The achievement gap between black and white students has frustrated educators and policymakers alike for decades. Although the number of black students at American colleges has reached an all-time high, less than half of those students are expected to make it to graduation. Stanford psychologists Greg Walton and Geoff Cohen believe one way to help close the gap is to change the way students think about school. In a recently published paper in Science, they explain how an intervention lasting only one hour boosted the grades of minority students over three years and cut the racial ... Read More
Minority Teachers: Hard to Get and Hard to Keep
December 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"Our teachers should be excellent, and they should look like America,” said the Secretary of Education in 1998, during the administration of President Bill Clinton. It was an admirable goal, backed by federal money, yet it is still out of reach today despite a ballooning number of minority teachers in the workplace. Too many are going in one door and out the other, researchers say. “Teachers of color are literally at risk: They’re leaving, and they’re leaving in droves,” said Betty Achinstein, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the co-author of ... Read More
The Revolution Will Be Mapped
December 28, 2009 • By • 14 Comments
To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks. Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw ... Read More
Breaking the Minority Attorney Drought
August 18, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Sonia Sotomayor may be the first Hispanic female nominated for the Supreme Court, but she's unusual in another way: She's a minority who made it past the law school gate. The American Bar Association's Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity reported that in 2000 (the last year statistics were compiled based on U.S. Census data), only 9.7 percent of attorneys in the U.S. were minorities; that breakdown showed 4 percent of attorneys were African American, 3.3 percent Hispanic and the remainder of the minority contingent Asian American. These rates were starkly lower than for other ... Read More
Broadening ‘Diversity’ at Universities
June 24, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
See Part One of our three-part series on affirmative action. In a May 2007 interview, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Barack Obama whether his daughters should enjoy the benefits of affirmative action. His answer, essentially, was no. "My daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as pretty advantaged," he said. While noting "there are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling, white kids who have been brought up in poverty and shown they have what it takes to succeed" deserve to have their difficult backgrounds taken into account when college ... Read More
Your Best School May Not Be Among Best Schools
June 23, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
See Part One and Part Three of our three-part series on affirmative action. Groucho Marx's quip "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member" is considered a classic confession of low self-esteem. But what if the quick-witted man with the mustache was right? What if turning down an invitation from a prestigious organization — say, an educational institution — is ultimately in one's self-interest? That appears to be the case for some students accepted into top-tier law schools as part of an affirmative action program, said law professor Richard ... Read More
Affirmative Action: Shifting Attitudes, Surprising Results
June 20, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
See Part Two and Part Three of our three-part series on affirmative action. The United States of America, by design, does not have a ruling class. We take pride in our national ethos of economic and social mobility, which makes it possible to rise from poverty and privation to positions of power. Bill Clinton’s life story reflects that arc; so does Barack Obama’s. However, it is unlikely either man could have honed his innate talents without access to an excellent education. Clinton went to Georgetown, Oxford and Yale; Obama attended Columbia and Harvard. As both men were acutely ... Read More
