Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

KY education commissioner says ‘dangerous’ anti-LGBTQ law led to his resignation

Valarie Honeycutt Spears, Lexington Herald Leader

Kentucky’s top education leader said he’s leaving his job, and the state, because he didn’t want to enforce the new “dangerous and unconstitutional” Senate Bill 150 that critics have called an anti-LGBTQ measure. “It is time for me to move on,” Education Commissioner Jason Glass told reporters Tuesday. Glass announced Monday that he was resigning and would leave his job September 29 to become an associate vice-president at Western Michigan University. Although the Kentucky Department of Education had taken politically motivated criticism lately, Glass said the agency had remained independent and stood for the best interests of students and the education system. GOP lawmakers and politicians have urged his ouster this year over KDE’s inclusive LGBTQ stances.

Christian Nationalists Can’t Wait for This School in Oklahoma to Open

Rachel Laser, New York Times

Something deeply un-American is underway in the state of Oklahoma. In June, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the nation’s first religious public charter school. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa were given permission to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in August 2024. That’s right, a religious public school, funded by the state’s taxpayers. Proponents hope this model will spread to the dozens of other states that allow charter schools. Seven percent of public school students in the country attended charter schools as of the fall of 2021, and that number continues to grow. That’s why Christian nationalist groups see charter schools as fertile ground for their full-on assault on the separation of church and state in public education.

The War on Libraries

Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect

Houston is a city with a diverse, progressive electorate and an African American mayor, Sylvester Turner. So it was bizarre when the new superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, Mike Miles, recently announced plans to fire librarians at dozens of schools, while converting libraries into discipline rooms for misbehaving students. The repurposed libraries will be called “Team Centers” where closely monitored students join their classes by zoom. Librarian positions are being initially eliminated at 28 schools as part of Miles’ New Education System, which includes mandated lesson plans for teachers, classroom cameras for discipline, and testing-based performance evaluations that affect teacher pay. The libraries at those schools will stay partly open, but schools will weed out objectionable books. The district, largest in Texas, serves 189,000 students.

Language, Culture, and Power

“Children should be treated as children, no matter their status or how they come into this country.”

Antero Garcia and Erika Andiola, La Cuenta

For almost 20 years, the Young Center has been one of the few organizations offering direct lines of advocacy for immigrant youth in the United States. Erika Andiola, the Young Center’s Director of Communications, recently spoke with La Cuenta to share the Center’s ongoing work to preserving the rights of all immigrant children. In this first part of our conversation, Andiola describes the context of this work for kids ranging from young toddlers to 17 year-olds imminently turning the corner into different legal woes once they become adults.

‘That is the language they understand’: why Indigenous students need bilingual teaching at school

Rikke Louise Bundgaard-Nielsen, Brett Baker, Hilda Ngalmi, Yizhou Wang, The Conversation

Last month, the federal government released the annual Closing the Gap data. According to the report, 34.3% of Indigenous preschoolers were starting school developmentally on track, compared to almost 55% of non-Indigenous Australian students as of 2021. About 68% of Indigenous people aged 20–24 years had attained Year 12 or equivalent as of 2021, with a target of 96% by 2031. Speaking about the Closing the Gap report, Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney noted her disappointment about the results. The gap is not closing fast enough. I know many people are frustrated by the lack of progress.

LAUSD celebrates 10 years of restorative justice, but progress remains uneven

Mallika Seshadri, Ed Source

This May, the Los Angeles Unified School District celebrated the 10th anniversary of the School Climate Bill of Rights — a resolution that halted suspensions for willful defiance and brought restorative justice practices into classrooms. Social justice advocates and school board members applauded the nearly 80% reduction in overall suspensions in LAUSD since the new policy passed. “The best thing that has happened is that LA Unified is seeing students for students, and that includes their boundary-pushing, their risk-taking, their lesson-learning — you know, behaviors that come with growth and development,” said school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, who authored May’s commemorative resolution. “And we’re seeing the adults as fully capable responders who can also learn and grow and shift to be more holistic and considerate and thoughtful about how this generation is growing up and preparing for their own leadership in the world.”

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Want teachers to teach climate change? You’ve got to train them

Anya Kamanetz, Hechinger Report

Sometime this fall, in a classroom in New York City, second graders will use pipe cleaners and Post-it notes to build a model of a tree that could cool a city street. They’ll shine a lamp on their mini trees to see what shade patterns they cast. Meanwhile, in Seattle, kindergartners might take a “wondering walk” outside and come up with questions about the worms that show up on the sidewalk after it rains. This summer, teachers around the country are planning these lessons and more, in professional development programs designed to answer a pressing need: preparing teachers to teach about the climate crisis and empower students to act.  “I believe that the climate movement is the most interesting movement in education,” said Oren Pizmony-Levy, associate professor of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. (Disclosure: The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.) Schools have to address student climate anxiety, provide them knowledge and skills, including the ability to recognize misinformation, and empower them to act, while schools also “clean up their act” by decarbonizing their physical infrastructure.

