The Civil Rights Road to Deeper Learning: Five Essentials for Equity(Multicultural Education Series)

This concise and compelling book outlines the key civil rights conditions that are essential to deeper learning—the skills and knowledge that students need to succeed in 21st-century jobs and life. It describes schools that enable young people, including those traditionally furthest from opportunity, to develop into caring and critical problem solvers, effective communicators, collaborators, and scholars. The book also describes the community and school inequities that have created persistent obstacles to these goals and the civil rights actions that have been and continue to be needed to remove them. These include policies and practices that ensure safe and healthy communities, equitable investments in public schools, supports for competent teachers, strategies for welcoming and nurturing school climates, and innovative curricula. The authors examine the civil-rights-based pathways that lead to these goals, highlighting examples of exemplary schools that offer the kind of deeper learning that engages and empowers students. This successor to Linda Darling-Hammond's Grawemeyer Award–winner, The Flat World and Education, is a big-picture view of what constitutes deeper learning—where it is found and what enables it—and what must be done to address the learning needs of all children.

Book Features:

• Offers a concise treatment written in a voice that will be accessible to a wide range of readers.
• Pulls together three key strands of the learning needs of children (civil rights, educational opportunity, and deeper learning), the distinct inequalities in their delivery, past efforts, and legal and educational paths forward.
• Examines neighborhood and environmental inequities that can compromise learning, along with inadequate school funding and segregation.
• Looks at the professional teaching quality imbalance between rich and poor districts and the inferior curriculum offerings for marginalized populations.
• Includes numerous examples of schools that succeed at deeper learning and equity and explains how they do so.

• ContentsSeries Foreword James A. Banks  vii
• Foreword Eliza Byard  xiii
• Acknowledgments  xv
• 1.  Introduction  1
• Deeper Learning in Action  2
• The Civil Rights Foundation  9
• 2.  A Safe and Healthy Community  13
• Environmental Injustice and Education: The Case of Flint, Michigan  15
• Beyond Flint  19
• The Civil Rights Contribution and Road Ahead  22
• 3.  Well-Resourced School Systems  28
• The Long-Term Fight for Adequate and Equitable School Resources  28
• How School Finance Influences Opportunities for Deeper Learning  30
• The Civil Rights Contribution and Road Ahead  33
• 4.  Supportive and Inclusive Schools  39
• Why Positive School Climate Matters  39
• How School Climate Is Constructed  41
• School Climate and Deeper Learning  43
• School Exclusion and Discrimination  45
• Community Schools and Wraparound Supports  50
• The Civil Rights Contribution and Road Ahead  54
• 5.  High-Quality Teaching  59
• Teaching for Deeper Learning  59
• Access to Well-Prepared Teachers  65
• The Civil Rights Contribution and Road Ahead  68
• A Marshall Plan for Teaching  71
• 6.  High-Quality Curriculum  73
• Inequalities in Access to Deeper Learning  73
• How Access to Deeper Learning Can Be Secured  75
• The Civil Rights Contribution and Road Ahead  81
• 7.  Conclusion  84
• Notes  90
• References  98
• Index  117
• About the Authors  128

Kia Darling-Hammond is author of the Bridge to Thriving Framework(c) and CEO of Wise Chipmunk, through which she offers learning opportunities and advising to educators, organizations, and other entities, including the Congressional Black Mental Health Brain Trust. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University, founding president of the Learning Policy Institute, past-president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and author of The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, which received the 2012 Grawemeyer Award in Education. She received the 2022 Yidan Prize for Education Research. She received the 2023 AERA Distinguished Public Service Award.

"Challenging us to see deeper learning or higher-order thinking skills as a necessity for all students rather than for the affluent or elite class, the Hammonds produce a compelling argument using statistics and research evidence from case studies. Drawing on the progress made during the Civil Rights era, the authors suggest that equity can be achieved when we as a society seek to eradicate gaps in learning and childhood poverty, ultimately lifting us all."

—NASSP Principal Leadership