articles about race and education

Exploring Equity: Race and Ethnicity

• Posted February 18, 2021
• By Gianna Cacciatore
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Inequality and Education Gaps
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education
• Teachers and Teaching

The history of education in the United States is rife with instances of violence and oppression along lines of race and ethnicity. For educators, leading conversations about race and racism is a challenging, but necessary, part of their work.

“Schools operate within larger contexts: systems of race, racism, and white supremacy; systems of migration and ethnic identity formation; patterns of socialization; the changing realities of capitalism and politics,” explains historian and Harvard lecturer Timothy Patrick McCarthy , co-faculty lead of Race and Ethnicity in Context, a new module offered at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this January as part of a pilot of HGSE’s Equity and Opportunity Foundations course. “How do we understand the role that racial and ethnic identity play with respect to equity and opportunity within an educational context?”

>> Learn more about Equity and Opportunity and HGSE’s other foundational learning experiences.

For educators exploring question in their own homes, schools, and communities, McCarthy and co-faculty lead Ashley Ison, an HGSE doctoral student, offer five ways to get started.

1.    Begin with the self.

Practitioners enter conversations about race and racism from different backgrounds, with different lived experiences, personal and professional perspectives, and funds of knowledge in their grasps. Given diverse contexts and realities, it is important that leaders encourage personal transformation and growth. Educators should consider how race and racism, as well as racial and ethnic identity formation, impact their lives as educational professionals, as parents, and as policymakers – whatever roles they hold in society. “This is personal work, but that personal work is also political work,” says Ison.

2.    Model vulnerability.

Entering into discussions of race and racism can be challenging, even for those with experience in this work. A key part of enabling participants to lean into the challenge is being vulnerable. “You have trust your students,” explains McCarthy. “Part of that is modeling authentic vulnerability and proximity to the work.” This can be done by modeling discussion skills, like sharing the space and engaging directly with the comments of other participants, as well as by opening up personally to participants.  

“Fear can impact how people feel talking about race and ethnicity in an inter-group space,” says Ison. Courage, openness, and trust are key to overcoming that fear and enabling listening, which ultimately allows for critical thinking and change.

3.    Be transparent.

Part of being vulnerable is being fully transparent with your students from day one. “Intentions are important,” explains McCarthy. “The gap between intention and impact is often rooted in a lack of transparency about where you’re coming from or where you are hoping to go.”

4.    Center voices of color.

Voice and story are powerful tools in this work. Leaders must consider whose voices and stories take precedence on the syllabus. “Consider highlighting authors of color, in particular, who are thinking and writing about these issues,” says Ison. Becoming familiar with a variety of perspectives can help practitioners understand the voices and ideas that exist, she explains.

“Voice and storytelling can bear witness to the various kinds of systematic injustices and inequities we are looking at, but they also function as sources of power for imagining and reimagining the world we are trying to build, all while providing a deeper knowledge of the world as it has existed historically,” adds McCarthy.

5.    Prioritize discussion and reflection.

Since this work is as much about critical thinking as it is about content, it is important for educators to make space for discussion and reflection, at the whole-class, small-group, and individual levels. Ison and McCarthy encourage educators to allow students to generate and guide the discussion of predetermined course materials. They also recommend facilitating small group reflections that may spark conversation that can extend into other spaces outside of the classroom.

Selected Resources:

• Poor, but Privileged
• NPR: "The Importance of Diversity in Teaching Staff”
• TED Talk with Clint Smith: "The Danger of Silence"

More Stories from the Series:

• Exploring Equity: Citizenship and Nationality
• Exploring Equity: Gender and Sexuality
• Exploring Equity: Dis/ability
• Exploring Equity: Class

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A future we can all live with: How education can address and eradicate racism

by  Cecilia Barbieri & Martha K. Ferede

Today, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that has exposed stark socio-economic inequalities and exacerbated hate speech, the world is also witnessing a global uprising against systemic, institutionalized and structural racism and discrimination.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible

These words spoken by Maya Angelou more than 30 years ago echo the injustices of the past, add gravitas to our turbulent present and show clearly that prejudice runs counter to what is needed, at the core, for us to become global citizens who promote and develop just and peaceful futures.

Today, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that has exposed stark socio-economic inequalities and exacerbated hate speech, the world is also witnessing a global uprising against systemic, institutionalized and structural racism and discrimination. Protests are unfolding in nearly every continent – from North and South America to Europe and Australia. This is not only about yet one more senseless killing of an unarmed African-American man. It is about the senseless killing of millions over many centuries, the unequal and unjust treatment, the different forms of violence, the economic and social inequality, the lack of opportunity, the racial profiling, the marginalization, the micro-agressions and the countless daily indignities. 

Systemic racism and discrimination are rooted in the structure of society itself, in governments, the workplace, courts, police and education institutions. Racism can be explicit but often exists in implicit, subtle and insidious forms that can be hard to pin down. 

Global data on education points to the malignancy of racism:  

School disciplinary policies disproportionately impact Black students . In some settings, starting as early as preschool, Black children are 3.6 times more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions than White children, increasing to 4 times as likely in grades K-12. Black students are also more than twice as likely to face school-related arrests and be referred to law enforcement ( US Department Office for Civil Rights, 2016 ;  Fabello et al., 2011 ). 

Teachers’ expectations differ by students’ race . Many studies have found a correlation between teachers’ expectations and students’ educational outcomes including academic achievement and completion of higher education ( Boser et al., 2014 ). However, teachers’ expectations differ by students’ race, economic status and national origin. For instance, Eastern European students have experienced various forms of racism and low expectations in the UK school system ( Tereschenko et al., 2018 ).

Students from ethnic and racial minority groups are more likely to be labelled ‘at risk’ . For example, in Quebec, Canada, students with Caribbean backgrounds are three times more likely to be identified as SHSMLD (students with handicaps, social maladjustments, or learning difficulties) and placed in separate classes for “at-risk” students ( Maynard, 2017 ).

Education attendance and attainment correlate with race . According to the  2020 Global Education Monitoring Report , although there have been advances towards increasing access in recent decades,  enduring racial inequality remains in educational attendance and attainment in Latin American countries. For example, compared to their non-Afrodescendant peers, attendance rates are lower for Afrodescendants aged 12-17 ( ECLAC, 2019 ). Based on World Bank data ( 2018 ), Afrodescendants in Uruguay and Peru are also reported as less likely to complete secondary school than non-Afrodescendants. 

Racial discrimination takes place among students . In Australia, a study of primary and secondary Anglo-Celtic/European, East or Southeast Asian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander and African students’ backgrounds, found that one in three reported being the victim of racial discrimination by their peers ( Priest et al., 2019 ).

The returns to education differ by race .  In post-Apartheid South Africa, although opportunities for education have improved, there has been a divergence in the valuation of that education. In 2004, differences in the returns to education accounted for about 40% of the White-African wage differential ( Keswell, 2010 ). By 2018, the average Black South African earned five times less than the average White South-African ( Syed & Ozbilgin, 2019 ).

Racism is a violation of the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights  (1948) and it goes against UNESCO’s  Convention Against Discrimination in Education  (1960), the  International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination  (1965), the  International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights  (1966) and the  Convention on the Rights of the Child  (1989).

Systemic racism and discrimination are rooted in the structure of society itself, in governments, workplaces, courts, police and education institutions.

Education systems and educational institutions have an important role and responsibility in addressing and eliminating racism through: 

Supporting schools to implement education policies that support racially integrated schools . Such schools have been found to promote greater social cohesion and cross-race relationships ( Eaton & Chirichigno, 2011 ).  

Training and recruiting teachers that reflect the diversity of students . Studies show that when teachers reflect the student body, there are improved learning outcomes, higher expectations and fewer disciplinary actions ( Egamit et al. 2015 ). 

Examining the curriculum from multiple vantage points . First, schools should give history, social memory and human rights – as well as indigenous forms of knowledge – a place at the core of teaching.  This helps us to fully understand the past and its relation to the present and to break the perpetuation of stereotypes. Second, educators should reexamine and revise curriculum, and textbooks in particular, to eliminate racist depictions, misrepresentation, and historical exclusions. 

Addressing implicit bias .  All actors in education institutions from policy-makers, leaders, teachers, staff and students should receive training to become aware of their implicit bias – their unconscious bias and beliefs. Reflective teaching, fair discipline policies based on data and use of external feedback are some strategies schools can use to reduce implicit bias ( Staats, 2015 ). 

The injustice of systemic racism is a significant barrier to the type of education that is needed for preferred alternative futures for all - for a world where people are able to live together peacefully as global citizens in strong and just societies that value diversity. As educators, citizens and as a global community, we have much work to do to ensure that the solutions proposed to defeat systemic racism do not remain mired in the system that is being critiqued, so that the roots of oppression and inequality can be removed. 

And for that, a frank and bold approach is needed as affirmed in the recent message from the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, “The position of the United Nations on racism is crystal clear: this scourge violates the United Nations Charter and debases our core values. Every day, in our work across the world, we strive to do our part to promote inclusion, justice, dignity and combat racism in all its manifestations.” 

It is time for essential conversations and inspired and informed action. 

Our future depends on it. 

The ideas expressed here are those of the authors; they are not necessarily the official position of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.

Cecilia Barbieri is the Chief of Section of Global Citizenship and Peace Education at UNESCO, coming from the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, where she was in charge of the Education 2030 Section. She has worked as an Education Specialist with UNESCO since 1999, mainly in Africa and Asia.

Martha K. Ferede is a Project Officer in the section of Global Citizenship and Peace Education at UNESCO. She is a former school teacher, researcher at Harvard University and lecturer at Sciences-po.

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The U.S. student population is more diverse, but schools are still highly segregated

Sequoia Carrillo

Pooja Salhotra

The U.S. student body is more diverse than ever before. Nevertheless, public schools remain highly segregated along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines.

That's according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). More than a third of students (about 18.5 million of them) attended a predominantly same-race/ethnicity school during the 2020-21 school year, the report finds. And 14% of students attended schools where almost all of the student body was of a single race/ethnicity.

The report is a follow up to a 2016 GAO investigation on racial disparity in K-12 schools. That initial report painted a slightly worse picture, but findings from the new report are still concerning, says Jackie Nowicki, the director of K-12 education at the GAO and lead author of the report.

Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

"There is clearly still racial division in schools," says Nowicki. She adds that schools with large proportions of Hispanic, Black and American Indian/Alaska Native students – minority groups with higher rates of poverty than white and Asian American students – are also increasing. "What that means is you have large portions of minority children not only attending essentially segregated schools, but schools that have less resources available to them."

"There are layers of factors here," she says. "They paint a rather dire picture of the state of schooling for a segment of the school-age population that federal laws were designed to protect."

School segregation happens across the country

Segregation has historically been associated with the Jim Crow laws of the South. But the report finds that, in the 2020-21 school year, the highest percentage of schools serving a predominantly single-race/ethnicity student population – whether mostly white, mostly Hispanic or mostly Black etc. – were in the Northeast and the Midwest.

School segregation has "always been a whole-country issue," says U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., who heads the House education and labor committee. He commissioned both the 2016 and 2022 reports. "The details of the strategies may be different, but during the '60s and '70s, when the desegregation cases were at their height, cases were all over the country."

How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'

The GAO analysis also found school segregation across all school types, including traditional public schools, charter schools and magnet schools. Across all charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, more than a third were predominantly same-race/ethnicity, serving mostly Black and Hispanic students.

There's history behind the report's findings

Nowicki and her team at the GAO say they were not surprised by any of the report's findings. They point to historical practices, like redlining , that created racially segregated neighborhoods.

And because 70% of U.S. students attend their neighborhood public schools, Nowicki says, racially segregated neighborhoods have historically made for racially segregated schools.

The 50 Most Segregating School Borders In America

"There are historical reasons why neighborhoods look the way they look," she explains. "And some portion of that is because of the way our country chose to encourage or limit where people could live."

Though the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed housing discrimination on the basis of race, the GAO says that in some states, current legislation reinforces racially isolated communities.

"Our analysis showed that predominantly same-race/ethnicity schools of different races/ethnicities exist in close proximity to one another within districts, but most commonly exist among neighboring districts," the report says.

School district secessions have made segregation worse

One cause for the lack of significant improvement, according to the GAO, is a practice known as district secession, where schools break away from an existing district – often citing a need for more local control – and form their own new district. The result, the report finds, is that segregation deepens.

"In the 10 years that we looked at district secessions, we found that, overwhelmingly, those new districts were generally whiter, wealthier than the remaining districts," Nowicki says.

Six of the 36 district secessions identified in the report happened in Memphis, Tenn., which experienced a historic district merger several years ago. Memphis City Schools, which served a majority non-white student body, dissolved in 2011 due to financial instability. It then merged with the neighboring district, Shelby County Schools, which served a wealthier, majority white population.

This Supreme Court Case Made School District Lines A Tool For Segregation

Joris Ray was a Memphis City Schools administrator at the time of the merger. He recalls that residents of Shelby County were not satisfied with the new consolidated district. They successfully splintered off into six separate districts.

As a result, the GAO report says, racial and socioeconomic segregation has grown in and around Memphis. All of the newly formed districts are whiter and wealthier than the one they left, which is now called Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Why Busing Didn't End School Segregation

"This brings negative implications for our students overall," says Ray, who has led Memphis-Shelby County Schools since 2019. "Research has shown that students in more diverse schools have lower levels of prejudice and stereotypes and are more prepared for top employers to hire an increasingly diverse workforce."

The GAO report finds that this pattern – of municipalities removing themselves from a larger district to form their own, smaller school district – almost always creates more racial and socioeconomic segregation. Overall, new districts tend to have larger shares of white and Asian American students, and lower shares of Black and Hispanic students, the report finds. New districts also have significantly fewer students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measure of poverty.

This is what the racial education gap in the US looks like right now

Racial achievement gaps in the United States has been slow and unsteady. Image:  Unsplash/Santi Vedrí

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Stay up to date:.

