We must be about the business of liberating the minds of Black children. In order for that to occur, the minds of all Blacks who interact with them must also be liberated. There is no other way. – Bobby E. Wright Recently...
Category - Higher Standards
If you’re not already aware, right before the new year a Black man was arrested at a Huntington Bank in Cleveland, Ohio, for cashing his check. Let that sink in. For cashing a check he earned, he was arrested. Over the course...
Robert Parker, a veteran educator, calls out college exam proctors for attempting to marginalize some of his students. In this open letter, Robert confronts the proctors and challenges them to improve their mindsets about Black...
I’ve written about teacher accountability before, but I recently read a few things that got me thinking. The first was a report out of Los Angeles that showed that nearly half the teachers in Los Angeles’...
Education Week likes to frustrate me in the morning. Reading their article today about the retreat of the anti-testing suburban opt-out movement, I should have been happy, but a few word-bytes in it are restating flimsy...

I’ve Got Some Extra Teacher Appreciation for Those Teachers Who Are Uplifting Our Black and Brown Students
This week was Teacher Appreciation Week, one of my favorite weeks. After all, it honors a profession that should be considered one of the most important vanguards of our communities. They have one of the hardest and most...
It would be so easy to stop caring about race. Yes, I can only say this because I’m White. Yes, I can only say this because I’ve been so tempted so many times. It would be so easy, and I wouldn’t even have to make a big...
By last December, the fall of my ninth year of teaching high school, I had been observed by teacher coaches, visitors from educational non-profit organizations, principals and assistant principals, no fewer than 15 times. Each...

Do You Know This Hidden Figure? Meet Legendary Resister, Dr. Anna Julia Cooper – A Black Educator Hall of Famer
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.” A multitude of hidden figures silently loom in our shadows, yet those...
“After 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching…is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented. The...