Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Republicans want to kill the Dept. of Ed and privatize education. Billionaires are helping them.

Nadra Nittle, The 19th

In the fall, the Department of Education will mark 45 years since its inception, but that anniversary could be its last if Donald Trump gets his way. The federal agency is one of several he’s vowed to slash if reelected president.  “We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C.,” he said in a campaign video last year. “We’re going to close it up — all those buildings all over the place and people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.” On Monday, the Republican National Committee approved a draft party platform ahead of its convention next week that supports Trump’s call to “return education to the states.” Among other aims, the platform pushes for increasing parents’ rights, championing school prayer and withholding federal funding to schools that engage in “gender indoctrination” or promote “critical race theory,” mirroring Trump’s proposed education policy.

‘Moms for Liberty on steroids’: Project 2025’s brutal plan to blow up public schools [Video]

Reidout, MSNBC

Project 2025 is Donald Trump’s roadmap for a second presidency. Drastic changes Republicans would make to children’s public school education, if Trump returns to the White House, are exposed by Joy Reid and her guests.

Philly special ed teacher rose from school bus attendant with the help of the district’s ‘grow your own teacher’ effort

Stephen Williams, WHYY

About a decade ago, Gemayel Keyes started his career as a bus attendant in the Philadelphia  School District and later became a paraprofessional in the classroom. Today, Keyes is a special education teacher at Gilbert Spruance Elementary School in the city’s Northeast section. “I stumbled upon what I would find as my calling,” Keyes said. On June 20, Keyes testified about his journey to become a teacher with the help of the district’s paraprofessional-to-teacher pipeline program before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in Washington, D.C. The committee is chaired by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The program offers paraprofessionals like Keyes and anyone who wants to become a teacher, financial assistance for college courses and teacher certification, in return for a multi-year commitment to teach in the Philadelphia public schools.

Language, Culture, and Power

60 Years Later, Freedom Schools Are Still Radical—and Necessary

Jon Hale, Time Magazine

Sixty years ago, over 40 Freedom Schools opened their doors to all children in the state of Mississippi. Iterations of “freedom schooling”—clandestine or fugitive learning by and for Black communities—existed for centuries, since the era of enslavement. For those communities, education was linked to liberation and the democratic project itself. But the Freedom Schools of 1964 were historically unique. Teacher activists and Freedom School organizers developed a curriculum that was barred in 1964—and the essence of that curriculum remains illegal today.

Since the Second World War, Black activists and activists of color amplified demands for fuller inclusion into the United States. But major milestones such as the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954—which deemed segregated education to be unconstitutional, but failed to enforce it—left many activists disillusioned. Segregation remained rampant for years to come.

Brazil’s unparalleled spate of book bans is a page out of US culture wars

Tiago Rogero, The Guardian

It started with a social media video: a school principal from a medium-sized Brazilian city lashed out against an award-winning novel, saying it was “disgusting” and disrespectful of “good manners”. The next day, the local department of education ordered all schools in nearby cities to remove the book from their libraries. In less than a week, three other states also banned O Avesso da Pele, by Jeferson Tenório – published in the UK as The Dark Side of Skin – from their schools. The book ban in March was the most high-profile in a series of such cases which have proliferated in Brazil in recent years. Works targeted for banning typically involve race, gender and the LGBTQ+ communities.

UN experts say famine has spread throughout Gaza

Emma Farge, Reuters

The recent deaths of several more children from malnutrition in the Gaza Strip indicate that famine has spread throughout the enclave, a group of independent human rights experts mandated by the United Nations said on Tuesday. Gaza health authorities say at least 33 children have died of malnutrition, mostly in northern areas which had until recently faced the brunt of the Israeli military campaign launched after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel. Since early May, the war has spread to southern Gaza, hitting aid flows into the enclave amid restrictions by Israel, which has accused U.N. agencies of failing to distribute supplies efficiently. In Tuesday’s statement, the group of 11 rights experts cited the deaths of three children aged 13, 9-years-old and six months from malnutrition in the southern area of Khan Younis and the central area of Deir Al-Balah since the end of May.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

California Legislature votes to ask voters for permission borrow $20 billion for climate, schools

Adam Beam, AP News

Mired in a stream of multi-billion dollar budget deficits, the California Legislature on Wednesday turned to voters for help. Lawmakers voted to place a pair of $10 billion bonds on the November ballot. If approved, the money would pay for the building of new schools and help communities prepare for the impacts of climate change. California was swimming in money just a few years ago as budget surpluses totaled well over $100 billion through the pandemic. But the state had to slash spending to cover deficits totaling more than $78 billion over the past two years as revenues declined amid rising inflation and an economic slowdown in the state’s pivotal technology industry. Money from the bonds would backfill some of those cuts, plus pay for a slew of priority projects up and down the state for years to come.

