Boundaries and Backlash: Resegregation and Recent Political Trends in Virginia’s Public Schools
Date: Wednesday, Feb 11, 2026
Start time: 12:00 PM
End time: 1:00 PM
Location: Online via Zoom
Audience: Open to all
Join the HRC and the School of Education for a Curriculum Conversation with Dennis Williams, Research Associate at the University of Virginia.
Description
This talk examines how resegregation and the contemporary politicization of education are reshaping Virginia’s public schools. It connects state-sanctioned residential segregation and the legacies of anti-busing politics to today’s curriculum debates, including recent anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ+ education policy shifts. It then reviews empirical research on racialized bias in academic evaluation and shows how racialized differences in academic expectations and student evaluation can compound within resegregated educational geographies. Williams will close with concrete, classroom-ready strategies educators can use to sustain equity, academic engagement, and students’ sense of belonging across racially diverse classroom settings.About the Speaker
Dennis Williams II, Ph.D., is a research associate at the University of Virginia. In 2025, he earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at UVA, where he completed a three-manuscript dissertation, Racialized Academic Devaluation and the Prosocial Classroom, using state-of-the-art Bayesian multilevel modeling and Abolitionist and QuantCrit frameworks to examine how educator social-emotional competence buffers students' experiences of racialized academic discrimination. His scholarship and writing have been featured at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, the International Society for Contemplative Research, the Mind & Life Institute Summer Research Institute, and in such outlets as Educational Policy, Richmond Racial Equity Essays, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and the African American Review.
Event contact: Ellie Musgrave, musgraveec@vcu.edu