don't Say Nothing

Kwanzaa and Me - A Teacher's Story by Vivian Gussin Paley

“All these white schools I’ve been sent to are racist,” Sonya says. “I’d have done better in a black school. I was an outsider here.” These are hard words for Vivian Paley, whose own kindergarten was one of Sonya’s schools, the integrated classroom so lovingly and hopefully depicted by Paley in White Teacher. Confronted with the grown-up Sonya, now on her way to a black college, and with a chorus of voices questioning the fairness and effectiveness of integrated education, Paley sets out to discover the truth about the multicultural classroom from those who participate in it. This is an odyssey undertaken on the wings of conversation and storytelling in which every voice adds new meaning to the idea of belonging, really belonging, to a school culture. Here are black teachers and minority parents, immigrant families, a Native American educator, and the children themselves, whose stories mingle with the author’s to create a candid picture of the successes and failures of the integrated classroom. As Paley travels the country listening to these stories, we see what lies behind recent moves toward self-segregation: an ongoing frustration with racism as well as an abiding need for a nurturing community. And yet, among these diverse voices, we hear again and again the shared dream of a classroom where no family heritage is obscured and every child’s story enriches the life of the schoolhouse.

“It’s all about dialogue, isn’t it?” asks Lorraine, a black third-grade teacher whose story becomes a central motif. And indeed, it is the dialogue that prevails in this warmly provocative and deeply engaging book, as parents and teachers learn how they must talk to each other, and to their children, if every child is to secure a sense of self in the schoolroom, no matter what the predominant ethnic background. Vivian Paley offers these discoveries to readers as a starting point for their own journeys toward community and kinship in today’s schools and tomorrow’s culture.

Read an article from the New York Times here:

Are White Schools Bad for Black Children?

Reaching Educational Equity: It Is Possible - Responsive Classroom Plays a Role

"...the unfortunate reality is that certain populations of students, particularly those living in poverty, students of color, and English language learners, continue to lag behind. Educators are increasingly aware and in agreement that this "achievement gap” is really an equity gap..."

Read the article here:  It is Possible

40+ Children's Books about Human Rights & Social Justice

40+ Children's Books about Human Rights & Social Justice

An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves … the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.

— Maria Montessori, Education and Peace

Bias Isn't Just A Police Problem, It's A Preschool Problem

Bias Isn't Just A Police Problem, It's A Preschool Problem

"...It's impossible to separate these findings from today's broader, cultural context — of disproportionately high suspension rates for black boys and young men throughout the school years, of America's school-to-prison pipeline, and, most immediately, of the drumbeat of stories about black men being killed by police.

If implicit bias can play a role on our preschool reading rugs and in our classrooms' cozy corners, it no doubt haunts every corner of our society..."

K-12 Teaching and Learning from the UNC School of Education

Teaching should be informed not only by the content of the discipline 

                                        but also by the lives of the students.

Culturally Relevant Teaching by Heather Coffey

A Post from the Lee & Low Blog "The Open Book"

Where to Find Culturally Diverse Literature to Pair with Your Required Curriculum

Learning While Black: Creating Educational Excellence for African American Children by Janice E. Hale

Learning While Black
Creating Educational Excellence for African American Children

Janice E. Hale
with a foreword by V.P. Franklin

In Learning While Black Janice Hale argues that educators must look beyond the cliches of urban poverty and teacher training to explain the failures of public education with regard to black students. Why, Hale asks simply, are black students not being educated as well as white students?

Hale goes beyond finger pointing to search for solutions. Closing the achievement gap of African American children, she writes, does not involve better teacher training or more parental involvement. The solution lies in the classroom, in the nature of the interaction between the teacher and the child. And the key, she argues, is the instructional vision and leadership provided by principals. To meet the needs of diverse learners, the school must become the heart and soul of a broad effort, the coordinator of tutoring and support services provided by churches, service clubs, fraternal organizations, parents, and concerned citizens. Calling for the creation of the "beloved community" envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hale outlines strategies for redefining the school as the Family, and the broader community as the Village, in which each child is too precious to be left behind.