• Racial achievement gaps in the United States are narrowing, a Stanford University data project shows.
• But progress has been slow and unsteady – and gaps are still large across much of the country.
• COVID-19 could widen existing inequalities in education.
• The World Economic Forum will be exploring the issues around growing income inequality as part of The Jobs Reset Summit .

In the United States today, the average Black and Hispanic students are about three years ahead of where their parents were in maths skills.

They’re roughly two to three years ahead of them in reading, too.

And while white students’ test scores in these subjects have also improved, they’re not rising by as much. This means racial achievement gaps – a key way of monitoring whether all students have access to a good education – in the country are narrowing, research by Stanford University shows.

But while the trend suggests progress is being made in improving racial educational disparities, it doesn’t show the full picture. Progress, the university says, has been slow and uneven.

Have you read?

How can africa prepare its education system for the post-covid world, higher education: do we value degrees in completely the wrong way, this innovative solution is helping indian children get an education during the pandemic.

Standardized tests

Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project uses average standardized test scores for nine-, 13- and 17-year-olds to measure these achievement gaps.

It’s able to do this because the same tests have been used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress to observe maths and reading skills since the 1970s.

In the following decades, as the above chart shows, achievement gaps have significantly declined in all age groups and in both maths and reading. But it’s been something of a roller-coaster.

Substantial progress stalled at the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s and in some cases the gaps grew larger. Since then, they’ve been declining steadily and are now significantly smaller than they were in the 1970s.

But these gaps are still “very large”. In fact, the difference in standardized test scores between white and Black students currently amounts to roughly two years of education. And the gap between white and Hispanic students is almost as big.

Schools not to blame

This disparity exists across the US. Racial achievement gaps have narrowed in most states – although they’ve widened in a small number. In almost all of the country’s 100 largest school districts , though, there’s a big achievement gap between white and Black students.

So why is this? Stanford says its data doesn’t support the common argument that schools themselves are to blame for low average test scores, which is often made because white students tend to live in wealthier communities where schools are presumed to be better.

In fact, it says, the scores actually represent gaps in educational opportunity, which can be traced back to a child’s early experiences. These experiences are formed at home, in childcare and preschool, and in communities – and they provide opportunities to develop socioemotional and academic capacities.

Higher-income families are more likely to be able to provide these opportunities to their children, so a family’s socioeconomic resources are strongly related to educational outcomes , Stanford says. It notes that in the US, Black and Hispanic children’s parents typically have lower incomes and levels of educational attainment than those of white children.

Other factors, such as patterns of residential and school segregation and a state’s educational and social policies, could also have a role in the size of achievement gaps.

And discipline could play its part, too, according to another Stanford study. It linked the achievement gap between Black and white students to the fact that the former are punished more harshly for similar misbehaviour, for example being more likely to be suspended from school than the latter.

Long-term effects

Stanford says using data to map race and poverty could provide the insights needed to help improve educational opportunity for all children.

And this kind of insight is needed now more than ever. The school shutdowns forced by COVID-19 could have exacerbated existing achievement gaps , according to research from McKinsey. The consultancy says the resulting learning losses – predicted to be greater for low-income Black and Hispanic students – could have long-term effects on the economic well-being of the affected children.

Black and Hispanic families are less likely to have high-speed internet at home, making distance learning difficult. And students living in low-income neighbourhoods are less likely to have had decent home schooling, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Earlier in the pandemic, it said coronavirus would "explode" achievement gaps , suggesting it could expand them by the equivalent of another half a year of schooling.

The World Economic Forum’s Jobs Reset Summit brings together leaders from business, government, civil society, media and the broader public to shape a new agenda for growth, jobs, skills and equity.

The two-day virtual event, being held on 1-2 June 2021, will address the most critical areas of debate, articulate pathways for action, and mobilize the most influential leaders and organizations to work together to accelerate progress.

The Summit will develop new frameworks, shape innovative solutions and accelerate action on four thematic pillars: Economic Growth, Revival and Transformation; Work, Wages and Job Creation; Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning; and Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice.

The World Economic Forum will be exploring the issues around growing income inequality, and what to do about it, as part of The Jobs Reset Summit .

The summit will look at ways to shape more inclusive, fair and sustainable organizations, economies and societies as we emerge from the current crisis.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality

By Keith Meatto

• May 2, 2019

Racial segregation in public education has been illegal for 65 years in the United States. Yet American public schools remain largely separate and unequal — with profound consequences for students, especially students of color.

Today’s teachers and students should know that the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education . Perhaps less well known is the extent to which American schools are still segregated. According to a recent Times article , “More than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite.” In addition, school districts are often segregated by income. The nexus of racial and economic segregation has intensified educational gaps between rich and poor students, and between white students and students of color.

Although many students learn about the historical struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum.

“No one is really talking about school segregation anymore,” Elise C. Boddie and Dennis D. Parker wrote in this 2018 Op-Ed essay. “That’s a shame because an abundance of research shows that integration is still one of the most effective tools that we have for achieving racial equity.”

The teaching activities below, written directly to students, use recent Times articles as a way to grapple with segregation and educational inequality in the present. This resource considers three essential questions:

• How and why are schools still segregated in 2019? • What repercussions do segregated schools have for students and society? • What are potential remedies to address school segregation?

School segregation and educational inequity may be a sensitive and uncomfortable topic for students and teachers, regardless of their race, ethnicity or economic status. Nevertheless, the topics below offer entry points to an essential conversation, one that affects every American student and raises questions about core American ideals of equality and fairness.

Six Activities for Students to Investigate School Segregation and Educational Inequality

Activity #1: Warm-Up: Visualize segregation and inequality in education.

Based on civil rights data released by the United States Department of Education, the nonprofit news organization ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. In this activity, which might begin a deeper study of school segregation, you can look up your own school district, or individual public or charter school, to see how it compares with its counterparts.

To get started: Scroll down to the interactive map of the United States in this ProPublica database and then answer the following questions:

1. Click the tabs “Opportunity,” “Discipline,” “Segregation” and “Achievement Gap” and answer these two simple questions: What do you notice? What do you wonder? (These are the same questions we ask as part of our “ What’s Going On in This Graph? ” weekly discussions.) 2. Next, click the tabs “Black” and “Hispanic.” What do you notice? What do you wonder? 3. Search for your school or district in the database. What do you notice in the results? What questions do you have?

For Further Exploration

Research your own school district. Then write an essay, create an oral presentation or make an annotated map on segregation and educational inequity in your community, using data from the Miseducation database.

Activity #2: Explore a case study: schools in Charlottesville, Va.

The New York Times and ProPublica investigated how segregation still plays a role in shaping students’ educational experiences in the small Virginia city of Charlottesville. The article begins:

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group. But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

Before you read the rest of the article, and learn about the experiences of Zyahna and Trinity, answer the following questions based on your own knowledge, experience and opinions:

• What is the purpose of public education? • Do all children in America receive the same quality of education? • Is receiving a quality public education a right (for everyone) or a privilege (for some)? • Is there a correlation between students’ race and the quality of education they receive?

Now read the entire article about lingering segregation in Charlottesville and answer the following questions:

1. How is Charlottesville’s school district geographically and racially segregated? 2. How is Charlottesville a microcosm of education in America? 3. How do white and black students in Charlottesville compare in terms of participation in gifted and talented programs; being held back a grade; being suspended from school? 4. How do black and white students in Charlottesville compare in terms of reading at grade level? 5. How do Charlottesville school officials explain the disparities between white and black students? 6. Why are achievement disparities so common in college towns? 7. In what ways do socioeconomics not fully explain the gap between white and black students?

After reading the article and answering the above questions, share your reactions using the following prompts:

• Did anything in the article surprise you? Shock you? Make you angry or sad? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • How might education in Charlottesville be made more equitable?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate school segregation in the United States and around the world.

1. Read and discuss “ In a Divided Bosnia, Segregated Schools Persist .” Compare and contrast the situations in Bosnia and Charlottesville. How does this perspective confirm, challenge, or complicate your understanding of the topic?

2. Read and discuss the article and study the map and graphs in “ Why Are New York’s Schools Segregated? It’s Not as Simple as Housing .” How does “school choice” confirm, challenge or complicate your understanding of segregation and educational inequity?

3. Only a tiny number of black students were offered admission to the highly selective public high schools in New York City in 2019, raising the pressure on officials to confront the decades-old challenge of integrating New York’s elite public schools. To learn more about this story, listen to this episode of The Daily . For more information, read these Op-Ed essays and editorials offering different perspectives on the problem and possible solutions. Then, make a case for what should be done — or not done — to make New York’s elite public schools more diverse.

• Stop Fixating on One Elite High School, Stuyvesant. There Are Bigger Problems. • How Elite Schools Stay So White • No Ethnic Group Owns Stuyvesant. All New Yorkers Do. • De Blasio’s Plan for NYC Schools Isn’t Anti-Asian. It’s Anti-Racist. • New York’s Best Schools Need to Do Better

3. Read and discuss “ The Resegregation of Jefferson County .” How does this story confirm, challenge or complicate your understanding of the topic?

Activity #3: Investigate the relationship between school segregation, funding and inequality.

Some school districts have more money to spend on education than others. Does this funding inequality have anything to do with lingering segregation in public schools? A recent report says yes. A New York Times article published in February begins:

School districts that predominantly serve students of color received $23 billion less in funding than mostly white school districts in the United States in 2016, despite serving the same number of students, a new report found. The report, released this week by the nonprofit EdBuild, put a dollar amount on the problem of school segregation, which has persisted long after Brown v. Board of Education and was targeted in recent lawsuits in states from New Jersey to Minnesota. The estimate also came as teachers across the country have protested and gone on strike to demand more funding for public schools.

Answer the following questions based on your own knowledge, experience and opinions.

• Who pays for public schools? • Is there a correlation between money and education? Does the amount of money a school spends on students influence the quality of the education students receive?

Now read the rest of the Times article about funding differences between mostly white school districts and mostly nonwhite ones, and then answer the following questions:

1. How much less total funding do school districts that serve predominantly students of color receive compared to school districts that serve predominantly white students? 2. Why are school district borders problematic? 3. How many of the nation’s schoolchildren are in “racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite”? 4. How much less money, on average, do nonwhite districts receive than white districts? 5. How are school districts funded? 6. How does lack of school funding affect classrooms? 7. What is the new kind of ”white flight” in Arizona and why is it a problem? 8. What is an “enclave”? What does the statement “some school districts have become their own enclaves” mean?

• Did anything in the article surprise you? Shock you? Make you angry or sad? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • How could school funding be made more equitable?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate the interrelationship among school segregation, funding and inequality.

1. Research your local school district budget, using public records or local media, such as newspapers or television reporting. What is the budget per student? How does that budget compare with the state average? The national average? 2. Compare your findings about your local school budget to your research about segregation and student outcomes, using the Miseducation database. Do the results of your research suggest any correlations?

Activity #4: Examine potential legal remedies to school segregation and educational inequality.

How do we get better schools for all children? One way might be to take the state to court. A Times article from August reports on a wave of lawsuits that argue that states are violating their constitutions by denying children a quality education. The article begins:

By his own account, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman’s five children have received a good education at public schools in St. Paul. His two oldest daughters are starting careers in finance and teaching. Another daughter, a high-school student, plans to become a doctor. But their success, Mr. Cruz-Guzman said, flows partly from the fact that he and his wife fought for their children to attend racially integrated schools outside their neighborhood. Their two youngest children take a bus 30 minutes each way to Murray Middle School, where the student population is about one-third white, one-third black, 16 percent Asian and 9 percent Latino. “I wanted to have my kids exposed to different cultures and learn from different people,” said Mr. Cruz-Guzman, who owns a small flooring company and is an immigrant from Mexico. When his two oldest children briefly attended a charter school that was close to 100 percent Latino, he said he had realized, “We are limiting our kids to one community.” Now Mr. Cruz-Guzman is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit saying that Minnesota knowingly allowed towns and cities to set policies and zoning boundaries that led to segregated schools, lowering test scores and graduation rates for low-income and nonwhite children.

Read the entire article and then answer the following questions:

1. What does Mr. Cruz-Guzman’s suit allege against the State of Minnesota? 2. Why are advocates for school funding equity focused on state government, as opposed to the federal government? 3. What did a state judge rule in New Mexico? What did the Kansas Supreme Court rule? 4. What fraction of fourth and eighth graders in New Mexico is not proficient in reading? What does research suggest may improve their test scores? 5. According to a 2016 study, if a school spends 10 percent more per pupil, what percentage more would students earn as adults? 6. What does the economist Eric Hanushek argue about the correlation between spending and student achievement? 7. What remedy for school segregation is Daniel Shulman, the lead lawyer in the Minnesota desegregation suit, considering? Why are charter schools nervous about the case? 8. How does Khulia Pringle see some charter schools as “culturally affirming”? What problems does Ms. Pringle see with busing white children to black schools and vice versa?

• Did anything in the article surprise you? What other emotional responses did you have while reading? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • Do the potential “cultural” benefits of school segregation outweigh the costs?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate potential remedies to school segregation and educational inequality.

1. Read the obituaries “ Jean Fairfax, Unsung but Undeterred in Integrating Schools, Dies at 98 ” and “ Linda Brown, Symbol of Landmark Desegregation Case, Dies at 75 .” How do their lives inform your grasp of legal challenges to segregation?

2. Watch the following video about school busing . How does this history inform your understanding of the benefits and challenges of busing?

3. Read about how parents in two New York City school districts are trying to tackle segregation in local middle schools . Then decide if these models have potential for other districts in New York or around the country. Why or why not?

Activity #5: Consider alternatives to integration.

