1. While students in grades 6-12 in Troy City Schools have indeed moved to fully-remote learning for a couple of weeks—as we talked about on Wednesday—the district has apparently changed its story on how it will deal with rona-related whipsawing in the future. Perhaps there should be a term for this too? Moving from an automatic response to high cases to a “we’ll-take-that-under-advisement” response. (Dayton Daily News, 11/11/20) The idea in Troy and other places where such a switch has occurred, it seems, is to try and minimize the whipsawing back and forth from hybrid learning to all-remote learning again and again due to changes in pandemic severity. But this in itself feels like just another area of whipsawing over which families have no control. While they do not use the term “whipsaw” (TM Jeff Murray 2020), the Enquirer covers the effect of such wild swings in weekly—and sometimes daily—changes in routines on parents and kids. Well, the headline says they’re talking about families, but all of the folks quoted in there are school and health officials. But that’s just it: the piece is entirely about how those insider folks think parents and kids are reacting. No actual parents or kids are given a say at all. Doesn’t seem super helpful to the analysis of this vital topic if you ask me. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 11/12/20)
    
2. Staying on the same topic (see what I did there?), editors at the Toledo Blade have some thoughts on the proposed new school funding plan currently being fitted with rocket powered sneakers down in the Statehouse. (Toledo Blade, 11/12/20) Similarly, (and I use that term deliberately), the education specialist for the League of Women Voters of Ohio has similar thoughts on that funding plan. Like…really similar. (Cleveland.com, 11/13/20)
   
   

3. I’m sure you’ve all been wondering—in those precious few moments not consumed by thoughts of coronavirus during the past many months—what’s going on in the Ohio school districts currently operating under the aegis of an Academic Distress Commission. You remember which ones I mean, right? The ones whose academic performance was so bad for so long that the state created a new mechanism of oversight to try and right their ships to provide better education for the children attending. Luckily for you, today I can provide you with two-thirds of an answer. Youngstown City Schools’ appointed CEO gave a wide-ranging update on the district he ostensibly leads. There’s a lot in there, so you should definitely read it all yourself. But I will summarize the highlights: The rona is so bad that all buildings are closed for the next two weeks. (Students have been on a fully-remote learning model for the whole semester—and will continue indefinitely—but most teachers had apparently been working from their buildings. Not anymore.) Medical clinics in the two district high schools will remain open for all comers. All food distribution efforts in the district will cease for the next two weeks also—as the rona was also being delivered on those routes. The entire freshman basketball team and Chaney High School has been quarantined and their season halted. All other sports are to continue without interruption at this time. Additionally, Choffin Career Center won some sort of award because the school’s “report card grades” have improved over the past three years (hmmm… interesting timing there). And finally, the district was swimming in money even before passage of a renewal levy earlier this month. Take that, 2020. (Mahoning Matters, 11/13/20) And in Lorain City Schools, a series of legal opinions and the delegation of authority to the elected school board were required to make sure the arrangement of Jeff Graham as boss and his wife as communications honcho was kosher going forward. As weird as all that sounds (including the bits about how the board can only increase her salary and how she can’t be tied in with the district’s lawyers anymore), it is actually progress, I think. The same arrangement in pre-ADC times required none of that fireproofing. (Elyria Chronicle, 11/13/20) 

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Charges of financial blunders have taken out district leaders before. Think the pandemic inoculates leaders from that possible fate? Think again.

In fact, leaders may be at higher risk for accusations of financial missteps than normal, thanks to a perfect storm of pandemic-era conditions. District leaders are making hurried off-cycle spending decisions with little public deliberation, all when money is tight and staff and community tensions are high. Given the fast and furious nature of this moment, it’s easy to slip up. And where board members, teachers unions, or others in the community are at odds with leaders, any potential misstep can get magnified.

Because of the pandemic (and the availability of federal CARES funds), many districts have moved swiftly to sign hefty contracts for everything from laptops and hot spots to personal protective equipment, air purifiers, and building ventilation system upgrades. With districts competing against each other for limited supplies, some superintendents have had to commit to contractor bids on the spot or lose out altogether.

