Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The Trump Administration’s War on Children

Eli Hager, ProPublica

The clear-cutting across the federal government under President Donald Trump has been dramatic, with mass terminations, the suspension of decades-old programs and the neutering of entire agencies. But this spectacle has obscured a series of moves by the administration that could profoundly harm some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S.: children. Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

Against Trump, For the Common Good: What Chicago Teachers Won in Their Latest Contract

Kari Lydersen, In These Times

Last week, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) membership voted overwhelmingly to approve a new contract following nearly a year of negotiations that were at times contentious with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The four-year contract represents a direct rebuke to the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom and immigrants, enshrining protections that the union began fighting for months before President Trump was elected. The agreement is also a prime example of the labor strategy of bargaining for the ​“common good,” with provisions that help not only specific union members in the workplace but the broader community as a whole, at a time when such measures are especially crucial.

A vision for greener schools: How unions are leading the charge for climate justice in the United States

Adrienne Coles, Education International

Climate change is a pressing global issue, yet achieving international consensus on enforceable action remains a significant challenge. In the United States, climate policy is often dictated by the political party in power at the federal level, leading to inconsistent progress. Given the current political landscape, substantial federal action on climate change appears unlikely. As a result, meaningful climate initiatives are increasingly being pursued at the state and local levels, where policies can be implemented more effectively. Notably, unions are emerging as key players in the fight for climate justice, using their collective power to push for a greener, more resilient future. As human-driven climate change fuels more extreme weather—heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires—public schools are feeling the impact. 

Language, Culture, and Power

California leaders must keep their promise by funding ethnic studies

Christine Sleeter, EdSource

Decades of institutionalized racism and inadequate funding have left California with a racial achievement gap in its schools. All of our students deserve the chance to learn and succeed, but all too often, students of color have been failed by an education system that still bears the marks of a long history of racism and inequality. To address this persistent structural problem, Gov. Gavin Newsom has allocated funding that will be directed toward the poorest schools, to be used specifically to help all student groups improve academic achievement in this year’s proposed budget. The governor did not, however, explicitly allocate funding to support Assembly Bill 101, the mandate that all public high schools offer an ethnic studies course in the 2025-26 school year and require all students to complete a one-semester ethnic studies course for graduation, beginning with the school year 2029-30. The lack of explicit funding has emboldened opponents of ethnic studies education, who now argue that the ethnic studies requirement must be delayed or withdrawn.

Democratic lawmakers want to restore federal office that serves English learners

Samantha Smylie, Chalkbeat

A top Illinois congressman is calling on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to reverse recent changes to the U.S. Department of Education office that provides support to over 5 million English learners nationwide. In a letter sent Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García from Illinois, along with Democratic Reps. Juan Vargas of California, and Grace Meng and Adriano Espaillat of New York, called the recent firings of nearly all staff in the department’s Office of English Language Acquisition and the department’s plan to merge the department with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education “an outright attack” on English learners. The “reduction in force” happened in March when the Education Department announced it was cutting staff by half. The letter also called the abrupt change to the office “legally dubious” since the office was created by statute.

Youth, Interrupted? Young Adults, Time and the Future During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Cécile Van de Veldehttp, Caroline Hardy, Stephanie Boudreaul3, Julie Richard, and Krystal Tennessee, Sociological Research Online

This article analyses how the pandemic reshapes young adults’ relationships with time and the future. While youth sociology has already highlighted the significant disruption of young adults’ daily temporalities, we emphasize the need to further explore young adults’ relationship with the « future » and its evolution in times of crisis. Using a life course perspective, we explore how the health crisis has affected not only the immediate time experiences of young adults but also their aspirations and their future outlook. Drawing on 48 life stories of young adults from various social backgrounds in Canada (Quebec and Ontario), we show that the pandemic represents a “shock of uncertainty” for all, necessitating rapid readjustments in one’s trajectory.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Teachers, States Stepping Up to Keep Climate Change Education Alive as Federal Government Defunds It

Anya Kamenetez, The Hechinger Report

This past fall, at an event in New York City’s National Museum of the American Indian, a packed room of educators and federal employees applauded the release of a document titled “Climate Literacy: Essential Principles for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change.” The 52-page document, released at Climate Week NYC, laid out principles for improving young people’s understanding of the science, skills and aptitudes required to address this fast-moving global challenge — including “hope” and “urgency.” Frank Niepold of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) told The Hechinger Report at the time that he hoped it would be widely adopted by states and even internationally. “We’re not just talking to classroom teachers,” he said. “This is for every kind of educator, every kind of communicator and all the decision makers.” In April, the Trump administration defunded the lead federal program that put out the guide, the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Many of the other agencies that worked on it, including NOAA, have also been decimated by staffing cuts. And the guide itself has been taken down from its government URL, leaving nothing but an error message.

Australia’s student strikers for climate believed they could change their future. Where are they now?