Is integration the best and only choice for families who feel their children are being denied a quality education? A recent Times article reports on how some black families in New York City are choosing an alternative to integration. The article begins:

“I love myself!” the group of mostly black children shouted in unison. “I love my hair, I love my skin!” When it was time to settle down, their teacher raised her fist in a black power salute. The students did the same, and the room hushed. As children filed out of the cramped school auditorium on their way to class, they walked by posters of Colin Kaepernick and Harriet Tubman. It was a typical morning at Ember Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, an Afrocentric school that sits in a squat building on a quiet block in a neighborhood long known as a center of black political power. Though New York City has tried to desegregate its schools in fits and starts since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the school system is now one of the most segregated in the nation. But rather than pushing for integration, some black parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant are choosing an alternative: schools explicitly designed for black children.

Before you read the rest of the article, answer the following questions based on your own knowledge, experience and opinions:

• Should voluntary segregation in schools be permissible? Why or why not? • What potential benefits might voluntary segregation offer? • What potential problems might it pose?

Now, read the entire article and then answer these questions:

1. What is the goal of Afrocentric schools? 2. Why are some parents and educators enthusiastic about Afrocentric schools? 3. Why are some experts wary of Afrocentric schools? 4. What does Alisa Nutakor want to offer minority students at Ember? 5. What position does the city’s schools chancellor take on Afrocentric schools? 6. What “modest desegregation plans” have some districts offered? With what result? 7. Why did Fela Barclift found Little Sun People? 8. Why are some parents ambivalent about school integration? According to them, how can schools be more responsive to students of color? 9. What does Mutale Nkonde mean by the phrase “not all boats are rising”? 10. What did Jordan Pierre gain from his experience at Eagle Academy?

• Did anything in the article surprise you? What other emotional responses did you have while reading? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • Did the article challenge your opinion about voluntary segregation? How?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate some of the complicating factors that influence where parents decide to send their children to school.

1. Read and discuss “ Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City .” How does reading about segregation, inequity and school choice from a parent’s perspective confirm, challenge or complicate your understanding of the topic?

2. Read “ Do Students Get a Subpar Education in Yeshivas? ” How might a student’s religious affiliation complicate the issue of segregation and inequity in education?

Activity #6: Learn more and take action.

Segregation still persists in public schools more than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. What more can you learn about the issue? What choices can you make? Is there anything students can do about the issue?

Write a personal essay about your experience with school segregation. For inspiration, read Erin Aubrey Kaplan’s op-ed essay, “ School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice ,” which links a contemporary debate with the author’s personal experience of school segregation.

Interview a parent, grandparent or another adult about their educational experiences related to segregation, integration and inequity in education. Compare their experiences with your own. Share your findings in a paper, presentation or class discussion.

Take action by writing a letter about segregation and educational inequity in your community. Send the letter to a person or organization with local influence, such as the school board, an elected official or your local newspaper.

Discuss the issue in your school or district by raising the topic with your student council, parent association or school board. Be prepared with information you discovered in your research and bring relevant questions.

Additional Resources

Choices in Little Rock | Facing History and Ourselves

Beyond Brown: Pursuing the Promise | PBS

Why Are American Public Schools Still So Segregated? | KQED

Toolkit for “Segregation by Design” | Teaching Tolerance

February 1, 2022

Teaching about Racism Is Essential for Education

Lessons about racial injustice help students understand reality

By The Editors

Elected officials who campaigned against critical race theory (CRT), the study of how social structures perpetuate racial inequality and injustice, are being sworn into office all over the U.S. These candidates captured voters’ attention by vilifying CRT, which has become a catch-all to describe any teaching about racial injustice. Lessons about the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, segregation and systemic racism would harm children, these candidates argued. Calling its inclusion divisive, some states have enacted legislation banning CRT from school curricula altogether.

This regressive agenda threatens children’s education by propagating a falsified view of reality in which American history and culture are outcomes of white virtue. It is part of a larger program of avoiding any truths that make some people uncomfortable, which sometimes allows in active disinformation, such as creationism. Children are especially susceptible to misinformation, as Melinda Wenner Moyer writes in “Schooled in Lies.”

It is crucial for young people to learn about equity and social justice so they can thrive in our increasingly global, multilingual and multicultural society. When students become aware of the structural origins of inequality, they better understand the foundations of American society. They are also better equipped to comprehend, interpret and integrate into their worldviews the science they learn in their classrooms and experience in their lives.

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Pondering racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities helps students understand, for example, why COVID death rates among Black, Latino and Native American people were much higher than those of white people as the pandemic began. They can better comprehend why people of color are far more likely to be subjected to the ravages of pollution and climate change or how a legacy of U.S. science that experimented on Black and Indigenous Americans may have led to distrust of doctors and health care.

Removing conversations around race and society removes truth and reality from education. This political interference is nothing new—political and cultural ideologues have fought for years to remove subjects such as evolution, Earth history and sex education from classrooms and textbooks, despite the evidence that sex ed helps to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, that evolution explains all life on Earth and that the world is older than a few thousand years.

Many of the school districts that brought in anti-CRT board members are the same ones that refuse to mandate masks, despite the evidence that masks can prevent the spread of COVID. These school officials also rail against vaccine mandates as a violation of personal choice. It is the same prioritization of individuals over community and a discomfort with hard truths that characterize the movement against the teaching of true history.

Fortunately, efforts to limit children’s education face stark opposition. The American Civil Liberties Union describes initiatives to quash discussions of racism in classrooms as “anathema to free speech.” And the U.S. Department of Education is debating a series of American History and Civics standards that include introducing “racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning.” Caught in the middle are teachers who are trying to educate children during a pandemic.

While many parents of school-aged children supported anti-CRT campaigns, voters with no connection to the classroom helped significantly to tip these elections. Parents and educators must bring the conversation back to teaching children about reality. EdAllies, a Minnesota-based educational-support nonprofit, is encouraging teachers to reach out to parents and administrators to explain the necessity of antiracist content in their lessons, as a way to build community support.

All over the U.S., school board meetings are being taken over by fear of the inclusion bogeyman. And after our recent elections, more board members have the power to act against lessons they dislike. Today, tomorrow and for as long as these elected officials are in office, it is the children and the teachers who will pay the price for an incomplete education. We must work toward a school experience that includes narratives of discrimination, social justice and inequality as truths we can learn from so that history might not repeat itself.

Why Access to Education is Key to Systemic Equality

All students have a right to an equal education, but students of color — particularly Black and Brown students and students with disabilities, have historically been marginalized and criminalized by the public school system. The ACLU has been working to challenge unconstitutional disciplinary policies in schools, combat classroom censorship efforts that disproportionately impact marginalized students, and support race conscious admission policies to increase access to higher education.

Let’s break down why education equity is critical to the fight for systemic equality.

What does “education equity” mean, and why is it a civil rights issue?

Education equity means all students have equal access to a high quality education, safe learning environment, and a diverse student body that enriches the educational experiences of all students.

As the Supreme Court said in Brown v. Board of Education , education “is the very foundation of good citizenship.” Through education, young people learn important values about our culture and democratic society, and about their own values and relationships to others in this society. In addition to being an important foundation for kids’ and young adults’ future professional success, education allows individuals to be informed voters and participants in democratic processes, and public education is the first experience most people will have with the government.

For all of these reasons, equity in education is a critical foundation for a democratic society in which people of all backgrounds are equally included. Without equal opportunities to obtain an education, they will not be able to participate equally in jobs, in voting, and in other crucial areas of life. And when students are not able to learn together, this harms their ability to work together and live and engage with one another later in life.

What was the foundational Supreme Court case aimed at addressing discrimination in education nationwide?

Modern understandings of educational equity have their roots in Brown v. Board of Education , the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision that ordered an end to school segregation and held racial segregation in education violates the Equal Protection Clause of the constitution. The ACLU played an important role in the Brown litigation, and has continued to fight for education equity on many fronts in the decades since.

What is the “school-to-prison pipeline”?

The school-to-prison pipeline refers to school discipline practices, such as suspensions and referrals to law enforcement, that funnel youth out of the classroom and into the juvenile and criminal legal systems.

This trend reflects our country’s prioritization of incarceration over education, and it’s made worse as resources for public schools are cut. From inadequate resources for counseling to an overreliance on school-based police officers to enforce harsh zero-tolerance policies, many students — overwhelmingly students of color and students with disabilities — are isolated, punished, and pushed out of our education system for typical childish behavior and behaviors associated with disabilities.

Cops and No Counselors

How the lack of school mental health staff is harming students.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Even a single suspension or disciplinary infraction can have enormous consequences for a child’s education. As a student is pushed further down the school-to-prison pipeline, those consequences escalate quickly. In some jurisdictions, students who have been suspended or expelled have no right to an education at all. In others, they are sent to disciplinary alternative schools.Youth who become involved in the juvenile system are often denied procedural protections in the courts, and students pushed along the pipeline find themselves in juvenile detention facilities, many of which provide few, if any, educational services.

How are Black students, students of color, and students with disabilities disproportionately impacted by discrimination in education? What barriers to higher education exist for students of color?

Black and Brown students and students with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to discipline and referrals to law enforcement that remove them from the classroom and subject them to additional punitive consequences and even physical injury. For example, over the 2017-2018 school year, Black students accounted for 28.7 percent of all students referred to law enforcement and 31.6 percent of all students arrested at school or during a school-related activity — despite representing just 15.1 percent of the total enrolled student population.

Our country’s schools are increasingly diverse, but also increasingly segregated . Students of all races are harmed by the inability to learn with one another in diverse school settings. Black and Latine students are also more likely to attend schools that are intensely segregated both by race and by socioeconomic status. Students of color are also less likely to have access to advanced courses, and are frequently tracked away from college preparatory courses when they do exist.

Moving Beyond the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Rulings

The work to ensure educational opportunities for people of color continues, despite the court’s decision.

Inequities in K-12 education can be replicated in college and university admissions criteria. As with elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities are required to ensure that educational opportunities are open to all students from the application stage and through student’s experiences during their college education. There are a wide range of things that colleges and universities can do to ensure that educational opportunities are open to people of all backgrounds.

What non-punitive responses should schools take when approaching school discipline issues? What non-punitive resources should schools invest in?

There are a range of evidence-based methods schools can use to respond to the behavioral needs of students. These range from strategies that teachers and schools can use to foster a positive learning culture and model, to interventions addressing particular disciplinary issues, such as conflict de-escalation or restorative justice, to using functional behavioral assessments and wraparound support for those students with higher levels of need.

Additionally, schools that employed more mental health providers saw improved student engagement and graduation rates . Schools that used other types of support, including restorative and trauma-informed practices, saw beneficial results, including reduced disciplinary incidents, suspensions, dropouts, and expulsions. Investing in mental health resources, support personnel, and interventions that promote positive student interactions can make schools safer and healthier learning environments, while also helping to combat the discriminatory school-to-prison pipeline that targets students of color and students with disabilities.

How do classroom censorship efforts (i.e. laws that block students and teachers from talking and learning about race and gender) lead to inequality in education?

Instruction about racism and sexism belongs in schools because it equips students to process the world around them and to live in a multicultural society.

Attacks on education have morphed from demands to exclude critical race theory from classrooms to ever-increasingly devious and dangerous demands to erase entire concepts from American history. Book bans, so-called transparency laws designed to intimidate educators into compliance, and attacks on individual expression have left our education system at the mercy of a hostile and discriminatory minority. Students can’t learn in that type of environment. Our future depends on educational institutions that value instruction about systemic racism and sexism. We need to expand culturally relevant instruction and increase funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools, not attack it for its role in uplifting the systematically oppressed.

What can colleges do to ensure they create opportunities for students of color in light of the recent Supreme Court decision effectively eliminating the use of affirmative action in college admissions?

Affirmative action in college admissions has been an important tool, but it is not the only avenue for ensuring that educational opportunities are open to all. In the absence of affirmative action, it is more important than ever that schools work to identify and remove inequitable barriers to higher education. At a minimum, schools must continue to comply with federal and state civil rights laws that require them to provide educational opportunities on an equal basis. They can achieve this by ensuring that policies and practices do not unnecessarily limit opportunities for people on the basis of race or ethnicity (or other protected characteristics, including disability, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity) and by ensuring that school climate enables all students to access and engage with educational opportunities .

What does the ACLU’s work in education equity look like today?

The ACLU and our affiliates around the country are challenging disciplinary policies that disparately target students of color and students with disabilities and infringe on their right to a safe learning environment. This includes litigation, such as our recent victory resulting in the end to charging students with “disorderly conduct” or “disturbing schools” in South Carolina schools, and advocacy, such as the ACLU of Idaho’s recent report Proud to be Brown and the related civil rights complaint. The report documents how school districts in Idaho are jeopardizing Latine students’ civil rights and liberties by enforcing “gang” dress codes that target mostly Latine students in a discriminatory way, and have negative consequences on their cultural identity, discipline, and education.

CYAP v. Wilson

The ACLU Union filed a federal lawsuit challenging South Carolina’s “disturbing schools” law.

We are also fighting back against efforts to ban books and restrict what students can learn about race, gender, and sexual orientation. In Florida, for example, we’re challenging the state’s harmful Stop WOKE Act. We continue to press for equity in higher education following the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, and defend against attacks on diversity in K-12 schools.

From K-12 to higher education, the ACLU is working to combat discrimination in education and ensure all people have equal access to safe, quality education.

Learn More About the Issues on This Page

• Racial Justice
• Human Rights and Racial Justice
• Human Rights

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Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education

Higher education in the United States (not-for-profit two-year and four-year colleges and universities) serves a diversifying society. By 2036, more than 50 percent of US high school graduates will be people of color, 1 Peace Bransberger and Colleen Falkenstern, Knocking at the college door: Projections of high school graduates through 2037 – Executive summary , Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), December 2020. and McKinsey analysis shows that highly research-intensive (R1) institutions (131 as of 2020 2 Institutions with very high research activity as assessed by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. ) have publicly shared plans or aspirations regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Ninety-five percent of R1 institutions also have a senior DEI executive, and diversity leaders in the sector have formed their own consortiums to share expertise. 3 Two examples are the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and the Liberal Arts Diversity Consortium.