"In this book, I am calling for the school to improve traditional instructional practices and create culturally salient instruction that connects African American children to academic achievement. The instruction should be so delightful that the children love coming to school and find learning to be fun and exciting."—Janice Hale

Janice E. Hale is professor of early childhood education at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is the founder of Visions for Children, a demonstration school designed to facilitate the intellectual development of African American preschool children. Her two previous books, Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles and Unbank the Fire: Visions for the Education of African American Children, are also available from Johns Hopkins.

Black Coffee Buddhism: E. Ethelbert Miller interviews scholar Charles Johnson

Read the interview from the Fall 2016 Tricycle magazine here:

Black Coffee Buddhism

"...There is nothing new one can say about issues of race in America. What is new is how Buddhists, working daily, can take the lead in expressing the desire for true brotherhood. I asked Charles Johnson questions a person in a crowd might be thinking about. His answers illuminate the road ahead.

–E. Ethelbert Miller

What White Children Need to Know about Race/Independent School Magazine

What White Children Need to Know about Race

"...Silence is a racial message and a “tool of whiteness.” In order to support the goals of their diversity mission statements and work toward a “racially just America,” schools need to take a more proactive approach to teaching white students about race and racial identity..."

Kwame Alexander on Children’s Books and the Color of Characters

"...The mind of an adult begins in the imagination of a child.

If we don’t give children books that are literary mirrors as well as windows to the whole world of possibility, if these books don’t give them the opportunity to see outside themselves, then how can we expect them to grow into adults who connect in meaningful ways to a global community, to people who might look or live differently than they. You cannot.

Am I saying that poetry and literature are the answer to Baton Rouge and Dallas and Orlando and Charleston? No. But their capacity to entertain, enlighten and empower — all at the same time — is an answer, and without them, we most certainly obstruct our children’s vision..."

Kwame Alexander on Children’s Books and the Color of Characters

What is Discriminology?

Discriminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, consequences, and prevention of modern day racism and discriminatory behavior, both on the individual and Institutional levels. Discriminology is an interdisciplinary field drawing especially upon the research of sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social anthropologists, as well as scholars of law.

Discriminology Home Page

Discriminolgy was founded in 2015 to document and publicize the mass racial inequalities that still exist in our education system. Through the use of descriptive statistics, public data portals & innovative social media work, we are empowering communities of color by making school data more transparent.

Educational Equity and the Responsive Classroom

Reaching Educational Equity: It Is Possible! Responsive Classroom Plays a Role

"...During the last twenty years, educators have made considerable strides in improving the quality of education for our nation’s students. Overall student achievement and graduation rates have risen. Yet the unfortunate reality is that certain populations of students, particularly those living in poverty, students of color, and English language learners, continue to lag behind. Educators are increasingly aware and in agreement that this 'achievement gap' is really an equity gap.These students are lagging in achievement because they are lagging in access to educational opportunities..."

Meet Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall

Read this article in the August 20, 2016, Washington Post:

Cissy Marshall recalls day of Brown v. Board of Education decision

Sixty-two years later, Cissy Marshall, now 88, remembers certain details of the day the 9-to-0 decision in Brown v. Board of Education was handed down, as if it happened yesterday.

She was in New York, working at the NAACP’s offices on 43rd Street.

Thurgood Marshall and the legal team that included James M. Nabrit and George Hayes had traveled to Washington on a tip the justices would reveal the ruling. “They were expecting the decision,” she said. “They were getting hints the opinion was coming down. You are not supposed to know anything of these things. But a grapevine gets going.”

Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Minneapolis Public Schools Educational Equity Framework

Minneapolis Public School Educational Equity Framework

Theory of Action 

This MPS Educational Equity Framework has been developed through the effort, ideas and expertise of more than 50 people representing diverse roles, experiences, expertise, and perspectives within the district and greater community. 

In order to meet the needs of underrepresented students and their families, we must: 

- recognize personal and collective responsibility 

- aim for true transformational change

- leverage a pedagogy of equity

- utilize equity and diversity impact assessments 

- engage families as partners in education

- ensure equitable practices in operations

- maintain alignment with both the district mission and the strategic plan

Together, we can overcome persistent and predictable system barriers to racial equity and create an equitable educational system.

