Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

To Build Working-Class Power, We Need a Workers’ Education Movement

Daniel Judt, The Nation

In December of 1936, a day into their historic sit-down strike at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, autoworkers set up a school. Surrounded by idle machines, freed from the foreman’s gaze, they took classes in public speaking and labor journalism, in political economy, in the history of the labor movement. This was not a spontaneous idea. Some of the key players in the strikes—the education director and several rank-and-file organizers in the nascent United Auto Workers (UAW), as well as its future president, Walter Reuther, and his brother, Roy—had spent time at Brookwood Labor College, a small independent school for workers who wanted to radicalize the labor movement.A century ago, labor colleges transformed American unions. It’s time to bring them back.

California is giving schools more homework: Build housing for teachers

Carolyn Jones, CalMatters

In a flurry of recent legislation and initiatives, California officials are pushing school districts to convert their surplus property into housing for teachers, school staff and even students and families. Some districts have already started; now the state wants every district to become a landlord. “I believe that California has enough resources and ingenuity to solve (the housing shortage), and the data shows that California’s schools have the land to make this happen,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said at a press conference in July. “As school leaders, we can get this done for our communities and restore the California Dream.”

But some superintendents and education analysts are skeptical, saying the idea won’t work everywhere and school districts might be better off focusing on education, not real estate development.

Project 2025 and education: A lot of bad ideas, some more actionable than others

Rachel M. Perera, Jon Valant, and Katharine Meyer, Brookings

Project 2025 outlines a radical policy agenda that would dramatically reshape the federal government. The report was spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and represents the policy aims of a large coalition of conservative activists. While former President Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, many of the report’s authors worked in the previous Trump administration and could return for a second round. Trump, himself, said in 2022, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” In other words, Project 2025 warrants a close look, even if the Trump campaign would like Americans to avert their gaze.

Language, Culture, and Power

Republican states challenge Biden effort to extend Obamacare coverage to DACA recipients

Tami Luhby Devan Cole, CNN

A coalition of 15 Republican-led states sued the Biden administration Thursday in an effort to stop the federal government from opening up Obamacare to immigrants who were brought to the US illegally as children. President Joe Biden announced in May that recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, will be eligible for coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, as well as federal subsidies, starting November 1. More than 100,000 recipients could gain health insurance, the White House said. Republicans, including those on the campaign trail, have criticized the administration for extending services to undocumented immigrants.

Milwaukee Public Schools looking at ways to reduce student suspensions [Audio]

Corrinne Hess, Wisconsin Public Radio

There were nearly 24,000 suspensions in Milwaukee Public Schools during the last school year, with Black students making up 78 percent of the suspension events. That’s compared to just 3 percent of suspensions for white students, according to data recently presented to an MPS committee. Just under 50 percent of the district’s 67,495 students are Black. Nine percent are white.  About 14 percent of the students suspended last school year were Hispanic. Hispanic students make up about 28 percent of the district’s population. Jon Jagemann, district discipline manager, said Black students are still being suspended at a much higher rate than the district would like to see, but there has been some positive movement.

Students divided after returning to schools with Confederate names restored

Rebecca Hartmann, BBC News

Briana Brown and A.D. Carter are starting their senior year of high school in Shenandoah County on Tuesday. Mr Carter, 17, plays football, he’s on the swim team and is hoping for a soccer scholarship to college next year. Miss Brown, 17, loves taking part in musicals and dressing up for homecoming week. But their pride ends when it comes to the school’s name – Stonewall Jackson High School, named after a prominent Confederate general in America’s Civil War. The school bore that name from 1960 until July 2021, following a 2020 school board vote to change the name to Mountain View High School, amid the racial reckoning that swept the nation after the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man.

But just four years later, the school board reversed its decision, changing back to the original name honouring the Confederate general.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

How Extreme Heat Is Threatening Education Progress Worldwide

Somini Sengupta, New York Times

The continued burning of fossil fuels is closing schools around the world for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and threatening to undermine one of the greatest global gains of recent decades: children’s education. It’s a glimpse into one of the starkest divides of climate change. Children today are living through many more abnormally hot days in their lifetimes than their grandparents, according to data released Wednesday by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund. Consider the scale of some recent school closures. Pakistan closed schools for half its students, that’s 26 million children, for a full week in May, when temperatures were projected to soar to more than 40 degrees Celsius. Bangladesh shuttered schools for half its students during an April heat wave, affecting 33 million children. So too South Sudan in April. The Philippines ordered school closures for two days, when heat reached what the country’s meteorological department called “danger” levels.

