The academic achievement of Black boys in the U.S. has been declining, and Black male mentorship can positively change these outcomes. Schools have tried many interventions to help Black boys receive the academic, social, and emotional support they need to close the performance gap. Some case studies have proven that Black male mentorship works.…

Racially and ethnically minoritized students are now the majority in U.S. public schools. This demographic change, along with heightened attention to racial injustice and evidence regarding the importance of Black teachers, has renewed a decades-old push to increase their numbers. Redesigning teacher education and development to support the…

In a time of growing teacher shortages, Black teachers are rapidly and disproportionately leaving the profession. Drawing upon their interviews with 30 Black teachers in the California Bay Area, Jessica Lee Stovall and Tara R. Sullivan provide insight into what it will take to keep Black teachers in the profession. The interviews depict both the…

Maine's Portland Public Schools has for years been committed to racial equity, but that commitment has been both an asset and a barrier to making the district hospitable to educators of color. The district's progressive and anti-racist stance led many white educators to assume that their colleagues did not experience interpersonal or institutional…

"Kappan"'s editor talks with the distinguished historian Vanessa Siddle Walker about the hidden -- and lost -- tradition of political advocacy by Black educational leaders in the segregated South. To promote equity and excellence for all students, she argues, today's educators will need to recover the sorts of extensive and…

Although we often look to schools to solve complex social problems, many educators are not ready to address the structural racism behind many contemporary conflicts. Pedro Noguera and Julio Angel Alicia present a brief history of the socioeconomic forces that drove school closures and gentrification in Chicago, the remaking of New Orleans after…

Despite the consistent policy focus on diversifying the teacher workforce, this workforce still fails to reflect the diversity of the student body in U.S. public schools. Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald, and Christopher Tien examine the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence supporting the importance of teacher workforce diversity. They…

Teachers in rural, black schools understood their communities and their students and provided lessons that are still relevant today. The three main lessons are to learn and use culturally appropriate teaching, initiate and maintain mutually respectful community connections, and expect great things from every student.

A series of focus groups with black teachers across the United States shows that black teachers bring to their work many skills that often go far beyond their roles as content experts and instructors. They build relationships with students of color that help those students feel connected to their schools, they tend to be "warm…

An undeniable issue of classroom management is the mix of white, middle-class teachers and administrators serving schools and classrooms with significant populations of male students of color. In some ways this is a widely researched and reported topic but rarely do we stop to consider the basic racial dynamic. A panel of African-American (mostly…