Normally, bigger contracts and purchases require approval at school board meetings. But with meetings shifted to clumsy virtual formats—and many boards granting superintendents sweeping emergency powers—there is less opportunity to vet spending decisions. That means local checks and balances may be less robust than normal. Take for example Los Angeles Unified School District, where Superintendent Austin Beutner has spent $210 million under the emergency powers since March, including a $51 million single-source contract to a start-up company for coronavirus testing and $70 million on devices for students. 

Less deliberation also means district leaders may not have the opportunity to build strong support or political cover for financial choices. Device purchases may seem like a no-brainer right now with so many students learning from home, but note that it was an iPad contract that contributed to former LAUSD chief John Deasy’s resignation in 2014. Critics questioned the bidding process, and while a federal investigation ended with no charges filed, the controversy was enough to derail a superintendent who had overseen substantial academic improvements for students.

Typical contract bidding processes are cumbersome, but those processes are often what insulates leaders from challenge as they commit public dollars to private vendors. Unlike Deasy, Superintendent Calvin Watts in Kent, Washington, kept his job after he faced community skepticism about a no-bid contract for budgeting software. In both these instances, tensions with the teachers union were a factor in the accusations. Like it or not, lower trust levels are a common factor when it comes to criticisms of spending decisions.

Worth noting is that many leaders are making financial decisions against a backdrop of thorny school reopening debates among competing factions of parents and teachers. Add in teacher furloughs, layoffs, and calls for hazard pay, depending on local circumstances. Given the complexity and clashing interests, and with scarce dollars to go around, someone is likely to be upset, making leaders especially vulnerable to being second-guessed on spending down the road.

Transparency matters, even if it means sharing bad news. Sweetwater Union’s superintendent lost her job in September after being accused, among other things, of covering up the extent of its district budget crisis. The late Seattle Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson was ousted in 2011 for not being transparent enough with the school board about a financial scandal that predated her term.

While leaders welcome the billions in federal dollars flowing to districts through the CARES Act (with more possibly to come), caution is warranted in how those new dollars get spent and how that spending is vetted. Just as the pandemic is the seismic event for today’s leaders, it was Hurricane Maria for Puerto Rico Education Secretary Julia Keleher. In the wake of the 2017 disaster that destroyed schools and deepened a financial crisis that brought some federal bailout funding, Keleher led broad education reforms and closed hundreds of schools, angering teachers. Allegations of improper contracting of federal money led to her resignation in 2019.

The message for district leaders right now is clear: Don’t assume today’s urgency protects you from fallout when the pandemic response is scrutinized in the rear-view mirror (and it will be). The nation’s education reporters are on alert and actively tracking pandemic spending, as they should be when large public sums are in the mix. With big money can come big stakes—and big mistakes.

This is a case where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Keep your eyes on the money. Watch the bottom line, spending within what revenues allow. Be hyper-transparent, over-communicate, and seek input on contracts, even when you’ve been granted exemptions from doing so. Even in a pandemic, district leaders can be sharing spending decisions and potential contracts in weekly calls with principals and board members—and asking them to flag issues before commitments are made.

Bottom line: This pandemic doesn’t grant leaders fiscal immunity. Some of the leaders mentioned here are my friends, and I consider them thoughtful, earnest, hardworking individuals who care deeply about students. My advice is the same for everyone: Want to stay out of the financial scandal headlines? Take those extra steps needed to spend smartly and transparently on behalf of students.

At a virtual town hall in Brooklyn about how the pandemic will change admissions to high-performing selective schools, New York City officials got a lecture on systemic racism.

“Racism is foundational in all of our institutions, in our government, our economy, our health-care system, our legal system and our education system,” Ayanna Behin, president of a school district council, said at the June meeting. “It’s our recommendation that we prioritize the end of racial segregation in our schools.”

Behin’s comments reflect a racially charged debate in New York City and across the country invoking Jim Crow-era language to describe an education flashpoint more recent than old-fashioned enforced segregation. The conflict—influenced by critical race theory, the idea that racism is embedded in the structures of society—is over disparate racial and ethnic admissions, which critics deem so pernicious that seemingly neutral yardsticks like grades and test scores are actually reinforcing them. These critics aim to integrate coveted, elite schools by removing the performance barriers that many White and Asian parents defend as fair and objective measures of achievement.

