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TT director Maureen Costello encourages educators to raise students ready to address injustice.

How social justice educators are using social media to find support, a platform and PD.

We tracked 90 hate incidents at schools in October alone—and that’s only what made the news. Just as important is the way schools respond, and in most cases, those responses don’t measure up.

Dr. Neal Lester talks about meeting folks across the country who want thoughtful, informed and critical conversation about the troublesome n-word.

My students are too young to remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Just four years before their birth, they refer to them as something from “back in the day.”But the themes of police brutality, poverty and racism are all too familiar. And most drew an immediate connection between the Rodney King verdict that sparked those riots and the 2009 fatal shooting of Oscar Grant. Grant was shot in the back by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle less than one mile from our school in Oakland.

The Teaching Tolerance team had a confab earlier this week to plan ahead. Looking at a 2011 calendar, Sean Price, Teaching Tolerance’s managing editor, reminded me that the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War was fast approaching. Did we want to do something? My first response? Frankly, no. As a former U.S. history teacher, I suspected that the next four years will present an unending opportunity mainly for military history buffs to strut their stuff. We would, I suggested to Sean, better serve teachers by focusing on the themes that spoke to racial justice.

Scattered across the cinderblocks of our middle school walls are some new faces, photographs of kids who have been silenced. Lee Simpson on Oct. 10, 2008. Scotty Weaver on July 22, 2004. Lawrence King on Feb. 12, 2008. Carl Walker-Hoover on April 9, 2009. All silent. They are dead.

We need to look around our schools and communities with an eye towards equity. And—like our predecessors—we need to find the courage to take a stand together when we see it.