ESOL Students in D.C. Area Narrow Achievement Gap - washingtonpost.com

ESOL Students in D.C. Area Narrow Achievement Gap - washingtonpost.com: English language learners have become star pupils in the Washington region, drawing accolades for top-performing schools that serve immigrant communities and showing standout results on state reading tests and national rankings.

From 2003 to 2008, gaps in the pass rates between English learners -- pupils designated as having limited English proficiency -- and other students narrowed by half on Maryland and Virginia state tests. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress ranked Virginia's English learners first in the nation for fourth-grade reading and Maryland's fifth.

In January, the trade publication Education Week reported that achievement gaps in reading for students of limited English proficiency were smaller in Maryland and Virginia than in most other states. According to D.C. data, English learners in the District's public schools perform at about the citywide average in reading, which is low but climbing.

The success of English learners in the region is partly a matter of where many of them live: Montgomery and Fairfax counties, achievement powerhouses that have trained their formidable resources on burgeoning populations of immigrant students. Montgomery has more than 17,000 such students, Fairfax about 34,000.

Education Secretary Duncan: HBCUs as Relevant Today as Ever

Education Secretary Duncan: HBCUs as Relevant Today as Ever: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made his first official visit to Howard University Thursday to discuss the role historically Black colleges and universities must continue to play in preparing teachers to educate the nation’s increasingly diverse student body.

The visit to the Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science (MS)2 came on the heels of a promise Duncan made earlier this month on the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show to visit a few of the nation’s HBCUs.

Joined by radio host Tom Joyner and Howard’s president, Dr. Sidney Ribeau, Duncan saw the highly trained middle school teachers and students in action. Launched in 2005, the middle school offers a rigorous curriculum to prepare students, many from low-income backgrounds, for careers in math, science and engineering.

HBCUs have a huge role to play in developing the teachers for the next generation, said Duncan. “Once students get into college, HBCUs have a unique ability to nurture and provide support to students who may need some extra help. Seeing Howard’s commitment, not just at the higher education level but at the middle school level, is phenomenal.”

From The Fields To The Classroom: A Mother's Tale : NPR

From The Fields To The Classroom: A Mother's Tale : NPR: Lourdes Villanueva's parents were migrant workers who harvested fruit throughout the South. Recently, she told her son, Roger, what it was like in the 1960s trying to get an education while her family was constantly on the move.

Villanueva says that everywhere her family went, even if they only planned to stay and pick crops for a month or so, her mother made sure to enroll the children in school.

But Spanish was frowned on in the school systems. 'Even out in the playground, they used to have the little playground patrols, which were our friends [who] were supposed to turn you in if you were speaking Spanish,' she says. For that reason, Villaneuva says she was always in trouble.

The family moved about 10 times during one school year, she recalls. The nomadic existence began to take an even greater toll when she hit ninth grade. She tells Roger, 'The ninth grade is when you started working for credits to graduate, and we never stayed in one place long enough to get any credits. So why even bother? I thought I knew everything that I needed to know at that time and got married at 18 and had you.'

Diversity In Mental Health HIV/AIDS Research Critical, Says Commentary

Diversity In Mental Health HIV/AIDS Research Critical, Says Commentary: In a lead commentary for this special supplement to the Journal, the authors argue the importance of ensuring racial and ethnic diversity in HIV/AIDS research. The supplement focuses on the recent epidemiological trends associated with HIV infection in diverse populations. It also addresses the need for mentoring programs to study these disparities and to include the underrepresented work force within these mentoring programs. The authors stress the need to diversify the scientific work force, not just on the premise of fairness and equity, but also to ensure full participation by all Americans.

'Diversity in the research work force promotes research that is sensitive to and inclusive of the needs and concerns of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups,' said the commentary's authors.

Growing hate groups blame Obama, economy - CNN.com

Growing hate groups blame Obama, economy - CNN.com: ...The Southern Poverty Law Center... released its annual hate group report.

The center's report, 'The Year in Hate,' found the number of hate groups grew by 54 percent since 2000. The study identified 926 hate groups -- defined as groups with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people -- active in 2008. That's a 4 percent jump, adding 38 more than the year before.