Aston Brown, The Guardian

On a stinking hot November day, seven years ago, Grace Vegesana and a handful of other young climate activists set up a small stage in a large square in Sydney’s CBD – and waited. Inspired by the first school striker for climate, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the high school students decided to organise their own rally. Vegesana expected a hundred people to show up. Five thousand came. “It was like, oh my God, we’ve unleashed some kind of beast, people want more,” she recalls. In the months afterwards crowds doubled and then tripled. A year later, the devastation of Australia’s black summer bushfires collided with a conservative government that was perceived to be failing to act. It was, as Vegesana says, “a tinderbox of fury”, which on 20 September 2019 was set alight: An estimated 300,000 people attended hundreds of rallies across Australia in what were probably the largest public demonstrations since the marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

If You Think the School Lunch Battle is New — Go to Philadelphia

Shannon Eblen, New York Times

Surrounded by a group of 10th graders, Alex Asal, a museum educator at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, read aloud from three school lunch menus. She asked the students to raise their hands for which sounded best. One menu had options such as pizza, Caribbean rice salad and fresh apples. Another had grilled cheese, tomato soup and green beans. The third featured creamed beef on toast and creamed salmon with a roll. That menu — which did prompt a few raised hands — was from 1914, Asal revealed. A century ago, butter and cream were considered as vital as fruits and vegetables are today because the concern was less about what children ate than whether they ate enough at all.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Head Start was the lifeline I needed — and that 800,000 children still need

Stephanie V. McKee-Anderson, MSNBC

I am not supposed to be here. Born a 6-pound, 7-ounce Black girl in 1967 at Crosby Memorial Hospital in Picayune, Mississippi, the odds were stacked against me from the beginning. Mississippi had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the nation at 35.3 deaths per 1,000 live births that year. And the rate that year for nonwhite infants like me was 47.4 per 1,000 live births. A small fraction of Black people born a generation or so ahead of me made it to the end of high school. Based on when and where I was born, my current success is something of a miracle.

What made the difference in my life? Early Head Start, which President Lyndon B. Johnson launched in 1965 as part of his “War on Poverty.” In my case, Head Start wasn’t just an educational program, but a lifeline. It operated out of the church annex of the Pilgrim Bound Baptist Church in Picayune, where three generations of my family had been active members. At that Head Start, my great aunts and my grandmother helped create a haven where genuine learning flourished and where we received hot meals each day.

US universities’ faculty unite to defend academic freedom after Trump’s attacks

Maya Yang, The Guardian

Faculty members from US universities – including public ones which do not receive endowments – are banding together in attempts to resist the Donald Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedoms. This month, Indiana University’s Bloomington faculty council followed in the footsteps of Rutgers University in passing a resolution to establish a pact with all 18 universities under the Big 10 academic alliance to defend academic freedoms. The resolution comes as a result of “recent and escalating politically motivated actions by governmental bodies [which] pose a significant threat to the foundational principles of American higher education including the autonomy of university governance, the integrity of scientific research, and the protection of free speech”.

What to know as the government begins collections on defaulted student debt

Rachel Treisman, NPR

The Trump administration says it will soon resume collections on defaulted student loans for the first time in five years, raising questions and anxieties for millions of borrowers across the country. The Department of Education announced Monday that its office of Federal Student Aid will resume collections on May 5, meaning it can start taking funds out of borrowers’ tax refunds, Social Security benefits and — eventually — wages. “Together, these actions will move the federal student loan portfolio back into repayment, which benefits borrowers and taxpayers alike,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said. The change will affect 5.3 million borrowers who went into default before the pandemic, according to the Education Department.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Inequity of Opt-in Educational Resources and an Intervention to increase Equitable Access

Carly D. Robinson, Biraj Bisht, and Susanna Loeb, Educational Researcher

Billions of dollars are invested in opt-in educational resources to support struggling students. Yet there is no guarantee these students will use these resources. We report results from a school system’s implementation of on-demand tutoring. The take-up was low. At baseline, only 19% of students ever accessed the platform, and low-performing students were even less likely to log in. We conducted a randomized controlled trial (N = 4,763) testing behaviorally informed messages directed at students and/or their parents to increase participation. Communications to students alone had no impact, whereas those to parents and students together increased usage by 46%. We found suggestive evidence that receiving these communications led to a four-percentage point decrease in course failures. Nonetheless, take-up remained low, highlighting that opt-in resources may increase—instead of reduce—inequality. Without targeted outreach, opt-in educational resources are unlikely to reach many students who could benefit.

Education Department cuts threaten summer learning programs

Avery Lotz, Axios

Uncertainty over Education Department funding won’t go on vacation when the school year ends because the cuts also threaten vital summer learning programs. Summer learning programs are essential for kids and working parents alike because federally-funded programs offer enrichment, academic support, social interaction and basic needs, like access to healthy food. “For every child that’s in a program, there’s a parent of at least one more that wants their kid to be in a program, but they don’t have access,” Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant said.

