Tag: News

  • Let’s Talk About Proxies and Admission (opinion)

    Let’s Talk About Proxies and Admission (opinion)

    The Trump administration has stepped up government scrutiny of college admission. Settlements reached with Brown and Columbia Universities each included a requirement that they pursue “merit-based” admission policies. On Aug. 7, President Trump issued a memorandum requiring colleges and universities to submit data to IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) demonstrating that they are not considering race in admission decisions. The Department of Education has since published in the Federal Register details about the planned data collection, with the public having 60 days to comment. And Attorney General Pam Bondi has entered into the fray by publishing a memo outlining what constitutes unlawful discrimination.

    I will leave it to others to rail against the unprecedented federal attack on higher education and the incursion into admission policies at individual institutions. I would prefer to examine some of the issues and underlying assumptions suggested by these documents.

    The Aug. 7 Presidential Memorandum

    Trump’s memorandum calls for increased transparency to expose practices that are “unlawful” and to rid society of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.” For some reason, it doesn’t say that all racial hierarchies are shameful and dangerous. Is that an oversight or a meaningful omission? The memorandum also asserts without explanation that race-based admission policies threaten national security.

    The call to get rid of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies” is ironic. It is easy to imagine previous administrations using the same phrase to defend the very race-based admission policies that the executive order now seeks to abolish. “Shameful” and “dangerous” are in the eye of the beholder, and may not be color-blind.

    What is not clear is how the administration intends to collect and analyze the data, given its efforts to gut the Department of Education. As Inside Higher Ed has reported, the National Center for Education Statistics had been decimated, with a staff of more than 100 reduced to a skeleton crew of three employees.

    The Bondi Memo

    Attorney General Bondi’s July 29 memorandum offered guidance to federal agencies about practices that may constitute illegal discrimination at colleges and other entities receiving federal funds. A lot of it is rehashed, targeting popular straw men/persons like DEI programs and transgender athletes (and bathrooms).

    What is interesting is Bondi’s take on what she calls “unlawful proxy discrimination,” defined as the use of “facially neutral criteria” that function as “proxies” for race or other protected characteristics. Per the memo, examples in higher education may include things like requiring diversity statements in hiring or essay questions asking applicants to reflect on their unique identity or to write about obstacles they have overcome.

    On a surface level, Bondi is right that those can become back doors to identify an individual’s race. At the same time, knowing the obstacles an individual has overcome is essential to understanding his or her unique story, and race would seem to be one of the factors that can heavily influence that story.

    Where Bondi goes off the rails is in maintaining that what she calls “geographic targeting” may constitute a potentially unlawful proxy. She is suggesting that recruitment or outreach in schools and communities with high levels of racial minorities may be illegal. That is preposterous. Trying to expand access to education through outreach is in no way comparable to reverse engineering an admission process to arrive at a desired class composition.

    Taken to its logical extreme, Bondi’s guidance would prevent colleges from recruiting not only at inner-city schools with a large percentage of Black students, but also at suburban schools with a large percentage of affluent white students. Both could be examples of what she calls “geographic targeting.” For that matter, colleges might be in violation for asking for an applicant’s address, because ZIP code information can be used as a proxy for determining race and socioeconomic status.

    New Data Collection Requirements

    As for data collection for IPEDS, the administration has proposed a new “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement,” or ACTS. ACTS will require targeted colleges and universities to report data in the following categories, disaggregated by race and sex:

    • Admissions test score quintile
    • GPA quintile
    • Family income range
    • Pell Grant eligibility
    • Parental education

    It will also ask for information to be broken down for early decision, early action and regular admission as well as institutional need-based and merit aid. What’s missing? Legacy status and athletic recruits, both categories that benefit white applicants. At some of the Ivies, between 10-20 percent of the undergraduates are athletes, many in “country club” sports where most of the competitors are wealthy and white, and the proportion of athletes is even higher at the highly selective liberal arts colleges that make up the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Discovery in SFFA v. Harvard revealed that recruited athletes had an 86 percent admit rate. You don’t have to have had an uncle who taught at MIT to know that is substantially higher than the overall admit rate.

    ACTS will apparently apply only to “all four-year institutions who utilize selective college admissions,” which the administration maintains “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws.” That may at first glance seem to be singling out elite, “name” colleges, and that’s probably the intent, but it also reflects a recognition that the vast majority of institutions couldn’t practice race-based admission even if they wanted to because they are too busy filling the class to worry about crafting the class.

    The focus on selective institutions will both make it easy to score political points and hard to derive meaning from the data. Selectivity, especially at the 5-10 percent level, makes it impossible to know why any individual is or isn’t admitted. Admission deans at the highly-selective (or rejective) universities report that they could fill several additional freshman classes from among those applicants who have been waitlisted or denied.

    Merit-Based Admission

    The real target of the push for “merit-based” admission may be holistic review. A holistic admission process allows colleges to take into consideration nuances in an individual’s background and life experiences. It can also be frustrating for applicants, since different individuals are admitted for different reasons. The government may be pushing consciously or unconsciously for a more formulaic selection process.

    But would that be any better? Even if you focus only on grades and test scores, should you put more weight on a three-hour test or on four years of high school? How do you compare applicants from schools with different grading scales and levels of academic rigor? Should a test score obtained after thousands of dollars in test prep count the same as an identical score without coaching?

    How do we distinguish between merit and privilege? Those who have strong test scores may be more likely to believe that test scores are a measure of merit, and yet test scores are strongly correlated with family income. Those who are born into wealth and privilege may come to believe that their good fortune is a proxy for merit, buying into a perverse and self-serving interpretation of John Calvin’s doctrine of the elect. They may see themselves as deserving rather than lucky.

    Proxies in Admission

    We need a larger discussion about proxies in college admission. Advanced Placement courses are a proxy for a rigorous curriculum. GPA is a proxy for academic accomplishment, and yet means little without understanding context. Similarly, SAT scores are often seen as a proxy for ability, despite the fact that the College Board long ago abandoned the pretense that the SAT measures “aptitude.” The U.S. News & World Report college rankings have always relied on proxies, such as alumni giving as a proxy for alumni satisfaction when it may be more a measure of the effectiveness of the development office. Selectivity is a proxy for academic quality—feeding into the belief that the harder a place is to get in, the better it must be. Are proxies for race any more problematic than these other proxies?

    The larger question here is what should the selective college admission process be a proxy for. Should we seek to reward students for past performance? Predict who will earn the best grades in college? Identify those students who will benefit the most from the college experience? Or predict who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?

    I’m waiting for an executive order or memo or even a discussion among college admission professionals about what the selective admission process should represent and what proxies will support those goals.