Despite ongoing efforts, our analysis suggests that historically marginalized racial and ethnic populations—Black, Hispanic and Latino, and Native American and Pacific Islander—are still underrepresented in higher education among undergraduates and faculty and in leadership. Students from these groups also have worse academic outcomes as measured by graduation rates. Only 8 percent of institutions have at least equitable student representation while also helping students from underrepresented populations graduate at the same rate as the general US undergraduate population. 4 For a closer look at the data behind the racial and ethnic representation among students and faculty in higher education, see Diana Ellsworth, Erin Harding, Jonathan Law, and Duwain Pinder, “ Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education: Students and faculty ,” McKinsey, July 14, 2022. Not included in this discussion are Asian Americans, who face a distinct set of challenges in higher education. These issues deserve a separate discussion.

These finding are not novel, but what is significant is the slow rate of progress. Current rates of change suggest that it would take about 70 years for all not-for-profit institutions to reflect underrepresented students fully in their incoming student population, primarily driven by recent increases in Hispanic and Latino student attendance. For Black and Native American students and for faculty from all underrepresented populations, there was effectively no progress from 2013 to 2020. 5 For a closer look at college completion rates, see Diana Ellsworth, Erin Harding, Jonathan Law, and Duwain Pinder, “ Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education: Completion rates ,” McKinsey, July 14, 2022.

Intensified calls for racial and ethnic equity in every part of society have made the issue particularly salient. In this article, we outline some of the key insights from our report on racial and ethnic equity in higher education in the United States. We report our analysis of racial and ethnic representation in student and faculty bodies and of outcomes for underrepresented populations. Then we discuss how institutions can meet goals around racial and ethnic equity.

A mirror of wider systemic inequities

Colleges and universities are places of teaching and learning, research and creative expression, and impact on surrounding communities. As the data and analysis in this report illustrate, these institutions have been reflections of existing racial and socioeconomic inequities across society.

These hierarchies include chronic disparities in outcomes throughout the education system. Consider that students from underrepresented populations still graduate from high school at lower rates compared to White and Asian students and tend to be less prepared for college. 6 “Public high school graduation rates,” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), US Department of Education, May 2021; “Secondary school completion: College and career readiness benchmarks,” American Council on Education (ACE), 2020; “Secondary school completion: Participation in advanced placement,” ACE, 2020. Evidence suggests that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are exacerbating these high school inequities, 7 For more, see Emma Dorn, Bryan Hancock, Jimmy Sarakatsannis, and Ellen Viruleg, “ COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning ,” McKinsey, July 27, 2021. which heavily influence the makeup of higher education’s student population. Forty-one percent of all 18- to 21-year-olds were enrolled in undergraduate studies in 2018 compared to 37 percent of Black students, 36 percent of Hispanic students, and 24 percent of American Indian students. 8 “College enrollment rates,” NCES, US Department of Education, May 2022.

Our analysis suggests that higher education has opportunities to address many of these gaps. However, our analysis of student representation over time also suggests that progress has been uneven. In 2013, 38 percent of all not-for-profit institutions had a more diverse population than would be expected given the racial and ethnic makeup of the traditional college-going population—that is, 18- to 24-year-olds, our proxy for equitable racial representation—within a given home state. By 2020, that number was 44 percent. At this rate, the student bodies of not-for-profit institutions overall will reach representational parity in about 70 years, but that growth would be driven entirely by increases in the share of Hispanic and Latino students.

Many institutions have indicated that in addition to increasing student-body diversity, they also seek to improve graduation rates for students from underrepresented populations. A positive finding from our analysis is that nearly two-thirds of all students attend not-for-profit institutions with higher-than-average graduation rates for students from underrepresented populations. However, when we overlay institution representativeness with graduation rates, only 8 percent of students attend four-year institutions that have student bodies that reflect their students’ home states’ traditional college population and that help students from underrepresented populations graduate within six years at an above-average rate (Exhibit 1). 9 For institution-specific completion data, see Diana Ellsworth, Erin Harding, Jonathan Law, and Duwain Pinder, “ Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education: Completion rates ,” McKinsey, July 14, 2022.

In addition, our analysis shows that from 2013 to 2020, only one-third of four-year institutions had improved both racial and ethnic representation and completion rates for students from underrepresented populations at a higher rate than underrepresented populations’ natural growth rate in that period (2 percent). If we look at improvements in racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic representation among students, only 7 percent of four-year institutions have progressed.

Among faculty, complex reasons including the changing structure of academia and patterns of racial inequity in society mean that faculty members from underrepresented populations are less likely to be represented and to ascend the ranks than their White counterparts. 10 Colleen Flaherty, “The souls of Black professors,” Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2020; Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, “Race on campus: Anti-CRT laws take aim at colleges,” email, The Chronicle of Higher Education , April 26, 2022; Mike Lauer, “Trends in diversity within the NIH-funded workforce,” National Institutes of Health (NIH), August 7, 2018. Additionally, representational disparity among faculty is more acute in R1 institutions. When we analyzed the full-time faculty population relative to the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher (given that most faculty positions require at least a bachelor’s degree), in 2020, approximately 75 percent of not-for-profit institutions were less diverse than the broader bachelor’s degree–attaining population, and 95 percent of institutions defined as R1 were less diverse. Additionally, the pace of change is slow: it would take nearly 300 years to reach parity for all not-for-profit institutions at the current pace and 450 years for R1 institutions.

Higher education’s collective aspirations for parity of faculty diversity could arguably be even greater. Faculty diversity could be compared to the total population (rather than just the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher) for several reasons. First, comparing faculty diversity to bachelor’s degree recipients incorporates existing inequities in higher-education access and completion across races and ethnicities (which have been highlighted above). Second, the impact of faculty (especially from the curriculum they create and teach, as well as the research, scholarship, and creative expression they produce) often has repercussions across the total US population.

Therefore, in this research, we compared faculty diversity to the total population. Our analysis shows that 88 percent of not-for-profit colleges and universities have full-time faculties that are less diverse than the US population as of 2020. That number rises to 99 percent for institutions defined as R1. Progress in diversifying full-time faculty ranks to match the total population over the past decade has been negligible; it would take more than 1,000 years at the current pace to reach parity for all not-for-profit institutions. (R1 institutions will never reach parity at current rates.) When looking at both faculty and students, few institutions are racially representative of the country; only 11 percent of not-for-profit institutions and 1 percent of R1 institutions are (Exhibit 2).

With faculty representativeness as the goal, it is important to highlight multiple opportunities to improve across the pipeline. From 2018 to 2019, there was a four-percentage-point gap between the percent of individuals from underrepresented populations with a bachelor’s degree and the percent of the total population with a bachelor’s degree. In the same period, there was a 12-percentage-point gap between the groups in regard to doctorate degrees, whose holders are a significant source for new full-time faculty. 11 “Degrees conferred by race/ethnicity and sex,” NCES, US Department of Education, accessed June 22, 2022. Therefore, addressing the lack of advanced-degree holders is one near-term priority for moving toward parity. Additionally, multiple studies have highlighted that faculty from underrepresented populations have less success receiving funding, getting published, or having their recommendations adopted, despite high scientific novelty, which could be driving the increased gaps at R1 institutions. 12 See the full report for more details.

Finally, colleges and universities are often prominent employers in their communities. University workforces reflect societal patterns of racialized occupational segregation, with employees of color disproportionately in low-salary, nonleadership roles. Our analysis suggests that these roles also shrunk by 2 to 3 percent from 2013 to 2020.

A webinar on ‘Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education’

Institutional reflection and progress.

Eighty-four percent of presidents in higher education who responded to a 2021 survey said issues of race and ethnicity have become more important for their institutions. 13 Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman, 2021 Survey of College and University Presidents , Inside Higher Ed, 2021. However, sectorwide challenges such as declining enrollment, greater public scrutiny—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—and stagnating completion rates can make institutional progress on racial and ethnic equity more complicated. 14 Richard Vedder, “Why is public support for state universities declining?,” Forbes , May 24, 2018; Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, “Colleges lost 465,000 students this fall. The continued erosion of enrollment is raising alarm.,” Washington Post , January 13, 2022; Emma Dorn, Andre Dua, and Jonathan Law, “ Rising costs and stagnating completion rates: Who is bucking the trend? ,” McKinsey, April 2022. In this context, institutions looking to advance their goals around racial equity could consider five broad actions learned from their peers who are further along in their efforts:

• realignment

Institutions looking to advance their goals around racial equity could consider five broad actions learned from their peers who are further along in their efforts.

While none of these strategies is a magic bullet, some or all of them may be useful for decision makers throughout higher education.

To start, decision makers and stakeholders at individual institutions could understand and reflect on their institution’s role in ongoing racial inequities before applying those insights in a review of its current systems. The initial reflection can create an environment of intellectual and psychological honesty and make conversations about each institution’s commitment to rectifying racial inequities feel more natural and productive.

After a comprehensive historical review , institutions could identify the ways in which their processes, systems, and norms contribute to the marginalization of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. For instance, universities could incorporate processes designed to boost racial equity in their administration of research and grant activities. Such processes would consider factors from researcher diversity to how the execution of the research may affect racial and ethnic groups differently.

Each institution could then realign its resources based on its stakeholders’ shared aspirations for racial equity. Decision makers could consider areas of initial focus, the breadth of impact they wish to have, and the institutional capabilities they can use to realize their goals.

Leaders may respond by embedding their new racial-equity priorities into their institution’s culture. This work involves incorporating racial equity as part of the strategic plan, dedicating sufficient resources to the effort, and assigning a senior leader and staff to support the president in implementing ideas and tracking progress. Clear and frequent communication to each institution’s stakeholders—including alumni, staff, and donors—at each stage of this work will ensure that people in every part of the institution and its extended community are progressing together toward a shared goal.

To be sure, many institutions have begun to explore measures that address some of the inequities embedded in higher education. Some of these actions may light the path for collective action by all institutions to achieve sectorwide reform . For instance, colleges and universities can provide learning opportunities more equitably if they eliminate race- and wealth-based advantages in admissions, such as legacy and donor admissions. Johns Hopkins University is one institution that has eliminated legacy admissions, which helped to increase the share of Federal Pell Grant–eligible students from 9 percent to 19 percent over the past decade. 15 Pell Grants are awarded by the US Department of Education to low-income students seeking postsecondary education. For more, see “Federal Pell Grants are usually awarded only to undergraduate students,” US Department of Education, accessed June 29, 2022. Sara Weissman, “Johns Hopkins ditched legacy admissions to boost diversity – and it worked,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education , February 5, 2020. Significantly, the change has made no meaningful difference in alumni giving. 16 Scott Simon, “Johns Hopkins sees jump in low-income students after ending legacy admissions,” National Public Radio (NPR), January 25, 2020.

As centers of research and creative expression, higher-education institutions could also consider targeted programs that support the work and progression of researchers from underrepresented populations. For example, the University of Massachusetts Boston allocates at least 20 percent of its faculty-hiring budget for pairing a specialized hire with a complementary hire from a historically marginalized group.

Finally, universities could ensure that their financial success is translated into positive outcomes for the surrounding communities. Action from the higher-education sector could result in institutions—especially ones with significant endowments—committing to investing in their surrounding communities.

By pursuing racial-equity goals, the higher-education sector may achieve gains in core areas of impact. If sustained, these investments in institutional action could benefit students, faculty, community members, and society.

Diana Ellsworth is a partner in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, Erin Harding is an associate partner in the Chicago office, Jonathan Law is a senior partner in the Southern California office and leader of the global higher education practice, and Duwain Pinder is a partner in the Ohio office and leader in the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility.

The authors wish to thank Arthur Bianchi, Avery Cambridge, Elisia Ceballo-Countryman, Judy D’Agostino, Ayebea Darko, Maclaine Fields, Kyle Hutzler, Charmaine Lester, and Sadie Pate for their contributions.

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U.S. Government Accountability Office

Racial Disparities in Education and the Role of Government

The death of George Floyd and other Black men and women has prompted demonstrations across the country and brought more attention to the issues of racial inequality. Over the past several years, GAO has been asked to examine various racial inequalities in public programs and we have made recommendations to address them.

Today is the first of 3 blog posts in which we will address these reports. The first deals with equality in education.

School Discipline

Unequal treatment can start at a young age. In  2018 , we reported that starting in pre-school, children as young as 3 and 4 have been suspended and expelled from school—a pattern that can continue throughout a child’s education. In K-12 public schools, Black students, boys, and students with disabilities were disproportionately disciplined (e.g., suspended or expelled), according to our review of the Department of Education’s national civil rights data.

These disparities were widespread and persisted regardless of the type of disciplinary action, level of school poverty, or type of public school attended. For example, while only 15.5% of public school students were Black, about 39% of students suspended from school were Black—an overrepresentation of about 23 percentage points (see figure).

Students Suspended from School Compared to Student Population, by Race, Sex, and Disability Status, School Year 2013-14

Note: Disparities in student discipline such as those presented in this figure may support a finding of discrimination, but taken alone, do not establish whether unlawful discrimination has occurred .

Minority students may also be more likely to attend alternative public schools because of issues like poor grades and disruptive behavior. In  2019 , we found that Black boys transferred to alternative schools at rates higher than any other group for disciplinary reasons, and that they, along with Hispanic boys and boys with disabilities, attended alternative schools in greater proportions than they did regular public schools attended by the majority of U.S. public school students.  For example, Black boys accounted for 16 percent of students at alternative schools, but only 8 percent of students at regular public schools in 2015-16.

Education Quality and Access

The link between racial and ethnic minorities and poverty is long-standing. Studies have noted concerns about this segment of the population that falls at the intersection of poverty and minority status in schools and how this affects their access to quality education. In  2018 , we reported that during high school, students in high-poverty areas had less access to college-prep courses.  Schools in high-poverty areas were also less likely to offer math and science courses than most public 4-year colleges expected students to take in high school. The racial composition of the highest poverty schools was also 80% Black or Hispanic.

