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Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Controversial education issues still alive in GOP platform

Louis Freedberg, Ed Source

While the assassination attempt on Donald Trump overshadowed discussion of policy issues at the Republican convention in Milwaukee on Monday, the GOP’s platform committee nonetheless adopted a 20-page party platform on Monday in which education features prominently. The platform is a reminder that a slew of controversial issues, from how the racial history of the United States is interpreted to complex issues around gender identity, are still very much alive on the political stage. The last time the GOP had a platform was in 2016, when Trump first ran for president, and it was a hefty 60 pages long. The current one is stripped down to a third the length reflecting what are core priority issues for the former president. Trump himself was key in shaping it — and his imprint is evident throughout, down to the use of capital letters in odd places. As Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, the chair of the platform committee, said yesterday, Trump had “personally reviewed, edited, and approved” the platform. Most of the platform consists of issues drawn from the culture wars that have roiled many school districts around the nation in recent years.

Moms for Liberty Have Had a Rough Year. They’re Still RNC Darlings.

Kiera Butler, Mother Jones

On the second day of the Republican National Convention, I made my way back to Milwaukee’s symphony hall to attend a town hall hosted by the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. This wasn’t my first Moms for Liberty event—I’ve attended the annual summits for the past two years. Back in 2022, Betsy DeVos, who served as former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, delivered the line that got the loudest applause. “While I know that everything we did was with the interest of kids in mind and policies that would really give as much power back to the states and local communities as we possibly could,” she said, “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.” At the time, that statement felt a little bit edgy—like DeVos was saying the quiet part out loud. But two years later at yesterday’s event, many of the panelists expressed that same sentiment as a foregone conclusion. “The fundamental problem that we have in the United States was the creation of the federal Department of Education,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told the crowd of maybe 400 or so mostly white women. In his remarks, erstwhile GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said, “We’re not just going to reform the Department of Education, it means we’re going to get there and actually shut it down.”

A Call to Disrupt the Deprofessionalization of Teaching

H. Richard Milner IV, American Educator

As a former high school English teacher, substitute teacher, community college instructor in developmental studies, and researcher who has spent hundreds of hours observing classrooms and interviewing teachers, students, caregivers, policymakers, and leaders, I am deeply concerned about the deprofessionalization of teaching and the attacks on practices that ensure all students feel safe, have an opportunity to learn about current and past truths about the United States, and are able to experience a robust curriculum that allows them exposure to a diversity of texts. I have never known educators to be more afraid to do what they know to be right for young people regarding the design, promotion, and enactment of learning opportunities that are truthful, just, and appreciative of diversity (particularly regarding history, race, sexual preference, and gender). At the same time, I know that educators are strong, caring leaders in their classrooms and communities. And I believe that as a society, we can still co-create spaces where communities come together to make society better: to support educators as they teach truth and to push back against policies designed to perpetuate and reify lies. In light of progress our society made in the past to reduce bias, I am confident that we can make progress again even in the midst of polarizing attempts to separate us from truth, justice, democracy, possibility, opportunity, and healing.

Language, Culture, and Power

The Library Is a Commons

Emily Drabinski, In These Times

The Montana State Library Commission voted 5-1 (with one abstention) in July 2023 to rescind its membership in the American Library Association because of the ALA’s then-president: a self-proclaimed Marxist lesbian, which is to say, me. Despite their claims, that does not mean the entire field is socialist, nor is the professional association, which is nonpartisan and dedicated to advocating for libraries and the professional development of library staff. Who knows how many of us are card-carrying socialists (probably not too many, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a total 140,000 library workers while membership in the Democratic Socialists of America stands at about 80,000, most of whom likely don’t work in libraries — yet), but there’s a reason the Right is suspicious of libraries as an institution. I ran for ALA president in 2022 on an openly socialist platform, and at least 54% of the 10,000-plus librarians who voted were at least socialist-curious enough to elect me.

Jeffco will pilot new programs, including a welcome center bus, to better serve immigrant students

Yesenia Robles, Chalkbeat

An influx of immigrant students last year left the Jeffco school district scrambling to meet their needs. So this fall, officials are piloting new programs and support to help newcomer students.