This is a 35 page document.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Theory of Action 
Medicine Wheel Metaphorical Meaning 
What and Why  
Purpose 
Student Emphasis 
Areas of Focus: Big Levers 
Alignment with Acceleration 2020 
The Big Picture and Ultimate Goal  
Systemic Change Barriers 
How We Will Use this Framework 
Contact for Information  

Pedagogy of Equity 
   Vision, Definition and Beliefs 
   Implementation Goals and Action Plan  
Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment 
   Vision, Definition and Beliefs 
   Implementation Goals and Action Plan 
   EDIA (Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment)Tools and Process 
Families as Education Partners 
   Vision Definition and Beliefs 
   Implementation Goals and Action Plan 
Equity in Operations 
   Vision, Definition and Beliefs 
   Implementation Goals and Action Plan  

Appendix A: Implementation Resources Needed 
Appendix B: Contributors 
Appendix C: Research and Resources 

MPS Educational Equity Framework Executive Summary

White People Need to Stop Snickering at Black Names by Steven M. Singer

"...Make no mistake. This is racist behavior. We are emphasizing the otherness of an entire group of people to put ourselves over and above them.

It’s bigoted, discriminatory, prejudicial and just plain dumb.

What’s wrong with black names anyway? What about them is so unacceptable?

We act as if only European and Anglicized names are reasonable. But I don’t have to go far down my rosters to find white kids with names like Braelyn, Declyn, Jaydon, Jaxon, Gunner or Hunter. I’ve never heard white folks yucking it up over those names..."

Read the entire essay here:

White People Need to Stop Snickering at Black Names

Absent Narratives Resources

The Minnesota Humanities Center is committed to helping people tell their stories. These stories, histories, and contributions are the Absent Narratives that are often left out of the mainstream story of Minnesota and many of its K-12 classrooms. These resources and many more can be found on the Absent Narratives Resource Collection, a free, searchable database of over 900 ready-to-use videos, teacher guides, and readings. Items included in the resource collection have been created or developed by the Humanities Center and its partners. 

Absent Narratives Resource Overview from Minnesota Humanities Center

Resource Assessment Tool from Minnesota Humanities Center

Minnesota Humanities Center

The Danger of a Single Story: Writing Essays about Our Lives

This article is from Rethinking Schools.

The Danger of a Single Story Writing essays about our lives by Linda Christensen

Linda Christensen (lmc@lclark.edu) is director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is author of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up and Teaching for Joy and Justice; co-editor of Rethinking Elementary Education and The New Teacher Book; and an editor of Rethinking Schools.

TED Talk by Author Grace Lin

The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf

Grace Lin Books

The Real Reason White People Say "All Lives Matter" by John Halstead

The Real Reason White People Say "All Lives Matter"

Want To Address Teachers' Biases? First, Talk About Race

"We are going to experience discomfort — well, we may or may not experience it — but if we have it that's OK," says Coles, a third-grade teacher at Eagle Creek Elementary School in Indianapolis.

Coles is black, one of just four teachers of color among Eagle Creek Elementary's 37 staff. Throughout last year she gathered co-workers in her classroom for after-school discussions about race.

Her goal? Create a common understanding of race and power, with hopes that teachers acknowledge, then address, how that plays out in the school.

Read the rest of the article from Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations here:

Want to Address Teachers' Biases? First, Talk about Race

How to Stop the Racist in You

Read the entire article here:  How to Stop the Racist in You

By Jeremy Adam Smith, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton | July 27, 2016 | 

The new science of bias suggests that we all carry prejudices within ourselves—and we all have the tools to keep them in check.

"...For many people, the very possibility that they too might get caught saying one thing but doing another is extremely threatening and aversive. That threat, in fact, has a name: aversive racism. It refers to the type of racism in which a person’s implicit biases are so out of line with their conscious values that social situations where they experience this conflict—such as interracial interactions—are something to fear and avoid..."

