By Matt Cregor & Damon Hewitt
Our nation’s school discipline rates have reached all-time highs. As suspension, expulsion and school-based arrests rates grow, racial disparities in discipline continue to widen.

By Lee A. Daniels
Mark Twain would be pleased, wouldn’t he?

The heated reaction to the publishing of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” changed to “slave” continues unabated in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

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 John Payton Related links Counterpoint:Banning Menthol Cigarettes Will Create a Huge Illegal, Contraband Market Lorillard’s Orwellian Assertion: Slavery Is Freedom Before we can analyze whether banning menthol as a tobacco flavor would lead to a market in contraband menthol cigarettes we must first clarify our terminology. Contraband market: That term is today used to [...]

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
State officials expressed hope that a new agreement giving oversight of four of New York’s most dangerous youth prisons will mark the start of significant reforms of the widely-condemned system.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
While at a swim meet two weeks ago in Canada, World Record Holder and 2008 US Olympic Swimmer Cullen Jones got some heartbreaking news: Another child of color had drowned in his United States.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
Dominque Freeman is one of the lucky ones. She is just completing her freshman year at Cal State Northridge, and she’s doing so with the help of a full academic scholarship. Even more importantly, she now has an identity.

Just a year ago, Freeman didn’t exist.

Unlike most U.S. citizens, she had no birth certificate, no social security number, and she’d just aged out of a foster care system that had determined that her case was closed.

By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.
In New York State Thurgood Marshall Day –appropriately — also marks the anniversary of a great American milestone.

The United States Supreme Court declared that children convicted of non-homicide offenses cannot be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Court concluded that because adolescents are, by nature, less culpable than adults and because life without parole is an extreme sentence which is rarely imposed on teenagers, it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a child who has not killed to life without possibility of parole