Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Where Does Kamala Harris Stand on Education? Inside the 2024 Democratic Platform

Libby Stanford, Education Week

Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates would push for universal prekindergarten, expanded career and technical education, a reduced emphasis on standardized testing, and efforts to improve teachers’ working conditions if elected later this year. Delegates to the Democratic National Convention voted to approve the party’s 2024 platform on Monday, the opening day of the party’s four-day gathering in Chicago. The platform doesn’t veer from the Biden administration’s approach to K-12. In fact, it passed without Democrats updating the document to reflect that Harris has replaced President Joe Biden as the top name on the ticket.

Many of the U.S. Department of Education’s initiatives under Biden, which have shown up in the president’s budget proposals in various forms for the past four years, are reflected in the platform’s education section.

How Teaching Shaped Tim Walz’s Politics

Owen Dahlkamp, The Nation

Before entering politics, Tim Walz was known as Mr. Walz, a high school social studies and geography teacher. “It was my experience as a teacher and my passion for education that led me to run for governor,” the Minnesota Democrat said during his gubernatorial inaugural address in 2023, highlighting his two decades as an educator that fundamentally shaped his approach to politics.After graduating from public university in 1989, Walz accepted a one-year position teaching high school in China. He then returned to his home state of Nebraska and met his wife, Gwen, a fellow educator. The couple married two years later before moving to Minnesota and accepting teaching positions at Mankato West High School, where Walz remained for 20 years.

Improving teacher diversity is key to reducing racial disparities in academic outcomes and addressing the teacher shortage

Katherine deCourcy, Hilary Wething, and Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute

There is a well-documented shortage of qualified candidates willing to teach in public schools at current compensation levels. But there is also a relative shortage of Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American Pacific Islander teachers. In this post, we measure this relative shortage of teachers by race and ethnicity by comparing the current teacher labor force to the current enrollment of school-aged children. We document a significant demographic mismatch between public school teachers and students, and we describe a substantial body of research indicating that narrowing this demographic mismatch could have educational benefits for Black, Hispanic, and AAPI students. 

Language, Culture, and Power

Biden’s immigration plan for undocumented spouses could transform lives — and the election

David Noriega, NBC News

Rodrigo de la Rosa was only 5 years old when he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with his father and three brothers. Growing up in South Phoenix, he had what he calls “just a regular American life” — until, as a teenager, he learned he was undocumented. “When you turn 16 and you can’t get a regular job, that’s when you realize, ‘Oh, I’m different,’” he said. In his mid-20s, de la Rosa married Ashley de Alba, who was born and raised in California by Mexican and Salvadoran parents. But marrying a U.S. citizen was not enough to fix his immigration status. He could apply for a green card but would need to leave the country first — and risk getting stuck in Mexico for a decade or even permanently. That changed Monday, when the federal government began accepting applications for a sweeping new Biden administration program allowing undocumented spouses of American citizens to apply to regularize their status without leaving the U.S. The White House estimates the program applies to 500,000 immigrants across the country, as well as to an additional 50,000 of their children (the stepchildren of their American citizen spouses). 

Asian American Immigrant Inclusion in California: Citizenship, Community, and Policy

Thai V. Le, Shannon Camacho, Chuchen Pan, Alicia Vo, USC Dornsife

As the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group in the United States, largely contributed by increasing migration from Asia, Asian Americans are estimated to be the largest immigrant group in the country by 2055. The growing and increasingly diverse population contributes to an expanding interest and need to understand the nuanced experiences of Asian American immigrants, including their pathways to citizenship. Given the existing citizenship regime in the United States, naturalization is an essential process for immigrants and their social, economic, and political inclusion. The benefits of naturalization include the right to vote, improved potential to sponsor family members, expanded eligibility for social services, and access to jobs that require citizenship. Though the benefits of naturalizing are multifold for immigrants and their inclusion, improving access to naturalization also facilitates a more representative and democratic society. In this report, we take a mixed-methods approach to explore the drivers and barriers to naturalization. Our report dives into the nuanced pathways to citizenship for Asian American immigrants, using statistical modeling, surveys, and interviews to tease out the differences in experience due to ethnicity, migration history, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and more.

