After all, her dad said, her true passion is social justice.  

McChristian said the explanation was simple: A lack of access and opportunity in mathematics for all students means many children, particularly kids of color and those living in impoverished communities, are forced to take educational pathways that leave them unqualified for lucrative STEM careers. 

“The role of math in educational equity is really a civil rights — and a social justice and racial justice — issue,” she recalled telling him. 

Broken down that way, friends and family quickly understood why the national policy director role at made sense for the Yale University and Columbia Law School graduate. 

And, its focus on education conjures an old love: McChristian, who holds a master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Nevada, was once a member of which recruits college graduates to work in high-need schools for two years. McChristian was a Head Start teacher in the Las Vegas Valley. 

But it was an even earlier experience that drew her to the field, she said. Her father, also a Yale grad, worked for IBM and moved his family frequently when McChristian was a child, allowing her to attend schools in several locations, including Japan. 

McChristian, who was born in California but lived all over the East Coast, said the constant relocation created a unique opportunity to observe educational inequity firsthand, both here and abroad. 

“In Tokyo, I was trying to catch up with students at my expat school,” she said. “And then, a year later, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, reading a textbook to another student in the 7th grade who didn’t know how to read. So that spurred me to want to understand why there are these disparities.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

What do you see as the purpose of your new position? 

There’s a disconnect between the people who live and breathe this work and everyday community members. My entire career has been about breaking down these concepts and these ideas that really impact people’s lives into actionable steps that they can take to change their communities. I’m excited to bring that kind of perspective to the math equity landscape.

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges that we as a nation face in moving kids forward in math?

A lot of times when you just say the word math, people’s minds shut off. They go quickly to, “Oh, I’m not a math person,” or “Math isn’t relevant to me.” They don’t even want to talk about the ideas around why that might be. Maybe they didn’t have access to math coursework that was relevant to their experience, that was culturally responsive. Did they have all the options for the coursework that would get them to the career or the path they wanted to have?

It’s been difficult, but it’s also been invigorating in many ways because it shows me the opportunities for me to add value. I can list why this is a racial and social justice issue. I can show what this means for the average high school student if they don’t have access to math that speaks to them and how that sets them up for their future career.

Historically, what have we been doing wrong in terms of math instruction?

For many, many years, we’ve had this traditional math sequencing without fail, where you go from Algebra I all the way up to calculus — if you’re able to. And that is still an extremely important pathway as calculus is kind of a soft requirement for highly selective colleges. 

But we know some students want computer science or data science instead. These kinds of courses may be more relevant to what they want to do in college — and for their future careers. 

We’re not saying do away with any certain model. We’re saying, make sure students have as many options as possible in terms of math coursework they need to succeed. It’s about adding more to the plate, giving students more resources. 

What would you like to change about how mathematics is taught today? 

First is the traditional sequence, the ending point of calculus for those students who want to go into STEM. We need more options there, additional pathways that can include data science and stats.

Then, once we get to the college admissions stage, we want to make sure colleges — including the more highly selective institutions — reflect this change. Because it’s not helpful if a high school can say, “Oh, now our students can take data science to complete their graduation requirement,” but the university those students want to attend does not factor that into the admissions process.

And then, once students get to college, we want to make sure they have access to other coursework — just as they did in high school — that may be more relevant to their experience. 

How will the Trump administration’s plans for NAEP impact the information we collect regarding student achievement? 

We are a nonpartisan . But I will say we have been very intentional about the push for the continuation of data. Data such as the Nation’s Report Card provides us with an assessment of where our kids are.

How will the defunding of Head Start impact students’ later achievement in mathematics?

At Just Equations, we focus primarily on the high school to college pathway. But as a former Head Start teacher, I feel very passionately about the work that can be done to support students’ social-emotional, literacy and math needs at the early childhood education level.

Why is it important to solve this issue? To bring more students into mathematics? 

For me, it’s informed by my family experience. My dad grew up in South Central Los Angeles and through a program called , he was able to attend a high- performing high school and then go on to Yale University. He had so many opportunities presented to him that he never would if it had not been for this.

