Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The Costs of Conflict: The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflict on Public Schools in the United States

John Rogers, Rachel White, Robert Shand, Joseph Kahne, UCLA IDEA

Steven Machi is an award-winning superintendent of a mid-sized school district in a Western state. Dr. Machi notes that, historically, his board members have been moderate Republicans who “care about kids and trust the district leaders.” But recently, a couple new board members, who

he characterizes as “extremists,” have been elected with support from Moms for Liberty and “other special interest groups.” These new board members use social media to challenge the district’s LGBTQ+ policies and attack individual educators: “It’s daily,” notes Dr. Machi, “they are spreading false propaganda, fear mongering.” Fellow board members have been “slandered as pedophiles”—which Machi says are “completely false fabrications.” The length of board meetings has grown from 90 minutes to five and a half hours, and much of this time is taken up by speakers claiming that local schools “are indoctrinating kids” with “ideologies around sexual health,” even as the district uses state-approved curriculum. “It’s gotten incredibly contentious,” Dr. Machi agonizes. “They’re just trying to disrupt.”

US public schools burned up nearly $3.2bn fending off rightwing culture attacks – report

Lois Beckett, The Guardian

Attacks targeting American public schools over LGBTQ+ rights and education about race and racism cost those schools an estimated $3.2bn in the 2023-24 school year, according to a new report by education professors from four major American universities. The study is believed to be the first attempt to quantify the financial impact of rightwing political campaigns targeting school districts and school boards across the US. In the wake of the pandemic, these campaigns first attempted to restrict how American schools educate students about racism, and then increasingly shifted to spreading fear among parents about schools’ policies about transgender students and LGBTQ+ rights.

Tim Walz’s candidacy for vice president underscores the political power of teachers

Christopher Chambers-Ju and Melissa Arnold Lyon, The Conversation

On July 25, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to the American Federation of Teachers – the first labor union she addressed after announcing her candidacy for president. Even though she was speaking to a roomful of teachers, Harris didn’t focus on teacher-specific issues. Rather, she spoke about general policies that working people want, such as sick leave and paid family leave. She also spoke about the labor movement more broadly. “When unions are strong, America is strong,” she said. At the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris’ running mate Tim Walz proudly claimed his identity as a teacher. On Instagram, he described himself as being a “dues-paying, card-carrying member of my teachers union for years.”

Language, Culture, and Power

Fernando Valenzuela’s Magical Life and Tragic Death Reminds Us That Immigration Is Beautiful

Dave Zirin, The Nation

Three days before the Los Angeles Dodgers face off against the New York Yankees in the World Series, the star of the last Dodgers team to beat the Yankees in the Series, Fernando Valenzuela, died at 63 years old. In a revival of what was once the greatest rivalry in team sports, the New York Yankees will play the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2024 World Series for the first time in 43 years. A rivalry that used to be a near-annual occurrence in the days of Eisenhower and then revived itself in the 1970s is making its return to the Bronx and Chavez Ravine. As the recently departed James Earl Jones said in Field of Dreams, a hokey baseball flick that Jones elevated, “This field, this game—it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.” (If this sounds Trumpian, and in another actor’s mouth it might, Jones makes about the peace and joy of youth, not a longing look at more reactionary times.)

Errol Morris’s Reminder of Trump’s Sadistic Border Policy

Eileen Jones, Jacobin

The new documentary by Errol Morris called Separated, which is considered a likely Academy Awards contender for Best Documentary, was made with the plan to share it with the public before the election. The main point of the film is to remind people of the cruel fiasco that was the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policy during his presidency: forcibly separating parents from children as a deterrent to illegal immigration along the southern border of the United States. Trump makes clear in an interview clip shown in the documentary that he intends to revive the sadistic policy if he’s reelected. And the mess his administration made is still with us. According to Separated, an estimated four-thousand-plus families were traumatized for life by the way children were removed and incarcerated. Even toddlers were sometimes held in literal cages for months at a time before the policy was overturned because of the public outcry and eventual legal action.

