A group of female high school students from immigrant families at an East Harlem high school spent eight weeks learning about each other through dance. Each one brought something from her own family's history, her own culture, her own story of how she ended up in that school. What happened in those eight weeks, the connections they made, and the way they saw each other afterward, is the kind of thing that takes most people a lifetime to figure out.

One student had spent years quietly sidestepping the question of where her family was from. You wouldn't know it anyway, she would think, and change the subject. Her family was from Burkina Faso, in West Africa, and she had never shared that part of herself publicly before. Over the course of the program, she learned a West African dance. Then she stood in front of an auditorium full of her peers and performed it. Afterward, she said she had finally been able to show people where she was from and "the music that really makes us happy." When she first heard about the program, she was skeptical enough to consider skipping it altogether. By the time it was over, she said she would go back "a hundred times."

I have been thinking about these young women a lot lately.

Programs like ours should be replicated and expanded, here and nationally, because they work. The problem is they reach too few students.

We are in a moment when programs designed to help young people understand each other across lines of culture, race, and background are being systematically dismantled. Legislation in dozens of states has sought to ban diversity training and culturally responsive curricula from public schools. Federal rollbacks have targeted initiatives designed to diversify the teaching workforce. Some states are eliminating restorative justice practices, which experts warn will push suspension rates up for minority students.

The argument, if it is offered at all, is that acknowledging difference divides us. I have spent seven years seeing it do quite the opposite.

Proven ways to build cross-cultural understanding in schools exist, and we should expand them, not dismantle them. Those young women in East Harlem are one example of what that looks like. For the past seven years, I have been bringing professional teaching artists into elementary, middle, and high school classrooms across New York........

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