The school district is piloting a series of changes, including new staff, resources, and curriculum materials, as well as a new welcome center bus, after hundreds of immigrant students arrived throughout the past school year. The district is planning for the surge to continue into next school year. “Our schools have been incredibly autonomous in how they meet the needs of our special populations and especially our multilingual language learners,” Jeffco Superintendent Tracy Dorland told the district’s school board this spring. “Our student achievement data tells us that’s not working.”

Make a Plan for Oracy

Amy Mosquera, Language Magazine

Schools are placing a greater emphasis on foundational skills than ever before, and rightly so. For many years, schools struggled to develop frameworks that explicitly and systematically teach these skills while also ensuring other components of literacy are present, such as reading grade-level texts and writing. In dual language and multilingual programming, the task is even more complex. How do we ensure that our multilingual students are developing critical literacy skills in the target language as well as in English? As districts work to provide systematic phonics instruction, it is important to keep our perspective inclusive and ensure that we maintain a holistic approach to literacy instruction.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

What does child empowerment mean today, and what can education systems do to help achieve it?

Jun Yu, LSE

Undoubtedly, today’s digital landscape has increased risks for children, including  misinformation, cyberbullying , hate speech, and online sexual abuse and exploitation. Consequently, “child empowerment” has become a central focus of many educational policies and practices. Empowering children is more crucial—and complex—than ever. What does “child empowerment” really mean in 2024, and how can we achieve it? A recently published OECD report, based on the 21st Century Children questionnaire with 23 OECD countries and systems, challenges conventional wisdom, suggesting that shielding kids from all online risks may not be the answer. While numerous efforts have been made to reduce online risks, eliminating all risks may not always be beneficial. EU Kids Online 2020, for instance, finds more risk to children online, but not always more harm. This is because risks and harms are conceptually different, and benefits can be accrued if a child is properly equipped to respond to risks. Children’s exposure to certain manageable risks may actually help them become more “resilient”, learning how to recognise, manage, and recover from risky online experiences. Conversely, over-protection may undermine their empowerment.

Existing Outside of the Binary in the Classroom

Julianna Iacovelli, Rethinking Schools

“I read that they’re putting litter boxes in the bathrooms for students who identify as cats. Is your school like that?” Unfortunately, my aunt was not the first person to ask me a question like this. It appears that many people are under the impression that schools have morphed into transgender training centers. That even though we do not have enough money to put tissue boxes in classrooms, we funnel money into our “indoctrination” plans. That while I try to lesson plan for 100 different students with diverse learning styles and needs, I simultaneously take the time to turn them gay — or transgender. If I had the kind of time on my hands that Republicans seem to think I do, I’d be caught up on my grading.  As a member of Gen Z, I can’t seem to kick the habit of living through catastrophic events. I was talking to a friend the other day about how I’ve never been able to discern if being 16 sucked really hard for everyone, or if I just happened to turn 16 during the infamous year of 2016. Becoming a teacher in the 2020s while also realizing my gender identity seems to have the same kind of vibe. Every day there is another piece of anti-trans legislation, another state I need to add to the list of places I should not visit, or another person screaming about schools trying to turn their kid gay. As someone who went to Catholic school until 18 years old, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter if the environment is supportive or not — if you’re gay, you’re gay.

California foster youth and COVID orphans gaining a sense of hope from trust fund program

Celestina Ramirez, Cal Matters

Before I went into foster care, I always looked up to my biological mother. She was a woman of God, fierce and taught me a key lesson: There is always hope. It’s a lesson that sustained me and still does as I now prepare to enter college – something I would have never imagined just four years ago. When I was 6 years old, my dad was deported to Mexico. My mother had to care for me and my three siblings – all of us were younger than 8. We lived paycheck-to-paycheck while she worked jobs as a crossing guard before and after school and nine hours per day at a fast food restaurant. Things took a turn for the worse when my mother got a new boyfriend and they began using drugs. She stopped caring for us properly. We didn’t have much food or clothes, and there was only a single bed with plastic sheets. We had to fend for ourselves in the house while they spent most of their time in the garage out back.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Women don’t have equal access to college in prison. Here’s why

Jenny Abamu, NPR

On a spring day earlier this year, the prison gymnasium at the Maryland Correctional Institution for women, about 25 minutes outside Baltimore, was decorated in blue and yellow balloons and flowers. State officials and teary family members gathered with a group of incarcerated people to mark a historic moment: The state’s first ever college graduation ceremony at a women’s prison.

