It's
Our Time: The Empathy Gap for Girls of Color
Who better to talk about the challenges and opportunities
young women of color face in education than the young women
themselves? As part of an ongoing project, the Wellesley
Centers for Women partnered with Boston-based Teen Voices to
produce a short film featuring teens "as the experts and
agents of their own learning experiences, offering examples
of effective strategies and solutions for closing the
opportunity gap." The goal of the project is to promote
public discourse about barriers to educational equity for
girls of color and push for change in education policy and
practice. Watch
it here> |
40
Years Later, Where Do We Stand?
By Nakisha Lewis, Schott Foundation for Public Education
2012 marked the 40th anniversary of the passage of Title IX
of the Education Amendments, which were established to
protect people from discrimination based on sex in education
programs or activities. The passage of this law allowed us
to formally acknowledge and address through legislation the
disparities that exist in our education system for women and
girls. Decades later, progress has been made, but as
evidenced by the continued complaints and subsequent
investigations of school districts by the United States
Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights,
barriers to educational success for young women still
remain. Read
more> |
Where
Do We Go From Here? Philanthropy & Black Male
Achievement
In the forward to a new report by the Open Society
Foundation (OSF) and the Foundation Center, Shawn Dove,
Campaign Manager for OSF's Campaign for Black Male
Achievement, writes: "The spirit of Dr. King’s 'fierce
urgency of now' declaration prompted the Campaign for Black
Male Achievement to commission the Foundation Center to
research and assess the current state of philanthropic
investments that specifically respond to the crisis facing
black men and boys in America. This report describes recent
philanthropic investments and innovations in the field of
black male achievement." Read
more> |
Breaking
Down Barriers:
Girls' Equity in Education
The Schott Foundation for Public Education is on the front
lines of the movement to ensure equity for girls in
education, and their Girls' Equity Grant Program was
recently featured in the December 2012 issue of The
Legislator, the publication of the National Black Caucus of
State Legislators! In the article, the Schott Foundation's
Dr. John Jackson and Nakisha Lewis explain that young women
of color face a unique set of challenges in the classroom
that often go unacknowledged in today's education reform
debate. Scott's grant program funds research and grassroots
organizing to better define the issues young women face and
elevate the voices of the young women at the center of these
issues. Read
more> |
The
Black Male Donor Collaborative & Holistic Education
Reform
Community-driven reform and wraparound investments "may rest
at the cutting edge of sustainable innovation in education
reform," writes Nicole W. Sharpe, Director of the New
York-based Black Male Donor Collaborative (BMDC), in a
letter about the need for a holistic approach to education
reform. Underscoring BMDC's work is a commitment to
increasing access to high-quality diverse schools;
developing afterschool programs in high-poverty and
underserved communities; intensive academic supports for
struggling 2nd- to 5th- grade students; and intensive case
management for 6th, 8th, and 9th graders who are falling
behind. Read
more> |
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The
Urgency of Now: New Interactive Website on Black Males
& Public Education
Pop quiz: What
is the high school graduation rate for Black male students
in your state? How about the percent scoring at or above
proficient on the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP)? Don't know? Use this interactive
tool to find out! The website is a complement
to the Schott Foundation for Public Education's recently
released report, The Urgency of Now: The Schott
Foundation 50-State Report on Public Education and Black
Males. Read
more> |
A
Pregnancy Test for Schools
By Fatima Goss Graves & Lara S. Kaufmann, National
Women's Law Center
From "Juno" to "16 & Pregnant," the American public has
been fascinated by the specter of teenage pregnancy.
Unfortunately, the issue of young mothers and their
education has received little attention. Even 40 years after
the passage of Title IX, the landmark federal law that bans
sex discrimination (including pregnancy discrimination) in
schools, pregnant and parenting students continue to be
barred from activities, kicked out of school, pressured to
attend alternative programs, and penalized for
pregnancy-related absences. Read
more> |
Progress
Means Supports, Not Just Standards
An increasing number of individuals and organizations are
realizing that raising standards does nothing to increase
achievement without the necessary supports to meet those
standards. A new initiative called Forward Promise perfectly
illustrates the type of cross-sector, supports-based reform
that our students and communities need to ensure all
students, particularly young men of color, have access to
the resources and opportunities they need to succeed. Read
more> |
Why
We Should Invest in Girls and Women
In a fantastic column, Jennifer Buffett, Co-Chair and
President of the NoVo Foundation, lays out exactly why it is
so vitally important that we empower and support young women
and ensure they have the resources and opportunities they
need to thrive. Young women are "powerful agents for
change," and though their unique situations and challenges
are often overlooked in an education reform debate that
frequently focuses on the plight of young men, they deserve
the same attention and investment in their futures. Read
more> |
Are
Girls Getting Lost in the School-to-Prison Pipeline?
In this first in a series of forthcoming reports from the
African American Policy Forum (AAFP), Monique W. Morris, a
2012 Soros Justice Fellow hosted by AAFP, examines how the
"school-to-prison pipeline" metaphor often fails to consider
the unique position of Black girls in the push to reform
school discipline policies. By ignoring issues of identity
politics and the stereotypes facing young Black women, the
current debate about school discipline leaves Black girls
"in a nebulous space between males and other women, where
they are rendered not only invisible but powerless to
correct course with opportunities that respond to their
triple status as female, as a youth, and as a person of
African descent." Read
more> |
The
District 16 Project: Bottom-Up Grassroots Reform
New York City's Community School District 16 serves a
concentrated population of low-income Black male students.
In the wake of numerous reports illustrating the grim
educational realities for all students in the district, a
coalition of local organizations has formed to try to save
the Bedford-Stuyvesant community schools. The District 16
Project decided that the best way to get to the heart of the
problem was by taking a bottom-up, grassroots approach. Read
more> |
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