My dad always told me, “There’s not a lack of talent, there’s a lack of opportunity.” And so that’s what really fortifies me in this space to ensure that every student, that Black student, that Latinx student, has access to the coursework they need to go into a STEM career. 

So that’s why I go back to it being a racial and social justice issue. We can’t afford for people to tune out of the math conversation as we have these new digital technologies emerge, as we see more of our world go online, as we see technologies to target communities of color.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations and to �鶹��Ʒ.

We met an inspired 15-year-old STEM activist, Kavya Venkatesan, from Old Bridge, New Jersey who believes innovation and STEM can solve social issues affecting everything from bias in healthcare to sustainability. Kavya is also dedicated to building the nation’s female STEM workforce pipeline

She has developed strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on her home state by creating an app, NJ X Connect, that connects individuals in low-income, coastal communities with flood relief organizations and resources in the event of an emergency. “Because right now, our strategy in those communities should be helping them be more resilient,” she said.

Kavya’s second app, Helios, a heat advisory system, aims to educate users about their risk of being hospitalized from heat strokes.

Her passion for STEM as a means of social change led her to the national organization Society of Women Engineers, where she brings industry professionals and students together to develop solutions for social change.

“I realized diversity, equity and inclusion — it has to be something that we need to focus more on in the STEM field,” Kavya said.

See our full interview — and celebrate our full 2022 class! 

At least three participants describe themselves as “sunny.”

Then, the mediator reads a script.

“The Positive Impact Circle includes those harmed by the offense, those who committed the offense and the community to determine the most effective response to promote healing and safety for everyone,” the mediator begins. 

The underlying philosophy for Piedmont Mediation’s process is restorative justice, said Terri Masiello, Piedmont Mediation’s executive director and the coordinator of the. 

Restorative justice is the practice of bringing together affected parties of a crime to discuss what happened and what needs to happen to make things right.

Piedmont Mediation is a diversion program that serves as an alternative to juvenile court for some cases in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, serving Alexander, Iredell, Davie, Davidson and Randolph counties.

Masiello was trained in restorative justice in Colorado about seven years ago. In 2018, she started working with North Carolina’s juvenile system to help expand restorative justice programs in the state. This year, she said she’s seen an uptick of referrals to her programs.

They have advocated for less punitive approaches to juvenile offenses. That will be important as kids return to school post-pandemic. As schools have resumed in-person instruction,. 

I hadn’t heard much about restorative justice in North Carolina, where it still remains the exception instead of the norm. I first heard about restorative justice in a different Piedmont, the  Piemonte region of northern Italy.

Reframing juvenile justice

Juvenile justice is different in Italy, said , a researcher at the Università degli Studi di Torino in Turin, Italy. 

In 2019 North Carolina, a state with 10.5 million people, incarcerated an average of  on any given day. That was before the Raise the Age law was enacted. 

In contrast, a January 2021 report showed there were incarcerated in Italian penal institutions on any given day for a population nearly six times the size of North Carolina.

The Turin Department of Juvenile Justice. Photo Credit: Elizabeth Thompson.

Diversion is a key part of the system, Miravalle said. Culturally and systemically, Italy’s juvenile justice system thinks differently about offenses by children than in the U.S.

“We have this strong Catholic tradition, even if we are in the postmodern era,” Miravalle said. “You still have this idea that if you are young, at the end, you need one more chance.”

One of the underpinning principles surrounding recent reforms to juvenile justice in North Carolina is that children are still developing behavioral regulation. That has played out in the push for the which spared 16 and 17-year-olds who committed nonviolent crimes from the adult criminal justice system and the more recent efforts to pass , which  for children to go to juvenile court from six to 10.

Countries such as Italy have begun to move away from thinking about juvenile offenses as crimes, and more like opportunities for rehabilitation.

Italy is at the forefront of implementing restorative justice practices, such as victim-offender mediation, in which the victim and the perpetrator of a crime meet, and with the help of a mediator, reconstruct what happened in the incident.

