Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Could Trump Shut Down the Department of Education?

Dana Goldstein, New York Times

On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump depicted the nation’s public schools as purveyors of an extreme ideology on gender and race. One of his proposed remedies has been to revive a Reagan-era call to shut down the federal Department of Education, founded in 1979. “We will move everything back to the states, where it belongs,” he said in one speech. “They can individualize education and do it with the love for their children.” Democrats have vowed to resist the effort. But is shuttering the department possible? And if not, how could Mr. Trump use the agency to achieve his policy goals?

Families celebrate after judge rules on Ten Commandments law in Louisiana classrooms

Nadra Nittle, The 19th

The nine multifaith families who sued over a Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in all public school classrooms are celebrating a federal district court ruling on Tuesday that found H.B. 71 to be unconstitutional. Enacted in June, the legislation mandates that schools permanently display a Protestant version of the Judeo-Christian code of conduct, but a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana on Tuesday will stop its implementation. The injunction takes effect immediately, even though the defendants are appealing the decision. Civil liberties advocates say that ignoring church-state separation in schools not only violates the Constitution by imposing religion on students but also risks exposing young people to harmful stereotypes about gender, race and the LGBTQ+ community.

The fights over culturally divisive issues in schools? They cost billions that could be spent helping kids

John Rogers and Joseph Kahne, Los Angeles Times

Education policy received little to no attention during much of the presidential campaign. But, in the final phase, Donald Trump was asked during a “Fox & Friends” interview how he would fix schools. His reply: “No transgender, no operations.… There are some places, your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl.” That was a lie. But it was far from the first time Trump, the Republican Party and a wide-range of conservative activists leveraged fears related to schooling for partisan gain. Over the last three years, there has been a coordinated and intentional political strategy targeting public schools. Our team of university researchers spent the past months surveying and interviewing hundreds of school superintendents about the costs of dealing with culturally divisive conflict, such as battles over LGBTQ+ rights, teaching about race and racism, and efforts to ban books. Their answers are troubling.

Language, Culture, and Power

No. Not everyone survived the first Trump term.

La Cuenta

Have you heard this lately?: “We survived one Trump term, we’ll survive another.” Except, no. Not everyone survived Trump’s first term and the mass detentions, the separations, the deportations, the deaths on the border, the deaths while held in custody, the forced sterilizations, the xenophobic attacks in workplaces, communities, and schools, the saw blade buoys, the on-and-off again status of DACA, the Muslim travel ban, the racist militias planning to shoot at immigrants, and on and on. Not everyone survived the first time and not everyone is the same as a result of the generational traumas. And so, we’re not waiting to analyze who’s to blame or what could have gone differently during last week’s election. We know that the undocumented community cannot spare time and energy looking at the past. Rather, there are mounting, dire threats in the days ahead.

How Schools Make Race [Audio]

Laura Chávez-Moreno, Harvard Edcast

Laura Chávez-Moreno says bilingual education inadvertently creates boundaries around Latinx identity by gathering Spanish-speaking students together. “Bilingual education, rightfully so, has focused on language,” says Chávez-Moreno, an assistant professor at UCLA. “But there has to be also a recognition that bilingual education, because it is a part of schooling in the U.S., that it is also engaging in the process of creating ideas about race and about creating our ideas about racialized groups.” In her new book, “How Schools Make Race,” she argues that while bilingual education aims to support students’ language and cultural identity, it often fails to address the broader racial dynamics affecting Latinx communities.

How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis

Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Entire generation in Gaza would lose education if UNRWA collapses, says UN

Michelle Nichols, Reuters

An entire generation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip would “be denied the right to education” if the United Nations Palestinian relief agency UNRWA collapses in the enclave under new Israeli legislation, the head of UNRWA warned on Wednesday. Israel’s parliament passed a law last month that will ban UNRWA from operating in the country when it takes effect in late January. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said its implementation “will have catastrophic consequences.” “In Gaza, dismantling UNRWA will collapse the United Nations humanitarian response, which relies heavily on the agency’s infrastructure,” he told a U.N. General Assembly committee. “Glaringly absent from discussions about Gaza without UNRWA, is education.”

