"'The historical contributions of Black people need to be integrated into the curriculum,' said Dionne Grayman, a staff developer at Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility in New York City. Before the country can move past racial harm, Grayman, who trains schools to have difficult conversations about race, said there needs to be 'truth, then accountability and then maybe reconciliation.'"
"Education experts and Black parents say decades of racism, institutionalized segregation and mistreatment of Black children, as well as severe underinvestment in school buildings, have left Black communities to doubt that school districts are being upfront about the risks."
As Americans survey the damage to our democracy, how much can we blame schools for the vast divide between how different groups understand our shared history? Should we expect schools to develop engaged and responsible democratic citizens? And what happens when we don’t? How much of the polarization, lost faith in our electoral system and rise of political extremism can we attribute to what students learned — or didn’t learn — in school?
"For Black and white students, anti-blackness is internalized by the age of five. Breaking that cycle will take years of professional development to create anti-racist and cultural environments to help these kids."