Victim-offender mediation was first introduced to . Now, it plays a critical role in the way juvenile offenses are processed.

Restorative justice is often mistakenly perceived as a “weak response” to a crime, said , a mediator and member of .

In fact, victim-offender mediation is often very difficult for both the victim and the perpetrator of the crime, Maccarini said.

“There are some questions when you are victim of a crime that nobody can answer but the offender,” Maccarini said. That includes questions such as “why me?”

Maccarini makes the analogy that a crime, at its core, is a breakup of a relationship. The breakup of that relationship can cause fractures in all kinds of social relationships and expectations. Getting those answers can help both parties begin to repair that relationship, Maccarini said. It can help them to start healing, to be restored.

In some cases, Maccarini said she has seen mediation sessions where a victim and perpetrator of different incidents, but similar types of crimes sit down together.

“It works,” she said.

Restorative justice in North Carolina

Piedmont Mediation is one of a number of organizations starting to employ restorative justice practices in North Carolina.

After the state’s (JJDP) receives a complaint, a juvenile court counselor can make a diversion plan for the youth and their parent or guardian without sending the child to court, said Jerry Higgins, communications officer for JJDP at the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.

“Based on the information at hand, state juvenile court counselors can refer at-risk children and their families to programs funded by local Juvenile Crime Prevention Council programs and other programs,” Higgins said in an email. “JJDP often directs parents to community resources as well as to the local mental health and social service agencies to assist them.”

Some of these programs include clinical evaluation and psychological assessment, home-based family counseling and restorative justice practices such as those employed at Piedmont Mediation.

Just as in Italy, the purpose of employing restorative justice practices is not to adjudicate whether or not a crime occurred.

“We make decisions about how to move forward,” Masiello said, “how to address the harm that was done, and also how to make sure that all the parties that were harmed including the youth move forward in a positive way.”

Crime impacts people in more ways than one, Masiello said. For both parties, the crime is more than just an isolated incident. It impacts them, their families, the way they are viewed by their community. 

That’s why it can be so difficult to sit down and talk about it.

Community investment in children and taking responsibility for the next generation could be the key to making real change, said , assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.

“Maybe that’s part of the reason why it’s better in Italy,” Fedders said. “There’s more of a sense of social cohesion and being responsible for the next generation, even if they’re not biologically related. Because we need more of that.”

At the Positive Impact Circle, members of the community volunteer to participate, to listen to children explain their side of the story — not to judge, but to help them move on.

“We’re all very aware that we have a rare opportunity to play a role in that young person’s life,” Massiello said.

This originally appeared at  and is published here in partnership with the .

Mirroring moves by other red-state legislatures across the country, Texas Republicans are attempting to reach into classrooms and limit what public school students are taught about the nation’s historical subjugation of people of color.

Two bills moving through the Texas Legislature would bar the teaching of , an academic discipline that views race as a social construct and examines how racism has shaped legal and social systems.

Decrying critical race theory has emerged as a common refrain among conservative Republicans nationwide, but the Texas legislation would go further by discouraging Texas students from discussing current events or controversial public policy issues.

“Texans reject critical race theory and other so-called ‘woke’ philosophies that maintain that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex or that any individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive,” said last week in a endorsing the legislation. “These divisive concepts have been inserted into curriculums around the state, but they have no place in Texas schools.”

But educators and social justice experts see the efforts as an attack on the state’s civic education curriculum at a time when students should be learning more, not less, about civics, social justice and history.

“There is more attention being given than ever before to the societal problem [of civic education] and how to fix it, which is why Texas, like every other state in the union right now, has so many civic education bills being put forth,” said Wendy May-Dreyer, who leads the Texas Civic Education Coalition. “The problem is we have a small faction who’s trying to quash that effort, that progress forward, and if we miss our opportunity, the Legislature doesn’t meet for another two years, and we likely have just missed the boat completely.”

Last week, the Senate passed , authored by , R-Conroe, which bans teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Many Texas Republicans see critical race theory as a way to give students implicit or unconscious bias training, which Creighton’s bill seeks to prohibit. It passed the upper chamber 18-13, all its supporters white Republicans.

