Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The radical L.A. student newspaper that inspired a generation of activists

Doug Smith, LA Times

At 17, he was locked up in Louisiana’s infamous Angola state prison, the youngest person in America on death row. She was 14, a student at a Detroit high school, searching for her place in the world. “As young people, something’s going to get you,” she said, looking back over so many decades. “Something’s going to catch you. What’s going to hold your passion?” For her it was a headline on a tabloid newspaper being hawked outside her school by a long-haired radical from Los Angeles: “SAVE GARY’S LIFE!”

Homegrown teachers make big differences in rural school districts [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

When teachers and administrators return to their rural hometowns to work in the schools, they can make a huge impact. They understand what it’s like to live in remote areas, everybody in the community knows them and they often stick around. In one superintendent’s case, he’s increased the number of high school graduates and students who attend college.

Can teachers be legally liable if district policy requires they break the law?

Diana Lambert, Ed Source

The Murrieta Valley Unified School District board voted on Aug. 10, 2023, to accept the policy passed by the Chino Valley Unified school board on July 20 “as is” — mandating that parents be told if their child shows any indication of being transgender. Teachers working in California school districts with conservative school boards are increasingly finding themselves with a difficult decision: violate district policy and risk losing their job, or potentially disobey federal and state laws and policies and take a chance on ending up in court. Last Monday was the first day of school at Chino Valley Unified campuses since the passage of a controversial board policy that would require teachers, counselors and administrators to notify parents if a child asks to be identified by a different gender or name, or to access a bathroom or take part in a program not aligned with the gender on their official records.

Language, Culture, and Power

Dorothy Casterline, Who Codified American Sign Language, Dies at 95

Clay Risen, NY Times

Dorothy Casterline, who as a young researcher at Gallaudet University in the early 1960s helped write the first comprehensive dictionary of American Sign Language, a book that revolutionized the study of Deaf culture, died on Aug. 8 in Irmo, S.C. She was 95. Pamela Decker Wright, a professor at Gallaudet, the only university designed for the deaf or hard of hearing in the United States, said Mrs. Casterline died, in a hospital, from complications of a fall.

The Small-Town Library That Became a Culture War Battleground

Sasha Abramsky, The Nation

Todd Vandenbark stands at a table in the Dayton Memorial Library and spreads out a cluster of books. All are aimed at children and young adults, with titles such as What’s the T?, Gender Queer, This Book Is Anti-Racist, and When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. They focus on race relations or issues of sexuality and gender identity and include titles that were bought to help celebrate Pride Month or Black History Month. Some are cardboard books, usually housed on the basement shelves that form the young children’s section. They include Being You, Our Skin, and Yes! No!, which explore issues of sexuality and consent in a way that kids who are still learning to read might understand. Throughout the country, far-right groups are trying to control what books kids can read. In Dayton, Wash., they tried to shut down the library altogether.

Years After Being Ticketed at School for a Theft She Said Never Happened, Former Student Prevails in Court

Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica

Earlier this week, Amara Harris had one last chance to take a plea deal. For $100, she could have avoided a trial, the testimony of her former high school classmates and deans, and the stress of not knowing whether a jury would believe her when she said she had mistakenly picked up a classmate’s AirPods — not stolen them. It would’ve been over. Instead, as she had for more than 3 ½ years, she chose to fight. Like other families and students across Illinois who have been ticketed by police for alleged behavior at school, Harris and her mother saw the system as unfair and capricious. But in a rare move, Harris, now 20, went to trial, hoping to clear her name — even as she knew that municipal tickets are hard to beat because the burden of proof is so low. On Thursday, Harris won her case when a six-person jury concluded the city of Naperville did not prove she knowingly took the AirPods and found her not liable of violating the local ordinance against theft.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Co-Designing Transdisciplinary Learning: Teachers, Students, Families, and Researchers Partnering to Reimagine Education

Shirin Vossoughi, Trinity Collins, Leslie Russell and Silvia Gonzalez in collaboration with Andrea Anders, Tiffany Childress Price, Anna Choi, Lindsay Hayden, Michael Meadows, Corey Winchester and TaRhonda Woods.

Starting in 2019, a group of Chicago and Evanston teachers and Northwestern researchers worked together to co-design justice-oriented transdisciplinary curriculum across students, teachers, and families. Within our current systems, students and families often do not have a central role in shaping the what, how, and why of learning in schools. Co-design creates the conditions for students, families, community members and teachers to creatively and collectively design curriculum and teaching practices. Pages 3-7 of this report define co-design, intergenerational learning, and transdisciplinary curriculum, and the ways they shaped our approach in this project. Pages 10-12 offer evolving principles for co-design developed by our lead teachers. Our documentation and study of this process examined the conditions that support meaningful co-design, the connections that emerged across disciplines, and the kinds of learning and change co-design can help make possible. We found three elements that supported robust conditions for co-design: the power of beginnings, sustained attention to relationship building, and an emphasis on embracing process.