Investigating why a high-performing superintendent left his job 

Kavitha Cardoza, Hechinger Report

Heath Grimes, the superintendent of Russellville City Schools in Alabama, had already received several accolades for his work with English learners when I spoke to him in June 2023 for a story on teacher apprenticeships. So I was surprised at the end of the call when he told me his contract had not been renewed. This happened while he was the elected president of the School Superintendents of Alabama. It was obvious he’d been surprised as well. I’ve reported on English learners for years and knew their educational outcomes often lagged behind their non-English learner peers because districts don’t always offer the training or have the resources to support them. Yet this conservative Alabama community of 11,000 people, where the district’s English learner population is at 33 percent, was seeing a lot of success. What went wrong? 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Japan students urge abolition of nuclear weapons in Geneva

Kyodo News

A group of 22 Japanese high school students on Tuesday submitted to the United Nations a set of signatures calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons and attended the world body’s disarmament conference in Geneva. The students, aged 15 to 18, who were selected as peace messengers by a Nagasaki-based civic committee, also met with Carolyne-Melanie Regimbal, chief of service of the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs’ Geneva Office. “A world without nuclear weapons is a goal that should be shared by all humanity,” said Kosaku Okimoto, a 16-year-old student from Hiroshima, during the meeting with Regimbal.

Her Name Was Marina [Video]

Ricardo Chin, Youtube

In agricultural Merced, arts students follow their dreams ‘one step at a time’ [Audio]

Rachel Livinal, KVPR

On a May night at Golden Valley High School, students were five minutes into the opening number of the final musical of the year: Legally Blonde Jr. Jacqueline Ortega-Barajas was at the back of the stage, tucking herself behind the hand-constructed wooden set. She was waiting for the main character, Elle, to burst through for a fast-paced costume change. The doors swung open. Within less than 10 seconds, Ortega-Barajas helped Elle pull on a sparkly hot pink skirt and glittery white cardigan. “We got it!” she said, as the actor playing Elle strutted through the doors to the front of the stage. As a “costumer,” this was one of five outfit changes Ortega-Barajas managed for the musical. Legally Blonde Jr. was her final production before she graduated in June.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

How Kamala Harris Embodies the Ethos of Howard University

Margaret Vigil-Fowler, Time Magazine

When she accepts her party’s presidential nomination on Thursday, Kamala Harris will become, among other historic firsts, the first Black woman and the first person of Asian descent to secure a major party’s nomination. But people often overlook that Harris is also the first nominee of either major party to graduate from a historically Black college or university. As a proud alumna of Howard University, Harris is one in a long line of the school’s graduates to become a leader within the African American community—and in the nation as a whole. That’s not a coincidence. Howard’s motto is “truth and service,” and the school has long instilled a deep appreciation for public service in its students. This history and Howard’s commitment to nurturing community leaders helped attract Harris to the school.

‘A police state’: US universities impose rules to avoid repeat of Gaza protests

Alice Speri, The Guardian

Universities across the US are planning tougher rules to restrict protests when students return from summer vacation, an effort to avoid the chaos of last semester when demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza led to police crackdowns on campuses nationwide. Columbia University students, who were at the vanguard of the movement, may encounter the most changes. The university president, Minouche Shafik, resigned this week in the wake of criticism for her handling of the protests, but not before overseeing the installation of fencing around the lawns of the school’s quad – the heart of campus life and the site of large protest encampments.

Anticipating More Unrest, Colleges Prioritize Civic Dialogue

Jessica Blake and Kathryn Palmer, Inside HigherEd

The fallout from last spring’s campus unrest over the Israel-Hamas war, combined with anxieties about this fall’s presidential election, have pushed many colleges and universities to prioritize promoting civil discourse and civic engagement as they head into the new academic year. Such programs have been available on many college campuses for years, but they’re often siloed, and experts say they aren’t as effective as they could be. Survey results have shown that students, particularly those who lean right politically or who belong to certain religious groups, feel like campus is no longer a place where they can speak freely. “Students are just more cautious in talking about political issues. Even when they disagree, they don’t want to say it,” said Ashley Biser, an associate professor and co-director of the Arneson Institute for Practical Politics and Public Affairs at Ohio Wesleyan University. “They’re worried about what their peers are going to think of them if they hold an opinion that’s not part of the majority.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

As a Black middle-school student, I was tracked into lower-level math classes that kept me back

Melodie Baker, Hechinger Report

When people learn that I have a doctorate in educational psychology and quantitative methods, they often assume that I love math. And the truth is, I do now, although that wasn’t always the case. Like many Black students, I faced challenges throughout my academic journey, with math tracking being the primary one. Despite high math scores in earlier grades and a passion for the subject, I was placed into lower-level math courses in middle school. This experience happened more than two decades ago, but limited access to advanced and engaging math options is still a problem today, even for high-achieving Black and Latino students.

Were school voucher programs used to evade integration after Brown v. Board of Education?