JD Vance Takes Trump’s Deportation Threats to Terrifying New Level

Paige Oamek, The New Republic

JD Vance has taken Donald Trump’s mass deportation threats to a terrifying new level, implying legal immigrants will also be rounded up. At campaign events in Arizona on Tuesday, Vance suggested he’d deport immigrants under legal programs like temporary protected status, or TPS, and refused to rule out deporting immigrants with deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA, status. “The problem is that Kamala Harris has granted mass asylum and mass parole,” he said, invoking a made-up right-wing buzzword. When a reporter at The Tucson Sentinel asked Vance whether he and Trump would plan on deporting DACA recipients, the vice presidential candidate dodged the question. “When you’ve got 25 million illegal aliens in this country, you’ve got to deport a lot of people or you don’t have a border anymore,” said Vance, who tried to turn attention to “violent criminal illegal aliens.” “We also have to deport people, not just the bad people who came into our country, but people who violated the law coming into this country. We’ve got to be willing to deport them.”

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Community Schools and the Elections

NEPC

Today’s Q&A is with Marisa Saunders, associate director for research at UCLA’s Center for Community Schooling. Dr. Saunders has conducted extensive research that explores the potential and challenges associated with college and career pathways. Her scholarship focuses on K-12 transformation efforts aimed to address long-standing educational inequalities, including the 2017 book, Learning Time: In Pursuit of Educational Equity.

Kids with obesity do worse in school. One reason may be teacher bias 

Kavitha Cardoza, Hechinger Report

Almost every day at the public elementary school she attended in Montgomery County, Maryland, Stephanie heard comments about her weight. Kids in her fifth grade class called her “fatty” instead of her name, she recalled; others whispered, “Do you want a cupcake?” as she walked by. One classmate spread a rumor that she had diabetes. Stephanie was so incensed by his teasing that she hit him and got suspended, she said. For years teachers ignored her in class, even when she was the only one raising her hand, said Stephanie, whose surname is being withheld to protect her privacy. “I was like, ‘Do you not like me or something?” she recalled.

Education in Gaza: Layla Mohammed’s Story

The Borgen Project

According to a World Bank report, Palestinians place high value on educational attainment, with a 2003 survey revealing that 60% of individuals aged 10 to 24 consider education their top priority. This dedication to education deeply impressed Nick Bilborough, founder of The Hands Up Project, during his visit to the region. He found the approach to education in Gaza to be especially “outward facing” and “creative.” However, the ongoing conflict has severely disrupted education, causing thousands of children to miss crucial stages of learning. A United Nations report warns that Gaza’s youth could lose up to five years of education if the conflict persists, leaving survivors with complex special educational needs. Many could suffer from psychological disorders like PTSD and some will have lost limbs. The Borgen Project recently spoke with Layla Mohammed, a 20-year-old student from Gaza whose university was bombed on the second day of Israel’s military actions in the region. 

Access, Assessment, Advancement

These teachers often live in poverty. A pay raise could help — but there’s a cost

Cory Turner, NPR

Sitting at a blueberry blue table in a Head Start classroom in Pullman, Mich., about an hour south of Grand Rapids, preschool teacher Julie Beck helps a little girl draw a rainbow with crayons. Nearby, longtime assistant Norma Silva kneads Play-Doh with the children. The kids think they’re just playing, but Miss Julie and Miss Norma, as they’re known, teach in a subtle, graceful tandem, sneaking in learning about directional words (the next stripe can go inside or outside the rainbow) or letter sounds (the Play-Doh becomes a “C” as in “c-c-c-cat!”). “We teach them so much,” Beck says with a laugh. “It’s fun though. The kids don’t know they’re learning.”

This election is finally for the parents

Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th

For most of her life, Julianne Webber had been a very conservative voter — “just left of MAGA,” by her own estimation. Then she welcomed a second child, just as her marriage was falling apart, and became a single mother in 2019. It changed everything, including her politics. When most of the parenting responsibilities were solely on her plate, it astounded her how just about everyone expected her to still do it all. Care for her two kids. Shuttle them to and fro. Maintain a full-time job and keep the grocery lists and do all the cleaning. Her to-do list as a parent was so long it put a CVS receipt to shame.

