As education reform continues a seemingly endless cycle of incremental advancement for students and teachers of color followed by the inevitable White-centric backlash threatened by ideas like equity and anti-racist curricula, it is essential to consider perhaps now more than ever, what the past has to teach us all. Inspired by three voices from…

African American males are three times more likely than their White male counterparts to be suspended or expelled in public schools. Changing these odds requires not only addressing disparities in discipline practices, but also lifting up a new narrative of hope, possibility, and brilliance so that young Black men can see and realize their…

This report examines how the nearly 1 million Black youth in California are faring from preschool through college and reveals the distressing disparities that newly released state and national data show persist at all levels of their educational journey. The report also highlights the groundbreaking efforts underway to reverse these trends in…

The current state of low academic achievement among a large majority of African American students is complex. While the U.S. has long professed that a world-class education is the right of every child, there are still major inequities in the education system that leave African American children with fewer opportunities to receive a quality…

There is a long history indicating that during times of reform, the interests and needs of Black children are in many ways dismissed. This history culminated in 1990's to what is described today as the "Math Wars." The underlying narrative focuses on America's national security, technological interests, social efficiency, and…

In order to ensure that American students are competitive with students in other countries, since the 1980s, U.S. policymakers have been trying to improve the K-12 public school system. Recent reform efforts have led to the current high-stakes testing movement, which measures student achievement and school effectiveness mainly by standardized test…

Charles H. Thompson is best known as the founder and the first editor-in-chief of "The Journal of Negro Education" (1932-1963). Throughout his career, Thompson sought to extend educational opportunity in ways that were "for the good of Negro education as a whole." His main concern was in educating future leaders for service in African American…

California touts some of the highest educational standards in the country. Yet when it comes to the state's African-American students, these standards have proved to be little more than a mirage, forever out of reach. This report analyzes the most recent data on African-American achievement and opportunity gaps from the elementary grades through…

There is a disproportional representation of African American students in special education in the United States. Minimal use of differentiated instruction is a common reason for overrepresentation of minority students in special education. I conducted an action research study with elementary school teachers involving differentiated instruction.…

This integrative review uses two of Asa Grant Hilliard's books, "SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind" and "The Maroon Within Us: Selected Essays on African American Community Socialization", to discuss aspects of his scholarly legacy in teaching, history, and psychology. His scholarship is provocative. Hilliard rejected the supremacy of the…

Yes We Can: Improving Urban Schools through Innovative Educational Reform is a empirically-based book on urban education reform to not only proclaim that hope is alive for urban schools, but to also produce a body of literature that examines current practices and then offer practical implications for all involved in this arduous task. This book is…

This article is a retrospective analysis of a commentary we published in "The Journal of Negro Education" 25 years ago in which we discussed the interrelationships between and among the interpersonal, institutional, community, and African American achievement variables before and after the historic 1954 "Brown" decision. We discuss in this piece…

Among the most interesting groups of children in gifted education today are those who are "new Americans"--children of different cultures and different languages. These children bring with them the same talents, gifts, and intellect that other children have; however, the way they manifest their gifts may be somewhat different based on family…