Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Book Bans and Gun Control: 3 Minutes From Kamala Harris’ Speech to Teachers [Video]

Jaclyn Borowski, Education Week

Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the American Federation of Teachers at the union’s convention in Houston on July 25. She contrasted her party’s desire to ban assault weapons with book bans that have proliferated around the country at the urging of conservative community members. “Book bans in this year of our Lord 2024. Just think about it,” she told the crowd of about 3,500. “So we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books. Can you imagine?” Here’s an excerpt from her message to educators.

Families face food insecurity in Republican-led states that turned down federal aid this summer

Kate Payne, AP News

Crystal Ripolio had tears in her eyes as she walked the produce line at the Good News Outreach food bank in Tallahassee. It was the bags of ripe peaches that did her in. “We don’t have anything in our fridge,” Ripolio said. Ripolio and her 8-year-old daughter, Isabella, walked away with paper bags filled with those peaches, other produce, bread and canned goods — grateful for the help she said they desperately need. Millions of American children are going without extra food this summer, after 13 states declined to participate in a federal program that helps families in need buy groceries. Thirty-seven states, four U.S. territories and five Native American tribes are benefitting from the program, according to the Department of Agriculture. Qualifying families with children who rely on school meals to get enough to eat are getting an extra $120 per child this summer to help feed their kids.

On Family Policy, Neither Party Has a Vision of the Good Life

Elliot Haspel, Jacobin

Republicans and Democrats could hardly have more starkly different ideas for family policy. Take care and education: the Republicans’ Project 2025 would zero out Head Start, costing over 750,000 low-income children and families their childcare and wraparound support, and move toward a deeply privatized version of public education modeled after the now-cautionary tale in Arizona. Meanwhile, presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has suggested that she wants to finish implementing the Biden administration’s care and education policies, which include enormous infusions of funds to build out an affordable childcare system and shore up public schools. Yet in a deeper sense, both parties are missing the point. Public policy on its own does not resonate with individuals’ sense of identity or place in society. 

Language, Culture, and Power

“It’s not the border crisis. It’s the humanitarian crisis that we should deal with.”

Antero Garcia and Bill Ong Hing, La Cuenta

Throughout my conversation with Professor Bill Ong Hing about contemporary immigration policy, I am continually struck by his impassioned focus on individuals and on their dignity. Despite years of frustration with inhumane immigration reform, Professor Hing has relentlessly pursued the most just opportunities for his myriad clients. In his recent book, Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System, Hing makes clear arguments for disrupting an immigration system that harms the immigrant community on a daily basis. Professor Hing has worked relentlessly within and across immigration law contexts over five decades of his career. He is the Founding Director of the University of San Francisco’s Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic where he is also Professor of Law and Migration Studies. He is also professor of Law and Asian American Studies Emeritus, at UC Davis. As he reiterates in our conversation, “I know what I’m talking about.” It’s time for policymakers to start listening.

Undocumented kids have a right to attend public schools. This coalition wants to keep it that way.

Kalyn Belsha, Chalkbeat

A new coalition is on high alert for violations of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that guarantees children the right to a free public education regardless of their immigration status. Known as Education for All, the campaign is working to counteract anti-immigrant rhetoric and conservative policy proposals seeking to limit the educational rights of undocumented children, which are protected by the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe. The campaign, which launched in May, comes as The Heritage Foundation, a think tank with ties to former President Donald Trump, is pushing states to charge undocumented children tuition to attend public school. Doing so, Heritage says, could lead the Supreme Court to reconsider the Plyler ruling.

California helped this teen fight deportation. Now the program is on the chopping block

Wendy Fry, CalMatters

A California project that provides legal advocacy for unaccompanied child immigrants will end in September unless backers can convince lawmakers to renew funding by next month. The Children’s Holistic Immigration Representation Project was funded through a one-time allocation in 2022 and not renewed when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California’s $298 billion budget last month. There were 64,173 unaccompanied children released in California between January 2015 and May 2023, according to a CalMatters analysis of federal data obtained by the New York Times.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

As climate changes fuels hotter temperatures, kids are learning less

Jessica Kutz, Hechinger Report

Angela Girol has been teaching fourth grade in Pittsburgh for over two decades. Over the years she’s noticed a change at her school: It’s getting hotter. Some days temperatures reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit in her classroom which, like many on the East Coast, isn’t air-conditioned. When it’s hot, she said, kids don’t eat, or drink enough water. “They end up in the nurse’s office because they’re dizzy, they have a headache, their stomach hurts — all because of heat and dehydration,” she said. To cope with the heat, her students are now allowed to keep water on their desks, but that presents its own challenges. “They’re constantly filling up water bottles, so I have to give them breaks during the day for that. And then everyone has to go to the bathroom all the time,” she said. “I’m losing instruction time.”