"...So what are the tricks that you can use to stop the racist in you? There are many, of course, but here are six to consider that follow from the scientific insights we describe.

• Consciously commit yourself to egalitarianism.
• But recognize that unconscious bias is no more “the real you” than your conscious values. You are both the unconscious and the conscious.
• Acknowledge differences, rather than pretend that you are ignoring them.
• Seek out friendship with people from different groups, in order to increase your brain’s familiarity with different people and expand your point of view.
• It’s natural to focus on how people are different from you, but try to consciously identify what qualities and goals you might have in common.
• When you encounter examples of unambiguous bias, speak out against them. Why? Because that helps create and reinforce a standard for yourself and the people around you, in addition to providing some help to those who are the targets of explicit and implicit prejudice.

Those are steps you can take right now, without waiting for the world to change..."

Books as Mirrors

On the Importance of Mirrors

"... the curriculum is a structure that ideally provides “windows out into the experiences of others, as well as mirrors of the student’s own reality.” In other words, schools should be spaces where kids explore the unfamiliar, but also see their own lived experiences validated and valued. For students whose racial, cultural, linguistic, or economic backgrounds differ significantly from that of the mainstream, the “mirrors” part of the metaphor can be particularly powerful..." Gregory Michie

Publishing Statistics on Children's Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators

CCBC's Choices 2016 List
CCBC Choices is the annual best-of-the-year list of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. This is a listing of titles that have been chosen for CCBC Choices 2016. The final CCBC Choices 2016 publication will include additional books (one or two might be removed) and include annotations and recommended ages for all of the books selected for final inclusion, as well as an author/title/subject index, and a commentary on the publishing year. The CCBC Choices 2016 booklet will be available at the CCBC after March 5, 2016. 

Cooperative Children's Book Center
CCBC's history statement:
In 1985 the Cooperative Children's Book Center began to document the numbers of books we received each year that were written and/or illustrated by African Americans. Then CCBC Director Ginny Moore Kruse was serving as a member of the Coretta Scott King Award Committee that year, and we were appalled to learn that, of the approximately 2,500 trade books that were published in 1985, only 18 were created by African Americans, and thus eligible for the Coretta Scott King Award.

As a statewide book examination center serving Wisconsin, the CCBC receives the majority of new U.S. trade books published for children and teens each year. In the early years of gathering these statistics, we used the CCBC's collections and worked in conjunction with the Coretta Scott King Award Task Force of the American Library Association, to document the number of books by and about African Americans published annually.
Starting in 1994 we began also keeping track of the numbers of books by Asian/Pacific and Asian/Pacific American, First/Native Nation and Latino book creators as well. We also began documenting not only the number of books created by people of color and First/Native Nations authors and illustrators, but the number of books about people of color and First/Native Nations, including the many titles that have been created by white authors and/or illustrators.

What I Said When My White Friend Asked for My Black Opinion on White Privilege by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

Read the article here: What I Said When My White Friend Asked for My Black Opinion on White Privilege by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

Lori Lakin Hutcherson is a Los Angeles native, Harvard graduate, former film studio executive, film and television writer/producer, and founder/editor-in-chief of the award-winning website Good Black News. She is also a wife, mother, vegetarian, crossword puzzle enthusiast, nerd, and avid music lover.



On Being

Reading While White

RWW's Mission Statement:

We are White librarians organizing to confront racism in the field of children’s and young adult literature.  We are allies in the ongoing struggle for authenticity and visibility in books; for opportunities for people of color and First/Native Nations people in all aspects of the children’s and young adult book world; and for accountability among publishers, book creators, reviewers, librarians, teachers, and others.  We are learning, and hold ourselves responsible for understanding how our whiteness impacts our perspectives and our behavior.

We know that we lack the expertise that non-white have on marginalized racial experiences.  We resolve to listen and learn from people of color and First/Native Nations people willing to speak about those experiences.  We resolve to examine our own White racial experiences without expecting people of color and First/Native Nations people to educate us. As White people, we have the responsibility to change the balance of White privilege.

Reading While White

Black Lives Matter Booklists and Resources

Teens are naturally curious about current events and their roles as emerging citizens. Including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry titles, this list offers a great starting point for discussions of race, justice, and privilege.