What makes this year's report different is that hate groups have found two more things to be angry about -- the nation's first African-American president and an economy that is hemorrhaging jobs. For the past decade, Latino immigration has fueled the growth of hate groups.

"We fear these conditions will favor the growth of these groups in the future," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "In the long arch of history, we are definitely moving forward, but these kinds of events can produce backlashes."

Black claims the number of registered members and readers on his white nationalist Web site surged to unprecedented levels in recent months.

On the day after Obama's historic election, more than 2,000 people joined his Web site, a remarkable increase from the approximately 80 new members a day he was getting, Black said. His Web site, which was started in 1995, is one of the oldest and largest hate group sites. The site received so many hits that it crashed after election results were announced. The site boasts 110,000 registered members today, Black said.

Duke Ellington becomes first African-American on U.S. coin - CNN.com

Duke Ellington becomes first African-American on U.S. coin - CNN.com: WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Jazz legend Duke Ellington is the first African-American to appear on an American coin, the U.S. Mint says in introducing the latest in its line of state-themed quarters.

The District of Columbia commemorative quarter showing Ellington playing the piano will be introduced by U.S. Mint Director Ed Moy at a news conference Tuesday at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Ellington won the honor by a vote of D.C. residents, beating out abolitionist Frederick Douglass and astronomer Benjamin Banneker.

Also on the coin is the phrase "justice for all." The mint rejected the first inscription choice of D.C. voters, which was "taxation without representation," in protest of the District's lack of voting representation in Congress.

Slave in Jefferson Davis' home gave Union key secrets - CNN.com

Slave in Jefferson Davis' home gave Union key secrets - CNN.com: WASHINGTON (CNN) -- William Jackson was a slave in the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. It turns out he was also a spy for the Union Army, providing key secrets to the North about the Confederacy.

Jackson was Davis' house servant and personal coachman. He learned high-level details about Confederate battle plans and movements because Davis saw him as a "piece of furniture" -- not a human, according to Ken Dagler, author of "Black Dispatches," which explores espionage by America's slaves.

"Because of his role as a menial servant, he simply was ignored," Dagler said. "So Jefferson Davis would hold conversations with military and Confederate civilian officials in his presence."

Dagler has written extensively on the issue for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.

In late 1861, Jackson fled across enemy lines and was immediately debriefed by Union soldiers. Dagler said Jackson provided information about supply routes and military strategy.

"In Jackson's case, what he did was ... present some of the current issues that were affecting the Confederacy that you could not read about in the local press that was being passed back and forth across local lines. He actually had some feel for the issues of supply problems," Dagler said.

Jackson and other slaves' heroic efforts have been a forgotten legacy of the war -- lost amid the nation's racially charged past and the heaps of information about the war's historic battles. But historians over the last few decades have been taking an interest in the sacrifice of African-Americans during those war years.

Pushing for a More Inclusive University

From age 8 through his years as a Stanford University student, Dr. Charles Ogletree, the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard University, labored in the fields with his migrant-worker parents.

“We worked in everything from walnuts and almonds to peaches and grapes and cotton and lettuce,” Ogletree says. “When I started college, I still came back summers ... working at ‘swamping’ watermelons — taking them from the field, tossing them from person to person.”

He worked with Hispanic immigrant farm laborers. “My father’s generation was jealous because they saw these people who wanted to do the work they were doing — for much less pay and less security,” he says. “There was this sense of cultural tension.

Those of us who were youger saw it as a way to create a more inclusive society.” Those memories partly inspired Ogletree to join a fledgling inter-faculty effort to debate Harvard’s future approach to immigration studies.

Early in the tenure of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, there was a faculty push to create a Latino studies or immigration studies center. His administration nixed it.

Ogletree hopes there will be renewed interest. On Dec. 1, 2008, he hosted the first meeting of the Immigration Policy Steering Committee, coordinated by Edward Schumacher-Matos, a visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Fifteen faculty members came from seven schools.

Analysis: Meltdown Could Force College Aid Shift

Analysis: Meltdown Could Force College Aid Shift: Johnny is a middle-class student who worked hard to get good grades and a high SAT score. Jane’s record isn’t as good, but her family is low-income, and without help she might not be able to go to college at all.