How greener schoolyards benefit kids — and the whole community

Claire Elise Thompson, Grist

When Lois Brink’s kids were in elementary school, she remembers being struck by how uninviting their schoolyard was. She described it as “scorched earth” — little more than a dirt field coated in “I don’t know how many decades of weed retardant” and some aging play equipment. But Brink, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Colorado Denver, didn’t just see a problem. She saw fertile ground for a solution. Over the next dozen years, she helped lead a transformation of nearly 100 elementary school grounds across Denver into more vibrant, greener spaces, dubbed “Learning Landscapes.” Public schools alone cover about 2 million acres of land in the U.S. Although comprehensive data is hard to come by, the “scorched earth” that Brink witnessed is the norm in many places — according to the Trust for Public Land, around 36 percent of the nation’s public school students attend school in what would be considered a heat island. And as with green spaces writ large, a dearth of schoolyard trees and other vegetation tends to be most common in lower-income areas and Black and brown neighborhoods.

How the Boston Teachers Union Is Inspiring Change

By Mira Brown, Betsy Drinan, Jack Elliott-Higgins, Irischa Valentin, American Educator

The Boston Teachers Union (BTU) Climate Justice Committee is a small but powerful group of educators fighting for a just transition to a green economy and striving to help themselves, their students, and their communities reverse the climate emergency. We sat down with four current and former Boston teachers—Mira Brown, Betsy Drinan, Jack Elliott-Higgins, and Irischa Valentin—to learn how they became climate activists and why they find their union to be an effective vehicle for pursuing their passion.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

From Brooklyn to Ghana: Why this Brownsville English teacher takes his students across the globe

Amy Zimmer, Chalkbeat

It’s an experience he continues to hold onto, and it has shaped his approach at Frederick Douglass Academy VII High School, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where’s taught English the past 17 years. Jordan makes sure his students get a chance to travel — and not just to museums across New York City. His students travel around the globe. In 2016, Jordan took his students to Spain. He followed with trips to Japan, South Africa, and Hawaii. Later this month, he’s taking students to Ghana. They plan to spend 10 days in the capital city of Accra and the surrounding areas.

“The 14 scholars and four chaperones in our group are all of African descent; we are following our roots back to where they lead us,” Jordan said. “For anyone who hasn’t heard of the Ghanaian principle of sankofa, this is it! It means ‘go back and get it,’ or that by going and exploring our heritage, we receive knowledge that will guide us forward.

As a new semester looms, students and colleges brace for more protests

Tovia Smith, NPR

To many pro-Palestinian campus activists, it was a crushing coincidence of the calendar. Just as nationwide protests over the Israel-Hamas war were coming to a crescendo, the spring semester ended and the students cleared out. The sounds of bullhorns and chanting suddenly went silent. “It was definitely very jarring,” says junior Marie Adele Grosso, a student organizer at Barnard College and Columbia University. “I wanted so badly to still be in New York. I wanted to be there organizing,” she says, “just trying not to lose that momentum.” Hundreds were arrested at the encampments, including Gross, who was taken in twice. Like many students, her criminal charges have since been dropped. And her school suspension was downgraded to probation. Now she’s among scores of students around the nation using the summer to strategize and plan for what their activism might look like in the fall.

Anti-Science Harassment Is on the Rise

Samuel Mendez, Inside HigherEd

Abortion is on the ballot in South Dakota. Insulin prices were a key issue in the June debate between Biden and Trump. The U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence a public health crisis, and the Florida governor called the declaration a pretext to “violate the Second Amendment.” In an intense presidential election year, the issue of anti-science harassment is likely to worsen. Universities must act now to mitigate the harm of online harassment. We can’t just wish away the harsh political divisions shaping anti-science harassment. Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker has logged five government efforts to restrict science research so far this year, including the Arizona State Senate passing a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds to address climate change and allow state residents to file lawsuits to enforce the prohibition.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