HCL List

Whether you're a parent, a student, a community organizer or a concerned neighbor, this Resource Series offers books, articles and videos to prompt discussion and action. This is a blog resource from the Oakland (California) Public Library.

Listen, Learn, Participate: A #BlackLivesMatter Resource Series

Black Lives Matter: Resource/Reading List Master Post

Basically, a list of ‘required readings’ to become acquainted not just with the movement, but with said movement’s philosophical, intellectual, and scholarly/academic underpinnings and foundations. And the results, yielded by the kind individuals in that group, were quite helpful. I’ve decided to compile the results here, in one single source, so as to create a better and wider access of information. This list will be updated as I come across more resource guides and the like. 
- Malcolm Teller/Malcolm Teller's Writing Space

New York Times: A Conversation on Race

A Conversation with Asians on Race

A Conversation with Black Women on Race

A Conversation about Growing Up Black

A Conversation on Race A series of short films about identity in America.

The New York Times presents this series of videos featuring personal stories that reflect the breadth of experiences in the United States. 

Why Talk About Whiteness?

Why Talk About Whiteness?

Toolkit for Why Talk About Whiteness

Don’t take it personally—it’s not about you! 

White people have come to expect a level of racial comfort. When that expectation is met with racial stress, DiAngelo explains the result can be White Fragility: “White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”

No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom

No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning 

by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom

352 pages, Simon & Schuster, 2004

• 
  

The racial gap in academic performance between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and Latinos and blacks, on the other hand, is America's most urgent educational problem. It is also the central civil rights issue of our time, say Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. Unequal skills and knowledge are the main sources of ongoing racial inequality, and racial inequality is America's great unfinished business. 
A wide and tragic gap in learning is evident in affluent suburbs as well as inner cities. But great schools are scattered across the country, as described in inspiring detail by the Thernstroms. These schools are putting even the most highly disadvantaged children on the American ladder of economic opportunity. 
There are no good excuses for the perpetuation of long-standing inequalities, the Thernstroms argue eloquently. The problem can be solved, but conventional strategies will not work. Fundamental educational reform is needed. Carefully researched, accessibly written, and powerfully persuasive, this book offers both a close analysis of the current landscape and a blueprint for essential and overdue change.

Look inside.
Must Schools Fail? A review from the New York Review of Books here.
Comments and Reviews here.

Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs by David R. Roediger 

At the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history, David R. Roediger is the author of the now-classic The Wages of Whiteness, a study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, he continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how American ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-once occupied a confused racial status in their new country. They eventually became part of white America thanks to the nascent labor movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants--the racist real estate agreements that ensured all-white neighborhoods--Roediger explores the murky realities of race in twentieth-century America. A masterful history by an award-winning writer, Working Toward Whiteness charts the strange transformation of these new immigrants into the "white ethnics" of America today.

Take a look inside here.

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta L. (Lynn) Hammond

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta L. Hammond 

This book presents a bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction. To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation-until now. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction. The book includes: information on how one's culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships; ten "key moves" to build students' learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners; and, prompts for action and valuable self-reflection. 

Take a look inside here.

Ready4Rigor

Culturally Relevant Teaching: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in Urban Schools by Darius D. Prier

Culturally Relevant Teaching: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in Urban Schools by Darius D. Prier

Culturally Relevant Teaching centers hip-hop culture as a culturally relevant form of critical pedagogy in urban pre-service teacher education programs. In this important book, Darius D. Prier explores how hip-hop artists construct a sense of democratic education and pedagogy with transformative possibilities in their schools and communities. In a postmodern context, students’ critical street narratives challenge educators to rethink where «public education» can happen, and the political and empowering purposes to which Black popular culture can serve social justice ends for youth in urban education. This book provides educational leaders in the academy and public schools with new cultural contexts that connect teaching and learning with music and popular culture in relation to race, class, gender, culture, and community.

Click here to read inside.

Bringing Hip-Hop to Education in a Meaningful Way by Sam Seidel