    Jim Jump recently retired after 33 years as the academic dean and director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va. He previously served as an admissions officer, philosophy instructor and women’s basketball coach at the college level and is a past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He is the 2024 recipient of NACAC’s John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award.

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  • California Schools Brace for Fallout from SCOTUS Decision on Religious Rights – The 74

    California Schools Brace for Fallout from SCOTUS Decision on Religious Rights – The 74

    Two months after the U.S. Supreme Court granted public school parents the right to withdraw their children from materials and discussions on LGBTQ+ issues and other subjects that conflict with their “sincerely held religious beliefs,” conservative leaders in California are predicting schools will be swamped with opt-out demands. 

    That hasn’t happened yet, but attorneys agree that this latest escalation of the culture wars will likely cause turmoil, confusion, and years of litigation, largely because the court offered no guidance on how opt-out requests should be handled, how religious belief claims can or should be verified, and how schools should handle potential logistical issues.

    “There is a lot of trepidation about how to handle this issue in a way that is legally compliant and doesn’t trigger a backlash from one side of the issue or the other,” Troy Flint, a spokesperson for the California School Boards Association, told EdSource via email Saturday night.

    “Superintendents have concerns about how to make a fact-specific determination regarding parent requests, and we have heard of districts getting threats of litigation from both sides,” he said.

    LGBTQ+ advocates and defenders of the state’s progressive school standards are threatening discrimination lawsuits if opt-outs are granted, Flint said. Parents are threatening to sue if they aren’t granted immediately.

    In most districts, he added, leaders “are hesitant to address this publicly for fear of attracting more scrutiny and making the issue even more difficult to manage.”

    A leading academic on education law said that while the Supreme Court decision was based on parental objections to LGBTQ+ books and lessons, the religious opt-outs are likely to have a broader reach.

    “It is deeply misguided for people to believe that this case is only about LGBTQ+ and equality,” Yale Law School professor Justin Driver told EdSource. The decision “sweeps, given the prevalence of deeply felt religious objections, to lots of material,” he said.

    It could “affect everything from reading to science, to literature to history. It’s difficult to overstate the significance of the decision,” Driver said. “Some people think Bert and Ernie are gay. Is ‘Sesame Street’ now suspect?”

    California, for instance, requires students to learn the history of gay people fighting for civil rights and the story of the country’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk. The San Francisco supervisor was assassinated in 1978 and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama.

    Flint said that parents “in at least one district have hinted at trying to expand the opt-out requests to other types of instructional materials.” He did not identify those materials.

    Meanwhile, as school administrators ponder their next steps, firebrand social conservatives are seizing the moment that the nation’s highest court created.

    “There should be opt-outs. There are things that go against what God laid down,” pastor Angelo Frazier, of Bakersfield’s RiverLakes Community Church, said of what’s taught in California schools. 

    “It’s not education. It’s ‘You can touch me here.’ It’s very suggestive and inappropriate.” He said the ruling was a relief to frustrated parents in his congregation. “It gives them breathing room.”

    The leader of a Fresno-based Christian group, long involved in parental rights advocacy, said the state is no longer in charge of what children learn in school.

    The ruling shows that “parents are the ultimate determination of whose values get taught to the child,” said Greg Burt of the California Family Council. “We’re now in charge of deciding what we think is good and what we think is not good.”

    But as opt-outs begin to play out across California’s more than 10,000 public schools as the 2025-26 academic year opens, the only certainty from the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, is that uncertainties abound — and may for years.

    They include:

    • Can or should parents file blanket opt-out requests stating they want their child removed from any and all instruction about LGBTQ+ topics, and leave school personnel to sort it out? Or should schools ask parents to review reading lists — often available online — and let parents flag those items to which they object? 
    • What do school leaders do with students whose parents opt them out of a class? Their class time still needs to be used for instruction. Where do they go?
    • Who watches or instructs the youngest of removed students, who can’t be left unsupervised? Some of the books cited in the Supreme Court case, including ones about a child’s favorite uncle marrying a man and a puppy getting lost at a Pride parade, are used in kindergarten and even transitional kindergarten classes.
    • Will school districts need to budget money to defend lawsuits from parents whose opt-out requests may be denied? 
    • Can parents even attempt to opt out their child from exposure to an LGBTQ+ teacher, or a teacher who displays a Pride flag in a classroom?

    Lawyers and academics interviewed for this story said that Justice Samuel Alito’s decision, joined by the court’s five other conservatives, offered little guidance on how opt-outs should work.  

    Mahmoud v. Taylor happened because the Montgomery County schools in suburban Maryland created an opt-out program to appease parents who objected to the teaching of LGBTQ+ materials on religious grounds. But the program ended in less than a year. Alito noted in his decision that school officials found that “individual principals and teachers could not accommodate the growing number of opt-out requests without causing significant disruptions to the classroom environment.” Parents then sued.

    Focusing largely on principles of religious freedom, Alito’s decision doesn’t specifically address how opt-outs might work given the Maryland situation, or how claims of a sincerely held religious belief might be evaluated. 

    The high court has long recognized the rights of parents to “direct the religious upbringing of their children,” he wrote, a principle at the case’s core.

    But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonja Sotomayor predicted opt-outs would cause “chaos for this nation’s public schools.”

    Giving parents the chance to opt out of all lessons and story times that conflict with their beliefs “will impose impossible administrative burdens,” Sotomayor wrote. It threatens the very essence of public education.

     “The reverberations of the court’s error will be felt, I fear, for generations.”

    Opting out in California

    Conservative groups in California opposed to LGBTQ+ themed teaching materials are generating letters and emails to school districts for parents to use to demand that school leaders proactively remove children from classes where there might be any mention of gay or transgender people, same-sex marriage and other related topics.

    A nonprofit Riverside County law firm, Advocates for Faith & Freedom, created one such letter, calling for children to be removed from any teaching involving “gender identity, the use of pronouns inconsistent with biological sex, sexual activity or intercourse of any kind, sexual orientation, or any LGBTQ+ topics” so parents can raise children “in the fear and knowledge of the Lord.”

    The letter gives principals 10 calendar days to respond in writing. Lack of a response “will be considered a denial” that will cause parents to “proceed accordingly.”  

    Erin Mersino, an attorney at the firm, said via email, “responses were just starting to come in,” and that it was too soon to discuss the letter’s effectiveness. Other groups are circulating at least four similar opt-out templates or email forms.  

    The 10-day response demand in the nonprofit’s letter “is insufficient in my opinion,” said Mark Bresee, a La Jolla attorney specializing in education law.