In one of the recent conflicts, the school superintendent in Fairfax County, Va., is pushing through changes to the competitive admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the nation’s top-ranked high school, over protests from Asian parents who say their kids are being penalized for working hard. At Lowell High School in San Francisco, a plan to drop merit-based admissions for next year because of the pandemic created an uproar at a virtual school board meeting in October from parents who want to protect its reputation for rigor.

In New York City, advocates, backed by hundreds of staffers in the Department of Education, are demanding more sweeping changes in the nation’s largest school district. They are calling for the end to admissions screening for almost two hundred selective middle schools, or more than a third of the total. And a mayoral advisory panel has also urged the city to rid elementary schools of gifted and talented programs and erase the “gifted and talented” wording from the system because it’s not in keeping with the spirit of integration.

“I strongly support the elimination of middle-school screens citywide,” says Miriam Nunberg, a civil rights attorney and leader in the movement to desegregate schools. “I found the admissions process we have in our districts to be so discriminatory.”

In this polarizing battle, parents who support screening for accelerated education are tarred as racists on social media. The idea that all students benefit by vying for admissions to top schools because it nurtures a drive for academic excellence is dismissed as a tool of segregation. Even moderate proposals to expand gifted and talented programs and make them more diverse face strong opposition.

“Our culture and economy thrive on excellence. When I think of New York, I think of artistic and intellectual excellence,” says Jonathan Plucker, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on making accelerated education more accessible to disadvantaged students. “And now, particularly in urban districts we are seeing a backlash, where the ideology is turning against excellence. We are institutionalizing anti-intellectualism, and that has long-term implications for us.”

Critical race theory provides the underpinnings for the backlash against selective schools. According to the theory, first developed by legal scholars, curriculums, teaching methods, assessments and much else are designed to reinforce dominant White culture, mute the voices that challenge this supremacy and cast Black students as deficient, according to a paper in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.  To help these students, teachers need to enlighten them about the harmful effects of racism and prod them to succeed “as a form of counterinsurgency.” In New York City, critical race theory is leaving a mark in the rollout of a new culturally responsive curriculum.

While the term segregation harkens back to a time when kids were forced to go to separate schools, today the highly fraught word is used to describe a statistical reality in many districts around the country.

With 1.1 million students, New York City has one of the most segregated systems in the country, a result of entrenched housing patterns and the proliferation of selective schools. Today Blacks and Latinos make up about two-thirds of public school students. But in more than half of city schools, they comprise over 80 percent of the students and sometimes beyond 90 percent.

In this system, achievement gaps have remained remarkably wide. In 2019, only about a third of Black and Latino students reached proficiency on math and English state tests for grades three through eight. That compares with roughly two-thirds for White and Asian kids. But the question of how to improve academic achievement for Blacks and Latinos defies easy answers.

Advocates say greater diversity is the remedy. They are pushing the city to replace test, grade and attendance-based admissions with a system designed to mix students of all backgrounds and academic abilities together. In such integrated schools, low achievers rise partly because of the influence of high achievers, who don’t regress academically, says Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who researches education policy. What’s more, students from different racial and ethnic groups build bonds at a time when America’s social fabric is fraying.

Parents fighting to keep selective schools in New York City reject the everybody-wins narrative as naive. Yiatin Chu, co-founder of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education (PLACE), says students of all groups have a wide range of abilities and lumping them together in classrooms makes it impossible for teachers to challenge all of them at once. A 2013 study, published in Gifted Child Quarterly, of five diverse elementary schools in several states found reading levels in classrooms ranging from about two years below grade level to about six years above it.

“I see a huge disparity in terms of abilities, and is it reasonable to expect our teachers in big classrooms to differentiate the teaching to really meet the needs of all students in that class?” says Chu, who has a child in public school. “The truth is no, they cannot.”

PLACE is fighting an uphill battle against the education department. New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has called screened schools “antithetical” to public education and has talked in vague terms about changing gifted-and-talented programs. Last year, as PLACE was advocating to keep admissions screens, the department reached out to integration groups, telling them to “make more noise.”

