EDUCATION

Why US schools need to shake up the way they teach physics. America has a physics problem. Research shows that access to physics education varies based on race, gender, sexuality and disability. Physics courses are usually standard offerings in suburban high schools, but at urban and rural schools that isn’t the case. Even in places where physics is taught, the lessons rarely highlight how physics can be applied to students’ everyday lives. This approach can hamper students’ desire to learn. In my work as a physics education researcher, I’ve encountered lessons centered on the rote memorization of formulas. This method fails to encourage critical thinking, constraining students’ ability to creatively solve problems. Teachers sometimes believe that if a student can’t grasp a physic...

School interventions offer best shot at reducing youth violence. Black youth show up in emergency rooms with gunshot wounds or other violent injuries at an alarming and disproportionate rate in the United States. Some hospitals have violence interventions that can be effective in keeping these kids safer after they are treated, but in most cases victims are sent back into the world to continue their struggles. What if there were a way to prevent these kids from ending up in that hospital room in the first place? What if, years earlier, we could identify factors that predict which children are most likely to head down paths to violence? I’m a social scientist focused on this question, and my research has led me to an answer that I believe is at once obvious and profound: Find these c...

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...