Just News 4.24.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Inside Linda McMahon’s effort to dismantle the Department of Education [Audio]

Dave Davies and Zach Helfand, Fresh Air

In filling out his Cabinet, President Trump has tapped some colorful characters, sometimes TV hosts and talking heads whose views appeal to him. His pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, has television experience of a different kind, talking smack in pro wrestling rings, often with her husband, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon, known for his showmanship and allegations of sexual abuse. Our guest, writer Zach Helfand, has written a profile of Linda McMahon in The New Yorker. She is no clown, he finds. She proved to be a savvy businesswoman as CEO of the family wrestling empire. And when Trump tapped her to head the Small Business Administration in his first term, Helfand writes she was a steady and effective leader. Many describe her as capable, kind and empathetic. She came to her new role with little experience in education policy but an unwavering commitment to Trump’s goal of eliminating the department altogether.

You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education

Molly Worthen, New York Times

Paige Drygas, who teaches high school English at a private school just north of Dallas, feels no pressure to make learning fun. She distinguishes between “fun” — meaning stress-free amusement — and the burden she feels to “get students engaged as much as possible. I can see it in their eye contact,” she told me. “I’m trying to get their minds going. For example, I don’t think many people would describe Emerson and Thoreau as fun.” Maybe that’s why some teachers have their students play “Walden,” a video game in which players simulate Thoreau’s solitary sojourn at Walden Pond. The game is free for teachers, but Ms. Drygas sticks to the texts. “The idea of self-reliance is really interesting. Once you engage that big idea, class moves quickly.”

The Black Teacher Pipeline Starts at HBCUs

Mary Ellen Flannery, NEA Today

“Every student has a significant moment in school,” says Tymaine Holt, who grew up in South Carolina and is now a sophomore at Claflin University, the first historically Black college and university in the state. “My significant moment was in tenth grade, when I had the first teacher who looked like me, who had hair like me, who sounded like me. I wasn’t accustomed to that.” He adds, “I’m not saying I had bad teachers up until then, … but this was different. And research shows that students, if they have somebody who looks like them, it makes a difference.” “I want to be that difference,” says Holt, an elementary education major who also serves as president of his school’s NEA Aspiring Educators chapter and sits on The South Carolina Education Association’s board of directors. 

Language, Culture, and Power

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor… The Case for Asylum in These Less Than United States 

Liz Theoharis, Tom Dispatch

In late March, I sat in the gallery of the Supreme Court for the first time in my life. Throughout my 30 years of grassroots anti-poverty work, I’ve joined countless protests and vigils outside the Court. In 2018, I was even arrested and held in detention for praying on its palatial steps. Now, I was seated with a clear view of the nine justices of the nation’s highest court. I was there as a guest of immigrant rights lawyers, as their team made oral arguments in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the most significant case on the right to asylum in decades. In February, the Kairos Center (the organization I direct) authored an interfaith amicus brief on that very case, alongside 31 denominations and organizations representing faith traditions practiced by billions worldwide.

Impact of I.C.E. immigration raids on schools [Video]

Catherine Anaya and Marisol Garcia, Arizona PBS

In this episode of “Horizonte,” we speak with Marisol Garcia, President of the Arizona Education Association, about the impact I.C.E. immigration raids are having on schools in Arizona. According to Garcia, increased immigration enforcement is causing fear among students in immigrant communities, leading to higher absenteeism and anxiety in schools. Garcia said educators report many students are struggling to focus, worried about family members being detained or deported. This decline in attendance may also impact school funding, which is tied to student presence. Garcia explained schools are working to reassure families by emphasizing safety policies and offering alternatives like online learning. Teachers and unions continue to support students emotionally and academically, striving to maintain stable learning environments despite growing uncertainty and stress affecting both students and educators.

For Women Leaving Prison, Education Can Be a Way Out

Victoria Law, Ms. Magazine

Standing at the bottom of the steps, waiting for her name to be called, Stephanie King took a deep breath. She was ready to walk across the stage at Tulane University and receive her diploma. “At that moment, I knew it was a bigger deal than I had allowed myself to believe,” she told Ms. King was 63 years old. She had spent 27 years, seven months and 24 days in prison. She had never attended a graduation ceremony outside a corrections facility. As a teenager, she dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant. It would be 13 years before she obtained her high school diploma—and that was in jail. “I just wanted to walk across that stage,” she says.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Climate Education Makes Economic Sense

Kathleen Rogers, The Progressive

In January 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Education Act, which framed the issue of environmental protection not only as a matter of regulation, but also of education. A year later, in his 1971 environmental message to Congress, Nixon emphasized that building a better environment would require “a citizenry that is both deeply concerned and fully informed.” Half a century later, as we near the fifty-sixth anniversary of the first Earth Day, that lesson may be more urgent than ever. Throughout modern history, education has been an economic strategy. Industrialists at the turn of the nineteenth century demanded mandatory education. They needed a generation of workers who could read and write. They needed managers who helped them innovate. They wanted to compete. The same was true of the space and computer revolutions.

