Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Teachers union bosses applaud Tim Walz as VP pick: ‘Represents America’

Kristina Wotrobski, Baltimore Sun

The leaders of the nation’s two largest teachers unions applauded the addition of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to the Democratic presidential ticket Tuesday. Vice President Kamala Harris selected Walz as her running mate after weeks of vetting numerous candidates. Other reported contenders for the position included Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

While announcing the news, Harris touted Walz’s previous experience as a social studies teacher and football coach. Both the governor and his wife previously taught at a high school in Mankato, Minn. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten and National Education Association (NEA) president Becky Pringle also latched onto Walz’s education background Tuesday morning.

What Happens to Education Under Trump vs. Harris

Lauren Camera, U.S. News & World Report

With the public education system and colleges and universities still in recovery mode from the COVID-19 pandemic, the election could have sweeping ramifications for the country’s students. On the K-12 front, a bitter culture war over information on race, racism, slavery, equity, LGTBQ issues and more wages and schools struggle to retain and attract teachers and find solutions to a chronic absenteeism crisis. The higher education sector, meanwhile, continues to navigate an enrollment cliff as students look for post-high school opportunities other than a degree program to avoid sky-high tuition and student loan debt. Harris and Trump offer two starkly different views on the federal government’s role in education. Harris advocates for injecting more funding in K-12, especially for increasing teacher pay and breaking down segregated school systems. She also supports universal preschool. On the higher education front, expect her to build on the Biden’s administration pursuit of student loan debt cancellation and boost funding for historically Black colleges and universities.

Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance tickets offer radically different visions of public education

Louis Freedberg, Ed Source

Rarely if ever have visions of education offered by the two major party tickets in a presidential campaign been so radically different. Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate this week affirmed her total support of public education — along with her acknowledgment of the crucial contributions of teachers, not only to her personal success but to the well-being of the nation as a whole. In his first appearance with Harris in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Walz spoke favorably of her view of education as a “ticket to the middle class.” By contrast, Trump and Vance take a conspiratorial view of education in which public schools are viewed as vehicles to indoctrinate children into left-wing ideologies. Rather than strengthening public education, a major goal of the Trump campaign, as in his previous ones, would be to provide parents with alternatives to what he, and many others on the right, disparagingly refer to as “government schools.”

Language, Culture, and Power

Biden’s “Parole in place” will have a huge impact on Dreamers, their family and the economy

Amy Hsin, Queens Daily Eagle

President Joe Biden recently extended access to life-changing “parole in place” for long-term undocumented individuals who are married to U.S. citizens – a bold and important step forward for American families across the country and for our entire economy. As we wait for implementation details to be finalized, what we do know is this long-standing policy tool will temporarily shield eligible individuals from deportation, and allow them to apply for work permits. And for some people who are already eligible – but subject to overwhelming backlogs – it could mean finally being able to apply for a green card. The White House estimates that up to half a million people could be eligible for protection under the policy, a number that would likely include a young woman named Sungmin who I interviewed as part of my research in 2018.

The stories of unaccompanied & undocumented queer migrant youth are finally being told

Stephanie L. Canizales, Queerty

I began my research with unaccompanied and undocumented migrant youth in 2012, just as communities across the US were settling into the Obama administration’s passage of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order. Colloquially known as DACA, this executive order granted a stay on deportation and work authorization renewable in two-year increments to a select group of undocumented migrant young people who arrived as children and grew up as students. While DACA had a significant positive impact on eligible groups’ political, economic, and social mobility, some criticized its limited scope, including that it left out 62 percent of the undocumented youth and young adults who did not meet the policy’s educational requirements. Among those excluded were the youth I was meeting in Los Angeles, who, because of their unaccompanied status, were not growing up as students in schools but as low-wage workers.

