Theme
The rule as written, the rule as applied, and the discretion in between.
Journal entries
Open questions
live
live
live
live
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 · 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.
Article · Lindsay Pérez Huber & Daniel Solórzano
Insists microaggressions are not interpersonal accidents but the everyday surfacing of a racial hierarchy — structure appearing in a sentence. This is my defense against the objection that micro-assumptions are just individual bad habits. They are a system running through individual heads.
Article · Jason Okonofua, Gregory Walton & Jennifer Eberhardt, Perspectives on Psychological Science
This is the piece that keeps me from writing racialized rigor as a story about villains. Two identical infractions, same file, different name at the top — and by the second one the teacher already sees a pattern. It is stereotype plus discretion plus fatigue, looping. My question is whether the same loop runs in the opposite direction with academic demands: the student who is already read as needing toughening gets toughened.
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 · 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 · Stanford Neurodiversity Project
The advocacy arm of the Stanford work — moving neurodiversity from a research topic into institutional practice: hiring, teaching, and campus culture. A model of what it looks like when a university treats neurodivergent people as a community to include rather than a problem to remediate.
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.
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.
Book · Tracey A. Benson & Sarah E. Fiarman
Written for working teachers like me and my colleagues: bias work as a developmental process, not a one-day training. Useful because my dissertation needs a frame my white colleagues can enter without feeling indicted — the door has to be open before the conversation can be honest.
Book · Paulo Freire
From my first presentation: Freire's banking model is the ancestor of every 'sit still and receive' classroom. Dialogue is not a nicety — it is the method. This is why my dissertation treats teacher and student perceptions as data to be put in conversation, not scores to be ranked.
Article · Einar Haugen
A classic from linguistics that I use sideways: when a school borrows the language of equity ('rigor,' 'grit,' 'belonging') but keeps the old structure, the words are loanwords that never assimilate. Language change without structural change.
Book · Philip W. Jackson
Where the 'hidden curriculum' comes from — the lessons school teaches that are never in the syllabus: waiting, compliance, being evaluated. Racialized rigor is a hidden curriculum finding, which is why this old book is still on my desk.
Talk · Kevin Kumashiro
Kumashiro's lecture framing Freire for educators now — including his argument that real learning is a form of crisis, and comfort is not the goal. It steadied my thinking on hard conversations: the discomfort of dialogue is a feature, not a failure.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV & Judson C. Laughter
The title is my dissertation in six words. Good intentions are the operating system of schools like mine — and they are not enough. This gives me the literature base for treating benevolence as a mechanism of harm, not a character trait.
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 · 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 · Kevin Kumashiro
Kumashiro's four approaches to anti-oppressive education — education for the Other, about the Other, critical of privileging and Othering, and education that changes students and society. The last two are where my dissertation lives: the problem is not only what students learn about others, but what they learn about themselves as the default.
Book · Kevin Kumashiro
The book that says the 'commonsense' practices — the routines, the praise, the grading — are precisely where oppression hides, because they feel natural to the people they work for. My micro-assumptions idea is downstream of this: the assumption feels like common sense, which is exactly why it has to be written down and examined.