Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools

′The beauty of this volume is that it is designed to help lay people-teachers, administrators, parents, community leaders, and even university professors begin to engage in the emotionally and psychically difficult conversations about race. Glenn Singleton and Curtis Linton have offered us an important book that provides us with empirical data and well constructed exercises to help us think through the ways that race affects our lives and our professional practices. My sincere desire is that after you have had an opportunity to read this volume you will, indeed, engage in some courageous conversations about race′ - Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of The Dreamkeepers

Singleton looks at the achievement gap through the prism of race, and in Courageous Conversations About Race, he begins by examining the evidence that points to race-not poverty-as the underlying cause behind the achievement gap.

This work, while exploring how race affects all educators, declares that we need to have engaged, sustained, and deep conversations about race in order to understand students and the achievement gap. Singleton calls this process "courageous conversations." Through these "courageous conversations," educators can learn how to redesign curriculum and create community and true equity.

Action steps to close the achievement gap include creating an equity team and collaborative action research. The final chapter presents a systemwide plan for transforming schools and districts, including activities, exercises, and checklists for central office administrators, principals, and teachers.

Glenn Singleton has devoted over thirty years to constructing racial equity worldwide and developing leaders to do the same. Author, thought leader, and strategist, he is the creator of Courageous Conversation a protocol and framework for sustained, deepened dialogue, and Beyond Diversity, the curriculum that has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to use it. Glenn is the Founder and President of Courageous Conversation TM, an agency that guides leadership development in education, government, corporation, law enforcement, and community organizing. He is the award-winning author of Courageous Conversations About Race; A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, Second Edition; and of MORE Courageous Conversations About Race. 

Glenn has consulted executives at Wieden + Kennedy (W+K) Advertising, Google, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, the New York Department of Education, the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the Stavros Niarchos, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundations. Along with W+K, he received the 2017 Most Valuable Partnership (MVP) Award by AdColor. He is the recipient of the George A. Coleman Excellence in Equity Award by the Connecticut State Education Resource Center. Cited in the June 2018 edition of the Hollywood Reporter for his work with 21st Century Fox Animation, most recently, Glenn was awarded the AdWeek/AdColor 2020 Champion Award, and the 2020 National Speech and Debate Association Communicator of the Year Award. In 1995, Glenn founded the Foundation for A College Education and continues to serve on its Board of Advisors. He is also the founder and Board Chair of the Courageous Conversation Global Foundation, which develops partnerships to promote racial justice, interracial understanding and human healing worldwide. 

Glenn has trained law enforcement leaders with the U.S. Embassy in Western Australia, and established the Courageous Conversation South Pacific Institute in Auckland, New Zealand. For eight years, he served as an adjunct professor of educational leadership at San Jose State University. Glenn has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University and has instructed faculty, students and administrators at the University of Minnesota, New York University School of Medicine, and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, Glenn Singleton is a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. and 100 Black Men. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Curtis Linton is a co-owner of The School Improvement Network where he is co-executive producer of The Video Journal of Education and TeachStream. He has spent the last 10 years documenting on video and in print the improvement efforts and best practices of the most suc­cessful schools and school systems across North America. Each year, he visits more than 100 classrooms and schools, capturing what they do to succeed with all students at the classroom, school, and system levels. Linton has written or produced dozens of award-winning video-based staff development programs. His areas of expertise include closing the achievement gap and improving minority student achievement, using data, leadership, effective staff development, brain research, differ­entiation, action research, and coaching. With the goal of delivering results-based professional development efficiently to large numbers of educators, he works with school systems to design comprehensive school improvement plans that integrate workshops, video, electronic media, and other resources. As a part of this, Linton conducts workshops on effective classroom practices. Linton also works extensively in the community, including serving on the Davis School District Equity Committee. Linton received his master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Southern California.