As LGBTQ library material comes under fire, California may ban book bans

Alexei Koseff

The presentation was unassuming, just a handful of picture books arrayed on the side of a bookcase — the ABCs of a Pride parade, biographies of the gay World War II codebreaker Alan Turing and 50 LGBTQ+ people who made history, the sex education manual “It’s Perfectly Normal,” a retelling of the Stonewall riot and “My Shadow Is Pink,” in which a young boy explores his gender identity. But when Fresno County Supervisor Steve Brandau heard a complaint from a constituent that Clovis librarians had put together a graphic Pride Month display for the children’s section, he was concerned enough to check it out. It wasn’t the type of material that he thought should be available alongside books about skunks and pirates.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Young climate advocates think Harris can do more for the environment than Biden, despite his big wins

Elysee Barakett, NBC News

President Joe Biden may have passed the United States’ most significant climate legislation ever, but many young environmental activists say they see Kamala Harris as stronger on the issue. Representatives from 11 organizations devoted to elevating young voters’ concerns about climate change said Harris’ record of going after big oil companies as a prosecutor and her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal as a senator make her a more appealing candidate than Biden, despite his environmental wins. “She has a history around holding Big Oil accountable in a way that we haven’t been able to do in the last four years,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, 26, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which pushes for government interventions to address climate change.

COVID-19 devastated teacher morale − and it hasn’t recovered

Lesley Lavery and Steve Friess, The Conversation

Kansas faces the worst teacher shortfall in its history. The 4,000 teaching vacancies Florida faces as the new school year approaches “is more than the population of teachers in 19 of Florida’s smallest counties combined,” the state’s teachers union says. In Vermont, there are days when whole grades of students are sent home because there’s no teacher or sub available. The teaching profession faces a morale – and staffing – crisis. A National Education Association survey of members found that, as of late 2022, a staggering 55% of educators were thinking of calling it quits. This is a legacy of COVID-19. Teachers were already unhappy before the pandemic, but the public’s reaction to the education their kids got during that crisis continues to haunt the profession. A Brown University study found teachers’ job satisfaction in 2022 hovered near its lowest level since the 1970s.

High schoolers’ mental health shows small improvement in a US government survey

Carla Johnson, AP News

There are small signs of improvement in the mental health of U.S. teenagers, a government survey released Tuesday said, but the share of students — particularly girls — feeling sad and hopeless remained high. From 2021 to 2023, the portion of high school students who reported feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness declined from 42% to 40%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. More than 20,000 students were surveyed at school in the spring of 2023. Among girls, the percentage reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness fell from 57% to 53%. The share of girls reporting they had seriously considered attempting suicide edged downward from 30% to 27%.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

This preschool in Alaska changed lives for parents and kids alike. Why did it have to close?

Moriah Balingit, AP News

She was a teenager, and the mother of a 2-year-old, when a knock came on the door of the trailer she called home. Two women were there to tell her about a federally funded preschool program called Head Start that was opening near her home in Chugiak. Would she be interested in enrolling her daughter? Then pregnant with her second child, Kristine Bayne signed up. She hoped it would make a difference for her daughter. What she didn’t know: It would shift the trajectory of her life, too.

Students gearing up for round 2 of pro-Palestinian protests: ‘We’ve been working all this summer’

Lexi Lonas, The Hill

The pro-Palestinian activists who disrupted campuses across the nation are plotting their return for the new academic year. Demonstrators say all forms of protest are still on the table, despite the more than 2,000 arrests so far, as students try to figure out a new strategy to demand their schools divest from Israel, among other goals. “What we will see [is] the students will continue their activism, will continue doing what they’ve done in conventional and unconventional ways. So not only protests, not only encampments, kind of any — any available means necessary to push Columbia to divest from from Israel,” said Mahmoud Khalil, student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

HBCU medical programs get massive cash infusion from Bloomberg Philanthropies

Todd A. Price and Eduardo Cuevas, USA TODAY

The presidents of America’s four historically Black medical schools were invited to meet last week with Bloomberg Philanthropies in New York. They thought it would be a chance to celebrate a $100 million gift the foundation made to the schools in 2020 to help relieve their students’ debt. Instead, they learned the foundation of entrepreneur and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg planned to make a new gift that left the presidents speechless. On Tuesday, Bloomberg formally unveiled that his philanthropic organization would donate $600 million to four historically Black medical schools: $175 million each to Howard University College of Medicine, in Washington, D.C.; Morehouse School of Medicine, in Atlanta; and Meharry Medical College, in Nashville; and another $75 million to Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, in Los Angeles.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

For a ‘quality’ education in Oregon, the price tag tops $13.5 billion

Julia Silverman, The Orgegonian

If the sky was the limit, Oregon would spend at least $13.5 billion on its public school system in the 2025-2027 biennium, according to a new report from the volunteer commission charged with pinpointing the approximate price tag for a “quality education.” How much the state actually allocates for schools won’t be known until the state Legislature hashes it out next year. But it is projected to be around $11.3 billion. That’s about $2 billion less than what the Quality Education Commission says it would take to get 90% of the state’s students graduating high school within four years, ready to take on college or a career.

