Theme
What a school counts, what it refuses to count, and what the numbers cannot say alone.
Journal entries
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 28, 2026 · Reading reflection · Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement was not a spontaneous eruption led by a few famous people, and it did not end neatly. I am reconsidering the first words, images, and people in my own unit — and what those choices have taught students to see.
Sep 27, 2026 · Reading reflection · Critical digital literacy
Reading more deeply about critical digital literacy has changed how I understand the production, authentication, and circulation of knowledge. Every account arrives through a lens; digital literacy asks who shaped that lens, who benefits from it, and what becomes possible when more people can answer back.
Sep 25, 2026 · Research idea · school demographic data
In 2018 our girls basketball team was predominantly white — I don't think there was a single Black player. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black, more highly skilled, and last year we won state for the first time in school history. I want to study the data behind that change.
Aug 30, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 19
Early in the research it was clear whose voices carried. I am trying not to judge — I just wonder.
Open questions
live
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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.
emerging
A structured review of the first names, images, questions, and verbs in my Civil Rights Movement unit — testing whether the curriculum presents people as organizers with agency or as icons and suffering bodies.
exploring
A developing frame for studying not only whether information is accessible online, but who produced it, whose knowledge authenticates it, which systems amplify it, and whether people can answer back.
emerging
A descriptive study of my own school's changing demographics since 2018 — enrollment, rosters, courses, clubs, discipline — sparked by watching the girls basketball team go from predominantly white in 2018 to mainly Black and state champions for the first time in school history.
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.
Website · U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights
The federal government's own account of what the civil rights laws did in schools: enforcement removed barriers that had legally shut doors, and the Office for Civil Rights exists to keep those doors open. I am reading it for the distinction it forces on me — the language is almost entirely about access, and access is the floor of equity, not the finish. A page dated August 2025 is also a reminder that enforcement priorities shift with administrations, so a school that treats federal pressure as its only reason to look will stop looking the moment the pressure lifts.
Website · U.S. Department of Education
ESSA is where equity becomes a reporting obligation: results are broken out by subgroup, so a claim that everyone is treated fairly turns into a number anyone can look up. That is the discipline I want for my own building. The catch is jurisdiction — the testing-and-reporting machinery attaches to public schools and the agencies that fund them, and most independent schools sit outside it. In my school nobody is required to count anything, which means equity work has to be chosen rather than compelled. That is a harder and more interesting question than compliance.
Book · Joy Buolamwini
Buolamwini's account keeps my reflection on belonging accountable to power. Feeling socially outside is real, but it is not interchangeable with racialized and gendered exclusion. Her work asks who technology recognizes, whose intelligence receives legitimacy, and who bears the cost when systems reproduce an unequal gaze.
Article · Douglas Kellner & Jeff Share
This is the clearest scholarly foundation for what I am trying to say: digital literacy cannot stop at operating a tool or checking a source. It has to ask how media construct reality, how power shapes representation, and how learners can become producers rather than passive consumers. The emancipatory promise and the obligation to verify belong together.
Book · Michel Foucault
Foucault keeps me from treating information as separate from authority. Who can name something, classify it, publish it, suppress it, or make it searchable is part of what that knowledge becomes. Digital platforms distribute voice, but they also build new and often invisible forms of control.
Book · Aldon D. Morris
Morris's Indigenous Perspective explains collective action through the institutions, leadership, relationships, and resources developed within Black communities. Here indigenous means internally generated, not Indigenous or Native identity. This helps me read digital organizing as strategy and infrastructure rather than spontaneous crowd behavior.
Article · Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, & Bernhard Jenny
A map is a powerful lesson in constructed knowledge. Every projection enlarges, compresses, or distorts something; the familiar view only feels neutral because I learned it first. Equal Earth gives me a concrete visual analogy for reading a news feed: ask what the representation makes large, what it makes small, and who chose the frame.
Article · Derald Wing Sue, Christina M. Capodilupo, Gina C. Torino, et al.
The foundational taxonomy — microassault, microinsult, microinvalidation — and the source of the line I cannot stop thinking about: that the perpetrators are usually well-intentioned people unaware of the harm. This is the article my micro-assumptions idea has to argue with. Sue names what is said; I am trying to name what was assumed a half-second before.
Article · Jackson A. Collins & Howard C. Stevenson
593 students of color in predominantly white independent schools — my exact setting, with numbers. It measures their confidence in noticing microaggressions, reframing them, and confronting them, and links school-climate perception to belonging through racial stress. The phrase "bracketed commitment to diversity" describes more independent schools than will admit it.
