Touted as the cure for what ails public education, charter schools have historical roots that are rarely discussed. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb on Mar 15, 2012 - 38 comments

Let me introduce you to Kai Davis and her poem "Truth" (NSFW); a powerful commentary, on racism and perceived intelligence, which has been quietly circulating the web since December 2011. While the poet herself does not seem to have a web page, Davis' slam poetry is being noticed in slam poetry circles as well as on Tumblr. [more inside]
posted by DisreputableDog on Jan 27, 2012 - 74 comments

Shakespeare's The Tempest banned by Arizona schools
posted by Artw on Jan 17, 2012 - 131 comments

Segregation. Elimination. Two different accounts of bizarro things happening in USA schools. [via]
posted by dirtynumbangelboy on Apr 17, 2006 - 35 comments

What's wrong with this teacher's comments? A Pasadena HS teacher circulated a letter with his complaint that African American students at the school are the reason for bad behavior and low test scores. He's now suspended...rightly? More inside...hoping to keep this civil, too...(thanks to Jim Romenesko)
posted by serafinapekkala on Oct 23, 2002 - 67 comments

Polls say blacks tend to favor checks.
"African-Americans ... are more likely than other racial groups to favor profiling and stringent airport security checks for Arabs and Arab-Americans in the wake of this month's terrorist attacks, two separate polls indicate."

"The findings by the Gallup Organization and Zogby International were met with varying degrees of disappointment and disbelief by black activists and intellectuals, who struggled with explanations."

Could it be that income and education are more related to racialist attitudes than race itself?
posted by sigsegv on Oct 2, 2001 - 16 comments

Boston area school divided by its namesake... Students and principal call for Agassiz Elementry to change its name, due to the racist evolutionary theory spun by the 19th century naturalist. "Reading about Agassiz was so painful I had to step back for a while." [says the student heralding the renaming effort]. A sample of Louis Agassiz's mindset "I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in me in thinking that they were really men." A new namesake has already been found-- Maria Baldwin, first black principal of the school [and first to preside over an all-white school in the Northeast in 1889].

Should namesakes of public institutions have a "clean" record? Why did it take 126 years to mobilize a renaming effort?
posted by noom on Mar 19, 2001 - 17 comments

Welcome back, state's rights. As if Dubya's comments following his "ethnic" Cabinet appointments wasn't enough retrograde logic -- roughly: if blacks and hispanics (would only?) work hard and make the right choices in life -- he's now using language that has been used to mask agendas based on race from before the Civil War through the fight against integration. And it looks like that fight ain't over, if you read "states rights" in today's context to mean the right to spend public funds on getting (primarily) white kids out of (primarily) black schools.
posted by subpixel on Jan 6, 2001 - 13 comments