School activities that combat racism may also reduce bullying. Will California use this strategy?

The same strategy that combats racial intolerance among K-12 students also produces schools where children are less likely to be bullied or feel alone, research has shown.

The secret lies in immersing students in racially and ethnically diverse groups during classroom and extracurricular activities, offering them daily opportunities to learn about and grow to understand each other, said UC Davis researcher Adrienne Nishina.

“Having cross-race and cross-ethnic friends may … make students of all racial or ethnic backgrounds feel like they belong at their school,” Nishina said. “We know that having a strong sense of belonging is related to a whole host of positive outcomes beyond positive attitudes towards school — such as better mental health and well-being.”

Much of the work of helping learners know and understand each other falls to teachers, but school districts have not consistently invested in their training and have created structures that hinder their ability to do this critical work, said veteran educator Darryl White Sr.

“When you build community, you build it in a way that kids like each other, kids experience each other, kids rely on each other,” he said. “When the kids are coming out of those kinds of environments, they rarely ever have problems with each other because there are systems in the classroom in which they can resolve their differences.”

This type of racial and ethnic socialization began at many U.S. schools in the 1970s, White said, but most U.S. public schools began as segregated institutions and seem to just naturally find ways to try and separate white children from Black children.

There really needs to be someone near the top of each district’s hierarchy — an assistant or deputy superintendent — charged with showing how a diverse community has benefited all stakeholders, curating training for faculty, setting goals for student engagement and advocating for continuous improvement, said White, who chairs the Sacramento Black Parallel School Board and does consulting with schools on cultural proficiency.

Sacramento-area schools have reported more racist graffiti and hate speech in the last five years than White has seen in some time, and he linked the growing number to a lack of continued focus on cultural competency in schools.

Researcher says race talks often viewed as scary

The 1980s brought a very visible example of how schools found a way to restore segregation, White and Nishina said, each separately pointing to academic tracking such as gifted and talented education, or GATE, programs and advanced placement courses.

These programs were billed as a way to boost high-achievers’ odds of college success and typically used standardized test scores or teacher recommendations to determine which students could gain entry, White said.

Research, however, has revealed that teachers didn’t advocate for Black girls in these enrichment programs, even though their transcripts rivaled those of their White peers. Federal data also show that schools serving mostly Black and Latino students have fewer seats in their GATE- and AP-track courses, and far too many schools do not offer college-track programs at all.

Consequently, college-track courses often end up with disproportionately low numbers of Hispanic and Black students, the data show.

These classes can be very lonely places for African American students who are sometimes treated as though they don’t belong, White said.

He’s had several complain to him that white students, oblivious of their prejudices, push the envelope with jokes, occasionally use racial slurs and make courses that should be intellectually stimulating exhausting instead.

Teachers are often the adults in the room observing such racially charged exchanges, and they can really help to defuse those situations, said behavioral scientist Camilla Griffiths. As a graduate student, she said, she observed how a middle school teacher in San Francisco skillfully handled an incident in his classroom.

A young boy kept touching the hair of a Black girl, even after the teacher had told him several times to stop, Griffiths said. Rather than punishing the boy, the instructor paused the lesson for 5-10 minutes and had several Black girls in the class talk about how they felt when people touched their hair without permission and what it meant to them.

“We really make these conversations into bogeymen that feel really scary and really big and complicated,” Griffiths said, but this instructor quickly facilitated a conversation and then checked in with the boy who’d done it to ensure he understood why he’d been asked to stop.

Academic tracking leads to segregation, educators say

It’s difficult, though, to work on building community across racial or ethnic divides when you don’t have a diverse representation of students in AP or GATE classes, White said.

Tracking visibly distinguishes between groups of students, indirectly highlighting their differences, Nishina said, and that reinforces stereotypes that kids may have developed over their short lifetimes.

In Seattle, Culver City and other communities around the country, educators have begun reshaping their advance placement programs in recent years with the aim of ensuring that students of color and socioeconomically disadvantaged students get equal access.

In fall 2022, New York eliminated its gifted and talented program for elementary school students, which had spots for only 2,500 children, replacing it with an accelerated instruction program open to all students.

The changes have not come without protests from students who liked the programs and their parents who have said school officials are sacrificing rigor to promote equity.

But Nishina said: “Decreasing or eliminating tracks seems to benefit those students who would have been diverted into lower tracks, while not academically holding back students who would have been in the more accelerated tracks.”

At the same time, she said, “more diverse schools and classrooms tend to have students who feel less lonely, safe in school, and less bullied than students in less diverse schools. This finding holds for all students across different racial and ethnic backgrounds equally well.”

When students engage in interactions across racial and ethnic divides, they do better in school and they are generally more engaged, said Nishina, a professor of human development and family studies.

Parents support teachers talking about race, surveys show

Do parents mind teachers talking about race? In a small research sample that Griffiths did, she found Black and white parents would support it.

Griffiths works at Stanford SPARQs where she and other researchers partner with industry leaders and change makers to combat bias, reduce disparities and drive culture change. She has conducted hundreds of surveys to gauge the sentiments of teachers and parents on a variety of issues related to race.

