A new Morgan State University program, “Preservation in Practice,” aims to bring diversity to the architectural field, reports the Baltimore Sun.

The eight-week program, lead by Morgan State professor of architecture and historic preservation, Dale Green, recruited six black architecture students. Green argued the city of Baltimore does not reflect its rich and diverse history through its monuments and architecture. He cited the absence of a monument dedicated to Harriet Tubman, a Maryland native.

In its first summer, the “Preservation in Practice” program has been providing students hands-on experience in preservation. The students have visited historic sites in Baltimore and Wyoming, studied alongside architecture experts and even learned to lay bricks, the Sun reported. Most recently, the students worked at the Peale Center in downtown Baltimore, the oldest museum building in the United States.

The Peale Center reopened its cultural center in 2017 after closing in 1997 due to lack of funds. Student participants helped continue restoring the Center to its previous state through maintenance of its historic brick and mortar, and also pulling weeds, according to the Sun.

The program is a partnership with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation had the students work with its Hands-on Preservation Experience Crew (HOPE). Monica Rhodes, the director of HOPE told the Sun: “We started HOPE to engage a large, more diverse audience in architecture trades.”

As the newspaper also noted, only five percent of architecture students are black, and only 0.3 percent of licensed architects are black women.

Morgan State University is the first HBCU (historically black college or university) to introduce the program, and program partners hope to implement it at other HBCUs.

“Historic preservation is extremely important,” said Monique Robinson, 22, a Morgan State junior. “This experience has inspired me to go find out where our history is. A lot of our history is repressed and lost. It’s ignored.”

Learn more at Next City

Last week, a white woman, Linda Krakora, called the police on a 12-year-old black boy for mowing a lawn too close to her property, just outside of Cleveland. Around the same time, another white woman, Alison Ettel, called the police on an 8-year-old black girl for selling water without a permit. In May, a white woman, Sarah Braasch, called the police on a fellow black Yale student for napping outside of her dorm. That same week, in Oakland, a white woman, Jennifer Schulte, called the police on black people barbecuing in a park. A white woman manager of a Starbucks in Philadelphia called the police on two black men for going to the bathroom without ordering coffee.

All of these events happened not in the former Confederate South, but in northern cities. In fact, Buzzfeed recently reported a surge in 311 calls from certain gentrifying parts of New York City, many of them about trivial nuisances such as “playing dominoes.” These are cities located above the fabled Mason-Dixon line where African Americans fled throughout the first half of the 20th century during a time period known perhaps too safely as “The Great Migration.” During this time period, millions of African Americans escaped the racial terrorism of the south in hopes of finding sanctuary in the cities of the north. Instead they walked right into a whole other variety of racial harassment from white people, but evoking the same white supremacist principle that the mere existence of black people in a public space should be met with suspicion and policing. The recent instances of white women calling police on black people under the pettiest circumstances is just a continuation of that tradition, but it’s important to remember on this Fourth of July how we got here.

The practice and policy of over-policing of black bodies extended through slavery, past the years and decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, and into the 20th century Jim Crow era, when states and cities passed “black code” and anti-integration laws that could get African Americans reported to the police for trivial violations such as the vaguely defined offense of “vagrancy,” or for being black in a park or on a beach reserved for whites.

I was reminded during my recent visit to The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, that African Americans getting reported to the police for such pettifogging offenses meant more than just getting arrested or sent to jail. It meant getting killed—bodies roped up and hung from a tree before being shot up and burned on the ground—by the police or by a lynch mob, oftentimes one in the same. Many of these lynchings began with reports from white women. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (known informally as the lynching memorial), also in Montgomery, recalls the names of thousands of black people lynched from the 19th century to deep in the 1940s, and the reasons why.

This doesn’t count the hundreds who were lynched after being accused of raping or sexually molesting a white women, or even for just looking at a white woman the wrong way, as what happened with the black teenager Emmett Till in 1955.

African Americans could also be reported to the police—and then jailed and/or killed—for violating laws that forbade black people from being in the same place as white people, even if those places were supposed to be public spaces. In 1920, Mississippi passed a law that punished any printing company for publishing materials that encouraged “social equality or intermarriage between whites and negroes” with a $500 fine or six months in prison. In 1947, Texas passed a law forbidding black and white people from participating in the same boxing and wrestling matches together; the following year it banned black and white people from using the same public libraries. And per the Buzzfeed investigation about police calls for domino games, in 1952, Montgomery, Alabama, passed an ordinance stating: “it shall be unlawful for a Negro and a white person to play together or in company with each other in the city in any game of cards, dice, checkers, or dominoes.” This is what African Americans were evacuating from when they left the South.

“Between 1910 and 1940, nearly six million refugees fled the South in response to the threat of racial terrorism,” reads an exhibit at The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, “...in a massive forced exodus known as The Great Migration.”

When considering those facts, one can’t help but wonder why this era is known under such a benign label. “The Great Migration” makes it sound like a bunch of people just packed up their bags headed for better jobs and homes—no different than the recent trend of Amazon-ian and Apple-American tech nerds moving in droves from Silicon Valley to greener, more affordable pastures in the former Rust Belt. In reality, the stakes for African Americans in the 20th century were much grimmer and urgent—they were moving to save their lives, as Bryan Stevenson, the racial justice advocate behind the lynching memorial and museum, regularly emphasizes. It probably should be called The Great Massive Forced Exodus.

“When you truly know what they were up against—the human rights abuses, the exclusion from voting and citizenship—and what happened upon their arrival, then you realize that 'refugee' gets closer to describing what they were,” says Isabel Wilkerson, author of the book The Warmth of Other Suns, a 15-year investigation into the escape patterns of black families throughout the 1900s. “They were seeking political asylum within their own homeland, to be free like other Americans.”

Scholars of that era came up with the name “The Great Migration” and then it just sort of stuck. Wilkerson agrees that the name is innocent to a fault—the term “migrant” suggests “a provisional temporariness” or a seasonal worker, says Wilkerson, but most African Americans of that time period were leaving the South with no intention of returning. Yes, there was the hope for better jobs in the North, and the need for sharecroppers and farm laborers were dwindling in the South as we entered the 1960s because of technological advancements. But those were side benefits. The narrative behind blacks flooding cities such as Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City is not A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; it’s Birth of a Nation. Yet, while Wilkerson finds the term “Great Migration” problematic she says there’s still value in using it as a tagpoint that many people recognize as pivotal to U.S. history.

“As someone who has devoted many years to studying the Great Migration, and who is also a product of the Great Migration, what matters most to me is that more Americans know about this watershed in American history that reshaped our cities, our culture, our politics, by whatever name it is called,” says Wilkerson. “When you understand the Great Migration, the forces that triggered it and the after-effects of it in the North and West—redlining, restrictive covenants, etc.—then what we are seeing in the news today should not surprise you. It's a cautionary tale for our current migration crises, our racial divide and our era as a whole.”

Meaning, this explains why we still find white people calling the police on black people under the most inauspicious terms. Today, millions of Americans in cities across America will commemorate Independence Day with patiotism and pride. Meanwhile, many people of color will have to watch over their shoulders as they barbecue and play dominoes in celebration.

Learn more at CityLab

IT IS NOT so often that a major university like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovers a new kind of science. But in the fall, the university will launch a novel sort of program, an undergraduate major called Urban Science that combines data analytics training with the sort of informed policy knowhow offered in typical Urban Studies programs.

Yes, it will be a science, with hypotheses that can be measured by data and evaluated with software engineering tools by smartypants computer scientists. But the new program will also attempt to honor the actual fleshy people with hopes, fears, and questions about how the places where they make their homes might adapt to the future.

Wifi networks, smart traffic lights, security cameras, cell phones, Ubers, and yeah, electric scooters throw off truckloads of data about American cities. Meanwhile, two-thirds of humanity is expected to live in urban places by 2050. Students will be asked to examine patterns mined from data, explain them in ways any urban dweller can understand, and transform them into effective, helpful policy—the guidelines that make cities go. Time to make all that information work for residents, instead of the other way around.

Urban science is a budding discipline that has exploded over the past half-decade, and multidisciplinary programs have cropped up at mostly private institutions like New York University, Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and Carnegie Mellon. In some places, it goes by “urban informatics,” in some, “spatial science,” but taken together, these departments ask: What can researchers glean from all this new data? What can’t they? And how much can that new knowledge really improve people’s lives?

Those in charge of the MIT program, officially a collaboration between the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, don’t necessarily envision their students as future city planners. They want to attract kids who might otherwise go straight to the sciences, but who also want some context about where the numbers go once they’ve organized, cleaned, and crunched them.

