Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

New State Laws Could Affect How Teachers Talk About Trump’s Indictment

Libby Stanford, Education Week

A New York grand jury’s indictment of former President Donald Trump is the latest in a series of current events that some teachers aren’t sure how to—or if they even can—bring up in the classroom. Last week, Trump became the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges, following an investigation into allegations that he paid hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his first presidential campaign in 2016. He is expected to appear in court in New York on Tuesday. The indictment is unprecedented and historic, but also highly controversial, involving a porn star, a divisive national figure, and a heated political moment. In states with laws limiting how teachers can talk about so-called divisive concepts, such as race, gender, sexuality, and politics, some educators may worry about how or if they can talk about the indictment. Eighty-six percent of educators said they would not talk about Trump’s indictment in an informal Education Week poll posted on LinkedIn that generated nearly 1,400 responses.

Uvalde students walkout to protest gun violence: ‘I’m scared of dying every day’

Kate Holland, ABC News

Students of the Uvalde Independent Consolidated School District staged a walkout on Wednesday to protest gun violence, acknowledging the 19 elementary school children and two teachers who were killed after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last May. Students said they took inspiration from students in Nashville, Tennessee, who conducted a massive walkout on Monday related to The Covenant School shooting, which left three children and three faculty members dead. That walkout has led to days of peaceful protesting at the Tennessee state house. Uvalde students gathered on the lawn inside the fences of the school, which were put up after the shooting and soon started making their way toward the perimeter.

The Flurry of Anti-Trans Legislation [Audio]

Zein Murib, No Jargon

In states across the country, a flurry of new laws are being considered, and often passed, that specifically target transgender individuals – from bills that bar access to gender-affirming healthcare for youth to legislation that bans transgender people from competing in athletics. Professor Zein Murib shared where things stand, why transgender people have become the focus of so much legislative activity, and what these laws mean for the future of the LGBTQ+ movement and American society as a whole.

Language, Culture, and Power

Adolescent Girls’ Body-Narratives: Learning to Desire and Create a “Fashionable” Image

Kimberly Oliver, Teachers College Record

This  critical  narrative  inquiry  took  place  in  an  inner  city  middle  school  in  the southeast  part  of  the  country.  The  purpose  of  the  study  was  to  explore  how  four adolescent girls constructed the meanings of their bodies. Of interest were the stories girls told about their bodies and how their stories, cultural storylines, and images of women  could  empower  and  disempower  girls  in  the  process  of  becoming  healthy women. The girls and I met 50 min twice a week for 15 weeks during their health and  physical  education  class.  Data  collection  techniques  included  25  audiotaped and transcribed group discussions, journal writing, freewriting, written stories, andmore. These girls were learning, through fashion, to desire and create a normalized image of the perfect woman. Fashion was a heuristic as they constructed the mean-ings of their bodies.

A ‘game changer’ for immigrants: Job-ready college classes in their native language

Debbie Truong, Selene Rivera, Jeong Park, LA Times

When a friend asked Andrea White Rubio if she was interested in caring for an 84-year-old man with early dementia and diabetes during the pandemic, she considered her job options. She had scrambled for months, working as a fruit vendor or going door to door selling shoes from a catalog. She agreed and, after two years on the job, found a new calling. “I have always had direct contact with people, but this time my mission was to be able to help people, many whose families cannot help,” the 50-year-old said.

As the global musical phenomenon turns 50, a hip-hop professor explains what the word ‘dope’ means to him

A.D. Carson, The Conversation

After I finished my Ph.D. in 2017, several newspaper reporters wrote about the job I’d accepted at the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of hip-hop. “A.D. Carson just scored, arguably, the dopest job ever,” one journalist wrote. The writer may not have meant it the way I read it, but the terminology was significant to me. Hip-hop’s early luminaries transformed the word’s original meanings, using it as a synonym for cool. In the 50 years since, it endures as an expression of respect and praise – and illegal substances. In that context, dope has everything to do with my work.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Meet The Activist Reimagining Climate Education [Audio]

Kathleen Davis, Science Friday

As a high school student, Sage Lenier remembers being frustrated with the way she was taught about climate change. It left her feeling helpless, contending with the gloomy predictions for a doom-filled future. Despite talking about the problems, she wasn’t learning anything about solutions.  A year later at the University of California, Berkeley, Sage took it upon herself to create the course she wished she had—one focused on solutions and hope. Nearly 2,000 students have taken her course since, and she recently founded Sustainable & Just Future, a youth-led educational non-profit. Guest host Kathleen Davis talks with Sage about her experiences, why we’ve gotten climate education all wrong, and how we need to be thinking about our future.