Children begin to notice racial differences early in life, even before they turn a year old, Griffiths said, and by the time they reach their preschool years, they typically begin noticing such things as differences in people’s homes and attaching those differences to the race of the people who live there.

“That process … is very natural for any human brain to try to do, which is to try to come up with explanations for why something in the world is the way that it is,” Griffiths said, “and that process is where a conversation, an honest conversation, can be really helpful to interrupt a potentially problematic explanation from developing in a child’s mind.”

Studies show White parents rarely discuss race or racism with their children, Griffiths said, so oftentimes, classroom readings or discussions are the first time that white children gain insight into things like socioeconomic differences they have observed.

Children may begin to believe that something is inherently wrong with a group of people as opposed to coming to understand that racial or ethnic differences could result from inequitable social policies, systematic disenfranchisement, segregation or whatever it may be, Griffiths said.

While some people have expressed concerns that school lessons and conversations make children feel bad about themselves, Griffiths said, that belief hasn’t been borne out by research. Classroom lessons actually give kids scaffolding, she said, to process things that they’re noticing in the world.

“You can’t shield kids from absorbing that information,” Griffiths said.

Educator: Racially charged incidents point to problem

White said he’s been dismayed by the number of racially charged incidents at Sacramento-area schools in recent years. Among them:

▪ Early this year, two White fans repeatedly used a racial slur and made monkey gestures to ridicule a Black wrestler at a Roseville High School match.

▪ In December, a Korematsu Elementary School staff member found a racial slur painted on the wall outside a Black teacher’s classroom.

▪ In 2022, Elysse Versher resigned her position as assistant vice principal at Sacramento’s West Campus High School. Versher said her students had targeted her with racist graffiti and violent threats and district officials had not protected her. She is suing the Sacramento City Unified School District.

These are tell-tale signs that schools aren’t doing work critical to the growth of students of all races, said White. Early in his career, he trained and supported San Diego teachers in building community among diverse groups of students and educating the kids about why differences exist.

That program petered out after the district had met provisions of a lawsuit settlement, White said, but school districts should consistently invest in training teachers on age-appropriate ways to expand students’ cultural competency.

Griffiths, who does a lot of research on teachers, said she also sees a need for increased training, and she praised books such as “Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps and Teaching in Today’s Classrooms” by Vanderbilt University’s H. Richard Milner IV for showing teachers how to engage in what Milner calls “race talk.”

Teachers feel a lot of pressure today when they offer these lessons or have these conversations, Griffiths said, because they don’t know how parents will react to it or whether administrators will back them if there’s a complaint.

In 2021, Sacramento teacher Katherine Sanders sparked an uproar when she used a racial slur as part of a class discussion on the power of words. Sanders, who is white, apologized two days later to her middle school students, but some would not accept it.

Ultimately, she resigned from Kit Carson International Academy.

White said he wished that the Black Parallel School Board had a program that offered a race relations training institute or a race relations counselor to work with teachers on specific issues and hopefully return them to the classroom.

SCUSD beefs up teacher training in past 2 years

Over the past two years, the Sacramento City Unified has provided robust, mandatory training to faculty through an anti-racist, anti-bias, and trauma-informed lens, said district spokesman Brian Heap.

A combination of staff and independent specialists such as EPOCH Education have led those education modules, Heap said. Since the training began at West Campus, he said, a student-led equity club has formed at the high school.

District staff also provide teachers with a weekly slide deck that focuses on culture, climate and social emotional learning, Heap said. Educators can use it, he said, to help build more positive relationships with students and foster a greater sense of inclusion and belonging in the classroom.

Asked whether district personnel monitor usage of this tool or set goals for cross-race or cross-ethnic activities, Heap said the district had no further comment.

White said that the only training modules he’s seen for Sacramento City Unified teachers were computer-based modules, not live discussions.

If parents want to influence how dollars are spent on race relations, tutoring or other areas, they should attend meetings of their school site council and district site council, said Mark Gaskins, co-founder of The Village Method. Based in suburban south Alameda County, this nonprofit connects African American families with the knowledge and organizations that can help them reach their full potential.

There are a couple of ways parents can advocate for what they want, Gaskins said. They can attend advisory meetings organized by the site councils and make recommendations. Or, now through Mar. 22, parents can fill out a so-called school climate survey.

The school site council will consider recommendations from both the meetings and the surveys when writing its three-year Local Control and Accountability Plan.

This document spells out how every district will use state dollars to improve educational outcomes. Each school district must adopt its plan as part of an annual budget process, which must be completed by the end of June.

But even if parents fill out the survey and show up for the advisory meetings, Gaskins said, they still should show up for the site council meeting to ensure dollars are appropriated for the needs they voiced. Suggestions might make the accountability plan list, he said, but that doesn’t mean they will get funding.

“School site councils … are the decision-making bodies,” Gaskins said. “We need parents to become presidents or chairpersons of these bodies.”