How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change 

Caroline Preston, The Grist

At the end of a semester that presaged one of the hottest summers on record, the students in Associate Professor Michael Sheridan’s business class were pitching proposals to cut waste and emissions on their campus and help turn it into a vehicle for fighting climate change. Flanking a giant whiteboard at the front of the classroom, members of the team campaigning to build a solar canopy on a SUNY New Paltz parking lot delivered their pitch. The sunbaked lot near the athletic center was an ideal spot for a shaded solar panel structure, they said, a conduit for solar energy that could curb the campus’s reliance on natural gas. The project would require $43,613 in startup money. It would be profitable within roughly five years, the students said. And over 50 years, it would save the university $787,130 in energy costs.

My life as a foster youth includes dreams of college

Andi Mata, Ed Source

From the time I was 8 years old, I lived in countless homes and attended more than five different elementary and middle schools combined and four high schools. To say my upbringing was different from the norm is an understatement. But I’m not alone. In California, 68,000 young people moving in and out of foster homes are currently experiencing the same challenges I faced.

As a former foster youth, my college journey was not easy. Living in so many different foster homes, frequently changing schools, feeling isolated and disconnected, and falling behind in school were just some of the hurdles I faced daily. When you are in foster care, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and abandoned because you don’t have a family to pick you up when you fall down. No one is around to offer comfort or gently push you in the right direction when you need it most.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

5 growing threats to academic freedom

Isaac Kamola, The Conversation

The ability to teach and conduct research free from political interference is the cornerstone of higher education and its contribution to the public good. Academic freedom, however, has become increasingly threatened. V-Dem Institute, a global research organization that monitors indicators of democracy around the world, determined that academic freedom has “substantially worsened” in the United States in recent years. This is largely due to political and social polarization. In recent months, professors across the country have sounded the alarm about infringements on academic freedom following crackdowns on pro-Palestine protesters on campus. The current conflict, however, is only the latest iteration of an intensifying decline in academic freedom. As a researcher who examines the politics of higher education, I believe there are five distinct but mutually reinforcing ways that academic freedom has been threatened in the U.S. in recent years.

School’s Out:  Demographic crashes and rising costs threaten an entire segment of higher education

Lilah Burkem American Prospect

When Olivia Montagno entered college as a freshman in 2018, she intended to major in biology. But by her second semester, she felt drawn instead to the music that had been part of her life since she started studying trumpet at age 8. So she decided to take up music education, with the plan of becoming a music teacher. By her junior year, that was in jeopardy. The College of Saint Rose, her Catholic liberal arts school in Albany, New York, was facing an $11.3 million budget deficit. And the music department was on the chopping block. The college cut 22 degree programs that year, which served about 10 percent of undergraduates. More than one-fifth of full-time tenured and tenure-track positions were eliminated.

UC sets new record with largest, most diverse class of California students for fall 2024

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

The University of California admitted the largest and most diverse class of undergraduates for fall 2024, opening the doors of the vaunted public research institution to more California low-income, first-generation and underrepresented students of color, according to preliminary data released Wednesday. In striking data, UC shared for the first time the gender identity of admitted students as part of its annual data release. Systemwide, women are the dominant gender among first-year students, reaching 55%. At six campuses — Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, UCLA, San Diego and Santa Barbara — the gender gap is greater, with men representing about 37% of students. UC Merced was the most evenly balanced, with 49% women and 46% men. The genders were at greater parity among transfer admits.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Still segregated and unequal: The reverberations of Milliken v. Bradley in Detroit 50 years later

Robyn Vincent, Chalkbeat 

In the books she read growing up, Nancy Jennings saw a lot of school buses cruising across the pages. She had always wanted to ride in one, but Jennings lived just a few blocks from her neighborhood school in southwest Detroit so she usually walked to class. When Jennings finally got the chance to step foot on a bus, her 10-year-old mind had no idea just how significant the moment was. In January 1976, Jennings, who is biracial, was among the students in Detroit bused to desegregate public schools. At the time, Detroit’s classrooms were becoming increasingly segregated. Racist practices – such as restrictive covenants that prevented Black residents from buying or leasing property, and policies that denied them housing loans – created and maintained segregated neighborhoods. White residents were fleeing the city for the suburbs, in part because of the 1967 Detroit uprising, a violent rebellion in response to the systemic racism and police brutality Black residents faced.