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 · Dorothy E. Roberts
Complicates my thread in a useful way: silence is not only submission — it can be chosen, strategic, protective, a form of resistance. If I study silence in my students, I have to be careful not to read every quiet student as voiceless. Some are holding their voice on purpose.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
This is the methodological spine of my dissertation. Researching the self, then the self in relation to others, then shifting from self to system — it is why the study is a self-study of my own classroom rather than an audit of somebody else's. The dangers I am least likely to see are my own.
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.
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 · Charles Tilly
Where opportunity hoarding comes from originally. Inequality lasts because it gets built into the ordinary categories organizations use to sort people — not because anyone renews their prejudice each morning. Useful to me because it explains how a school can change every adult in the building and keep producing the same pattern.
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.
Video · Cheryl Poe & Maria Davis-Pierre
Two Black advocates naming what the mainstream neurodiversity conversation leaves out: that Black families fight a different battle for diagnosis, services, and belief. It grounds the "missing voices" slide from my presentation — the internet built community for many neurodivergent people, but access to that community, and to being heard in it, was never evenly distributed.
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 · Sarah Clark & Megan Soutter
A useful caution for my research vocabulary: schools love 'growth mindset' talk, but demanding risk-taking from students who are punished more harshly for mistakes is not mindset work — it is racialized rigor wearing a motivational poster.
Article · Carol Goodenow
One of the foundational belonging studies: students' felt membership predicts motivation and achievement. It anchors the private-school side of my question — belonging there is conditional and priced, so measuring it carefully matters.
Website · National Center for Education Statistics
The demographic ground truth for my dissertation setting: who actually attends and teaches in U.S. private schools. When I write 'a mostly white faculty serving a diversifying student body,' this is the dataset I will cite.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
The uncomfortable one: institutions — and people — move toward racial justice when it also serves their interests. Milner applies Derrick Bell's interest convergence to teacher education itself. It explains why schools like mine adopt the language of equity easily and the redistribution of grace slowly.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
Milner arguing that reflection is not neutral — what a teacher notices, names, and remembers is shaped by cultural context. For my decision logs this is the caution: my reflection can itself be a racialized act, so I pair it with student accounts and a critical friend.
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.
Article · Chinwe J. Uwah, H. George McMahon, & Christopher F. Furlow
Belonging predicting aspirations and self-efficacy for Black boys specifically — the students most exposed to racialized rigor in my own building. Gives my student-interview protocol a validated construct to listen for.
Article · Roy F. Baumeister & Mark R. Leary
The foundational claim underneath all belonging theory: belonging is not a preference or a school-climate nicety but a fundamental human motivation, and deprivation has real cognitive and emotional costs. If that is true, then a school that makes belonging expensive for some students is not just unkind — it is taxing the thing learning runs on.
Article · Karen F. Osterman
The review that moved belonging from social psychology into education: students who experience belonging are more engaged, more motivated, and more willing to ask for help — and the adults' behavior is a major determinant. That last part is the hook for my study: belonging is something teachers do or withhold, not something students bring.
Article · Gregory M. Walton & Geoffrey L. Cohen
The belonging-uncertainty experiments: Black students' achievement was dragged down not by ability but by persistent doubt about whether they fit — and a brief, well-timed intervention closed much of the gap. This is the mechanism my micro-assumptions idea needs: small daily signals accumulate into a verdict about whether you belong, and the verdict does academic damage.
Book · Terrell L. Strayhorn
Strayhorn defines belonging as students' perceived social support on campus — a felt sense of being cared about, accepted, and mattering — and shows it is especially consequential for marginalized students. His framework gives my interview protocol language for what to ask: not 'do you feel welcome' but 'who here would notice if you were gone.'
Article · Kelly-Ann Allen, Margaret L. Kern, Christopher S. Rozek, Dennis M. McInerney, & George M. Slavich
The meta-analytic check on my enthusiasm: belonging interventions work, but effects are modest and uneven, and teacher support is one of the strongest levers. Keeps me honest — belonging is real and measurable, not a magic variable, and the teacher's daily behavior is exactly where the effect lives.
Article · Aldon Morris
Morris — the sociologist of the civil rights movement as an organized, indigenous, strategic effort — traces the line from Emmett Till and Rosa Parks through to Black Lives Matter. Two things I keep turning over: his account of Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician of the March on Washington who could not safely be made the public face of the movement because he was gay; and the dismantling of the collective-behavior picture of protest as spontaneous emotion. Movements succeed through planning and discipline. Whoever gets described as irrational gets managed instead of heard — which is exactly the mechanism my racialized rigor work studies at classroom scale.
Article · John D. McCarthy & Mayer N. Zald
Resource mobilization theory gives me a direct challenge to accounts of protest as irrational crowd behavior. Movements acquire resources, build organizations, cultivate relationships, make strategic choices, and sustain action under pressure. Teaching that infrastructure restores thought and agency to people whom a cleaned-up curriculum too often presents only as victims or symbols.