Theme
Which students the ordinary machinery of a school quietly serves.
Journal entries
Oct 7, 2026 · Reading · Research direction
I love Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Dreamkeepers chapter of her culturally relevant teaching work most of all. She found the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children and studied what they did. That is the standard I want my research measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry is the right method for it.
Oct 6, 2026 · Educational equity · Career reflection
My whole career has been about growing in my understanding of fairness versus equity. Fair treatment is not necessarily equitable treatment — students need scaffolds that help them reach their best potential — and I want to understand what that requires in the elite school where I teach.
Sep 4, 2026 · Field thinking · public and private school settings
The demand is heavier, the grace is thinner, and the whole arrangement is delivered as care. I am trying to describe how racialized rigor actually shows up in a building — because until it is describable, it is deniable.
Sep 1, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 24–25
How do we take all of these layers and move toward more equity for neurodiverse students in schools? Start with who gets identified — and who gets sent to me.
Aug 31, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 20–22
The world seems to divide along cultural paradigms about what neurodivergence means — and the older paradigm was never the deficit one.
Aug 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, closing activity
I asked the room to name two or three norms at their workplace that might exclude someone with a different neurocognitive style. Then I had to answer it myself.
Aug 27, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 14–16
Three civil rights leaders who lived the intersection of race, disability, class, and gender — and one quote I have carried my whole life without knowing whose it was.
Aug 26, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, racial justice and intersectionality
Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Donald Galloway did not treat disability rights and racial justice as adjacent causes. My own coursework had.
Aug 24, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, key figures and pioneers
Itard believed empathy and language separated men from beasts. Ninety years later the Supreme Court decided Carrie Buck's rights did not matter. The same logic runs through both.
Jan 24, 2026 · Research Design
I kept reaching for a survey, then stopped. A number can tell me a student feels safe on Tuesday. It cannot tell me why they stopped raising their hand by November.
Nov 18, 2025 · Organizational Culture & Change
I walked in to manage a conversation. I walked out with a genuinely new question about whose expertise counts in a room.
Milestones
Open questions
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Research ideas
emerging
A proposal to build something like ESSA's disaggregated reporting for a school that is not required to produce any — starting with the four levers Barth names (funding, curriculum, teachers, discipline) and adding the discretionary ones my own study is about: extensions, retakes, referrals, and who is offered a scaffold.
exploring
Ladson-Billings's Dreamkeepers teachers saw themselves as members of the community they taught in, and teaching as giving back to it. I want to think about what it would mean to incorporate culturally relevant teaching into the community around my school — and to use narrative inquiry, the method her book is built from, to do it.
emerging
Racialized rigor: when white teachers and administrators place heavier demands on students of the global majority, believing they are preparing them for college and career, while white students in the same building are held to a lighter standard.
exploring
If neurotypical is a norm a society constructed and then called neutral, then every deficit measured against it is measuring distance from power.
emerging
Lawrence Fung's strengths-based model and the LEANS curriculum both exist. The gap is institutional: what a building would have to stop doing to adopt them.
emerging
An intellectual rabbit hole: how the language of rigor gets used to justify withholding support.
Projects
EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education · Fall 2026 · Week 6
A co-presentation with Diana Gaukel tracing neurodiversity from 18th-century institutionalization through Buck v. Bell, IDEA, and the self-advocacy movement, into decolonizing critiques and present-day school practice — closing with positionality and a norms exercise for the room.
Reading & influences
Article · Patte Barth · Center for Public Education
The cleanest working definition I have found: equality is students treated the same with access to similar resources, equity is each student receiving what they need to graduate prepared for life after high school. The brief also names the four levers research connects most strongly to student outcomes — funding, curriculum, teachers, and discipline policies — and the last one is exactly where my dissertation lives. It is written for public school boards, which is why I have to translate it for an independent school where none of those levers is counted in public.
Article · Rui Fu, Stephen S. Leff, Ian C. Carroll, Shelby Brizzolara-Dove, & Kenisha Campbell
A systematic review focused on early adolescence, when racial-ethnic identity is forming and microaggressions do the most developmental damage. Useful to me as a map of what has already been measured in schools — and therefore as the place to check whether anyone has isolated the assumption rather than the act.
Book · Carol Gilligan
Gilligan's argument that women's moral reasoning was measured against a male standard and found deficient — when it was simply different — rhymes with everything I am learning about neurodivergence and about students measured against the white standard. The wrong yardstick is the story of my whole research life.
Article · Kimberlé Crenshaw
Gave me the language and the picture for something my students live: discrimination arrives on several roads at once. Once I had the diagram I could not un-see it in placement decisions.
Article · Krystal Cohen, Princeton University
Race and maternal education showing up as factors in gifted identification. This is opportunity hoarding with a nomination form attached — the same discretion I keep circling in my racialized rigor question, only pointed upward instead of downward.
Person · Cheryl Poe
Grassroots advocacy training for Black families navigating school systems. Her work shows what support looks like when it is built by the community that needs it rather than delivered to them.
Talk · Fannie Lou Hamer
I have heard this line my whole life without knowing whose it was. Knowing she said it while living at the intersection of race, gender, poverty, and disability — including a forced hysterectomy — changes what the sentence weighs.