“At MIT, the computer science degree is one of the more popular ones, because people feel like this is the language and tool of the future,” says Eran Ben-Joseph, the head of the university’s Urban Studies and Planning Department. “So for us, the question is, ‘How do you make a better connection between the training and computation, and what the implication of the work will be, for communities, for policies?”

In other words: How do you create a good citizen and a good computer scientist?

Good Citizenry 101

According to those who run urban data analytics programs across the country, building a thoughtful city resident isn’t as easy as forcing annoyed and sleep-deprived youngsters to pass an ethics class. To give students experience making good decisions with data, MIT and other universities offering new, urban science-like courses stress partnerships with cities, which give them access to real data in exchange for their consultation help.

For example: For MIT’s Underworlds project, a collaboration between its urban studies staff and a computational microbiology lab, researchers built robots that search through Boston-area sewage for (literal) raw data about drug use and chronic diseases. Computer scientists use that information to understand what populations are suffering from specific health problems, to predict future outbreaks, and to inform public health policy. Other potential MIT projects include crafting transportation systems that get people to their jobs efficiently, but serve all members of the community and their different work schedules.

Or take students in USC’s spatial sciences program. Through a partnership with the Los Angeles mayor’s office, its students have analyzed data, then created visualizations of where crime is most affecting the city. The university hopes its students will uncover important patterns, but it also wants to teach them to translate those patterns into words or infographics that all citizens can understand.

“We have sensors and satellites flying all around the sky; we’re awash in data,” says John Wilson, a sociologist who directs the university’s Spatial Sciences Institute. “Now we need to make sense of it.”

The trick, however, is to teach students how to handle data, as well as how to avoid worshipping its results blindly. Northeastern University’s urban informatics master’s program started admitting students in 2015 and now graduates about 10 a year. It often dispatches them on data-inflected missions that take them to the streets of Boston. There, they observe the sources of their data (and its limitations), and talk to the people generating it. “It’s not just being great at analytics,” says Daniel O’Brien, an assistant professor in the university’s public policy school who teaches in the program. “It’s being able to know which questions to ask and answer and how they fit into the long run of what cities have been, and what they’re going to be.”

UP, Up, and Away

After graduation, students from MIT, like those from other, similar programs, are likely to head to a few big tech companies, or least a few big companies that use a lot of tech: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, GM, Boeing, Northrop Grumman. Within those shiny office walls, workers are now beginning to question the ethics, sagacity, the point, really, of the work they do—how their data-mashing is affecting their fellow humans out in the world. That’s the point of an urban science degree, too.

Meanwhile, city governments scramble to find talent to help them use and evaluate the sorts of data they increasingly demand from companies like Uber, Lyft, and e-scooter startups. They cannot offer salaries that complete with the ride-hailing startups and the Googles. But an increased supply of workers—the kids who are interested in civics and willing to go through the urban programs and then fan out into city governments—can help.

As Amazon pushes cities to out-concession each other for a new headquarters, Elon Musk prepares to build mass transit in Chicago, and dockless bike-share companies seek sidewalk domination, the idea of combining big cities with big data seems more relevant than ever. And the nascent urban sciences major suddenly seems much more important.

Learn more at WIRED

The Los Angeles school board on Tuesday approved an $8.2-billion spending plan for the next school year as expected, but also pledged support for a comparatively tiny amount of new spending to give students free college admissions tests and college savings accounts.

The school board also debated whether to ask local voters for more money in November through an annual tax on every parcel located within school district boundaries. Board members postponed a decision until July 10.

The budget, which has been under discussion for months, included no major surprises. As in previous meetings, senior district staff forecast that the nation’s second-largest school system was headed for financial disaster in four years, when they predict that reserves will have dried up.

After some hand-wringing, the Board of Education approved the plan, 6 to 1. The dissenting vote came from Scott Schmerelson. He voted no after calling unsuccessfully for an additional $5 million for a school-based reform plan supported by the teachers union and allied activists.

The entire board favored one new spending item: covering the costs of the college aptitude tests that many colleges require applicants to submit.

Under the plan, students will take the SAT or ACT during a regular school day, probably in March, in their own schools. The familiar surroundings should help with student performance on the test, said supporters, including board members and staff from the city and school district.

Based on a 10th-grade enrollment of 34,438 students, paying the fees for the tests should cost about $750,000. The estimate assumes that 85% of students will qualify for reduced rates because they come from low-income households. Initial training costs for staff to administer the tests could surpass $400,000. And extra help for students could cost close to that, although some free online resources are available.

The resolution also directs the superintendent to report back in 60 days with a plan to provide the PSAT, a practice test for the SAT, to all eighth-, ninth-, and 10th-grade students. The district already pays for 10th graders to take the test.

Separately, the board reiterated its support, by a formal vote, for a city-led plan to create a college savings account for every first-grader. Each account would get $50 in seed money and the plan would be rolled out over five years.

“Just opening an account and putting that money away starts that college statement, that mentality,” board member Nick Melvoin said.

“We’re putting students on the path toward higher learning,” board member Kelly Gonez said.

The preliminary planning for such accounts has taken two years, with city staffers exploring different options for how the accounts could work.

Later in the meeting, school board member George McKenna put forward a plan to try to slow or even reverse the district’s projected slide toward insolvency.

McKenna proposed a parcel tax for the November ballot that would raise $150 million a year. Passing the measure would require a two-thirds majority.

There’s much debate in districts across the state about whether the November election is likely to be a favorable moment for parcel taxes and school construction bonds.

L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner did not get involved in Tuesday’s debate, but sources within the district suggest that he’s concerned that the timing is not yet right. McKenna alluded to that presumed hesitancy.

“Mr. superintendent, with respect to your position, all you have to do is say go …. and the people in this district will go,” McKenna said. “I’m advocating for a now, a boldness and an urgency.”

Several board members expressed concern about the expense of a ballot measure and fear that voters’ rejection then might hurt the district’s chances in a later election.

“I am concerned that there has to be a strategy to win, not just a strategy to put on the ballot,” school board President Monica Garcia said.

Learn more at L.A. Times

Boarding school conjures a certain image: children in preppy blazers, leafy quadrangles in New England and tuition that costs more than many families earn in a year.

That stereotype would not apply if officials carry out their vision for a dusty, trash-strewn lot in South Los Angeles that has sat vacant for more than two decades.

Their pitch? A transportation boarding school, free to its students.

The school would offer a vocational and college-preparatory curriculum, tightly tailored to train students for jobs in the transportation industry. Officials say some could find work with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority or local contractors after graduation; others could go on to college to study engineering, architecture or urban planning.

The 4.2-acre site at Vermont and Manchester avenues where the school would be built has been vacant since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when a swap meet was torched and burned to the ground. Since then, the land has been caught in a tug-of-war between politicians and residents who disagree on what should be built there to address blight.

“For 25 years, we passed this spot and thought about insurrection,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who is also a Metro director, at a press event Monday. “But today, we think about resurrection.”

Though the proposal is in its infancy, it has sparked resistance from some South L.A. residents who say the neighborhood needs more sit-down restaurants, grocery stores and retail space — not a boarding school.

Los Angeles County won ownership of the lot through eminent domain in April. The boarding school is a key piece of the county’s development plan, along with apartments, a job training center, a plaza for transit riders on Vermont, and 50,000 square feet of retail space, including a grocery store.

But the proposal does not include the sit-down restaurants, coffee shops and retail spaces that local residents need, said Elisa McGhee, who lives in Vermont Vista, a mile and a half south of the site.

“This is not the best thing for our community,” McGhee said. “Building this school will not attract the retail that’s needed here.”

She also questioned why Metro and the county would build a new school in South L.A., when struggling high schools nearby would welcome the funding and support.

Some schools in Los Angeles offer magnet programs for science and technology, and others offer vocational training, but no one school offers them in combination, with a tight focus on the transportation industry, said Joanne Peterson, Metro’s head of human resources.

The new development, she said, is an opportunity “to bring new life” to a piece of land in South L.A. that has been “unoccupied and blighted” for 26 years. The development’s location is also convenient because Vermont is the second-most traveled transit corridor in the county, officials said.

The Board of Supervisors is expected to vote this week on an exclusive negotiating agreement with the nonprofit SEED Foundation, which runs public boarding schools, to develop more detailed plans for the L.A. school’s construction and operation.

The foundation would also apply for a charter with the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

About 400 students in high school could attend, staying on campus during the week and returning home on weekends, said Ridley-Thomas deputy Karly Katona. Room and board would be free. The school could open as soon as the fall of 2020, she said.

