Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Nashville student activists not willing to wait a generation for gun control

Liz Willen, Hechinger Report

Activism has been part of Safiyah Suara’s young life since her politician mother hauled her along to demonstrations in a baby carrier. That’s why she’ll be spending this week protesting guns and the expulsion from the Tennessee House of two Democratic lawmakers by their Republican colleagues. She’s hoping more young Tennesseans will join her. “The most important thing is to keep speaking out, and to show the legislature and the rest of the world that we won’t stop fighting,” said Safiyah, an 18-year-old senior at Hume-Fogg, a magnet high school just a few blocks from the state capitol.

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson’s win reflects local and national shifts on education

Becky Vevea, Chalkbeat Chicago

The direction of public education in Chicago changed last week, when voters elected a teachers union organizer and former middle school teacher to be the city’s next mayor over a former schools chief and education consultant. Brandon Johnson, 47, clinched victory with 52% of the vote over Paul Vallas, 69, and will be sworn in as mayor on May 15. He comes to the job with more experience in public education than most, if not all, previous mayors.

Tax Avoidance Continues to Fuel School Privatization Efforts

Carl Davis, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

One of the most disturbing recent shifts in U.S. public policy has been the renewed push to privatize the nation’s K-12 education system. Originally born out of a desire to preserve school segregation and racial inequality more broadly, the so-called “school choice” movement is enjoying a resurgence as many state lawmakers look for ways to move more kids into private and religious schools. That end is being hastened through the tax code in major ways. In short, school privatization proponents have managed to set up state policies that harness deficiencies in federal tax law and the self-interest of wealthy families to gin up enthusiasm for privatizing the U.S. public education system. State voucher tax credits are among the most significant tools eroding the public education system and propping up private schools. These policies are on the books in 21 states and proposals to create or expand them are being discussed this year in places like Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Texas.

Language, Culture, and Power

States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

Lourdes Medrano, The Nation

When the debate over teaching race-related concepts in public schools reached Kimberly Tilsen-Brave Heart’s home state of South Dakota, she decided she couldn’t in good conscience send her youngest daughter to kindergarten at a local public school. “I knew that the public school system would not benefit my child without the important and critical history and culture of Indigenous people being taught,” said Tilsen-Brave Heart, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Tilsen-Brave Heart worried that her 5-year-old daughter, Pia, would be exposed to even fewer lessons taught through a cultural lens than her older siblings had been, robbing her of an educational experience that would foster a sense of belonging and self-identity. “I want my children to know who they are,” said Tilsen-Brave Heart. “I want them to know their language, their culture, where they come from — to be proud of their ethnicity and their history and their culture.”

New Indian textbooks purged of nation’s Muslim history

Anumita Kaur, Washington Post

The Taj Mahal is one of India’s most iconic sites. But this year, millions of students across India won’t delve into the Mughal Empire that constructed it. Instead, Indian students have new textbooks that have been purged of details on the nation’s Muslim history, its caste discrimination and more, in what critics say warps the country’s rich history in an attempt to further Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.

Preventing online radicalization and extremism in boys: A conversation with Pasha Dashtgard

Kathleen Vail, Phi Delta Kappan

Misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate made news headlines recently when a series of Twitter exchanges with environmentalist Greta Thunberg appeared to land him in a Romanian jail. Those news stories were the first time many Americans became aware of Tate. However, according to a February article in Education Week, teachers are seeing an increase in misogynistic remarks among preteen and teenage boys, which can be attributed to exposure to extremist social media influencers like Tate and others. Boys don’t stumble into this toxic online world by accident. Male supremacist groups target boys and young men through popular social media platforms like Twitch and Discord, according to Pasha Dashtgard, who studies online extremism.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

11 Middle Grade Titles to Share with Budding Activists for Earth Day

School Library Journal Reviews

From a fictional tale about saving orangutans and rainforests to a real-life story about a biological conservation mission to the lost city of the jaguar, hand these 11 titles to tweens who care about the environment and want to help any way they can.

How the war in Ukraine has forever changed the children in one kindergarten class [AUDIO]

Elissa Nadworny & Claire Harbage, NPR

In the city of Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine, there is a kindergarten classroom with bright yellow and green walls and long, gauzy curtains. It’s filled with toys and books. The lockers — purple, green and yellow with name tags on the front: Sofiia, Daniel, Bohdan — are still filled with children’s belongings: shoes, backpacks and a drawing of a snowman. But these days, there are no children.

Conflict in eastern DR Congo forces thousands of schools to close

Al Jazeera

Thomas Tumusifu Buregeya wishes he were studying for his final school exams. Instead, he scrapes a living doing odd jobs in a displaced people’s camp in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo after a wave of rebel violence upended his life yet again. Buregeya fled the town of Kibumba with his family in October amid a renewed offensive by the March 23 Movement (M23) rebel group – the third time in 15 years he has been forced to escape his home – and has not been able to study for a whole year. He is now 22 and still waiting to complete school.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

What parents should know about transitional kindergarten

Karen D’Souza, Ed Source

Declining school enrollment seems to be a fact of life in California’s TK-12 system. However, one of the few bright spots in the picture is kindergarten enrollment, including TK, or transitional kindergarten, which altogether rose nearly 26,000 to 496,000 students over the past year. It is now the biggest cohort among all the grades. And yet even there, the numbers fall short of projections. State officials had predicted the average daily attendance of students in TK would be 120,000 but as of the first half of the year, it was only 91,000, according to reports filed at the California Department of Education. That’s about 29,000 less than projected in TK. It used to serve only the children who just missed the kindergarten cutoff, but transitional kindergarten now is being gradually expanded to reach all the state’s 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year.

