Giving Compass' Take:

• As this Stanford Social Innovation Review reports, one Berlin high school encouraged students to fight racism and discrimination. Now, 9 percent of German schools are displaying a plaque against xenophobia — and it's working. 

• How can other schools around the world adopt this method of promoting tolerance? What would be the impact measurement?

• Here's why charter schools should heighten a focus on racism.

Berlin’s Leibniz High School, a handsome art deco building from the turn of the 20th century, has a new imprimatur on its facade: a black-and-white metallic plaque, about the size of a large shoebox, that reads “Schule ohne Rassismus, Schule mit Courage” (“School without Racism, School with Courage”).

The elite institution in downtown Berlin is the latest in Germany — the 2,763rd, to be precise — to feature such a tablet, expanding the countrywide network that makes School without Racism, or SoR, the largest independent antidiscrimination school-oriented program of its kind. Today incorporated into about 9 percent of all schools in Germany, SoR arguably serves as a model for extracurricular initiatives fighting against identity-based discrimination in schools.

“The plaque is something that our students see every day that they enter the school,” explains Sanem Kleff, director of the Berlin-based NGO Aktion Courage, which operates the SoR program. “It’s not an award or commendation, but rather it reminds [them] that they’ve taken a pledge to strive to be a discrimination-free school and to demonstrate civil courage in the face of xenophobia.”

Read the full article about discrimination-free schools by Paul Hockenos at Stanford Social Innovation Review.