Articles

The Texas State Board of Education approved standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses Friday. That is national news because of Texas’ huge role in shaping textbooks across the country. Given that conservative Christians dominate the board, the result was predictable.

Teaching Tolerance has reported many times and in many ways that the United States is plunging headlong toward racial and cultural re-segregation. That process took an enormous leap in the wrong direction last week when the Wake County school board in North Carolina voted to dismantle its policy of diversifying the schools.

On March 7, 1965, millions of Americans sat watching their television sets in horror. Grainy black-and-white news images from Selma, Ala., showed about 600 mostly African-American protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were marching to the state capital, Montgomery, to win voting rights in the Jim Crow South.

It used to be thought that college was where you went to open your mind, explore ideas and, in the words of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, “be freed from the prison-house of … class, race, time, place [and] background.”

Are charter schools helping to resegregate public schools? A just-released study states flatly that they are.

Earlier this month, hundreds of educators, parents and students gathered at the Educating Youth of Color Summit in Colorado Springs, Colo. That the state’s 4th Judicial District sponsored the event was no accident.

When you’re the only person of color in your class, school can become a struggle between two worlds.

‘Encounter experiences’ help pre-service and practicing teachers confront their attitudes about race and privilege.

No Child Left Behind is plunging many English language learners into the educational mainstream — and sometimes getting them in over their heads.

You’re forgiven if you missed it. Late last month, Congress passed and President Obama signed a bill that included text that “apologizes … to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” Not only was news of the measure knocked from front pages by the health care debate and Tiger Woods, it was well-camouflaged within the 2010 defense appropriations bill.