The state House is set to consider SB 2202’s sister bill, , proposed by , R-The Woodlands, as early as this week.

Teachers’ organizations and education advocacy groups alike have mobilized to oppose both bills, and groups with no official stance toward critical race theory, like the Texas Civic Education Coalition, oppose the bills because they limit civics engagement and learning for students.

Beyond discouraging teachers from discussing current events and critical race theory, SB 2202 and HB 3979 also prohibit students from receiving class credit for participating in organizations that promote civic engagement and interest, according to the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. And the bills would ban school districts from receiving private funding for opportunities like social studies curriculum development, course materials and teacher training, as well. That provision means individual schools won’t be able to accept donations or materials for teaching the curriculum, a program developed by The New York Times Magazine that centers on critical race theory.

Many of the bill’s proponents have focused on playing to the popularity of banning critical race theory from Texas schools, May-Dreyer said, but few have mentioned the other provisions to diminish efforts to expand the state’s civic education curriculum.

Texas AFT, the Texas State Teachers Association, Texas Educators Vote, the Texas Legislative Education Equity Coalition, the Texas Council for the Social Studies and The Education Trust have all expressed strong opposition to the bills, agreeing with May-Dreyer’s points while also going further to defend critical race theory.

“These bills try to ignore or downplay the racism, sexism and other injustices in our state’s and nation’s history, but students must be encouraged to fully explore and understand those injustices if Texas is to provide an equitable future for a rapidly diversifying population,” said Clay Robison, a public affairs specialist for TSTA.

In a statement to The Texas Tribune, Creighton defended his bill, arguing that Texas schools should emphasize “traditional history, focusing on the ideas that make our country great and the story of how our country has risen to meet those ideals.”

Across the country, many Republican-controlled state legislatures are considering similar bills to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory. Last week, became the first state to officially bar critical race theory from public schools and colleges after the governor signed the legislation, which the bills proposed in Texas closely mirror.

Also last week, the Louisiana House Education Committee discussed a similar bill authored by state Rep. Ray Garofalo. He withdrew the legislation after his colleagues criticized him for commenting on “the good” of slavery, according to .

“Not talking about racism and other forms of injustice won’t make them go away,” said Jonathan Feinstein, the Texas state director of The Education Trust. “This unnecessary bill — like others introduced across the country — prevents schools from proactively addressing harmful acts of discrimination, ties the hands of teachers rather than supporting them, and seeks to hold students back from grappling with and helping to solve real challenges facing our society.”

With just a few weeks left in this session, the battle over this legislation may go down to the wire. , a Black Democrat from Houston who chairs the House Public Education Committee, pulled Toth’s HB 3979 back to the committee on Monday morning. Later Monday, members voted the bill out of committee for a second time with Dutton’s support. Dutton’s office did not respond to a request for comment on why he voted for the bill. Experts said they expect the bill to reach the House floor at some point in the next three weeks.

“The prohibitions in the bill are broad and may be interpreted in ways that limit the learning, diversity and inclusion efforts already underway in schools across Texas,” said Zeph Capo, the president of Texas AFT. “The last thing we need is more overly broad ‘education’ legislation that will trap our state and school districts in expensive, needless litigation. Let teachers teach.”

Duncan Agnew is a reporting fellow at , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Disclosure: Texas AFT, Texas State Teachers Association and New York Times have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

Updated April 7

Attending a mostly white boarding school in Connecticut allowed Dena Simmons to escape the danger of her poor, Black and Latino neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. But it also separated her from her culture and made her feel like she didn’t belong. “There is emotional damage done when young people can’t be themselves,” she said six years ago during a that has received almost 1.4 million views.

That’s why Simmons, who became assistant director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in 2018, worked to make the center’s popular K-12 program on understanding feelings more meaningful for marginalized students. She pushed to include figures such as former President Barack Obama and girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai in lessons and challenged teachers with bold statements about schools being systems of white supremacy.