5 Ways the Black Panthers Shaped U.S. Schools [Audio]

Nimah Gobir, KQED

When Angela LeBlanc-Ernest first learned about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in college in the 1980s, she realized there was a lot of history missing from the textbooks she used as a K12 student. A documentarian and historian, LeBlanc-Ernest went on to author chapters about women in the Black Panther Party in two books. Some 40 years later, she said textbooks still commonly misrepresent or downplay the Panthers’ significance. Founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party was created to patrol African American neighborhoods and protect residents from police brutality. While it’s often remembered for its militancy, the party’s Ten-Point Program advocated for broader social reforms, including prison reform, voter registration drives and health clinics. Learning about the Ten-Point Program, especially point five, which demanded education that teaches people their true history, was eye-opening, said LeBlanc-Ernest. “I became curious about the Black Panther Party, which was a grassroots organization of young people primarily, who decided it was time to create a community based alternative to the poor educational experiences that they had.”

The gold medal champions of inequality

Oxfam

This summer, Oxfam launched the 2024 Inequality Games, an Olympics-inspired competition to crown top performers around the globe. But instead of honoring solidarity, respect, and fair play, our Games highlight the most greedy and shameless billionaires and corporations out there—the world champions of inequality. Like the Olympic Games, the stakes are high. A handful of men control corporations that impact millions of people globally. Seven of 10 of the world’s biggest corporations have either a billionaire CEO or billionaire as their principal shareholder. By squeezing workers, dodging taxes, and privatizing the public sector, corporations are using their power to direct profits to the super-rich. Who are these billionaires and corporations fueling Olympic levels of inequality? And which mega-billionaire has the ignoble honor of earning the all-around medal?

Why Detroit Public Schools are some of the most segregated in the country [Audio]

Robyn Vincent, WBUR

Detroit Public Schools are among some of the most segregated in the country today. As of 2022, Detroit Public Schools were 80% Black, 13% Hispanic and just 4% white. Robyn Vincent, a reporter with Chalkbeat, joins us to talk about the landmark Supreme Court case that sealed the fate of Detroit Public Schools.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Debating Public Education in North Carolina

Janie Ekere, American Prospect

When it comes to state-level races in the swing state of North Carolina, much of the focus has been on the governor’s race between Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein and Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson. Robinson is especially controversial for his opposition to abortion under any circumstance and his comments disparaging LGBTQ people. But the election for superintendent of public instruction has received much less attention, despite the potential impact on public education. The superintendent race mirrors the contest for governor. It is a classic contest between a mainstream Democrat with a strong record as an educator and a far-fringe Republican. The Democrat, Maurice “Mo” Green, was formerly general counsel of the state’s largest public school system, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and went on to serve as superintendent of Guilford County Schools. Republican Michele Morrow disparages public schools, despite obtaining her nursing degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, a public university.

Universal school vouchers rarely benefit school-aged children, yet conservatives widely support them

Andrew Fortin-Caldera, The 19th

Conservatives are pushing “school choice” as a key issue this election, with several state legislatures developing programs to divert taxpayer money intended for public K-12 schools to instead subsidize private school tuition. These programs – otherwise known as school vouchers – are touted as promoting educational equality by making private schools accessible and affordable for all students. The 2024 Republican National Convention supported “universal school choice” in every state as a means to unburden students from “political meddling” in educational environments. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee cited school choice during the gathering as “the civil rights issue of our time.” Also, Arizona in 2022 adopted the nation’s largest state-wide school voucher program which purports to benefit more than 68,000 students.

Children to be taught how to spot extremist content and fake news online

Nadeem Badshah, The Guardian

Children in England will be taught how to spot extremist content and misinformation online under planned changes to the school curriculum, the education secretary has said. Bridget Phillipson said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against “putrid conspiracy theories”. One example may include pupils analysing newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help differentiate fabricated stories from true reporting.

Other News of Note

On being a scholar/activist: Personal history and acquired wisdom

Michael W. Apple, Education Review

Requests to publicly think about what one has learned over time are always interesting to me. They require that authors reflect back on a trajectory that may not be totally clear even to the writers themselves. They ask writers to construct an historical narrative that is simultaneously both personal and intellectual/political. In this “acquired wisdom” essay, I want to engage with this combined task, to reflect on some of the political/intellectual/educational history of the development of my work over time, on some of the most important things I have learned, and on the situations and processes that made this more likely.  At the same time, I want to situate this development in some of the more personal groundings that might explain how and why the work I’ve done came about.