Trump pledged to roll back protections for transgender students. They’re flooding crisis hotlines

Jocelyn Gecker and Sharon Lurye, AP News

Transgender youth in the United States have been flooding crisis hotlines since the election of Donald Trump, who made anti-transgender themes central to his campaign. Many teens worry about how their lives could change once he takes office. During his presidential bid, Trump pledged to impose wide-ranging restrictions and roll back civil rights protections for transgender students. And his administration can swiftly start work on one major change: It can exclude transgender students from Title IX protections, which affect school policies on students’ use of pronouns, bathrooms and locker rooms. One ad that aired over 15,000 times crystallized Trump’s stance on rights for transgender and nonbinary Americans: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Philly schools get state grant to plant more trees

Dale Mezzacappa, Chalkbeat

Lauryn Lawson, 10, a fifth grader at Logan Elementary School in Northwest Philadelphia, likes trees and plants. So does her classmate Lawrence Butler, 11. They both take every opportunity they can to go outside and help tend the small raised bed vegetable garden on the school’s front lawn. For one thing, planting and harvesting peppers and other vegetables “is more fun than being in the classroom,” Lawrence explained. He also likes learning about what he eats and how they grow, like “broccoli, carrots, and lettuce,” he said. On Tuesday, Lawrence, Lauryn, and other students were front and center with important city and state officials to highlight a half-million dollar grant to the Philadelphia school district for the planting and tending of trees on its property.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Trump’s win brings uncertainty to borrowers hoping for student loan forgiveness

Cheyanne Mumphrey, AP News

Savannah Britt owes about $27,000 on loans she took out to attend college at Rutgers University, a debt she was hoping to see reduced by President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts. Her payments are currently on hold while courts untangle challenges to the loan forgiveness program. But as the weeks tick down on Biden’s time in office, she could soon face a monthly payment of up to $250. “With this new administration, the dream is gone. It’s shot,” said Britt, 30, who runs her own communications agency. “I was hopeful before Tuesday. I was waiting out the process. Even my mom has a loan that she took out to support me. She owes about $18,000, and she was in the process of it being forgiven, but it’s at a standstill.”

Colleges wonder if they will be “the enemy” under Trump

Vimal Patel and Sharon Otterman, New York Times

For many years, Republicans portrayed colleges as bastions of leftism, awash in bias against conservatives and impervious to change. With Donald J. Trump’s victory to a second presidential term and a Congress potentially under unified G.O.P. control, Republicans are now poised to escalate their efforts to root out what they see as progressive ideology in higher education. The return to power of Mr. Trump comes at a vulnerable moment for higher education. Universities have been under increasing pressure from lawmakers, while public confidence in colleges has fallen.

It used to be a notoriously violent prison. Now it’s home to a first-of-its-kind higher education program

Wayne D’Orio, Hechinger Report

In less than 15 minutes, Michael Mariscal validated why a team of officials at Cal Poly Humboldt have spent more than three years trying to set up the first bachelor’s degree program at a maximum-security prison in California. At the end of a class in persuasive speaking, Mariscal was tasked with giving a presentation to highlight his personal growth. His 22 classmates inside B Facility at Pelican Bay State Prison were skeptical: Just two weeks earlier, Mariscal had used his presentation time to give step-by-step directions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But today was different.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Disability, Social Class and Stigma: An Intersectional Analysis of Disabled Young People’s School Experiences