Talk · Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw
Multiple points of discrimination that intersect and do not operate independently. It moved from something I cited to something that constrains how I would sample and whom I would ask.
Podcast · Maria Davis-Pierre, LMHC; Cheryl Poe, M.A. Urban Ed.
Where I go to correct the whiteness of my reading list. Advocacy and clinical practice in the same voice, aimed at families the research literature keeps under-describing.
Person · Dr. Lawrence Fung, Stanford Neurodiversity Project
Proof that a strengths-based frame can survive contact with an institution. Useful counterweight to my instinct that reframing is only rhetorical.
Article · Assorted articles
Useful corrective. Distributing leadership without distributing time is just distributing work, and I had been sloppy about the difference.
Article · Edward W. Morris & Brea L. Perry, Social Problems
The closest thing I have found to hard evidence for half of racialized rigor. Suspension is not just a response to an achievement gap, it helps produce one — the discipline itself removes learning time and then the lost time is read back as the student's deficiency. If demands are higher and consequences arrive faster, this is the mechanism that turns that into a transcript.
Article · Russell Skiba and colleagues, The Urban Review
The finding I quote most: Black students are not referred for more serious or more objective offenses, they are referred more often for the subjective ones — disrespect, defiance, excessive noise. Categories that require an adult to interpret tone. Twenty-plus years old and my building's referral codes still read like the list in this paper.
Book · Monique W. Morris
Corrects my default image of the punished student. Black girls are disciplined for being loud, unladylike, or insufficiently deferential — a standard that is racial and gendered at once. Reading this next to Crenshaw is what convinced me racialized rigor cannot be studied without intersectionality doing real analytic work.
Talk · Gloria Ladson-Billings, AERA Presidential Address
Reframes the whole vocabulary. A gap sits between two groups and implies somebody should catch up; a debt sits on the institution and implies somebody owes. If I am going to coin a term, this is the standard — the name should locate the problem in the right place. Racialized rigor has to point at the adults.
Book · Prudence L. Carter & Kevin G. Welner, editors
My reference shelf for the inputs side. Useful counterpressure on my own idea: much of the harm is under-resourcing and low expectations, not over-demanding. Racialized rigor only earns its keep if it names something these chapters do not already cover — that is the test I keep failing to fully pass.
Article · Bettina L. Love, Education Week
Short, and it stung. Gap language keeps the conversation comparative and comfortable; harm language forces a question about who did what to whom. It is also a warning for me — a coined phrase can become another polite euphemism if I let it.
Website · Sins Invalid
The movement that grew out of — and past — the disability rights framework I presented in Week 6. Its insistence on intersectionality, leadership of the most impacted, and anti-capitalist critique of "productivity" keeps surfacing in my thinking about who schools are built to reward. This is where disability rights stops being a checklist and becomes a lens.
Book · Thomas Armstrong
The practical companion to the conceptual work. Armstrong's "positive niche construction" — changing the environment to fit the learner instead of fixing the learner to fit the environment — is exactly the move racialized rigor refuses to make: it demands the student adapt to a standard instead of asking whether the standard is just.
Article · Article on neurodiversity-affirming teaching
Argues that neurodiversity should be taught to everyone in the room, not delivered as a service to a labeled few — the LEANS curriculum idea. If difference is ordinary, then the "extra" demands and "extra" grace in a classroom become visible as choices, and choices can be studied.
Article · Thomas S. Dee
Evidence that being assigned a teacher of one's own race measurably changes achievement for Black and white students. Directly relevant to my mostly white faculty: if teacher race shapes outcomes at scale, then the interpretation and grace decisions inside a classroom are never race-neutral, no matter how kind the teacher.
Article · Gloria Ladson-Billings
The 1995 foundation: academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness — all three, not one. It gives me a way to ask whether our rigor is actually rigorous, or just more compliance in whiter packaging.
Book · Gloria Ladson-Billings
The book I keep returning to. Ladson-Billings asked parents and principals to name the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children, then studied what those teachers did. They saw teaching as giving back to the community, believed every child could learn, and held academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness together. This is the standard I want my research to be measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry fits: the whole book is built from teachers' stories.
Book · April Baker-Bell
Connects language to everything else I study: when we correct Black students' language 'for their own good,' we are doing benevolent harm in the register of grammar. Racialized rigor lives in red pens, not only in referrals.
Book · Geneva Gay
The theory side of the same coin as Ladson-Billings: teaching through students' cultural frames of reference is not lowering the bar — it is the only way most students ever reach it. A direct counter to the 'rigor means ignoring culture' instinct.
Book · H. Richard Milner IV
Milner takes poverty seriously without treating it as destiny, and insists the curriculum is where race gets taught whether we mean to or not. This is where my private-school setting fits: affluence on campus does not exempt students from race — it just changes the mechanism.
Article · Katherine Probherbs & Jody Freeman
One of the few sources that names private schools specifically: racial discrimination in independent schools has measurable mental-health costs. Closest to home of anything on this list — the harm I am studying is not abstract.
Article · Jordan G. Starck, Travis Riddle, Stacey Sinclair, & Natasha Warikoo
Large-scale evidence linking county-level implicit teacher bias to racial achievement gaps. This is the quantitative spine for my claim that perception gaps between teachers and students are not just interpersonal noise — they pattern, at scale.