While advocates say academic research overwhelmingly shows the benefits of integrated schools, there is in fact significant disagreement among scholars. Their findings vary widely largely because of the difficulty of isolating the effects of peers and schools on performance from other powerful influences like family and its socioeconomic status, says Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

David Armor of George Mason University carefully controlled for students’ backgrounds in a robust 2018 study. He found that the socioeconomic composition of schools had a negligible impact on results in math and reading tests in grades three through eight across three states and over multiple years.

Even scholars who support policies to make schools more diverse do not stress short-term performance benefits. Gary Orfield at UCLA says fifty years of research has produced a preponderance of evidence of a small gain in test scores. The bigger benefits come as poor kids of color learn personal skills and make connections with successful students and college counselors in integrated schools, boosting their chances of getting into universities and finding good jobs.

“If you’re in a school that’s connected to information about colleges and jobs, you’re much better off,” says Orfield, who co-directs UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, an advocacy group. “People in our society get jobs through contacts.”

For his part, Armor says he opposes mandatory desegregation because it causes middle-class flight, making segregation worse. He points to Jefferson County, Ky., where the number of White students plunged from 89,000 the year after a mandatory integration plan was rolled out in 1975 to 48,000 four decades later, creating a district where the majority of students are Black and Latino.

“New York City would be making a very big mistake by getting rid of its selective schools,” Armor says. “It will probably lose another chunk of its middle-class population. If they would just look at the data.”

Admissions based on economic status

If the city does stop screening for middle school admissions, it could follow other districts around the county that have assigned students to schools based on their economic status to spread out poor kids more equally and reduce segregation. The number of school districts and charter networks pursuing a form of economic integration has grown from just two in 1996 to more than one hundred today, according to research by The Century Foundation. The most common approaches to integration, such as redrawing district boundaries, have mostly kept students closer to home and reduced the need for the kind of busing that ignited protests several decades ago.

Foundation Fellow Stefan Lallinger says the current outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter is adding to the momentum for school integration. “We can’t tackle racial injustice without addressing the fact that our public schools are very segregated along lines of race and class,” says Lallinger, a Ph.D. from Harvard. “I absolutely anticipate that more districts and organizations across this county will be committed to this issue.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned on a pledge to reduce inequity, waited several years before tackling the contentious issue. The mayor’s efforts to end the use of a single test for admission into the city’s elite specialized high schools, including Brooklyn Tech where his son attended, were stymied by state officials amid a flurry of protests from parents.

Last year, the mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group took aim at somewhat easier targets -- selective middle schools and gifted and talented programs that cater to “economic privilege.” The group’s report said families with the means to prep their young kids – including many relatively poor Asians who scrimp and save to pay for test classes -- give them an advantage over Black and Latino students. Together they received only 18 percent of the offers to join elementary gifted-and-talented programs in 2017.

Brooklyn’s District 15, a politically progressive area that integrated its middle schools in 2019, is touted as a model for the rest of the city. Nunberg, the civil rights attorney, joined a working group of parents, educators and community organization members that led a series of public workshops to build support for the plan.

Students from low-income families made up about 52 percent of the entire district but were heavily clustered together, constituting almost 100 percent of students in two schools in a Latino neighborhood. At the three top-performing selective middle schools, poor kids made up less than a third while White students were more than 50 percent of enrollment.

To integrate the schools, screening was ended. Students entering the sixth grade ranked their school choices and entered a lottery. Seats were prioritized for low-income kids to distribute them out more equally at the eleven middle schools. High performers could no longer expect to get into a top schools, but only a small number of parents pulled their kids from the district.

The plan led to a big drop in segregation. But the district’s political bent was a key to its success and finding support for similar shifts in school demographics will be harder in the city’s more moderate and conservative districts.

The big question is whether the performance of the disadvantaged students in the Brooklyn district will improve. Potter of The Century Foundation points to several cities including Cambridge, Mass., where integration improved academic outcomes. Other areas, like Jefferson County, have struggled to close the achievement gap.

The disruption from the pandemic, particularly on low-income students, would complicate any attempt to measure short-term academic effects in the Brooklyn district. But the long-term impact may never be known either. The diversity plan didn’t include a method to evaluate whether it will improve academic performance over time. “That’s educational malpractice,” says Plucker of Johns Hopkins. “If you are going to do this, you have to have systems in place to study the effects on achievement.”