How closures would affect demographics of Seattle schools

Dahlia Bazza, Seattle Times

In a gentrifying city and socioeconomically segregated school system like Seattle’s, closing 20 elementary schools could trigger a demographic shake-up. Free lunch is guaranteed for all at schools where at least 30% of families are low-income. Multilingual teachers are stationed where English learners attend. Certain schools offer cultural programs that cater to students’ heritage. As the district makes plans to redirect thousands of students to new buildings, it faces pressure to preserve certain programs for kids who need them the most. Seattle Public Schools says it is prioritizing making schools “well-resourced” and diverse without exacerbating existing segregation. A 2023 Seattle Times investigation found Seattle schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1980s, with some school attendance zones mirroring areas that were once redlined to keep residents of color boxed into certain areas.

The Myth of the Math Kid

Shalinee Sharla, Time Magazine

Across the nation, kids are heading back to school. It’s an exciting time. I remember both the joy and the nervousness that came with my now twin 13-year-olds’ first starting school. In fact, one day in particular stands out. I was rushing to the school, late as usual. As I hustled up four flights of stairs to their classroom, another parent interrupted my thoughts and started talking. “She’s like me, basically,” the woman said. “She’s just not a math kid. We are creative types.”

Democracy and the Public Interest

Why it’s not enough to teach our students that America is ‘no place for political violence’

Michael Wordsworth, Chalkbeat

For the past few years, I’ve watched the first episode of the HBO miniseries “John Adams” with my ninth grade U.S. History classes, as part of our unit on the American Revolution. The students enjoy it, but there’s one scene that always stands out. In it, a tax collector in Boston Harbor is stripped, tarred, feathered, and paraded around by the Sons of Liberty, a paramilitary group. In the foreground, a gleeful mob cheers; in the background, a group of captive Africans stands by, in chains. Watching on, a shocked John Adams demands answers from his more radical cousin Samuel Adams: “Do you approve of brutal and illegal acts to enforce a political principle, Sam?”

The Troubling Trend of State Takeovers of Public Schools

Georgia Jensen, Inequality.org

The state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the eighth-largest public school system in the United States, is entering its second year. State-appointed superintendent Mike Miles is celebrating the occasion by touting state test score results that show preliminary improvement in student achievement. Other leaders in education across the country are paying close attention to Miles’ tactics to see if they’re effective enough to implement in their own schools. Since 1989, over 100 school districts across the U.S. have been subjected to state takeovers, in which the state seizes control of low-performing or financially struggling school districts, replacing their locally elected school boards. 

How Charter Schools Became Politically Isolated

Jeff Bryant, The Progressive

Now that abolishing the U.S. Department of Education has become the default position of the Republican Party, charter schools—which educate about 7 percent of K-12 students in the U.S.—also appear to be in disfavor in today’s more radical GOP. Indeed, if Trump returns to the White House and a Republican majority in Congress acts on their pledge to shut down the federal government’s involvement in education policy, charter schools would be irreparably harmed. Abolishing the Department of Education would kill the charter school grant program, which is the federal government’s only source of dedicated funding to charters. It would also likely convert funding for special education and economically disadvantaged students—money that also goes to charters—into block grants that states could spend however they want.

Other News of Note

Bengali Youth Speak Out on State Violence Against Student Protesters

Aina Marzia, The Nation

On July 15, students in Bangladesh began protesting the quota system that reserves 30 percent of government jobs for the families of “freedom fighters”—or veterans of the 1971 War of Independence against Pakistan. Student protesters demanded instead the reinstatement of a merit-based system for government jobs, which they fought for in 2018 after similar protests. However, a written petition from members of Bangladesh’s veteran class urged the court to reapply the quota in June, leading to the protests of the last few weeks. Young Bengalis have come to the streets in massive numbers. But what started as an attempt to represent the marginalized classes of the country through peaceful demonstrations quickly became a bloodbath after authorities began using excessive force. The Bengali government shut off Internet access on July 18 as students quickly shifted the movement to protest state repression and police violence. As of July 25, over 200 people have reportedly been killed and the Bengali police have arrested around 3,000.