EDUCATION

Books about sexual assault aren’t pornographic. Schools are banning them as ‘obscene’ anyway. A new trend is emerging in book banning: School officials are pulling works about sexual violence from library shelves, often by labeling them “obscene.” That’s the finding of a report released Tuesday by freedom of expression advocacy group PEN America. Nineteen percent of banned books during the 2021-2023 school years included passages about sexual assault, the report found. What’s more, school officials are banning books at a faster pace. PEN recorded 4,349 book bans in 23 states and 52 public school districts during the first half of the current school year. That figure tops the 3,362 books banned during the entire previous school year. Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to R...

The hostility Black women face in higher education carries dire consequences. Isolated. Abused. Overworked. These are the themes that emerged when I invited nine Black women to chronicle their professional experiences and relationships with colleagues as they earned their Ph.D.s at a public university in the Midwest. I featured their writings in to get my Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction. The women spoke of being silenced. “It’s not just the beating me down that is hard,” one participant told me about constantly having her intelligence questioned. “It is the fact that it feels like I’m villainized and made out to be the problem for trying to advocate for myself.” The women told me they did not feel like they belonged. They spoke of routinely being isolated by peers and potential men...

A Texas court ruling on a Black student wearing hair in long locs reflects history of racism in schools. A Texas judge ruled on Feb. 22, 2024, that the Barbers Hill School District didn’t violate the law when it punished Darryl George, a Black student, for wearing his hair in long locs. The Texas law in question – the CROWN Act – prohibits discrimination against hairstyles in schools and workplaces. The school district argued – and Judge Chap B. Cain III agreed – that the law doesn’t mention anything about hair length. In the following Q&A, Kenjus Watson, an education professor at American University who studies the psychological and social effects of racism, discusses how the decision upholds a long-standing legacy of cultural assimilation . What message has the court just sent? I’d...

College applications rose in states that legalized recreational marijuana. Colleges in states where recreational marijuana became legal over the past decade saw a significant but short-term boost in applications from top-notch students. They also got more applications overall. Those were the key findings of a new study our team published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Economic Policy. In the year that a particular state legalized recreational marijuana, the number of applications for that state’s colleges grew by about 5.5% more than colleges in states that did not legalize. This means that colleges in legal-marijuana states received a temporary boost in applications. We didn’t detect any increase beyond the initial spike. Our results control for school quality, tuitio...

How Black male college athletes deal with anti-Black stereotypes on campus. In an effort to avoid stereotypes about Black male athletes, such as being labeled a “dumb jock,” Spike, a college football player, says he wore athletic clothes to class as little as possible. “I mean, granted, I’m a 6-foot-4, 240-pound Black kid on campus, so it’s kind of hard to get away from that,” he said. “But I didn’t want any, you know, significant confirmation that I was an athlete. So, I just wore like a collared shirt, jeans and nice shoes every day.” Trey, a baseball player, refrained from speaking up or sharing personal information – even with his teammates. He said he was often “outnumbered in opinion” as he was one of two Black athletes on a team of 40, which led to him “not even wanting to speak ...

Education doesn’t solve the pay gap. Experts say they’re not surprised. Education does not solve the pay gap between men and women, data from the U.S. Census Bureau found, and the higher-paying the field, the greater the difference. That disparity is unsurprising to experts and advocates, who point to societal norms, policy shortcomings and inflexible working schedules as big parts of the problem. The gender wage gap is the difference in median annual earnings of women compared to men, and, according to a report published by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, it has not changed much in the past 20 years. Pew found that in 2022, women earned 82 cents for every dollar a man earned, compared to 2002, when women earned 80 cents for every dollar a man earned. The census data shows th...

Education linked to better employment prospects upon release from prison. Better job prospects. Higher wages. A greater chance of staying out of jail. Those are the key outcomes that we discovered for incarcerated people who get an education while serving their time. Our findings were published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice. They are based on an analysis of research studies on the effects of prison education in the U.S. We examined a range of programs, from adult basic education to college. We analyzed 152 data points from 79 research papers published between 1980 and 2023. Specifically, our analysis found: • Reduced recidivism: Participating in prison education decreases the chances of recidivism by 6.7 percentage points – from 46% to 39.3%. This translates to safer comm...