Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Trump orders review of Smithsonian over ‘negative’ portrayal of U.S. history [Video]

NBC News

President Trump has ordered a formal review of the Smithsonian Institution, claiming museum exhibits are too focused on “how bad slavery was.”

Oklahoma will require teachers from NY, CA to prove they back ‘America First’

Kayla Jimenez, USA TODAY

Teachers from California and New York who want to work in Oklahoma public schools will be required to pass a certification test to prove they share the state’s conservative political values. Regardless of the subject or grade they teach, they’ll have to show they know “the biological differences between females and males” and that they agree with the state’s American history standards, which includes elements of a conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 presidential election from President Donald Trump, which fact checkers have said are false.

Federal judge temporarily blocks Texas schools from enforcing Ten Commandments law

BrieAnna J. Frank, USA TODAY

A federal judge has temporarily blocked several Texas school districts from enforcing a law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.  U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery’s Aug. 20 ruling came less than two weeks before the Texas law, known as SB10, is set to go into effect on Sept. 1. The Texas attorney general has vowed to appeal. The plaintiffs, a group of both religious and nonreligious families represented by organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, sued an array of school districts in July, saying the law violated the First Amendment. 

Language, Culture, and Power

Trump administration rolls back pivotal guidance about educational rights of English learners

Kalyn Belsha, Chalkbeat

The Trump administration has quietly rescinded guidance spelling out the educational rights of the nation’s more than 5 million English learners that educators say was crucial to serving children from immigrant families. In recent weeks, a Dear Colleague letter issued in 2015 by the Education Department and Department of Justice was stamped with a red message saying the document had been formally rescinded. Neither agency issued a public notice explaining the rationale for the change as they usually do when they roll back federal guidance. The rescission comes after the Trump administration laid off nearly every staffer in the Education Department responsible for serving English learners and looks to wind down a federal website that provides toolkits for helping English learners. The administration has also proposed zeroing out dedicated Title III funding for English learners and issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the United States.

Challenges to the education rights of children on the move in Latin America: A scoping review

Claudia Diaz-Rios, Tatiana Feitosa de Britto, Gisele Cuglievan-Mindreau, Sana Abuleil, Indira Quintasi-Orosco, EPAA

Research on education in emergencies underscores the significant structural obstacles refugee children encounter in accessing education within low- and middle-income countries. However, there remains a notable gap in understanding the challenges confronted by transnational migrant children and the evolving nature of these challenges amidst shifting migration dynamics. To address this gap, we conducted a scoping literature review of 144 articles written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English examining transnational migration and education in Latin America, a region undergoing profound shifts in immigration patterns. Our analysis reveals that changes in these patterns activate new challenges for education rights. As migrants gradually relocated to other Latin American countries, their children encountered barriers to education compounded by instances of assimilation and discrimination within schools. 

LAUSD’s Black Student Achievement Plan remains resilient amid complaint and opposition

Mallika Seshadri, Ed Source

Many supporters and advocates of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Black Student Achievement Plan are beginning the school year with renewed hope after the school board voted to boost the program’s 2025-26 funding with an additional $25 million.  Their optimism comes after years of challenges, from the broadening of BSAP after a complaint lodged by the conservative group Parents Defending Education, which argued the program discriminated against students of other races and backgrounds, to ongoing federal threats to programs that support diversity, equity and inclusion. “LAUSD remains steadfast in its commitment to supporting all students, including Black students,” said a Los Angeles Unified spokesperson in a statement to EdSource.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Puerto Rico’s schools are unequipped to cope with ever hotter heat waves

Tatiana Díaz Ramos, AP News

When temperatures soar at a public school on the small Puerto Rican island of Culebra, students scatter in search of relief. During a summer program last month, as outdoor temperatures climbed into the upper 80s, Zedrik, a rising third grader, sat in the schoolyard beside a bush not tall enough to shade him entirely from the sun. Kenneth, a ninth grader, took refuge in the library. Nayla, an eighth grader, went to the director’s office, where an air conditioner offered limited relief. The school has ceiling fans, but they don’t operate at full strength. Other cooling equipment in the school doesn’t work because it’s been damaged by fluctuations in electrical voltage on an island dealing with an energy crisis.

Teachers Try to Beat the Heat

McKenna Schueler, In These Times

Summer break is coming to a close, and high school math teacher Ashley Modesto is worried about whether her students will be able to sit through class. Not because of the subject matter, but because — more and more frequently — her classroom is sweltering.  Now, Modesto’s union — the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association — is fighting to cool things down. 