This Harlem community center is powered by asylum seekers for asylum seekers

Eliana Perozo, Chalkbeat

Since coming to the U.S. from Guinea four months ago, 18-year-old Sadio Diallo splits his time between school and volunteering at a community center in Harlem called Afrikana. The center opened a year ago to help asylum seekers and is run almost entirely by volunteers who are themselves asylum seekers. Many of them are students like Diallo, who is studying for a GED diploma.

Safe Schools, Thriving Students: What We Know About Creating Safe and Supportive Schools

Jennifer DePaoli and Jennifer McCombs, Learning Policy Institute

A rise in the number of school shootings over time has driven increasing attention to school safety. However, school shootings are not the only physical safety threat students may encounter at school. Other types of violence include sexual assault, robbery, physical attack or fights, and threats of physical attack (with or without a weapon). In addition to immediate physical harms, school violence can have long-lasting effects that undermine students’ engagement and mental health. It can also increase drug use and risk of suicide. Although there is widespread agreement that all children and youth deserve a safe and healthy school environment, there is significant debate about how best to promote student safety. This report summarizes the prevalence and effectiveness of strategies to improve student safety in schools. States, districts, and schools can look to existing research to understand more about the effectiveness of proposed strategies and the potential risk of unintended consequences.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

College Affordability Still Out of Reach for Students with Lowest Incomes, Students of Color

Marián Vargas and Kim Dancy, Institute for Higher Education Policy

In today’s rapidly evolving higher education landscape, high-quality postsecondary data can provide critical insights that inform decision-making and advance equitable outcomes. New IHEP analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s 2019-20 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:20) underscores a disconcerting reality: most students face a gap between what their families can afford and what they must pay to attend college. That gap, often referred to as “unmet need,” is much larger for American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black, Latinx and/or Hispanic, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students compared to White students, on average. Additionally, students who received a federal Pell Grant at least once face almost $10,000 of unmet need, on average, while students who never received Pell Grants are typically able to fully cover their financial need with resources to spare. Affordability barriers are especially stark for students from the lowest income backgrounds, who would need to contribute almost 150% of their household income to cover the full-time cost of a four-year college, even after accounting for grant and scholarship aid.

Administration Urges Colleges to Pursue Diversity Despite Affirmative Action Ban

Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times

The Biden administration, in its first guidance on how to handle the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, offered colleges and universities on Monday something of a road map for how to achieve diverse classes while abiding by the court decision. The administration said schools still had broad latitude when it comes to expanding its pool of applicants, through recruitment, and retaining underrepresented students through diversity and inclusion programs, like affinity clubs. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, in a news briefing, made it clear that the administration faced the task of enforcing a court ruling that it strongly disagreed with. “This is a moment of great urgency in higher education,” Dr. Cardona said.

Affirmative Action for Taiwan’s Indigenous Students [VIDEO]

TaiwanPlus News

Indigenous student and policy researcher Margaret Tu explains Taiwan’s Indigenous Education Act

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Rashida Tlaib’s End Child Poverty Act Would Dramatically Reduce Poverty

David Trimmer, Jacobin

n April of this year, the End Child Poverty Act (ECPA) was reintroduced in Congress. The ECPA Iis a child allowance proposal that would replace the current intricate system of family tax credits with a simple, universal child benefit. The ECPA has the potential to help millions of families and significantly reduce child poverty. However, the ECPA has yet to receive a detailed analysis that estimates its cost and impact. That is, until now. Recently, I collaborated with Max Ghenis, Founder of PolicyEngine, to create an in-depth analysis of the ECPA for 2023. Using PolicyEngine, Max and I were able to determine the program’s cost and effects on household income, poverty, and inequality. This comprehensive evaluation sheds light on the true potential of the ECPA.

‘Defiant Dreams’ memoir tells of Afghan woman who risked everything to get an education [AUDIO]

WBUR

In 1996 — the year Sola Mahfouz was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan — the Taliban took over the country for the first time. Under a brutally repressive regime, the Taliban banned girls from attending school and confined women to their homes. But the country would undergo major changes. Mahfouz says her parents remember Sept. 11, 2001 well. They learned about the attack from a BBC radio broadcast. At the time, none of them had ever heard of New York’s Twin Towers or of Osama bin Laden. But finding out about the attack still caused Mahfouz’s grandmother concern.