Carmela Guaglianone, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

Yes. Several Southern states established school voucher programs to evade integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that deemed race-based segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman helped popularize the idea of using government funding to provide vouchers for private schooling in a landmark essay in 1955, the same year the Court issued the Brown II ruling ordering integration. He suggested vouchers would foster competition and offer parents improved school choice.Milton acknowledged the implications for desegregation efforts in the footnotes of his piece, writing that although he personally “deplored” segregation, the strength of the voucher system was that “there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to.” 

Impact of education and income inequalities on life expectancy: insights from the new EU members

Gamze Sart, Yilmaz Bayar, Marina Danilina, Frontiers in Public Health

Life expectancy is one of the primary population health indicators and in turn increases in life expectancy indicate improvements in population health and human welfare. Therefore, one of the ultimate goals of the countries is to increase the life expectancy. This article studies the effect of education and income inequalities, ICT indicators, CO2 emissions, and real GDP per capita on life expectancy in the new EU members for the period of 2010–2022 by employing fixed effects regression. The coefficients of panel regression uncover that education and income inequalities and CO2 emissions negatively impact life expectancy, but ICT indicators of internet usage and mobile cellular subscriptions and real GDP per capita positively affects the life expectancy. The findings of the panel regression analysis indicate that public policies to decrease the inequalities in education and income will make a contribution to life expectancy. 

Democracy and the Public Interest

‘The fever is breaking’: DeSantis-backed school board candidates fall short in Florida

Kate Payne, AP News

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign to expand his conservative education agenda in Florida schools didn’t quite go the way he wanted on Tuesday. Of the 23 school board candidates that DeSantis endorsed this cycle, preliminary results show more of them appeared to lose their election races than win them. Unofficial vote tallies show 11 candidates backed by the governor lost on Tuesday, including some incumbents in conservative-leaning counties. Meanwhile, six of DeSantis’ preferred candidates won their races and six were poised to advance to a November runoff after no one in their contests cleared 50% of the vote. Those runoffs could still go in DeSantis’ favor. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, DeSantis acknowledged that efforts to make school boards more conservative were more successful two years ago, but said progress is still being made.

Harris’s Candidacy Has Fired Up HBCU Students. Will the Enthusiasm Turn Into Votes?

Sara Weissman, Inside HigherEd

Last week, Tevon Blair went to Yard Fest—a celebratory event for freshmen at Virginia State University—armed with a tent, a table, a photo booth and games like Jenga and Connect Four. He wanted to create what felt like a block party, in hopes of energizing and informing students at the historically Black university about the voting process. University cheerleaders performed. Members of the Divine Nine—historically Black fraternities and sororities—did signature step routines. Thousands of students turned up, according to Blair, and at least 77 registered to vote. A few dozen students even stuck around for a panel about how to engage voters in this election cycle. Blair, an alum of Dillard University in New Orleans, is the co-founder of Xceleader, a national HBCU alumni organization started by former Student Government Association presidents that’s dedicated to encouraging student leadership. The group is partnering with HeadCount, a nonpartisan organization focused on youth voters, on an ambitious goal: mobilize 10,000 HBCU students to vote in this election cycle.

Politicians step up attacks on the teaching of scientific theories in US schools

Ryan Summers, The Conversation

Scientific theory has had a rough time in America’s public schools. Almost 100 years ago, science teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating a Tennessee law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution. Although his conviction was overturned on a technicality in 1927, laws banning classes on Darwin’s theory stuck around for another 40 years. They were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968. Over the past few decades, conservative or religious groups that object to including the theory of evolution in science classes have tried a different approach. Now, they argue, if the “scientific” theory of evolution is taught, other views, such as “intelligent design” – a stand-in for creationism – should also be taught.

Other News of Note

Arlene Inouye, Laureate of the 2024 Albert Shanker Education Award

Arlene Inouye, Education International

I am humbled to receive the laureate Albert Shanker Education Award. I appreciate the acknowledgement of my journey over the past 50 years; my work in public education and in support of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Two formative experiences come to my mind. Back in the 1990’s, I lived in a low income neighborhood in Los Angeles as part of a nonprofit organization that provided services to the community. With the sudden influx of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugee families fleeing the Indochina war, they came to our Latinx neighborhood in LA. I developed an afterschool program to support 8-12 year old children adjusting to life in America. These youth taught me about their harrowing experience escaping their country and the determination and resilience of their families in the face of murdered family members and being uprooted into a foreign culture and country. I treasure the relationships with them that have continued to this day, and how they opened my heart and broadened my world view.