Theme
What a school counts, what it refuses to count, and what the numbers cannot say alone.
Journal entries
Reading & influences
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.