Articles

Today marks the 15th annual National Day of Silence, organized by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). This student-led civil protest will unite LGBT youth and their allies in thousands of middle schools, high schools and colleges nationwide.

On February 27, 1960, about 300 college students marched into downtown Nashville to confront Jim Crow segregation. Each of the marchers understood that they belonged to a larger movement of young people. Just three weeks earlier, in Greensboro, N.C., four college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth store. That action desegregated the lunch counter and triggered waves of copycat protests—like the one in Nashville.

Take this quiz to see if you're up on one of the biggest trends in U.S. education--the resegregation of public schools.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has declared April Confederate History Month. His original seven-paragraph proclamation was full of paeans to grey-clad heroes but nowhere mentioned the agonies of slavery. This understandably offended African Americans, and McDonnell spent a day or so getting beat up in the media.

Remember Constance McMillen? She’s the lesbian teen in Fulton, Miss., who fought to take her date to the prom and wear a tuxedo. Her case drew national attention after she and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Itawamba County School District. The district had banned same-sex prom dates and decreed that only male students could wear tuxedos.

An important date awaits in April, and it’s coming sooner than April 15.The Census Bureau has designated April 1 as "National Census Day," the date for mailing census forms to bureau offices. Households that don’t get their forms sent off by then will get a visit from a census taker.

A powerful collection of Civil Rights-era photographs is on display now through August 2010 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. If you can’t organize a class trip to the museum, consider taking your students on a virtual tour of the era.

Last month, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez used an erasable marker to scribble on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith,” she wrote, along with, “Lex was here. 2/1/10,” punctuated with a happy face. But neither her Spanish teacher nor the principal at Alexa’s Queens, New York, middle school were amused. They called school security—New York City police officers—who arrested and handcuffed Alexa, and walked her across the street to their precinct, according to the New York Daily News.

A school district in northern Mississippi has cancelled its high school prom rather than let a lesbian student wearing a tuxedo attend with her girlfriend.

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.