The school’s annual operating subsidy from Los Angeles County is expected to be about $10 million, or about $25,000 per student, Katona said. Like other charters, the school would receive money from the state for each pupil, and would also pursue grants, philanthropic funding and donations from the transportation industry.

Metro hopes graduates could address a critical need in Southern California: qualified workers. Nearly a dozen new rail lines are to be built across Los Angeles in the next four decades, creating thousands of vacant positions in construction and engineering.

Already, Metro struggles to fill some jobs. The agency hires about 2,200 people per year, and is continuously recruiting for some positions, including track inspectors and engineers, Peterson said. About 40% of Metro’s 11,000 employees are eligible for retirement today.

“What we’re trying to do is really flood the market with qualified people,” said Metro Chief Executive Phil Washington. “We want to be the farm team for the industry.”

Trained graduates would be in high demand among firms that “either go to the union hall and get folks off the bench, or take a chance on someone right off the street,” Washington said. The hope, he said, is that private companies will send employees to guest lecture, help shape the curriculum and give money to the school.

Early plans for the curriculum call for seven career tracks, including logistics, civics and public policy, engineering and mechanics. Students would also take classes that meet the state’s curriculum requirements.

A similar approach exists at Transit Tech High School in New York City, where teenagers take English, math and other standard classes, but also learn about computer circuitry, hydraulics and electronic troubleshooting. The program is a public school, not a charter, and students go home at night.

Formerly a vocational school for all kinds of trades, the school switched its focus in 1986 at the urging of New York transit officials. Today, the school bears the slogan “The express to success.”

When graduates land jobs with Amtrak, or with New York City’s deteriorating subway system, the school’s Twitter account congratulates them with the rousing cheer, “Go Transit!”

In L.A., officials hope to attract students from across the county who have been homeless, in foster care, or involved in the criminal justice system — and have reached out to LACOE, the Los Angeles Unified School District, community colleges and social service agencies for advice.

Critics have questioned whether officials would launch a school with that emphasis, or a focus on career training, in a majority-white neighborhood.

Officials say the obstacles children face in the neighborhoods near the site make the case for a school with a stable place to live. More than 1,700 children are in foster care and group homes in the eight surrounding ZIP codes, and the teen pregnancy rate is twice the county average.

The school would be an opportunity to provide “early, strategic intervention” for teenagers who could otherwise “end up costing the county a lot of money in the long term,” Katona said.

Metro officials argued that the program would amount to economic development, creating a pipeline that would allow young people to find work in their own neighborhoods.

McGhee said she worried that the school would be a "soft jail,” where students from rival gangs could endanger other students or neighborhood residents. She said residents are “not going to want to mix kids up that are doing well with kids that are trying to catch up, or learning how to behave.”

There are a few precedents for a program that focuses on foster youth, including San Pasqual Academy, a year-round boarding school in Escondido for teenagers in the foster care system. In the 2016 school year, 77% of students graduated, according to county data.

The SEED Foundation’s boarding school in Miami, which opened in 2014, caters exclusively to students who are at risk of failing school, live in public housing or foster care, and whose families qualify for social services or other benefits.

The foundation’s D.C. school is among the best-known charter schools in the country. It was featured in the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman,” and has hosted a number of dignitaries, including then-President Obama and Prince Charles of Britain.

If the L.A. school includes a significant number of students who have been homeless, in foster care or arrested, teachers and administrators should be prepared to work through unresolved trauma, familial issues and other emotional needs, said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA.

“A lot of times, you don’t see high-quality education and support being provided to disadvantaged kids,” Noguera said. But, he said, the idea of training students for high-quality jobs in the future “is a promising concept.”

Learn more at L.A. Times

In 1968, the Polish-American psychologist Robert Zajonc conducted a landmark study at the University of Michigan. He recruited students and told them they’d be participating in a language-learning experiment, but this was just a cover for his true intentions. Instead, Zajonc began by showing them fake “Chinese” characters that he claimed signified various adjectives, then continued to display each character to his subjects over and over again, at various frequencies–some as many as 25 times, others just once or not at all. Finally, Zajonc asked each student volunteer to guess how positive or negative the definition of each adjective was (that is, did it represent a “good” trait or a “bad” trait) and how much they “liked” it.

Zajonc discovered that there was a strong linear relationship between familiarity and not just how positively his subjects interpreted his utterly meaningless characters, but with how much they liked it, too. The more a student saw a given character, the more they preferred it.

Zajonc’s research later became the foundation of the well-documented “mere exposure effect,” whereby the more we’re exposed to something, the better we like it. Which begs an obvious question: Does this apply to people, too? And if so, can mere exposure help our brains unlearn unconscious biases and assumptions–including racist ones?

FEELING BETTER VERSUS FEELING LESS BAD

Researchers Leslie Zebrowitz and Yi Zhang at Brandeis University set out to answer those questions in a study, and they published those findings in 2012. Their question was simple: What would happen–at the cognitive level–if they showed people faces of individuals of different ethnicities over and over?

Zebrowitz and Zhang decided to focus on the orbitofrontal cortex, which is tied to the reward system of our brains. It drives two different reflexes that help our brains assess a situation before we take action. Specifically, the orbitofrontal cortex’s role is to tell us whether we’re better off approaching or avoiding a person, place, or thing. But it’s made up of a few component parts.

Our minds’ so-called “approach reflex” can be measured by observing activity in our the medial orbitofrontal cortex. When this area of the brain is activated, your motor system eggs you on to engage with someone or something. As Zhang explained it to me, “In a gambling setting, if you start to win money, the medial orbitofrontal is where [the brain] activates the most because it registers positive rewards.” The lateralorbitofrontal cortex registers what brain scientists refer to as our “avoidance reflex,” which cues our bodies to run away to avoid a possible negative outcome. The stronger the activation, the more pronounced the feeling. “When you start to lose money,” she continued, “the lateral orbitofrontal is the region that activates more because that’s when you feel bad about the situation.”

Zhang and Zebrowitz wanted to learn whether repeated exposure would either increase the approach reflex or decrease the avoidance reflex. Or as Zhang put it, “Is it because we start to feel better about those stimuli or is it that we start to feel less bad about them?” The researchers conducted an fMRI study of 16 white men and 16 white women. Each participant was exposed to pictures drawn from a collection of black faces, Korean faces, written Chinese characters (real ones), and random shapes. These pictures were shown different numbers of times to the study participants, with some pictures never shown and others shown many times. Next, the researchers put each participant into the fMRI machine and exposed them to 40 images they’d never seen before and 20 they had. The idea was to see how and where the brain would react.

What the scientists found was that the unfamiliar ones images activated subjects’ avoidance reflex; simply put, people were afraid of the unknown. More than just for faces, this same effect occurred when respondents were exposed to unfamiliar shapes and Chinese characters. This made sense: humans have evolved to fear the unknown because it signals potential harm. However, the study subjects’ avoidance reflex was significantly reduced when they were exposed to the same faces, shapes, and characters they’d seen before going into the fMRI machine.

HOW ANTI-BIAS SPREADS THROUGH THE BRAIN

Zhang observed another surprising effect, though. “Once our participants have been exposed to a prototypical Korean face,” she explains, “they start to show less adverse reactions to other faces in the same racial category.” Indeed, familiarity actually helped subjects’ brains generalize from the particular images they were exposed to–helping reduce race-based biases overall.

So what about the approach reflex? Interestingly, with increased familiarity, it neither changed nor increased. Familiarity does not make us like things more. Rather, it makes us fear things less. This is one reason why we typically enjoy our own homes. People and objects that are familiar feel safe. We may not particularly like that old chair we inherited from our grandmother–it’s not that great to sit in and it clearly needs reupholstering–but it gives us comfort to have around.

It seems our brains must back out of their subconsciously racist beliefs, rather than actively embrace more inclusive ones. But once we take those first few steps away from our biases, our brains know where to go from there.

Learn more at Fast Company

Offering an expansive view of California’s education system that extends from before birth into the workplace, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom last night pledged to deliver on what he called a “cradle to college promise for the next generation” along with setting a goal to “end child poverty in California.”

In speech to supporters in San Francisco Tuesday night after coming in first in California’s primary race for governor, he said the state needed to “reinvest” in its public education system, and begin treating teachers “like the heroes that they are.”

He made his remarks after dealing a devastating blow to the gubernatorial bid of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was knocked out of the race after coming in third behind both Newsom and GOP businessman John Cox. Newsom received 33.3 percent of the vote, to Cox’s 26.4 percent and Villaraigosa’s 12.9 percent .

