Next week Thursday at 3pm, and again at 10pm, State of Opportunity's Jennifer Guerra presents a special hour-long documentary on race, education, and opportunity in Michigan.

While some might say we're "burned out" with talk about race and racism, it remains a timely topic in so many ways. Before we bring it home with Jen's doc on race and Michigan kids, just a wide-ranging look at how race appears in the media last two weeks:

 As I was working on yesterday's story about charter schools, I came across a problem that must be frustrating for many parents: It is incredibly difficult to find the right information to compare schools in Michigan. The information is all out there. It's just really hard to put it together in a way that makes sense. 

The first problem is figuring out where to look. So, here are five resources to help start the search: 

If you think of the best of what the charter school movement was meant to accomplish – you might think of a school a lot like University Prep Science + Math Middle School in Detroit. It’s attached to the Michigan Science Center in Midtown.

Students fill the hallway, dressed in white shirts, and khaki pants.  The boys wear ties.

Based on state testing, these are some of the top performing students in Detroit.

UPrep Science + Math CEO Margaret Trimer-Hartley is eager to brag.

"Not only do we do well on the data, we are the number one performing free-standing charter middle school in the state of Michigan," she says.

So you might think U Prep Science + Math has a waiting list every year, full of families who want to enroll their kids.

Trimer-Hartley says it’s the opposite.

I spend a lot of my time, as many journalists do, trying to convince people to share their experiences and stories. Sometimes it takes a lot of work. 

Most of my persuasive skills have to be channeled into convincing people they have a story worth telling, that their experiences matters. It does matter. The telling of every day experiences informs and connects people. Reporters can put connective tissue made up of context and background around these experiences and out comes a news story. 

I put a call out a few months ago for poems by students that somehow tied back to the issue of race and culture. The kind folks at InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit, an organization that brings creative writing into Detroit Public Schools, sent me a number of relevant poems by youth from the area.

We would love to read more poems about race and culture. If you think you've got a poem that fits, send it our way! Meantime, here are some poems we'd like to share with you. 

TAKING ROOT

In Southwest Detroit
Life grows best on the roofs of abandoned buildings.
Outsiders look at the graffiti juxtaposed against islands of grass
but don't understand that art and science create wonders.

When I moved near Vernor St.
it took me a while to blend in with the community.
Like oil paint submerged in water, I always stood out.
Maybe I never understood the environment.
Learning the culture was like trying to decode
the meaning of a Van Gogh painting,
except my neighborhood was more like a mosaic
of different backgrounds glued together by struggle,
to prove that those abandoned buildings aren't abandoned.

Reporting on a University of Connecticut study, The Atlantic prettied up data on how parents around the world describe describe their children.

Sarah Harkness and Charles Super, researchers in human development, found that, according to The Atlantic, "Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children's intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as 'happy' or 'easy' children to parent." Harkness called this focus nearly obsessive in that it ignores other aspects of early childhood development.

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case involving the Indian Child Welfare Act. The law is designed to make sure Native American children in the child welfare system stay connected with their tribes.  

Why?  Because for decades, American Indian families all over the country, including in Michigan, were wrenched apart by private and state child welfare workers.

Often with little reason, these workers removed Indian children from their families and tribes and tried to assimilate them into white and usually Christian culture. As barbaric as that might sound, it is not ancient history. 

Judge Alli Greenleaf Maldonado's mother was taken away from her family after her mother, Maldonado's grandmother, died.  She could have been placed with any number of relatives," Maldonado says. "But instead, she was sent to another state to be a domestic worker for a Mennonite minister and his wife."

Maldonado's mother was only four years old when she started working as a maid. Maldonado says it was common practice for young girls to be sent to be domestic workers,  while boys were sent to be farm hands in an attempt to give the children job skills.