Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement Omar Wasow∗ Jacob M. Grumbach∗ April 1, 2026 Abstract What precipitates the collapse of seemingly durable social orders like Jim Crow? During the 1920s, approximately 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” were built across the rural South through a partnership between philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and Black communities who raised matching funds, donated land, and petitioned local governments. Local elites saw vocational training that would preserve the racial order. We argue Black educators used this accommodationist cover to build veiled capacity: organizational infrastructure for collective action behind a veil of compliance. Counties with more Rosenwald Schools show greater civil rights protest in the 1960s. Mediation analysis reveals that pre-existing social capital predicted protest through Rosenwald teacher placements, not enrollment. Instrumental variable models suggest the effect is not driven by community selection. Moving from no Rosenwald teachers to the 75th percentile predicts 45% more protest. The political effects of education may depend less on what elites intend than on what educators build where elites cannot see.

Excited to share new paper w/ @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social: "Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement"

The puzzle: did ~5,000 segregated schools built in rural South emphasizing “manual labor” strengthen or weaken Jim Crow? 🧵 omarwasow.com/wasow_grumba...

STEM Education is about so, so much more than high school math and science class.

My hunch (coming late to ed tech from a tech ed perspective): systems are better at using technology supporting adult work than figuring out how technology can create powerful student learning experiences (which often means students creating with technology).

I think we're about to find some strange policy coalitions around this. As budgets tighten, 1-to-1 chromebooks become an easy target...

That is a tough battle at the moment. I am probably in the "curious skeptic" about how genAI can support teaching and learning but come off as a refuser. Most of my students are ambivalent, though they really don't like the idea of intermediating student-teacher-family relationships with genAI.

Is this grammarly expert thing derived from the "what will my professor grade me" feature? Because I tried that. And it worked terribly.

But, the main findings of this are quite interesting and important. Thanks to the authors and Cristo Rey (and funders) for making it happen.

We'll share similar results from a different measure and setting at #AERA26. Our focus is on measurement and the evidence is poor. My hunch: we are not seeing employers treat WBL students as capable adults and peers so they don't take the ratings all that seriously. 3/3 A conversation to continue

while not the central aims of their study, the employer measure of student professional skills is an important, open question for WBL. The authors report highly skewed reports (mean 4.11 on a 5-point scale) along with high inter-item correlations for the subskills. 2/3

Are Work-Based Professional Skills Associated with Postsecondary Entrance and Persistence? Novel Evidence from the Cristo Rey Network Professional skills such as initiative, communication, and adaptability are thought to shape postsecondary success, but most evidence comes from self- or teacher-reported measures collected in school ...

Are Work-Based Professional Skills Associated with Postsecondary Entrance and Persistence? Novel Evidence from the Cristo Rey Network edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1419

I need some wisdom from the Education Research crowd: What is the status of getting disclosure for restricted-use NCES projects? Is there any movement on projects approved or submitted in the last year or so? Trying to prioritize my next steps on a project

Lots of districts cut ties over the past ~10 years. Some of the bipartisan "reform" coalition went all in on vouchers who might have been helpful. Not sure where the coalition is

Thanks for bringing this up. Story to watch. She plays the role of policy entrepreneur well. Focus on "workforce." Play on some fears/uncertainty in the labor market for new graduates. Feels in when I graduated (2007) all over again. Last problem: where are the TFA contracts going?

Seems like they went away from this as a recruitment strategy and now bringing it back around? Or maybe I haven't been paying attention

It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Marketing computing: how school branding reinforces or challenges gender stereotypes This paper examines how school branding and policy may shape gender disparities in computing education. Wong et al. explore how schools portray computing in brochures, websites and related material...

🎯 New open access paper: What do school websites signal about computing and who it is for? Using document data (n = 960), we examine how schools frame computer science in public-facing materials, and what that might mean for gendered participation.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Better yet, don’t collect any data: let ChatGPT make it up!

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

The latest from Anthropic: using Anthropic's products makes you worse at your job

AI Literacy Part 1 "Where Angels Fear to Tread" with Sam Wineburg Over the last two years, teachers and schools have felt immense pressure to incorporate AI literacy into their curricula. In the fall of 2024, California became the first state to pass a law…

pca.st/episode/c3a3...

AI literacy is quickly becoming a core education issue.
www.newamerica.org/education-po...

#AIinEducation

As US secondary schools ramp up WBL, we need to understand the critical role of school-based personnel to prepare students for and make sense of their WBL experiences. Nice paper.

Each Tuesday, we will signpost you to new texts available in the JVET journal.

This week we share ‘Preparing students in need of support for work-based learning: vocational teachers’ experiences and pedagogical approaches’ by My Olofsson (2025).

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This is pretty surprising given the positive evidence. Do they think the work is done? Backbone infrastructure like hubs should be state-funded. Others are happy to fund specific project and programs.

But is the person there? Over the past year I've had several people's bots show up without them which is awkward.

New to me that OpenSciEd is thinking this way. I've got to say, working in a CS-is-required K-12 state, anyone wishing to make something like this happen has a massive infrastructure challenge.

OPINION: We cannot wait until high school or college to integrate computer science lessons  The future of work will demand fluency in both science and technology. From addressing climate change to designing ethical AI systems, tomorrow’s challenges will require interdisciplinary thinkers who can navigate complex systems and harness the power of computation. And that is why we can’t wait until high school or college to integrate computer science into general science. The time to begin is during middle school, that formative period when students begin to shape their identities, interests and aspirations. If schools want to prepare young people for a future shaped by technology, they must act now to ensure that computer science is not a privilege for a few but a foundation for all.

OPINION: We cannot wait until high school or college to integrate computer science lessons 

The future of work will demand fluency in both science and technology. From addressing climate change to designing ethical AI systems, tomorrow’s challenges will require interdisciplinary thinkers who can…

Buenrostro, P. M., & Morales-Doyle, D. (2024). Ditching chemistry and calculus: An axiological shift towards alternative futures in high school STEM. The High School Journal. muse.jhu.edu/article/966227

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up? If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Ad…

Wouldn't be the first Springer to run into issues retractionwatch.com/2025/06/30/s...

Opportunity Structures in Vocational Education and Training This open access book unites authors from diverse academic disciplines to promote a positive discourse around vocational education and training

link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

We can do a better job, I think, of supporting teachers own knowledge mobilization to local contexts. Ed leadership is further along than teacher prep in that regard. 2/2