Villaraigosa’s poor showing came despite an endorsement by the California Charter Schools Association Advocates, and $23 million in spending to boost his campaign by an independent expenditure committee that the charter schools organization established. Most of those funds came from multi-billionaires with a long history of backing charter schools.

In his speech, Newsom referred to his severe dyslexia that made attending school a torturous experience, and has fundamentally shaped his views on education.

His policy positions differ dramatically from those of Cox, whom he will face in the November general election. Cox rejects the idea that California needs to spend more money on public education. In his speech to supporters last night, he blamed Newsom for the “mismanagement” of the state’s public schools.

“It wasn’t President Trump who gave us one of the most expensive and failing school systems in the country,” he said. “It is criminal to deprive children of the education they deserve.” Raising a theme he brought up repeatedly on the campaign trail, he said extra taxes approved by California voters at the ballot box in recent years are not going into the classroom, but instead are going “into administration and pensions.”

He also argued for the “school choice” agenda similar to what Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are pushing. “We need to give parents and children the education they deserve, and that means more charters, giving parents more choice and encouraging home schooling,” he said.

And instead of increasing funds for higher education and boosting student aid to make it more affordable for students, as Newsom promised, in an April interview with EdSource Cox said colleges should trim their budgets and require professors to teach more classes as a way to reduce costs. “You don’t make things more affordable by handing out loans and subsidies to people,” he said.

In his interview with EdSource, Cox also reversed socially conservative positions on education he took during his brief campaign for president in 2007. Cox said then that he was concerned about a “problem with transvestites who want to be school teachers,” and supported a proposal that would cut off federal funding for schools that “expose our children to homosexual propaganda.”

“I think the world has evolved to some degree since then, and I don’t necessarily hold those views now. I don’t necessarily consider them (transgender teachers) a danger or a problem,” Cox said.

Newsom outlined his education reform plans in considerable detail in response to a 12-question questionnaire EdSource submitted to him lastmonth. Read his full responses here. Cox did not respond to the questionnaire, but his views on education can be found in this EdSource article.

Newsom said he offered “a new way of thinking about education as a lifelong pursuit.” “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career,” he wrote.

His plans start with expanded access to prenatal care, developmental screenings and child care, as well as universal pre-kindergarten education for all 4-year-olds. They continue with large increases in K-12 funding — Newsom has thrown his support behind a proposal to raise per-pupil spending by 60 percent. And they extend into higher education, as Newsom calls for increased funding for California’s public colleges and universities, as well as a more generous state financial aid system to make college more affordable for students.

Asked by EdSource how he would fund universal pre-school, for instance, Newsom did not directly answer. He wrote, in part, “I am committed to identifying the resources to ensure a robust early education system.”

Despite Newsom’s extensive and detailed education platform, it is unlikely that education will be a major issue in the campaign itself, said seasoned political observers Bruce Cain, a political science professor and director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, and Mark DiCamillo, director of the UC Berkeley IGS Poll.

Instead, issues that Cox will raise, such as immigration and the state’s gas tax — and other taxes generally — will be far more prominent, while Newsom will tie Cox to Trump, who is more unpopular in California than almost any other state, said DiCamillo.

But education advocates will be looking closely at Newsom’s positions on education because it is a certainty, barring some political catastrophe, that Newsom will be California’s next governor. In that role, he will have considerable clout to implement his policies in a variety of ways. The governor appoints the 11-person State Board of Education, which is the state’s key policy-making body for education. His annual budget has an impact on how much money goes to schools and how it is spent.

Newsom’s trouncing of Villaraigosa represented a major victory for the California Teachers Association and other teachers unions who had endorsed him. Early in his career Villaraigosa had worked for the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the union representing teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But as state Assembly speaker and during his tenure as L.A. mayor he emerged as a leading critic of the unions. His endorsement by charter school advocates and the millions they poured into the gubernatorial campaign only deepened the hostilities.

“Educators are excited that a champion of our public schools is on the path now to become our next governor,” CTA president Eric Heins said. “Newsom’s clear victory tonight shows that California’s democratic process is not for sale.”

Villaraigosa’s inability to secure a place in the November election “was a huge defeat for charters,” said Kevin Gordon, president of Capitol Advisors, a prominent Sacramento-based education consulting firm. He said the charter groups that organized against Newsom “just emptied the piggy bank on the governor’s race with a big bet. Newsom pledged to be reasonable on charters, but he won’t forget the money raised by the charter school association against him.”

But Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor in USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, said it was oversimplifying to say that Newsom’s victory over Villaraigosa was a blow to charter schools, and that there were many other reasons to explain Villaraigosa’s third place showing.

Stanford’s Cain pointed to Villaraigosa having been out of office for a number of years, that his support among Latinos didn’t materialize to any significant degree, and he didn’t draw in independent or moderate Republican voters to support him in the primary.

Despite the financial influence of their supporters, charter schools themselves weren’t an issue in the race, or one most voters cared about, Jeffe, Cain and DiCamillo said,

“The issue really never gained salience in the election,” DiCamillo said.

The silver lining for charter school supporters in yesterday’s election, Jeffe said, is that Marshall Tuck, the candidate they endorsed for state superintendent of public instruction, had come out ahead of Tony Thurmond, who is backed by teachers unions.

Tuck and Thurmond will face each other in the November runoff, and the funds that wealthy charter backers might have spent on Villaraigosa, had he made it onto the ballot, may well now go to Tuck.

Regardless of the outcome of the Tuck-Thurmond race, however, Newsom is overwhelmingly favored to win in November, and the positions he has taken on education now carry enormous weight. “The Republicans are not nominating an Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Cain said. “It looks to me like it’s going to be a runaway race for Gavin.”

Learn more at EdSource

There is no education without diverse points of view, said Danoff Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana, sitting in his office the morning after Harvard’s 367th Commencement sent 7,000 graduates into a world of differences.

A good education piles up the unknowns, Khurana said. It allows students to reconsider assumptions in multiple aspects of their lives — intellectual, social, personal — by presenting them with new facts and new experiences, and by surrounding them with diverse groups of classmates and viewpoints, both formally and informally.

In the end, that exposure not only instills knowledge and a more accurate view of the world, it gives students a lens through which to re-examine themselves, their upbringings, and their beliefs.

“Diversity in the student body is important for the same reason that it’s important in research,” Khurana said. “The only way to advance a field, to advance research … is through a diversity of perspectives. It is a necessary condition for knowledge to advance. This is not a new, original insight, but one that we need to remind ourselves of over and over again.”

Harvard College’s whole-person approach to creating a diverse student body is currently being challenged in federal district court, the latest in a series of lawsuits that have targeted universities’ right to consider race as one factor among many when choosing among academically qualified applicants. The last serious test came in June 2016, in Fisher v. University of Texas, when the Supreme Court upheld a university’s right to consider an applicant’s race in admissions.

The most recent case has been brought against Harvard by a group created by conservative activist Edward Blum, who has sought through prior legal challenges to eliminate race-conscious admissions. The case argues that Asian-American students, who make up 22.7 percent of Harvard’s incoming freshman class and 6 percent of the U.S. population, are underrepresented on campus.

“The only way to advance a field, to advance research … is through a diversity of perspectives. … This is not a new, original insight, but one that we need to remind ourselves of over and over again,” said Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

The report of the Khurana-chaired Committee to Study the Importance of Student Body Diversity, which was adopted by the faculty in 2016, noted the critical role diversity plays in a liberal arts education, one “in which challenge and confrontation are essential counterparts to collaboration and cooperation.”

Recognition of the value of a diverse student body dates back to the College’s founding days, the report said, when Harvard’s charter, granted by Gov. Thomas Dudley in 1650, dedicated the institution to “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country.”

The pursuit of student diversity continued over the centuries, albeit imperfectly and in the context of changing times. In the mid-1800s, as the nation veered toward civil war, then-Harvard President C.C. Felton argued for nationalizing what had been a regional college, because admitting students from “different and distant states must tend powerfully to remove prejudices by bringing them into friendly relations.”

In the mid-1900s, with the admission of more public school students leading to a more socially and economically diverse student body, the House system was conceived as a way to keep students from self-sorting, by having them share living space. In 1997, after it became clear that individual Houses had become places more welcoming to students of specific backgrounds, assignments were randomized.

“A fair reading of Harvard’s history reveals a process across time in which the College has developed a recognition and appreciation of the excellence that comes only from including and embracing multiple sources of talent,” the committee wrote.

