By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans    NEW YORK  (IPS) — It’s four o’clock on a sunny afternoon in Harlem and 19-year-old Solideen Rann is spread out on a plush hand-me-down couch inside an old glass-and-aluminum storefront on Malcolm X Boulevard.His body language is making no effort to conceal he’s only reluctantly participating in a conversation with Dedric […]

By Jazelle Hunt, Washington Correspondent  WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Teachers have always graded students. The Obama administration feels the time has come for someone to grade teachers. Teacher training programs—from colleges and universities, to for-profit certification courses and non-profit preparatory programs—have few, if any, external evaluation systems to check for and improve quality. In fact, only five […]

By Marc Morial “Race matters…because of the long history of racial minorities being denied access to the political process…because of persistent racial inequality in society — inequality that cannot be ignored and that has produced stark socioeconomic disparities.”–  Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court of the United States. Two weeks ago, in a disturbingly lopsided 6-2 vote, […]

By Freddie Allen, NNPA Washington Correspondent  WASHINGTON (NNPA) – After suffering  a major setback last year in the Supreme Court, voting rights advocates are buoyed by a decision last week by a federal judge in Wisconsin striking down the state’s voter ID law as racially discriminatory. John Ulin, a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP and […]