Corporations Are Recruiting High School Students to Help Fuel the Climate Crisis

Aina Marzia, The Nation

In October 2022, student activists at Harvard, MIT, and Brown pulled out the stops to challenge Big Oil, demanding during an Exxon recruitment event that the administrations divest from fossil fuels. “We showed up, we started to chant, and we did not allow them to give their presentation,” said Phoebe Barr, an organizer of the disruption. Barr is an activist working with Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard—one of many college organizations pushing back against unsustainable corporations’ deep influence on education. Apart from on-the-ground organizing, the group works to promote fossil-free careers and expose academic projects funded by Big Oil. For Barr, their ultimate goal is “to ban the fossil fuel industry from funding any kind of research project that could be related to climate science.”

US Surgeon General says young people are facing a mental health crisis

Connor Morris, Ideastream Public Media

The U.S. Surgeon General visited with students and healthcare providers in Cleveland today to learn more about what he called a “mental health crisis” among young people. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, joining Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb in a joint press conference Wednesday afternoon, said Cleveland students told them they were facing a lot of pressures that were negatively affecting their mental health. Bullying and the harmful effects of social media; transitioning back to in-person schooling after the pandemic-related school closures; and gun violence and other traumatic experiences that come from living in impoverished neighborhoods.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

English Learners, Students With Disabilities Blocked From Gifted Programs, Data Finds

Ileana Najarro, Education Week

English learners and students with disabilities are substantially underrepresented in gifted and talented programs, according to a new national data analysis. Specifically, English learners are an eighth as likely to be identified relative to their share of the national student population, and students with disabilities are a sixth as likely to be identified relative to their share.

Activists sue China’s education ministry over rainbow flag reprimand

Chiang Chuang-nai, Radio Free Asia

Two LGBTQ+ students from Beijing’s Tsinghua University have lodged an administrative lawsuit against China’s Ministry of Education after being harassed and threatened by the authorities over their sexuality. In May 2022, Huang and Li bought 10 rainbow flags on the auction site Taobao, and left them on a small table in a campus supermarket, with a note that read: “Please take one #PRIDE.” The pair, who asked to be identified by pseudonyms for fear of further reprisals, had already given a great deal of thought to what they knew was a highly risky action. They considered posting about the flags on social media, but they knew the authorities would be able to track them down, as they had been forced to use their real names to sign up for an account.

Women account for two-thirds of US student loan debt. Here’s how it affects them

Alia Wong, USA Today

Like most Americans, Amy Eichberger wasn’t raised by parents who could easily afford her college tuition. Her dad died before she was born, and her mom lived paycheck to paycheck. Eichberger, by her own account, wasn’t the best student in high school and struggled to get scholarships. So, she had to take out loans.  This was in the early 1990s. Tuition for the community college in her Connecticut town cost no more than a few hundred bucks a semester. But upon getting her associate’s degree and thriving in an academic setting, she decided to level up, getting her bachelor’s in public health. Then, facing lackluster job prospects, she pursued a master’s in health care administration. Eventually, she went back to school again, completing a two-year graduate program required of her current job.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

School District Mission Statements Highlight a Partisan Divide Over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in K-12 Education

Meltem Odabas and Carolina Aragão, Pew Research

In recent years, K-12 education has emerged as a political flash point in American society. Lawmakers in numerous states have proposed laws that limit what educators can say in the classroom about topics like race or gender identity – even as other states have mandated greater emphasis on these topics. And a recent Pew Research Center survey found widespread partisan divisions in the topics that parents of K-12 students across the country believe are appropriate for children to learn about in school. A new content analysis by the Center of 1,314 mission statements from public school districts across the country finds these same themes playing out in how school districts themselves describe their mission in educating students.

K-12 enrollment: Does the increase in homeless students indicate a worsening trend?

Joe Hong and Erica Yee, Cal Matters

K-12 enrollment: Does the increase in homeless students indicate a worsening trend?