The Department of Education has several initiatives to help students prepare for college. For example, GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) seeks to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. In 2016, Education awarded about $323 million in grants through GEAR UP.

In our 2018 report, we described  an investigation the Department of Education conducted in 2014 looking at  whether Black students in a Virginia school district had the same access to educational opportunities as other students. It found a significant disparity between the numbers of Black and White high school students who take AP, advanced courses, and dual-credit programs.

Addressing Disparity in Schools

So, what can be done to identify and address racial disparities in K-12 public schools? In  2016 , we recommended that the Department of Education, which is to ensure equal access to education and promote educational excellence through vigorous enforcement of civil rights in our nation’s schools, routinely analyze its Civil Rights dataset, which could help it identify issues and patterns of disparities. Our recommendation was implemented in 2018.

The Department of Justice also plays a role in enforcing federal civil rights laws in the context of K-12 education. For example, it monitors and enforces open federal school desegregation orders where Justice is a party to the litigation.  At the time of our study, many of these desegregation orders had been in place for 30 and 40 years.   For example, in a 2014 opinion in a long-standing desegregation case, the court described a long period of dormancy in the case and stated that lack of activity had taken its toll, noting, that the district had not submitted the annual reports required under the consent order to the court for the past 20 years. In 2016, we recommended that the Department of Justice systematically track key summary information across its portfolio of open desegregation cases to help inform its monitoring. Our recommendation was implemented in 2019.

To learn more about GAO’s work on education, visit our key issues pages on  Ensuring Access to Safe, Quality K-12 Education  and  Postsecondary Education Access and Affordability .

Comments on GAO’s WatchBlog? Contact  [email protected] .

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Race Matters: How Race Affects Education Opportunities

We know what works to educate children — quality teachers, small classes, after-school programs. But, do we understand the educational inequality permeating our poorer school districts due to embedded racial inequity and unequal access to education?

Embedded racial inequities produce unequal opportunities for educational success. Systematic policies, practices and stereotypes work against children and youth of color to affect their opportunity for achieving educational success. We need to understand the consequences of these embedded racial inequities, how disparities are produced and how they can be eliminated to ensure that all children and youth have the same opportunity for educational success.

This is part of a comprehensive Race Matters toolkit. For more information, visit the Race Matters Institute website.

Findings & Stats

Black and Latino students are more educationally segregated today than they were two decades ago.

Students of color with the same tests scores as white and Asian students are less likely to be placed in advanced classes.

The most critical factors to effectively promote student success are quality teachers, smaller class sizes, access to high quality after-school programs, advanced curricula and modern learning facilities.

Race and Education Inequality Statements & Quotations

The consequences of failing to ensure educational success are far-reaching. The adverse impact is long term and reflected in future employment prospects, poverty and incarceration rates.

Because of race and class segregation and its relationship to local school revenues, students in high-poverty racially segregated schools are not exposed to high-quality curricula, highly qualified teachers, or important social networks as often as students in wealthier, predominantly White schools.

Key Race and Education Inequality Takeaway

How does race affect education opportunities.

The wealthiest 10% of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10%.

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Black-White Achievement Gap: Role of Race, School Urbanity, and Parental Education

Shervin assari.

1 Departments of Family Medicine, Charles R Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, CA, 90059, USA

Abbas Mardani

2 Nursing Care Research Center, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Maryam Maleki

3 School of Nursing and Midwifery, Shahroud University of Medical Sciences, Shahroud, Iran

Shanika Boyce

4 Departments of Pediatrics, Charles R Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, CA, 90059, USA

Mohsen Bazargan

5 Departments of Family Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

Recent research on Marginalization-related Diminished Returns (MDRs) has documented weaker boosting effects of parental educational attainment on educational outcomes of Black than White students. Such MDRs of parental education seem to contribute to the Black-White achievement gap. Given that Blacks are more likely than Whites to attend urban schools, there is a need to study if these MDRs can be replicated at both urban and suburban schools.

To test the contribution of diminished returns of parental educational attainment on the Black-White achievement gap in urban and suburban American high schools.

A cross-sectional study that used baseline Education Longitudinal Study (ELS-2002) data, a nationally representative study of 10th grade adolescents in the United States. This study analyzed 8315 youths who were either non-Hispanic White (n = 6539, 78.6%) or non-Hispanic Black (n = 1776, 21.4%) who were attending either suburban (n = 5188, 62.4%) or urban (n = 3127, 37.6%) schools. The outcome was standard math and reading grades. The independent variable was parental educational attainment. Gender, parental marital status, and school characteristics (% free lunch and relationship quality with the teacher) were the confounders. Race/ethnicity was the effect of modifier. School urbanity was the strata. Linear regression was used for data analysis.

In urban and suburban schools, higher parental educational attainment was associated with higher math and reading test scores. In urban and suburban schools, Black students had considerably lower reading and math scores than White students. At urban but not suburban schools, significant interactions were found between race (Non-Hispanic Black) and parental education attainment (years of schooling) on reading and math scores, suggested that the protective effect of parental education on students’ reading and math scores (ie school achievement) is smaller for Non-Hispanic Black relative to Non-Hispanic White youth only in urban but not sub-urban schools.

Diminished returns of parental education (MDRs) contribute to the racial achievement gap in urban but not suburban American high schools. This result is important given Black students are more likely to attend urban schools than White students. As MDRs are not universal and depend on context, future research should study contextual characteristics of urban schools that contribute to MDRs.

Introduction

Educational success plays an important role in shaping people’s future opportunities in life. 1 Students who perform better at school are more likely to gain higher salaries, 2 become active citizens, 3 experience higher life satisfaction, 4 and avoid high risk and criminal behaviors 5 during adulthood. Given that students’ academic achievement (eg test scores) is a substantial predictor of economic and non-economic outcomes later in life, 5 it is necessary to address racial inequalities in school performance, also known as the Black-White achievement gap.

Previous research has shown persistent and large racial inequalities of academic achievement in the United States school system, which is in part due to the low quality of education at urban schools. 6 Urban schools provide a lower quality of education because of fewer resources, leading to lower academic achievement among students. 7 The Black-White achievement gap, however, remains significant beyond controlling for school urbanity as a covariate. 8 It is, however, unknown whether Black-White achievement gap can be seen within both urban and suburban schools.

Child’s academic achievement is affected by school socioeconomic status (SES). 9 Concentration of poverty among students who attend urban schools is considered one of the greatest contributors to low academic achievement in such contexts. 10 Recent studies demonstrate that poverty has both a direct impact on student achievements through cognitive ability 11 and education quality. 12 For example, differential teacher quality may explain some of the achievement gap between Blacks and Whites. 13 Children of low SES families start school less prepared 14 and academically perform worse than their peers with higher family SES at school. 10 This is another reason we need to differentially study contributors of the Black-White gap in predominantly Black (suburban) and White (suburban) schools.

Family SES is also among the major determinants of students’ school achievement. 9 Among SES indicators, parental education is among the most stable aspects of family SES background, 15 which influence the quality of home learning settings 16 and higher levels of parental engagement in children’s schooling. 16 , 17 Children of low-educated parents more so than students with highly educated parents tend to demonstrate lower educational achievement. 18 Parents with higher education levels can provide greater SES resources which influences the academic achievement of their children, 19 but lower SES in Black parents can be restricted their investment in their children. 20

Eligibility for using free or reduced price lunch (FRPL) is one of the other indicators of SES that may predict student academic achievement. 21 FRPL is a proxy of school SES. 21 , 22 Predominantly Black and urban schools have higher FRPL usage than predominantly White and suburban schools. 23 Students who are FRPL eligible score lower in reading and math test scores than equivalent students who were not eligible for FRPL. 24

The educational attainment gap between students of low SES and high SES is observable at the age of seven, and at the end of compulsory education. 10 In addition, education aspiration, especially among poor students, has been connected to academic achievement, 25 such that over time and when approaching the end of compulsory education, educational aspirations fall in low-income students. 14

In the US, students with low family SES are most likely to attend urban schools. 26 On the other hand, children who go to urban schools in low-income neighborhoods show lower academic progress. 27 , 28 Indeed, sixth-grader children in the wealthiest school regions compared to children in the poorest regions are four grade levels ahead. 29 In addition, the high percentage of students with low family SES in urban schools is related to lowers the engagement and attempt of all students. 7

In the US education system, schooling and residential place are closely connected. As a result, residential neighborhoods affect both the value of property (wealth) and the racial and socioeconomic composition of schools. 30 Therefore, the role of race could be disadvantageous for the academic achievement of minorities. 23 In spite of the modest decreases in the Black-White residential segregation, Black students remain concentrated in racially segregated public schools in urban zones where a higher percentage of the population is from the racial or ethnic minority groups with low income. 31 A previous study showed schools in the poor regions have insufficient resources and elementary education quality varies drastically racial lines. 32 Also, research has shown lower academic achievement obtain in urban schools and schools where a greater part of the student body is Blacks. 31 , 33

Race is closely linked to family SES. 34 Race is also associated with school SES and racial composition. 35 Schools with a high concentration of minorities have lower SES. 36 School social status, student–teacher ratio, class size, teacher selection, and school rules are influenced by school SES. 23 African American students in mainly Black schools both in advanced and general classes are more likely to be exposed to a less demanding curriculum due to lower teacher quality and expectations 31 which lead to the academic achievement gap.

Furthermore, a significant factor in enhancing student educational achievement is teacher quality. 37 Educational background, professional certifications, and teaching experience of teachers improve student achievement in schools. 38 Studies in the US have shown that students’ academic achievement may be three times higher when taught by a high-quality teacher. 39 But evidence indicates that schools with a high percentage of minority students are more likely to have lower qualified and experienced teachers with higher rates of teachers’ turnover. 40 , 41 Also, new teachers inclined to start their work in schools with greater concentrations of low SES students do so to acquire more experience and then tend to transfer to higher-SES schools. 30 In addition, poor and Black students are more probably taught by teachers who have an alternative certification. 6

Although Black and White students' academic achievement gap improved across time, 42 this gap still exists and substantial especially in urban schools. 6 , 43 Recent data revealed the achievement gap between White and Black youth in reading and math remained relatively constant over the past years. 44 Additionally, the Black-White academic achievement gap in both reading and math scores during the first 4 years of the primary school nearly 0.10 standard deviations increased each year. 45 Research suggests this gap may be due to the SES achievement gap between minorities and the majority group. 46 However, in recent years, the relationship between race and SES also is dropping. 47

Research has revealed that racial/ethnicity minorities may not receive equal gains from their SES compared to dominant racial/ethnic groups, 48 , 49 identified as Marginalization-related Diminished Returns (MDRs). 50 , 51 In the US, marginalization-related diminished returns of SES indicators (eg education attainment, income) are established across domains of health 52 such as exercise, 53 diet, 54 smoking, 55 , 56 depression, 57 , 58 anxiety, 59 mental well-being, 60 self-rated mental health, 61 and chronic medical conditions. 54 Recent research has also documented diminished returns of parental educational attainment on school performance of Black children. 62

Recently, diminished returns of parental educational attainment have been investigated on student academic performances of minorities group in the US population. In two studies, parental educational attainment has smaller positive effects on grade point average (GPA) in Hispanic and Black than non-Hispanic White youth 62 and non-Hispanic Blacks than non-Hispanic Whites college students. 63 The result of another study indicated that the family socioeconomic position at birth has a smaller protective result for school bonding in Black than White youth. 64

To investigate diminished returns of parental education on the school performance of elementary students, we applied a nationally representative sample to compare Black and White students reading and math scores as a function of race and parental education. We tested these effects across urban and suburban schools. Our hypothesis is that Black and White students’ academic performance are differently affected by parental education and available resources in urban and suburban schools. If we could observe diminished returns of parental education in both urban and suburban schools, then diminished returns of parental education is not just a problem of urban schools. MDR are also not all because Black and White students attend different schools. If diminished returns exist in urban schools but not in suburban schools, urban school would be the context that generates MDR. We hypothesized that urban schools (low education quality and poor education context) not suburban schools will show MDR. That means we expect urban schools to be a mechanism by which parental education generates less outcomes for Black than White students.

Design and Settings

This cross-sectional study is a secondary analysis of Wave 1 of the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) study. 65 Funded by the US Department of Education (DOE), ELS is one of the main studies of youth education in the US. The ELS sample is representative of 10 th grade youth in the US. Although ELS has enrolled all race/ethnic groups, this analysis was limited to 10,702 youth who were composed of 2020 (18.9%) non-Hispanic Black and 8682 (81.1%) non-Hispanic White youth. Exclusion criterion in the current analysis was any race other than White or Black.

All participating youth provided written assent. Youth parents signed written consent. The institutional review board (IRB) of the Department of Education (DOE) approved the protocol of the original article. As this analysis used fully deidentified public data, this secondary analysis was deemed to be exempted from a full IRB review.

Sample and Sampling

The ELS youth sample was enrolled in the private, public, or Catholic schools. These schools could be selected from either Urban, Suburban, or Rural areas. ELS used a multi-stage stratified random sample. The analytical sample of this study was 10,702.

Study Variables

The study variables included race/ethnicity as the moderating variable, parental education as the independent variable (predictor), youth math and reading test scores as the outcomes (dependent variables), and demographic factors (gender and parental marital status) and school characteristics (% students receiving free lunch).

Race/ethnicity

Race/ethnicity, a dichotomous variable, was self-identified as non-Hispanic Black (1) versus on-Hispanic White (0).

Parental Educational Attainment (Independent Variable)

Parental educational attainment was a continuous variable that reflected the highest number of years of schooling in parents. This variable was self-reported by the parents.

Demographic Factor (Covariates)

Gender and family structure were demographic covariates. Parental marital status was a dichotomous variable (1 = married parents, 0 = unmarried parents) and calculated based on parents’ marital status. Gender was 1=male 0 = female.

