Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Trump Keeps Trying to Axe Education. Democratic Attorneys General Won’t Let Him

Andrea Campbell, Time 

In a disheartening blow that undermines the right of every child to receive a quality public education, the Supreme Court issued a ruling a few weeks ago allowing President Donald Trump to proceed with his plan to dismantle the Department of Education by laying off nearly half of its workforce. As a mother of two boys in public schools and the product of public schools myself, this news was disturbing to say the least. Without any explanation, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump Administration to begin dismantling a cabinet agency, created by Congress, that is tasked with fulfilling the federal government’s obligation to support public education. And make no mistake, this Administration will do everything in its power to hobble our nation’s schools—by cutting funding, supports, programming, and accountability measures that are critical to ensure every student has equal access and can live up to their potential.

Why The White House backed down from its first big education cuts: The Atlantic [Video]

Youtube/MSNBC

The Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa joins Morning Joe to discuss his new piece ‘Why the White House Backed Down From Its First Big Education Cuts’.

Schools As Sites Of Struggle: What The ICE Raids In LA And Trump’s Defunding Schools Reveal

Lois Weiner, Z

Two crises in this moment show Trump’s nearly-unchecked power: Brutal deportations of immigrants in Los Angeles and the sudden withdrawal of seven billion dollars in education funding passed by Congress for this coming school year. But when these policies are seen in the totality of Trump’s project, which is simultaneously ideological, political, social, economic, and cultural, they reveal education’s importance as a site of struggle, demonstrating that our location as education workers is uniquely important in building a powerful movement to overturn the Right’s agenda, being fueled by the wealthiest, most powerful elite in this country’s history.

Language, Culture, and Power

Students without legal status have the right to attend public school. Will Trump try to change that?

Carolyn Jones, CalMatters

Funding cuts. Raids near campuses. Exclusion from programs like Head Start and career training. For months, the Trump administration has been chipping away at the rights of students without legal status in public schools.  Could the administration take away those students’ right to free public school entirely? Experts say that may be the next step. “People have worried about this for a couple decades, but this is different,” said Patricia Gándara, education professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “Right now we have to be extremely vigilant. These people will stop at nothing.” A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Plyler v. Doe, guarantees all students, regardless of immigration status, the right to a free public education in K-12 schools. But last year the conservative Heritage Foundation called for the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling and for states to charge tuition to immigrant families, even if their children are U.S. citizens. 

Teaching “Mexican Repatriation”

Erin Green, Rethinking Schools

I first learned about “Mexican repatriation” during the Great Depression while studying for my master’s degree. It had never been mentioned in any history class I had taken before. This erasure supports the dominant narrative of the United States as a land of opportunity, while sidelining the realities of racialized labor exploitation and state violence. Between 1930 and 1933, up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to Mexico. An estimated 60 percent of those expelled were U.S. citizens. The U.S. government justified these mass raids and expulsions by blaming Mexicans for widespread unemployment, claiming that they were taking jobs from American workers.

Black teachers are key mentors for Philly high school seniors navigating college decisions

Joseph Sageman, The Conversation

Zikia, a 12th grader in Philadelphia, was stressing over where she would attend college in the fall. Her charter school’s college decision ceremony was the next day, and she was torn between her two top choices. At a crossroads, she reached out to her favorite teacher, the only Black educator on her course schedule. “I texted him at nighttime,” she recalled. “I didn’t feel like I could do that with my other teachers.” In my research on college and career readiness, I did not initially set out to study the impact of Black teachers, but students like Zikia readily brought up the topic.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Centering Ethnic-Racial Identity in Education Framework: A Culturally Affirming Approach to Home-School Collaborations With Black and Latine Youth and Families

Hillary Parkhouse, Chelsea Derlan Williams, and Chandler Golden AERA Open

Research on youth ethnic-racial identity and socialization, primarily coming from the field of developmental psychology, offers insights for preparing teachers to create affirming classrooms for Black and Latine youth. On the other hand, research from the fields of teacher education and curriculum illuminates how school contexts, societal influences, and knowledge construction relate to identity and socialization. Synthesizing these two literatures, we developed the centering ethnic-racial identity in education framework with an advisory board of teachers and Black and Latine youth and caregivers. The framework illustrates how ethnic-racial identity and socialization interact with home, school, and social spaces and with the roles and relationships of caregivers, teachers, and peers. The review concludes with implications for teacher training and advocacy for culturally affirming schools.

