Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Harvard Historian Responds to Trump’s Order Targeting the Smithsonian [Video]

Michel Martin and Tiya Miles, Amanpour and Company

Trump is targeting the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum complex, with an executive order designed to eradicate what he calls “a divisive, race-centered ideology” at the institution. Civil rights groups are hitting back, saying Trump is “whitewashing” America’s complex and troubled past. Award-winning author and Harvard professor Tiya Miles joins the show to reflect on what this might mean for the future of the United States.

Trump education department threatens federal school funding nationwide over DEI

Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

The U.S. Department of Education is giving state education agencies 10 days to certify that their schools do not engage in any practices that the administration believes illegally promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a letter sent Thursday, the Education Department told state schools chiefs that they must sign a certification that their schools are in compliance with its controversial interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Those that do not sign will not receive any federal funding, officials said. Federal funding represents about 10% of all K-12 funding nationwide but makes up a larger share of local budgets in high-poverty districts. The threat comes as many school districts are preparing their budgets for the next school year.

What Nina Simone Teaches 1st and 2nd Graders About Making Change

Cristina Paul, Olivia Lozano, and Nancy Villalta, Rethinking Schools

On the carpet, children listened intently for more than a minute as Nina Simone played the piano before beginning to sing in a video of her 1976 performance of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” When she heard Simone sing “I wish I could be like a bird in the sky. How sweet it would be if I found I could fly,” Kaylee inhaled audibly. She leaned over and whispered to Sienna: “’Cause the bird’s free and that’s what she wants for everyone.”  At the end of the song, Gia smiled and said “Al final de la canción dice que se siente free. [At the end of the song, she says she feels free.]”  Matsumi gesticulated with strong hands and a loud voice, imitating Simone’s powerful finale. “Ella es muy fuerte al final y usa su voz para estar free. [She’s very strong at the end and uses her voice to be free.]”

Language, Culture, and Power

School Surveillance Systems Threaten Student Privacy, New Knight Institute Lawsuit Alleges

Jennifer Jones, TeenVogue

What happens when the era of AI-powered surveillance coincides with an authoritarian assault on public education? The transparency needed to answer that question does not exist, which is why the Knight First Amendment Institute, where I work, has filed a lawsuit seeking information about how one school district uses surveillance systems to monitor student laptops. It is estimated that millions of children — nearly half of K-12 students across the nation, according to a recent New York Times report —are subject to digital surveillance systems that can potentially monitor every word or phrase they type on school-issued laptops, tablets, and software. These software systems, supplied to school districts by private education technology companies like GoGuardian, Gaggle, and Lightspeed, scan students’ communications, internet searches, and assignments, searching for keywords or phrases that may indicate cyberbullying, thoughts of self-harm, or thoughts of harming others. If a student uses a certain word or phrase deemed inappropriate by the vendor or the school district using the technology, administrators are notified and, in some instances, police get involved. 

Kenya Key uses restorative justice to improve mental health outcomes for youth in custody

Efua Andoh, American Psychological Association

Restorative justice is a powerful tool for transforming mental health for justice-involved youth, says Kenya Key, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and Certified Correctional Health Professional–Mental Health in Washington, D.C. As deputy director of health services for the city’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, Key is responsible for the behavioral health service delivery system and a restorative justice program for more than 150 youth in custody. Key leads a team that brings critical services to justice-involved youth, many of whom receive acute psychiatric care. Their restorative justice approach promotes healing, accountability, and long-term resolution between victims, offenders, and community members.

“Safety” and “Protection” as Shared Grievances and Oblique Identification in Educational Organizations

Uriel Serrano and Andrea Del Carmen Vazquez, Educational Researcher

How are carcerality and antiblackness embedded in educational organizations? Racial upheaval in 2020 started conversations and created opportunities to understand how carcerality and antiblackness are entangled. This article draws on participant observations from two large research projects in California—one in an urban context and the other in an agricultural landscape—to provide a symptomatic reading of responses to demands to defund school police in 2020. Our findings show how “safety” and “protection” were shared grievances that countered demands to defund school police in one context and oblique identifications with blackness in another. We conclude with recommendations for researchers and practitioners who want to attend to the anti-Black logics that make and remake educational carcerality.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

