Geography, as a social studies discipline, can be a powerful tool for students to explore how their social and political worlds have been built. In this sense, the discipline can be an affirmational, positive inquiry into how humans organize in and around spaces to form communities. It can also, however, be used to explore how discriminatory…

One of the major contemporary topics in education is teaching issues of race in K-12 social studies classrooms. Over the last several years, at least 35 states have passed or proposed legislation to prohibit or restrict conversations about race in K-12 schools. Most supporters of this legislation argue that teachers are indoctrinating students and…

Ten years ago, the United States Supreme Court struck down two local school board initiatives meant to reverse extreme racial segregation in public schools. The sharply divided 5-4 decision in "Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District" marked the end of an era of efforts by local authorities to fulfill the promise…

According to a report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project (2017), New Jersey is the sixth most segregated state for Black students and the seventh most for Latino students. Black and Latino students in New Jersey also attend schools with large percentages of low-income students. Volumes of research on school segregation show that students attending…

The purpose of this article is to chronicle the life and contributions of Mary Frances Early (b. 1936), the first African American to graduate from the University of Georgia in 1962. After suffering many indignities and being forgotten for more than three decades, Early became one of the University's most celebrated graduates. Teaching music in…

In this month's interview, Kappan's editor talks with Paul Kuttner and Kevin Coe about their recent research into how network television news programs have covered preK-12 education. They found that, over the last 35 years, coverage of education has been rare, well under 1% of total coverage. Stories tend to focus on individual teachers and…

Mexican Americans have a long history in the struggle to end school segregation and achieve educational equality. Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson trace that history through a series of court cases that show how their fight for desegregation both intersects with and differs from the more well-known struggle of Black Americans. In some cases, Mexican…

Understanding how and why rising racial and economic segregation impacts achievement gaps is critical to closing them. Analyzing data from every school district in the U.S., researchers sean reardon, Erin Fahle, Heewon Jang, and Ericka Weathers evaluate how growing racial segregation interacts with unequal economic opportunities and contributes to…

A close look at segregated African American progressive high schools in the Southeast during the Jim Crow era offers insights into the "courageous willingness" of black educators to examine and modify their practices. This essay is part of the John Dewey Memorial Lecture series sponsored by the Daniel Tanner Foundation.

Decades of curriculum research have uncovered a persistent trend: white people are depicted as dominating the history of the United States, whereas communities of color and their experiences are omitted or misrepresented in social studies textbooks and curriculum standards. The message the resulting curriculum sends to children is that the United…

A growing number of states have policies that positively address resource equity in school construction, distributing capital resources based on district wealth (although as addressed in this brief, these policies are not always implemented with actual funding), but almost no states require any consideration of diversity or segregation in their…

In the middle of the 20th century, trustees, elected officials, and others in the southern United States required black and white institutions to forfeit academic freedom protections when faculty research and teaching threatened to undermine white supremacy. In the early 21st century, faculty who critique white supremacy are facing similar attacks…

This article focuses on the interplay between institutional arrangements, family strategies, and market devices in the transition to higher education (HE) in France with a view to documenting both persistent features of the French 'conservative' educational regime and recent changes, in particular those related to neo-liberal influences. Using a…

The Law School at South Carolina State College, a black college located in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was founded in 1947 as a segregated school to keep black students out of the state's all-white law school. However, this small law school produced in its nineteen-year existence a generation of attorneys whose education and achievements outlived…

In 1969, four years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in Greene County, Alabama, reclaimed control of local government, becoming the first community in the South to do so since Reconstruction. A half century later, however, Greene County remains an impoverished and largely segregated area with poor educational outcomes,…