Her drive for cultural relevance, however, repeatedly clashed with the views of her supervisor, Marc Brackett, the center’s prominent director and best-selling author of .

“The political examples automatically alienate people (Black or white) and we can’t judge people for being Democrats or Republicans,” Brackett wrote Simmons in one of several emails and documents shared with �鶹��Ʒ.

His insistence on staying on the political sidelines ran afoul of Simmons and others at the Yale center who viewed his stance as tone deafness toward issues of historical injustice. Their lessons — for example, using a book about a transgender boy to teach about feeling understood — might get the curriculum “banned” in some parts of the country, Brackett said in one email. The conflict has put the center in the middle of a controversy that has rippled from the university to the larger world of what has come to be known as social-emotional learning.

Simmons, 37, resigned from her position in January, seven months after she was targeted by anonymous racial slurs during an to memorialize the death of George Floyd. She left, she told the university at the time, due to a “hostile work environment” at the center, where she was subjected to “unconsented hair touching” and once received a reprimand from a supervisor for calling out social-emotional learning practices she viewed as harmful to students of color.

In interviews, four other former staffers supported her account, describing what they saw as an unwelcome atmosphere at the center toward issues of diversity and inclusion.

“There was no emotional intelligence afforded me,” Simmons told the 74. “I hope to push the field and institutions to do better — to put their actions where they say their values are.”

In a lengthy statement on her resignation sent to roughly 2,500 schools and organizations it works with around the world, center leaders said they were “deeply disheartened by our colleagues’ hurtful experiences at Yale.”

“We want to stress that we do not tolerate discrimination or bias in any form,” they wrote. “We care deeply about our team’s well-being and safety, and we continuously strive to create a workplace that fosters a sense of belonging where all people feel valued and connected.”

Despite strides toward “creating and sustaining an antiracist workplace,” the statement acknowledged “there is much more work to do.” Contacted by �鶹��Ʒ, Brackett said he is taking “a pause on interviews” and sent a link to his center’s on diversity, equity and inclusion — developed after the online incident.

The episode at one of the nation’s most elite universities offers a window into how social-emotional learning programs — and schools more generally — are grappling with issues of historical discrimination as well as a growing backlash from those who say such efforts are politicizing the curriculum.

“As goes the consciousness of the country, so goes education,” said Robert Jagers, vice president of research at the (CASEL), a hub for research and policy expertise in the field. “There is a measure of urgency that was not present two years ago.”

Mood Meters and Meta-Moments

In many ways, the Yale schism reflects the enormous growth social-emotional learning has experienced since the term’s first invocation at a . Today, the concept is ubiquitous. It is not unusual for large school districts to have whole departments devoted to helping students form positive relationships, manage difficult emotions and make sound decisions. It’s also big business, drawing $21 billion to $47 billion annually on programs and teacher training, according to a .

While some criticize the field for “” definitions and unclear targets, a formidable body of research now says social-emotional learning can improve and lead to .

After completing post-doctoral work in psychology with Peter Salovey, now Yale’s president, Brackett became one of the field’s early pioneers. Like Simmons, he came to the study of human emotion from painful personal experience. In an last year with Brené Brown, author of and , he described being sexually abused as a child and turning to his uncle, a teacher, for help.

“When I disclosed what was happening, he was the only adult who was there for me,” Brackett said. “He just listened. He didn’t say, ‘Toughen up!’ like my father did, and he didn’t have a breakdown like my mom did. And God bless my parents, they did everything they could, but they just had no resilience, they had no strategies to deal with their feelings.”

His center’s signature program is RULER — an acronym for “recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating” emotions. The “Meta-Moment,” one of its stock tools, prompts students to imagine their “best self” when responding to tense situations. Lessons on “feeling words” ask students to study how a book character or a well-known person might have felt in a particular situation.

“Marc’s vital voice regarding the connection between emotions, cognition and learning has resonated in the field,” said Chi Kim, CEO of Pure Edge, a nonprofit that provides health and fitness programs for schools and funds research in social-emotional learning.