Asian parents in New York City mobilized last year to protect the selective education that’s been a gateway to the middle class. PLACE, which now has 2,000 supporters of all backgrounds, and Plucker seek to change the debate that pits equity against excellence.

“We can have a system that provides equitable opportunities for students and also promotes excellence,” Plucker says.

For instance, instead of snuffing out accelerated education, Chu says, the city should expand it to achieve its laudable diversity goals. Today, less than 15 percent of the city’s more than 700 elementary schools have gifted-and-talented programs. By spreading them to all elementary school, more kids from every community will get seats, setting them on a path to selective middle schools. The single-test G&T admissions process also has to change to allow more ways for all students to be selected.

“Parents want these programs to challenge their kids,” says Chu, an immigrant who attended an elite specialized high school in New York City. “Why are we not creating more of them?”

New York could follow the lead of Montgomery County in Maryland. It used to depend on parents to apply for elementary gifted-and-talented spots, which filled a handful of magnet programs with about 750 mostly Asian and White kids. Once educators began universal screening of all students, they found thousands of kids, many of them Black and Latino, who would benefit from accelerated education and won seats through an assessment of report cards and tests. Since the 2016–17 school year, the program has spread to four additional magnets and more than 40 elementary schools with classes serving over 4,000 kids, says Kurshanna Dean, supervisor of accelerated and enriched instruction.

“My advice to New York is to expand your programs, not remove them,” Dean says.

The pandemic has now brought the controversy to a head. The cancellation of state tests and modification of grading means that selective middle schools don’t have the data for fourth graders that they typically use to determine admission. Less reliable measures of future performance, such as third grade test scores, are available.

The department is now devising a new admissions policy for the next school year, Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack said at the Brooklyn town hall. He made clear that the disproportionate effects of the pandemic would guide the department’s decision, which is expected to be announced soon.

“Black and Latinx New Yorkers have gotten sick and died at greater rates than others,” Wallack said. “These forms of discrimination have deep historical roots and we must reckon with them as we make policy.”

Advocates see a win for integration in the making. If the department ends middle school screening for next year, that’s a big step toward a permanent ban.

“The city should absolutely end middle school screening for this coming year,” says Lallinger, who recently served as a special assistant to Chancellor Carranza. “And going forward it presents a wonderful opportunity to rethink the way certain schools get to select which students they serve.”

Editor’s note: This was first published by RealClearInvestigations.

When the 116th Congress adjourns, sometime before January 2021, Tennessee’s eighty-year-old senior senator, Lamar Alexander, will retire after three full terms. No one living today has had more far-reaching influence on American K–12 education. As we wish him many glorious years of retirement, we do well to recognize that his legacy will last even longer. That’s in no small part because his work in the realm of education, and in others, adhered to a consistent and effective vision of leadership. Lamar followed some simple advice that he had found in a book about the presidency by LBJ press secretary George Reedy: a leader should “do three things: 1) see a few urgent needs, 2) develop a strategy to meet each of those needs, and 3) persuade at least half the people that he is right.”

Known to those who have worked with him simply as “Lamar,” the senator is renowned for his approachability and affability as well as his intellect, steadfast pursuit of the public interest as he construes it, and insistence on “getting things done.” In recent years on Capitol Hill, he has stood as one of the few representatives of an older and more honorable era of constructive bipartisanship. In 2011, as Congress was growing more polarized and partisan, Lamar voluntarily exited the ranks of Senate Republican leadership, where he was a rising star, explaining that doing so “will liberate me to spend more time working for results on the issues I care most about. I want to do more to make the Senate a more effective institution so that it can deal better with serious issues.”

Instead of waiting to become an admiral, Lamar opted to captain a battleship. While serving on four Senate committees and 10 subcommittees, Lamar focused primarily on his chairmanship of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, known as the HELP Committee. During his four years in that chair, the committee reported out some forty-five separate bills that were enacted into law, a remarkable accomplishment in this fraught era on Capitol Hill. Working effectively across the aisle with Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the committee’s ranking Democrat, he advanced signal legislation on primary-secondary education, including 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act and 2018’s reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. Last year, he and Murray agreed on a bill to simplify the notorious FAFSA undergraduate financial-aid application with which 20 million families wrestle each year and to permanently fund historically Black colleges and universities. As I write, he’s doing his darnedest to get those reforms across the congressional finish line.