The real work of equity and inclusion is difficult, messy and absolutely necessary

Recy Benjamin Dunn, Hechinger Report

Leaders have been lied to for decades about DEIA. We’ve been told there is a clean, clear way to integrate diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism into an organization and that simply making a statement, changing hiring demographics by a percentage point or investing in training is enough. All of those things are positive; all are progress. However, human beings aren’t data points that can easily be changed and manipulated. We’re complex individuals with many layers and connecting identities. The equity we are hoping to see will not be reached by easy-to-achieve metrics alone. That’s why we must push ourselves and our organizations to lead our DEIA work by accepting the mixed and unique nature of all our identities, so we can better serve our students, staff and families. This sounds incredibly messy because it is.

Study details ‘transformative’ results from L.A. pilot that guaranteed families $1,000 a month

Rebecca Plevin and Dakota Smith, Los Angeles Times

Some of L.A.’s poorest families received cash assistance of $1,000 a month as part of a 12-month pilot project launched nearly three years ago. There were no strings attached and they could use the money however they saw fit. Now, a new study finds that the city-funded program was overwhelmingly beneficial. Participants in the program experienced a host of financial benefits, according to an analysis co-authored by University of Pennsylvania and UCLA researchers. Beyond that, the study found, the initiative gave people the time and space to make deeper changes in their lives. That included landing better jobs, leaving unsafe living conditions and escaping abusive relationships.

Democracy and the Public Interest

How they defend the freedom to learn:  Stories and a blueprint from Florida  [Video]

Human Rights Watch

It’s a race to the bottom in Florida, where lawmakers have sealed the state’s reputation as the country’s epicenter of discriminatory censorship in schools. Over the past few years, new policies and laws in Florida have stopped teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity, while also repressing any honest efforts to grapple with systemic racism and slavery.

Sadly, Florida is not alone. Since 2020, discriminatory educational censorship laws have spread rapidly across the United States. Conservative groups helped fuel this change by organizing a 50-state campaign, providing state lawmakers with template legislation to restrict the freedom to learn. Today, nearly half of US public school students attend schools impacted by educational censorship laws.

Students join educators and advocates in effort to reverse book bans across the country

Eshe Ukweli, The 19th

Casting shadows over both public and school libraries, book bans have hit record numbers and continue to trend upward. But education experts say that despite these “bleak” realities, the power to preserve literary freedom still remains in the hands of concerned parents, kids and educators. On July 10, children marched across the campus of South Carolina State University in a protest against book bans. A part of the “Why Not Young Lives” summer program, the children joined the chorus of voices from citizens across the nation pushing back against literary suppression. Research and legal experts say this community resistance, along with legislative initiatives in states like Illinois and Minnesota to ban book bans, illustrate the rocky state of literary rights.

Students respond to state super’s decision to not approve AP African American studies

Rebecca Gaunt, Cobb Courier

“At that time, they told us it was a paper tiger,” educator Tracey Nance said of the decision by the Georgia State Board of Education to pass a resolution against critical race theory in June 2021, at the urging of Gov. Brian Kemp. Nance, the 2020 and 2021 Georgia Teacher of the Year, made that comment at a Friday press conference during which students expressed their frustration with state Superintendent Richard Woods’ decision last week not to approve AP African American Studies at the state level. At the time the CRT resolution occurred, Nance was serving as an ex-officio member of the state board. Though she was typically included on board matters, in this particular case, she found out about it from a reporter. “Paper tiger” is used to describe something that seems powerful or dangerous, but is actually weak or insignificant. But Nance views Woods’ decision as an example of systemic racism, the very thing the board resolution in 2021 claimed didn’t exist in Georgia or the United States.

Other News of Note

Reclaiming Black Queer Trancestors: Fighting K-12 Miseducation

Sikivu Hutchinson, The Humanist

Ask American adults across the political spectrum to name a U.S. Supreme Court case and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision or the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision are the most likely examples they would cite. Ask them what trailblazing legal scholar and activist was central to both and they would most likely draw a blank. Tell them that a Black queer gender-expansive late-in-life Episcopal priest named Pauli Murray was one of the key intellectual architects of the legal theories that inform the democratic freedoms that many Americans have enjoyed, and it would be transformative for some and heretical for others. The first Black person assigned-female-at-birth to be admitted to and graduate from Howard University Law School, Murray was a giant of twentieth-century civil rights law, as well as women’s and human rights activism. As a young Black girl attending L.A. public schools in the eighties, I was robbed of this education. Murray’s radical life and influence also remain largely unknown to Gen Z youth, who are more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than any other generation in history. Bucking gender binaries, these youths are direct “descendants” and beneficiaries of the sea change Murray’s work had on our notions of race, gender, and sex in the U.S.

Teaching for Black Lives Study Groups 

Zinn Education Project

Each year, the Zinn Education Project hosts Teaching for Black Lives study groups across the United States. Using the Rethinking Schools book Teaching for Black Lives, educators explore how to teach about racism, resistance, and joy in free, teacher-led professional learning communities. Apply now for the 2024-2025 school year.