Equity

Tsewone Melaku discovered engineering in high school through a UW mentorship program. Now a UW student majoring in Human Centered Design and Engineering and minoring in Education, Learning and Society, she is aligning her interests in engineering with her passion to make STEM education accessible to underrepresented high school students.

For elementary teachers, it’s an increasingly tricky question to contend with: How to address immigration, race, gender identity and other social justice issues that touch the lives and futures of their students?

Even as public schools in the United States grow more diverse and systemic inequities continue to impact the quality of education available to students, educators rarely have time to authentically work together on how to address those issues of inequity in their teaching.

Most schools offer parents specific ways to help out: Join the PTA, chaperone a field trip, grade papers for a teacher or assist on a classroom art project.

Those volunteer opportunities, however, not only reinforce the top-down power structure of schools, but also cater to mostly white, privileged families, maintaining the institutionalized racism that marginalizes low-income families and families of color, said Ann Ishimaru, assistant professor of education at the University of Washington.

During the University of Washington College of Education’s June 10 graduation ceremonies, two representatives of the Class of 2017 discussed the role of education in a thriving democracy as families, friends, faculty and staff gathered to celebrate more than 700 graduates.

During her 10-year career as a teacher at a Seattle public high school, Sooz Stahl has watched as its student population has steadily grown less diverse, a direct result of a 2007 Supreme Court decision that found that SPS’s efforts to diversify school demographics by race was unconstitutional.

While the career movement patterns of black teachers parallel those of their white colleagues in many respects, a new study from the University of Washington College of Education shows key divergences that could help education leaders and policymakers boost the recruitment and retention of teachers of color.

Researchers from the University of Washington College of Education shared their work to realize the promise of making and tinkering for diverse audiences during the American Educational Research Association’s 2017 annual meeting.