The Yale center, which sits in the medical school, draws in millions of dollars in grants, including at least $5 million in from the U.S. Department of Education since 2012. It has even earned the endorsement of current Secretary Miguel Cardona. As state chief in Connecticut, he hired Brackett’s center to give all educators in the state access to a 10-hour , funded in part with $500,000 from Dalio Education, a state foundation. CASEL cites RULER as an example of a program based on research, and Brackett sits on its board.

He has also brought to the field pop-culture cachet. He teamed up with Lady Gaga in 2015 for on how teens feel about school and frequently on TV talk shows. Even parents who don’t know RULER or recognize Brackett’s name are familiar with the “Mood Meter,” which teaches children to associate feelings with colors. The resulting boards of multi-hued Post-it Notes produced by parents and teachers have become mainstays on .

A former middle school math and English teacher in the Bronx, Simmons joined the center in 2014. She believed in its mission and called the opportunity “a dream come true.” Her doctoral studies had focused on how middle school teachers can address bullying. Now, she wanted to help schools become more compassionate places for marginalized students.

But as the program grew, so did Simmons’s view that the center’s leaders saw equity as an “add-on.” She became convinced that common practices in social-emotional learning, such as taking deep breaths in times of stress, wouldn’t serve students of color well.

“Try telling a child in poverty to breathe through racism,” she said in an interview. “That is insulting.”

She recruited others with classroom experience to the center and blended Learning for Justice’s — like showing “empathy when people are excluded or mistreated” — into RULER materials.

Susan Rivers, who co-founded the center with Brackett in 2013, recalled that Simmons “emerged as an education leader, despite not having the support, encouragement or collaboration to do anti-racist, inclusive work while at Yale.”

“She asks really tough and essential questions about equity in education, and she has the courage and conviction to do and lead the work,” said Rivers, who left the center in 2016 and now runs iThrive Games, a foundation that supports game-based learning for teens.

That quality often put Simmons at odds with the center’s leadership. In commentaries such as 2019’s “Why We Can’t Afford Whitewashed Social-Emotional Learning,” she argued that sidestepping the “larger sociopolitical context” in which students live keeps them from developing skills to confront hate and injustice. Ignoring that background, she said, could turn their teachings into “.” That statement, she said, earned her a warning from Linda Mayes, director of the Yale Child Study Center that oversees the emotional intelligence program, to be more careful with her words.

Mayes declined to comment on the incident.

‘Dead presidents’

In charge of teacher training and curriculum, Simmons directed her energy toward integrating that real-world context into RULER’s “feeling words” — the vocabulary students develop to describe their emotions and match them with the red, blue, green and yellow quadrants on the Mood Meter.

For “hopeful” — in the yellow, energetic and highly pleasant range — Simmons thought Obama, author of 2006’s , would be a natural fit. But at a lunch meeting with two other center leaders, Brackett blanched at the idea, she recalled.

“He said … that if we focus on presidents, we should only focus on dead presidents,” she said. “He must not have realized that all of the dead presidents were white men.” The two others she said were present — Scott Levy, the center’s executive director, and Nicole Elbertson, the director of content and communications — did not respond to requests for comment. Levy announced his resignation from the center March 10. Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for the Yale School of Medicine, said he is “pursuing another opportunity” but will remain on the center’s board.

The center’s leaders ultimately acquiesced on using those examples, but drew the line on others. For a lesson on “despair,” Karina Medved-Wu, who worked on RULER’s lessons for afterschool programs, dipped into current events and wrote a vignette about an undocumented parent stuck in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.

The example was replaced with the story of a runaway cat.

Medved-Wu noted the irony of a workplace devoted to emotional intelligence where many workers felt uncomfortable sharing their emotions.

“If Black employees, non-Black employees of color, employees who have self-identified as LGBTQ+and employees with disabilities do not feel safe, valued or heard in-house,” she asked, “then what biases and messaging are being sent locally and globally?”

