Essays, reflections, and works in progress exploring race, education, knowledge, and institutional life.
Featured Essay
Math for All: Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud
In 1942, a college dean stood before the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and calmly proposed dividing American students into different mathematical futures. More than eighty years later, we continue to describe this history as “math for all.” This essay asks what happens when we stop taking that phrase at face value.
Why I Write
Beyond the Standard is where I think in public. These essays explore questions that do not fit neatly into journal articles—questions about race, education, institutions, and the ways ideas become common sense. These essays are invitations to think alongside me rather than conclusions to accept.
From the Archive
We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question
We tell this story as triumph. I want to tell you it’s also a diagram — a perfect, unintentional diagram of the question we keep asking about Black children and mathematics: how do we give them access?
Real Research Questions
I find that my research questions are never really representative of the questions I really want to ask.