Who should be first in line for help from the government to pay for college?

It’s a debate that hits hot-button questions about fairness and opportunity, and lately, many experts think the middle class has been winning.

But the economic meltdown could be shifting the playing field, as the government and colleges themselves are forced to focus on helping the neediest students and try to head off a wave of dropouts.

Some experts think that could prove one of the few beneficial outcomes of the downturn.

“For a long time, the discussion was about the middle-income squeeze: wealthy people could pay for (college), poor people were getting grants, people in the middle were having a hard time,” said Vanderbilt University education professor William Doyle. While ideally college would be cheaper for everyone, he said, the research is clear that “the most efficient way to spend the money is to focus on the margins, people who wouldn’t otherwise go.”

TIDES

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport serves as a comprehensive resource for issues related to gender and race in amateur, collegiate and professional sports. The Institute researches and publishes a variety of studies, including annual studies of student-athlete graduation rates and racial attitudes in sports, as well as the internationally recognized Racial and Gender Report Card, an assessment of hiring practices in coaching and sport management in professional and college sport.

TIDES: The Racial and Gender Report Card (RGRC) is the definitive assessment of hiring practices of women and people of color in most of the leading professional and amateur sports and sporting organizations in the United States. The report considers the composition - assessed by racial and gender makeup - of players, coaches and front office/athletic department employees in our country's leading sports organizations, including the National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), Major League Soccer (MLS) and Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), as well as in collegiate athletic departments.

TV Festival Explores Latino Image in Film

Forty films showing the progression of how Latino characters and culture are depicted in cinema will be the stars of a festival hosted by Turner Classic Movies and Chon Noriega, author and film professor from the University of California/Los Angeles.

“Race And Hollywood: Latino Images in Film,” airing on TCM television on Tuesdays and Thursdays, May 5-28, is the fourth in a series of film festivals exploring Hollywood's portrayal of racial groups.

Charles Tabesh, senior vice president of programming for TCM said the film festivals so far have shown “the way in which Hollywood depicts different cultural groups can have a tremendous impact on how those groups are viewed in society as a whole.”

In 2006, the series explored how Hollywood has portrayed African-Americans. Last year, it aired portrayals of Asians. In addition, TCM highlighted Hollywood's depiction of gay images in film in 2007.

South Carolina Law Targets Illegal Immigrants Going to School

South Carolina Law Targets Illegal Immigrants Going to School: Dayana Rodrigues graduated in the top 5 percent of her high school class in 2007 and completed nursing prerequisites at Horry-Georgetown Technical College.

But in January, the college refused to re-enroll the 20-year-old returning student because she is an undocumented immigrant, The Post and Courier of Charleston reports.

“You know it's not personal,” she said. “But it is.''

The South Carolina Illegal Immigration Reform Act became law in June and, among other measures, banned illegal immigrants from attending colleges and universities that receive state money.

Supporters of the ban feel strongly that taxpayers' money should not fund a school that is educating lawbreakers. Opponents said it's unfair to punish children for their parents' crimes.

South Carolina is the first to legalize such a ban, although other Southern states have restrictive policies. For instance, North Carolina and Alabama bar undocumented people from attending community colleges.

At least nine states, mainly on the West Coast, have moved in the opposite direction and allow in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. No federal law regulates the issue.

It’s a Woman’s World (at least at these colleges)

The six women’s colleges in Massachusetts continue to innovate academically and financially to appeal to college-bound women.

It’s a Woman’s World (at least at these colleges): Historically, Massachusetts has been home to some of the most vibrant, viable and prestigious educational institutions for women in the country. That number has decreased over time as schools such as Lesley University, Regis College and Wheaton College, among others, have gone coed. In 1999, Radcliffe College officially merged with Harvard University.

Susan Lennon, president of the Women’s College Coalition, says too often the conversations focus on the number of women’s colleges today versus 40 years ago rather than on the education and advancement of women and girls.

“We have to make the education and advancement of women and girls matter in this society,” says Lennon. “For me, in terms of women’s colleges today, it really is about the contemporary interpretation of founding mission.”

