When I was growing up, the term “melting pot” was used a lot to describe America. As I’ve been wrapping up my book on South Asian American experiences in schools in America, I’ve been thinking more and more about that larger context — America — and whether or not it’s still fair to think of it as a melting pot at all.

The term “melting pot” was popularized in the early 1900s by the writer Israel Zangwill, and it had quite a different implication from the melding together of cultures and ethnicities that happens today (or even when I was growing up). …

As my colleague Heather Yuhaniak (@equitywarrior on Twitter) recently stated, in a discussion about how depressing it is to look at education policy from a systems level,

There is a “disconnect between our stated ideals and our practices.”

We certainly claim that improving the state of education in our country is a priority, but not only does that not play out in all of our policies. We implement new concepts (Curriculum 2.0, Ready for the Core) without even waiting to see the results of the initial intervention of the first one. We ignore what the research tells us and continue doing more of the same (we know desegregation works, and yet, schools are still extremely segregated). The trend is that of policy not supporting interventions, no matter how effective, so naturally, when I look at policy, I feel frustrated. …

When I was a teacher, at the end of the school year, I would try to leave a day or two to teach about miscellaneous topics the students expressed interest in — each year, this included technology. So, I taught a brief lesson (you can find more details about the lesson at the end of this post) about emerging technologies, and about the futurist theory that “the technological singularity is near.”

The technological singularity (“the singularity”) is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization, and perhaps human nature. …