I asked students why they go to school. This answer changed how I design campuses.

Enrico Giori, Chalkbeat

At first, the question seemed simple: “Why do we go to school?” I had asked it many times before, in many different districts. I’m a planner and designer specializing in K-12 school projects, and as part of a community-driven design process, we invite students to dream with us and help shape the spaces where they’ll learn, grow, and make sense of the world. In February of 2023, I was leading a visioning workshop with a group of middle schoolers in Southern California. Their energy was vibrant, their curiosity sharp. We began with a simple activity: Students answered a series of prompts, each one building on the last.

CPS expands enhanced schools amid budget crisis

Monica Eng, Axios

Chicago is nearly doubling its stable of public schools that offer enhanced educational, social, medical and mental health services. This expansion of sustainable community schools (SCS) from 20 to 36 locations — costing $500,000 per school annually— is rolling out as CPS continues to lay off staffers and cut services to close a $734 million budget deficit in the next two weeks. First launched in 2018, sustainable community schools partner with groups to provide health services, meals, trauma treatment, restorative justice programs, parental help and after-school activities in the school building to create a community hub. The expansion is being cheered on by Mayor Brandon Johnson, CPS interim CEO Macquline King and the Chicago Teachers Union, which secured plans for 70 SCS schools by 2028 as part of its latest contract.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

UCLA says Trump administration has suspended $584 million in grants, threatening research

Julie Watson, AP News

The Trump administration has suspended $584 million in federal grants for the University of California, Los Angeles, nearly double the amount that was previously thought, the school’s chancellor announced Wednesday. UCLA is the first public university whose federal grants have been targeted by the administration over allegations of civil rights violations related to antisemitism and affirmative action. The Trump administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against private colleges. “If these funds remain suspended, it will be devastating for UCLA and for Americans across the nation,” Chancellor Julio Frenk said Wednesday in a statement, noting the groundbreaking research that has come out of the university. The departments affected rely on funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, Frenk said.

Under Trump, Student Labor Organizers Face New Challenges

Lucy Tobier, The Nation

When Michael Ziegler started his PhD at Brown University in 2019, his union shop consisted entirely of graduate students. But in the past few years, three undergraduate bargaining units totalling about 500 students were formed at Brown, drastically expanding the size and reach of the union. Nationally, from 2020 to 2025, undergraduate unions went from two to more than two dozen, with many more in the works. But whether this momentum can continue under Donald Trump’s National Labor Relations Board is unclear, as student organizers anticipate changes in their bargaining rights and a landscape far less friendly to collective bargaining.

Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication

Alice Speri, The Guardian

In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed. Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to “education and Palestine”. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Trump’s Deals With Top Colleges May Give Rich Applicants a Bigger Edge

Claire Cain Miller, New York Times

In recent deals with Columbia and Brown, the Trump administration demanded that they publicly share anonymized data about all applicants, including their standardized test scores, grade point averages and race. Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said the agreements with the two Ivy League colleges would ensure that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.” But another factor strongly influences students’ chances of being admitted to an elite college: their parents’ income. Rich parents generally spend more time and money on children’s education throughout their youth, so by the time they apply to college, they tend to have higher test scores and other qualifications elite colleges seek.

How schools could be hit by Medicaid cuts

Terrell Wright, Washington Post

Special-education advocates and some public school districts are bracing for potential budget constraints as they prepare for the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts the president signed into law last month. The billions that public schools get each year in reimbursements from Medicaid for services such as counseling and speech therapy are at risk, advocates warn. As cuts to Medicaid start next year, educators and other experts say they are beginning to evaluate an uncertain future that could make schools responsible for billions more in services for students. Federal law requires schools to provide medical services to eligible students with a range of disabilities and needs.