    Bresee also questioned if “a blanket, year-long ‘opt-out’ demand” is consistent with Alito’s decision, noting that the justice wrote that the “religious development of a child will always be fact-intensive. It will depend on the specific religious beliefs and practices asserted, as well as the specific nature of the educational requirement or curricular feature at issue.”

    It’s unclear how far and fast those letters are circulating. Some school officials said they have received a few opt-out notices.

    Conservative activist Brenda Lebsack, a Santa Ana Unified School District board member, said mass opt-out requests are unlikely to come until school districts themselves notify parents of the new right the court granted. “Opt-out forms should really be coming from the schools because if you’re getting opt-out forms from all these different law firms, and they’re all different, that could get really confusing,” she said. 

    At the Manteca Unified School District in San Joaquin County, Assistant Superintendent Victoria Brunn said late last week that only one “opt-out request has been received so far. She said the parents who made it were told it would be granted. 

    A spokesperson for the Turlock Unified School District in Stanislaus County said it had received a single inquiry about the opt-out process and created a standard form for requests, but that no requests had been received. Parents can either use the form or email a teacher, citing “specific instructional content” a student should not receive, according to a copy provided to EdSource.

    “Teachers can also provide notice of upcoming curriculum,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

    At the Hope Elementary School District in Santa Barbara County, Superintendent Anne Hubbard created an opt-out form. As of Friday, it had been used once to opt out two children in the same family, she said. 

    Last week, the board of the 85-student Howell Mountain Elementary School District in Napa County canceled plans to create an opt-out form after community objections.

    “Howell Mountain Elementary respects and values the LGBTQ+ community. We will not be adopting any type of opt-out form that specifically targets LGBTQ+ curriculum,” Superintendent Joshua Munoz said in a statement. Instead, the district will remind parents annually that the right to opt out exists, but will not cite any specific curriculum.

    The Press Democrat reported that among those who spoke to the board was a St. Helena High School junior who’d attended Howell Mountain.

    “When I was in seventh grade, I realized that I liked girls,” she said. “In school, the times that we were taught about LGBTQ+ people would remind me that I was not alone. I was not a freak or an alien. I was just me. And I could still do anything I wanted in my life.”

    In San Francisco, Mawan Omar, the parent of a sixth grader, told EdSource he intends to opt his son out of LGBTQ+ materials because the teaching contradicts his family’s Muslim faith.  

    Omar said his son, Hezma, objected on his own to an LGBTQ+ lesson in elementary school because it was contrary to what he had learned from the Holy Quran. “He just didn’t want to be around it because he knows our religion,” Omar said. After what he described as a dispute with the school’s principal, it was agreed informally that Hezma would be allowed to leave any classes involving similar materials.  

    Now, Alito’s decision, Omar said, is gratifying. “We knew all along we were right.”

    But Lebsack, who focuses on transgender issues and has formed an interfaith coalition primarily around them, said Alito’s decision isn’t enough.

    “I think Mahmoud versus Taylor is throwing us crumbs,” she said in an interview. “I mean, I’m grateful for it, but it needs to go much further than that.”

    Lebsack, a special education teacher and former Orange County probation officer, claimed the California Department of Education is ripe to be sued under the First and 14th amendments for “compelling public school students to accept and affirm extremist ideologies of unlimited gender identities” and for “bringing extremist forced teachings into K-12 public education.”

    Asked to respond to Lebsack’s assertion, a spokesperson for the state Education Department directed a reporter to guidance posted online about Alito’s decision. It states, in part, “The California Department of Education and California law continue to promote a safe, fair, and welcoming learning environment in all schools. It is important to note that Mahmoud does not invalidate or preempt California’s strong protections for LGBTQ+ youth from discrimination, harassment, and bullying.” 

    The goal: Banning books?

    Other conservatives said they see a path where Alito’s decision could lead to the removal of books and teaching they oppose by overwhelming schools with opt-outs to the point where the best option is to remove the materials.

    “If there are so many people who want to opt out of this curriculum, maybe we should stop teaching it,” said Julie Hamill, an attorney and president of the California Justice Center. School leaders, she said, should be reflecting on whether they are “doing something wrong as a district and educational entity. Those are questions that are not being asked right now. It’s very obvious that’s what needs to happen.”

    Sonja Shaw, a Chino Valley Unified School District board member running for state superintendent of public instruction in next year’s election, said she wants opt-outs to “overtax the system to where they just give up, and they stop teaching this stuff.”

    If so many opt-outs were filed that books are removed from curricula, that would help, said Burt of the California Family Council, which has urged parents to flood districts with opt-outs. “We’re advocating for good books in school, and we think these are bad books, so we’re not going to be sad if we see them go.”

    But an anti-censorship advocate said that would amount to book banning by a different name. 

    “I’m not at all surprised that this is their plan of attack,” Tasslyn Magnusson, senior adviser to the Freedom to Read team at PEN America, an anti-censorship group, said of conservative activists. “These are books about families. These are books about how we experience the world, and they’re beautiful and well written,” she said. “Remember that it’s important for kids to have a variety of materials in front of them that resonate with their lives and their experiences.”

    Another impact of the opt-outs will be how LGBTQ+ students and students from families with LGBTQ+ members will react when classmates leave and when teaching materials reflecting their lives are presented.

    That could make “a child feel they’re not only different, but that they’re not accepted or that they should be ashamed of the family that they have,” said Jorge Reyes Salinas,  a spokesperson for Equality California, a civil rights group. Although the opt-outs promise to be disruptive, he said, they won’t end the state’s use of an inclusive curriculum. “We’re talking about a very small population of parents that are ignorant and full of hate.”

    The presidents of California’s two largest teachers unions both said educators are not going to fold under pressure created by the high court’s decision.

    “The role of the public school is to help students develop the critical thinking skills and knowledge necessary to engage in a pluralistic democracy,” said Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers. “We cannot have individuals dictating what is the good of the public. It’s also important that our public schools avoid over-compliance and refuse to capitulate to the weaponization of this decision.”

    David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, said that teachers “will obviously follow the law, but we want to make it clear to our members that there are other laws in California around kids’ ability to learn about their own identity, cultures, or all kinds of identities. We’re going to still honor kids’ ability to learn about their own identity and all kinds of identities.”

    Goldberg also said it would be a mistake for school administrators to place the burden of opt-outs on teachers. “Teachers are overwhelmed already, just getting through the curriculum,” he said. Opt-outs are “a compliance thing that districts are going to need to figure out.”

    The Scopes Monkey Trial

    The country has a long history of science clashing with religion.

    Driver, the Yale law professor, noted that in a 1987 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned a lower court that ruled fundamentalist Christians could remove their children from public school lessons that depicted women working outside the home, which they argued conflicted with their religious beliefs. 

