Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The Story of One Child Living in Gaza [Audio]

Rob Schmitz, Anas Baba, Greg Dixon, NPR

As Israel’s war against Hamas continues, children in Gaza are suffering. According to the United Nations, more than 25,000 children have been killed or injured since October. That’s one child every ten minutes. We hear about one of those children, a twelve year-old boy injured in Gaza.

Schools try to balance freedom of speech and security during student protests [AUDIO]

Sequoia Carrillo, NPR

Schools weigh freedom of speech and safety risks as nationwide protests pop up on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Biden Administration Releases Revised Title IX Rules

Zach Montague and Erica L. Green, New York Times

The Biden administration issued new rules on Friday cementing protections for L.G.B.T.Q. students under federal law and reversing a number of Trump-era policies that dictated how schools should respond to cases of alleged sexual misconduct in K-12 schools and college campuses. The new rules, which take effect on Aug. 1, effectively broadened the scope of Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. They extend the law’s reach to prohibit discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and widen the range of sexual harassment complaints that schools will be responsible for investigating.

Language, Culture, and Power

Without Expanded DACA Protections, Undocumented Students Are Being Left Behind

Lajward Zahra, The Nation

At age 15, Luis came to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico. Today, he’s a 22-year-old senior at Rice University, studying math and planning to go to graduate school next fall. His grandparents are US citizens, and his mom has applied for a green card. Since Luis was brought into the US as a minor, you might think he qualifies for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which shields young adults who arrived in the US as children from being deported, offering them work authorization along with temporary and renewable legal status. “I checked all the boxes, except for one,” said Luis, “which is that you have to have been here since 2007.”

Undocumented students at U.S. public schools targeted by efforts to overturn Supreme Court case [AUDIO]

WBUR

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, is launching a strategy to overturn a landmark Supreme Court decision that protects the right of undocumented students to attend public school.

Norwalk 3rd grader wins national essay contest: ‘Being bilingual is my superpower’

Kalleen Rose Ozanic, The Hour

Just two years after immigrating to the United States with her family, a Silvermine Dual Language Magnet School third grader won a national essay contest — while writing in her second language. Reisli Sofia Maldonado Quintero, 8, submitted an essay to the National Association For Bilingual Education for its 2024 “Being Bilingual” Student Essay Contest last fall. She was among the younger students to enter in the contest’s third through fifth grade category. She was honored at a Board of Education meeting last month with her family, teachers and Silvermine Principal Yesenia Paredes in attendance.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

New Guidelines Limit Added Sugars in School Meals for the First Time

Jonel Aleccia, Time Magazine

The nation’s school meals will get a makeover under new nutrition standards that limit added sugars for the first time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday. The final rule also trims sodium in kids’ meals, although not by the 30% first proposed in 2023. And it continues to allow flavored milks — such as chocolate milk — with less sugar, rather than adopting an option that would have offered only unflavored milk to the youngest kids. The aim is to improve nutrition and align with U.S. dietary guidelines in the program that provides breakfasts to more than 15 million students and lunches to nearly 30 million students every day at a cost of about $22.6 billion per year.

Spurred by Teen Girls, States Move to Ban Deepfake Nudes

Natasha Singer, NY Times

Caroline Mullet, a ninth grader at Issaquah High School near Seattle, went to her first homecoming dance last fall, a James Bond-themed bash with blackjack tables attended by hundreds of girls dressed up in party frocks. A few weeks later, she and other female students learned that a male classmate was circulating fake nude images of girls who had attended the dance, sexually explicit pictures that he had fabricated using an artificial intelligence app designed to automatically “strip” clothed photos of real girls and women. Ms. Mullet, 15, alerted her father, Mark, a Democratic Washington State senator.

Birdie’s Bookmobile spreads joy of reading to Detroit children

Eleanore Catolico, Chalkbeat Detroit

Inside classroom 148, a gleeful Alyce Hartman was telling the tale of three musicians: a squirrel cradling a guitar, a grizzly bear plucking a bass, and a chicken strumming a banjo. Hartman’s voice rippled like a wave as she read the picture book “I’m Sticking with You-and the Chicken Too!” by Smriti Prasadam-Halls, an author of South Indian heritage. Twenty-five second graders at Voyageur Academy sat on the floor listening, invested in the plot with every turn of the page. In the end, the talking animals formed a friendship. “We make our own music. We’ve nothing to prove. We do our own thing, and find our own groove,” read Hartman, like the storyteller her mother and the gauntlet of children’s theater taught her to be.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

California is rolling out free preschool. That hasn’t solved challenges around child care

Cheyanne Mumphrey, AP News

A year before I-Ting Quinn’s son was old enough for kindergarten, she and her husband had the option to enroll him in “transitional kindergarten,” a program offered for free by California elementary schools for some 4-year-olds. Instead, they kept their son, Ethan, in a private day care center in Concord, California, at a cost of $400 a week. Transitional kindergarten’s academic emphasis was appealing, but Ethan would have been in a half-day program, and options for afterschool child care were limited. And for two parents with hectic work schedules in the hospitality industry, there was the convenience of having Ethan and his younger brother at the same day care, with a single stop for morning drop-off and evening pickup.

Paying for College: How Do Students’ Views Differ by Social Class?

NEPC

Money means different things to different people in different contexts. A recent study explores this reality as it pertains to paying for higher education. An article about the study, which was conducted by Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley of Baylor University, Ashli Duncan-Buchanan of The University of Texas at Austin, Eliza Epstein of The University of Texas at Austin, NEPC Fellow Huriya Jabbar of the University of Southern California, and Lauren Schudde of The University of Texas at Austin, was published in October in the peer-reviewed journal, Education Policy Analysis Archives. The researchers drew upon interviews with 56 Texas community college students who had indicated they planned to transfer to a four-year school in the next 12 months. The students’ socioeconomic backgrounds varied, ranging from working-class and lower-middle-class students whose parents typically did not have college degrees to upper-middle-class students whose parents had typically graduated from four-year schools.

