Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality

Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods

What I Know Now: A Parent’s Reflections on Gifted Education

In this commentary, the author reflects on what she has learned about gifted education from the perspective of a parent.

What If Only What Can Be Counted Will Count? A Critical Examination of Making Educational Practice “Scientific”

In recent decades, federal policymakers have pushed for education to be a more “scientific” endeavor. Through an ethnographic study of one school district’s implementation of multi-tier system of supports, the authors examine the applied logic of this comprehensive reform initiative and its impact in practice.

Mass School Closures and the Politics of Race, Value, and Disposability in Philadelphia

This article examines 30 recent school closures in Philadelphia to explain how such closures have become yet another policy technology of Black community and school devaluation in the United States.

“A Ditcher and a Scholar”: Figuring College-Going Identities in an Urban Magnet High School

This article uses figured world theory to explore how college-bound youth construct college-going identities in an urban magnet high school.

Educating All Children: A Global Agenda

Self-Efficacy and Future Goals in Education

Millennial Teachers of Color

Leadership Matters in the Education of Students with Special Needs in the 21st Century

Teaching Social Studies: A Methods Book for Methods Teachers

Selling Out and Other Sins of the Justice Oriented Educator

This commentary engages the "sell out" phenomenon that often plagues justice oriented educators: not being able to engage in all forms of resistance and interruption often weighs on teachers engaged in critical teaching.

Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America

Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States

Documentation and Inquiry in the Early Childhood Classroom: Research Stories from Urban Centers and Schools

Ambitious Science Teaching

Curriculum Windows: What Curriculum Theorists of the 1990s Can Teach Us About Schools and Society Today

So I tried out Gab.ai

After the recent purges of Alex Jones and assorted conservatives and libertarians by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others, I decided it really is time for me to learn more about other social networks that are more committed to free speech. I decided to try Gab.ai, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t prove to be quite as racist as it is reputed to be.

See, while I love freedom of speech and will strongly defend the right of free speech—sure, even of racists and Nazis, even of Antifa and Communists—I don’t want to hang out in a community dominated by actual open racists and Nazis. How boring.

So I went to the website, and, well, Gab.ai certainly does have a lot of people who are at least pretending to be Nazis. I never would have guessed there were that many Nazis online.

To support my impression, I posted a poll:

Wow! 1,368 votes! I sure hit a nerve with Gab.ai. But the results, well, they were disappointing: 57% of self-selected poll answerers on the web poll said they were OK with open racism on Gab.ai, 37% tolerated it, and it made 6% of them want to leave. But I was told by several people that I should have added another option: “That’s what the Mute button is for.”

There’s another reason I’ve spent this much time exploring the site. It’s that I really doubt there are that many actual Nazis on the site. Consider for a moment:

1. The Establishment is increasingly desperate to silence dissenting voices.
2. Gab.ai and some other alternative media sites have been getting more popular.
3. Silicon Valley executives know the fate of MySpace and Yahoo: it’s possible for giants to be replaced. Users are fickle.
4. Like progressives, most conservatives aren’t actually racist, and they will be put off by communities dominated by open, in-your-face racists.
5. There’s a midterm election coming up and people spending untold millions to influence social media, since that, we are now told, is where it’s at.

Considering all that, it stands to reason that lots of left-wing trolls are being paid (or happily volunteer; but no doubt many are paid) to flood Gab.ai and make appallingly racist, fascist, anti-Semitic accounts. Of course they are; it’s an obvious strategy. The only question is how many—i.e., what percentage of the Gab.ai users—consist of such faux racists.

Such trolls aside, there are at least two broad categories of people on Gab.ai. In one category there are the bona fide racists, Nazis, anti-Semites, and other such miscreants, and in the other category there is everyone else—mostly conservatives, libertarians, and Trump voters who do things like share videos of (black conservative) Candace Owens and shill for Trump (I voted for Gary Johnson, and I’ve always been bored by political hackery). The latter category of user mutes those of the former category, apparently.

So, feeling desperate for an alternative to Twitter, I spent a few hours today on the site, mostly muting racists, and a bit of getting introduced to some people who assured me that most of the people on the site were decent and non-racist, and that what you had to do was—especially in the beginning—spend a lot of time doing just what I was doing, muting racists.

Boy, are there a lot of racists (or maybe faux racists) there to mute. I still haven’t gotten to the end of them.

But I’m not giving up on Gab.ai, not yet. Maybe it’ll change, or my experience will get better. A lot of people there assured me that it would. I love that it’s as committed to free speech as it is, and I wouldn’t want to censor all those racists and Nazis just as I wouldn’t want to censor Antifa and Communists. Keep America weird, I say!

If it’s not Gab.ai, I do think some other network will rise. Two others I need to spend more time on are Steemit.com, a blockchain blogging website, similar to Medium and closely associated with EOS and Block.one, and Mastodon.social, which is sort of a cross between Twitter and Facebook. Steemit has become pretty popular (more so than Gab.ai), while Mastodon has unfortunately been struggling. I also want to spend more time on BitChute, a growing and reasonably popular YouTube competitor.

Hanging In, Stopping Out, Dropping Out: Community College Students in an Era of Precarity

Using in-depth interviews with 45 students, this article investigates the factors that keep students from completing community college credentials.

Hitting Pause

Inside PreK Classrooms: A School Leader’s Guide to Effective Instruction

The First 100 Days in the Main Office: Transforming A School Culture

What’s Next for Student Veterans

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice (3rd Edition)

Spreading the Word: Boundary Crossers Building Collective Capacity for Data Use

This study examines how data team members acted as boundary crossers to build school-wide capacity for data use and how they implemented an improvement plan.