California schools are on the frontline of climate impacts

Andra Yeghoian, EdCal

Across California, school leaders are increasingly confronting the impacts of climate and environmental conditions on their campuses. California’s TK-12 schools sit at the epicenter of two converging realities: outdated school facilities and accelerating environmental and climate challenges. Climate hazards — extreme heat, wildfire smoke, severe storms, and flooding — are increasingly disrupting learning, harming student health, and straining school facilities. These impacts have already begun to show up in student attendance, cognition, and learning outcomes. At the same time, most school buildings are outdated and environmentally unsustainable, contributing to environmental burdens and failing to provide equitable access to safe and healthy spaces for students and educators to learn, play, and work.

Citing Child Cancer Risk, Lawsuit Targets Trump EPA Over Glyphosate

Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams

Just days before the US Supreme Court is set to hear arguments related to glyphosate’s health risks, the Environmental Working Group on Tuesday sued the Trump administration for unlawfully delaying its response to an EWG petition seeking stronger restrictions on “the most widely used herbicide in the United States and globally.” The filing at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit calls out the US Environmental Protection Agency for failing to act on evidence that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, “is exposing infants and young children to harmful levels through everyday foods.”

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Head Start programs face funding squeeze

Jennifer Smith, News from the States

When Rickencia Clerveaux McClean’s son was around 18 months old, she noticed he wasn’t speaking the way she expected. He pointed instead of asking. He struggled with food textures. McClean looked ahead at his future in public school with some dread. Fortunately, she said, there was an opening at Head Start at Action for Boston Community Development in Dorchester – the same program her younger sister had attended years before. Now her son is three, eating applesauce with his classmates and using his words. “I feel like ABCD helped him navigate first before he was able to go to a public school,” said McClean, whose 2-year-old daughter is enrolled there, too. “That’s the best pathway for any kid who’s having a difficult time on their own.” McClean, 27, is a student at Roxbury Community College working on the requisite classes for the nursing program. Head Start, she said, is what makes that possible. She is among the lucky ones these days.

Yale Has Come Up With a Surefire Way to Make a Terrible Situation Worse

Michael Roth, New York Times

Yale University’s report on how to restore public confidence in America’s colleges and universities is full of smart and sensible recommendations. That’s not surprising when one sees the smart and sensible faculty who wrote it, led by the scholars Beverly Gage and Julia Adams. Among the suggestions: Reinforce the academic core of the university; don’t allow classes to be dominated by open laptops or other devices; do more to ensure that people do not self-censor; respect the ideals of free speech and academic freedom; “be human.” Although the committee doesn’t go so far as to say that nepotism in admissions should be eliminated (it asks only that it be reduced), it does suggest that Yale try to make its educational offerings free for a larger percentage of the population. Who would disagree?

Editors’ Statement on the Palestine Exception: Reflections on the Silencing of Palestinian Scholarship in the Harvard Educational Review

Editors, Harvard Educational Review

For centuries, Jerusalem stood as the site of a flourishing intellectual, economic, and cultural hub—deemed an Islamic waqf, or place of refuge, in 1193. It is hard to imagine, then, what was lost in the destruction wrought by the Six-Day War. On June 6, 1967, the Israeli Army captured the Old City quarter. By June 10 the demolition team arrived, giving all residents three hours to clear out their belongings. And by June 12 the entire neighborhood was emptied, the homes razed, and the lands flattened. Within six days, a large part of the neighborhood’s eight hundred years of history was decimated. The Old City was once a pious site of worship for both Jews and Muslims; an intellectual frontier in legal, philosophical, and religious studies; fertile grounds for farming; a birthplace of rich Maghrebi artisanship; and the vivacious social and economic center of Jerusalem; today a plaza now serves as a venue for swearing in Israeli soldiers and as a place of worship for Jewish pilgrims. Historian Simone Ricca notes that “this erasure was not only physical, but one of memory as well.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Why the Rich Should Get Free Public Childcare Too

Meagan Day, Jacobin

Late last month, the New York Times highlighted what might be considered a weakness in Zohran Mamdani’s universal free childcare plan: the rich will get to use it too. The article, titled “They Pay $34 for Burgers. Should Their Child Care Be Free?,” enumerated the consumerist excesses of a tony Upper East Side neighborhood slated to receive a daycare center, then questioned whether a city facing a budget crisis “should be using taxpayer money to fund free services that some families could pay for themselves.” Its author, Eliza Shapiro, presented a range of perspectives, to her credit, including the view that progressive taxation already addresses any potential unfairness. Mamdani’s childcare centers will be tax-funded, and income taxes rise with household tax brackets, so wealthier Upper East Siders are already paying more for public programs. The article also acknowledges that not everyone in the neighborhood is wealthy, and that the center will also serve residents of less affluent areas like Roosevelt Island and parts of Chinatown.

Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Scandinavia and the United States

Jens-Peter Thomsen, Stefan Bastholm Andrade, Florian R. Hertel, Max Thaning,and Øyvind Nicolay Wiborg, Sociology of Education

Intergenerational educational mobility reflects a welfare state’s ability to provide citizens with opportunities to climb the social ladder. Representing two distinct welfare state types, studies have contrasted mobility patterns in Scandinavia and the United States but have provided no consistent answer as to who achieves the highest level of intergenerational educational mobility. We conduct a meticulous examination of intergenerational educational mobility in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United States for cohorts born between 1958 and 1987 using comparable operationalizations and methods and the best available data (administrative data in Scandinavia and eight surveys in the United States). We focus on methods that capture relative mobility. Across models, we find that inequality in Scandinavia is 20 percent to 30 percent lower than in the United States. 

Trump administration delays rule aimed at improving disability access in schools

Jonaki Mehta, NPR

Public colleges, K-12 schools, local governments and other public institutions will have an extra year to make their digital materials fully accessible for people with disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Many institutions had been racing, for at least two years, toward a deadline that was originally set for this Friday to comply with new federal accessibility guidelines updating the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was a day disability rights advocates had been eagerly awaiting. But just four days ahead of the deadline, the Justice Department overrode the original rule and said public entities serving 50,000 or more people will now have until April 26, 2027. Smaller public institutions will have until that date in 2028.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Cost of Culturally Divisive Conflict on US K-12 Public Schools

John Rogers, Rachel White, Robert Shand & Joseph Kahne, Peabody Journal of Education

This article examines the prevalence of culturally divisive conflict in U.S. public schools during the 2023–2024 school year as well as the costs that school districts incurred responding to such conflict. Our analysis of culturally divisive conflict centers on community-level attacks challenging: (1) teaching about issues of race and racism; (2) rights and protections for LGBTQ+ students; and (3) student access to a full range of books. These attacks frequently spread misinformation, adopted violent rhetoric, and engaged in threatening behavior. Drawing on data from a national survey of superintendents (n = 467) we administered in summer 2024, we compare the costs incurred by districts with low, moderate, and high levels of culturally divisive conflict.

Book bans and attempted bans remain at record highs, with ‘Sold’ topping the list

Hillel Italie, AP News

Book bans and attempted bans remain at record highs, according to the American Library Association. And efforts to have titles removed have never been more coordinated or politicized.

The ALA on Monday issued its annual list of the books most challenged at the country’s libraries, part of the association’s State of America’s Libraries Report. Patricia McCormick’s “Sold,” a 2006 novel about sex trafficking in India, topped the list for 2025. Others targeted include Stephen Chbosky’s high school novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer” and Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy favorite “Empire of Storms.” The ALA usually features 10 books, but this year has 11, with four tied for eighth place: Anthony Burgess’ dystopian classic “A Clockwork Orange,” Ellen Hopkins’ sibling drama “Identical,” John Green’s boarding school narrative “Looking for Alaska” and Jennifer L. Armentrout’s paranormal romance “Storm and Fury.”

Here’s why this Colorado teacher gives out pocket copies of the U.S. Constitution

Ann Schimke, Chalkbeat

Sam Westerdale, a civics and government teacher at Aurora’s Rangeview High School, has a master’s degree in political science. But she’s not afraid to admit what she doesn’t know. “I try to demonstrate that fragility is natural in the learning process, and it shouldn’t be seen as weak, but rather, as being curious in wanting to understand or learn more.” Westerdale spends a lot of her summers attending workshops to improve her craft. For example, learning how to teach the concept, “stare decisis,” a Latin term for the legal doctrine that says courts should honor historical precedents when they decide similar cases.

Other News of Note

In Sudan’s mountains, wartime orphans are raised to be peacemakers

Sophie Neiman, Christian Science Monitor

In a dusty courtyard between sepia-colored mountain slopes, bright-eyed children in gray uniforms sing about respecting God and their elders. Their voices are high and clear, but the littlest struggle to clap along in time. This is Our Father’s Cleft, a school and children’s home in the Nuba Mountains, a vast range spanning some 30,000 square miles in the borderland area between the conflict-racked countries of Sudan and South Sudan. Large numbers of children began arriving at Our Father’s Cleft after Sudan’s third civil war erupted in April 2023 – a testament to how many families have been torn apart as the fighting has spawned the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Director Ezekiel Ayub, who applauds the singers on this hot February day, works with his staff to provide shelter, education, and care to the children.