Trauma-sensitive climate change education can develop truthful hope

Nathalie Reid, Audrey Aamodt, Jennifer MacDonald, The Conversation

Summer is a time for educators and students to recharge. For educators, this opportunity to reflect and regroup often includes planning for how to support students in the next school year. It is becoming increasingly important that this support involves helping students navigate the impacts of the climate crisis. Doom and gloom discourses encountered at school and through multimedia exposure risk evoking worry, fear, anxiety and hopelessness. To enhance a growing understanding of complex climate emotions, we think it’s important to notice feelings like climate anxiety and climate trauma, among others.

Florida adds more textbook restrictions. This time, it’s climate change

Jeffrey S. Solochek, Tampa Bay Times

First, Florida told textbook publishers to excise all mentions of “critical race theory” if they wanted to sell their editions to the state’s schools. Next came the prohibition on “social-emotional learning” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Now it looks to be climate change. Authors say the DeSantis administration has instructed them to ditch most references of the term, following a move to eradicate the concept from much of state law. “Florida is one of the most impacted by the impacts of climate change, and oh my goodness Gov DeSantis, why?” said Brandon Haught, a Volusia County science teacher who has fought for accurate science standards.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

U.S. Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided

Jeffrey Jones, Gallup

An increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education. As a result, Americans are now nearly equally divided among those who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence (36%), some confidence (32%), or little or no confidence (32%) in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and 10% had little or none. The latest results are based on a June 3-23 Gallup survey that gauged Americans’ confidence in various institutions. A follow-up story reporting on the remainder of institutions will be published in the coming days.

This year, Gallup and Lumina Foundation partnered to better understand the nature of confidence in higher education. The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members. A review of the historical trends shows that confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the U.S. population over the past two decades, but more so among Republicans. 

Most Philly public school students have college ambitions − but their level of preparation depends on which high school they attend

Joseph Sagemen, The Conversation

When Nadia was in high school, her teachers and administrators portrayed college as the only realistic pathway to a respectable career. “College, they make it seem like the end-all, be-all,” she said. “If it’s not college, I’ll visit you at the drive-thru once a week, that type of thing. There’s kind of like this dark hole. Anything outside of it, you’re not a part of moving up in society in a way.” Faculty at April’s school across town, meanwhile, presented college as one of several possible routes to economic opportunity. “The teachers let us know that they want us to do better with our lives,” she said. “Go to college, even start your own business. Mostly everybody has a career and technical education class and can get a license for (an industry). So even if you don’t go to college, you can start your own thing.”

The Endless Pursuit of Equality Through College Admissions

Alex Nguyen, Mother Jones

Admissions Granted, a documentary set to premiere on MSNBC on Sunday at 9 pm ET, gets at a central question about equality in the United States. “Everyone is treated the same, or equality demands that people be treated differently in order to produce the equality,” Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard law professor, says in the film. “This has been there since the beginning of the country and was there at the inception of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it’s one that is unresolved.”  The documentary probes this idea by tracking the progress of a 2014 lawsuit alleging that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions program—which was intended to help underrepresented minorities—was illegal. Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an anti-affirmative action legal nonprofit, simultaneously sued the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (my alma mater!), arguing that, as a public school, its admissions process breached the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Using social and behavioral science to address achievement inequality

Eddie Brummelman, Nienke van Atteveldt, Sharon Wolf & Jellie Sierksma, Science of Learning

Achievement inequality is a defining challenge of our time. Around the world, students from disadvantaged backgrounds perform worse academically than their more advantaged peers, even if their ability is the same. This represents a significant loss of potential and perpetuates inequality across generations. The achievement gap emerges early in development and widens with age. At age 15, the gap equals three full years of schooling. This is a global problem, occurring across high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Despite large-scale efforts to combat inequality, it has increased steadily over the past 60 years. We believe that the social and behavioral sciences are well positioned to address achievement inequality. They have theories and methods that are needed to better understand—and eventually address through intervention—the types of experiences that cause, maintain, or reinforce achievement inequality. Unfortunately, however, much social and behavioral research occurs in disciplinary silos, which prevents scholars from identifying and studying novel questions that cut across disciplines. We organized this Special Collection to bring together insights across the social and behavioral sciences in addressing achievement inequality.

Disabled students are struggling to get what they need at school [Audio]

Jonaki Mehta and Marc Rivers, NPR

Sam is a smiling, wiggly six-year-old who loves dinosaurs and “anything big and powerful,” says his mother, Tabitha, a full-time parent and former special education teacher. Sam lives with his seven siblings and parents in a small town in central Georgia. Sam has significant disabilities including cri-du-chat syndrome — a rare genetic disorder. He can use a walker for short distances, but he mostly gets around using a wheelchair. Lately, Sam has been bestowing Sign names upon everyone in his house— Sam primarily communicates using American Sign Language (ASL) because he’s partially deaf. His own name translates to “Sam Giggles,” which he does a lot.