As the number of unhoused students in California’s public schools continues to rise to pre-pandemic levels, experts and educators fear that today’s economy paired with the state’s unrelenting housing crisis will lead to unprecedented rates of homeless youth. According to updated data released today by the California Department of Education, there are about 5.9 million students enrolled in public schools this school year, close to 40,000 fewer students than last year or a .7% drop. But the number of students experiencing homelessness increased by 9%, about 16,000, to a total of approximately 187,000 kids. The overarching cause of homelessness among all Californians is the perennial shortage of affordable housing in the state, according to Angela James, a researcher at UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools.

Does California’s landmark school funding formula need 10th year makeover?

John Fensterwald, Ed Source

Two legal advocacy groups that have bird-dogged districts’ spending for a decade under the state’s education funding formula are calling for significant changes they say are vital for students the law is intended to serve. They join Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is also urging a big expansion of the Local Control Funding Formula on its 10th anniversary, including more funding for high-poverty schools. In pursuit of more equitable and transparent spending, both would broaden districts’ reporting requirements.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Schools should be shaped with help from the people they serve

Jason Glass and Tom Flanagan, Hechinger Report

Here’s how decisions about schools are usually made: The same insiders call the shots behind closed doors, year after year. They make judgments about families and children based on limited data, rarely speaking to anyone directly. They write “strategic plans” that no one reads. Or, worse, they let politics prevail. These bad habits result in schools that don’t match the needs or wants of the students, families and communities they serve. Bad leadership habits create divisions and breed distrust. They are the reason that waves of politically motivated policies and initiatives keep pounding schools but never effect real change. As top education officials in Kentucky and Burlington, Vermont, we said: enough.

Grief and tangled politics were at the heart of Kentucky’s fight over new trans law [AUDIO]

Divya Karthikeyan, NPR

Kentucky state Sen. Karen Berg had to deal with the most devastating thing a mother could imagine. In December last year, Berg’s transgender son Henry Berg-Brosseau died by suicide. He was just 24 and a prominent LGBTQ rights activist who inspired his mother to run for office. As Berg thumbs through pages of her son’s work, she finds the last piece of writing he left, one that foreshadowed a new law in his home state of Kentucky.

The culture wars are driving teachers from the classroom. Two campaigns are trying to help

Javeria Salman, Hechinger Report

When Willie Carver Jr. won Kentucky’s 2022 Teacher of the Year award, he had no plans to leave the profession he was so passionate about. But a few months later, in June of last year, Carver suddenly announced he was departing his position as a high school teacher because of the constant discrimination and threats he said he faced as an openly gay man.  “I never had an easy time teaching. I was a gay man in the rural south,” Carver said. “But I felt called to do it, because I know that students need to see people who look like them, who come from where they come from.”

Other News of Note

I Received Death Threats for Protesting Against Racism in High School — But I Never Stopped Fighting

Zulaikha Patel, Global Citizen

I am a 20-year-old South African anti-racism activist and the founder and CEO of a non-profit organisation called Dare to Change, which was founded in 2022. Our focus is on empowering youth and children using education, literacy, and activism as tools to change the world around them. We focus on increasing the literacy rates, and building a culture of reading. Our program called Reading to Change the World focuses on building library corners in schools that don’t have libraries. The library corners house a selection of books by African Black authors only, so that the children can read stories that they’re able to relate to from a representation perspective, and be empowered by seeing stories written by them, for them, and about them. The reason I chose to focus on books and to place a direct emphasis on literacy in South Africa is because in my work, I’ve realised that a big part of fighting racism deals with the mind — and the only way to unlock and liberate the mind is through access to knowledge.

Margot Stern Strom, Anti-Bigotry Educator, Dies at 81

Richard Sandomir, New York Times

Margot Stern Strom, a former schoolteacher who in the mid-1970s turned her dismay over her lack of knowledge about the Holocaust into a nonprofit educational organization that develops anti-hate curriculums for teenagers, died on Tuesday at her home in Brookline, Mass. She was 81. Her daughter, Rachel Fan Stern Strom, said the cause was pancreatic cancer. Ms. Strom was teaching seventh- and eighth-grade language arts and social studies at the Runkle School in Brookline in 1975 when she and a colleague, Bill Parsons, attended a workshop on the Holocaust. It was an unsettling experience, which made them realize how little they knew about the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. She and Mr. Parsons, she was quoted as recalling on the website of Facing History & Ourselves, the organization they went on to found, felt that they had been “victims of the silence on the Holocaust.”