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My mother’s birth certificate, dated 1915 and issued in Brooklyn, New York, gives her name as Maria. I knew her only as Mary, the name that appears on her marriage certificate, her social security card and her gravestone. Her sister Philomena was so determined to get away from her name that she had it changed legally to Phyliss. Their brother Philipo chopped his down to Philip. Their other siblings? Anna became Anne, Elisa morphed into Alice and Cosimo was known to his friends as Pete.

On August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, Dorothy Height sat on the speakers’ platform and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. She had helped organize the rally that brought about 250,000 people to the National Mall. In fact, she’d been in the forefront of the civil right struggle for decades as the president of the National Council of Negro Women.

Hundreds of high school and college students gathered around the state capitol in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday. They were there to convince Gov. Jan Brewer to veto Senate Bill 1070. These young protesters were disappointed though. Brewer signed the bill and instantly set back relations between whites and Latinos in Arizona and other parts of the country.

There’s an old joke among real estate agents that the three most important things to consider in any property are location, location, location.

For National Poetry Month, we departed from our typical prose-only style to present this special Why I Teach column.

Over 3,000 schools across the country challenged social boundaries on national Mix It Up at Lunch Day last November. Some schools took it to the next level by actively embracing respect and inclusiveness as core values of their school communities.

Today marks the 15th annual National Day of Silence, organized by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). This student-led civil protest will unite LGBT youth and their allies in thousands of middle schools, high schools and colleges nationwide.

On February 27, 1960, about 300 college students marched into downtown Nashville to confront Jim Crow segregation. Each of the marchers understood that they belonged to a larger movement of young people. Just three weeks earlier, in Greensboro, N.C., four college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth store. That action desegregated the lunch counter and triggered waves of copycat protests—like the one in Nashville.

Take this quiz to see if you're up on one of the biggest trends in U.S. education--the resegregation of public schools.