A classroom teacher of 10 years in Orange County Public Schools — the nation’s eighth-largest school district — Modesto is haunted by a particular memory from two years ago. Her school’s air-conditioning system ​“completely” went out, and in her class of roughly 30 students, the packed room quickly grew hot and stagnant. Mere days into the school year, students left early ​“because they were so uncomfortable.”

The Eaton Fire Destroyed Their School. They Created a New Wonderland Onstage.

Isabelle Taft and Isadora Kosofsky, New York Times

At first it seemed unthinkable that the school’s spring musical, “Alice in Wonderland,” would happen. But school leaders quickly decided that it should go on.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Investigating Nature-based Preschoolers Gains in Early Literacy and Select Executive Function Skills

Arianna E. Pikus, Lori E. Skibbe, and David Sobel, AERA Open

Nature-based education is a growing educational practice throughout the United States due to the numerous socioemotional and physical benefits for children from learning outdoors. From 2008 to 2017, the number of nature-based early childhood programs in the U.S. has increased from 20 to over 250, with this number doubling to over 585 nature-based early childhood programs in 2020. In addition, recent global health issues have led parents, teachers, and administrators to search for safe and in-person options to schooling, particularly for young children. Proponents of nature-based education argue that the outdoors can be used as an effective classroom setting, but that nature should also be integrated into the daily curriculum to promote learning. This study investigates whether a nature-based approach to learning supports the development of the academic and socioemotional skills children need to be prepared for kindergarten.

UCLA’s Jewish community unites against Trump’s $1-billion demand: ‘Misguided and punitive’

Daniel Miller and Jaweed Kaleem, Los Angeles Times

A large swath of UCLA’s Jewish faculty — some of whom are fervently divided over Israel’s war in Gaza — united to sign a letter denouncing the Trump administration’s “misguided and punitive” demand for a $1-billion fine to settle claims over alleged campus antisemitism. The letter, crafted by a handful of professors and signed by more than 360 people, was expected to be sent by organizers as early as Monday afternoon to the University of California’s Board of Regents. It also decries the government’s freezing of $584 million in research grant funding. “Cutting off hundreds of millions of research funds will do nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews nor diminish antisemitism in the world,” the letter said. “It will not benefit Jewish Bruins nor Jews beyond campus who make extensive use of its first-rate medical facilities, ground-breaking scientific innovations, and cutting-edge cultural institutions.”

‘It felt like my dreams had collapsed’: international students react to Trump policy shift

Anna Betts, The Guardian

As the new academic year is about to begin at most universities across the United States, many international students are navigating a mix of anxiety and uncertainty as the Trump administration’s crackdown on higher education and immigration continues. The Guardian asked international students studying in the US to share how they are feeling as they prepare to return to campus. Some described how policy shifts have derailed their academic plans, while others said that they were now reconsidering whether the US is a place where they want to pursue their academic futures. “Leaving the US after I receive my degree is increasingly a top priority,” said Andre Fa’aoso, a 20-year-old student from Auckland, New Zealand, who is entering his third year at Yale University.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Reconciling Reconciliation: How the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” Will Impact Children

NEPC Newsletter

Robin Hood in reverse. That’s how the budget reconciliation bill signed into law last month by President Donald Trump is described in a recent U.S. News and World Report commentary by Elaine Maag, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, along with NEPC Fellow Bruce Fuller, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Under the new law, Maag and Fuller write, the average one-percenter will get an $80,000 per year federal income tax break. By contrast, the average middle-class family, with annual earnings less than that $80,000 tax break, will get $720. This small break is due, in part, to an increase in the child tax credit, which benefits most children, by 10 percent ($200)—to $2,200 per year per child.

Elite schools in South Africa: how quiet gatekeeping keeps racial patterns in place

Samantha Kriger, The Conversation

In South Africa, children’s admission to a particular public school is decided by province. Each provincial education department manages its own digital admissions system. The Western Cape province introduced an online admissions portal in 2018 which became fully operational in 2024. The aim was to make school placement more transparent. This is important because historically, under apartheid, South African education was racially segregated and unequally funded. White schools received the best resources. Education researcher Samantha Kriger took a closer look at what actually happens in admissions to schools in the Western Cape that used to be exclusively white (known as Model C schools). She set out her findings in a book coauthored with education academic Jonathan Jansen. Though Who Gets In and Why was published in 2020, she says the circumstances remain the same in most of these schools. Here she answers some questions about what she found.

