Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

“After Uvalde”: Maria Hinojosa on Guns, Grief & Community Outrage 1 Year After Texas School Shooting [Video]

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now

Wednesday marks one year since an 18-year-old gunman armed with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle entered his former elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and shot dead 19 children between the ages of 9 and 11 and two of their teachers, as nearly 400 officers rushed to Robb Elementary School but took 77 minutes to confront the gunman. Investigators later found officers “failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety.” More than 1,000 incidents involving firearms have shaken America’s schools since 2018 — a dramatic increase over any similar period since at least 1970, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. We discuss this uniquely American epidemic with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, the founder of Futuro Media and host of Latino USA. She anchors the upcoming Frontline, Futuro Media and Texas Tribune co-production, After Uvalde: Guns, Grief & Texas.

What has and hasn’t changed for teachers in the 5 years since ‘Red for Ed’ walkouts [AUDIO]

Jonaki Mehta, NPR

In spring 2018, public school staff took to the streets to protest low funding, low wages and shrinking benefits. Five years later, teachers reflect on what’s changed since then.

Creating This New Position Could Save Schools Money. Here’s How

Mark Lieberman, Education Week

School districts could collectively save millions of dollars by hiring administrators who focus on energy savings and sustainability initiatives. That’s a key takeaway from a new report on sustainability directors and environment managers, emerging K-12 professions whose responsibilities can include tackling the escalating effects of climate change on districts as well as the already-difficult work of overseeing complex public buildings. The report comes from the Center for Green Schools at the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council.

Language, Culture, and Power

On the latest obsession with phonics

Valerie Strauss, David Reinking, Peter Smagorinsky, and David B. Yaden, Washington Post

The “reading wars” have been around for longer than you might think. In the 1800s, Horace Mann, the “father of public education” who was the first state education secretary in the country (in Massachusetts), advocated that children learn to read whole words and learn to read for meaning before they are taught the explicit sounds of each letter. Noah Webster, the textbook pioneer whose “blue-back speller” taught children how to spell and read for generations, supported phonics. So it started.

He was a journalist covering education. What he saw made him switch professions

Manuela López Restrepo, NPR

After covering education as an outsider, one journalist has been inspired to make a difference from the inside. Who is he? Cameron Fields was a Cleveland-based reporter, originally focused on writing about sports before transitioning into community journalism. That eventually led him to work on a project called Cleveland’s Promise. The project focused on telling the stories of young students, including their struggles, triumphs, and everything in between.

L.A. County juvenile halls “unsuitable” & ordered to shut down

Betty Márquez Rosales, EdSource

Two juvenile halls in Los Angeles County were found to be “unsuitable for housing youth” after a vote Tuesday of California’s Board of State and Community Corrections. Staff has 60 days from May 24 to move youth currently housed at the Barry J. Nidorf facility in Sylmar and Central Juvenile Hall in Boyle Heights. According to reporting by the L.A. Times, the county Probation Department plans to reopen Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, which shuttered in 2019, to house all of the impacted youth.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The U.S. Surgeon General’s Warning About Social Media and What It Means for Schools

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

There’s a lot we don’t know about how social media can affect developing brains, but the potential risk it poses to children’s mental health is substantial. That’s the big takeaway from an advisory issued by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. The advisory adds another high-profile voice to a growing chorus of policymakers in recent months who have highlighted the link between kids’ rising social media use and deteriorating mental health—a connection that educators have been ringing alarm bells over since before the pandemic.

For One Group of Teenagers, Social Media Seems a Clear Net Benefit

Claire Cain Miller, New York Times

The surgeon general’s warning Tuesday about social media’s “profound risk of harm” to young people included a significant qualification. For some of them, the warning said, social media can be beneficial to health in important ways. For one group in particular — the growing share of young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer — social media can be a lifeline, researchers and teenagers say. Especially for those growing up in unwelcoming families or communities, social media often provides a sense of identity and belonging at a crucial age, much earlier than for many L.G.B.T.Q. people in previous generations.

Trans kids crave acceptance at school in a nation that often resists it

Laura Meckler, Washington Post

Rowan Johnson learned what it meant to be transgender not from a parent or a teacher, but from Jerry Springer. Home from school one day when they were about 8 years old, Johnson caught Springer’s often-raucous daytime talk show. “There are girls here to tell their parents they want to be boys,” Johnson recalls hearing at the top of the hour. That’s something a person can do? Johnson thought. They had sensed already that something was different about their own gender identity but didn’t know what.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Early Childhood Education: What do we know and what should we do?

Isabel V. Sawhill & Morgan Welch, Brookings

When children start school, they do so with differing experiences, influenced by their early home environments, parenting, care arrangements, and neighborhoods. The result is widely varying levels of school readiness by age five. [1] These differences in school readiness have led many to conclude that providing children with a high-quality pre-K experience would help them do better in school and reduce current educational and income disparities.

One state just became a national leader on child care. Here’s how they did it.