A moment that changed me: my teacher went totally off script – and opened a door for my life to flow through

Colin Walsh, The Guardian

It happened towards the end of secondary school. Sunlight was cutting through the classroom, and it must have been close to lunchtime because the air was caramel-thick with boredom. This was in the queasy final weeks before the Leaving Cert, the state exams every Irish teenager has to sit if they want to go to university. We were a bunch of young lads, all acne and adrenaline, who had spent the previous summer passing through thresholds like hands through water: first loves, first time getting drunk, all that feverish giddy hormonal magic. But with the Leaving Cert, the coordinates of our lives had been redrawn. I don’t think we’d ever felt more unhappily embedded in the faceless machinery of education. Our sole objective for an entire year had been to memorise as much information as possible, in order to regurgitate it in one exam after another. Our teacher’s sole objective was to drill all that information and rote learning into us.

Chicago eyes dramatically expanding its Sustainable Community Schools program

Mila Koumpilova

On a recent July morning, students at Brighton Park Elementary prepared chicken tenders and honey mustard sauce with a visiting chef in the Southwest Side school’s gleaming kitchen. Later, some went to a boxing class, pairing off to spar on blue mats. Next door, about 20 students on the school’s student voice committee huddled to brainstorm ideas for a campaign to reopen Chicago’s shuttered mental health clinics. They were getting a $1,000 stipend to participate. And in a room downstairs, school moms enrolled in a free arts and crafts class folded colorful strips of paper into ruffles to decorate star-shaped piñatas.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Nine Ways to Shrink the Opportunity Gap in Early Childhood

NEPC

They start before birth, with unequal access to prenatal care.

From there, these opportunity gaps grow along with the child, as educational, legal, housing, labor market, and healthcare systems widen disparities between more and less advantaged populations. In a report published earlier this year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine take aim at addressing these factors, putting forth the recommendations of the Committee on Exploring the Opportunity Gap for Young Children from Birth to Age Eight. The dozen scholars forming the Committee included NEPC Fellow Alfredo Artiles of Stanford University. The report is significant in that it represents a consensus of top experts and is based on decades of research from fields as diverse as medicine, education, and law. “The nation’s racialized opportunity gaps start early and often,” explains NEPC Director Kevin Welner, co-editor of the 2013 book, Closing the Opportunity Gap. “The recommendations of this new report are not radical. Nor are they sufficient. But if fully implemented, these recommendations would meaningfully move the nation toward its ideals of equal opportunity for

all children.”

College attendance: How family income impacts who goes to Stanford vs. UCLA and UC Berkeley

Nami Sumida, San Francisco Chronicle

Students from wealthy families have long been overrepresented at elite colleges. At Stanford University, for instance, more than half of its undergraduates come from families in the top 10% of the U.S.’ income distribution. But new research finds that the reason wealthier students are more likely to attend elite universities is not just because they have better academic credentials, like higher GPAs or better test scores. Even among students with the same academic credentials, the study found gaps in attendance rates between wealthy and lower-income students at elite institutions like Stanford and the Ivy League schools. Researchers from the Harvard research group Opportunity Insights analyzed data on college attendance, standardized SAT and ACT scores and parental income for students who applied to college between 2001 and 2015. Along with the study, the researchers published their findings on more than 100 U.S. colleges, including 10 private and nine public schools in California.

“Better Asians than Blacks”

Claire Jean Kim, The American Scholar

Affirmative action in U.S. higher education is dead. Last month, the Supreme Court, ignoring a half-century of precedents, struck down race-conscious admissions at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, finding that they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Over the past five decades, race-conscious admissions programs in higher education, which have been narrowly affirmed by the Court on three occasions, have helped to partially desegregate colleges and universities, increase educational and employment opportunities for students of color, and grow the non-white middle-class. They have also been a special target of the right. So when President Trump appointed three conservative justices in rapid succession, affirmative action supporters feared the worst. On June 29, 2023, the Court delivered the expected coup de grâce with a 6-3 ruling in favor of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff. It is now up to colleges and universities across the nation to figure out what the ruling means for them.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

‘Pervasive’ Denver school segregation harms Latinos, English learners, study finds

Erica Meltzer, CPR News

Denver schools remain intensely segregated by race and family income —conditions that have persisted for decades and play a major role in shaping educational opportunities, a new study finds. Latino students and English learners are especially likely to attend schools where students of color living in poverty make up the large majority. Meanwhile, three-quarters of Denver’s white students attend schools where white and higher-income students make up a significant majority, despite making up just a quarter of Denver students overall, the study finds. These more privileged schools boast graduation rates 10 to 40 percentage points higher than schools with high concentrations of poverty —and the benefits extend to students from all groups who attend these schools.