Revealing Campus Debt: How Colleges are Borrowing Away the Future

NEA Today

A lot of people don’t know what you’re talking about when you say campus debt. Their minds automatically go to student debt. How to do you explain or talk about it? Rich Levy: My one-sentence summary is basically that because of state cutbacks to higher ed, campuses are forced to pay for capital construction and deferred maintenance, and then the cost of that debt is passed on to students through tuition and fees and to faculty and staff in terms of cutbacks.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Scandal of America’s Apartheid Education System

Nathan Robinson and Jonathan Kozol, Current Affairs

Jonathan Kozol is one of the leading critics of the U.S. education system. He has written a series of widely acclaimed books across a 60-year career, including Savage Inequalities, The Shame of the Nation, and Letters to a Young Teacher. Here, he discusses his new book An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America, which sums up his argument about what is wrong with public schools and what we can do about it.

Children on the Move – The History of Stark Solutions to Address Inequality in Boston Schools

Susan E. Eaton, Stephanie Leydon, Emily Juden, WGBH

America’s longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, buses children of color from Boston’s city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban schools. In contrast to the infamous violence and rage that greeted forced school busing within the city in the 1970s, the work of METCO has quietly and calmly promoted school integration. But how has this program affected the lives of its graduates? Would they choose to participate if they had it to do over again? Would they place their own children on the bus to suburbia? In The Other Boston Busing Story, sixty-five METCO graduates who are now adults answer those questions and more, vividly recalling their own stories and assessing the benefits and hardships of crossing racial and class lines on their way to school.

Montclair Voices Resonate at Conversation on N.J. Segregation

Matt Kadosh, Montclair Local

Bingo cards and redlined maps of Essex County were laid out on tables at the Montclair Public Library as part of a forum on segregation at which experts detailed the local history of segregation and its impacts on the community. At the event by the nonprofit public service news provider The Jersey Bee on Thursday neighbors discussed the history of segregation in Essex County, local effects and the movement in New Jersey toward reparations.

Democracy and the Public Interest

There Is No Leadership Without Risk

Darren Walker, New York Times

There has never been a more difficult time to lead anything — whether a publicly traded corporation or a nonprofit nongovernmental organization; whether a global university or a local, public school or classroom. Indeed, many of the best would-be leaders I know are asking, why would I even want to be a leader? As I prepare to step down from the Ford Foundation, having served through the years on more than a dozen boards of directors across sectors and industries, I see a gathering crisis of leadership. The consequences for our shared democratic values and institutions are clear and present. The cycle that causes America’s leadership crisis ought to be, as well.

Vermont educators ponder how to teach in, and about, a politically polarized country

Ethan Weinstein, VT Digger

Educators nationwide face a tricky question in an election year: In an increasingly polarized political age, how should schools teach about politics, and with it, democracy? In Vermont, teachers are collectively grappling with the challenge. Hundreds of educators gathered at the University of Vermont last week for a conference on “Democracy and School,” exploring how teachers contribute to a democratic culture. The topic guided the 13th annual gathering organized by The Rowland Foundation, which supports Vermont’s teachers in an effort to improve school culture and climate. 

‘The Limitation Effect’: NYU study examines effect of censorship in schools

Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix

Florida education policies targeting classroom discussion and materials related to sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and ethnic studies are being felt by educators and parents, a New York University study found. The study, “The Limitation Effect: Experiences of State Policy-Driven Education Restriction in Florida’s Public Schools,” was conducted in the fall and winter of 2023-2024 by professors at NYU and the University of California San Diego. 

Researchers found among the survey’s 76 respondents and interviewees that education laws passed in Florida since 2021 have “played a key role in pressuring education restriction.”

Other News of Note

Thelma Mothershed Wair, a member of the Little Rock Nine who integrated an Arkansas school, has died

Emily Wagster Pettus, AP News

Thelma Mothershed Wair, one of the nine Black students who integrated a high school in Arkansas’ capital city of Little Rock in 1957 while a mob of white segregationists yelled threats and insults, has died at age 83. Mothershed Wair died Saturday at a hospital in Little Rock after having complications from multiple sclerosis, her sister, Grace Davis, confirmed Sunday to The Associated Press. The students who integrated Central High School were known as the Little Rock Nine. For three weeks in September 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block the Black students from enrolling in Central High, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated classrooms were unconstitutional. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school on Sept. 25, 1957.