Here's a recent piece on shifts at the Department of Education since Obama:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/01/you_can_call_me_arne.php

My most recent book, Because of Race, examines debates I encountered and participated in while working at the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights at the end of the Clinton era. The most heated such debates were over the "everyday" experiences of students of color in American schools. Which opportunity denials experienced by students of color would be remedied?

As OCR employees, we were allowed to pay attention to various everyday events that families said were fundamentally affecting (negatively) students’ academic trajectories and relationships to school. We looked at how security guards gave Latino hall wanderers’ names to the police department as potential “gang members”; how deans suspended black students for extensive periods for small offenses; how Latino and Asian-American students lacked necessary English language learner services; and many more.

Working at OCR clarified, for me, the importance of analyzing "everyday" forms of opportunity provision and denial within schools and districts. We often talk about unequal outcomes as if they are created by “systems” and “institutions,” not people. But as educators, we know that everyday activity by countless actors, over many years, contributes to who is on the graduation stage. Students’ academic fates are produced in part through the aggregation of everyday activity in schools and districts, as educators react to students and vice versa.

So, all actors connected to schools need to be analyzing "everyday" opportunity provision inside schools and districts -- even as we also analyze students’ everyday experiences in homes and after school. (Both of my recent books make this same argument.)

Yet my colleagues at OCR were deeply afraid –even under Clinton—of being too proactive in suggesting that educators in schools and districts should provide students of color with additional opportunities, or improve their everyday educational experiences in specific ways. Accordingly (as I describe in the book), we often “shut down” our own efforts to equalize opportunity.

I will be curious to see how Obama’s Ed. Department frames necessary opportunity provision – and unacceptable opportunity denial.

An interesting piece by Richard Rothstein in EdWeek suggests that the Obama administration might focus in part on enriching “everyday” learning experiences. Rothstein argues that the NCLB drive to test children in math and reading has resulted in low income children/children of color being drilled exclusively in those skills; they are too often denied other opportunities to learn history, music, art, social studies, and science. Their wealthier counterparts learn all of the above.

http://lnk.edweek.org/edweek/index.html?url=/ew/articles/2009/01/28/19ro...