School characteristics

School characteristics included school control system (public versus private), and % students receiving free lunch. Both these variables were administrative rather than self-report.

School Urbanity

School urbanity was a dichotomous variable: 1= urban schools, 0 = suburban schools. This variable was administrative, not self-report.

School Function/Achievement (Outcomes)

Our dependent variables were standardized test scores of math and reading. These variables were transformed to z scores which helps comparison of the students and interpretation of the regression coefficients. Students performed the test.

Statistical Analysis

SPSS 23.0 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, New York, US) was used to analyze the data. We had normally distributed outcomes thus we decided to perform linear regressions. There was no multicollinearity between our independent variables such as race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment. Our model passed the assumption of homoscedasticity (eg, distribution of error terms). This strategy also helped us with the comparability of MDR across our two outcomes. We ran two hierarchical linear regression models per outcome, in the pooled sample. The first block of variables only included race/ethnicity. Our second block included educational attainment (years of schooling). Block 3 included the educational attainment (years) by race/ethnicity interaction term. The fourth block included gender and parental marital status. The fifth block included school characteristics, namely, relation with the teacher and % students with free lunch. We reported beta (b), B, standard error (SE), and p value.

Descriptive Data

Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for our sample. This study included 8315 youth. From this number, most were non-Hispanic White (n = 6539, 78.6%) and a minority were non-Hispanic Black (n = 1776, 21.4%). From all participants, most were attending either suburban schools (n = 5188, 62.4%) and a minority were attending urban schools (n = 3127, 37.6%).

Descriptive Characteristics

Note : * p < 0.05.

Bivariate Analysis

Table 2 presents the summary of bivariate analysis in the pooled sample. Reading and math test scores were closely correlated (r = 0.75, p < 0.001). % free lunch at school was inversely correlated with reading (r = −0.33, p < 0.001) and math (r = −0.36, p < 0.001) scores. Urban school was correlated with lower math (r = −0.03, p < 0.001) but not reading (p > 0.05) score. Race (Black) was negatively correlated with both reading (r = −0.34, p < 0.001) and math (r = −0.39, p < 0.001) scores.

Correlations in the Pooled Sample (n=8315)

Note : ** p < 0.01.

Multivariable Models

Table 3 presents the summary of two hierarchical linear regression models in suburban schools. In both these models, race (non-Hispanic Black) and parental educational attainment were associated with the outcomes (reading and math scores). These models did not show statistical interactions between parental educational attainment and race on youth educational outcomes. No interaction terms suggest that the link between high parental educational attainment and youth educational outcomes (grades) is similar for non-Hispanic Black than and Non-Hispanic White youth.

Associations Between Race and Parental Education on Reading and Math Score at Suburban Schools

Note : ***p < 0.001.

Table 4 presents the summary of two hierarchical linear regression models in urban schools. In both these models, race (non-Hispanic Black) and parental educational attainment were associated with the outcomes. These models showed an interaction between parental education and youth outcomes. These interaction terms suggest that the positive link between parental education and youth educational outcomes (grades) is smaller for non-Hispanic Black relative to Non-Hispanic White youth. These findings suggest that in urban schools, non-Hispanic Black youth with highly educated parents have low school performance, and these diminished returns of parental education.

Associations Between Race and Parental Education on Reading and Math Score at Urban Schools

Notes : *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

The current study showed four findings: First, high parental education was linked to higher math and reading scores among youth. Second, in urban but not suburban schools, the boosting effect of parental education on school achievement is weaker for non-Hispanic Black than for Non-Hispanic White families. Third, parental education differently influenced reading and math scores at urban schools above and beyond relation with children, marital status of the parents, and % free lunch eligibility of the students. Fourth, at suburban schools, Black and White students similarly gain school performance from their parental education.

Diminished returns of education contribute to the Black-White academic gap in urban schools only. At urban schools, Black students remain at educational risk, despite their highly educated parents. Such level of risk is unexpected and disproportionate to their parental educational attainment.

As MDR remained as a contributor to the Black-White achievement gap in urban but not suburban school characteristics, we argue that urban school context may be a probable cause for diminished returns of parental educational attainment as a cause of racial achievement gap. Still, as shown by previous studies, other upstream social forces that occur beyond education system may also contribute to such gap. For example, labor market discrimination may put Black parents in worse jobs, which may reduce Black parents’ available time to engage with their children’s school activities. However, differential context of education of Black and White youth seems to be essential for Black-White achievement gaps due to MDR. 66

With a similar pattern observed in urban schools, Black students with highly educated parents have shown to report poor school outcomes, 67 poor school attainment, 51 and poor school bonding; 68 all outcomes that are disproportionate to their high parental education. Previous research, however, could not tell whether these patterns can be observed in both urban and suburban settings.

One recent study documented worse than expected aggression, chronic diseases, tobacco use, psychological problems, and school performance in Black youth with high parental education. 66 As argued in other studies, 69 – 71 a plausible conclusion seems to be that some distal and upstream social processes interfere with the effects of parental education for racial and ethnic minority families. 66 According to this study, however, diminished returns of parental education are not all because Black youth attending urban schools where the quality of schooling is lower.

The education system seems not to be the only reason we see worse outcomes for Black youth in the middle class with highly educated parents. Diminished returns of parental and own education result in higher than expected prevalence of asthma, 72 Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, 73 mental health problems, 74 depression, 75 , 76 obesity, 61 , 77 dental health problems, 78 poor health-care use, 79 impulsivity control, 80 and cigarette smoking 81 in middle class Black families. Similar patterns are shown for Black adults, 82 – 84 Black youth, 77 , 80 , 85 Hispanic adults, 56 , 86 , 87 and Hispanic youth. 66 As similar patterns are shown for various groups, it is not a group behavior but the upstream underlying mechanisms such as social stratification, structural racism, and marginalization that reduce the positive effects of education for minority families. 66

While parental education promotes educational outcomes for youth, this association is diminished for Non-Hispanic Black and White youth. The smaller marginal returns of parental education are beyond what can be explained by school characteristics that differ between Non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White students. Diminishing returns of parental educational attainment (MDR) may be an unrecognized source of racial youth disparities. Equalizing SES would not be enough for equalizing outcomes. There is a need for public and economic policies that reduce diminished returns of SES for Black families.

The major contribution of this study is that we found diminished returns of parental education in urban but not suburban schools. That is, diminished returns of parental education may be specific to the context, thus modifiable through educational policies. This results in advocates for policies that target the education quality of urban schools. We argue that Black youth from the middle class perform worse than expected in part because they are more likely to attend urban schools. They would probably do similar to White middle-class youth if they had the chance to attend suburban schools.

Racial inequalities and disparities are not all due to the lower SES of Blacks as inequalities can be also seen in middle-class people. Thus, other social mechanisms are at work to cause inequalities across racial groups, even for middle-class families that access education.

Policy Implications

These results have considerable implications. Innovative policies, as well as public health programs, should be designed, implemented, and evaluated to reduce racial and ethnic inequalities across all levels of SES strata. To address disparities that are not due to low SES but diminished return of SES, we should go beyond exclusively focusing on equalizing access to resources. While equal access is important, there is a need to address broader social and economic processes that hinder middle-class Black families’ abilities to leverage their available resources. Policies should aim to equalize the gain that follows access to SES resources. Such policies are hoped to reduce inequalities that sustain across all the SES spectrum. 55 , 59 , 77 – 80 , 82 , 86 , 88 , 89 We need policies and program solutions that equalize highly educated Black families’ abilities to leverage their educational attainment. 88 , 90 Some suspect the cause of MDR are labor market practices and preferences. 82 Although there are strong anti-discrimination laws, further enforcement of such existing policies may be required if we want to minimize the existing diminishing marginal returns of education and other SES indicators in the lives of Black families. Communities, where the majority of residents are Black, may benefit from higher quality and abundant jobs that facilitate translation of educational attainment into tangible real-life outcomes. 91 Programs should help highly educated Black parents successfully compete with Whites to secure high paying jobs. At the same time, we should reduce the societal and environmental barriers that are common in the everyday lives of Black population. In addition, we should invest in educational programs and in outcomes of Black youth, including middle-class Black youth, in urban and suburban schools. There is a need to empower Black parents to utilize their education and increase their engagement with their children's school performance. Finally, we need to minimize the discrimination of Black students in urban and suburban schools. 92 , 93

Limitations

This study had a few limitations. With our cross-sectional design, we cannot make any causal inferences. The unequal sample size across groups prevented us from running race-specific models. This study only included Non-Hispanic Blacks and Non-Hispanic Whites. Other ethnic minorities such as Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans should be included in future studies. We only studied the differential effect of parental educational attainment. Other family SES indicators such as wealth, income, employment, and area-level SES should be studied. This study did not include geocoded data. Thus, educational policies were not included. Despite these limitations, this study still contributes to the MDR literature on as well as the racial achievement gap. Some strengths included a large sample size, a random sample, and a representative sample that resulted in generalizable findings to the US, and standardized tests. However, the main contribution of this study is beyond these methodological strengths. This was the first study showing that diminished returns of parental education on school performance can be seen in both urban and suburban schools, thus these diminished returns are not all because of poor urban schools that are weak in educational quality.

In the United States, non-Hispanic Black youth who attend urban schools are at a disadvantage compared to Non-Hispanic White youth regarding the magnitude of the effect of parental education on their educational outcomes. Such diminished returns of parental education that are observable in urban schools are absent in suburban schools. Context of education may be one reason Black youth from middle-class families do worse than middle-class White youth.

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.

How AP African American Studies Works in a State That Limits Teaching About Race

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In the classroom of teacher Ahenewa El-Amin at Henry Clay High School in Lexington, Ky., where murals of books and the words “read” and “think” decorate the walls, junior Nia Henderson-Louis held up a handmade diorama depicting the founders of the oldest historically Black sorority, the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

The College Board’s new Advanced Placement African American Studies course requires instruction on the history of historically Black colleges and universities and affiliated Black Greek-letter organizations. For the pilot version of the course currently offered at Henry Clay, El-Amin had her students craft their own presentations on these organizations.

Nia, 17, spoke about Alpha Kappa Alpha traditions in the context of the Divine Nine historically Black fraternities and sororities. She shared how her mother “crossed the line” as a college student.

“I need you to just help me out for next year,” El-Amin said before Nia continued. “I’m going to need to teach this again, so what does it mean to cross the line?”

“Cross the line means that you’re officially coming into the sorority as a sister,” Nia said. “So you’re crossing the line of being just outside of the sorority and trying to make it in, and you finally make it in.”

El-Amin asked her class, which is predominantly Black, if predominantly white sororities also participated in the tradition of crossing the line. A white student mentioned that such organizations are better known for a “rush week” when new members try to join.

Making cross-cultural connections, maintaining a classroom culture where asking questions and sharing feedback is always encouraged, and developing critical thinking skills are all benefits El-Amin and her students see in the AP African American Studies course set to officially launch nationwide this fall after two years of pilot classes in a select number of schools.

The course faced a tumultuous start when in 2023 Florida officials banned the pilot for allegedly violating state law that restricts instruction about race. Seventeen other states have imposed such restrictions since January 2021—including Kentucky, which has a Republican-controlled statehouse and Democratic governor. (In Arkansas, with similar restrictions, state officials moved to not allow the course to count for high school graduation credit.)

As schools across the country face the option of offering the official course this fall while instruction about race and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives continue to come under political fire from Republicans, El-Amin’s class offers a glimpse of how it all can work.

A groundbreaking course in a complicated political climate

Henry Clay is the only one of the Fayette County district’s six high schools that’s currently offering the course. Four other schools in Kentucky are also participating in the course’s second-year pilot, according to the College Board.

Students in the course this year will be the first to take an end-of-year exam. Schools requested more than 11,900 exams for the course in November 2023.

“For years, African American Studies has been one of the most widely requested additions to the AP Program, and we know students across the country are eager to take this course,” Brandi Waters, senior director and program manager for AP African American Studies, said in a statement. “My priority is making the course available to as many students as possible.”

One potential challenge to accessing the course lies in legislation in at least 18 states restricting instruction on race. In Kentucky, a 2022 bill that initially drew a veto from Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, which the Republican-dominated legislature then overturned, sets parameters on how to teach about race in K-12 schools. That includes stating that “the institution of slavery and post-Civil War laws enforcing racial segregation and discrimination were contrary to the fundamental American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but that defining racial disparities solely on the legacy of this institution is destructive to the unification of our nation.”

Chaka Cummings, executive director for the Association for Teaching Black History in Kentucky, said that he would imagine if the AP African American Studies pilot were offered in 2018, more schools in the state would have tried to participate because they would not have been concerned over how the course would work with the legal restriction.

The state association officially launched in 2023 to help schools and partners such as the state department of education share resources and training for teachers seeking to teach more Black history, Cummings said. It all started as a response to racial tension in the state in 2020 over issues such as police brutality, including the case of Breonna Taylor, whom Louisville, Ky. police officers shot and killed in her home on March 13, 2020.

As the association and others work to expand and improve Black history instruction across the state outside of the AP course, Cummings sees the AP course as validating and adding to his group’s work.

“It gives credence within spaces that maybe haven’t spent a ton of time figuring out how to effectively teach Black history,” he said.

Though there were national debates at the pilot’s launch among Black scholars over whether the survey course truly addressed all necessary topics, Cummings argues that “you have to balance the current political landscape with this opportunity to be able to introduce lessons and coursework and curriculum in an area where many schools are lagging.

“And so within that balance, hopefully, this course feels like something that can address what is an opportunity area for a lot of districts across the United States.”

The Kentucky and classroom landscape

Some Kentucky state leaders and educators see great potential for the course within the state, even under the state’s current political context.

“There is no legislation, no bill out there banning African American history” in the state, said Thomas S. Tucker, who was hired to be the Kentucky department of education’s deputy commissioner and chief equity officer. “That’s not on the table. I’ve not had any conversation with any of our lawmakers discussing that.”

