Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The Elections and Issues Around Racial and Ethnic Diversity

Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr., NEPC Newsletter

Today’s final Q&A is with Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr., an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Henry researches market-based approaches to education and issues around racial equity. His research elevates the perspectives and practices of Black educational actors while examining how the persistence of anti-Blackness and white supremacy shapes Black peoples’ educational experiences.

We are one: Struggle rooted in a belief system

Jitu Brown, The People’s Think Tank

I had a moment in my young life—in 1991—where I had a choice. I grew up in Bronzeville, the historic African American community on Chicago’s South Side. I was on my way to becoming a successful music artist; I had a record deal in the works with Polygram Records. At the same time, I was also becoming politicized by hip hop, beginning my journey into studying African

History. I was soon introduced to a community organizing group in my neighborhood called KOCO, the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization. Around the time that Polygram approached me to sign a solo record deal, KOCO asked me to see if I’d be interested in volunteering with their youth programs. I eventually became disgruntled with the record deal and lack of support for the socially conscious music I was creating, so I negotiated my release from my contract with Polygram. I then chose to volunteer with KOCO, and it was the best decision I ever made in my life.

“When I think about the thing that I’m fighting for, it’s giving people back their time. Their time to be human, their time to be in this world to thrive.”

Rita Kamani-Renedo, Antero Garcia, and Silky Shah, La Cuenta

This week we continue with the second part of our interview with Detention Watch Network director and author of Unbuild Walls, Silky Shah.

Language, Culture, and Power

Trump’s deportation plan could separate millions of families, leaving schools to pick up the pieces

Kalyn Belsha, Chalkbeat

When immigration agents raided chicken processing plants in central Mississippi in 2019, they arrested nearly 700 undocumented workers — many of them parents of children enrolled in local schools. Teens got frantic texts to leave class and find their younger siblings. Unfamiliar faces whose names weren’t on the pick-up list showed up to take children home. School staff scrambled to make sure no child went home to an empty house, while the owner of a local gym threw together a temporary shelter for kids with nowhere else to go. In the Scott County School District, a quarter of the district’s Latino students, around 150 children, were absent from school the next day. When dozens of kids continued to miss school, staff packed onto school buses and went door to door with food, trying to reassure families that it was safe for their children to return. Academics were on hold for weeks, said Tony McGee, the district’s superintendent at the time.

Lost for centuries, Virginia school for enslaved children gets new life

Susan Svrluga, Washington Post

Tonia Cansler Merideth stepped inside the 18th-century building and paused, as if listening. The wide floorboards had been worn down over the centuries, the newel at the base of the stairway smoothed by hundreds of hands. Propped along a wall next to a brick fireplace was a copy of a roster from the 1760s listing, in flowing script, the names of the children who attended the school that year. Three of the children named were free. Twenty-seven were enslaved.

Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism 

Nancy A. Andoh, Black Perspectives

An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism is a groundbreaking work that illuminates the transformative power of friendship across cultural divides and in which David Weinfeld takes readers on a captivating journey through the intertwined lives and minds of two intellectual giants: Horace Kallen, a Jewish philosopher, and Alain Locke, an African American scholar. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century America, a nation grappling with the complexities of identity and belonging, this book unveils the remarkable story of how an unlikely bond between two marginalized thinkers gave birth to the revolutionary concept of cultural pluralism. Drawing on a rich array of primary and secondary sources, including unpublished manuscripts, personal correspondence, published writings, and contemporaneous commentary, Weindfeld constructs a nuanced narrative of how Kallen and Locke’s friendship served as a crucible for the development of their shared vision of a pluralistic America.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

“The Children,” James Baldwin Wrote, “Are Always Ours, Every Single One of Them”

Saqib Bhatti, In These Times

After 18 hours with a nebulizer strapped to his face, my two year old was finally cleared to eat. He recovered from his asthma attack in the hospital the night before and we expected him to be released soon. It was a beautiful summer day, and I could see the sun reflecting off Lake Michigan from the window. I walked to a nearby restaurant in downtown Chicago to pick up our lunch: poke bowls for me and my wife, and fries for our picky little eater. I was gone just 20 minutes, and returned to mayhem: my son’s hospital room was full of doctors and nurses. It looked like they were panicking.