She also proposed a fifth-grade lesson about , the book about a transgender child that sparked pushback from Brackett. “We can’t be in a position that our curriculum is banned,” he wrote in an email to Simmons and other staff members. “We have to be neutral.” To respond to his concerns, Medved-Wu included an alternative assignment: in which a father took a forgiving approach to confronting a boy who had bullied his son.

In October 2019, she said she spoke to Darin Latimore, the medical school’s deputy dean for diversity and inclusion, who indicated he had launched an investigation into the working environment at the center; at the time of their talk, he told her he had spoken to 15 people, she recalled. Latimore did not respond to requests for comment.

Peart, the Yale spokeswoman, declined to discuss the results of his “climate assessment,” but said without elaboration that “action is in process to address the themes gleaned during the review.” The center’s goal is for RULER to be “non-partisan,” she said, adding that it regularly seeks feedback on content to make it more inclusive. A school that wanted to use The Other Boy, she said “would be met with our full support.”

To the bewilderment of some staffers, Brackett appeared to have no resistance to such themes in his personal life. Brackett, who is gay, supports finding ways for young people “” to feel accepted, and he recently completed with his cinematographer husband on a camp for youth devoted to “exploring gender diversity.”

But inside the center, staff members say they heard a different message. “I recall him frequently emphasizing … that the appeal of our work had to be for everyone,” said Sarah Kadden, a former program manager for early childhood.

Simmons and Medved-Wu suspect Brackett’s motivation for keeping the lessons free of controversy was financial. A six-week training institute for three district staff members costs $6,000.

“If RULER were to be banned, it would impact the bottom line,” Simmons said.

The issue most important to Simmons — equity — was where she felt the least support. She had been pushing for years to brand the term into the center’s mission statement. In 2019, Brackett proposed in an email that she “create the vision … for how we infuse equity/culturally responsive practices, etc. into our training and curriculum.” By that point, Simmons said, the center was sending mixed messages, pushing inclusion while resisting her attempts to broaden the curriculum. In one email, she told Brackett that she did not want to become “a prop” for the center’s work on diversity.

“We were discouraged from raising equity issues, such as the school-to-prison pipeline, racist discipline practices [and] the cultural mismatch often found between students and teachers,” said Kadden, now a social worker in Connecticut’s New London Public Schools.

Then came the Zoom bomb.

On May 25, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody sparked an outcry in cities and campuses across the country. In early June, thousands of Black Lives Matter flooded the streets of New Haven, where Yale is located, presenting a list of demands, including the removal of resource officers from local schools. Weeks later, during an online event devoted to racial healing held by Yale’s Child Study Center, Simmons was reading a poem when several anonymous gate-crashers interrupted her with racial slurs, both verbally and in the chat field. Simmons logged off of the event, which was not password protected, but returned at the urging of colleagues. The harassment resumed.

In its statement, the Yale emotional intelligence center decried the “horrific, racist Zoom bombing” and said it had taken steps to curb its online “vulnerabilities.” Leaders have offered workshops on cultural sensitivity, hired a chief diversity officer and scrutinized RULER to “ensure it is equitable and inclusive,” the statement said. But Simmons, who took a seven-month medical leave, said the experience followed a pattern of incidents in which she felt dehumanized, such as colleagues touching her hair and calling it exotic. She left the university Jan. 19, the day she was supposed to return.

For those who view Simmons as a leader, not only in social-emotional learning but in the broader anti-racist movement, her departure raises troubling questions.

“Dena’s star was certainly on the rise … because she brought a perspective in content that was transformational,” said Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t know how you lose somebody like that.”

Some districts that use RULER and sent teachers to learn from Simmons have taken note of her departure. An official in the Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma said any further expansion of RULER in the district is “on pause [until we] see the response from the university.” And the executive director of the Tauck Family Foundation in Wilton, Connecticut, which funds RULER in Bridgeport early-childhood programs, said she wants to see what “progress has been made in addressing the issues raised” by Simmons’s resignation before continuing its support.