Currently there are more than 50 women’s colleges in the United States and six of them are located in Massachusetts: Bay Path, Pine Manor, Mount Holyoke, Simmons, Smith and Wellesley. Only Pennsylvania tops that number with seven, according to the Women’s College Coalition Web site.

At-risk high school students benefit from partnership with HBCU

At-risk high school students benefit from partnership with HBCU: Disadvantaged students at a Texas public high school are achieving at a higher level as a result of a recent partnership between Prairie View A&M University, according to results announced yesterday by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) Redesign Network.

The partnership between Prairie View and the high school is part of TMCF’s college preparedness program that matches historically Black colleges and universities with high schools that educate at-risk students.

Participating colleges implemented redesign initiatives in their partner high schools to improve student achievement. The initiatives are based on best practices in school reform and meant to better prepare students for college.

Some of the highlights of Prairie View A&M University’s collaboration with Royal High School in Texas during the 2007-08 school year are:

* 83 percent of math students met state proficiency standards for Texas’ standardized test. This rate is 90 percent higher than 2005 scores
* 86 percent of English language arts students met state standards, which is 14 percent higher than 2005 levels
* 93 percent of social studies students met state standards

Students involved with the program also came away better prepared for college, according to program officials.

Hispanic Enrollment Up, Bucking Trend at UT Austin

Hispanic Enrollment Up, Bucking Trend at UT Austin: Although spring enrollment is down overall at the University of Texas at Austin, numbers are up slightly for Hispanic, African American and foreign students, a preliminary report shows.

The report shows that total enrollment for the spring 2009 semester is 47,334, a decrease of 234 students (-0.5 percent) from spring 2008, according to Kristi D. Fisher, associate vice provost and director of the university's Office of Information Management and Analysis.

However, the number of Hispanic students is 7,484, a 1.5-percent increase over spring 2008, according to the preliminary “12th class day” numbers. African-American student enrollment is 2,093 (up 4.2 percent), and the foreign student total is 348 (up 1.5 percent) for spring 2009.

Enrollment decreased for white students to 25,757 (1.9 percent) and for American Indian students to 197 (4.8 percent). Asian American enrollment, at 7,199, remained about the same, with only two fewer students than in spring 2008.

Creating a Sustainable Pipeline

Creating a Sustainable Pipeline: When Dr. James L. Sherley began a hunger strike outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost’s office in February 2007 alleging racism in his tenure denial, the then-associate professor of biological engineering re-ignited, in a very public way, concerns about the institution’s commitment to diversity.

The lack of diversity has been a recurring problem at MIT. At the time of Sherley’s protest, just 27 of MIT’s 740 tenured faculty members were American Indian, Black and Hispanic. Today, there are 34 underrepresented minorities out of 767 tenured faculty members.

Sherley never won tenure, and a Black faculty member and a Black former trustee broke their ties to MIT as well in protest over the manner in which the school handled the Sherley incident as well as its seeming lack of commitment to diversity. Two years later, the administration is taking steps to ensure the school is welcoming to faculty members of color — an effort some say is moving too slowly.

Racial gap in cancer deaths as wide as in 1981 - USATODAY.com

Racial gap in cancer deaths as wide as in 1981 - USATODAY.com: Blacks are more likely to develop cancer and die from the disease than any other group, according to a report released today. Black patients also live a shorter time after diagnosis than others.

Death rates have fallen in recent decades for all groups, and the gap between the races has fluctuated over the years. Yet the gap between blacks and whites is just as wide today as it was in 1981, report co-author Ahmedin Jemal says.

Among women, for example, death rates were 14% higher for blacks than whites in 1981. Today, those rates are 16% higher. Death rates are 33% higher among black men than whites, a difference that is almost unchanged since 1981.

Black cancer patients have made some progress in recent years, however. Among men, overall death rates have been falling faster for blacks than whites, mainly because fewer black men are dying from lung and prostate tumors, the report from the American Cancer Society shows.

But blacks tend to be diagnosed at more advanced stages than whites, whose cancers are more often found at earlier, more curable stages. Blacks also are less likely than whites to get high-quality treatment in time to make a difference, says Peter Bach of New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who was not involved in the new study.