A Solid Majority of Young Americans Is Very Worried About Climate Change

Nina Dietz, Mother Jones

A new study delving the emotional and psychological impact of climate change on 16,000 young Americans provides crucial empirical evidence for what until now “we’ve been relying on our intuition to tell us,” the study’s first author says. A clear majority of young Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 are either very, or extremely, worried. Eric Lewandowski, a psychologist at New York University, focuses on the mental and emotional effects of climate change and co-authored a 2021 paper on the subject but still felt there was more to be studied in the United States.

In Asheville, high school seniors make key life choices under the stress of Helene recovery

Maykiya Seminera, AP News

On a recent Friday, Ari Cohen and three friends — all seniors at Asheville High School — gathered to play UNO inside his house, next to a pile of bottled water in his living room.

It had been weeks since they and thousands of other students had been inside a classroom because of devastation from Hurricane Helene, which left a massive tree leaning on Cohen’s house. Without reliable cell or internet service, students in hard-hit Asheville have been finding other ways to pass the time — whether volunteering, exploring hurricane-damaged parts of town or playing board games.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

2 out of 5 child care teachers make so little they need public assistance to support their families

Jackie Mader, Hechinger Report

Caring for children during their first few years is a complex and critical job: A child’s brain develops more in the first five years than at any other point in life. Yet in America, individuals engaged in this crucial role are paid less than animal caretakers and dressing room attendants.

That’s a major finding of one of two new reports on the dismal treatment of child care workers. Together, the reports offer a distressing picture of how child care staff are faring economically, including the troubling changes low wages have caused to the workforce. Early childhood workers nationally earn a median wage of $13.07 per hour, resulting in poverty-level earnings for 13 percent of such educators, according to the first report, the Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024. 

5 facts about child care costs in the U.S.

Rebecca Leppert, Pew Research

Child care costs have been a hot topic in the 2024 presidential race. Here are key facts about the issue, based on data from the federal government and Pew Research Center surveys.

Is This the End of the High-Stakes High School Graduation Exam?

Mary Ellen Flannery, NEA Today

When Massachusetts special education teacher Kelsey Romano thinks about the MCAS—the high-stakes standardized test that the state’s high school students must pass to graduate—she thinks about the student who changed her flat tire. He’s helpful, kind, and determined, meeting academic challenges through hard work. A student-leader in Monument Mountain High School’s horticulture program and on its athletic fields, he has earned passing grades in his classes and grade-level proficiency in reading and math, despite a learning disability. His future is bright. Or it was—until he recently failed the biology section of the MCAS.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

US math teachers view student performance differently based on race and gender

Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, Ian Thacker, Joseph Cimpian, The Conversation

Teachers report thinking that if girls do better in math than boys, it is probably because of their innate ability and effort. But they also report that when boys do well in math, it is more likely due to parental support and society’s higher expectations for their success. That’s what we discovered from 400 elementary and middle school math teachers we surveyed across the country for our new study. The purpose of the study was to learn more about how teachers explain students’ success and failure in math. We found that the variation in views among educators is not limited to the gender of students. Teachers also hold contrasting views about math performance when it comes to students’ race and ethnicity, our study found.

Let’s Talk About Wealth, Baby

Danny Dorling, Jacobin

Introducing a new word into the English language is no easy task. A colleague of mine claims that a medical paper he coauthored years ago was the original source for the phrase “vanilla sex,” originally referring to sex unlikely to result in much calorie-reducing physical exercise. While the definition of vanilla sex remains somewhat vague, “wealtherty,” by contrast, was clearly and thoroughly defined in the 2021 article that was the prelude to Sarah Kerr’s 2024 book, Wealth, Poverty and Enduring Inequality: Let’s Talk Wealtherty: I am proposing a pivot to a new articulation of the problem: wealtherty. Wealtherty is the state or condition of prosperity in abundance of possessions or riches, plus concomitant political power and influence, and resultant risks to the democratic process. This articulation assumes that the social (of social policy) is made up of richer and poorer people. It assumes that there is such a thing as morally and politically unjustifiable surplus wealth and that this wealth bleeds into socially damaging political influence. It assumes that the existence of surplus wealth in conditions of urgent unmet needs is intolerable. It assumes a set of restricted capabilities (such as media and political influence) that are usually only accessible to those with money and influence, and which, in their operation, can cause harm to others. Finally, transposing theories of privilege from race, wealtherty exists when this dynamic is self-sustaining and has made itself invisible – a form of wealth privilege, which makes it unlikely that beneficiaries of the system will be motivated to enact change.

