(The Root) — Federal mediators and public school administrators in Meridian, Miss., have reached a landmark agreement to launch a rewards-based disciplinary plan, aimed at keeping in the classroom more black students who routinely received harsher disciplinary action when accused of relatively minor infractions. The March 22 consent decree outlined by the U.S. Department of…

Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Click here to read part 1, “Freedom After 40 Years in Solitary?” In December 2012 the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to curb the use of solitary confinement in that state’s prisons, broadly decrying it as “extreme isolation” that imperils the physical and…

Editor’s note: This is the first of two parts. After four decades of solitary confinement in the nation’s most populated maximum-security prison—and one of its most historically brutal—a member of the internationally known “Angola Three” has reasonable cause to expect that he will soon be released, his attorneys and supporters say. The request to set…

As it faces a possible lawsuit over the alleged hazing death of one of its Marching 100 band members, Florida A&M University has formed an independent, anti-hazing committee charged with creating a template whose potential uses extend beyond FAMU into a collegiate world where hazing is pervasive, committee members said. “Our job is to come…

Lest anyone forget, Bill Cosby is still a comic. “I’m going down there to make people laugh,” he told The Root, a few days prior to a mid-January performance for a North Carolina audience that is paying to hear Cosby’s comedy. From his Massachusetts home, he was winding down an almost hourlong conversation in which…

During the holiday meals of B. Smith‘s western-Pennsylvania girlhood, the children of her extended clan learned some essential lessons: How to set a table. How to arrange flowers. Which dishes had been prepared by whom. How to chat with the one adult who invariably sat at the children’s table, signifying the next generation’s importance in…

Several years ago, Louisiana State University nixed an open-enrollment rule that had granted admission and ample financial aid to any applicant who was a state resident. Eliminating that rule was the prudent thing to do, given the tally of remedial students who entered the university but never got up to par academically, said Mary Alice…