Our efforts at antiracist professional development at my school have been ongoing, and although our staff and administration are almost entirely white, I appreciate the focus our administrator has brought to this issue. I know we still have room for improvement, though.

I can attest to this. My wife and I sent our two children to a public Montessori school rather than their neighborhood school. The school they attended, although diverse by Iowa standards, was less diverse than the school district as a whole, and most families were middle-class. This happened because middle class parents were much more likely to know about Montessori education and about the option of enrolling their children in this school.

Or arguing that students need to develop "grit" in order to be successful in school...

This reminds me of a couple of professional development sessions I attended earlier in my teaching career. In one session, our school improvement leader presented on the concept of white privilege. Of course, some of my peers rejected the existence of this in education and weren't open to any discussion of the topic.

The use of the term "new racism" reminds me of the arguments laid out by Ibram X. Kendi in How to Be an Anti-Racist. I've always thought the definition of racism he gave in that book was spot on.

Uh oh! Don't let the leadership in the Iowa Legislature or Governor Reynolds catch you acknowledging the existence of structural racism! I wonder if I'm going to be put on some sort of watch list by completing this assignment. :)

Including social systems, which is one of the reasons the emphasis on teaching "traditional values" and the glorification of leaders in history education is so harmful.

Perhaps this should be the objective of studying history and social science - to help students recognize the "outcome of things interacting together" to better understand the social world.

This point confirms my previous annotation about AP history and social science courses. The curricula for these definitely emphasize analysis and not synthesis.

This makes me think about the importance of bringing systems-based thinking to social and environmental science classes especially. I wonder what research has been done into this. History and social science teachers are especially prone to teaching students to think in a linear way: first this happened, and then that was the result. AP curricula try to move beyond this, but the application is uneven at best. Part of the problem is that the College Board talks a good game about teaching history and social science students that "it's complicated," but then expects them to take a standardized test at the end of the course that, for the most part, still prioritizes memorization. The redesigns of the AP exams for these classes in recent years have led to questions that are more about the application of source-interpretation and data interpretation skills and the use of evidence to support an argument, but students can still simply regurgitate information and do well. I wonder how feasible it would be to move toward portfolio-based assessment for these courses. I think that's happening in AP Seminar and AP Research, but I could be wrong.

The political implications of bringing systems thinking to public education are exciting. If we could help students see that the concepts mentioned here can be applied to help us better understand and address political, social, and economic challenges, we could work toward a more just world. Of course, politicians need to simply things to get elected, so this would also mean abolishing elections and moving to some other method of choosing our political representatives. I've read a lot about sortition, or choosing representatives by lottery, in the past few years. Its supporters argue that if we removed the necessity of getting elected from the equation, representatives could acknowledge the complexity of the problems we face and address them in a much more systematic way.

I can confirm from personal experience that "those at the margins" of our educational system are demotivated by grades. As a special education teacher for eight years, I worked with many students who refused to see getting a good grade on a test, quiz or assignment as a good enough reason for engaging in that activity. Now that I work with "gifted" students who wouldn't typically be thought of as marginalized, I can see the same dynamic at play. The students from middle-class and upper-middle-class families are usually more than happy to play the grades game, but less socioeconomically advantaged students, just as in my special ed days, often find grades more stressful than motivating. As a program we've made strides in reducing that gap over the past eight years, but we still have a gap.

I wonder if my co-workers and I would all define humanization the same way, or even believe that humanization is a worthy goal in education. I'm confident that my fellow history and social sciences teachers would define this term similarly, and that my administrator would as well, but I'm not convinced all teachers in our program would.