Theme
Heavier demands and harsher consequences for students of the global majority, delivered as benevolence.
Journal entries
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.
Open questions
Research ideas
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.
Reading & influences
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 · 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 · 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 · 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.
Book · Amanda E. Lewis & John B. Diamond
The book that gave me the words opportunity hoarding in a school building rather than an economics paper. Well-resourced, self-consciously progressive school; white parents work the system for AP placements, exceptions, and second chances, and Black students meet the rules as written. The good intentions are real. So is the sorting. This is the private-school half of my question.
Book · Ann Arnett Ferguson
Ethnography, so it shows the thing that referral data can only imply: adults deciding, in the moment, which eleven-year-old is being a kid and which one is being a problem. "Adultification" is the term I was missing. It also models the method I would need if I studied racialized rigor honestly — you have to be standing there.
Article · Luigi Esposito & Victor Romano, The Western Journal of Black Studies
The theoretical name for the part of racialized rigor I find hardest to say out loud. Harm delivered sincerely, as help, by people who would fail any test of explicit bias. "I'm hard on him because the world will be" is a sentence I have said myself. I need to be able to critique it without pretending I stood outside it.
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.
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.