For Black families — and the rooms where their Blackness reads as foreign.
428 questions for the families deciding — and for the schools being decided about.
Am I choosing for the child I have, or the child I was?
Twelve minutes on how the deck is built, how to move through it, and how to use the sequences — so you know exactly what you are getting.
Every purchase gives you the interactive deck on any device — phone, tablet or computer. Open it once online and it works offline after that. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app.
01 · Midnight & Bronze
One hundred and five questions asked of you — before you choose, and every year you renew that choice.
02 · Daylight
For children who can tell you who got in trouble and who's in the top reading group — long before they can name why it matters.
03 · Dusk
The pressure years. Perceived discrimination climbs sharply between ages 10 and 14, and eighth grade sets high school placement.
04 · Ink & Ember
From the summer before ninth grade to the last semester. Placement hardens into a transcript here.
325 of the 428 explain the evidence. All 428 carry a note on the back, and every one ends with Listen for — so you are never left holding a good question with no idea what the answer means.
Cites the study it comes from — Johnson, Reardon, Gershenson, Grissom & Redding, Harris-Britt, Yip, Tennessee STAR.
What the card is diagnosing when no single study covers it — the roster, the referral rate, the placement, the silence.
How to ask it well. When to ask it, what not to say, and why the question works the way it does.
Deciding whether to send, stay, or go — and what to watch for in either case. Enrollment renews itself every year. Your consent should not.
Not to understand how hard it is. To find out what your building is actually costing the students inside it — the roster in the AP class, the referral-to-suspension rate, who gets the benefit of the doubt.
Immediately. Stripe sends you to your deck the second the payment clears, and a second email arrives with a permanent link. No download, no zip file, nothing to install.
Yes — phone, tablet and computer. Add it to your home screen and it opens like an app. After the first load it works offline, which matters because most of these questions get asked in a car.
Printing is included with the Facilitator License, which comes with print-ready PDFs at 3.5 × 5 in — four cards per sheet, backs aligned for double-sided printing, cut lines included. The single editions and the Complete Series are the interactive deck only.
The Parent Edition is asked of you, not your child — most families want that one plus their child's grade band. If you have children in more than one band, the Complete Series costs less than three singles.
No. Most people who buy it have already enrolled. The deck is built to be worked across the school year — it tells you how the current year is going and what next year's answer should be.
You need the Facilitator License. It covers printing sets for a room and includes a run-of-show and a discussion guide. Districts and multi-site organizations, email darren@invertstrategies.org.
All sales are final. Every purchase is delivered instantly and in full — the complete deck is in your hands the second payment clears — so there is nothing to return. Read the edition descriptions above before you buy, and if you are unsure which one fits your family, email darren@invertstrategies.org and I will tell you honestly. If a link ever fails to open or a file will not load, that is a delivery problem, not a refund question, and I will fix it the same day.
A school does not earn twelve years. It earns one, twelve times.
Invert Strategies · The Decision Deck