How schools can help students facing homelessness get to class

Betty Márquez Rosales, Ed Source

A quiet place to complete homework, free and stable transportation options, and not immediately being penalized for missed work are among the things that Te’yana Brown said could have helped her as she faced homelessness at different points between elementary and high school. Instead, Brown spent most mornings trying to figure out how to get to her high school. Sometimes, a family member could drive her the 45 minutes to an hour to school, while on other days she took the bus. She missed so much school at one point that she was deemed chronically absent, meaning she’d missed at least 10% of the school year. “I think they knew periodically because I would always have absences or I would always be tardy, but I don’t think they were really concerned because, either way, I usually got my work done,” Brown responded in a recent interview to a question about whether her school knew she was experiencing homelessness. “I guess they didn’t really want to make me feel bad about it, but I wish they would have provided a little bit more resources.”

California not backing down on trans student privacy — despite Trump’s threat to yank funding

Carolyn Jones, CalMatters

California officials said they won’t back down from a state law that protects the privacy of transgender students, despite the Trump administration’s threat today to withhold federal funding over the issue. “Our students must be safe in order to learn,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. “I have heard from so many students and families whose safety has been impacted by forced outing policies. To our LGBTQ+ youth and families, I want to make sure that you hear us as loudly as we hear you: You are heard, you are protected, and you are loved.” The U.S. Department of Education said it would investigate California for allegedly violating parents’ right to view student records under the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act, based on a new state law that prohibits schools from requiring staff to notify parents if a student identifies as transgender. 

Mexico bans junk food sales in schools in its latest salvo against child obesity

AP News

A government-sponsored junk food ban in schools across Mexico took effect on Saturday, officials said, as the country tries to tackle one of the world’s worst obesity and diabetes epidemics. The health guidelines, first published last fall, take a direct shot at salty and sweet processed products that have become a staple for generations of Mexican schoolchildren, such as sugary fruit drinks, packaged chips, artificial pork rinds and soy-encased, chili-flavored peanuts.

Announcing that the ban had become law, Mexico’s Education Ministry posted on X: “Farewell, junk food!” It encouraged parents to support the government’s crusade by cooking healthy meals for their kids.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Head Start is turning 60. The federal child care program may not make it to 61 

Anya Kamenetz, Hechinger Report

Bright morning sun is streaming through her home’s windows as Sandra Dill reads a picture book about penguins to a room full of busy toddlers. While listening, the kids blow kisses, plop in a visitor’s lap, then get up to slide down a small slide. Dill has been running a family child care business from her home for 15 years, and every one of her 13 grandchildren has spent time here — currently it’s 20-month-old Nathaniel, who has a puff of curly hair and a gooey grin. “My older ones started to call it ‘grandma school,’” she said. Another one of her granddaughters, now a teenager, is returning this summer to help out.

No need to apply: Cal State is automatically admitting high school students with good grades

Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters

More than 17,400 high school seniors last fall got the sweetest news any anxious student can get: Congratulations, because of your high school GPA, you’re automatically admitted to one of 10 California State University campuses of your choice — and they’re all relatively affordable. Even with less than a week to go before the campuses wrap their final decisions about whom to admit, a pilot program focusing on Riverside County is already showing that more students have been admitted from the county than last year, about 10,600 so far in 2025 compared to last year’s roughly 9,800.

The Fired Student-Debt Relievers

E. Tammy Kim, The New Yorker

On March 3rd, when Linda McMahon was sworn in to lead the Department of Education, she lauded its “momentous” and “historic final mission”: self-destruction. About a week later, she notified employees of a large-scale “reduction in force.” (President Donald Trump had instructed her to “do a great job and put yourself out of a job.”) Politico published an org chart that tracked the scope of the firings. Across seventeen pages, many divisions and subdivisions were shaded blood-red.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Does School Funding Matter in a Pandemic? COVID-19 Instructional Models and School Funding Adequacy

Mark Weber and Bruce D. Baker, AERA Open

The closing of schools at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 is arguably one of the most consequential events in the history of American education. A research consensus is emerging that finds that remote schooling during the 2020–2021 school year had a pronounced effect on the academic progress and mental health of students. School districts, however, varied widely in how they delivered instruction: some districts offered fully remote/virtual schooling, some were fully in-person, and some were a hybrid of the two. In addition, in response to changes in the local COVID-19 case rate or other factors, districts changed their instructional models as the year progressed. Given the consequences of these choices, understanding why school districts offered the instruction that they did is an important policy question.

