As the parent of African American sons, I learned the power and pernicious impact of implicit bias early on. These biases can impact not only learning skills, but also students' psychological health. When I asked my colleague, James L. Mason, PhD, chief diversity officer at Providence Health and Services, Oregon Region, for his thoughts on educational bias, he commented, "Bias has many forms; it is often separated into unconscious and conscious dimensions. The conscious bias is often apparent or visible, and people are willful in their discriminatory or biased behavior. Unconscious bias is often not intentional, yet has the same discriminatory impact.
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