UC Pledged To Let Undocumented Students Get Jobs, Then Changed Course. What Happened, And What’s Next [Audio]

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, LAist

State policymakers and the leaders of the state’s marquee public university system have each expressed support in recent months for opening campus jobs to students who are undocumented.

But conflict over how to create such a policy — and not end up in a legal battle with the federal government — has set the stage for a power struggle. It started when the University of California regents approved a groundbreaking proposal nearly a year ago to open campus jobs to their undocumented students. Then, in January, they voted against opening those jobs.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Oral History Offers a Model for How Schools Can Introduce Students to Complex Topics

Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week

As historian David McCullough said, history is the study of who we are and why we are the way we are. That’s why teachers in the Memphis-Shelby County public schools, as racially isolated now as they were when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, have launched a curriculum to introduce their students to the 13 children who helped integrate these Tennessee city schools in 1961. Memphis-Shelby County teachers, researchers from the University of Memphis, and the local Memphis 13 Foundation worked with seven of the 10 surviving members of the Memphis 13—a group of Black 1st graders who peacefully enrolled in four all-white schools at the height of the civil rights era—to develop teacher training, lesson plans, and oral history activities for elementary students.

Gifted and Talented Programs Benefit White Students Disproportionately

Tracie McMillan, Teen Vogue

I still remember the the first time I heard about “gifted” kids. I was fifteen, and taking part in a summer program for “gifted” Michigan high school students. Most of my classmates in the program had been “gifted” their whole lives. It was my first time, though. I went to school in a rural, low-income district without the funding to run gifted programs. Being gifted, I figured, usually took money—and I was proud to have earned that title without it. I thought about that a lot when I began reporting the story of two millennial sisters, who I call Lindsey and Maryann, from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I went there to study how the re-segregation of America’s public schools, which began in the late 1980s, played out by the 2010s. I was shocked to find a holdover pattern of segregation alive and well: The school’s gifted and talented program.

Chicago’s low-income families of students with disabilities eligible for new $500 grants

Reema Amin, Chalkbeat Chicago

The city of Chicago is using pandemic relief money to offer $500 grants to students with disabilities who come from low-income families, Mayor Brandon Johnson announced Tuesday. Families need to apply for the one-time grants, which will be awarded to up to 8,000 people. The Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities is partnering with Ada S. McKinley Community Services to distribute $5 million through the new Diverse Learners Recovery Fund, supported by American Rescue Plan dollars, which the federal government distributed to help cities and states recover from the pandemic. Chicago received nearly $1.9 billion in those funds, which must be allocated for spending by December 2024, according to the city.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Chicago student group hosts ‘peace talk’ forums for conversations on Israel and Gaza

Lyndsay Eanet, Chalkbeat Chicago

“When you think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what feelings come up?” A dozen Lincoln Park High School students, most of them Jewish or Arab American, pondered the questions and attempted to sum up months of intense emotion in just one word. The students wrote their answers on a piece of paper, which they crumpled into a ball and tossed into a bowl. Then they took turns reading each other’s emotions. Nearly all had written the same words. Angry. Frustrated. “We broke down those emotions,” said Intisar Alkhatib, a student organizer at Lincoln Park, describing the scene on March 22.

Schools and democracy, Art dependence, Right to repair [Audio]

Central Time, Wisconsin Public Radio

Schools and democracy, Art dependence, Right to repair

Wisconsin and the nation have seen heated confrontations at school board meetings over high-profile issues in recent years. The authors of a new book say there’s a better way for schools and their communities to interact–by bringing the public into the decision-making process more and earlier. They make the case for an “Open System” for schools.

Buenos Aires: Thousands protest against education cuts

BBC

Argentina’s President, Javier Milei, came to office in 2023 after vowing to take a chainsaw to public spending. He’s tried to justify the cuts by calling state-run universities centres of socialist indoctrination. But top universities are struggling, with one warning that it could be forced to shut down. Ricardo Gelpi, rector of the University of Buenos Aires, says that the institution may have to close within three months unless it receives more funding. The right-wing government has kept university funding this year at the same level as in 2023, despite inflation reducing the real value of the budget by as much as 80%.

Other News of Note

Columbia’s 1968 protests were also marked by arrests

Maham Javaid, Washington Post

At first, the protest at Columbia University had a “carnivalesque quality,” with a student band playing music and balloons floating about as the university was brought to a shutdown. But as the week drew on, tensions rose. A dean was briefly taken hostage. Students protested the United States’ role in Vietnam and university policies they considered racist. They seized five buildings, according to the student publication Barnard Magazine. Water, electricity and telephone lines were cut off from the buildings. Early on the morning of April 30, 1968, about 1,000 officers from the New York City Tactical Patrol Force, called in by Columbia President Grayson L. Kirk, poured onto the campus.

Illusions of Safety:  On freedom from policing

Mariame Kaba, The Baffler

We’re in the midst of yet another bipartisan crime panic. Democratic mayors in San Francisco, Chicago, D.C., Atlanta, and New York City are loudly demanding “law and order” while President Joe Biden calls for one hundred thousand more police officers on the streets. On the right, Republicans stoke conspiracy theories about a border crisis in which immigrants are flooding the nation with drugs, diseases, and, of course, crime. Across the political spectrum, lawmakers urge us to be afraid of strangers, of our neighbors, and of each other. The drumbeat of fear is hyperbolic and manipulative. It’s effective, though, because most of the people who live in the United States do not feel safe most of the time. By all reasonable measures, ours is a violent and dangerous society.