    Now, following Alito’s decision in the Maryland case, the losing argument in that case could be successful, Driver said. “It seems to me the Mahmoud versus Taylor decision empowered these sorts of objections to potentially carry the day.”

    Alito’s decision also came 100 years after the landmark court case on the teaching of evolution in public schools — the epic clash of science versus religion known as the Scopes Monkey Trial that pitted legendary lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan against each other. 

    Jennings, hired to prosecute a high school biology teacher, John Scopes, for teaching evolution against state law, won. But Tennessee’s Supreme Court later overturned Scopes’ conviction, ruling that a state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools was unconstitutional.

    But it didn’t end the debate over teaching science in the face of religious beliefs, said Pepperdine University law and history professor Edward Larson, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the trial. When it ended, “school districts all over the country and some states banned the teaching of the theory of human evolution,” he said.

    Even when religious objections were later banned, “a series of state laws and local actions calling for balanced treatment of either teaching creation science, along with evolution, or later intelligent design” followed, Larson said. Several states, including Alabama, require disclaimers in biology books stating evolution “is just a theory,” he said.

    “The issue of evolution in public schools remains a flash point,” Larson said. “It has been for a hundred years, it still is today.”

    As the Alito decision plays out in the coming years, Larson said, “Schools may want to force people to provide all sorts of evidence” to prove their sincerely held religious beliefs. “But I’m thinking that most won’t feel it’s worth their time to get too engaged,” he added. 

    “That’s just inviting trouble.” 


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  • LGBTQ+ Rural Teens Find More Support Online Than in Their Communities – The 74

    LGBTQ+ Rural Teens Find More Support Online Than in Their Communities – The 74


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    New research has found that rural LGBTQ+ teens experience significant challenges in their communities and turn to the internet for support.

    The research from Hopelab and the Born This Way Foundation looked at what more than 1,200 LGBTQ+ teens faced and compared the experiences of those in rural communities with those of teens in suburban and urban communities. The research found that rural teens are more likely to give and receive support through their online communities and friends than via their in-person relationships.

    “The rural young people we’re seeing were reporting having a lot less support in their homes, in their communities, and their schools,” Mike Parent, a principal researcher at Hopelab, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “They weren’t doing too well in terms of feeling supported in the places they were living, though they were feeling supported online.”

    However, the research found that rural LGBTQ+ teens had the same sense of pride in who they were as suburban and urban teens.

    “The parallel, interesting finding was that we didn’t see differences in their internal sense of pride, which you might kind of expect if they feel all less supported,” he said. “What was surprising, in a very good way, was that indication of resilience or being able to feel a strong sense of their internal selves despite this kind of harsh environment they might be in.”

    Researchers recruited young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who identified as LGBTQ+ through targeted ads on social media. After surveying the respondents during August and September of last year, the researchers also followed up some of the surveys with interviews, Parent said.

    According to the study, rural teens were more likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to find support online. Of the rural respondents, 56% of rural young people reported receiving support from others online several times a month compared to 51% of urban and suburban respondents, and 76% reported giving support online, compared to 70% of urban and suburban respondents.

    Conversely, only 28% of rural respondents reported feeling supported by their schools, compared to 49% of urban and suburban respondents, the study found, and 13% of rural respondents felt supported by their communities, compared to 35% of urban and suburban respondents.

    Rural LGBTQ+ young people are significantly more likely to suffer mental health issues because of the lack of support where they live, researchers said. Rural LGBTQ+ young people were more likely to meet the threshold for depression (57% compared to 45%), and more likely to report less flourishing than their suburban/urban counterparts (43% to 52%).

    The study found that those LGBTQ+ young people who received support from those they lived with, regardless of where they live, are more likely to report flourishing (50% compared to 35%) and less likely to meet the threshold for depression (52% compared to 63%).

    One respondent said the impact of lack of support impacted every aspect of their lives.

    “Not being able to be who you truly are around the people that you love most or the communities that you’re in is going to make somebody depressed or give them mental issues,” they said in survey interviews, according to Hopelab. “Because if you can’t be who you are around the people that you love most and people who surround you, you’re not gonna be able to feel the best about your well-being.”

    Respondents said connecting with those online communities saved their lives.

    “Throughout my entire life, I have been bullied relentlessly. However, when I’m online, I find that it is easier to make friends… I met my best friend through role play [games],” one teen told researchers. “Without it, I wouldn’t be here today. So, in the long run, it’s the friendships I’ve made online that have kept me alive all these years.”

    Having support in rural areas, especially, can provide rural LGBTQ+ teens with a feeling of belonging, researchers said.

    “Our findings highlight the urgent need for safe, affirming in-person spaces and the importance of including young people in shaping the solutions,” Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes, vice president of research and evaluation at Born This Way Foundation, said in a statement. “If we want to improve outcomes, especially for LGBTQ+ young people in rural communities, their voices–and scientific evidence–must guide the work.”

    Parent said the survey respondents stressed the importance of having safe spaces for LGBTQ+ young people to gather in their own communities.

    “I think most of the participants recognize that you can’t do a lot to change your family if they’re not supportive,” he said. “What they were saying was that finding ways for schools to be supportive and for communities to be supportive in terms of physical spaces (that allowed them) to express themselves safely (and) having places where they can gather and feel safe, uh, were really important to them.”

    Hopelab seeks to address mental health in young people through evidence-based innovation, according to its organizers. The Born This Way Foundation was co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, West Virginia native Cynthia Bisset Germanotta.

    The organization is focused on ending bullying and building up communities, while using research, programming, grants, and partnerships to engage young people and connect them to mental health resources, according to the foundation’s website.

    This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


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  • Indianapolis Public Schools to Transfer Two Closed School Buildings to Settle Legal Battle – The 74

    Indianapolis Public Schools to Transfer Two Closed School Buildings to Settle Legal Battle – The 74


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    Indianapolis Public Schools will put one closed school building up for lease or sale to charter schools for $1 and will sell another to a local nonprofit, the district announced Friday.

    The transfer of the buildings that used to house Raymond Brandes School 65 and Francis Bellamy School 102 stems from an Indiana Court of Appeals ruling in a lengthy battle over the state’s so-called $1 law, which requires districts to transfer unused school buildings to charter schools for the sale or lease price of $1. The court ruled in May that IPS must sell School 65.

    The announcement also comes as the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance ponders how to solve facility challenges for both IPS, which continues to lose students in its traditional schools every year, and charters, which frequently struggle to acquire school buildings.

    The district said in a statement that Damar Charter Academy, a school for students with developmental and behavioral challenges in Decatur Township, had reached out to IPS to express interest in School 65 — which is located on the southeast side of IPS. The district does not have the power to pick which charter school it will sell a building to — if more than one charter school is interested, state law requires a committee to decide.