The Right to Education for Disabled Young Adults

Mike Ervin, The Progressive

There are milestone birthdays we all look forward to reaching. When you’re sixteen, you’re old enough to legally get a driver’s license. When you’re eighteen, you’re old enough to legally vote and do a lot of other things. And when you’re twenty-one, you’re old enough to do pretty much everything else. But for a lot of disabled people, turning twenty-two is a milestone they dread. They fear that once they reach that age they can legally be pushed over a virtual cliff. Federal law says that students with disabilities have the right to receive an education until they earn a high school diploma or turn twenty-two. However, the problem is that school districts often cut these students off the day after their twenty-second birthday, even if that occurs in the middle of the school year.  In Illinois, where I live, the state legislature passed a law in 2021 allowing all special education students to continue attending school through the end of the school year, even if they turn twenty-two in the middle of it. 

Democracy and the Public Interest

He wanted to focus on issues students cared about. Then the crises began.

Nicole Asbury, Washington Post

Sami Saeed first got a glimpse last summer of how intense his term would be as the student representative of Maryland’s largest school district. Protesters were flooding Montgomery County’s school board meetings to call for the district to let families opt out of storybooks featuring LGBTQ characters. “Is this normal?” he recalled asking others on the board. Long-serving members said they could not recollect a protest of that magnitude. Saeed, 18, said it was the start to a year that was marked by seismic crises. In addition to the calls for an opt-out policy, the school system also faced scrutiny for its handling of employees’ reports of misconduct after The Washington Post reported a middle school principal was promoted while he was under investigation for sexual harassment. Several administrators left, including former superintendent Monifa B. McKnight, which led to a search for a new system leader.

Satanists in Florida offer to fill school counselor roles after DeSantis law

Lexi Lonas, The Hill

Florida Satanists are volunteering to fill school counselor roles after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a law allowing religious chaplains into public schools amid staffing shortages. “Nothing in the text of the bill serves to exclude us, and no credible interpretation of the First Amendment could. Should a school district now choose to have chaplains, they should expect Satanists to participate as well,” Lucien Greaves, cofounder and spokesperson for The Satanic Temple, said in a statement to The Hill on Monday. Back when DeSantis signed the bill in April, he described Satanism as “not a religion” and said its members would not be allowed to participate in the program. But Greaves said the governor “openly lied to the public” regarding the situation. “Either entirely ignorant of the most basic fundamentals of constitutional law, or too incompetent to care, DeSantis fails to recognize that it is not the place of the government to confer unique rights to one religious identity while denying them to another,” he said. 

Rabbi Bonnie Margulis on young people learning civic values

Murv Seymour, PBS Wisconsin

It’s so important, particularly today, when democracy is so under threat and the students really need to understand the power of their voice and that they really have not just the right but also the responsibility to vote, to learn about issues, to look into things that they care about that are important to them, and to build relationships with their elected officials so that they can tell their elected officials, “This is something that I care about,” “This is something that’s affecting my life, and you as my state representative or my alder or my school board member — you have the power to affect change, and this is the change “that I as your constituent want to see.” And as students are here on campus and they’re in learning mode — this is the perfect time to get them and to do these kinds of trainings. Within four years, they’re gonna be out into the world and they need to have these skills at their fingertips, and hopefully they will also share them with their peers, both on campus, in their faith communities, and when they go out into the broader community.

Other News of Note

Jane McAlevey Demanded We Go Beyond Speaking Truth to Power

Patrick Dedauw, Jacobin

For all her obsessive work teaching the fundamentals of organizing, Jane McAlevey grumbled that they alone were not enough — the Left and labor had to “learn real strategy.” In the years I worked under her assisting with strategic research, training design, and writing preparation, she’d say it over and over. She was grateful that so many have put the organizing lessons she popularized into practice, teaching each other the spadework of developing the strike muscle that is the ultimate basis of workers’ power. She wouldn’t have spent so much time figuring out how to get people to internalize the principle that workers needed to discover and systematize their ability to act together to create a crisis for the employer class by durably and collectively withholding labor if she didn’t think so. But Jane thought the labor movement also had to do much more: learn how to wield that power against the right targets, avoid overshooting or undershooting because of misreading the moment, as we transformed the power needed for individual contract campaigns to the power needed to win class-wide goals. This relentless demand to improve organizers’ ability to strategize was at the center of how Jane worked: given the stakes of the fight facing the working class, people who had committed our lives to the work of struggle had to hold ourselves to the highest standards, and then do one better.

Labor Organizer Jane McAlevey on UAW’s Astounding Victory in VW Tennessee & Her Fight Against Cancer [Video, April 23, 2024]

Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! speaks with the great labor organizer and writer Jane McAlevey about the historic victory for Volkswagen employees at a Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory who voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers union. The plant will become the first foreign-owned car factory in the South to unionize. “This win wasn’t just a win — it was what we would call a beatdown,” says McAlevey, who says the UAW’s recent success is a result of direct democracy and smart, strategic organizing that could lead to the unionizing of Mercedes workers in Alabama. “It’ll be a massive change in the U.S. South.” We also speak with McAlevey about her terminal cancer diagnosis and why she’s “going to fight until the last dying minute, because that’s what American workers deserve.”