Americans agree that schools should teach about historic racism and slavery, but divided on present-day racism, writes Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat. He analyzed 20 polls. Should racism be taught as history or current events? Americans disagree. People also disagree about whether “schools pay too much or too little attention to race and racism,” he writes. However, “the vast majority of parents also said their child’s school does at least a decent job keeping them abreast of curri

Joy Pullman rants well. In The Federalist, she takes on social justice math. University of Illinois Professor Rochelle Gutierrez, who teaches future teachers, will “argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge” in a keynote to the Mathematics Education and Society conference in January, writes Pullman. An education and Latino studies professor, Gutierrez helped write Common Core math tests and served on several National Science Foundation committees. “The Unite

Well, it looks like tracking to me. And I’m fine with it. Jonathan Plucker, a Johns Hopkins education professor, sees “a subtle shift” in the last four years from boosting minimum competency to challenging achievers. He advocates placing “high-achieving and high-ability students in advanced classrooms for their strongest subjects, but not for every subject,” writes Goldstein. The groupings should be more flexible than the rigid “tracking” of students in decades past, the advo

Math literacy — using numbers to understand real-world problems — should be the goal of high school math classes, concludes a report from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. NCTM critiques the “algebra-geometry-algebra 2 trifecta,” writes Ed Week‘s Stephen Sawchuk. In addition to preparing students for college and careers, math coursework should help students “identify, interpret, and critique math in social, scientific, and political systems; to understand math

America’s history of tracking could doom proposals for youth apprenticeships, writes New America’s Abigail Swisher. Would a robust system of youth apprenticeship, scaled across the country, expand educational and career opportunity for all students, or would it return us to an education model that unfairly sorts and separates students into unequal tracks? In the past, students from low-income and non-white families were the most likely to be labeled “not college material” and

Creating schools that “work for everybody” is a challenge, writes Education Week‘s Catherine Gewertz. When the bell rings at Wheaton North High School, a river of white students flows into Advanced Placement classrooms. A trickle of brown and black students joins them. But mostly, the Latino, African-American, and Asian teenagers file into lower-rung classes. Six years ago, the school eliminated the remedial track. Low achievers, who primarily come from lower-income, minority