Anti-Racist Initiative

NYU Metro Center's ongoing commitment to promote educational equity and confront anti-Black racism and white supremacy has spanned four decades. As we have pursued this work, a difficult truth has emerged: white people have internalized messages, attitudes, and beliefs about white supremacy, regardless of their intentions or awareness, and often act to perpetuate racial hierarchies in our schools and communities. As Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and people of Asian descent work to disrupt systemic racism and challenge white people to act, many white people are seeking opportunities to expose supremacist ideologies and practice anti-racism. 

To support these efforts, NYU’s Metro Center introduced an Anti-Racist and Critical Whiteness Initiative. The anti-racist initiative is an organized effort between three of our sub-units at NYU Metro Center--the Educational Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative, the Center for Strategic Solutions, and the Integration and Innovation Initiative. 

By engaging these three sub-units, we are able offer a robust range of services: 

• parent and community organizing and coalition building for racial justice in education;
• quick turnaround data and research support;
• culturally responsive-sustainable education (CRSE) and anti-racist training, coaching, and skills-building for public school parents and parent groups, especially for white parents committed to becoming antiracist;
• national expertise in working with stakeholders in educational communities and other organizations to operationalize critical change around race, power, and privilege;
• and expertise in youth development, community coalition building, and  policy design.

Bill & Melinda Gates Grant for Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Research

NYU Metro Center was awarded a $1,000,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to be used to study the interconnected relationships of culturally responsive-sustaining education (CRSE), racial identity formation, and student academic success. With this grant, we will be able to explore what it means to consider CRSE as a dimension of quality academic solutions (i.e., in order for a solution to be deemed effective in improving the academic experiences of Black, Latinx, and students impacted by poverty, a solution must include some element of CRSE). 

Funding will be used to codify CRSE approaches and elements that are solutions based and that emerge from important lessons that might be learned in the course of this project. We will work with and study a cohort of organizations committed to improving student racial identity to better understand their approaches, harness the components of their programs that are central to their approaches, determine how each organizations measures impact, and explore current identity development measurement frameworks to see whether they can be applied to programs focused specifically on racial and cultural identity. We are deeply grateful to our generous benefactors, for placing their faith in us to do this vital work in the pursuit of racial equity in education.

Language RBE-RN

The 2019-20 academic year was a particularly evolutionary year for our Language RBE-RN team. Amongst several professional development pivots made to address the adjustment from in-person to remote workshops, workshops also needed to be adjusted for students’ remote learning needs. Many of the workshops that were provided in the spring of 2020 focused on adjusting the usual in-person instruction practices for a variety of topics so teachers could continue to reach and support their students in the remote setting. Language RBE-RN’s ability to readily adapt to meet the immediate needs of ELL teachers and students greatly contributed to the successful win of a highly competitive contract with the New York State Department of Education that guarantees funding for this program for an additional 5-year period.

Another major achievement and growth within the Language RBE-RN program was their ability to  recognize and adapt their work to more explicitly connect language and culturally responsive-sustaining education. This focus continues into the 2020-21 year with workshop series offerings such as, “Comprehensive & Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Literacy Instruction for Emergent Adolescent Multilingual Readers” and “Linking Social Justice and Intercultural Communicative Competence in a Spanish as a Foreign Language Class.”

In addition, Language RBE-RN’s director Ron Woo is a member of the NY State Culturally Responsive Education team,  a statewide team that represents different elements of the education community and works with the State to develop an overall strategy for the rollout of the CRSE framework.