Rutgers University faculty members are striking over a contract dispute

Ayana Archie and Joe Hernandez, NPR

Three faculty unions representing around 9,000 workers at Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, went on strike Monday morning. The three labor organizations — the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents part-time lecturers; the AAUP-AFT, which represents full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and counselors; and the AAUP-BHSNJ, which represents faculty in the health and sciences departments — announced the strike on Sunday. It is the first time Rutgers University faculty has ever gone on strike throughout the institution’s 250-year history, according to WHYY.

Graduate Workers at Stanford University Are Organizing a Union

Tania Flores, EM Horst, Sara Wexler, Jacobin

Joining a wave of graduate student unionization efforts in higher education, grad workers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, are seeking to form a union. The union drive comes in the wake of successful union votes among grad students at a number of other prestigious private universities this year, including Yale, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins. That unionization wave has taken place amid a broader climate of militancy in higher ed: nine thousand faculty members at Rutgers University are now striking, months after a successful faculty walkout at the New School in New York City and a historic 48,000-strong academic worker strike in the University of California system. Last week, Jacobin’s Sara Wexler sat down with two worker-organizers with the Stanford Solidarity Network to discuss their organizing effort and what they hope to achieve with a union.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Who’s Afraid of Integration? A Lot of People, Actually

Thomas Edsall, New York Times

In 1999, Robert D. Potter, a federal judge who was a protégé of Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, ordered the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district to abandon the busing-for-desegregation program that had integrated its public school system for three decades. Potter declared that the school district had “eliminated, to the extent practicable, the vestiges of past discrimination in the traditional areas of school operations.” In fact, when Potter’s order was carried out in the summer of 2002, both Black and white students were abruptly transferred from integrated schools to neighborhood schools with much higher levels of segregation. His ruling set in motion what social scientists call a natural experiment — the opportunity to determine who wins and who loses in response to changes in public policy — and what the consequences are.

Why so many kids with autism get expelled from preschool [AUDIO]

Deepa Fernandes & Gabrielle Healy, WBUR

A new study finds that about one in six kids with autism are expelled from preschool and daycare. Dr. Jan Blacher co-authored the study, and says getting expelled can have severe consequences for kids and their families. “It is serious and it’s very sobering when you think about it,” Blacher says. “These little 3-year-old kids already have a record, if you will.” Study data from 2017 says 250 children are expelled or suspended from preschool per day, at much higher rates than their K-12 counterparts.

Schools Are Confronting Centuries of Racial Injustice. Will They Offer Reparations?

Mark Lieberman, Education Week

Cainan Townsend’s father started 1st grade at 11 years old, and graduated from high school at 22. This wasn’t by choice. The schools that served Black students in Farmville, Va., where Townsend’s family has lived for generations, shut down between 1959 and 1964. They were engaging in what’s now known as Massive Resistance, protesting the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision that mandated the end of racially segregated public schools nationwide. Four decades later, in the early 2000s, the state of Virginia opened a $2 million scholarship fund for Townsend and his fellow Prince Edward County classmates to pay for new academic pursuits. Last month, the state extended the program’s eligibility to anyone in the state who lost access to school during Massive Resistance, and to include descendants of those affected.

Democracy and the Public Interest

What’s Behind the State Takeover of Houston’s Schools

Jeff Bryant, The Progressive

On March 15, Texas officials announced plans to take over Houston’s public schools—the largest school system in the Lone Star State and the eighth largest in the nation. The takeover will put Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath in charge of Houston schools, the school board will be stripped of its authority, and a board of managers appointed by Morath will call the shots. Morath will also get to appoint a new superintendent. This decision has enormous implications, not just for the students and parents that rely on the schools, but for the entire community. Houston Independent School District (HISD) employs about 27,000 people, more than almost all other employers in the city, save Walmart. Nearly three-quarters of the district’s annual budget of $2.2 billion comes from property taxes that local businesses and households pay. And given that school quality is a major factor in determining property values and where families and employers nationwide decide to move or start a business, state takeover of Houston’s schools will remove public input from most, if not all, decisions that affect schools, including closures, personnel, budget allocations, and charter school expansions.

What Albania taught our reporter about media literacy [AUDIO]

Zaidee Stavely, Carolyn Jones, and Ashley Smith, Education Beat Podcast

What’s the best way to teach media literacy? How does a society build and maintain a free press that can earn and keep the people’s trust? EdSource reporter, Carolyn Jones, recently visited Albania on a mission to help develop the country’s K-12 media literacy guidelines. Her experience there highlighted challenges both in that country and back here at home.

Teaching Cooperative Intelligence, for a Solidarity Economy

Evan Casper-Futterman, Non Profit Quarterly

How do you support people from different walks of life to initiate or continue a learning journey about the theory and practice of a democratic economy—an economy in which ownership is widely shared and in which workers and community stakeholders have a direct say in the decisions that manage our collective resources. This question was front of mind when, in February 2020, right before the COVID lockdown began, the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, co-hosted an “innovation encuentro.” The meeting brought visitors from Mondragón, the famed Spanish worker co-op network that employs 80,000 people, into dialogue with the local Bronx community, cooperative, and elected leaders for a conversation about cooperation and economic democracy.

Other News of Note

Letter from Birmingham City Jail

Martin Luther King Jr. April 16, 1963

Listen to Dr. King read his letter.

My Dear Fellow Clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here. But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.