Elijah Armstrong

The night of October 24th, while scrolling through Twitter, I found myself suddenly snapped back to my time as a college student at Penn State, and I haven’t been able to shake the deeply permeating despondency since. The founder of the Proud Boys, a group with a history of violence and large overlap with white supremacist organizations, had been invited to campus by a student group. To protest, students were putting themselves at risk, and in harm's way.

I recently learned that my work has been used as justification by school officials who advocate deliberately concentrating poverty in a few schools. The high-performing, high-poverty schools I write about hold many lessons, but none of them is that we should deliberately create more high-poverty schools. First, the context.

Mississippi is about to do something colossally asinine in the name of parent engagement. Here’s the story: Mississippi State Rep. Gregory Holloway (D-Hazlehurst) recently introduced the Parental Involvement and Accountability Act, which was intended to improve parent engagement in low-performing schools by having teachers grade parents on their involvement. Rep.