Her group anticipates an “an even larger shortage of summer learning.” Organizers are “very uncertain and anxious” about hosting summer programs while facing upheaval at the Education Department and broad spending cuts, Grant said. While the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program — a critical funding stream that supports summer, afterschool and before-school programs — remains intact, the first Trump administration repeatedly pushed to eliminate it.

Wayne Township schools ends diverse-business policy following Trump guidance

Carley Lanich, Chalkbeat Indiana

Wayne Township’s school board voted unanimously last week to repeal the westside district’s policy incentivizing “minority and local business participation.” It comes in response to federal officials’ recent instructions to remove references to race in school admissions, hiring and scholarship decisions, or face a loss of funding. “The word minority right now is a hot button,” Superintendent Jeff Butts said during an April 14 board work session explaining the proposed policy change. “We’re trying to eliminate lightning rod terminology without eliminating being rational and reasonable in what we’re trying to do.” The decision comes at a time when the Trump administration’s calls for the removal of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have pushed some schools to minimize the presence of certain programs.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Supreme Court’s “Don’t Say Gay” argument went disastrously for public schools

Ian Millhiser, Vox

Three years ago, Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters for use in public school classrooms. Not much else is known about these books, how they have been used, when they were used in lessons, or how teachers plan to use them in the future. These questions have come before lower courts, but the Supreme Court decided to hear a case — Mahmoud v. Taylor, brought by conservative Muslim and Christian parents who find these books objectionable — before these lower courts had a chance to sort out whether anyone’s constitutional rights have actually been violated. Despite all this uncertainty, all six of the Supreme Court’s Republicans appeared absolutely convinced, during an oral argument on Tuesday, that the Montgomery County school district violated the Constitution, and that it must do more to protect parents who object to these books on religious grounds.

To Combat Trump’s Attacks on Public Education, We Need Democracy in Our Unions

Lois Weiner, Truthout

As May Day approaches, two grassroots organizations of education workers, one created in response to neoliberal reforms and the other emerging from the strike wave that swept several red states in 2018, are coalescing to organize a rank-and-file movement of education workers. At the same time, a coalition launched by the Chicago Teachers Union, under the banner of “bargaining for the common good,” bringing together labor and community groups, is supporting a National Day of Action on May 1, providing tool kits and online trainings for activists. This moment of action from both the independent rank-and-file movement of teachers and the National Day of Action network (MayDay Strong) is welcome as Trump’s unconstitutional dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education  has grabbed headlines and sparked widespread protest, putting education in the political spotlight.

The global assault on universities is an attack on democracy

Salvador Santino Regilme, Nature

Universities across the world are facing an intensifying wave of political interference, financial disinvestment and ideological attacks. These range from Hungary’s expulsion of the Central European University from the country in 2019 to ongoing funding threats from the US government against institutions such as Columbia University in New York City. As an academic who has worked in the United States, the Philippines and the Netherlands, I have observed at first hand the growing fragility of academic freedom across a range of democratic contexts. Today, even in the Netherlands — a country long seen as a beacon of academic liberty — higher-education institutions face deep budget cuts, which erode the underlying mission of universities to serve the public. This global trend reveals a dangerous misunderstanding: education is being treated as a commodity, not as a constitutional obligation. If nations are willing to set benchmarks for gross domestic product for military spending, they should do the same for education, science and health. Universities are not luxuries; they are crucial democratic infrastructures. Their erosion signals broader democratic decay. Societies must reaffirm universities as civic institutions, not merely economic engines. The survival of democracy itself depends on it.

Other News of Note

RELIGIONS AND EDUCATION: TOWARDS A GLOBAL COMPACT ON EDUCATION (2021)

Pope Francis, The Vatican

Dear brothers and sisters: I am pleased to welcome you on this significant occasion to promote a Global Compact on Education. On this World Teachers’ Day instituted by UNESCO, we, as representatives of different religious traditions, wish to express our closeness and gratitude to teachers, and at the same time our concern for education. Two years ago, on 12 September 2019, I appealed to all those engaged in various ways in the field of education to “dialogue on how we are shaping the future of our planet and the need to employ the talents of all, since all change requires an educational process aimed at developing a new universal solidarity and a more welcoming society” (Message for the Launch of the Compact on Education). For this reason, I promoted the initiative of a Global Compact on Education in order “to rekindle our dedication for and with young people, renewing our passion for a more open and inclusive education, including patient listening, constructive dialogue and better mutual understanding”. I invited everyone “to unite our efforts in a broad educational alliance, to form mature individuals capable of overcoming division and antagonism, and to restore the fabric of relationships for the sake of a more fraternal humanity”.  If we desire a more fraternal world, we need to educate young people “to acknowledge, appreciate and love each person, regardless of physical proximity, regardless of where he or she was born or lives.”