Civil rights in court spotlight - USATODAY.com

Civil rights in court spotlight - USATODAY.com: WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court returns to the bench Monday for the second half of its annual term, justices will hear several cases that could make this the most important session for civil rights law in years.

These cases will further shape the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, which will end its third full session this summer.

'At the beginning of this term in October, I don't think many people thought it would be shaping up to be as significant as it is now in terms of civil rights cases,' says Columbia University law professor Theodore Shaw, a former counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Among cases the justices will take up:

• A 'reverse discrimination' claim that arose when a Connecticut city rejected results of a civil service test for firefighter promotions because whites scored disproportionately higher than blacks.

• A major voting rights dispute over whether the Department of Justice may still oversee state electoral law changes based on the states' history of bias after the nation elected its first African-American president.

• A long-running Arizona dispute over whether the state spends enough money to provide English-language classes for non-native speakers under U.S. education rules.

The justices' docket will present several other high-profile disputes, including one on when elected state judges should be disqualified from cases involving their big donors.

Early Launch for Language - washingtonpost.com

Early Launch for Language - washingtonpost.com: Can kids learn anything if they are exposed to a subject for only half an hour a week, with no homework?

When it comes to learning another language, educators say yes.

"The kids getting it for 30 minutes won't become fluent, but that's not the point of those programs," said Julie Sugarman, research associate at the nonprofit Center for Applied Linguistics in the District. "It's to give them exposure to the language. Just because kids aren't able to do calculus in sixth grade doesn't mean we shouldn't teach math in elementary school."

Foreign language instruction is considered more important than ever as the nation's demographics and national security issues change and the world's economies become intertwined.

Although new brain research is revealing secrets about how people acquire language, complex questions remain about what constitutes effective teaching. In the No Child Left Behind era, which has focused on basic reading and math skills, some educators say time for teaching foreign languages is scarce. That means aiming for a goal short of fluency.

UMass Boston’s Asian American Studies Program Takes a Practical Approach

UMass Boston’s Asian American Studies Program Takes a Practical Approach: For many educators, large numbers of graduates are not only a bragging right but a goal. But those involved in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston are quite comfortable producing only one or two graduates annually — despite boasting one of the largest programs of its kind among New England schools.

UMass Boston faculty don’t encourage many students to major in Asian American studies. Instead, students typically delve into Asian topics alongside a major such as nursing, management or criminal justice. Why?

Faculty want students to earn degrees leading directly to careers. Like ethnic studies programs everywhere, a bachelor’s in Asian American studies often leads to graduate school.

“So many of our students are working class, they need to be practical and support their families,” says Dr. Peter Kiang, a professor of education and director of the UMass Boston Asian American Studies Program. “We want our program to complement engineering or accounting or any other career.”

US to help plan UN racism conference - washingtonpost.com

US to help plan UN racism conference - washingtonpost.com: WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration said late Saturday it would participate in planning for a U.N. conference on racism despite concerns the meeting will be used by Arab nations and others to criticize Israel.

The U.S. will decide later whether to participate in the conference.

The State Department said it would send diplomats next week to participate in preparatory meetings for the World Conference Against Racism, which is set to be held in Geneva, Switzerland in April and which some countries including Israel have already decided to boycott.

During the Bush administration the United States and Israel walked out the first U.N. conference on racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001 over efforts to pass a resolution comparing Zionism _ the movement to establish and maintain a Jewish state _ to racism.

Those efforts failed but there are signs the resolution may be reintroduced at the so-called "Durban 2" meeting in Geneva and Israel has been actively lobbying the United States and European countries to stay away from this year's meeting.

Courtland Milloy - Education Still the Pathway to Freedom - washingtonpost.com

Courtland Milloy - Education Still the Pathway to Freedom - washingtonpost.com: In recognition of Black History Month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has presented a flattering economic sketch of black people in the United States. In this drawing by the numbers, we are seen as a relatively young and hearty workforce -- 17 million black people strong -- poised to weather the difficult economic times ahead.

Nearly two-thirds of us are 45 and younger, according to the bureau. And more than one in four are employed in education and health service fields -- where some of the fastest growing occupations are expected to be found through 2016.

