Weekend Reads: What if the best way to help students who have fallen behind is a curriculum that’s pegged further ahead?

  • An important series of stories looks at the challenges and innovations that come from the fact that “minorities” now make up most students in America’s schools. (Slate & The Teacher Project)
  • Another series tackles what contemporary school segregation looks like in New York City. (WNYC)
  • How “embedded honors” classes let schools preserve diversity within their classrooms. (Chalkbeat)
  • How one under-the-radar charter network is achieving results by focusing on a rich curriculum, from an advocate of the approach. (Education Next)
  • And why one New York school with many students who have fallen behind adopted a more challenging curriculum. (Chalkbeat)
  • A journalist explains how her own family’s journey fits into the long history of school segregation. (New York Times)
  • One of the country’s oldest desegregation programs is phasing out, even though local districts remain segregated — and are happy with the program. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
  • A new study finds that interracial friendships diminish over time — and teachers seem to play a role. (NYU)
  • What a teacher of color would have said at a national diversity conference if he had the floor for longer. (The Progressive)
  • Massachusetts’s exam is widely respected. Here’s why the state is reworking the test anyway. (Boston Globe & Hechinger Report)
  • There are some tests that educators say they like, but they aren’t easy to use as state exams. (Chalkbeat)
  • Valedictorians are using their graduation speeches to reveal that they are undocumented immigrants. (Texas Tribune)
  • By some measures, Detroit’s charter sector looks like it’s better than Denver’s. Could that be true? (Neerav Kingsland)
  • Louisiana’s new standards are (at least a little bit) different from the Common Core 20 percent of the time. (Curriculum Matters)
  • The United Kingdom has more poor kids making it to college. Here’s why. (The Atlantic)
  • Chicago is facing a principal exodus amid extreme turmoil. (Catalyst)
  • It’s June. So why not start thinking about what to do on the first day of school? (dy/dan)