The beauty of the World Cup is that while thirty-two countries get to cheer for their respective teams, the event also affirms a global pluralism - it is as much a festival of cultural multiplicity as it is a competition featuring some of the best athletes in the world.

Education is a human right - a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded.

The benefits of prison education go beyond lowering recidivism rates and increasing post-release employment. It can also rekindle a sense of purpose and confidence.

The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.

Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.

It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible.

The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.

As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren't what they once were - that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints.

'A Talk to Teachers' showed me that a teacher's work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students' lives.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I've had with opportunities my students aren't given and how profoundly unfair that is.

In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.

Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.

School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.

Sometimes sports serves as a reprieve from politics, and sometimes it serves as an extension of it.

There is a solidarity that black people can find in celebrating the athletic success of our own, especially in sports where our existence is sparse.