    On Monday, Damar confirmed to Chalkbeat that it is interested in School 65.

    In the statement, the district said it would prefer to “move forward with disposition” of School 65 through a collaborative community process.

    “But, we respect the court’s decision and will proceed in full compliance with that order,” IPS Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said. “If the building is claimed by a charter school, we think Damar has a strong record of serving some of the most vulnerable and underserved students in our city and I have confidence that acquiring Raymond Brandes will allow them to expand their operations to serve even more students.”

    Meanwhile, the district will sell School 102 to Voices, a nonprofit that works with youth, for $550,000. The district had already leased the school on the Far Eastside to Voices, which also shares the space with two other youth programs.

    “Indianapolis Public Schools is committed to continuing to engage with our community on thoughtful re-use of our facilities and to being good stewards of our public assets,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are excited to move forward with our planned sale of the Francis Bellamy 102 building to VOICES and to see their impact in serving our community continue for many years into the future.”

    This story was originally published on Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.


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  • Veronica Alvarez’s Journey in Arts Education – The 74

    Veronica Alvarez’s Journey in Arts Education – The 74


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    Veronica Alvarez was 4 when her family came to the U.S. from Cotija in Michoacán, Mexico, a small town famed for its cheese. Her father picked avocados amid the scorching heat in the San Fernando Valley, while her mother cleaned houses. One of nine children, she learned how to scrimp and save, how to work hard and how to dream big.

    “We were so poor, I knew not to ask for much,” said Alvarez, 52, now executive director of Los Angeles-based Create CA, one of the state’s leading arts education advocacy organizations. “Looking back on those years now, I don’t know how my parents did it. I have a white-color job and two sons, and I can barely afford it.”

    Her sunny disposition belies a steely resolve. She remembers well the sting of being an undocumented immigrant in the age of Gov. Pete Wilson, an era when some felt ashamed to even speak Spanish in public. She brings that fire to her arts education mission. 

    “I believe access to the arts is a social justice issue,” as she puts it.

    “Unfortunately, students that have the most need do not get equal access and opportunities.”

    Her chops as a fighter, someone who doesn’t give up on a cause, are part of what makes her special, arts advocates say.

    “Veronica is an inspiring and dedicated arts education advocate and leader,” said Merryl Goldberg, a veteran music and arts professor at Cal State San Marcos, who also serves on the Create CA board. “Her commitment to equity and lifting student voices is front and center.”

    Alvarez didn’t become fluent in English until about the fourth grade, but she instinctively understood that education was the key to escaping poverty. 

    Education was my path out of poverty. That was always my thing. I loved school.

    Veronica Alvarez

    The only one in her family to graduate from high school, for her, school was always a matter of sink or swim. She chose to dive deep. She paid her way through college working at Chuck E. Cheese, where she honed her chops in engaging children.

    “I’ve always been pretty driven,” said Alvarez, a mother of two boys with a doctorate in education and a master’s in ancient history. “Education was my path out of poverty. That was always my thing. I loved school.”

    She also loved to walk to the library. It conjured an oasis of calm amid her raucous household.

    “I’d come home with bags of books and sit in a corner to read and immerse myself in the world created by the author,” she remembers. “That love of reading has lasted to this day.”

    At first, she wanted to be an artist, but her fourth grade teacher said she lacked talent. 

    “I loved making art as a child,” said Alvarez. “But I had always been taught to respect your elders. I didn’t think it was my place to question it.”

    So, she stopped trying to make art, channeling her drive into academics. Determined to graduate early, she took every AP class she could in high school and found her happy place in art history. A self-professed nerd, she always felt drawn to the world of books and ideas.

    “To be able to sit and read and learn always seemed like a luxury to me,” she said. 

    As a child, she was first entranced by Caravaggio and Bernini, and later became beguiled by the works of Frida Kahlo and Graciela Iturbide. 

    Making sure everyone can participate in the arts is what drives Veronica Alvarez, now head of Create CA. (Courtesy of Veronica Alvarez)

    “I loved Bernini’s ‘David’ because of his teeth biting his lip; he looked vulnerable and intense — along with the fact that he was mid-motion as he threw the rock at Goliath,” she remembers. “The ‘Barberini Faun’ made me blush. A big piece of marble made me blush.”

    She’s a full-fledged museum addict and a politics junkie with a passion for the place of women in antiquity, particularly Greek and Roman history. That expertise is what led her to the Getty Museum, where she helped launch the Getty Villa. 

    “My parents would’ve never dreamed of taking us to museums; that was not a place for us,” said Alvarez, who later became the director of school and teacher programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “My passion has always been about access and equity, making a place for everyone.”

    While at the Getty, she worked on an English learners program with migrant workers who often start work at 4 a.m., which means language classes happened at all hours of the day and night. It was a struggle to convey the meanings of words until she landed on using the visual realm. 

    “When you learn a new language, you learn ‘manzana’ means apple, and then you see a picture of an apple,” she recalls. “I thought, why don’t we use Cézanne’s ‘Still Life with Apples’? And the conversations suddenly got so much more interesting. We got the students to really engage, centered around the artwork.” 

    That obsession with making sure everyone, not just the lucky few, can feel the transformative power of the arts is why she feels right at home at Create CA, which has been helping schools navigate the rules around Proposition 28, the state’s arts education mandate. 

    The organization has long fought for expanding access to arts education and helped advocate for arts educators and teaching artists in the classroom. One of the biggest challenges facing the organization now is making sure Prop. 28 funds are spent as they were intended, as well as pushing for more funding.

    “With the passage of Prop. 28 and dedicated funds for arts education, people may think we have solved arts education,” she said. “However, while a billion dollars may sound like a lot of money, we have 6 million students in CA. When we parcel out what that means to individual school districts, especially in rural areas, sometimes the funds aren’t sufficient to hire one art teacher.”

    Alvarez is known for her poise and her ability to keep the peace amid intense personalities.

    “I’ve been struck by her powerfully calm demeanor and her openness to advocacy as a ground-up endeavor versus a top-down activity,” said Goldberg. “Being an arts leader can be challenging in so much as there are many voices in the mix and they don’t all agree.”

    Alvarez has the polish to be diplomatic in a deeply divided world, partly because she puts the cause first. 

    “She brings a worldly and positive energy to the discussions, and she strikes me as very much always in the problem-solving and equity-centered mode,” said Letty Kraus, director of the California County Superintendents Statewide Arts Initiative. “I also have experienced her as hands-on, participatory, and collegial in her approach.” 