Court: Time for Florida to Stop Needlessly Institutionalizing Disabled Kids

Julia Métraux, Mother Jones

Last Friday, the federal court for Florida’s Southern District issued a groundbreaking ruling: that the state had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by unnecessarily institutionalizing children with complex health needs, placing them in nursing homes instead of providing community health services.  As an outcome of the ruling, which follows a two-week trial in May, Florida will have to develop plans to help children institutionalized due to lack of community resources return home. The case has been a decade in the works, as South Florida NPR affiliate WUSF noted in its coverage.  “Unjustified institutionalization of individuals with disabilities is unacceptable, especially given the advances in technology and in the provision of home-based care,” US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks wrote in his decision.

Chasing the dream of equity: How policy has shaped racial economic disparities

Adewale A. Maye, Economic Policy Institute

The Civil Rights Movement ushered in a new chapter in American history. The combined efforts of many moved the U.S. Congress to pass sweeping civil rights legislation to reverse oppressive Jim Crow laws and broadly combat discrimination against people of color. While this movement succeeded in removing key barriers to equal rights under the law, many economic demands were left unmet. Failure to address these has adversely impacted the economic security of people of color and exacerbated many of the long-standing racial disparities in economic outcomes present today.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Public Counsel sues Temecula school district over its ban of critical race theory

Howard Blume and Milla Surjadi, Los Angeles Times

The public interest law firm Public Counsel is suing the Temecula Valley Unified School District over its ban on critical race theory and other restrictions on teaching about racism, alleging the policy violates the California Constitution, the organization announced Wednesday. The action will take the battle over the classroom instruction about racism to the state civil courts. If the suit overturns the ban, it could have a broad effect in California, where a small number of districts, including Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified, have passed similar bans or restricted instruction on race. At issue is a resolution passed by the Temecula school board on Dec. 13, 2022, part of a wave of similar actions across the country. The resolution states that “Critical Race Theory assigns generational guilt and racial guilt for conduct and policies that are long in the past” and suggests that such teaching is unconstitutional because it “violates the fundamental principle of equal protection under the law.”

Teens engaged in activism become better critical thinkers, U-M study finds

Fernanda Pires, Michigan News

Youth involved in community-based activism over time become better critical thinkers and more politically active, according to a new University of Michigan study. The study, recently published in Child Development, highlights the importance of community engagement in supporting and developing critical consciousness and social action among adolescents. “Community-based activism serves as a key consciousness-raising system that supports youth to recognize, negotiate and challenge oppression in their lives,” said Matthew Diemer, U-M professor of education and psychology. “This is politically contentious work, with a quantitative approach that is sophisticated and rigorous. We’re directly paying attention to inequality instead of avoiding talking about inequality or pretending it doesn’t exist.

Students fight for right to vote — on local school boards

Colin Hogan, New Before Light

Young people from across Massachusetts visited the Statehouse last week to ask the Legislature to change how democracy works. Members of the Massachusetts Association of Student Representatives, the high schoolers who sit on school boards, have drafted legislation that would allow themselves equal voting rights with the school board members they already serve alongside. “We are the ones receiving the education. We’re in those desks. We get the bulk of whatever the School Committee has to throw at us,” said Elliott Talley, a New Bedford High student, jazz band member, and student council president who was among those petitioning on Beacon Hill. “I think it is very important to have a youth voice on school committees,” he said.

Other News of Note

A Brief But Spectacular take on blending the worlds of art, ASL and accessibility [Video]

Brandon Kazen-Maddox, PBS Newshour

I am a grandchild of deaf adults, or a GODA, which means that my first language is ASL, sign language. I was raised in a family of deaf and signing people. For me, my hands are storytellers, and my words are just along for the ride. So, that means that I primarily think in ASL, in sign language. And I make sure that my hands follow what — the concepts and images and memories and feelings that my heart and that my mind are expressing. Growing up, my family would always eat around the dinner table. There was such an amazing mixture of communication. And I grew up watching all of that and participating in it. My grandparents would express themselves in sign language.