This legislative activity, however, is just the latest, and perhaps not the final, act in Lamar Alexander’s half-century performance on the education stage…

Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next. Read the rest of it there.

In policy circles, school choice and desegregation discussions often stop at the schoolhouse door. But a timely new book edited by a high school senior from Columbus goes inside the gates, and should be essential reading for anyone working in education at any level.

Black Girl, White School is a strong reminder that the students who attend charters or private schools aren’t just statistics or dollar amounts, but real people who are willing to leave familiar terrain in pursuit of a better education. Given the segregating nature of school district boundaries, such decisions often mean that students of color attend predominantly White institutions (PWI). Such is the case for the book’s editor Olivia V.G. Clarke, as well as the volume’s other contributors, who range from fellow high schoolers to college students to young adults who are now part of the working world.

Clarke herself seems to have thrived at Columbus School for Girls (CSG), a highly-regarded, secular, independent, K–12 private school. She will graduate a year early thanks to the availability of academic acceleration. But as the book’s subtitle suggests, academics often take a backseat to racial dynamics. According to GreatSchools, CSG’s student body is 31 percent non-White, but Clarke often felt that she was the “token” Black student, and therefore required to represent all Black people to White students and teachers. In one of many letters to her younger self, Clarke writes: “Suddenly and often unfairly you become a representative for all people of your ethnic background.” Various other contributors express similar experiences. “In the transition from public middle school to the private, predominately white school you currently attend, you lost everything you once knew…,” high school junior Aminah Aliu writes. “In the classrooms where you were the only Black girl—the only Black person—you felt betrayed by the school that let you in but didn’t know how to keep you from falling apart.” From slavery to desegregation to Black Lives Matter, these young people—trying to learn history and civics too, don’t forget—found themselves being used as the filters through which White adults and peers explored difficult and complex topics.

Unfortunately, being asked to “do the work” of representing Blackness for the benefit of White adults and peers was one of the more benign struggles described. Obsessions with students’ hair, skin, and names abound in the book’s essays, poems, and reflections. The authors recount rude questions, intrusive requests, and numerous slights from White kids and g alike. And worse. “I don’t see why you’re worried about getting into college,” begins an unwanted comment recalled by Lydia Patterson in her freshman year at “the bougiest private school” in Houston. “You have affirmative action… You know that’s the only reason you’re here, right?”

An interesting facet of these memoirs is a tonal difference based on age. Pieces from the youngest contributors are often characterized with questions—they wonder if they brought such attention onto themselves by their actions or words, and they long to figure out how to simply exist and learn without so many people watching their every move. “Some will ask why your hair is not straight like theirs,” warns Marissa Glonek to other Black girls following in her footsteps. “Some will stare at you in history class to gauge your reaction to slavery.” The oldest contributors’ pieces are set off from the others by text and design—titled “Thrive Tips”—forming a sort of chorus of affirmation in response to the younger students’ questions. The gist of their reflections is “we survived this, and so can you.” In fact, Clarke herself seems well on the way to turning that corner. Knowing that in the past, she didn’t always feel comfortable to fully be herself, she writes to her younger self: “Take pride in what you have. Take pride in your gorgeous hair and your beautiful melanin. You are enough. You’re beautiful.”

There are plenty of important takeaways from this book. But the biggest is that it shouldn’t be this hard for students of color who seek a new and better learning environment. It is completely awesome that Olivia V.G. Clarke and her peers have taken the initiative to band together and support each other to and through PWI’s. But it would be far more awesome if the staff and students in these schools offered unconditional welcomes and fewer questions and thoughtless comments. There are more and more students of color coming behind Clarke. Policymakers and school leaders must remember that real students are uprooting themselves in search of a better fit. They need more thriving, less just surviving, and no more requests to touch their hair.

SOURCE: Olivia V.G. Clarke, ed., Black Girl, White School: Thriving, Surviving, and “No, You Can’t Touch My Hair”, Lifeslice Media (Columbus, Ohio), 2020.