Janet Johnson, one of the two graduates, was bubbling with emotion. She said she waited over 10 years for this moment. “I feel like this opens a door for me.”She’s already thinking about what’s next.

Biden announces initiatives for Latino education, immigration

Clyde Hughes, UPI

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced new benefits for Hispanic-serving institutions to boost higher educational opportunities for Latinos. President Joe Biden will sign an executive order creating the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through colleges federally designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions, of HSIs. It also created the President’s Board of Advisors for HSIs to increase awareness of opportunities for HSIs, identify best practices, improve STEM offerings, and strengthen recruitment and support. These entities will, among other things, work to Increase awareness of opportunities for HSIs to take part in federal programs and improve their ability to line up program offerings with economic needs of their local communities and the country at large “especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and teaching,” the White House said.

HBCUs are Leading the Fight for Environmental Justice

Gary Frank Triple Pundit

Historically Black colleges and universities’ (HBCUs) long histories of advocating for social The impact of climate change falls most heavily on disadvantaged communities, including many Black communities in the southern United States. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are “uniquely positioned to lead” in the struggle for climate justice and environmental resilience, according to a report from the United Negro College Fund. “HBCUs are particularly well suited to lead efforts in climate justice due to their deep-rooted connections to communities that they already have,” Kendra Sharp, a strategist for the fund’s Institute for Capacity Building, told TriplePundit. “They have been disproportionately affected by environmental injustices for so long that they now can use that setback as a strength to help influence the conversation.” The report analyzes existing climate and sustainability practices at HBCUs and, with support from the climate-solutions-focused Waverley Street Foundation, charts a course for launching a network of HBCU Climate Action Hubs.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

A Texas school that was built to segregate Mexican American students becomes a national park

Ken Miller, AP News

A west Texas school built in 1909 for Mexican and Mexican American students as part of “separate but equal” education segregation was designated Wednesday as a national park. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland formally established the Blackwell School National Historic Site in Marfa, Texas, as the nation’s newest national park and the seventh national park unit designated by President Joe Biden. “This site is a powerful reminder of our nation’s diverse and often complex journey toward equality and justice,” Haaland said in a statement. “By honoring the legacy of Blackwell School, we recognize the resilience and contributions of the Latino community in our shared history.” The designation as a national park provides permanent protection to help tell the history of Texas school districts that established separate elementary schools for Mexican American children, according to the Interior Department.

The Book Bag That Binds Japanese Society

Motoko Rich, New York Times

In Japan, cultural expectations are repeatedly drilled into children at school and at home, with peer pressure playing as powerful a role as any particular authority or law. On the surface, at least, that can help Japanese society run smoothly. During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, the government never mandated masks or lockdowns, yet the majority of residents wore face coverings in public and refrained from going out to crowded venues. Japanese tend to stand quietly in lines, obey traffic signals and clean up after themselves during sports and other events because they have been trained from kindergarten to do so. Carrying the bulky randoseru to school is “not even a rule imposed by anyone but a rule that everyone is upholding together,” said Shoko Fukushima, associate professor of education administration at the Chiba Institute of Technology.

Zambia made education free, now classrooms are crammed

Marco Oriunto, BBC News, Kafue

It’s 07:00 on a chilly winter morning and a group of students has just arrived at Chanyanya Primary and Secondary school, a little over an hour’s drive south-west of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka. “You need to come early to school because there is a shortage of desks,” says 16-year-old pupil Richard Banda. “Two days ago I came late and I ended up sitting on the floor – it was so cold.” His discomfort encapsulates the problem of a lack of resources and overcrowding that has come as a result of offering free primary and secondary school education here. The school is in a compound made up of 10 classrooms arranged in a horseshoe shape around a playground where acacia trees and plants spring out of the sandy soil.

