21st Century Scholar

I wrote the Foreword to Damon William’s Examining Strategic Diversity Leadership: Activating Change and Transformation in Higher Education (Stylus, 2013). Here’s what I said: In his epic The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois commented that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Damon Williams [...]

How the higher ed world changes in such a short time. K–12 education has been in “crisis” much of my adult life, but usually higher education has been spared the Hollywood-like metaphors. “A nation at risk” paralleled other 20th century reports that forecast calamity because particular goals had not been reached in K–12 education. The [...]

As faculty members and co-directors of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, we lead action research using CUE’s Equity Scorecard. The mission of our center is to create the “tools” needed for colleges and universities to bring about racial/ethnic equity in students’ collegiate experiences and outcomes. In the action [...]

AERA’s 2013 theme is centered on the issue of “poverty.” It is spurred by President Bill Tierney’s provocation that despite education’s ability to lift students out of poverty, schooling is often mired in economic relations surrounded by the debilitating effects of poverty. There are at least two senses of “poverty” invoked here, to which I [...]

I confess some ambivalence about a definition of poverty which encompasses the moral, intellectual, and material domains. Not because each of these domains is unimportant; rather, my concern is that defining poverty this broadly runs the risk of obscuring the ways in which they are intertwined. Impoverished material circumstances may heighten the risk of an impoverished moral or [...]

Bill’s assignment was like coming face to face with a task that I had been putting off. Constantly having to put up with political and social rhetoric that wants to take the US back to the days of rugged individualism and “I got mine, you get yours” that has been a central component of this [...]

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a student I’m mentoring from my hometown of Detroit. This young man was an average high school student and bombed in his first attempt at community college. After dropping out he returned home to work at a nearby Burger King. He indirectly complained to me about the nature [...]

In this essay I argue the economic inequities of today carve out a very large social condition that is orders of magnitude greater than can be conveyed by the term “poverty.” This condition derives from a massive theft of public wealth and abandonment of the principles of representative democracy. There is a silver lining: on [...]

A monumental challenge facing scholars, researchers, and practitioners is in designing, implementing, and taking to scale powerful interventions that disrupt the synergism among education, racism, and poverty. This synergism is at the core of educational systems and practices that maintains and perpetuates racism, power, and privilege; that denies equitable access to education; and that frames and [...]

The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. –Jay-Z There is a common myth that spans the globe about America, which presents us as the ultimate privileged country offering [...]