Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Trump’s Tax Bill Will Starve Public Schools

Becky Pringle, Time

Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.

COVID-19 vaccines for kids are mired in uncertainty amid conflicting federal guidance

David Higgins, The Conversation

It’s August, and parents and caregivers are frantically preparing their kids for a new school year by buying supplies, filling out forms and meeting teachers. This year, many parents also face a question that’s more complicated than usual: Should my child get an updated COVID-19 vaccine, and will I even have that choice? For some, that decision may have already been made by chaotic federal policy, just as COVID-19 cases are rising nationwide. As a pediatrician and researcher who studies vaccine delivery and health policy, I am hearing uncertainty from both parents and health care providers. If that describes you, you are not alone. A poll published Aug. 1, 2025, by the health policy organization KFF found half of parents are unsure whether federal health agencies are recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children this fall.

Back to school gears up: Will immigrant children be there?

Jackie Valley, Christian Science Monitor

Amid stepped-up immigration enforcement activity nationwide, how many children will actually head back to school this year? That’s the question weighing on school district leaders across the United States who are deploying resources and launching messaging campaigns to ease concerns among immigrant families and encourage daily student attendance. In Los Angeles, where immigration raids and protests put residents on edge this summer, local and school district leaders gathered in a show of unity on Monday to outline their approach.

Language, Culture, and Power

At a Bronx school for immigrants, an undocumented teen fights for an education under Trump

Michael Elsen-Rooney, Chalkbeat

In the hours after one of his students was apprehended by federal immigration agents, Hedin Bernard was on the phone nearly nonstop. He’d comforted the student’s mother. He’d called advocates and lawyers. And in the moments in between, the school counselor had agonized over how he would tell his other students at ELLIS Preparatory Academy that Dylan Lopez Contreras, a first-year student from Venezuela, had been detained. He was particularly worried about telling one student. Bridget, an 18-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant, was a friend of Dylan’s, close enough that he shared arepas with her at lunch. Bernard knew that Bridget and her mother, Marta, were dreading their own upcoming court date and immigration check-in, and word of Dylan’s arrest would get out soon. He wanted Bridget to hear it from him.

A coach detained. A friend gone. As kids confront immigration realities, they’re learning to stand up 

Kate Sequiera, Los Angeles Times

The scene at the dais in Riverside’s City Council chambers looked a bit different on a recent Monday morning: Instead of men and women in business attire, children wearing navy blue T-shirts emblazoned with vibrant orange and yellow butterfly wings occupied the swivel chairs. The children were participating in a mock council meeting as part of a summer leadership program run by TODEC, a legal center serving immigrants and farmworkers in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley. The organization brought kids from across Coachella Valley and nearby cities to the Riverside City Council to give them hands-on learning experience on civic engagement and culture. The annual field trip had a different tone this year, however, as immigration enforcement raids have swept their communities. Since June, the children have witnessed friends self-deport with their families, learned a local youth soccer coach was detained and have seen their own undocumented family members change daily routines in fear. 

US museums are finally going bilingual: here’s why it matters

Julia Halperin, The Art Newspaper

It has never been easier to find bad news about US museums (or anything else in the world, for that matter). Attendance is down, federal grants are disappearing, self-censorship is on the rise. Efforts to address equity and accessibility are losing momentum. Morale is low. But at a moment when so many problems facing US art institutions feel intractable, there is at least one area where they have made, and continue to make, substantive progress: language access. No, it is not particularly sexy. But it is significant. Over the past decade, more museums have successfully integrated translations—primarily, but not exclusively, from English to Spanish—into wall texts, websites, wayfinding, catalogues and video captions. Forty-three million people, or almost 14% of the country’s population, speak Spanish at home. For museums eager to attract new audiences, that number represents a big opportunity.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Anti-abortion lawmakers push to get fetal development education in public schools

Sarah Butrymowicz, Teen Vogue

Last August, Republican Rep. Gino Bulso looked out at a room filled with dozens of fellow state lawmakers as he touted new legislation he had just helped become a reality in Tennessee. Under the law, a fetal ultrasound or a video of a computer-animated fetus developing in the womb had become mandatory viewing for students in the state’s sex education classes. Bulso was there at the request of the event’s host, anti-abortion advocacy nonprofit Live Action. The group had gathered legislators from across the country to provide them “with the policy information and persuasion strategies they need to end abortion,” according to its annual report.