The report highlights different ways student-body diversity — whether racial, ethnic, socio-economic, national, or experiential — is an important part of the Harvard experience. One place different perspectives find expression is the classroom, where students can spark discussion on topics a more homogenous class might not think controversial, or even noteworthy, the report said. The General Education Curriculum, meanwhile, is designed to introduce students to diverse disciplines and ideas.

Outside the classroom, residential and extracurricular experiences — including athletic teams, public service organizations, and clubs — expose students to new ideas and experiences. Students regularly cite classmates as an important source of learning, whether through late-night conversations or meet-ups at the dining hall.

“Each of us brings a unique perspective based on our personal and sociological biography,” Khurana said. “These perspectives can offer deep insights and allow us to test our understandings against an intellectual framework or established understandings. Our personal experiences can also limit what we see and understand, which is why comparative perspectives are so critical. These comparative perspectives — historical, cross-cultural, a different framing of a problem — create new understandings and new possibilities.”

While racial and ethnic differences are key considerations in forming the student body, other factors are also important. Harvard’s 15-year-old financial aid program has helped fuel social and economic diversity. More than half of today’s students receive financial aid, and the average annual cost to parents of students receiving aid is $12,000. One in five undergraduates comes from a family that earns less than $65,000 per year, meaning they pay nothing toward the cost of education.

International education is another key facet of student diversity, fostered both by admitting students from all over the world and more than 250 study-abroad programs.

The incoming freshman class is one of the most diverse in Harvard’s history. To date, it is 15.5 percent African-American, 22.7 percent Asian-American, 12.2 percent Latino, 2 percent Native American, and 0.4 percent native Hawaiian. It is also majority female, at 50.1 percent. International students, who make up 12 percent of the class, hail from 90 countries.

“I don’t think we can say with any level of confidence that we are forming tomorrow’s global leaders if these students are not being shaped in a context that reflects global reality,” said Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Jonathan L. Walton. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

While Harvard has continued to work on diversity since the report came out, committee member Jonathan Walton said that it’s misguided to seek an end to the work — to see diversity as a goal to be achieved.

“Diversity is a reality to be lived and experienced,” said Walton, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church. “We never say that we’re there. Diversity is like Veritas: it’s an ideal of which we are in constant pursuit.”

Training students in a diverse environment is crucial to preparing them for the world that awaits them, Walton said. Future leaders in education, business, and government have to be able to understand and engage with people different from themselves.

“I don’t think we can say with any level of confidence that we are forming tomorrow’s global leaders if these students are not being shaped in a context that reflects global reality,” Walton said.

“One might say that we have to be mindful that we are not educating a generation of aristocratic elites that are given to neo-fascism because they’ve been able to use power and pedigree to mask their ignorance,” Walton said. “And we know ignorance leads to fear and intolerance, which always leads to hate and suffering. What’s our moral responsibility to society at large?”

“What a disservice we do, frankly, to the world, if we fail in attracting excellence from all quarters, and even more if we fail to foster that excellence once we’ve identified it and have it on campus,” said Emma Dench. Rose Lincoln/Harvard file photo

Emma Dench, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and another committee member, said that a commitment to campus diversity shows that Harvard takes seriously its mission to educate tomorrow’s global leaders.

“What a disservice we do, frankly, to the world, if we fail in attracting excellence from all quarters, and even more if we fail to foster that excellence once we’ve identified it and have it on campus,” Dench said.

One doesn’t have to look very far to see attacks on diversity-focused ideals, she added.

“This is an area that is quite endangered,” Dench said.

This spring, President Drew Faust accepted the recommendations of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, empaneled in May 2016, and appointed former Morehouse College President John Silvanus Wilson as a senior adviser and strategist to the president to implement them.

In her Commencement speech, Faust reflected on the importance of diversity and the idea that Harvard is likely the most diverse place most students have lived, or may ever live. The University, she said, seeks to attract talented individuals of the broadest range of backgrounds and interests, and then asks them to both learn from and teach one another.

“This isn’t easy. It requires individuals to question long-held assumptions, to open their minds and their hearts to ideas and arguments that may seem not just unfamiliar, but even disturbing and disorienting,” she said. “It … becomes ever more difficult in an increasingly polarized social and political environment in which expressions of hatred, bigotry, and divisiveness seem not just permitted but encouraged. But in spite of these challenges all around us, we at Harvard strive to be enriched, not divided, by our differences.”

Learn more at The Harvard Gazette

Walmart, the country’s largest private employer, announced Wednesday that it will pay for its workers to go back to school — as long as they get degrees in business or supply-chain management.

The retailer is partnering with three universities to offer associate’s and bachelor’s degrees to 1.4 million part-time, full-time and salaried Walmart and Sam’s Club employees — a pitch to improve employee retention rates and engagement at work, while also drawing new workers. Walmart will cover the costs of tuition, books and fees, while employees will be required to pay $1 a day for the duration of their studies.

“We know there [are] a lot of benefits from a business perspective,” Drew Holler, vice president of people innovation for Walmart U.S., said on a call with reporters. “We know we’re going to see an influx of applications.”

Degrees will be offered by the University of Florida in Gainesville, Brandman University in Irvine, Calif., and Bellevue University in Bellevue, Neb., all nonprofit institutions with online programs for working adults. Rachel Carlson, chief executive of Guild Education, a Denver-based company that will oversee the program, pointed out that the program allows employees to earn a degree without amassing college debt.

Walmart’s announcement comes as retailers struggle to attract and retain workers in an increasingly competitive labor market. The unemployment rate is at a 17-year low, and the number of open jobs in retail — 723,000 as of March — has continued to grow, according to government data.

Earlier this year, Walmart raised its starting hourly wage from $9 to $11 and began offering paid parental leave and adoption benefits to full-time employees. Other companies have also taken similar measures in recent months, with Target pledging to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 and Starbucks offering paid sick leave and stock grants to its baristas.

Walmart, based in Bentonville, Ark., joins a growing number of employers in offering subsidized college educations. Chipotle Mexican Grill provides its workers as much as $5,250 in annual tuition assistance, while Starbucks gives employees a full ride to Arizona State University for undergraduate degrees in more than 60 subjects.

For now, Walmart will pay only for degrees in business and supply-chain management because those areas of study “will be relevant across the industry and for future work opportunities,” according to spokeswoman Erica Jones.

Employees can sign up for the program after working at Walmart for 90 days. Executives said there are no other requirements or fees, and participating employees are not obligated to remain with the company for any period of time. (Employees who leave Walmart before completing their degrees are no longer eligible for company subsidies but can continue on their own.)

And unlike the tuition-reimbursement programs offered by many other companies, Walmart does not require employees to foot any costs upfront, making it more accessible for low-wage workers, said Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

“Most Walmart workers are not making a lot of money, so paying anything out of pocket, even for a relatively short period of time, can be difficult,” he said. “Walmart seems to have realized that if you have happier employees, you’ll have lower turnover.”

But some said workers could face new challenges because they already struggle to plan around unpredictable work schedules. Walmart employees have long complained that they don’t receive as many shifts as they’d like, particularly if they need to schedule around other commitments, like schoolwork or childcare. Nearly 70 percent of part-time Walmart workers say they’d like to be full-time, according to a recent survey by OUR Walmart, an employee group that advocates for workers’ rights.

“Because of Walmart’s erratic scheduling system, many people who work at Walmart are unable to plan to take college classes or even pick up their children from school,” said Cynthia Murray, who has been working at a Walmart store in Laurel, Md., for 18 years.

Walmart executives said they did not know how much the program would cost the company, which last year had $486 billion in revenue, but said they expected as many as 68,000 employees to sign up in the first five years. Annual tuition and fees at the three schools ranged from $7,365 at Bellevue University to $28,658 for out-of-state students at the University of Florida, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Learn more at the Washington Post

In August of 2016, Chanté Marie Catt left her home in Redding, in the Sacramento Valley, to begin her first semester at Humboldt State University. Catt was 36, with a boyfriend and 1-year-old daughter, and possessed a booming laugh and no small amount of confidence. After nearly two decades running her own pet-care business in Los Angeles, she had begun to feel limited by her lack of a college degree, and several years earlier followed her parents north and enrolled at Redding’s Shasta College. The transfer to Humboldt had her dreaming of towering redwoods and cool ocean breezes. “We were excited to start a new life, maybe buy a house,” she says.

