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If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, you might remember the scene in which Scout beats up Walter Cunningham in the schoolyard. It’s the first day of school and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline, is not from Maycomb. She doesn’t understand just how hard the Great Depression has hit the farmers of southern Alabama. So she innocently offers Walter a quarter to buy lunch in town. He refuses. As Scout explains he’s a Cunningham, and Cunninghams never take anything they can’t pay back. Every student at my school is eligible for free lunch this year, so they understand Walter’s situation. But what they don’t understand is “why other students get to go off campus for lunch and we don’t.”

One of the surest ways to motivate students to not only write, but to write with passion, purpose and power, is to make sure they have an authentic audience. This means they must write for somebody other than me, their teacher. Students must know that there is power in their words and that they can be heard.

As Earth Day approaches, it’s a good time to think about how you approach issues of identity and diversity when it comes to the environment—regardless of the subject you teach. Here’s how one science teacher did it.

Schools and communities must work together to counter Islamophobia, bullying and hate in all its forms. This curricular resource can help.

This high school student with APD shares some classroom and teaching techniques that helped her succeed—and that can benefit all students.

When the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights mandated diversity trainings for this school district, everyone pulled together to make some serious changes for the better.

Readers talk coming out, teen dating violence and our Children’s March film.

Three years ago, a young activist used social media to put her idea into practice. Now her effort to honor Native people is an international event—and it keeps growing.

Fundraising has become standard for most schools—but an education system that relies on private donations will never be equitable.

Divisive fundraisers make schools unsafe for kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.