Without Diversity and Inclusion Safeguards, More Black Students Risk Misclassification and Being Underserved

Quintessa Williams, Minnesota Spokesman Recorder

For years, Black parents and educators have voiced concerns about the disproportionate placement of Black students—especially boys—into special education programs, often as a punitive measure rather than a supportive one. “Behavior and disability are not the same thing,” emphasizes Georgia Flowers Lee, Vice President of United Teachers of Los Angeles and a retired special education teacher. “But too often, when a Black child exhibits behavior issues, schools rush to classify them instead of addressing the root cause.” Now, as President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon move toward dismantling the Department of Education, Black children—both with and without learning disabilities—face heightened risks of misclassification, inadequate support, and academic isolation.

What Working People’s Struggles to Survive The Great Depression Can Teach Us Today

Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times

“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. economy almost completely collapsed,” historian Dana Frank writes in her new book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? ​“By 1933, a third of all those who’d had jobs were unemployed; another third were scraping by with lesser work. Racism, far from collapsing, festered and metastasized as insecurity rippled through the country, pushing people of color even further downward… As we face our own crises today — a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, growing racism, climate change — and lie awake at night, facing our own fears, these stories from the Great Depression offer us new and often surprising insights into our own time, our own choices.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Frank about her new book and what taking a fresh look at poor and working people’s struggles in the dark 1930s can teach us about navigating our own perilous moment in history.”

Democracy and the Public Interest

A Texas School Board Cut State-Approved Textbook Chapters About Diversity. A Board Member Says Material Violated the Law

Jeremy Schwartz and Dan Keemahill, ProPublica

In 2022, conservative groups celebrated a “great victory” over “wokeified” curriculum when the Texas State Board of Education squashed proposed social studies requirements for schools that included teaching kindergartners how Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez “advocated for positive change.” Another win came a year later as the state board rejected several textbooks that some Republicans argued could promote a “radical environmental agenda” because they linked climate change to human behavior or presented what conservatives perceived to be a negative portrayal of fossil fuels. By the time the state board approved science and career-focused textbooks for use in Texas classrooms at the end of 2023, it appeared to be comfortably in sync with conservatives who had won control of local school boards across the state in recent years.

Democracy Can Be Dangerous Work: The Story of Youthbuilders Civic Education Program 1938-1948

Jessica Shiller, Democracy and Education

This article describes the work of a civic education program in New York City schools called Youthbuilders, which existed from 1938 to 1948. Youthbuilders’ aim was to engage youth in civic education projects and teach them about their place in a democracy and worked with them to support racial and social equality. Shortly after World War II, they were attacked by a conservative Catholic organization that was working to eliminate groups associated with so-called Communist beliefs like social justice and racial equality. Youthbuilders shut their doors by 1948. The story is one that helps us understand the fragility of working for democracy and race equity in times of social anxiety.

Welcome to Commie High [Review]

Pamela Annas, Radical Teacher

Welcome to Commie High is an engaging documentary film about one enduring educational experiment begun in the Free School Movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Inspired by School Without Walls and Philadelphia’s New Park School, a group of radical educators created an alternative high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan—Community High School. The film is fab, and your students in education and American history will be astonished and energized by its story. The documentary was filmed over the course of a school year as it relates through interviews with current and former students as well as current and former faculty the history of Community High School from its beginnings in 1972.

Other News of Note

Will You Put Your Body On the Line to Defend and Support Your Neighbors?

Theo Oshiro, Andrew Friedman, and Greisa Martinez Rosas, The Nation

A few weeks ago, a 10-year-old US citizen with brain cancer was deported to Mexico along with her immigrant parents. Not long after, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent lawful resident, was abducted from his home and forcibly separated from his pregnant wife, simply for exercising his First Amendment rights. In Georgia, a man was arrested as the sermon at his church came to an end, and in Chicago ICE took another man into custody right after his wife dropped their child off at school. These cruel and widespread kidnappings are an affront to professed American values. Amid this shock-and-awe, many of us may feel helpless to stop the devastation threatening our neighbors and communities. But, history can be our guide. By following in the footsteps of students, local officials, religious leaders, and community members who have refused to cooperate with injustice, we can uphold a longstanding American tradition of nonviolent resistance.