    For Alvarez, art is the tether that connects us to our shared human heritage. It’s a bridge to the past that all should be encouraged to cross. 

    “Human beings are unique,” she said. “Out of all the animals, we have the ability to create art, to connect across time and culture. That’s why I love the arts so much. The craftsmanship of the human hand, the human eye, is so important to me.”

    As an educator, the elusive nature of cognition — why the human mind absorbs some concepts while discarding others — also fascinates her. 

    “To me, what you have to teach is the love of learning,” she said. “How does the mind retain information? It’s all about making connections. You learn something in history, and then you apply it in English. It’s about providing the full context; that’s how you retain information.”

    If something truly moves us, she suggests, we may remember it forever. That’s why the arts can push us to transcend boundaries and grasp universal truths. 

    “The arts are essential to students’ creativity,” she said. “When students can’t access the traditional curriculum, the arts allow them to express themselves, their feelings, and tell their stories. The arts are essential to our well-being.” 


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  • Hawaiʻi Is Increasingly Relying On Unlicensed Teachers To Fill Vacancies – The 74

    Hawaiʻi Is Increasingly Relying On Unlicensed Teachers To Fill Vacancies – The 74


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    As students returned to class earlier this month, Hawaiʻi schools reported the lowest number of teacher vacancies the state has seen in more than five years. As of last week, only 73 teacher positions were unfilled, compared to more than 1,000 in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    But schools are employing a growing number of unlicensed teachers, also known as emergency hires, to fill those vacancies. Last August, Hawaiʻi schools started the year with 670 emergency hires, an 80% increase from four years ago. 

    Emergency hires can work in schools for up to three years but must make progress toward earning their licenses. 

    The recent increase in emergency hires partly stems from state efforts to put more teachers in classrooms, including increasing pay for unlicensed educators in 2023. But while research shows that emergency hires tend to have higher retention rates, they may also be less effective than licensed teachers, who typically have more training and classroom experience.

    While the Hawaiʻi teacher licensing board tracks emergency hires in schools, it doesn’t publish regular data on how many of these teachers go on to earn their teacher licenses and continue working in public schools here.    

    Even so, principals and researchers say hiring unlicensed teachers is better than leaving positions vacant, which can leave schools scrambling for substitutes. The state has also explored other options to recruit and retain educators, like raising teacher pay and bringing in workers from the Philippines, but some solutions may only be temporary. 

    “There’s a united front to attract qualified educators that are already certified,” said Chris Sanita, principal at Hāna High and Elementary. “I think it’s a larger state issue on housing and affordability.” 

    A Growing Population

    In 2018, Brandon Galarita began teaching at Ke’elikōlani Middle School as an emergency hire, hoping to build on his experience as a substitute teacher and use his college degree in English. While the pay was low, Galarita said, working full-time as an emergency hire allowed him to earn a living while also completing the requirements for a teacher license. 

    “At least it starts building a teacher if they want to go into education,” said Galarita, who earned his license from the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa in 2020. “I would hope that the influx of emergency hires will result in more teachers that are staying in the profession.” 

    University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa’s College of Education offers a program that helps cover the costs of tuition and fees for residents pursuing their teacher’s license. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)

    Osa Tui Jr., president of the state teachers’ union, said he attributes the big jump in emergency hires to the pay raise they received two years ago. Currently, emergency hires earn about $50,300 a year, compared to $38,500 previously. 

    “These numbers reflect exactly what we were hoping to accomplish,” Tui said. 

    The state has encouraged prospective educators, including emergency hires, to earn their licenses through the Grow Our Own initiative at UH Mānoa, which helps cover the costs of tuition for teacher preparation programs. Teachers who complete the program and earn their licenses must work in public schools for at least three years. 

    Emergency hire numbers don’t always reflect teachers’ progress toward earning their licenses, said Waiʻanae Intermediate School Principal John Wataoka. While he has around 11 emergency hires on staff this year, only one of the teachers has yet to complete a teacher preparation program.

    The rest have finished their training but are waiting to take a licensing exam or haven’t received the results of their final tests yet, Wataoka said. 

    “Right now, it’s just a waiting game,” he said. 

    But a recent study of emergency hires entering Massachusetts schools during the pandemic suggests that unlicensed teachers may be less effective than other educators. Students taught by emergency hires tended to have lower math and science test scores compared to their peers, according to research from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. 

    Jonathon Medeiros, a teacher at Kauaʻi High School and vice president of the Hawaiʻi Education Association, said he understands parents’ possible concerns about emergency hires and the quality of education students are receiving. But it’s still preferable to have an emergency hire in a classroom than a substitute — or nobody at all.

    In the past, Medeiros said, students were occasionally sent to the library or cafeteria for study hall when there weren’t enough educators to teach every class and the state faced a shortage of substitute teachers. 

    Unlike emergency hires, DOE doesn’t require substitute teachers to have a college degree.   

    “We all want skilled, caring, talented teachers who are from the community and committed to their schools,” Medeiros said. “How do we make sure we get those people in every single classroom is the key question.”

    Expanding The Pool

    While the boost in emergency hire pay has attracted more teachers to public schools, the state is still searching for other solutions to increase the hiring pool. 

    At Waiʻanae Intermediate, Wataoka said he’s hired seven international teachers to fill staff positions over the past two years. The J-1 visa program, which DOE has participated in since 2019, allows teachers from other countries, primarily the Philippines, to teach in the state for up to five years. 

    This year, the department hired around 100 new teachers through the visa program, Superintendent Keith Hayashi said in a Board of Education meeting earlier this month. International teachers’ interest in working in Hawaiʻi is comparable to past years, he said, despite concerns that participation could drop after Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents raided the shared Maui home of teachers from the Philippines last spring. 

    On Maui, Sanita said he’s also seeing the impact of the bonuses introduced for teachers in hard-to-fill positions five years ago. While it’s difficult to attract people to Hāna — a town with limited housing and no stop signs – the $8,000 bonus for remote schools helps retain teachers who would otherwise struggle with the high cost of living, Sanita said.   

    “The differentials have really helped people, our teachers in Hana, not to have five different side hustles,” Sanita said. “They can actually teach and make ends meet.” 

    The bonuses have also incentivized teachers to remain at Waiʻanae Intermediate even when they face long commutes from other parts of the island, Wataoka said. While the Leeward Coast has the greatest concentration of new teachers in the state, the $8,000 bonus has helped experienced teachers cover the cost of gas to West Oʻahu and remain at Waiʻanae Intermediate.

    But despite more retention measures in place, the department saw a jump in the number of teachers leaving schools last year. Over 1,200 teachers voluntarily resigned or retired from DOE in the 2023-24 school year, compared to roughly 1,000 the year before.