How A Notorious Georgia Army School Became America’s Training Ground For Global Torture

Alan Macleod, Mint Press

Fort Benning, the infamous Georgia U.S. military base, is once again in the news, changing its name to Fort Moore, thereby ditching its Confederate name. Yet none of the media covering the rebranding – not The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, ABC, CBS News, USA Today nor The Hill – mentioned the most controversial aspect of the institution. Across Latin America, the very name of Fort Benning is enough to strike terror into the hearts of millions, bringing back visions of massacres and genocides. This is because the fort is home to the School of the Americas, a shadowy academy where around 84,000 Latin American soldiers and police officers have been taught on the U.S. dime on how to kill, torture and how to stamp out political activists. Thus, these units effectively serve as shock troops for the U.S. Empire, making their country safe for American multinationals to pillage. MintPress has found that no fewer than 16 School of the Americas graduates would go on to become heads of state in their country.

Democracy and the Public Interest

US universities launch partnership to elevate free speech to counter threats to democracy

Thalia Beaty, AP News

The presidents of a wide-ranging group of 13 universities are elevating free speech on their campuses this academic year, as part of a new nonprofit initiative announced Tuesday to combat what organizers call dire threats to U.S. democracy. The Campus Call for Free Expression will take different forms on different campuses. The campaign, created by The Institute for Citizens & Scholars with funding from the Knight Foundation is designed to cultivate the freedom of expression on campuses and help students work together to find solutions to complicated, divisive problems. “The national context of the deep political polarization, the inability of people to speak across difference in constructive and civil ways, it seems to me that colleges and universities need to be the institutions at the forefront of showing a better way to do that,” said Jonathan Alger, president of James Madison University, which is participating in the initiative.

Outrage as Arkansas tells high schools to drop AP African American course

Gloria Oladipo, The Guardian

Advocacy groups are outraged after the Arkansas department of education warned state high schools not to offer an advanced placement course on African American history. The admonition from Arkansas education officials is the latest example of conservative lawmakers limiting education on racial history, sexual orientation and other topics they label as “indoctrination”.

The Arkansas Education Association (AEA), a professional organization of educators in the state, said the latest decision is of “grave concern” to its members and other citizens worried about “the abandonment of teaching African American history and culture”. “Having this course pulled out from under our students at this late juncture is just another marginalizing move that has already played out in other states,” said a statement from AEA president April Reisma, which was shared with the Guardian.

Lacking political power in California, conservatives turn focus to local school boards

Laurel Rosenhall, Hannah Wiley, Mackenzie Mays, Los Angeles Times

A Republican bill requiring school districts to inform parents if their children use a different gender identity at school from the sex on their birth certificate was such a nonstarter in the Democratically controlled California Legislature that it was not even taken up for discussion when introduced earlier this year. But there was the bill’s author, Assemblymember Bill Essayli (R-Corona), standing in front of the state Capitol on Monday with an air of victory. “I have a message to my colleagues in the Legislature: You can shut me up in Sacramento. But you cannot shut up the people of the state of California,” Essayli said to applause from a crowd of parent activists standing behind him.

Other News of Note

Young environmental activists prevail in first-of-its-kind climate change trial in Montana

Amy Beth Hanson and Matthew Brown, AP News

Young environmental activists scored what experts described as a ground-breaking legal victory Monday when a Montana judge said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development. The ruling in this first-of-its- kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change. If it stands, the ruling could set an important legal precedent, though experts said the immediate impacts are limited and state officials pledged to seek to overturn the decision on appeal. District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found the policy the state uses in evaluating requests for fossil fuel permits — which does not allow agencies to look at greenhouse gas emissions — is unconstitutional.

“Watershed Moment”: Montana Rules Youth Have Constitutional Right to Healthy Climate

Amy Goodman, Julia Olson, Olivia Vesovich, Democracy Now

In a landmark climate case, a judge in Montana has ruled in favor of a group of young people who had sued the state for violating their constitutional rights as it pushed policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels. In her decision, Montana Judge Kathy Seeley wrote, “Plaintiffs have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate.” We speak with plaintiff Olivia Vesovich about the historic ruling, which she calls “the most life-changing news that I’ve ever heard.” “It’s a real watershed moment,” adds Julia Olson, chief legal counsel and executive director of Our Children’s Trust, a not-for-profit law firm representing the 16 youth plaintiffs between ages 5 and 22. “There’s going to be huge ripple effects as other courts start stepping up and doing their role in our democracy to be a check on the other branches of government.”