The portrait, based on 2008 data, is relentlessly upbeat, without even a hint that 2.2 million black people were unemployed last year. It is as though they had been airbrushed from the picture altogether.

Yet, if you really want to cut black unemployment, who better to look at than those of us who have jobs? What you'll see is a strong correlation between work and education. Hard to tell that when the numbers crunchers start whittling away at school programs in a recession.

Cherokees Go to Court Over Freedmen Status

Cherokees Go to Court Over Freedmen Status: TULSA, Okla.— The Cherokee Nation wants a federal judge to decide whether descendants of the tribe's former Black slaves, known as freedmen, have a federal right to citizenship in the tribe.

In the five-page complaint filed last Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, the nation argues that, because of the U.S. government's modification of an 1866 treaty it had with the tribe, descendants of freedmen are not entitled to federal citizenship rights. It names several freedmen descendants and the U.S. Department of the Interior, among others, as defendants.

'We feel like it will help settle the issue of whether or not we broke the treaty,' said Mike Miller, spokesman for the Tahlequah-based tribe. 'We feel confident we have not, and that's why we're willing to take that step.'

For decades, descendants of freed Cherokee slaves fought to reclaim their citizenship, even though they were adopted into the tribe in 1866 under a treaty with the U.S. government. A tribal court order gives them citizenship for now while their case moves through the tribal court system.

The Obama Cabinet ‘Trickle Down’ Effect

The Obama Cabinet ‘Trickle Down’ Effect: The federal government bills itself as a leader in employing minorities, with American Indians, Asians and Blacks all holding a larger share of federal jobs than in the civilian labor force.

The exception: Hispanics, with 7.8 percent of federal jobs in 2007, despite holding 13.3 percent of nonfederal jobs. Hispanics are even scarcer in the Department of Education, with just 4 percent of the jobs. Hispanic groups want President Barack Obama to change that.

Even before Obama took office, the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), an umbrella group of advocacy organizations, gave the transition team a scathing report on Hispanic underrepresentation in the federal work force. It noted that two departments with the most critical shortages of Hispanic employees — education and health and human services — also oversee areas most critical to the community. Hispanics have the highest high school dropout and lowest college enrollment rates of any ethnic group and many are among the nation’s uninsured.

The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) raised the issue in a Dec. 30 conference call with the transition team, noting there are no Hispanics in the Department of Education upper management ranks known as the Senior Executive Service, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Debate Rages Over Hebrew Charter School in NYC

Debate Rages Over Hebrew Charter School in NYC: Two years after the debut of a controversial public school focusing on Arabic language and culture, a Hebrew language charter school is opening in New York City, stoking further debate about the purpose of a public school education.

Backers of the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School, slated to open this fall, say it will appeal to diverse ethnic and religious groups and not just Jews. But critics here and elsewhere around the nation question whether public schools should celebrate one particular culture.

'They're trying to transmit cultural values and identity, and that's not the purpose of a public school,' said Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.

Last month the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit over a school in Minnesota that caters to Muslim students, and a Hebrew charter school in Florida has spurred debates over church-state separation.

At 100, NAACP Still Kicking

At 100, NAACP Still Kicking: When leaders of the NAACP gather this month to formally begin a year-long recognition of 100 years of civil rights work, they’ll be talking as much about the organization’s future as they will be honoring its past.

On dozens of college campuses across the nation, where plenty of groups have taken on justice issues that for decades only the NAACP would touch, it is not uncommon to hear people question whether the NAACP is still relevant. The question is answering itself, however, as all discover there’s still more than enough work to be done and still not enough people to take it on.

“On our campus, we can get people excited, but continuity is a problem,” says Brittney Autry, president of the 45-member NAACP student chapter at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where student activism in the NAACP dates to the mid-1930s. That’s when Howard students marched on Capitol Hill to protest the lynching of Blacks across the South. “Our fight is the same as it was in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Autry. “It’s now more institutionalized and covert, so we have to find new techniques.”