Rachel Cohen, Vox

Action in Congress to support child care has been stalled for years. But in Vermont, lawmakers have just approved an ambitious plan that would pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s starved child care system. The bill authorizing $125 million in annual investment comes after nearly a decade of organizing. As in many states, thousands of Vermont kids lack access to any child care program, and among families that have been able to land competitive slots, average costs exceed $26,000 a year, more than 30 percent of many families’ household income.

Meanwhile, child care workers are some of the lowest paid employees in the state, earning about $15 per hour, and typically with no benefits. Given that their workers could make more money doing just about anything else, programs struggle to hire and retain staff — adding additional stress to parents who can’t rely on their child care programs to stay open.

College Gender Gap Starts Early and Extends across Races

Hans Johnson, Daniel Payares-Montoya, and Marisol  Cuellar Mejia, PPIC

Throughout the country, prospective college students have recently made decisions about where they intend to go to school. Increasingly, these students are more likely to be women than men. In California, 56% of undergraduates at the state’s public universities and community colleges are women, as are 54% of undergraduates at nonprofit colleges and 63% at for-profit colleges. The growing college gender gap has far-reaching consequences for young men’s economic prospects, especially for those from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Learning on the move: Resetting the agenda for education and learning in conflict-affected settings

Halimatou Hima, Brookings

Conflict, insecurity, and the resulting humanitarian crises have imposed major disruptions on education systems in many parts of the African continent. Between 2020 and 2021, over 2,000 attacks on schools and educational infrastructures were documented in 14 African countries, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mali most affected. In the Central Sahel (namely Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger), the confluence of armed conflict and threats of attack have led to the closures of 7,000 schools, affecting the education of 1.3 million children and young people, while over 30,000 teachers are unable to teach. Girls are particularly affected and are less likely to return following these school closures.

Red States Are Now Weakening Child Labor Laws While Defunding Public Schools

Glenn Daigon, The Progressive

In the headlines: “10-Year-Olds Found Working Late Nights at Kentucky Fast-Food Operator”; “National Franchise Found Guilty of Employing Underage Workers, and fined $212,500”; “Pennsylvania Roofing Contractor Faces Criminal Charges for Employing 12 to 15 Year Old Workers in Hazardous Work”; and “Company Fined $1.5 Million for Hiring Children to Clean Meatpacking Plants.”  Were these stories ripped from the 1890s, the era of the robber barons? Were they the sources used by the famed muckraker Upton Sinclair in his ground-breaking 1906 expose of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle? Not by a long shot. They were breaking news in 2023. And the recent push at the state level to loosen child labor regulations is seen as part of a coordinated assault on not just workers’ wages but on schools and other public institutions as well as on the whole concept of equality in American society.

How Michigan punishes its poorest families for their students’ low attendance

Koby Levin, Chalkbeat Detroit

Between August and December of this school year, Shetaya Griggs’ 11-year-old daughter missed more than 50 days of school, a rate of chronic absenteeism that troubled school officials. It also left Griggs worried that she could lose the public assistance she relies on to feed her family. Each year, under state law, Michigan yanks a cash benefit from hundreds of poor families because their children don’t attend school regularly enough. Thousands more families who apply for the benefit are rejected because of their attendance records.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Stopping the Privatization Train [Audio]

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, Have You Heard?

School privatization has been on a roll this year. But then the ‘fund students not systems’ express hit a wall in states like Kansas, Georgia and Idaho. So what happened? We talk to public education advocates in all three states and come away with some lessons in effective organizing, not to mention a much-needed dose of inspiration.

‘Culture wars’ candidates for Oregon school boards mostly lost

Julia Silverman, The Oregonian

In nonpartisan school board races across Oregon this spring, particularly in the Portland-area exurbs, candidates backing a nationally field-tested Republican strategy calling for more parental control of school curriculum and materials largely came up short. Prime examples were in Canby and Newberg, on the fringes of the Portland -metro area, which have been home to politically charged battles over banning books and Black Lives Matters signage. Voters largely lined up behind candidates who rallied behind protections for LGBTQ+ students’ rights and the ability of educators to teach freely about the country’s complicated history with race.

Amanda Gorman’s poem for Biden’s inauguration banned by Florida school

Freida Frisaro, AP

A poem written for President Joe Biden’s inauguration has been placed on a restricted list at a South Florida elementary school after one parent’s complaint. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, poet Amanda Gorman vowed to fight back. Her poem, “The Hill We Climb” was challenged by the parent of two students at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes, along with several books. “I’m gutted,” she wrote. “Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.” Gorman, who at 17 became the country’s National Youth Poet Laureate, said she wrote the poem “The Hill We Climb,” so “all young people could see themselves in a historical moment,” and that she’s received countless letters and videos from children who were inspired to write their own poems.

Other News of Note

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?

Howard Zinn, Zinn Education Project

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land. It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause. It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President. There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day.

The First Decoration Day

David Blight, Zinn Education Project

Americans understand that Memorial Day, or “Decoration Day,” as my parents called it, has something to do with honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created it, and why? As a nation we are at war now, but for most Americans the scale of death and suffering in this seemingly endless wartime belongs to other people far away, or to people in other neighborhoods. Collectively, we are not even allowed to see our war dead today. That was not the case in 1865.