TeachME Professional Development

1. Although educational policies are intended to be 'colorblind', the reality is that such policies interact with school systems and residential patterns in which race is a central factor in deciding where students go to school, what resources and curricula they have access to, whether they are understood and appreciated by their teachers and classmates, and how they are categorized across academic programs.

2. In order to create and maintain more racially and ethnically diverse schools, each of the following is recommended EXCEPT:

3. One way to support curriculum, teaching, and assessment that enhances diverse schools is to tap into Common Core's progressive potential to support diversity.

4. A large body of interdisciplinary research exposes how factors such as housing markets, school district boundaries, and _______________________ are actually far from colorblind in their impact on the public education system.

5. While in recent court cases White plaintiffs have sought to end race-conscious affirmative action policies in higher education and K-12 public schools, respondents have argued that these policies are necessary to dismantle discriminatory systems, and can assist universities and public schools in promoting racial and ethnic diversity for all students.

6. Policymakers must support programs that lessen inequality overall, and specifically, policies related to housing and school choice need to address the multiple barriers to creating flexible, changeable, and parallel communities.

7. Ongoing discrimination practices, both public and private, affect metro migration patterns within and across changing urban and suburban landscapes, and much of this segregation and inequality occurs between school districts and not within them, making possible solutions to these problems more complicated and dependent upon inter-district solutions.

8. Without appropriate public policies that foster viable, racially diverse schools, parents who are denied access to integrated schools will make color-conscious choices that create greater racial imbalances, which in turn will affect:

9. An approach to accountability that relies almost exclusively on standardized tests often has a negative impact on the educational experiences of all children, but particularly those of low-income Black and Latino students.

10. One of the intents of the Common Core framework is to engage students in anti-bias texts and in deeper, richer dialogues in which their assumptions are challenged by emphasizing:

11. When livelier and better informed class discussions are initiated through common core practices, students will be directed to examine the assumptions of others in order to promote cross-racial understanding and break down stereotypes.

12. While a growing number of parents realize that their children need to be prepared for a diverse global society, they still tend to make choices about schools within an educational system that:

13. Rather than relying on standard test results or seeking to take over schools that perform poorly on these accountability evaluations, broader measures of school quality need to be embraced, such as:

14. State policymakers must prioritize maintaining stability in suburban school districts in order to avoid the the self-fulfilling prophecy of becoming poor districts serving students of color with a low-level curriculum, low expectations, and few tangible or intangible resources.

15. One way to foster cross-district cooperation is by promoting meaningful magnet-like programs to attract students with shared interests from across district boundaries, and expand upon existing inter-district special education or __________________ collaborations.

16. In order to promote diversity, open-enrollment laws could be restructured to be in line with NCLB's requirement that students in failing schools and districts be offered the choice to transfer to non-failing schools and districts.

17. When state testing regimes were first being implemented, it was noted that prior student academic achievement and students' ____________________ were the strongest predictors of how well a given school would do on academic achievement measures, rather than narrow, non-diverse testing measures.

18. One benefit of inter-district transfer policies is that a great number of white students are now being drawn to urban magnet schools, which is furthering the promotion of diversity that currently exists in most open-enrollment situations.