Many schools are playing catch-up in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, which sparked a reckoning on issues of race in education, from hiring practices to teaching history. “I think that Marc and Yale feel constrained about what they can do and they can’t do,” said David Osher, vice president and fellow at the non-partisan American Institutes for Research. “Probably many organizations prior to this past summer were … more timid about taking on issues that involved being explicitly anti-racist.”

Osher’s work on school safety and student engagement includes social-emotional learning. He’s collaborated on grants with the Yale center and credits Brackett’s work with helping him understand the importance of training adults before children. But he noted that curriculum developers must create programs that “play in both blue and red states.” Of the Yale center, he added, nothing about Simmons’s departure “would make me stop working with them.”

The push for educators to address structural racism has prompted its own outcry, turning critical race theory and new histories such as The New York Times’ “1619 Project” into fodder for the nation’s ongoing culture wars. At , for example, a former staff member has attracted a passionate YouTube following for criticizing the school’s insistence that employees undergo anti-bias training that centers on white privilege. Several academics recently formed the to combat what they see as an overly cynical emphasis on race, gender and sexual orientation, rather than “.”

“There is no such thing as a values-neutral [social-emotional learning] program,” said Ian Rowe, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a member of the foundation’s board. “But integrating reductionist ideas that carry oppressor [and] oppressed identities based on race will only perpetuate false, corrosive notions of superiority and inferiority.”

‘Sins of our history’

With Yale behind her, Simmons is free to approach social-emotional learning her way.

She has launched — a curriculum with equity at the center — and next year, St. Martin’s Press will publish her book, . “I needed my voice to ring louder than other people’s doubts, slights and limitations,” she wrote recently. “I left so that I could save myself, so that I could dream. And I left so that I could invest my time into changing the very system that failed me and is failing so many others.”

Dena Simmons is finishing her book, White Rules for Black People. (Nuria Rius for �鶹��Ʒ)

But her message still rattles. When she spoke in February to teachers in a predominantly white, affluent Chicago suburb, a writer for a right-wing website called out some of Simmons’s more provocative statements, such as saying the nation’s education system is “based on a foundation of whiteness.” Simmons later that coverage of the event sparked threats and hate mail.

Dan Iverson, president of the Naperville Union Education Association, said he heard complaints from a few participants, though he and most teachers present saw the speech in a more positive light.

“It’s not a sin to be white,” told �鶹��Ʒ. “We’ve always had a hard time in this country with the idea that the sins of our history are still relevant. It’s inherently very difficult to exist in a place where you can be OK with who you are as a white guy, but to understand you are better off.”

Flare-ups like the one in Naperville do not surprise Kamilah Drummond-Forrester. For years, she has asked teachers to examine their attitudes and biases toward students as part of the training for Open Circle, a social-emotional learning program based at Wellesley College, an elite liberal arts school in Massachusetts. The program is used in about 300 schools across the country.

In workshops, teachers sometimes drop comments, such as, “Those students don’t care about school,” or “Their parents aren’t interested,” said Drummond-Forrester, the program’s former director. Teachers call out what they view as “coded language” toward Black and Hispanic students, only to anger colleagues who think they’re being branded as racists.

But like Simmons, Drummond-Foster views such encounters as necessary. “You can’t talk about teaching skills around social awareness devoid of the systems that these kids are navigating,” she said.

That’s not the only thing they have in common. Just 10 days after Simmons’s resignation, Drummond-Forrester left her position as head of the Wellesley program.

In a statement, the college’s Centers for Women, which includes Open Circle, called Drummond-Forrester “a thought leader” for her work exploring social-emotional learning “through an equity lens,” and said staff would continue to work with her on other . Echoing Simmons’s concerns, Drummond-Forrester said the responsibility for equity work fell on her shoulders because she is Black.

“I was burned out,” she said.

Disclosures: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to and �鶹��Ʒ. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to and �鶹��Ʒ.

Lead Image: Dena Simmons spent seven years striving to make the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s popular RULER program more culturally responsive. Now she’s leading her own efforts to incorporate equity into social-emotional learning. (Nuria Rius for �鶹��Ʒ)