The rays of the early-morning sun are caught in a cloud of dust stirred up by boys and girls sweeping the classrooms. Just before the bell rings, one of the students sprints to the middle of the playground and raises the Zambian flag atop a tall pole. These start-of-the-day rituals have become part of a new routine for two million extra children who since 2021 have been able to go to state-run schools without having to pay, because the government made schooling free for everyone.

Democracy and the Public Interest

School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget.

Eli Hager, ProPublica

In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies. In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model. Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.

Nurturing a Rainbow of Resistance to Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws

Linda Christensen, Rethinking Schools

Recent legislation attempts to censor LGBTQ+ curriculum, books, rainbow flags, to enforce binary bathrooms, to refuse to acknowledge students’ chosen names and pronouns, to ban transgender student athletes in sports, to criminalize doctors and families who support transgender medical care and more. However, according to the Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to advocacy, education, and crisis support for LGBTQ+ young people for more than 25 years, “[T]here is reason for optimism: Nearly 90 percent of harmful bills considered in 2022 were defeated by LGBTQ advocates and allies.” As an educator, I want to bring both stories into the classroom. Yes, students need to be aware of the devastating crush of new — and old — laws, but they also need to know the history and impact of resistance by “transcestors” and allies who have been fighting back against the erasure of the LGBTQ+ community for decades.

Thou shalt teach religion in schools? Activists, parents and pastors object

Nadra Nittle, The 19th

A Louisiana law requires students as young as kindergarteners to confront a document that discusses sex, lies and murder: the Ten Commandments. On Monday, a coalition of advocacy groups, clergy members and concerned families from diverse religious backgrounds sought a preliminary injunction to stop the Judeo-Christian decree from appearing in all public school classrooms by January 1, as mandated by House Bill 71, signed into law last month by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry. “This law violates the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty, specifically the separation of church and state,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “Louisiana is imposing an official religious orthodoxy on every public school student in the state. School officials can’t force religious scripture on students as a condition of getting a public education.”

Other News of Note

Bernice Johnson Reagon, Civil Rights Activist and Founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dead at 81

Jodi Guglielmi, Rolling Stone

Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights song leader and co-founder of The Freedom Singers who later started the acapella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died at the age of 81.

Reagon’s death was confirmed by Courtland Cox, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Legacy Project, according to NPR. No cause of death was given.

In the Sixties, Johnson Reagon was a central part of the African American struggle for civil rights, starting her work in her hometown of Albany, Georgia, while enrolled in college, where protests and marches were often accompanied by mass arrests. She found inspiration in the songs elders would sing at meetings and community gatherings. “As a singer and activist in the Albany Movement, I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective,” she said on NPR’s Fresh Air. “It was the first time that I knew the power of song to be an instrument for the articulation of our community concerns.” Reagon was jailed in 1961 for participating in a civil rights demonstration and was kicked out of college for her activism.

In Our Hands: Thoughts on Black Music (1976)

Bernice Johnson Reagon, National Humanities Center

In the early 1960s, I was in college at Albany State [Georgia]. My major interests were music and biology. In music I was a contralto soloist with the choir, studying Italian arias and German leider [classical songs]. The Black music I sang was of three types: 1) Spirituals sung by the college choir. These were arranged by such people as Nathaniel Dett and William Dawson and had major injections of European musical harmony and composition. 2) Rhythm ’n’ Blues, music done by and for Blacks in social settings. This included the music of bands at proms, juke boxes, and football game songs. 3) Church music; gospel was a major part of Black church music by the time I was in college. I was a soloist with the gospel choir.

“We Must Stand Against Political Violence”

Reverend William Barber, The Nation

We all have to stand against political violence. Debates over ideas are one thing, but violence, assassination attempts, and killing innocent bystanders is something else. And it is wrong, no matter what the justification. We have to give authorities time to do a full investigation of the man who tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania. It’s irresponsible to assume motive by saying he was a registered Republican. And it’s certainly wrong to say he hated Trump because he was for President Joe Biden or he was an agent of Satan sent to kill Trump, who is an instrument of God.