All Articles Tagged "education equality"
Soledad O’Brien Is Now A Harvard Fellow
Soledad O’Brien has been named Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2013-2014 school year at The Harvard Graduate School of Education. According to a press release statement from the school’s dean Kathleen McCartney, O’Brien’s qualifications for the honor include her work on the Black In America and Latino In America series, which have focused on education equality, and her organization, the Soledad O’Brien and Brad Raymond Foundation (founded with her husband), which helps disadvantaged women attend college.
“At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, O’Brien will explore a wide variety of topics related to public education in America – including the influence of income on educational equality, the role of gender specific education, and efforts to overcome racial and ethnic achievement gaps in education,” the release says.
O’Brien’s CNN program, Starting Point, may have ended last month, but she’s already off and running with her new production company Starfish Media Group, which will continue to produce documentaries for CNN and other outlets. Among the many honorifics bestowed upon O’Brien, she is an Emmy winner (for her coverage of the devastating earthquake in Haiti), was a member of a George Foster Peabody award-winning team that covered the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, and has been selected as Journalist of the Year by The National Association of Black Journalists.
The NAACP Tackles Resegregation At First Education Summit In Three Years
By Brittany Hutson
Today, for the first time in three years, the NAACP will begin their three-day national education summit in Raleigh, NC to address the problems within the nation’s educations system, particularly as it relates to re-segregating schools.
It’s a fight the civil rights organization is no stranger to since they have been advocating against segregation since the passing of Brown v. Brown. The flames were ignited within the last year as the organization brought attention to re-segregation activity in schools in the South, especially in North Carolina. This confirms a January 2009 report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA that stated 40 percent of Latinos And 39 percent of Blacks now attend segregated schools, in which 90 to 100 percent of students are non-White.
Schools rely on code words, such as forced busing and neighborhood schools, to push segregation. According to NAACP North Carolina State Conference President Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, 40 years of research proves that re-segregation is in opposition to equal education. “We can prove that statistically—in North Carolina, there are 44 failing high schools where the graduating rate is less than 50 percent,” he explained. “With re-segregation there is underfunding, high teacher turnover, high suspension and low graduation rates.”
But segregation is only one roadblock on a complex journey to education reform and equality. Barber says the NAACP considers at least eight things that are critical to reform: stopping re-segregation and promoting diversity, equity in funding, high quality facilities and leadership, high quality teachers and smaller classrooms, parental and community involvement; a focus on math, science, history and reading, and addressing the disparities with minorities in graduation, suspension and drop-out rates.
“We need to treat the sickness for the system,” said Barber. “Re-segregation works against holding all those things together.”
Blacks and Latinos Still Locked Out of Elite Colleges
(Color Lines) — A new report shows that blacks and Latinos might be gaining more access to higher education, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gaining access to all tiers of the system. The study, led by Michael Bastedo, a professor at the University of Michigan, says that even though college-going rates for blacks and Latinos are on the rise, they’ve been accompanied by a parallel increase in admissions standards which have locked them out of the top colleges, and only further entrenched stratification in the higher education world. What people already know is that a college education from a community college is not the same as one from an Ivy League university, let alone one that students get from a private college or a state school. And even though community colleges remain an important entry point for many into higher education, people who start at community colleges end up leaving before obtaining a diploma, and the most selective universities offer long-term benefits—access to networks and opportunities—that go far beyond the classroom.