Child care centers often reject kids with disabilities. These states are trying to change that.

Sarah Carr, Chalkbeat

When Selina Likely became director of the Edwards Creative Learning Center six years ago, she knew there was one longstanding practice that she wanted to change. For as long as she had taught at the thriving child care center, it had turned away many children with disabilities such as autism and Down syndrome. The practice was even encoded in the center’s handbook as policy. Likely, the parent of a child with a disability, wanted to stop telling families no, but she knew that to do that she and her staff would need more support. “I said, ‘Let’s start getting training and see what we can do.’” Not too long after, her effort received a big boost from a state-funded initiative in Ohio to strengthen child care teachers’ knowledge and confidence in working with young kids with disabilities and developmental delays.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Dusty L.A. Stable Where Black Migrants Made Real Democracy

Cori Tucker-Price, Zocalo

What if the key to understanding American democracy lies not in marble hallways but in a dusty Los Angeles horse stable, where a one-eyed Black preacher gathered people to pray? In the spring of 1906, William J. Seymour, the son of formerly enslaved parents, launched a revival on Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles. That converted livery stable quickly became the birthplace of modern Pentecostalism and one of the most racially integrated religious gatherings in American history. Seymour preached a message on divine healing and sanctification to a crowd of Black, white, Asian, and Latino worshippers that defied the logic of segregation. As parishioners fell to their knees in prayer, speaking in tongues, something profound happened: They practiced a kind of democracy that few had ever seen.

A Content Analysis Investigating the Framing of Anti-CRT Laws and Their Impacts on Social Studies Teacher Agency

Ryan Cowden, and Kyle P. O’Brien, Teachers College Record

In recent years, 44 U.S. states have proposed legislation that restricts the teaching of race and racism in social studies. Commonly called “anti–critical race theory” (anti-CRT) legislation, these laws are notoriously difficult to interpret and have led many social studies teachers to avoid discussing race and controversial issues in the classroom. However, anti-CRT laws are not monolithic and differ widely in how they use explicit and implicit language to impose new limits on knowledge and pedagogical practices. Because confusion around these laws has led to increased avoidance of controversial issues in classrooms, the purpose of this study is to provide greater clarity around the limits and implications of these laws in an effort to mitigate the “chilling effect” and enable teachers to renew engagement with important topics in social studies classrooms. 

This ‘Chilling’ Right-Wing Movement Is Taking Over Classrooms — And It’s Only The Beginning

Molly Wadzeck, HuffPost

Across the United States, more parents are growing concerned as they witness a narrow religious ideology gaining influence over their children’s public schools. While some argue that inclusive school curricula are threatening their religious freedom, many others are worried that one belief system is being imposed — dictating not only which books are available in classrooms but who gets to be represented in the school experience. The battle over books, especially those centering LGBTQ+ lives and diverse identities, has become a larger conflict about who controls the definition of American childhood and which values shape that narrative.

Other News of Note

Tricycle and metal helmet [Photograph]

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Children of Hiroshima [Documentary. 1952]

Youtube

This film follows a teacher and former resident of Hiroshima, who returned to the city five years after the atom bomb explosion and recalled the horrors of the blast.

Remembering the Children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Tim Wright, Common Dreams

Before dawn on August 6, 1945, Tsuyako Kubota gave birth to her second daughter at her home in Hiroshima’s Nishikanon neighborhood. A few hours later, in a blinding flash, much of the city was reduced to smoldering ruins by a single atomic bomb. The young mother, her newborn baby and her two-year-old daughter, Sumie, became trapped in the wreckage of their home. The girls’ father, Minoru, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, tried desperately to free them. “Sumie was crying,” he recalled. “She said to me, ‘Daddy, it’s hot! The fire is coming! My hands are burning!’ There was a final scream, and then I couldn’t hear her voice anymore.”