In his talk, Professor Darity discusses how internal segregation of schools with respect to curriculum and instruction perpetuates the racial achievement gap. He will also talk about how Project Bright Idea/Project Bright Tomorrow, developed in North Carolina, has addressed the problem of racialized tracking there. The project was the focus of a five-year study by Darity looking at 10,000 kindergarteners and first- and second-graders. The findings suggest that raising expectations could be a key to improving education nationwide for traditionally underserved students.

William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy Studies and Professor of African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University.

Previously he served as director of the Institute of African American Research, director of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in economics, and director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina.

Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, doctrinal history and the social psychological effects of unemployment exposure.

He was a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He is a past president of the National Economic Association and the Southern Economic Association. He also has taught at Grinnell College, the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Texas at Austin, Simmons College and Claremont-McKenna College. He is Editor in Chief of new edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, (Macmillan Reference, 2008.)

His most recent books are Economics, Economists, and Expectations: Microfoundations to Macroapplications (2004) (co-authored with Warren Young and Robert Leeson) and a volume co-edited with Ashwini Deshpande titled Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (2003) both published by Routledge. He has published or edited 10 books and more than 125 articles in professional journals.