When asked whether teachers could teach AP African American Studies in full in Kentucky under state law, he said “I don’t see any prohibitions with this.”

“[The course] goes deeper than just having Black history in Kentucky academic standards in social studies,” Tucker said. “Its goal is really to help American public school kids, and our private school kids as well, develop a greater respect for each other.”

Tucker said he isn’t aware of any complaints in the state against the course. He’s only gotten one question from local scholars: why there aren’t more Black Kentuckians featured in the course given their contributions to American history.

Another challenge in getting the course into more schools, Cummings said, may be teachers who may feel they lack the training to properly teach the course.

El-Amin at Henry Clay, who is Black, said she is focusing on developing a course where teachers of any race feel comfortable navigating hard conversations in the classroom as she does. Her class this year was predominantly Black. The cohort of students already expressing interest in the course next fall is predominantly white, meaning she may need to help students make more connections to history and culture with which they are not as familiar.

Though fellow teachers at Henry Clay—and an online community of AP African American Studies teachers—offer El-Amin support and guidance, navigating an interdisciplinary course that’s very new and covers a lot of material in a short timeframe has still proved challenging.

That’s why she looks to students and families to guide her.

A class where students are the experts

She’s constantly asking students for their feedback.

“I am very open about the fact that I’m fumbling my way through this course,” El-Amin said. “I learn and they teach me.”

For instance, she was raised Muslim and was not familiar with the musical tradition of call and response in Black churches, which one of the course units covers. Her students quickly filled her in—though not without some good-natured teasing.

At the end of presentations on the Divine Nine historically Black fraternities and sororities, El-Amin reminded students that the various PowerPoint slides, dioramas, and other crafts they put together will serve as examples for future classes.

When the class was learning about ancient African kingdoms early in the course, El-Amin had students make ceremonial masks that now decorate a wall by her desk. Through that activity, students learned about how much effort went into constructing such artifacts and, as a result, gained a deeper appreciation for the course material.

“You all did a great job at being experts,” El-Amin said of their Divine Nine presentations. “But what went right and what went wrong, if I had to do this assignment again next year?”

Student presentations this school year have covered a wide range of topics, from government surveillance of Black civil rights leaders to Black comedians to white artists whom people think are Black.

Students once watched an episode of the sitcom “black-ish” and made Black Santas when learning about Black Christmas to lighten the mood from covering heavy subject matter.

Parents have also provided El-Amin with feedback.

Nia’s parents teach Africana studies, anthropology, political science, and gender and women’s studies at a local university. They’ve helped El-Amin ensure she’s on track with her lesson plans and offered suggestions for resources.

El-Amin recommends that future teachers of the course at her school and beyond “try to have a bridge between some of the universities and the schools because these curriculums seem to be rooted in what you need to know at the next level for college.”

For El-Amin, the course pushes students to think critically about the world around them and their own lived experiences by drawing connections between the past and present and learning how to engage with other cultures.

“Thinking is revolutionary in itself,” she said.

At the end of the class period featuring Divine Nine presentations, students whose presentations had included step-dance routines led their peers in a mini-step lesson. They even convinced El-Amin to join.

In the hallway just outside the dancing classroom, a poster advertising the course formally launching this fall summarized the challenge that lies ahead: “History is not always pretty. Can you handle the truth?”

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Education Is Under Attack. Here’s 13 Feminist Educators on How to Fight Back

Teaching is an act of love and struggle. when the road forward seems dangerous, collective voices for transformative learning emerge..

Ms . Classroom wants to hear from educators and students being impacted by legislation attacking public education, higher education, gender, race and sexuality studies, activism and social justice in education, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs  for our series, ‘ Banned! Voices from the Classroom .’ Submit pitches and/or op-eds and reflections (between 500-800 words) to  Ms . contributing editor Aviva Dove-Viebahn at  [email protected] . Posts will be accepted on a rolling basis.

Educators advance the spirit of teaching by encouraging inquiry, engagement and investigation of diverse perspectives. Many carry the torch forward by addressing critical issues affecting our lives and communities. Education challenges entrenched thinking—not by telling students what to think, but by offering lessons on how to think critically. That is why education is under attack. 

Here’s an inspiring sample (in alphabetical order) of wise women cultural critics, philosophers, theorists, scholars and professors from among many who inspire social justice education.

Elizabeth Alexander

In The Trayvon Generation (2022) Elizabeth Alexander writes, “Sometimes we forget that remembering people, and making their work and legacy available, indelible and strong, is hard work. The scholars, teachers, artists, meaning-makers and family storytellers, work against forgetting.” Art and history, she writes later, “outlive flesh… offer us a compass or a lantern with which to move through the wilderness and allow us to imagine something different and better.” 

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004)

Gloria Anzaldúa challenges either-or thinking in Borderlands / La Frontera (1987) and describes a nonbinary in-between state of identity as cultural collisions originating from colonial conquests. She outlines the nuances of navigating two worlds where negotiating the “ choque ” [clash] means gaining skills and a sharp intelligence for survival. An opportunity for genuine exchange of gifts and resources can emerge from an understanding of polarities. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the concept of critical race theory (CRT) in 1989. She sought to challenge the role of structural racism in the law, and to rethink the ideological effects of discrimination and deficit-informed research stemming from the legacy of slavery. To explain how race intersects with other identities such as gender and class, she coined the phrase “intersectionality.”

As co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum , Crenshaw counters censorship of teachers and librarians with joint initiatives like the “Freedom Readers Campaign” bus tour that delivered thousands of banned books to more than two dozen cities from Minnesota to Florida. 

Angela Y. Davis

Angela Davis champions the interconnections of human rights issues and the need for unity among the different calls for justice and equity to heal a wounded and divided society. Davis recognizes the power of the arts as a transformative process. In Abolition. Feminism, Now . (2022) written in collaboration with other scholars, Davis makes the case that linking the past to the present with a collective response that interconnects critical issues to resolve lingering inequities opens the pathway to freedom. 

Jessica Hoffmann Davis

Jessica Hoffmann Davis promotes interdisciplinary collaboration of ideas and projects with arts at the core. Davis advocates for non-arts educators to value arts education which is steeped in scholarship, culture, history and vital learning opportunities that other subjects don’t provide. She argues, because of their processes, “their ongoing redefinition, and even their outsider status that arts deserve a central place in education.”

Davis’ books and essays, notably Ordinary Gifted Children (2010) and Why Our High Schools Need the Arts (2008) emphasize narratives and storytelling where students learn to express emotion, feelings and empathy to stimulate imagination, leading to invention, agency and self-discovery.

Eleanor Duckworth

Eleanor Duckworth plays with learning material as phenomena full of wonder, surprises and excitement. The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (1996, 2006) addresses critical exploration through noticing, listening and valuing process and complexity. Her approach as a cognitive psychologist to learning and teaching is influenced by her early work as a student of and assistant to Jean Piaget, known for his theory of cognitive development, and researcher/translator for developmental psychologist Bärbel Inhelder.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones challenges opposition to academic freedom. From her experience in a high school class on the African American experience, she writes, “Sitting in that class each day, I felt as if I had spent my entire life struggling to breathe and someone had finally provided me with oxygen.”

In “ The 1619 Project ” series in The Times Magazine (2019), podcasts of the series (2020), the anthology of essays, poems, photography and short stories, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021), and a six-episode TV docuseries (2023), Hannah-Jones explains, “Much about American identity, so many of our nation’s most vexing problems, our basest inclinations, and its celebrated and unique contributions spring … from the contradictions and ideological struggles of a nation founded on both slavery and freedom.”

bell hooks (1952- 2021)

bell hooks counters the rise of white supremacy in the U.S. by showing the power of art to inspire dialogue. In her book Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995), she states, “Art constitutes one of the rare locations where acts of transcendence can take place and have a wide-ranging transformative impact… In a democratic society art should be the location where everyone can experience the joy, pleasure and power.”

She blends liberatory education and art with antiracism, feminism, nonbinary sexual identity, Black-Christian-Buddhist thought and activism rooted in the hopefulness of seeking knowledge in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003). 

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, botanist and environmentalist, delivers the antidote to profit-driven “extractive” technology. Through traditional Native stories honoring the earth combined with ceremonies of reciprocity, Kimmerer fosters a mutual respect for other beings past, present and future.

In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013) and Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults (2022), Kimmerer contrasts Indigenous philosophy and wisdom with Western practice in agriculture.

Kimmerer notes the inaccessibility of most Western scientific study and how “this has serious consequences for public dialogue about the environment and therefore real democracy, especially the democracy of all species. For what good is knowing unless it is coupled with caring?”

Gloria Ladson-Billings

Gloria Ladson-Billings shifts the research narrative advocating for culturally sustaining pedagogies, culturally responsive teaching, culturally relevant pedagogy in The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (1994, 3rd edition 2023).

Excellent teaching can counter the damaging effects of trauma and gaps in educational opportunities. Honoring the “education debt” the system owes students who are poorly served means acknowledging systematic racism and economic inequalities. Her work, notably Justice Matters (2024), explores the roots of interconnected societal injustices and offers ways to champion social change. 

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot pioneered the social science research methodology called portraiture, blending art and science, capturing complexity, and undermining stereotypic thinking. The Art and Science of Portraiture (1997) co-authored with Hoffmann Davis, demonstrates a search for “goodness” through a constructive vision reflecting the possibility of transformation and healing rather than emphasizing deficits and pathology.

“In portraiture, the voice of the researcher is everywhere: in the assumptions, preoccupations, and framework … questions … data … choice of stories…language, cadence, and rhythm…”

Lawrence-Lightfoot promotes nuanced storytelling by accepting ambiguity and multiple meanings for interpretation. 

Eve Tuck (Unangax̂)

Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) presents Indigenous social thought and perspective on trauma and resilience and the effects of settler-colonial power in North America. She proposes “rematriation” of curriculum studies by identifying harmful practices. She suggests ( 2011 ) re-storying deeply embedded knowledge by “uncovering the quiet thoughts and beliefs of a community; mapping the variety of ideas … available to other generations using home languages, … engaging in the flow of knowledge… that reflect epistemology/cosmology and relationships to land.”

She is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska, and contributing writer and editor of Who Decides Who Becomes a Teacher? Schools of Education as Sites of Resistance (2019). 

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson parallels the rigid caste and race systems of India, the United States, and Nazi Germany in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), made into the film “ Origin ” (2024) by Ava Duvernay. Caste details the inordinate preoccupation with white supremacy in the US and exposes the creation of complicated decrees, laws, policies, statutes, and customs that justify mob violence, lynching, dehumanization of one group of people over another, showing how stereotyping media depictions can distort our mentality.

In the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010), Wilkerson gleans stories from interviews with hundreds of Black migrants who fled the South of the United States from 1915-1970 during the Great Migration. 

Teaching is an act of love and struggle. When the road forward seems dangerous, collective voices for transformative learning emerge, generating healing exchanges to build an equitable, hopeful future. 

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U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms . has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms . today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you . For as little as $5 each month , you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms . Studios events and podcasts . We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity .

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The banality of racism in education

Subscribe to how we rise, jon valant jon valant director - brown center on education policy , senior fellow - governance studies @jonvalant.

June 4, 2020

A few years ago, I ran a study with a colleague, Daniel Newark, of how Americans think about test score gaps in education. It featured a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of adults. The study design let us test for differences in how Americans see Black-white, Hispanic-white, and wealthy-poor gaps. The study’s main finding was that Americans are far more concerned about, and willing to address, wealth-based gaps than race- and ethnicity-based gaps.

The finding that has stuck with me the most, though, came from a question about how people explain the gaps that exist today. We asked, “How much of the difference in test scores between white students and Black students can be explained by discrimination against Blacks or injustices in society?” Nearly half (44%) of respondents chose “None.” Only 10% chose “A great deal.”

That 44% figure still feels stunning, and plainly wrong—especially in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. We are a country only a century-and-a-half removed from the enslavement of African Americans and its accompanying anti-literacy laws, which prohibited teaching slaves to read and write. The end of that era led not to some type of egalitarian or meritocratic society—or any sincere, sustained attempt to get there—but rather to the Jim Crow laws and de jure segregation of yesterday and the de facto segregation and structural racism of today. We are not a country in which current disparities just reflect how hard different groups of people are trying. Yet respondents to our survey were far more inclined to attribute gaps to perceived deficiencies in Black parenting and student motivation than to these profound inequities.

I don’t know exactly what attitudes and experiences led to those responses. Undoubtedly, many reflect individual prejudices and failures of empathy. But I also worry that the manifestations of structural racism have become such a fixed, omnipresent part of the educational landscape that it is hard for many of us to see them.

Some of those manifestations are not explicitly in education policy or practice, but they affect students nonetheless. There are exclusionary zoning policies that keep families that can’t afford single-family homes out of high-performing school districts; tax policies that prevent Black wealth accumulation (and corresponding spending on educational resources); and mass-incarceration practices that remove parents from children’s homes and strain those left behind.

Other manifestations are direct matters of education policy and practice . Some are subtle decisions that happen largely out of sight, day after day, like missed opportunities to assign students of color to advanced coursework and excessive discipline practices that send misguided messages. Others are there for us to see: funding levels that leave many high-poverty schools inadequately resourced; attendance boundaries that erect barriers to desirable schools; and test-based accountability measures that stack the deck against high-poverty schools by emphasizing student proficiency over growth.

If there’s a silver lining for education in the simultaneous crises of COVID-19 and police brutality, maybe it’s an increased public willingness—however fleeting—to take a closer look at our education systems and the countless inequities they inherit, reproduce, and create. Of course, not everyone will want to look. Some will, though, and perhaps they will see just how defining those inequities are and what we could do about them.