    Tui said there’s no single answer as to why the number of teachers leaving schools jumped. In some cases, teachers may have felt more comfortable changing jobs after the pandemic as they faced less uncertainty in the job market, he said. 

    This year, educators continuing to work in public schools will receive a 3% pay raise, with some veteran teachers receiving a larger raise of around 7%. While the pay increase will encourage teachers to stay in schools longer, Tui said, it’s possible the state will see a wave of educators retiring after three years as they qualify for higher state pensions. 

    For teachers hired before 2012, the state uses their three highest years of pay to determine their pensions. 

    “We have to make sure that we can get people into the profession that we can recruit to handle a drop off like that,” Tui said. 

    Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.


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  • 4-Year-Olds Now Eligible – The 74

    4-Year-Olds Now Eligible – The 74


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    Break out the crayons and finger paint: Every 4-year-old in California is now eligible for transitional kindergarten.

    Fifteen years after a handful of school districts opened the first TK classrooms, California now has the largest — and fastest growing — early education program in the country. At least 200,000 youngsters will attend TK this fall, enjoying low teacher-student ratios, age-appropriate curriculum and plenty of music, art and circle time.

    “This really is something to celebrate,” said Carolyne Crolotte, policy director for Early Edge California, an advocacy group. “Now, there’s no question about who’s eligible and who isn’t. Everyone is eligible.”

    TK is meant to be a bridge between preschool and kindergarten, preparing 4-year-olds for the routine and expectations of elementary school while honing their social skills and self-confidence. In TK, children learn how to make friends, write their names and do basic math. Mostly, they’re supposed to fall in love with learning.

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  • Chancellors Playing Footsie With Authoritarianism

    Chancellors Playing Footsie With Authoritarianism

    It is hard not to feel at least occasionally helpless these days trying to operate between the twinned pincers of a Trump administration steamrolling our democracy and an AI industry pursuing its goal of automating all means and matter of human expression.

    It seems like, combined, they can take away just about anything: our grants, our international students, our jobs, our freedom.

    Things get worse when those of us toiling away as laborers see those in positions of leadership at the institutions that should be bollards blocking the path of antihuman, antifreedom movements instead lying down so as to be more easily run over.

    (Looking at you, Columbia University.)

    Arguments about how we should consider some measure of accommodation (to fascism, to AI) abound, and some are even reasonable-sounding. These are powerful forces with their hands around the throat of our futures. Certainly no one can be blamed for doing what it takes to nudge those hands back a few millimeters so you can get enough air to breathe.

    Those with the power to do so can seemingly take just about anything they want, except for one thing: your dignity.

    Your dignity must be given away by an act of free will. Maybe I was naïve to think that more people would be protective of their dignity in these times, but I see so many instances of the opposite that I’m frequently stunned by the eagerness with which people are willing to hurl their dignity into the abyss for some perceived benefit.

    The worst examples are found in the members of Donald Trump’s cabinet, who are occasionally tasked with a public performance of sycophantic fealty to their dear leader. It is amazing to see accomplished people treat the president of the United States like a toddler in need of a level of affirmation that would make Stuart Smalley blush. I think I understand the motives of these people: They are wielding power at a level that allows them to literally remake society or even the world.

    If it is your life’s goal to shield chemical companies from the financial responsibility of cleaning up the “forever chemicals” that cause cancer and miscarriages—which The New York Times reports is the apparent mission of some monster named Steven Cook—maybe it’s worth it to slather Trump in praise.

    But the decision to jettison one’s dignity made by the New York Times writer who looked at these displays and decided they are an example of leadership via reality television host rather than aspiring authoritarian is tougher for me to figure. While the article correctly identifies some of the lies conveyed during the spectacle, the overall tone is more of a “can you believe he’s getting away with this shit?” approach, rather than a “shouldn’t we be concerned he’s getting away with this shit?” approach, which would be far more accurate to the occasion.

    I can believe he’s getting away with it when the paper of record continually covers Trump like a novel spectacle practicing unusual politics rather than an authoritarian.

    I don’t know how one maintains their dignity when writing a story about Trump deploying the United States military in the nation’s capital that gives any credence to a “crackdown on crime” given that this is transparently BS, and yet the Times reflexively characterizes what is happening as a “crackdown” (see here, here and here), rather than, I don’t know, an “occupation.”

    In other jettisoning of dignity for strategic gain news, I have been, to a degree, sympathetic to the pre–Trump II stance of Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier and WashU chancellor Andrew D. Martin’s views of higher ed reform anchored in institutional neutrality.

    I disagreed with that view as a matter of principle and policy approach, but this is a debate over principles.

    Now that we find ourselves in the midst of the overt Trump II attempts to destroy the independence of higher education institutions, I found their answers to a series of questions from The Chronicle’s Megan Zahneis about an apparent dispute between them and Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber about higher ed’s stance in relationship to Trump astounding as a performance of willed ignorance.

    This debate is taking place at a time when, obviously, the Trump administration has taken aim at higher ed. Are either of you concerned about this debate weakening the sector’s sense of autonomy?

    Martin: I would say the fact there is a public debate about the future of American higher education has no relationship whatsoever to what actions that the administration is taking.

    So you don’t see debate between leaders as detracting from that autonomy?

    Diermeier: I’m not 100 percent sure what we do about that. We have a point of view. We’ve had the point of view for a long time. We’re going to continue to argue for a point of view, because we think it’s essential. Now, if people disagree with that, I think that’s their decision. That’s the nature of civil discourse. We think that it’s important to get this right. We don’t think that the alternative, to hide under the desk, is appropriate.

    These answers would make Hogan’s Heroes’ Sergeant Schultz proud: “I know nothing! I see nothing.”

    Earlier in the interview, both chancellors make it clear that they are seeing a benefit to their institutions in the current climate, potentially enrolling more students who have been turned off by the turbulence being visited on their elite university brethren of the Northeast.

    They have apparently decided that they now have an advantage in the competitive market of higher education by their willingness to wink at an authoritarian push.

    Speaking of their fellow institutional leaders, Diermeier says there that there has been “no despising or disrespect or hatred among the sets of colleagues we’ve been engaged with,” and while I’m not a colleague of these gentlemen, let me publicly register my strong disrespect for their performative cluelessness in the interview.

    Let me also suggest I can’t imagine someone who respects themselves following that path, and I’m grateful to the institutional leaders like Christopher Eisgruber who are willing to express reality.

    I don’t know what the future holds. It’s possible that WashU and Vanderbilt are positioning themselves as the favored elite institutions of the authoritarian regime, ready to hoover up that federal cash that Trump is threatening to withhold from the schools that will not bend to his will.