The couple tried to find a place from Redding, scouring Craigslist for openings without luck. In person, Catt figured, her prospects would improve. Once they had checked into a campground north of the university and enrolled their daughter in daycare, she dedicated her time to visiting property management companies. A week went by, then another. She paid application fees to management companies—$20 here, $43 there—and called through every listing she found, but even with a solid credit and rental history, never heard back. The family bounced from one campsite to another, with occasional stops at a motel to clean up. It was an expensive way to live, and she rapidly blew through $16,000 in financial aid and student loans. One day, out of a combination of anger and desperation, Catt took to Craigslist from her motel room. “I’m a sociology student,” she wrote, “starting research on our homeless students and on the property management companies here. Anyone want to share their stories!?”

Within hours, she received more than 150 responses. Homeless students told her of moving from couch to couch, of sleeping in the woods and of completing their research assignments at McDonald’s, where they took advantage of free Wi-Fi. “My children are cold, we are broke from all the rental application fees and I’m tired of it,” wrote a mother of two. A graduate student who worked full-time revealed that he was living in his car for the second consecutive semester: “I never knew it would be this hard to find a place to rent.”

Several weeks later, while still homeless, Catt had organized a campus group, the Homeless Student Advocate Alliance, and was spending her free time passing out fliers to attract more members. They weren’t hard to find. “Every couple of students I talked to was experiencing some sort of displacement,” she says. For many students at Humboldt, going to college meant becoming homeless.

One homeless-student conference included workshops on outdoor living, covering topics like how to light fires to keep homework dry.

The true scale of this crisis was revealed last January in a groundbreaking reportcommissioned by the California State University system. The study found that 11 percent of students on the university’s 23-campuses reported being homeless during the past year. The problem was most acute at Humboldt State, where nearly a fifth of the student body had been homeless at one point the previous year.

“In large part, students are homeless because they don’t get enough financial aid,” says Jennifer Maguire, a Humboldt social work professor, who co-authored the study with Rashida Crutchfield of Long Beach State. “It’s even worse here, because we’re in a rural area with a very limited housing stock.” According to the North Coast Journal, a local newspaper, there aren’t even enough rental units in the city of Arcata, where the university is located, for the students who need housing—much less anywhere else. And while the university plans to build more student housing, it can currently only guarantee slots for first-year students.

This shortage allows landlords to crank up rents and reject applicants at whim. For students without a financial cushion, the situation can quickly turn into a full-blown emergency—and in the CSU system, that’s a lot of students. More than half the students at Humboldt are the first in their family to attend college, and a third are Latino. Many work full-time; some have kids. “The ‘non-traditional’ student is now the traditional student,” says Maguire.

On a cool April morning, more than 200 people packed into a theater at the College of the Redwoods in nearby Eureka, for a forum on homelessness co-hosted by Humboldt State. “I mentioned to a community member last week that I would be attending this summit today and she asked me, ‘What does homelessness have to do with HSU?’” said Humboldt State president Lisa Rossbacher. The crowd laughed, which represented at least some progress. It’s no longer a secret that Humboldt State students struggle with homelessness.

“My children are cold, we are broke from all the rental application fees and I’m tired of it,” wrote a Humboldt State University student.

Much of the progress is due to the efforts of activists like Catt. After several months of homelessness, her family eventually landed an apartment, thanks in part to an emergency welfare grant. By that time, she had organized the homeless student alliance, which was pressing the university to finally address the problem. Last fall, the group held a three-day conference at Humboldt State that included workshops on outdoor living, which covered topics like how to light a fire and keep your homework dry. On the third day, a group of students put up tents on the quad and stayed for two nights. They then moved to the library, which they occupied, and demanded that it remain open 24 hours a day to give homeless students a safe and warm place to be.

The next day, an administrator contacted Catt and offered her the position of off-campus housing liaison, which had been one of the alliance’s demands. Since January, Catt has worked with more than 100 students, many of whom are in need of housing or have dealt with retaliation from landlords. It’s a start, though there are limits to what she can accomplish. One student who was living out of her car recently came to Catt’s office, and Catt gave her a code to the campus lockers, which are normally reserved for students taking physical education classes. The student broke down in tears at the prospect of a hot shower. A few days later, Catt texted her that a landlord had recently called with a room to rent, but the student had moved back in with her parents. “She told me it had just been too cold out there,” says Catt.

A couple of days after the homeless summit, I met Jasmine Bigham, a 23-year-old transfer student, on the steps of the campus library. Like Catt, she had arrived at Humboldt in 2016, and anticipated finding housing within a week or two. “Weeks turned to months,” she says. She spent a semester living out of her Subaru Outback, searching for places to park at night that looked safe, then curling up on the back seat. She didn’t tell her parents. “No parents want their kids living like that,” she says—and anyways, they didn’t have much extra money. Bigham is from a small town in neighboring Siskiyou County, and before college had lived inside a metal shop designed to store tractors and supplies; her parents created walls by hanging tarps. “I sort of grew up having to figure shit out,” she says.

Homelessness has caused Jasmine to give up on some dreams. She wants a college education, so that means giving up a home.

After a semester in the Subaru, she bought a used trailer for $1,000 and parked it at a KOA campground for $600 a month. That felt safer, but then the trailer’s ceiling collapsed and an intoxicated neighbor harassed her, so she left for a room in a house that was infested with mold and rats. She could only handle the grime for so long, so last year she sold her Subaru and plowed the rest of her savings—which she earned by waitressing in Lake Tahoe—into a GMC van. Since January, she’s been living at a parking lot next to student housing.

As we walk from the library to the parking lot, Bigham outlines her semester budget. Scholarships nearly cover her tuition, and she’s in charge of the rest. Right now she’s not working, because she’s taking 19 units, the maximum allowed. The parking pass is $180 a year, and she rents two lockers, at $5 a piece, for the semester. Each day she stops by the campus food pantry, where she fills plastic containers with soup and picks up rice and beans. She describes the area around campus as a food desert but in reverse—filled with only “really expensive healthy food” that’s out of her reach. She takes a bus to Eureka, then walks a mile to reach a more affordable grocery store, where she can load up on quinoa, bell peppers and mangos. She has a camping stove, or else prepares meals for the week at friends’ homes.

At the parking lot, she points out several other vehicles where students are living. She’ll graduate in December, and tells me that when she returns this fall she hopes to get the other homeless students to park together, to create a greater sense of safety. She opens the back of her van, which is meticulously organized: a plastic container for her clothes, a folded mattress she bought on sale at Ross Dress for Less, an ice chest and cans of beans. “I had to learn what food stays good and what doesn’t,” she says.

Bigham tells me that she’s always felt different. She is an African American from an all-white rural community. She grew up on a “broken-down ranch” with cows and pigs, while many students at Humboldt talk about eating meat as if it were a crime. “The hardest thing is people not understanding,” she says, leaning against her van. “If you talk about how people don’t have enough to eat, they say, ‘Well, why don’t they just feed themselves?’”

Homelessness has caused her to give up on some dreams. She loved track, and was recruited by a couple of larger colleges to throw the javelin, but didn’t want to live in a big city. She hoped to continue with athletics, but juggling a full academic load while being homeless didn’t leave much room for anything else. She shrugs and smiles. “You can either be sad or you can figure it out. If you don’t have money, but you still want to do things, you have to give up something,” she says. She wants a college education, so that means giving up a home.

Learn more at Capital and Main

Many proposals for addressing school segregation seem pretty small, especially when compared to the scale and severity of the problem. Without the power of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, progress can feel extremely far off, if not altogether impossible. Some even believe—understandably though mistakenly—that no meaningful steps can be taken to integrate schools unless housing segregation is resolved.

But a new theory from Thomas Scott-Railton, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, provides reason to believe there are still new ways to think about this issue. Railton’s approach does something that’s all too rare in education-policy debates: He takes what are normally viewed as discrete issue areas—K–12 segregation, college admissions, and the lack of diversity at top universities—and says, what if those can all be addressed together? What if, in fact, it’s impossible to address them apart? Scott-Railton’s proposal, which he published in the Yale Law & Policy Review, is to reduce K–12 segregation by reforming the college-admissions process.

Scott-Railton began thinking about this last fall, after listening to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s reporting on This American Life about school segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area. The radio broadcast featured wealthy white parents in a St. Louis suburb distressed by the prospect of black students from a neighboring town enrolling in their public schools. The black children’s district had recently lost its accreditation due to poor academic performance. (It was the same district that Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by police in August 2014, had graduated from.) If a Missouri school district loses its accreditation, the state permits any student enrolled to transfer to a nearby accredited one.

Packed at a school-board meeting, white parents one after another spoke out about their fears of this new incoming student population—that they’d bring increased crime, violence, and disease. And, some parents feared how the black students’ test scores might threaten their own children’s academic standing. “Once [they come] in here, will that lower our accreditation?” asked one parent, to thunderous applause.