The End of White America? - The Atlantic (January/February 2009)

The End of White America? - The Atlantic (January/February 2009): The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

Md. Leads U.S. in Passing Rates on AP Exams - washingtonpost.com

Md. Leads U.S. in Passing Rates on AP Exams - washingtonpost.com: ...Six states, including Maryland and Virginia, had at least one-fifth of graduates pass an AP test in high school: New York (23.3 percent), Connecticut (21 percent), Massachusetts (20.8 percent) and California (20.2 percent). The nationwide rate for the Class of 2008 was 15.2 percent. In the District, the rate was 6.9 percent. All figures represent only public schools.

About 10 percent of graduates nationwide who took one or more AP tests never attained a passing score. The same was true for about 13 percent of 2008 graduates in Virginia, 14 percent in Maryland and 19 percent in the District.

Virginia and Maryland have ascended in the AP program, with their largest systems leading the way. In Montgomery County, 46.4 percent of last year's graduates passed one or more AP tests, twice the state average and three times the national average. Fairfax County did not release such figures, but the system ranked just above Montgomery in the latest edition of the Challenge Index.

Immigrant Parents Push to Protect English Classes - washingtonpost.com

Immigrant Parents Push to Protect English Classes - washingtonpost.com: Each year, Fairfax County classrooms serve more than 20,000 students who are learning English as a second language. They also serve many of their parents.

More than 8,000 foreign-born adults enroll in classes annually through the county's adult and community education program. They study English grammar and are taught about getting ahead in a new country. The courses are offered in public schools, and the fee, which works out to about $2 an hour, is subsidized by the school system.

But as the School Board seeks to close a $250 million budget gap, funding for the adult English classes could be trimmed and the course fee could increase, potentially by a few hundred dollars a class. Dozens of students born in China, Nicaragua, Italy and other corners of the world attended a public hearing last month to urge the School Board to maintain the funding that keeps the classes affordable to new immigrants.

'Without English, we are separated from our children, separated from the school, separated from the society,' said Efrem Ghebremedhin, an Eritrean immigrant. He said the course was an important first step in getting a good job.

NAACP chief outlines new 'human rights' focus - Race & ethnicity- msnbc.com

NAACP chief outlines new 'human rights' focus - Race & ethnicity- msnbc.com: WASHINGTON - The NAACP's new leader intends to hold President Barack Obama accountable for his promises about civil rights, regardless of Obama's status as the first black occupant of the White House.

'The president being black gives us no advantage,' NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said in an interview with The Associated Press, adding that Obama's background as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer may make him more receptive to the NAACP's agenda.

Jealous said he expects 'the traditional relationship' that presidents have had with the NAACP: 'We will be the people at the end of the day who help make him do what he knows he should do. We will help create the room for (Obama) to fulfill, I think, his own aspirations for his presidency.'

How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance

Here's a trick question, so think carefully before you answer: If someone mentions the word "beast" to you, which word would you match it with?

1. Afraid. 2. Words. 3. Large. 4. Animal. 5. Separate.

A beast is an animal, of course, so what's the trick? It's that getting the right answer may depend on who asks you the question.

Vocabulary questions like this have been routinely posed to thousands of Americans as part of the General Social Survey, a national survey that tracks societal trends. And for years, blacks have scored lower on the vocabulary test than whites.

Sociologist Min-Hsuing Huang recently decided to ask whether the race of the person administering the survey mattered: He found that when black people and white people answered 10 vocabulary questions posed by a white interviewer, blacks on average answered 5.49 questions correctly and whites answered 6.33 correctly -- a gap typical of the ones found on many standardized tests.

Huang then examined the performance of African Americans who interacted with black interviewers: He found that black respondents then answered 6.33 questions correctly -- the same as white ones. The reason African Americans scored more poorly on tests administered by white interviewers, Huang theorized, is that these situations can make the issue of race salient and subtly remind the test-takers of the societal stereotype that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.

Huang's findings, recently published in the journal Social Science Research, are only the latest in a body of research that has gone largely unnoticed by policymakers, parents and managers: Dozens of field experiments have found that reminding African Americans and Latinos about their race before administering academic tests, or telling them that the tests are measures of innate intelligence, can hurt their performance compared with minorities who were not reminded about race and not told that the results reflect inherent ability.

Study links children's lead levels, SAT scores - USATODAY.com

Study links children's lead levels, SAT scores - USATODAY.com: Could a decades-long drop in the concentration of lead in children's blood help explain rising SAT scores?