    I’m genuinely curious if that scenario is worth one’s dignity.

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  • Later Wake-Up Call for Inside Higher Ed’s Daily News Update

    Later Wake-Up Call for Inside Higher Ed’s Daily News Update

    Loyal Inside Higher Ed readers who wake up to our daily newsletter will soon have an easier time finding each day’s edition in their crowded inboxes. 

    Starting Tuesday, Sept. 2, the Daily News Update will arrive between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. Eastern, several hours later than the current 3:15 a.m. This may upset the morning routines of the handful of souls on the East Coast who rise before the sun, but for most readers, we hope this change means our newsletter is there at the top of your inbox when you log in, ready to inform your day.  

    Thank you for waking up with Inside Higher Ed. 

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  • On Being a Black Anthropologist (opinion)

    On Being a Black Anthropologist (opinion)

    The one week my Yale graduate Anthropology 101 class spent studying Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men felt like a glass of cool water on a hot summer day. Learning about her scholarship and her refusal to accept the way her white colleagues recentered whiteness through their research on nonwhite people reminded me of the anthropologists who first led me to the discipline.

    But the fact that Hurston was the sole Black woman anthropologist whose work we studied suggested that she was the only Black woman anthropologist whose work was worthy of the ivory tower. As if she was the only Black person committed to using the tools of anthropology to create knowledge about the people relegated to the Global South in ways that are mutually beneficial to the researcher and their interlocutors. Hurston’s singular inclusion in my graduate training paired with the general exclusion of Black and brown scholars aimed to pacify the problematics of anthropology without upending the infrastructure of a discipline that is in crisis.

    As my graduate school years continued, I grew increasingly disillusioned by the idea of a career in academia. Even though I had come to terms with a definition and practice of anthropology that felt useful, identifying as an anthropologist myself felt wrong. How could I proudly claim affinity to a discipline that knowingly promulgated the othering of Black and brown people around the world and within the discipline itself? The answer would come through my research on Black Capitalists, and through my own experience beyond grad school as a Black entrepreneur and Wall Street professional.

    My experience as a Ghanaian American on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase exposed me to the ways in which Black people use the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes centered on collective thriving. They led me to my definition of what it means to be a Black Capitalist: a Black person who is a strategic participant in capitalism with the intention to benefit from the political economy in order to create social good. What they were doing was complicated, contradictory and, for many, oxymoronic.

    To many, to be a Black Capitalist is to be in an identity crisis. Black studies scholars I’ve spoken to have gone so far as to say, “Black Capitalists don’t exist!” or “It’s impossible for any good to come from capitalism!” I’m usually taken aback by such rebuttals. Because if the Black people I spent hours talking to who identified themselves as Black Capitalists don’t actually exist in real life, are they fictions of my imagination? And is my own experience invalid? Black Capitalists are as real as the version of capitalism we experience today that aims to entrap us all. Black Capitalists are merely trying to get free and help others do the same while facets of society attempt to place limits on how they can narrate, and ultimately live, their own lives.

    Surely, one’s ability to disavow capitalism depends on what continent they are on, or come from. For the Black Capitalists I’ve spoken to who are from Africa, for example, it’s neither a matter of loving capitalism nor wanting to dismantle it. Living in and through capitalism is the reality of trying to build a life in countries that imperialist capitalist forces have already destroyed and continue to exploit. If they are to live their later years comfortably in their homeland, leaving it in the meantime is a requirement. And hustling in the Western world to achieve this dream is so often the method. So for them, much like it was for my mother, who emigrated to America from Ghana with the haunting knowledge that her family was counting on her and that “failure was not an option,” the question becomes: For our own collective thriving, how do we game a system that was founded on us as its pawns?

    So how are Black Capitalists using the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes that allow them to secure the bag and the people they care for? Their methods are as diverse as Black people themselves. But the common denominator between all of their practices is a focus on communal uplift.

    Some are strategizing throughout key industries within corporate America to develop sustainable initiatives that subversively promote diversity, equity and inclusion—especially in the wake of its demise. Some are leveraging grassroots approaches to build community-forward real estate clubs that make the dream of homeownership and passive income possible through the resources—money, credit, knowledge and social connections—that are shared among members.

    Others are teaching aspiring entrepreneurs in their community the fundamentals of effective entrepreneurship and shepherding them through the process of collectively buying successful small businesses formerly owned by white entrepreneurs. Some are using the skills they developed during their tenures on Wall Street to create investment firms on the African continent to help grow pan-African businesses focused on health care, technology and agriculture that generate value for the African consumer. Some of the companies these Black Capitalists are building are worth millions of dollars—even billions. Irrespective of the spaces Black Capitalists occupy, their impact in Black communities globally is invaluable in the fight to close the racial wealth gap that has Black people lagging behind across key wealth indicators including homeownership, small business ownership and financial health.

    But their existence is unnerving to both Black and white people alike, for very different reasons. For many Black people, the very idea of a Black Capitalist makes their toes curl, because when you’ve been on the wrong side of capitalism for so long—as its most valued commodity but never its greatest beneficiary—it’s hard to believe that another relationship to capitalism, or a more equitable version of it on our journey to collective liberation, is even possible.

    And for white people invested in upholding the racial hierarchy that shapes social, political and economic life, they worry and wonder what they are set to lose when Black people are organized and move as one unified body in an economic system that nurtures individualism. Both perspectives reveal the underlying truth that money and our obsession with it is a culture of its own. And this revelation presents a growing problem society has created but has yet to solve: What do we do when money becomes the dominant culture in a society wherein most people don’t have enough of it to live?

    In the face of paralyzing social anxiety about the expansiveness of Black life, anthropology’s superpower lies in its ability to use evidence from the human experience to upend our social scripts and create space for us to dream up new ways of being that are both scalable and sustainable. I realized that being a Black Capitalist and being a Black anthropologist were both seen as oxymorons. I now gravitate toward the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston and other exceptional Black anthropologists. I learned that I can be a different kind of anthropologist who uses the tools of anthropology, like ethnography, oral histories and participant observation, to tell new stories about Black life that are restorative, hopeful and reflective of the power Black people carry.

    But even so, my existence as a Black anthropologist is unnerving to “scholars” who benefit from and are invested in perpetuating the harms of traditional anthropology. To raise the standard of knowledge production to ensure it is created in community with those who play a role in developing it threatens the validity of how scholars have traditionally conducted research and the scholarship that is held in high esteem. It’s damning enough that anthropology is like a snake eating its tail. My presence is the proverbial pain in the discipline’s side—a reminder of the work that is needed to transform the discipline, and realize what anthropology can be, but has yet to become.

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