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A McGraw-Hill textbook is under fire for its characterization of enslaved people as “workers”—the latest example of our national unwillingness to face white supremacist history.

What do we mean by the “American Dream”? This educator has some ideas for meaningfully engaging students with this topic.

My mother’s birth certificate, dated 1915 and issued in Brooklyn, New York, gives her name as Maria. I knew her only as Mary, the name that appears on her marriage certificate, her social security card and her gravestone. Her sister Philomena was so determined to get away from her name that she had it changed legally to Phyliss. Their brother Philipo chopped his down to Philip. Their other siblings? Anna became Anne, Elisa morphed into Alice and Cosimo was known to his friends as Pete.

This school administrator offers recommendations for setting up courageous conversations in the new year, with discussions among colleagues as the first step.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” These few words, spoken casually by Sonia Sotomayor at the annual Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at UC-Berkeley in 2001, came back to haunt President Barack Obama’s nominee for the United States Supreme Court during the spring and summer of 2009. Hard to believe that this brief statement could cause such anguish, particularly among the conservative white senators who form part of the Senate Judiciary Committee, yet they led to days of arrogant grilling by the Senators and weeks of newspaper articles and commentary by television pundits speculating on what Sotomayor meant, whether it would hurt her confirmation, and what it would signal for the new court.

In almost every public school in the United States, attitudes and behaviors in the classroom presume an unacknowledged, yet pervasive, Christian norm. How does this affect students who are not Christian?

What tools and strategies do you use to address wealth and poverty?