Part of the responsibility for clearer vision lies with the education community, which must speak clearly and honestly about the depth and causes of educational inequity. A growing chorus of scholars—including Gloria Ladson-Billings , Prudence Carter, and Kevin Welner —argues that we have done a poor job of conceptualizing and communicating about inequities. In particular, the term “achievement gap,” while useful in increasing public recognition of a problem, connotes a failure of low-scoring students (who do not or cannot “achieve”) rather than a societal failure in creating the opportunity gaps that produce those scores. An interesting new paper by David Quinn shows that an “achievement gap” framing can, though does not always, lead people to underestimate Black students’ performance—a topic that warrants further study.

Neither the COVID-19 outbreak nor the national outcry over police brutality is, at its core, an education story. But the issues surfaced by those crises are familiar. Education rarely has a lurid moment—what political scientists call a “focusing event”—that, while horrific, can draw attention to an issue and mobilize action. When we do, like the Parkland shooting, it seldom points directly at issues of race and inequality. Rather, moments of educational inequity happen quietly, day after day, in places like classrooms and school-board meeting rooms, often at the hands of people who mean no harm.

In many ways, it’s this banality that feels so dangerous. It’s that so much of the problem lies in plain sight and still can be so difficult for many of us to see. Hopefully the circumstances of the moment will help us see those problems, and their solutions, more clearly.

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Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative

Jennifer B. Ayscue, Kfir Mordechay, David Mickey-Pabello

March 26, 2024

Jennifer Wyatt Bourgeois, Howard Henderson

November 28, 2023

Richard V. Reeves, Simran Kalkat

April 18, 2023

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eAppendix. Supplementary Methods

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Shahriar AA , Puram VV , Miller JM, et al. Socioeconomic Diversity of the Matriculating US Medical Student Body by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex, 2017 - 2019. JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(3):e222621. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.2621

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Socioeconomic Diversity of the Matriculating US Medical Student Body by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex, 2017 - 2019

• 1 University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis
• 2 Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, Minneapolis, Minnesota
• 3 Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
• 4 Codman Square Health Center, Boston, Massachusetts
• 5 Department of Family Medicine, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

Workforce diversity contributes to the quality of health care, 1 yet for decades, medical students, like other postsecondary education students, 2 have disproportionately hailed from high-income households. Significant attention has been rightfully directed toward racial-, ethnic-, and gender-based diversity in medical schools, 3 with little mention of socioeconomic diversity, which is a less visible form of diversity. This survey study compares the socioeconomic composition of the 2017 to 2019 matriculating medical student body with that of the US population, by self-identified race and ethnicity and by sex.

This survey study was deemed not human participants research by the University of Minnesota and therefore exempt from institutional review board review and informed consent. This study is reported following the American Association for Public Opinion Research ( AAPOR ) reporting guideline.

We included matriculating allopathic medical students who reported parental income on the Association of American Medical Colleges Matriculating Student Questionnaire (AAMC-MSQ) between 2017 and 2019 (overall response rates, 65%-71%). The comparison group included households who responded to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASEC) between 2016 and 2018.

Respondents were categorized into household income groups using national quintile-based income limits. For each race and ethnicity, medical student household income was compared with that of the general population. We report a representation index (RI) for each subgroup, defined as the ratio of proportions of that subgroup in the medical student body and in the general US population. Values above and below 1.0 indicate overrepresentation and underrepresentation in the medical student body, respectively. For χ 2 tests, P values were 1-sided, and statistical significance was set at P  < .05. Detailed methods are provided in the eAppendix in the Supplement .

Of 44 903 AAMC-MSQ respondents, 30 373 (67.6%) reported parental income, of which 50.5% belonged to the top quintile of households, 24.0% belonged to the top 5%, and 52.4% were women. Four racial and ethnic groups accounted for 93% of the sample: 21.3% non-Hispanic Asian students, 6.4% non-Hispanic Black students, 10.9% Hispanic students of any race, and 54.0% non-Hispanic White students. Included and excluded respondents were similar apart from survey year, because beginning in 2018, respondents could enter unknown for parental income. Overall, this study captured 46.4% of matriculating allopathic medical students.

The Figure compares the income composition of each racial and ethnic group between the medical student body and US population. The top 5% of households were consistently overrepresented (RI > 1.0) in medical schools compared with the general population (all: RI, 4.8 [24.0% vs 5.0%]; P  < .001; Asian: RI, 2.3 [21.7% vs 9.5%]; P  < .001; Black: RI, 5.3 [9.1% vs 1.7%]; P  < .001; Hispanic: RI, 6.6 [14.7% vs 2.2%]; P  < .001; White: RI, 4.8 [28.6% vs 5.9%]; P  < .001). The top quintile was overrepresented (RI > 1.0) for each race and ethnicity, and the bottom 3 quintiles were consistently underrepresented (RI < 1.0) ( Figure ). Variability by sex was less pronounced ( Table ).

The 6 largest subgroups of Asian-identifying students were Indian (33.0%), Chinese (22.7%), Korean (9.3%), other Asian (9.2%), Vietnamese (7.1%), and Pakistani (5.0%). More than half (54.2%) of Chinese-identifying students were from the highest household income quintile. Likewise, 62.6% of Indian students were from the highest income quintile. More even income distributions were observed for medical students identifying as Korean, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi, and other Asian ethnicities.

In this exploratory survey study, high-income households were overrepresented in the medical student body both overall and within each racial and ethnic group. The underrepresentation of low-income groups was nearly ubiquitous across race and ethnicity groups.

Achieving demographic representation among physicians is a widely accepted ideal, but recent studies have shed light on the absence of progress with respect to race and ethnicity. 3 Our findings suggest that underlying the lack of progress may be the inaccessibility of the profession to low-income students, who, owing to powerful historical and contemporary forces, like structural racism, are disproportionately students who identify as Black or Hispanic. A low socioeconomic status significantly decreases the likelihood that a student who is interested in medicine will apply or gain acceptance into medical school. 4

Medical schools can assess socioeconomic disadvantage during the admissions process using essays and validated tools on the application server, like the parental education and occupation indicator. Likewise, common metrics, such as grade point average and Medical College Admission Test scores, can be adjusted for socioeconomic disadvantage. 1 , 5 Long-term solutions will require upstream engagement, including community partnerships and targeted investments in pipeline programs. 1 , 4 Matriculants who come from low-income households should be monitored for financial health and the accumulation of unexpected expenses, given that they do not have the family support of their peers from high-income households. 6

This study has limitations. Reliability and validity of self-reported parental income are unknown, subject to response biases, and may differ between groups. Furthermore, AAMC-MSQ nonrespondent characteristics were unavailable, potentially introducing sampling variance. Future work should explore temporal trends and examine factors resulting in such a broad range of representation among the lowest-income students of various racial and ethnic groups.

Accepted for Publication: January 19, 2022.

Published: March 15, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.2621

Open Access: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License . © 2022 Shahriar AA et al. JAMA Network Open .

Corresponding Author: Arman A. Shahriar, BS, University of Minnesota Medical School, 420 Delaware St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 ( [email protected] ).

Author Contributions: Mr Shahriar and Dr Miller had full access to all the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Concept and design: Shahriar, Puram, Miller.

Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: All authors.

Drafting of the manuscript: Shahriar, Miller.

Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: All authors.

Statistical analysis: Shahriar, Puram, Miller.

Obtained funding: Shahriar, Crichlow.

Administrative, technical, or material support: Shahriar.

Supervision: Prasad, Crichlow.

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

Funding/Support: Tyler Litsch, MPH of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) generated the dataset used in this study. This work was funded by the Minnesota Medical Association Foundation and the Minnesota Academy of Family Physicians Foundation.

Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Disclaimer: This material is based upon data provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges (“AAMC”). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the AAMC.

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The End of Foreign-Language Education

Thanks to AI, people may no longer feel the need to learn a second language.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. “My favorite food is sushi,” I said— wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi —with no hint of excitement or joy.

I’d created the video using software from a Los Angeles–based artificial-intelligence start-up called HeyGen. It allows users to generate deepfake videos of real people “saying” almost anything based on a single picture of their face and a script, which is paired with a synthetic voice and can be translated into more than 40 languages. By merely uploading a selfie taken on my iPhone, I was able to glimpse a level of Mandarin fluency that may elude me for the rest of my life.

HeyGen’s visuals are flawed—the way it animates selfies almost reminded me of the animatronics in Disney’s It’s a Small World ride—but its language technology is good enough to make me question whether learning Mandarin is a wasted effort. Neural networks, the machine-learning systems that power generative-AI programs such as ChatGPT, have rapidly improved the quality of automatic translation over the past several years, making even older tools like Google Translate far more accurate.

At the same time, the number of students studying foreign languages in the U.S. and other countries is shrinking. Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, according to the latest data from the Modern Language Association, better known as the MLA. In Australia, only 8.6 percent of high-school seniors were studying a foreign language in 2021—a historic low. In South Korea and New Zealand , universities are closing their French, German, and Italian departments. One recent study from the education company EF Education First found that English proficiency is decreasing among young people in some places.

Many factors could help explain the downward trend, including pandemic-related school disruptions, growing isolationism, and funding cuts to humanities programs. But whether the cause of the shift is political, cultural, or some mix of things, it’s clear that people are turning away from language learning just as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous across the internet.

Read: High-school English needed a makeover before ChatGPT

Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one. Something enormous will be lost in exchange for that convenience. Studies have suggested that language shapes the way people interpret reality. Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.

AI language tools are now in social-media apps, messaging platforms, and streaming sites. Spotify is experimenting with using a voice-generation tool from the ChatGPT maker OpenAI to translate podcasts in the host’s own voice, while Samsung is touting that its new Galaxy S24 smartphone can translate phone calls as they’re occurring . Roblox, meanwhile, claimed last month that its AI translation tool is so fast and accurate , its English-speaking users might not realize that their conversation partner “is actually in Korea.” The technology—which works especially well for “ high-resource languages ” such as English and Chinese, and less so for languages such as Swahili and Urdu—is being used in much more high-stakes situations as well, such as translating the testimony of asylum seekers and firsthand accounts from conflict zones. Musicians are already using it to translate songs , and at least one couple credited it with helping them to fall in love.

One of the most telling use cases comes from a start-up called Jumpspeak, which makes a language-learning app similar to Duolingo and Babbel. Instead of hiring actual bilingual actors, Jumpspeak appears to have used AI-generated “people” reading AI-translated scripts in at least four ads on Instagram and Facebook. At least some of the personas shown in the ads appear to be default characters available on HeyGen’s platform. “I struggled to learn languages my whole life. Then I learned Spanish in six months, I got a job opportunity in France, and I learned French. I learned Mandarin before visiting China,” a synthetic avatar says in one of the ads, while switching between all three languages. Even a language-learning app is surrendering to the allure of AI, at least in its marketing.

Alexandru Voica, a communications professional who works for another video-generating AI service, told me he came across Jumpspeak’s ads while looking for a program to teach his children Romanian, the language spoken by their grandparents. He argued that the ads demonstrated how deepfakes and automated-translation software could be used to mislead or deceive people. “I'm worried that some in the industry are currently in a race to the bottom on AI safety,” he told me in an email. (The ads were taken down after I started reporting this story, but it’s not clear if Meta or Jumpspeak removed them; neither company returned requests for comment. HeyGen also did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its product being used in Jumpspeak’s marketing.)

The world is already seeing how all of this can go wrong. Earlier this month, a far-right conspiracy theorist shared several AI-generated clips on X of Adolf Hitler giving a 1939 speech in English instead of the original German. The videos, which were purportedly produced using software from a company called ElevenLabs, featured a re-creation of Hitler’s own voice. It was a strange experience, hearing Hitler speak in English, and some people left comments suggesting that they found him easy to empathize with: “It sounds like these people cared about their country above all else,” one X user reportedly wrote in response to the videos. ElevenLabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ( The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs’ AI voice generator to narrate some articles.)

Read: The last frontier of machine translation

Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, told me that part of the problem with machine-translation programs is that they’re often falsely perceived as being neutral, rather than “bringing their own perspective upon how to move text from one language to another.” The truth is that there is no single right or correct way to transpose a sentence from French to Russian or any other language—it’s an art rather than a science. “Students will ask, ‘How do you say this in Spanish?’ and I’ll say, ‘You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different,’” Deborah Cohn, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about the importance of language learning for bolstering U.S. national security , told me.

I recently came across a beautiful and particularly illustrative example of this fact in an article written by a translator in China named Anne. “Building a ladder between widely different languages, such as Chinese and English, is sometimes as difficult as a doctor building a bridge in a patient's heart,” she wrote. The metaphor initially struck me as slightly odd, but thankfully I wasn’t relying on ChatGPT to translate Anne’s words from their original Mandarin. I was reading a human translation by a professor named Jeffrey Ding, who helpfully noted that Anne may have been referring to a type of heart surgery that has recently become common in China. It's a small detail, but understanding that context brought me much closer to the true meaning of what Anne was trying to say.

Read: The college essay is dead

But most students will likely never achieve anything close to the fluency required to tell whether a translation rings close enough to the original or not. If professors accept that automated technology will far outpace the technical skills of the average Russian or Arabic major, their focus would ideally shift from grammar drills to developing cultural competency , or understanding the beliefs and practices of people from different backgrounds. Instead of cutting language courses in response to AI, schools should “stress more than ever the intercultural components of language learning that tremendously benefit the students taking these classes,” Jen William, the head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University and a member of the executive committee of the Association of Language Departments, told me.

Paula Krebs, the executive director of the MLA, referenced a beloved 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to make a similar point. In “Darmok,” the crew aboard the starship Enterprise struggles to communicate with aliens living on a planet called El-Adrel IV. They have access to a “universal translator” that allows them to understand the basic syntax and semantics of what the Tamarians are saying, but the greater meaning of their utterances remains a mystery.

It later becomes clear that their language revolves around allegories rooted in the Tamarians’ unique history and practices. Even though Captain Picard was translating all the words they were saying, he “couldn’t understand the metaphors of their culture,” Krebs told me. More than 30 years later, something like a universal translator is now being developed on Earth. But it similarly doesn’t have the power to bridge cultural divides the way that humans can.