Moms and teachers are mad about school supplies again

Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th

Ah, a new school year. Crisp backpacks, gleaming sneakers, pressed uniforms and, of course, the collective rage of parents and teachers over school supply lists. How long they are. What’s on them. And who should foot the bill for pencils and paper, but also Clorox wipes and Kleenex.  This year, though, those conversations, which typically clog up social media feeds as summer rolls to a close, have a new dimension. At a time when prices are creeping back up and public education is witnessing some of the steepest funding cuts in American history, the school supplies debate is a window into how families and workers are faring.  “It’s not our job to supply all other students’ school supplies,” one mom said in a video on TikTok. “We pay taxes for that. The school should be funded to supply pencils and erasers and construction paper.”

Democracy and the Public Interest

Charter Schools at a Crossroads: As the Promise Fades, the Reckoning Begins

Carol Burris, The Progressive

Thirty years ago, charter schools stood for possibility. At their inception in the 1990s, they were supposed to be nimble, innovative, community-driven alternatives to traditional public schools—labs of experimentation led by teachers and grounded in equity. But in 2025, the movement finds itself at a turning point, not because it succeeded, but because it strayed too far from its original vision. The first installment of a new report, titled “Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Disillusionment, and Cost,” by the National Center for Charter School Accountability lays bare a system in decline. Closures are accelerating. Enrollment is stagnating. And beneath the rhetoric of “choice” and “opportunity,” a harsh reality has emerged: a sector in retreat, propped up by unchecked federal funding and powerful lobbying interests.

Grooming Authoritarianism: Anti-Trans/Queer Panic as Pedagogy for Democratic Decline

Aylon Cohen and Samuel R. Galloway, PS: Political Science and Politics

We address the anti-trans/queer panic integral to the ascendance of authoritarian politics in America and respond by calling on all political scientists to “queer” political science by undoing the cisheteronormativity of the discipline. We contend that this is not the special obligation of LGBTQ scholars but all political scientists. In this we follow Eve Sedgwick’s orientation away from a “minoritizing” to a “universalizing” epistemological perspective that situates this responsibility relative to resisting democratic decline.

How a Group of Michigan Parents Defeated Anti-Trans MAGA Activists

Sarah Stankorb, The New Republic

In March, just days after the U.S. Department of Education announced the launch of its “End DEI” portal—a tattle site for parents, teachers, students, and community members to report “discrimination based on race or sex”—an opinion piece in The Detroit News reported that at least four complaints had already been filed against Michigan public school districts, including mid-Michigan’s Mount Pleasant School District. It was not hard for locals to figure out where that one complaint came from. On Facebook, Bree Moeggenberg, the chair of the right-wing parents’ advocacy group Moms for Liberty in Isabella County, where Mount Pleasant is located, posted, “Oh Dear how does this happen,” with a flushed-face emoji, seeming to imply knowledge or responsibility for the complaint.

Other News of Note

Sowing Possibilities: Educational and Social Farms for Change, Well-being, Empowerment, and Social Justice

Paolo Riseri, Human Rights Centre-Antonio Papsica

In an increasingly urbanised world, where direct contact with nature has become a privilege enjoyed by few, multifunctional farms that combine educational services with social activities, both service-oriented and inclusive (as defined by Lombardy’s regional regulations), are emerging as catalysts for meaningful social and environmental change. These spaces, conceived as communal and collective environments, go far beyond the simple role of hosting: they become genuine centres of empowerment, fostering social justice, collective well-being, and sustainability. Every activity carried out within them becomes an opportunity for personal growth, inclusion, and the reclaiming of the stories that connect us to the land, serving as a driving force for social and cultural transformation. When we speak of Sowing Possibilities, we are referring not only to the metaphor of agricultural sowing but also to an invitation to lay the foundations for a more inclusive, conscious, and resilient society. We recognise the land not merely as a productive resource to be exploited quantitatively, as appears to be the case under the current political system, but as a space for relationship, growth, and human redemption: a gesture of trust in the future, an educational act, and a form of political resistance.

The Many Lives of James Baldwin

John Livesey

James Baldwin has become the literary pinup of a generation. In 2025, he is everywhere: his most famous quotations stamped on viral infographics while his face is sold on mugs, t-shirts, and tote bags. The Fire Next Time has become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, redesignated as a how-to guide for dismantling structural racism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baldwin has even reached TikTok, where five million videos are currently tagged under his name. We can trace the arc of this resurgent popularity back to 2014. On August 9 of that year, Michael Brown — an unarmed black teenager — was shot and killed by white police officers in Ferguson, Missouri. The following day, Ferguson was flooded by demonstrators, and over the course of two weeks, thousands more protesters from across the country would take to the streets, inaugurating the largest social-justice movement of the twenty-first century, Black Lives Matter.