Producer DJ Cashmere spent seven years teaching Black and brown students at a Noble Street charter high school in Chicago. At the time, Noble followed a popular model called "no excuses." Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college. After DJ left the classroom to become a journalist, Noble disavowed its own policies — calling them "assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist, and anti-black." In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.
Offering sanctuary to vulnerable students
Keeping black teachers
Fear, uncertainty for undocumented students under Trump administration
College-educated and out-of-touch
Election leaves undocumented students in limbo
Clinton and Trump don't talk much about education
The stress of racism may impact learning
Talking about race in schools
Schools give low-income students a chance to travel abroad
What a flipped classroom looks like
A new study finds school readiness gaps have declined over the past decade
How thousands of kids were denied special education in Texas
Rewriting the Sentence: College Behind Bars
What It Takes: Chasing Graduation at High-Poverty High Schools
Spare the Rod: Reforming School Discipline
Stuck at Square One: The Remedial Education Trap
Hungry hungry students
What is restorative justice?
A homeless student struggles towards graduation
The facts and fictions of student debt
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