Stella Chatzitheochari and Angharad Butler-Rees, Sociology

Recent decades have witnessed a renewed interest in stigma and its effects on life-course trajectories of disabled people. However, sociological narratives largely adopt monolithic understandings of disability, neglecting contextual meanings of different impairments and conditions and their intersections with other ascriptive inequalities, which may be consequential for exposure to stigma. Our article provides an intersectional analysis of disabled young people’s lived experiences of stigma in mainstream school settings. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 35 autistic, dyslexic and/or physically disabled students, we show that stigmatisation is contingent on social class background, which affects students’ location within the school. We also find substantial variation in experiences of stigma between and within sub-categories of conditions/impairments, as a consequence of the perceived distance from normative ideals of skills and behaviour attached to individuals in school settings. Our findings highlight the importance of intersectional analyses of stigma, challenging universalised views about stigmatised disabled people.

Early Modern Maths [Audio]

Tom Johnson and Malin Hay, London Review of Books

On budget day, Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England, from the black and white squares of the ‘reckoning cloth’ to logarithmic calculating machines, as described in a new book by Jessica Marie Otis. How did the English go from seeing arithmetic as the province of tradespeople and craftsmen to valuing maths as an educational discipline? Tom and Malin consider the importance of the move from Roman to Arabic numerals in this ‘quantitative transformation’ and the uses and abuses of statistics in the period.

American Coup: Wilmington 1898 [Video]

American Experience, PBS

American Coup: Wilmington 1898 tells the little-known story of a deadly race massacre and carefully orchestrated insurrection in North Carolina’s largest city in 1898 — the only coup d’état in the history of the US. Stoking fears of “Negro Rule,” self-described white supremacists used intimidation and violence to destroy Black political and economic power and overthrow Wilmington’s democratically-elected, multi-racial government. Black residents were murdered and thousands were banished. The story of what happened in Wilmington was suppressed for decades until descendants and scholars began to investigate. Today, many of those descendants — Black and white — seek the truth about this intentionally buried history.

Democracy and the Public Interest

California schools brace for Trump’s attacks on immigrants, trans students and ‘woke’ curriculum

Carolyn Jones, Cal Matters

Education has never been a top priority of President-elect Donald Trump’s, but that doesn’t mean schools — or students — will be immune from Trump’s agenda in the next four years, education experts say. Trump may slash school funding, cut civil rights protections and gut the U.S. Department of Education, based on his previous statements and the visions outlined in the Republican platform and Project 2025, a conservative manifesto reimagining the federal government. But students may experience the most devastating effects. Trump has threatened mass deportations of undocumented residents and crackdowns on LGBTQ rights, which could lead to higher absenteeism, higher rates of bullying and greater anxiety generally on school campuses.

Despite Trump’s Win, School Vouchers Were Again Rejected by Majorities of Voters

Eli Hager and Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica

In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools. Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%. Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states. But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky.

The Woman Who Gave Today’s Book-Banning Moms a Blueprint

Katie Gaddini, Time Magazine

Book bans are skyrocketing in America, finds a new report from PEN America, a non-profit organization that champions free expression in writing. During the 2023-24 school year, over 10,000 books were banned across the country, more than double the number that were banned the prior year. Those in favor of bans argue that books depicting LGBTQ+ characters, gender diversity, sexuality, and racism are unsuitable for children. Working together, conservative pressure groups and politicians have successfully banned a historic number of books across the nation. The number is expected to increase in 2025. In July alone, Utah enacted a bill to create a “no read list” across the state, while Florida enacted a sweeping bill giving parents the power to veto books in public schools and libraries. More recently, a large county school board in Tennessee voted to ban six books from public libraries, including Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Other News of Note

Democratic Dealignment w/ Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor [Audio]

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Daniel Denvir, The Dig

Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Trump’s decisive victory, Harris’s catastrophic loss, multi-racial working-class dealignment, and where the left might go from here. 

‘Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown​’: living in dark times

Rebecca Solnit

We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act. Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons. In 2003 and early 2004, I wrote a book to make the case for hope. Hope in the Dark was, in many ways, of its moment – it was written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq. That moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defence.