A Virginia economist who pored over years of national data says there's an 'incredibly strong' correlation, which adds to a growing body of research on lead's harmful effects.

The findings, to be published this winter in the journal Environmental Research, suggest that from 1953 to 2003, the fall and rise of the average SAT math and verbal score has tracked the rise and fall of blood lead levels so closely that half of the change in scores over 50 years, and possibly more, probably is the result of lead, says economist Rick Nevin.

He controlled for rising numbers of students taking SAT prep courses and for rising numbers of students who speak a foreign language at home — that would depress verbal scores.

Nevin estimates that lead explains 45% of the historic variation in verbal scores and 65% in math scores.

Your Family May Once Have Been A Different Color

To begin, please point your elbow to the ceiling.

Then imagine yourself naked.

Then look at the patch of skin on the inside of your upper arm, the part of you that almost never sees the sun.

Whatever color you see there is what experts call your basic skin color, according to professor Nina Jablonski, head of the Penn State Department of Anthropology.

And that color, the one you have now, says Jablonski, is very probably not the color your ancient ancestors had — even if you think your family has been the same color for a long, long time.

Different Place, Different Color

Skin has changed color in human lineages much faster than scientists had previously supposed, even without intermarriage, Jablonski says. Recent developments in comparative genomics allow scientists to sample the DNA in modern humans.

By creating genetic "clocks," scientists can make fairly careful guesses about when particular groups became the color they are today. And with the help of paleontologists and anthropologists, scientists can go further: They can wind the clock back and see what colors these populations were going back tens of thousands of years, says Jablonski.

She says that for many families on the planet, if we look back only 100 or 200 generations (that's as few as 2,500 years), "almost all of us were in a different place and we had a different color."

Over the last 50,000 years, populations have gone from dark pigmented to lighter skin, and people have also gone the other way, from light skin back to darker skin, she says.

"People living now in southern parts of India [and Sri Lanka] are extremely darkly pigmented," Jablonski says. But their great, great ancestors lived much farther north, and when they migrated south, their pigmentation redarkened.

"There has probably been a redarkening of several groups of humans."

Black History Month has added meaning in 2009 - USATODAY.com

Black History Month has added meaning in 2009 - USATODAY.com: Frederick Barron, 17, a senior at North Atlanta High School in Atlanta, says the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president is making Black History Month come to life.

'Barack Obama is opening our hearts and minds to the true meaning of Black History Month,' Barron said. 'African Americans won't be viewed as just a minority but as people who make a difference.'

Obama's election, and this year's 100th anniversary of the NAACP, means there has probably never been more reason to celebrate the annual February observance, black leaders and historians say.

'We celebrate whenever a glass ceiling is broken and the presidency may be the highest glass ceiling,' said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, which is celebrating its 1909 founding this year.

But those leaders also agree those milestones don't mean that racial inequalities no longer exist. While Obama's breaking of the color barrier in the White House may make the NAACP's job easier, Jealous said they will pressure Obama just as they have past presidents.

In Black History Month, One-Room School Opens to Offer Lessons - washingtonpost.com

In Black History Month, One-Room School Opens to Offer Lessons - washingtonpost.com: A 19th-century school that served Prince William County's African American population opens for public tours today in honor of Black History Month.

The Lucasville School, at 10516 Godwin Dr. in the Manassas area, will be open every weekend this month from noon to 4 p.m. The one-room school was the only one in the county solely for African Americans, said Robert Orrison, a historic site manager for the county. A few one-room schools that served whites remain, but most have been converted into homes.

'We opened the school up last February,' Orrison said. 'It's a great place to learn about segregated schools and how education was done in the 19th and early 20th century.'

Built in 1885, the Lucasville School served children in grades one through six until 1926, Orrison said. About 20 to 25 students of different ages would pack into the building each year to learn from a single instructor. The school was filled with benches, not desks, Orrison said, and blackboards were made of pieces of plywood painted black, unlike at white schools, where students had blackboard slates.

Orrison said the school was named after the Lucasville village, which dissolved around the 1940s. The village sat at Lucasville Road and Godwin Drive and was home to several former slaves.