Many of the white parents’ fears were prejudice, plain and simple. But Scott-Railton knew that the parents were right about one thing: Integrating the school could mean that the school’s rating would drop, and schools with lower ratings tend to pay a penalty in the highly competitive college process. Universities tend to give a leg up to affluent, high test-scoring suburban schools—which then incentivizes wealthier parents to seek out segregation. But what if those incentives could be changed?

And thus Scott-Railton’s idea was born: to take demographics of schools into account in college admissions—giving priority to applicants who attended schools with a certain threshold of low-income students (say, above 40 percent). In other words, admissions officers would look favorably on students who attended an economically integrated school, much as they do those who have had unusual travel experiences or outstanding extracurricular achievements.

In a nutshell, he argues, this idea would drive integration in three ways: It would create an incentive for middle class and wealthy parents to enroll their students in socioeconomically integrated schools, it would create countervailing considerations for white parents considering leaving currently integrated school districts, and it would provide an incentive for private schools to enroll more low-income students. Middle-class students would likely benefit more from Scott-Railton’s idea than low-income students, since his proposal doesn’t inherently change the financial barriers to attending college. But millions more would benefit from the increased K–12 integration, which decades of research show improves public schooling.

It wouldn’t be the first time colleges sought to change applicant behavior by altering admissions incentives. In 2016, deans and admissions officers from more than 50 elite universities signed on to a report—Turning The Tide—a first-of-its-kind effort led by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to signal that going forward, colleges will work to de-emphasize resume padding and hyper-competitive achievement, and prioritize communal values and work taking care of others. The colleges recognized that they were powerfully positioned to transmit different cultural messages to applicants and their parents.

One strength of Scott-Railton’s proposal is that colleges and universities would not have to sacrifice much to make it work. It would be relatively cost-neutral to implement, and wouldn’t require schools to accept any particular students. As he puts it, the plan operates within higher education’s “existing institutional constraints.” But that also means it would be unlikely to substantially increase campus diversity, at least initially, and for that reason Scott-Railton says his idea should not be seen as an alternative to measures like affirmative action and Pell Grants.

Nevertheless, Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy and an expert on college admissions, said one of the biggest challenges this kind of proposal faces is just institutional inertia. “A lot of this will come down to courage,” he said. “Universities get bogged down in political constraints, caught up in managing competing interests, and it can sometimes just be easier to do nothing, rather than try something new.”

But if colleges could work up the will to try it, another benefit of this idea would be that it seems to be on solid footing legally. In the wake of Supreme Court decisions that have challenged both K–12 desegregation plans and university-level affirmative-action policies, advocates for diversity have been wary of pursuing new strategies. Scott-Railton took that into account in crafting his proposal, which recommends that admissions boosts come primarily from taking the poverty level of a school—not its racial makeup—into account, and for this reason it is more likely to withstand any kind of constitutional challenge.

“My sense of his plan is that it probably threads the needle pretty effectively,” said Sam Erman, a law professor at the University of Southern California who has studied integration and affirmative action. “There are some ambiguities in the legal doctrine, but it’s hard to see how you would launch a successful attack on this idea.”

Fear that the Supreme Court would eliminate race-based affirmative action has led other scholars to propose a college-admissions focus on school or neighborhood demographics. For instance, in her 2014 book Place Not Race, law professor Sheryll Cashin proposed substituting race-based affirmative action with a geographically-based system that took segregation into account. Scott-Railton’s idea builds upon this sort of notion by focusing more explicitly on using admissions to transform the makeup of K–12 institutions.

As Erman told me, without some kind of new experiment, integration advocates shouldn’t expect much to improve. “Most of what we’ve seen implemented are ideas that nibble at the margins, that make relatively small adjustments to things that the court has already approved,” he said, noting that unless the court swings left, it’s reasonable to expect the legal constraints to narrow even more.

“This is a very smart and strategic way of dealing with what has been the overwhelming obstacle to school integration, which is white and middle-class resistance,” said Rick Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a longtime scholar of segregation. Kahlenberg said he likes the idea not only because it creates incentives for hyper-competitive affluent families, but also because it creates a way for universities to have more students who arrive with experience navigating diverse environments. “Elite universities need more bridge-builders,” he said. “I think this is a win-win.”

While the idea remains in its infancy, some other researchers have launched efforts to develop it further. Ilona Arnold-Berkovits, an education researcher at Rutgers who also began thinking more deeply about these issues after listening to the same This American Life episode which inspired Scott-Railton, launched a website, schoolbonuspoints.org, to begin mobilizing other policy experts, researchers, and funders around this idea of voluntary incentives.

There may be room for additional development. Scott-Railton’s idea could offer a real bulwark against white flight, but it is ultimately focused on integrated schools more than the truly disadvantaged schools. If an incentive-based policy like this were to be truly successful, leaders would need to coordinate it with efforts that directly address schools where racial and economic segregation are far worse. A strategy that preserves integration in schools that are 40 percent low-income may have no impact at all in a school that’s 90 percent low-income.

Perhaps one of the strongest merits of Scott-Railton’s idea is that it advances a new way of thinking about some very old problems, and encourages thinking about two issues—K–12 integration and diversity in higher education—together, rather than apart.

“In reality, for students, it’s a seamless web,” said Kahlenberg. “One impacts the other, and it’s not really until this proposal that we’ve seen those two worlds come together.”

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University of California regents voted Thursday to increase tuition for nonresident students at a time of surging enrollment and constrained state funding.

They approved the increase by a 12-3 vote despite eloquent pleas from numerous students, including those from California.

To try to soften the blow, regents promised to rescind the increase if they managed to successfully lobby the Legislature for more money. They also unanimously voted to ask the state to restore financial aid for needy nonresident students, a benefit eliminated in 2016.

The 3.5% increase would boost the supplemental tuition that nonresident students pay by $978 — from $28,014 to $28,992 for the 2018-19 school year. If regents end up raising the base tuition — which is what in-state students pay — nonresidents would have to absorb that increase, too.

UC officials say the $35 million they expect to raise from the increase will help reduce class sizes and support more academic support and counseling.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, an ex-officio regent who is running for governor, wanted Thursday's vote to be delayed while lobbying efforts to get more money from the state continued.

"Once again, we're letting them off the hook by making a decision prematurely," Newsom said.

He voted against the increase, as did regents John A. Pérez and Paul Monge.

But UC President Janet Napolitano said the notion that the Legislature would provide more money for nonresident students was "illusory."

"Reality has to intrude here," she said.

Napolitano urged regents to approve the increase, with admissions decisions coming later this month. She said families need to know what their college costs will be and campuses need to know whether they can count on the revenue.

After the January regents meeting, UC students, faculty, administrators, alumni and regents launched a unified push to lobby the Legislature for an additional $140 million this year. They did so in part to bring in the $70 million needed to avoid a proposed 2.7% tuition increase for California students, and regents held off voting on that increase until May in hopes of success. The rest of the money would be used to ease overcrowding, repair aging facilities and enroll more California students.

But UC budget officials, in a presentation after the tuition vote, said billions of dollars more are needed for new classrooms, dorms and labs, deferred maintenance, salary increases and the hiring of more faculty to lower class sizes, as well as to cover escalating pension and health costs. UC spending per student has dropped by 31% since 2000 because state funding has not risen to fully cover the additional 90,000 students enrolled since then.

The regents, meeting at UCLA, acknowledged that they needed to find longer-term solutions to their budget woes — and some suggested they should do so in a cost-saving, high-tech way that would radically reshape the UC experience.

Regents Peter Guber and Lark Park asked Thursday whether UC could afford to stick with the age-old model of educating students in campus buildings and housing them in campus dorms.

"I don't know that five years at a college to finish a college degree has to be all five years in brick and mortar at the school," Guber said. "That seems a little asinine to me in the world we're living in right now."

Park said new ideas were imperative given fiscal realities.

Students, faculty and chancellors pushed back against any major replacement of face-to-face learning with online instruction. Napolitano suggested a deep dive into UC's current online education efforts at the May meeting.

Myriad financial pressures, years in the making, led to the current controversy over nonresident students. When the state cut one-third of the UC system's funding after the 2008 recession, campuses scrambled to make up the lost revenue by recruiting higher-paying out-of-state and international students.

From fall 2009 to fall 2017, the number of nonresident undergraduates nearly quadrupled, to 37,217 from 9,552, while the number of Californians rose from 167,900 to 179,530, according to UC data.

