education
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PTA in NYC Catches Heat for Using Blackface Photo for Fundraiser Message in the Year of Our Lord 2018
The Facebook post seemed innocuous enough. The parent-teacher association for Public School 118, The Maurice Sendak Community School, in Brooklyn, N.Y., had settled on a theme for its fundraiser: “Speakeasy.” The announcement, posted in January, came with an image broadcasting the date of the event and some 1920s Prohibition-era photos for the themed event. The…
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NYC Investigates Principal Who Barred Black History Month Lessons From Being Taught at Her Middle School: Report
The New York City Department of Education is investigating a white middle school principal in the city’s Bronx borough for racially hostile actions against staff and students of color. The most incendiary charge: that Principal Patricia Catania barred Black History Month lessons from being taught to the students of Intermediate School 224—95 percent of whom…
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Parents Big Mad Over High School Math Teacher’s Drug-Referencing Homework
One high school teacher in Illinois tried an unconventional way of getting students to care about math—drugs. The Roxana, Ill., teacher sent his students home with math homework with word problems centered on cocaine and how much money they might owe a theoretical dealer. Predictably, this created a stir among parents, as ABC affiliate ABC…
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Dear, Teacher: How Does It Feel to Be an Oppressor?
The New York Daily News reported Feb. 1—the start of Black History Month—that a teacher in a majority-minority school in the Bronx, N.Y., instructed three black children in her seventh-grade class to lie on the floor during a lesson on slavery. Then she stepped on the students’ backs, allegedly to show them “how it feels…
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Surprise, Surprise: Survey Reveals That American Students Are Not Being Adequately Taught About Slavery
Water is wet; also, a new survey from the Southern Poverty Law Center has drawn attention to the fact that students in the United States are not being taught the full truth about slavery, leaving them inadequately educated on the subject. Of course, anyone who knows anything about education in the United States is probably…
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‘See How It Feels to Be a Slave?’: NYC Teacher Steps on Student’s Back to Simulate Horrors of Slavery
For the students at Middle School 118 in New York City’s Bronx borough, it was an immersive lesson gone way too far. Teacher Patricia Cummings is catching heat from students and parents after a social studies lesson she delivered about the Middle Passage—one that involved her stepping on her students’ backs. The New York Daily…
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New Report Says White Supremacist Propaganda Spiked on College Campuses Last Year
White supremacist propaganda on college and university campuses increased more than 258 percent in 2017 compared with 2016, according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, the ADL tracked 147 incidents of white supremacist propaganda on campuses during the fall 2017 semester alone. This includes flyers,…
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Low Graduation Rates Aren’t an HBCU Thing
A black woman with a teenage son told me that several people had sent her the recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about black colleges “struggling” with low graduation rates to warn her against sending her son to an HBCU. The article’s headline stated that the six-year graduation rates at “many” HBCUs are lower than 20 percent.…
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Google Looks to Train More Black Engineers, but Will It Hire Them?
Google created Howard West last year as a three-month residency program for rising junior and senior computer science majors at Howard University. Students attended the program on Google’s Bay Area campus and were taught by senior Google engineers as well as Howard faculty. TechCrunc reports that after the success of the first program, the company…
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Report Finds Some HBCUs Graduating Less Than 1 Out of 5 Freshmen Within 6 Years
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, after analyzing federal data tracking graduation and retention rates for HBCUs, came across an alarming finding. At 20 HBCUs, six-year graduation rates were at 20 percent or lower in 2015. To frame it another way, only 1 in 5 enrolled freshmen ended up graduating within six years. For perspective, the 2015 national…