In the recent past, college-educated blacks were less likely to smoke cigarettes than similarly educated whites. Now the reverse is true.

By The Editors
In the last decade, a coalition of public school educators, parents and civic activists across the country have charted substantial progress in deterring tens of thousands of students from dropping out of high school, according to a newly-published study.

By The Editors
The Senate Thursday tabled legislation that would provide a clear route to citizenship for high school and college students in the U.S. illegally, raising the possibility that the push to pass it has failed.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
Tracking in public schools began innocently enough in the 1920s in this country, an era when many high school students took jobs right after graduating and relatively few went to college. Education experts and school officials reasoned it was more practical to establish different curricula, or “tracks” that would prepare students for their likely future. But in the decades since, including those since the Brown decision, tracking too often morphed from scholastic sorting to racial discrimination.

By The Editors
With exhibits, panel discussions and other commemorative gatherings, New Orleans this weekend marked the 50^th anniversary of one of the landmark events of American history: the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools.

By The Editors
“I have often been asked how a white lawyer from the Bronx came to a career devoted to the rights of black people, a career where he would work mostly with black lawyers and leaders. There is one simple answer and another, deeper one.”

By TaRessa Stovall
Which is sadder: the fact that black kids are more likely to be suspended than any other group in middle school, or our lack of surprise at this revelation?

By The Editors
For more than a quarter-century, there’s been an intense national discussion about the crisis in educating black boys in the nation’s public schools.

In the meantime, despite numerous successes of programs in individual public, private and charter schools, and scattered community efforts, the crisis has only gotten worse.

Jefferson Thomas, one of the Little Rock Nine, died Sunday. In 1957 he and eight other black teenagers in Little Rock, Arkansas, risked their lives to go to the high school they were entitled to in order to prove the greatest declaration of American idealism had meaning.

By Stacey Patton
When school begins this Wednesday, 267 of Biloxi’s top-performing elementary students will be attending a new school less than a mile down the road. But some parents and city residents feel that move will threaten the student’s continued high scholastic achievement.