Illinois Could Downgrade Arts Education

Brandon Malave, The American Prospect

It’s been five years since Illinois became the first state in the country to put the arts on the same footing as math and science as vital features of a public school education. But the progress toward educational equity and access is at risk due to the uncertainty surrounding whether the arts will stay on the same plane as those subjects, as the state rethinks how to measure the factors that go into a top-tier education. The Illinois State Board of Education plans to move to a new model that will completely eliminate a system that used numerical values to rate school performance. Known as “weighted indicators,” these values helped the state assess how well a school is meeting the needs of its students, whether through academic indicators like test scores and grade point averages or meta-indicators like college and career readiness.

Adding bus stops, serving biscuits and gravy, and catching butterflies: How schools are tackling absenteeism

Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

Chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10 percent or more of the school year, is 50 percent higher across the nation than before the pandemic. Researchers say it’s difficult for schools to address the problem because it is both so intense, with students missing huge chunks of the school year, and so extensive, affecting both rich and poor students and even high achievers. And the reasons vary widely, from asthma and bullying to transportation problems and the feeling that school is boring.

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Access, Assessment, Advancement

Ms. Rachel on Gaza: “My Deep Care for Children Doesn’t Stop at Any Border” [Video]

Democracy Now!

We speak with Rachel Griffin Accurso, the educator known to millions around the world as Ms. Rachel, who has become a leading advocate for children in Gaza. Her YouTube channel for young children became wildly popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and today has more than 16 million subscribers. Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, Accurso has used her social media reach to speak out for Palestinian children facing hunger, disease, injury and death. She has been hailed as the heir to Mister Rogers, the legendary PBS children’s entertainer who also used his position in families’ living rooms to speak out on social issues. “I see all children as precious and equal. My deep care for children doesn’t stop at any border,” Accurso tells Democracy Now! in a wide-ranging interview. 

Fearing deportation, international students go silent at California’s universities

Emewodesh Eshete, CalMatters

International college students are learning that speech isn’t as free as they thought in the United States. After President Donald Trump began his second term, hundreds of international students lost their student status as part of an executive order cracking down on immigration and alleged antisemitism. While lawsuits resulted in many of those students having their status reinstated since April, the uncertainty of it happening again has created fear among international students, particularly within the University of California system, where international students make up 13.6% of student enrollment as of Fall 2024. Some international students told CalMatters they have changed their involvement in campus activities, from the routes they take on campus to avoid free speech areas, to the topics they include in their research projects, to scrubbing their social media posts and limiting their political activism. 

Judge orders Trump administration to partially restore UCLA research funding

Eric He, Politico

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to restore some of the funding it cut from the University of California, Los Angeles in late July, handing a partial victory to the UC system as it faces a $1 billion settlement demand from the White House over alleged antisemitism on campus. It was not immediately clear how much money would be returned to the campus. The ruling is only expected to apply to around 300 grants from the National Science Foundation out of the roughly 800 awards the Trump administration suspended, totaling $584 million, from the NSF, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Hard work or inherited (mis)fortune? Young people’s future in an unequal world

Aini Gauhar, London School of Economics Blogs

In precolonial southern California, a person’s death was followed by the death of their wealth. Clothes, riches and other possessions passed to dust, not the next of kin. Parts of Europe in the Late Bronze Age saw similar funerary practices. Jewellery, metals and artwork were placed on the pyre with the deceased, denied to any lovers, siblings or children. The intentions behind these customs may be hidden from us, but their effect was the same, with material wealth removed from circulation and familial inheritance restrained. At least on an economic level, children from these places likely had similar lots in life, and their experience of wealth was no doubt tied to mortality – to an end. In Britain today, this concept seems unthinkable. Wealth outlives us all. There are thousands of billionaires globally, and all of them under 30 have inherited their wealth.