The growing number of nonresidents sparked a political backlash. Legislators ordered a state audit — which contended that UC officials had harmed California students by enrolling so many from out of state — and then directed UC officials to eliminate financial aid for nonresident students and place a cap on their numbers.

Just before the vote Thursday, regents Park and Sherry Lansing added the amendments to lobby for more money to rescind the tuition increase and seek state approval to reinstate their eligibility for financial aid. During public comments, they had heard nonresident students' stories of hardship.

Ashraf Beshay, a fifth-year UCLA biology student from Egypt, told regents that an economic collapse in his country had devalued its currency, effectively sending the cost of his UC education soaring from $50,000 to $120,000.

The higher costs have forced him to go to school part time, he said, and his father recently sold his car to pay his education bills.

Other students, from China, said they had to overload their schedules to graduate in three years to save money.

"Don't treat us as ATM machines," one said.

Learn more at LA Times

In an upper-level seminar on artificial intelligence, Occidental College professor Justin Li started a discussion outside the realm of a typical computer science class.

Should a self-driving car, if unable to brake in time, be programmed to steer into a wall to avoid crashing into pedestrians — perhaps killing a single person in the vehicle in order to save five on the street?

One question led to another. Is it morally OK to choose five lives over one? How about 10? Who gets to make this decision anyway — the programmer, the government, the person who can afford a self-driving car?

Occidental established a computer science major this fall, one of numerous liberal arts colleges to do so in recent years. They've popped up at Reed College in Oregon and Whitman College in Washington state.

These schools better known for teaching history and philosophy are shaping their programs to draw on their strengths. They don't just focus on the vocational or on abstract algorithms. As artificial intelligence and automation increasingly enter everyday life, their courses push students to examine how modern technology both changes and challenges society.

In Maine, Bates College started a multidisciplinary Digital and Computational Studiesprogram, with aims including "to interrogate the values and assumptions of a digitized world" and "increase understanding of the power and limitations of computers in solving problems."

At Occidental, where a young Barack Obama discovered political science, teaching students how to code is the straightforward part, said Li, a cognitive science professor who led the design of the major. Classes also push them to grapple with the inequalities and philosophical dilemmas that technology is creating out in the world. Such social discussions are woven into every lesson.

"The goal is to make students consider the real-world implications of what they are doing — that their code is not just abstract problem-solving but may have positive or negative impacts on real people," Li said.

Stephanie Angulo, a junior, says it's that sort of approach that drew her to Occidental rather than an engineering school. She hopes to break glass ceilings one day as a tech leader and wanted to study somewhere that would also teach her how to write better.

"You have to think about how you communicate your ideas or how you think about problems," said Angulo, who has interned at Facebook and is studying computer science and philosophy. "My friends and I talk about these issues pretty much every day, whereas I've noticed the people I've worked with who are more engineering-focused don't tend to think about these questions as much."

The broader way of looking at computer science also has the benefit of perhaps drawing new people in to help narrow tech's much-discussed diversity and gender gaps, said Andrea Danyluk, a Williams College professor and member of the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium. "We have the art major who needs to take a science course or a history student who discovers this is actually kind of cool," she said.

As more multidisciplinary programs emerge, some in the field caution against taking too much focus away from the fundamentals of computer science. "You need a very solid core," said Kim Bruce, who started the departments at Williams and at Pomona College.

Learn more at LA Times.

Lupita Hightower is the superintendent of a school district outside Phoenix, Arizona, that's 82 percent Latino and where 89 percent of kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The Tolleson Elementary School District doesn't ask families their immigration status, but judging from the concerned calls from teachers and principals, there's a good number that include undocumented members. Hightower's staff know that she herself was once undocumented—her parents brought her to the United States when she was in 7th grade—and often ask for her help whenever a student is having a crisis. "I think, a lot of times, the principal feels that I'll be able to understand and give them hope," she says.

The day after Donald Trump's election, Hightower got on the phone with a 7th-grade boy, an American citizen, who was crying inconsolably because the president's rhetoric made him think his undocumented parents would be deported. More recently, Hightower spoke with a middle-school girl whose parents had been deported to Mexico. The girl and her siblings didn't have a guardian; their 21-year-old brother was taking care of them. The girl began cutting herself as a means of coping with the stress. Hightower called a crisis team, to start the process of getting the kids help.

It seems true that she understands them. "I feel their pain," she says.

Tolleson Elementary's problems are disturbingly common across the country, according to a new survey from the University of California–Los Angeles. Teachers and administrators from more than 700 schools in 12 states reported to researchers that they're feeling the effects of the Trump administration's harsher immigration policies in their classrooms. In recent months, their students seem to have exhibited more emotional and behavioral problems, more school absences, and worse academic performance. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a policy of not making arrests in "sensitive locations," such as schools and churches, which means enforcement actions don't typically occur at schools (although ICE recently made headlines for arresting undocumented parentsas they dropped their kids off for the day). But educators report that the stress at home is still hitting their classrooms, hard.

"The additional burden of trying to educate children who are, very often, U.S. citizens, and are living in terror of losing their families, may simply be too much to ask of our schools," says Patricia Gándara, an educational psychologist who led the survey. Among the schools Gándara and her team analyzed, those with high proportions of students from low-income families, like Tolleson, were especially likely to report dealing with the ripple effects of immigration enforcement. "The ones that struggle the most to close achievement gaps are hit the hardest by this enforcement regime," she says.

"The calls coming into NEA about immigration have never been higher or more frightening," says Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, a professional group for public-school workers.

Immigrant advocates have long criticized President Barack Obama for his administration's high number of deportations. But those removals usually happened at the border, according to ICE numbers. The Trump administration has overseen many more so-called "interior" deportations, of people who are already living in the country. Those are much more likely to affect families with children enrolled in American public schools.

The reasons for the behavioral and academic problems that teachers and staff are seeing can be obvious. Children are worried about themselves or their parents, like the students Hightower has had to soothe. There are also myriad other ways immigration enforcement can affect schoolkids. Some of Gándara's respondents said local workplace raids had put parents out of jobs, throwing families into poverty or forcing older kids to become breadwinners. Hightower, whose district participated in the survey, says she often sees formerly high-achieving students stop trying because they don't see a future for themselves in America. And it's not just undocumented students, or the children of undocumented adults, who are affected. Of the 5,400 teachers, principals, and school counselors who answered Gándara and her team's survey, about 2,000 said kids at their schools whose families aren't threatened by deportation have nevertheless had their learning affected by their worries for their classmates.

Learn more at Pacific Standard

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Schenley High, Westinghouse High, and other city schools graduated scores of black notables and anchored the neighborhoods around them.

When historians analyze the causes of the Great Migration, the exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South in the early 20th century, they stress the urgency of escaping the vicious Jim Crow backlash against Reconstruction and the dream of finding factory jobs in Northern cities. Yet a less studied factor—worth noting in this era of crude stereotypes about black attitudes toward education—was the lure of better schools in the North. And surprisingly, nowhere was that attraction greater than in the gritty steel town of Pittsburgh.

In the 19th century, what is now the University of Pittsburgh was called the Western University of Pennsylvania and considered a sister school to Penn in Philadelphia. Before his death in 1858, Charles Avery, a white Pittsburgh cotton trader whose travels through the South had awoken him to the horrors of slavery and turned him into an ardent abolitionist, endowed a fund for 12 scholarships a year at Western University for “males of the colored people in the United States of America or the British Province of Canada.”

Forty years later, Robert Lee Vann, the teenage son of a former slave cook from North Carolina, traveled by himself to Pittsburgh to claim one of those scholarships. It was the start of a remarkable success story. In 1910, after earning undergraduate and law degrees from Western University, Vann accepted a job as the editor of thePittsburgh Courier, a four-page chronicle of local events. Eventually becoming publisher and owner as well, Vann transformed the Courierinto America’s best-selling black newspaper, with 14 regional editions and an avid readership in black homes, barber shops, and beauty salons across the nation.

Ever since the Civil War, blacks had voted overwhelmingly Republican out of loyalty to the Great Emancipator. But in 1932, Vann used the Courier as a soapbox to urge blacks to turn “the picture of Abraham Lincoln to the wall” and vote for FDR, beginning a migration to the Democratic Party that transformed American politics. As World War II loomed, Vann pressed for a greater role for black soldiers. After his death in 1940, his successors led a “Double Victory” campaign to rally black support at home while demanding an end to racial injustice once the war was over. (Sadly, that second victory never materialized—a betrayal that the Courier exposed as dashed hopes helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement.)

Read more at City Lab