Migration: A View From Below

Jan Breman & Marcel van der Linden, New Left Review

Mainstream discussion of migration is polarized around two principal positions, which might be characterized as ‘looming civilizational crisis’ versus ‘win-win’. The first may be argued from a demographic perspective, as in Stephen Smith’s Scramble for Europe, which extrapolates from Africa’s youth bulge and rising living standards to predict that a hundred million African immigrants will have crossed the Mediterranean by 2050. Or it may make a democratic case, as in Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, which notes that citizens’ consent was never sought for mass non-European immigration to European countries. Or, as in Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, it may advance the cultural—in his view, civilizational—argument that large-scale Latino immigration will erode the USA’s Anglo-Protestant identity through bilingualism and Catholicism, producing non-assimilable Hispanicized enclaves in a way that earlier immigrations did not.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Keeping students from political events undercuts their civic education

Joel Westheimer, Ottawa Citizen

Politics is not a four-letter word, and being political is not a bad thing when it comes to educating Canadian youth. But you wouldn’t know it by the Ontario government’s reaction to the recent incident involving middle-school students from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) attending a protest. Originally intended as an educational experience to raise awareness about mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows, the excursion veered into unexpected territory when students found themselves participating in a protest that included pro-Palestinian slogans. The school board immediately issued an apology and started its own investigation, but that didn’t stop the outrage expressed by the Ontario Ministry of Education, the provincial government, and some parents and pundits.

Black Youth Are Invested in their Communities but Encounter Barriers to Voting

Sam Searles and Sara Suzuki, CIRCLE

Our research finds that Black youth can have complex motivations for participating in elections, and that there is a nuanced relationship between their community belonging and voting.

Authors: Sam Searles, Sara SuzukiThe civic participation of Black youth in recent years has been complex, with both bright spots and challenges. For example, young Black women, alongside other young women of color, have often been at the forefront of activism and civic action. But Black youth, and especially young Black men, have voted at lower rates and remain underrepresented in the electorate. This analysis of Black youth ages 18-34 who participated in our 2024 pre-election poll re-emphasizes that Black youth are not a monolith regarding civic engagement. They possess a wide range of motivations, ideas, and perceptions about the electoral and civic process. A better understanding of these dynamics can help us support their participation and eliminate inequities in voter turnout.

Why bringing children to the voting booth matters

Amira Barger, Ed Source

Children are not merely passive recipients of voting outcomes; they are capable participants in building a future shaped by informed civic values and active community involvement. We must foster responsible use of their civic knowledge and power for a better future. Introducing children to voting from an early age — as young as 5 or 6 — can instill in them a sense of civic responsibility, sparking curiosity about how individual actions influence the broader community, and shaping informed, engaged citizens for the future. In my work on diversity, equity and inclusion, I spend much time thinking about misinformation, access barriers and participation roadblocks.

Other News of Note

Día de los Muertos: Learning About Death Through Observing and Pitching In

Isabel T Gutiérrez, Karl S Rosengren, and Peggy J Miller, Advances in Child Development and Behavior

The chapter explores how young children in the state of Puebla, Mexico are socialized with respect to death by observing and pitching in during the annual celebration for día de los muertos. This chapter focuses on observations made of children’s participation in practices related to día de los muertos and their experiences with death as explored through ethnographic interviews of preschool children and adults from the cities of Cholula and Puebla. We found that children were included in all aspects of día de los muertos and participated by hanging out, observing, pitching in, and listening. Parents (and grandparents) viewed this active participation as crucial for children to acquire the skills and traditions necessary to be responsible adults in their culture. The current research provides new perspectives regarding the study of children and death within the field of developmental psychology by focusing on how multiple modes of participation are an integral part of young children’s socialization with death.

DÍAS DE LOS MUERTOS CURRICULUM PACKET

Bea Carrillo Hocker, Oakland Museum of California

These Day of the Dead curriculum materials offer teachers and students an opportunity to experience a living and evolving cultural tradition. The materials provide resources for integrating lessons related to history, culture, and art. These lessons can extend learning at home as students and parents apply them to learning about their own family history and the legacies they have inherited.