Trump Administration Scraps Research Into Health Disparities

Roni Caryn Rabin and Irena Hwang, New York Times

The federal government has for decades invested vigorously in research aimed at narrowing the health gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups, pouring billions of dollars into understanding why minority and low-income Americans have shorter lives and suffer higher rates of illnesses like cancer and heart disease.Spending on so-called health disparities rose even during the Trump administration’s first term. But in its second, much of the funding has come to a sudden halt. Following a series of executive orders prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion policies at every level of the federal government, the National Institutes of Health this year began terminating initiatives that officials said smacked of identity politics and offered dubious benefits.

‘Our children are dying’ – rare footage shows plight of civilians in besieged Sudan city

Barbara Plett Usher, BBC

The women at the community kitchen in the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher are sitting in huddles of desperation. “Our children are dying before our eyes,” one of them tells the BBC.

“We don’t know what to do. They are innocent. They have nothing to do with the army or [its paramilitary rival] the Rapid Support Forces. Our suffering is worse than what you can imagine.” Food is so scarce in el-Fasher that prices have soared to the point where money that used to cover a week’s worth of meals can now buy only one. International aid organisations have condemned the “calculated use of starvation as a weapon of war”.

Democracy and the Public Interest

A Republic, if They Can Force It

Timothy Messer-Kruse, History News Network

Amidst the widespread fallout from the 2024 presidential election, it hardly registered as news when Alabama’s state education board proposed new social studies standards for the first time in 14 years. In a moment when red states were rushing to ban “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts,” Alabama’s new guidelines for K-12 education were praised by Democratic members of the State Board of Education and aroused little public criticism. Few observers seemed to realize that profoundly undemocratic language was buried in the fine print. The state’s undermining of the fundamental principles of American government are first visible in the introduction to the 2024 Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies.

Teachers confused over how to meet state law requiring Ten Commandments in classrooms

Avni Trivedi, Dallas Morning News

A new law requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every Texas classroom, but some North Texas teachers are confused about how the legislation will be implemented. Public schools must clearly display a 16-by-20-inch poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom with text that can be read by anyone inside the room who has average vision, according to Senate Bill 10, which goes into effect Sept. 1.The Next Generation Action Network Legal Advocacy Fund and several faith leaders have sued to block the law from being implemented, arguing SB 10 violates the First Amendment. The lawsuit lists Dallas, DeSoto and Lancaster independent school districts as well as Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath as defendants.

Am I making any difference? A California civics teacher’s response to a civic education poll

Juan Resendez, EdSource

Recently, EdSource reported that 67% of Californians believe that public schools should prioritize civic education, according to a poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California. As a civics teacher in California for the past 17 years, I would have loved that percentage to be 100%, but it was good to read that a supermajority of folks in my state value what I do. In our current political and media climate, robust civics education is an important antidote to the rising problems of misinformation, polarization, political dysfunction and uncivil discourse. Survey after survey shows that many Americans lack a basic understanding of civics. According to a 2024 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey, most Americans can only name one right guaranteed by the First Amendment, while about 36% of Americans cannot name all three branches of government, and only about half of American adults can identify which party controls each house of Congress.

Other News of Note

Building an Opposition to Survive the Trump Era

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope

Americans roundly oppose Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime and the miserable state of the country. While the president claims that he has a mandate on “mass deportations,” 62 percent of the public opposes his draconian immigration policies. Outraged people in liberal and conservative towns and cities nationwide have come together to defend their neighbors from the terror of abductions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of adults blame Trump for the rising costs of groceries — a signature campaign issue of his — and half say his policies are making them worse off financially. But given the scale of the onslaught, there is a sense that people aren’t resisting enough.